Chapter 36: On Horseback

Riding a horse was harder than it looked. Burr was well-trained, but it was my own lack of skill that posed the biggest problem. With a slew of apologies, I slowly learned the commands and got myself onto the saddle, and we trotted off at a respectable pace. It was about the same as a slow jog, but not as fast as a gallop. Horses, after all, could get tired very quickly.

We took the road through Slowbend, which attracted a few gazes, but soon, we were off, trotting across the fields and heading northwest. The sappers estimated it would only take about a week to reach Castle Urcia at this rate.

We rode late into the night. Towns were spaced far enough apart that you could travel all day between them on horseback and not have to camp in the wild if you didn’t want—which I wished we’d done on our first journey to Castle Urcia, but evidently, we hadn’t got the timing right.

There was also, of course, the problem of us not all having horses back then. The towns were evidently spaced for horseback riders, not for travellers on foot. That meant, on the first day, we bit the bullet and rode well into the night until we reached a town in order to get the timing right.

But the sappers promised that they’d pay for my room and board—they could put it directly on the Warlord’s tab if we stopped in a town that didn’t have a garrison and we had to use an inn.

“Keep your wits about you,” they instructed me. “Orcs could be making more and more incursions deeper into Gate.”

“How do we deal with them?” I asked.

“We wait for reinforcements,” the first sapper replied. “But for now, that’s not your job. Your job is to learn and grow stronger, and hopefully, become a sapper.”

The second sapper added, “Don’t get your hopes up, kid. You’re late, and most of the good squads will have already grouped up. I don’t mean to be a downer, but you may be heading back this way in a few weeks.”

I winced and nodded. “Right.” Internally, I told myself that it wasn’t a lost cause yet. I didn’t have as early of a start as the other candidates for this year, but that didn’t mean I just had to give up. No, there was plenty I could do to get myself into the SAP still.

“If nothing else, you’ll get yourself a horse riding Skill if you have to ride there and back,” said the first sapper.

We arrived at a town around midnight. I didn’t know exactly how deep into Gate territory we were or where the orcs had started raiding, but at the moment, this village was free. There were a few villagers with makeshift spears watching it, along with a few Dupes in a watchtower, and even late into the night, the civilians were working on a palisade wall.

We stopped at an inn and slept until the crack of dawn, scarfed down breakfast, then continued on our way. Last night, I had been cautiously optimistic about how I was handling horse riding, but then I woke up, and muscles I didn’t even know I had were aching.

Worse, at the end of the second day, I found that my inner thighs had been chaffing pretty horribly. I stopped at a store in the town and found a riding salve, which, according to the clerk, was a relatively common product. Either I’d get used to riding or I wouldn’t, but the salve helped.

The process continued for a few days as we crossed the countryside. There was no sign of orcs at first, until, on the fifth day, we passed a burning homestead. The elderly were dead on the front porch, bodies still smouldering, and there was no sign of anyone else.

“Keep moving,” the sappers said. “The orcs will be around here somewhere.”

“Did they return to a Labyrinth?” I asked.

“There’s a good chance of it.”

I almost wanted to beg them to stop, but we didn’t have to. We found the party of orcs a few hours out, dragging their prisoners slightly northeast along the road. They were deathly silent until they saw us, at which point they began screeching and calling us ‘sameface’ as loudly as they could. It was like they wanted a confrontation.

“Stay back,” the sappers instructed me, and I didn’t have to be asked twice. From what I understood, they were both Titanium-tier—they were, after all, high-ranking sappers. If they could use Arts like Aldhelm’s, then I didn’t want to get in the way.

The problem was, their Arts weren’t as obviously visible. They couldn’t conjure storms or shoot fireballs, but the sapper with the sword had an Art that made all the blades of the orcs’ weapons resonate and become unwieldy, then unleashed sharp blades of invisible cutting force everywhere.

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It didn’t kill all the orcs, and the prisoners were mostly untouched. The second sapper used his axe to cut down the other orcs with brutal efficiency, temporarily transporting himself to other locations—which included teleporting in front of the orcs and cutting off their escape.

In a matter of seconds, all the orcs were dead. We brought the prisoners with us to the nearest town, where they would be safe.

The farther west we travelled, the less signs of the orcs there were. We met a hunting party of Dupes who were heading east to track down the orcs, but as far as I was concerned, the front lines had just shifted west. We’d lost ground, and more orcs would be coming to hold the ground they’d taken.