"What if Shikele reports this to the Great Chieftain afterward?"
One of the Legion Commanders asked.
"Why do you care about that?
We have our own ways of dealing with the Great Chieftain. After all, we're all directly under the Great Chieftain's command. He definitely won't want to see Shikele deal with us however he pleases!"
The group discussed it among themselves and reinforced each other's confidence. They absolutely could not show weakness in front of that bastard Shikele.
"Brothers, we must stand together. If he scares us into backing down, everyone else will suffer along with us.
Remember, we're the Great Chieftain's direct troops. We're not like that Shikele fellow—he wasn't even originally from the Iron Bone Tribe."
Everyone nodded in agreement. They knew Shikele's background all too well.
Shikele was indeed rather unusual. In his early days, he had been the leader of a wandering bandit gang on the grasslands, not even a particularly famous or notorious outlaw.
Later, that gang robbed a merchant caravan from a small tribe. By coincidence, the caravan's trading partner was a tribal chief from the Iron Bone Tribe, and that chief was on good terms with Heshima.
At the time, Heshima was merely a warlord within the Iron Bone Tribe, not its Great Chieftain. The chief whose goods had been stolen asked Heshima to help him find the bandits and recover his property.
Heshima personally led his troops to wipe out the bandit gang led by Shikele, but things did not go smoothly. Though Shikele had only a little over a hundred grassland bandits under him, he used them to contend with Heshima across the grasslands for a long time. It was said that they struggled for at least a year.
In the end, Heshima gathered several thousand men before finally cornering