"Keep chasing, keep chasing. Let's see how much farther you can go. Just a few more minutes, and every last one of you will be finished." Swinburne looked back at the Knight Squad pursuing him relentlessly. He felt no fear at all. Instead, he smiled, secure in the safety his horse afforded him.
He turned to look ahead, and the smile suddenly froze on his face.
The glow along the horizon swept across the land, opening up the view and revealing everything. In the early morning, mist rose, thickening around the woods and gathering over the water.
On the path ahead, where the woods met the lakeshore, stood a horse with a rider on its back. He remained motionless, merely raising his head to look over. That single glance froze Swinburne's smile.
Even from two hundred meters away, unable to make out the man's face, Swinburne could feel the imposing aura spilling from him-sharp as a blade, fierce as thunder, hard as steel. It was Yetos.
Damn it, what's he doing here? Was he lying in ambush here all along, too? No, if that were the case, why didn't he attack earlier? That would have spared them needless casualties.
Swinburne was entirely right. Yetos had not been lying in ambush here. Like Kanni and his men, he had been waiting to ambush the enemy five li to the west.
While they had been fighting earlier, the troops Yetos led had already wiped out that Viking Squad. In fact, he alone had killed half of them, and half of the remaining seven or eight hundred had fallen to arrows. Those two factors had brought the battle to a swift conclusion. Sensing the commotion here, he had ridden around to investigate and stopped on the very path where Swinburne now saw him.