Herald of Steel

The cavalrymen on horses on both sides could be seen menacingly circling each other, as they threw javelins, pilla and spear and sword stabs, as they tried to open an opportunity to charge once given the slightest chance.

The far more agile Matbar (Marquiss) forces would try and conduct hit and run tactics on their much heavier armored foe, while Menes's men tried to bait them to come closer so that even their slower attacks landed.

Now normally, in such a case the lighter skirmishing force would win as it would be able to eventually whittle down the enemy slowly but surely, and kill it with a thousand cuts. 

But this was not a normal battlefield.

Here the flat terrain was limited and if any unit left it, they would find themselves in a severe disadvantage, even risking losing their horse on the rough slopes.

So in this confined game of cat and mouse, the heavier Zanzan cavalrymen were not out of the fight yet, being occasionally able to hit one or two hits of their own. 

But much more than that, they usually relied on the scouting cavalry that were mixed with them, armed with, to what the Matbar's (Maruqiss) appeared as strange crossbows.

This was of course the instant bow and Alexander usually equipped only his scouting units with these, giving his men a sudden burst of enormous damage.

This came as a very nasty surprise to any unsuspecting and even suspecting enemies.

Employed defensively, it could give the scouts a good weapon to dig themselves out of a pickle, like when facing an outnumbering enemy force chasing them.

A rapid release of the five shots could puncture a hole in most encirclements efforts, and leave the enemy in the dusts even before he could wake up to what the hell happened.

While offensively, it was quite a useful trick to have when you can dirt in and out of somewhere very quickly, sowing chaos through these hit and run tactics.

A scouting unit equipped with this was able to double as a skirmisher, with the ability to not only harass the enemy but use the suddenness of the attack to leave the him stunned and immobilized.

*Bang*, *Bang*, *Bang*

The five rapid shots not only were unexpected, but they were also loud enough to surprise the enemy, while the strange shape of the weapons left most seeing it for the first time shocked at the weird gadget.

And then die before being able to fully comprehend what had happened as they would find with one or two bolts sticking into them.

These scouts usually had twenty to forty percent accuracy.

Alexander even thought of using them as deadly assassins with the situation presented itself.

And now, when mixed with heavy cavalry like now, they unexpectedly became a potent mix of fighting units.

When the Matbar's (Marquiss) forces were too far away for the heavy cavalry to charge, these instant bow wielding scouts would be able to harass them with their superior range.

But if they were threatened with the enemy coming at them to engage, well they could quickly retreat behind their much tank-ier comrades and wait, or perhaps say dare the enemy to come and get them.

Because the lances the heavy cavalry members carried were no joke, those lightly armored men would be figuratively cleaved in two, man and horse.

The forces Matbar (Marquiss) Kyuam had sent were the best he had, and they would be able to match the standard of any well trained cavalry unit not in just Adhania, but in the whole world.

But even they when faced with this new and unorthodox technique they were stumped. 

This current situation went against all their preconceived perceptions.

Because it was well understood not to mix heavy and light cavalry.

Because they did very different jobs.

One was quick and nimble, meant to tire the enemy by repeated stabs and jabs, while the other was heavy and bulky, meant to stand its ground and fight.

Mixing these two sounded like they would only get in each other's way.

And even Alexander was of that school of thought.

So he never mixed the two.

But now, here, under a very specific circumstance, these two seemingly contrasting units very organically fused together to form this perfect symbiosis of a phenomenon.

It was magical and while Menes rejoiced, many of the Matbar's (Marquiss) men cursed.

And hearing these words, many of the Zanzan cavalrymen had some thoughts.

And it was that thorough heavily accented, it sounded very much very were speaking Azhak, and not at all like Tibias's native tongue. 

In fact, though Manuk's six thousand 6,000 infantry was very well hidden by its armor and the rest of the surrounding Tibian men, the cavalry were all Matbar (Marquiss) Kyuam's men.

Meaning they were all Adhanians.

And Menes's cavalrymen fighting the enemy did find it weird just how similar these men seemed to their own.

Their looks, get up and the various small personal fashion choices they had on their clothes, such as the colors they wore, the distinctive designs they had, the way they had their hair done, or simply how they walked, the cavalrymen did not know why, but these men all gave the aura of being from places near Zanzan.

Of course, immediately following this they felt absurd, for in their mind there was no way this made sense, since they were clearly fighting Tibians.

But still, they could not shake off that nagging feeling.

It was like how are you able to a fellow country men in around foreign land just from looking at his back, or you can which state someone is from just from the way he talks or behaves.

Of course in the modern world, due to the existence of rapid transportation and much intense intermingling of cultures, many such subtle differences between cultures have worn away.

But in Alexander's current time, even adjacent villages might have clear visual distinctions in many aspects of their life. 

Of course, it also helped that the men were very obviously speaking Azhak, taunting and mocking many of the cavalrymen as they attacked.

"Haha, you got nowhere to run."

"Fresh meat."

"Die! I already killed three." 

"I will enjoy fucking your ass."

Though it was quite heavily accented, the Menes's men thought they were Tibians who had learned a few phrases and were trying to intimidate them.

Whereas the real reason for this discrepancy was that given that Zanzan was quite a mountainous region, traveling was quite hard, so without the cultural exchange, many areas developed their own independent version of Azhak.

And in doing so, some dialects became so twisted that they almost became their own language.

For a real life example of this, one only needed to look at the British Isles, which is relatively a small island, yet the amount of dialect and accents they managed to create is truly mind bogging and a testament to human creativity.

It feels like every town has its own way of pronouncing one or two specific words.

And so it was already a small miracle that a country as big as Adhania, spanning around 4 million sq kilometers still spoke the same language.

Or at least the root of the spoken dialects were the same.

And the sole reason that Alexander could think of why this would be was because of Ramuh's Holy Scriptures.

It had been written in standard Azhak, and the tens and hundreds of thousands of priests had helped propagate that version of the book every day of every year for centuries to all corners of the empire.

Due to that the people at least that some connection to the basic root of the language.

If not for that, Adhania might have simply become a patchwork of states with a king nominally at its head.

Indeed, religion would bring people together.

But anyway, since the cavalrymen were in the middle of a literal war when facing these weirdly accented 'Tibians' they really could not just stop and ask to clear their doubts.

That would have been too convenient.

So they pushed such curiosities down, replacing it with the desire to triumph and survive, and kept on fighting.

And the cavalrymen for their part mostly did well and were even able to push the enemy back quite a bit.

But alas!

This was perhaps the most insignificant part of the battlefield, with the lowest number of combatants.

Their results would not really be enough to turn the tide.

And so as the clock ticked on, the inevitable tide of the battle began to become clearer and clearer.

Perseus was able to maul to Menes very bloody and the black general felt his men reaching thier end point.

They had been under the dreadful spear tips of the enemy for literally hours, and though Menes had been able to constantly cycle new troops to the front, thus spreading out the fatigue, even that had its limits.

They might break soon.

Of course, Perseus's own phalangites were having no cake walk either.

As said earlier, the melee had been brutal, and these men had to earn each and every kill in enomorus blood and sweat.

Menes and his officers made sure of that.

But even still, ultimately it were the phalangites that came out on top of the exchange no question about it, thus dashing Menes's hidden wish that the enemy would simply break from exhaustion.

'Time to call Melodias.'

'Time to call Petricuno.'

And seeing this, the two leaders almost simultaneously decided now was the time to play their trump card.