Civilization- Barbarians Read online

  Shall you order your other servants to leap upon him and stab Marcus to death to prove that none shall defy you?

  Hahahaha, good luck if you expect anyone to pass their morale check to try to fight Marcus. They’ve seen him fight.

  Remove Marcus as the minister of defense, but otherwise let him do his own thing, and give your own orders to the elves? The change in the command structure will substantially damage the morale of everyone.

  And here was the scary tense moment.

  God I felt sick.

  And Marcus had been right it seemed, I should have ignored archery in favor of additional training, at least after we had developed the javelins.

  I should just let him make the choices. He’d been right, I should have murdered that man. Of course it still would have been cold blooded murder and… and…

  It was as if some sense in my mind switched. I did not know for certain what was the right choice.

  I truly did not.

  But I knew, I had been chosen to guide this people. I was the one who ultimately must choose how we would fight. The buck stopped with me, not with Marcus.

  The elves would have low morale?

  That would not matter so much if I laid the ambushes right, and their low morale meant they would scatter and run quickly, rather than trying to fight when they were doomed. So long as I managed things correctly, and made sure each unit of the elves was made up of close friends and lovers who would be frightened enough for each other to stick together instead of turning into an each man for themself mob, a bit of fear might save lives without stopping me from crippling the enemy.

  And I would set the first ambushes far out, at least a half day’s journey from the settlement. If those ambushes went disastrously, I’d assume that all of my plans would fall apart in the same way, and hand complete command over to Marcus once more, and we would still be in the same position that we would have been in the first place. A substantial army drawn up in the clearing around the settlement that was vulnerable to being attacked at night.

  I closed the popup, and went to the list of leaders.

  And here I paused for a long moment. It still took a great deal of nerve to make the choice I was now making. I did not know if I was making the right choice, and I hoped Marcus would stay within the tribe and not go completely rogue.

  I selected the oldest elf amongst the soldiers who had trained with Marcus. He had been chosen as a squad leader by Marcus, and I chose him to be the new war leader of the tribe, and then I chose Marcus to be leader of the scouts, but not of the overall military of the community.

  I looked back at Marcus, with the status bar open. To my complete surprise, his opinion of me had actually gone up slightly after I removed him from the command position. He immediately felt the change, and so did everyone else in the council room.

  Marcus shook his head slightly, and then he bowed. “As you order. I shall yet do my best to defend us in this new role you give. And though I believe your scheme will likely destroy us, I shall hope for success.”

  I then got another popup.

  Morale collapsing among the army

  Everyone now knows that you have removed Marcus. Everyone has an opinion, and most think you are crazy. They think everyone will die without Marcus leading the army. Others are not sure and are confused. And everyone is scared. None of them believe any longer that you shall win the battle, and they all are thinking about how they can flee into the woods and hide after your armies are crushed.

  -30 points to morale.

  Okay.

  The only thing about this that was really unfortunate was that I would need to use spiritual energy to force them to listen to me when I ordered everyone to do the hard work of digging spike pits and dragging stones up high into trees to drop onto barbarian heads. Otherwise this was not a problem.

  Marcus himself immediately left to fulfill his new orders as the leader of the scouts. He grabbed one of the squads in the town, and jogged out with them towards where Arnhelm shadowed the barbarians.

  I was deeply relieved by this.

  While Marcus would not lead the army to set up the ambushes I wanted, I could trust him to fight when I told him to stand in a certain place and kill enemies. And perhaps after a few of my planned battles had worked, he would be ready to trust me and command the army once more.

  The new commander of the elves was a man named Martialus.

  He was a middle-aged elf who was 473 years old, and he had the same reckless bravery that Arnhelm had, along with a streak of sadism. His bio said that before he’d been treated for this and conditioned to stop, as a young man he would torture puppies. But he definitely never did anything like that afterwards, and years of meditation had changed him so that he could always control his impulses.

  But Martialus desperately wanted a chance to prosocially brutalize the cannibal barbarians who were coming to fight us.

  I was not sure what I thought about that. I used the search function to quickly check, and sure enough he was literally the only person in the community who had either sadism as a character trait, or torture as a skill. Though there was apparently a strong fondness for BDSM play among about 10% of the elves.

  Whips, sexy pain, both experienced and delivered, and the like.

  I was not at all entirely sure I had wanted to know that. I was not in fact a dirty man who liked to watch my people fuck without protection. Hence the reason I had not taken the population growth trait all that time ago.

  Okay. So this was another example of me being given someone with specific skills that might be needed. Except I was not going to torture any barbarians. If they didn’t talk, I would just execute them.

  At first Martialus had very low morale, despite his elevation to command. But when I gave him the order to think of ways to prepare traps and ambushes, he became very enthusiastic, as he thought about all sorts of ways to inflict pain on his enemies.

  Soon the line of orders was going through all of the people.

  I sent out a forward group of about a hundred people deep into the forest to prepare the first ambushes that would be launched, and everyone else was sent into the forest around the settlement to focus on creating as many traps and obstacles to make ambushes easier as they could produce in three days’ time.

  The biggest effort was put into having the best climbers go high up into the trees to find hollows where we could fit piles of fist sized stones that would be large enough and heavy enough to crush skulls if dropped from a height of forty to a hundred feet.

  The climbers would take with them very long ropes made from woven grass, and when they found a good spot, someone on the ground would tie a bag full of rocks to the bottom of the rope, and then the climber would pull the rocks up and set them in the safe hidden hollow.

  I was able to mark on my minimap where all of these rock piles were, so that I could make sure they were removed after the battle, or made more steady, since I was frightened of some of them coming unstuck and braining my people as they walked below.

  The groups who were focused on doing this put the rocks in the tops of thousands of trees around the camp over the next three days as they unenthusiastically followed the orders Martialus enthusiastically bellowed to them.

  Other groups prepared ground level traps.

  I decided to drop the idea of using pit traps, since it would have taken an enormous amount of time and effort, and the sort manual labor the elves hated, to dig pits everywhere. However we had by now lots of sharp flint blades, and we had never thrown out any of the inferior edges that had been produced. So what we did was fix along all of the main pathways into the village thousands of flint blades into the ground, sticking both straight up and slanted sideways. And then we hid them all with piles of the autumn leaves fallen inches thick everywhere.

  The barbarians mostly wore sandals, but I examined them closely, and decided that the sandals were made from wrapped hides that could be cut open with a blade, and we also had a lot of the f
lint blades tied to the poles from broken spears, and they stuck out horizontally high enough up if they weren’t seen the barbarians would run into them with their completely unprotected ankles or calves.

  We also took piles of extra spears that we had, and stuck them in the middle of various paths blocking the way so that the barbarians would not be able to run easily through them. And the elves practiced running between the spears so that they would be ready to escape past these obstacles.

  Everyone in the village knew the pattern that was established for where the traps were, so they would be able to avoid slicing their own feet up.

  I did not expect these ground traps to do much direct damage. The goal was to keep the barbarians moving slowly and carefully, which would make it far easier for my people to run away after ambushes, or if a big battle went badly.

  As we made the preparations for the battle morale was slowly improved, from abysmal to merely very worried.

  In the night of the day before the barbarians would reach our settlement, I made the first attempt to strike at them.

  The nights were cold by now, and the barbarians, while they kept a lot of men out on watch, set high fires burning for heat. Their sentries walked around clapping their hands in the cold, and cursing the weather.

  But I could tell, simply from looking at them, that they were all in high spirits.

  Arnhelm, Marcus, and the other scouts had never been seen by the barbarians, though part of this was that Marcus stayed a fair distance back from the group, as he was a very visible person who couldn’t hide and blend into the forest scenery the way the elves could. While the barbarians camped for the night, I called them back and had them join the group.

  I gave Arnhelm command of this mission, since I still did not believe Marcus would order the elves into an operation he thought was ill considered.

  I’d sent out towards the barbarians a group of a hundred elves, and amongst them were most of the best javelin throwers. I had the elves sneak up as close as they could get to the sentries in the dark. The idea was that they would get into javelin range, toss the spears into a bunch of the barbarians, and then run back, getting away safely.

  I had had them practice the previous night running in the dark, and after that most of the group I wanted for this assignment had slept during the first half of the day.

  As they snuck in close I placed a strong spiritual blessing on all of these elves, which would both fortify them in bravery, give them an extra ability to think before they stepped to ensure they made as little noise as possible, and it would help them to aim so they killed, or at least hurt, their targets.

  Alas, the plan did not go very well.

  One of the elves, who was shaking so hard from fear at actually facing a real enemy, dropped his spear, and he made a loud thrashing sound as he desperately looked for it in the dark.

  The sentry he was approaching to attack called out loudly, and I was given the translation, Demand for identification.

  The entire camp of barbarians roused themselves, and there was a shout, at almost the same moment from two of the other sentries, separately pointing at the elf who was sneaking up on them. This shout was, Exclamation upon seeing the enemy.

  I ordered my elves to immediately throw their javelins, from wherever they were, and run away.

  Three barbarians were wounded, but none killed as the throws were made from much too great of a distance for them to be able to hit with a great deal of force, or to aim at vital points on the targets.

  Even as the elves hurled their weapons, the now alerted barbarians with gesticulations shouted and pointed at them, many throwing up their hands and going for their spears. But a few of the barbarians, men with more serious faces, and colder eyes than most, including their leader, calmly went without hesitation for their own throwing spears.

  They gripped their weapons with easy gestures and eyes which judged the distance. They hurled the spears with practiced and effective gestures at my elves.

  Fortunately all of the elves were able, despite their inexperience, to react instantly to this threat as they had a strong blessing on them, letting them recognize the danger in every point of the field in front of them instantly, and to judge where the spears would land.

  They all moved, throwing themselves to the side, and dodging.

  Only one of my elves was wounded. He was clipped by a spear in the arm, but the wound proved not to be severe.

  All of the elves fled, and in the darkness they were immediately much beyond the range at which the barbarians could throw by the time the less alert barbarians grabbed their weapons, or their more alert comrades grabbed a second throwing spear.

  Several barbarian warriors, wrapped in heavy hanging deer hides for warmth that looked almost black rather than tawny brown in the flickering firelight, went to run after my likewise deer clad warriors. But before they barely got past the circle of the fire, their commander shouted in a raging voice as he jumped up and down and brandished a deadly looking spear. The translation I received was, Questioning of parenthood and intelligence. Insult for following an obviously bad idea.

  In a strange way though, despite being unsuccessful, my raid boosted morale. Both mine and the elves.

  We’d made a try at this terrible looking army, none of us had died, and we’d drawn a little blood.

  The next morning we made an attempt to get part of the barbarian band to chase us into an ambush.

  They hadn’t taken the bait in the dark, but perhaps their leader wouldn’t stop them in the less superficially deadly daylight.

  My plan was simple, and if it did not work, I’d hide groups with javelins along their likely route, and have them throw and run. But this worried me, because in that case the barbarians could throw javelins back.

  I had a group of women who were part of my armed band stand in an area along their path, apparently in the middle of collecting mushrooms.

  As soon as the women were seen by the barbarians the seven of them gibbered, half in feigned, and half in real terror. They took off running, fortunately in the direction they had been ordered to go. Their status sheets showed terror.

  The barbarians saw these women, and a group of their fastest runners took off after them, moving far faster than even the elvish women could race.

  Two of barbarians tripped with heavy thudding falls over unseen roots. One gasped in pain and gripped his ankle, being left far behind by the others, but the other leapt up and kept running behind them immediately.

  But the other ten who chased the elves were very fast, they gained ground on my fleeing elves with every wide stride. It was going to be close, I suddenly realized.

  If I had a heart, it would have hammered.

  For about fifteen seconds I thought I’d had not put the ambushers close enough to where the women had been seen, and these brave women warriors would be caught and killed. Perhaps every plan I’d made would fall apart, since they could chase us down in the woods reliably.

  And then the women ran past where Marcus hid behind a six foot wide tree trunk, his eleven foot tall spear standing tall, and with pieces of bark glued to it, up and down the length so it looked like a natural stick if a man did not look closely at it.

  And as the fleeing women ran past him, Marcus smiled. He didn’t move, but my reputation with him ticked up to a just slightly nicer shade of red.

  And then the barbarians running forward reached close enough, and Marcus pulled on my blessing once more, this time simply as my warrior.

  The barbarian’s eyes widened, and I felt a horrible anticipation as I watched them hurtle towards Marcus, knowing they would all be dead in seconds.

  They tried to parry his weapon with hastily interposed spears.

  In the first seconds of combat Marcus ripped three of their throats to shreds with the sharp point of his spear. Lightning fast stabs and swings of his spear.

  The others ran forward, thinking they could be safe from Marcus’s weapon if they were within its re
ach. They plunged their spears towards Marcus as a group. Marcus swung his spear in a wide low arc a foot above the ground, tripping three of them, who tumbled to the ground, but they all kept their weapons with them as they began rolling back to their feet.

  Marcus contemptuously stepped out of the way of two of the other spears that came close enough to threaten him, and he pulled the last spear from the hand of the man holding it.

  He caved in the skull of the barbarian warrior with the back of his own weapon.

  The other elves hidden in the forest rushed forward towards the barbarians who were coming up to stab them and kill them. The three that Marcus tripped were killed before getting back to their feet, though one of them settled his spear to the ground and nearly ran one of the elves through as he ran towards him. But the elf threw himself to the side at the last second, and a different one of my people stabbed the barbarian.

  I had opened up my blessing to everyone in this group, feeding them extra spiritual energy. As we fought to defend ourselves, this gave an even bigger boost to their skills than they normally got from my blessing.

  Whenever a barbarian made a move that would kill one of the elves, that man immediately saw the danger and stepped back and the presence of his friends kept the barbarian from chasing the elf.

  Another group of elves stepped out from the path the barbarians had run along, blocking their retreat.

  And Marcus was his normal epic self.

  In less than a minute they all were, except the one who had tripped at first, dead. When he saw the elves slaughtering his companions, he threw his spear to the side, and fled under the javelins that were thrown at him with fast tosses.

  Out of the nine kills, six of them were from Marcus. We only had three minor injuries, but it terrified me to watch the barbarians try to stab my people. If Marcus had not been there we would have had many deaths.

  And I ordered my men to howl their victory.

  An eerie whooping howl.

  I’d given Martialus the idea of a wolf’s howl, or a lion’s to teach the men. I had wanted something inspired by stories about the rebel yell from the Civil War, and the unnerving affect it supposedly had on the Northern soldiers.