12th July 1574"Sir! Bad news!"
Barely a moment after we finally managed to depart from the Capital"s docks, a horse messenger approached the sh.o.r.e of the river that we were travelling through.
"Speak!"
While I was quite angry that the first moment of rest after the long talk with Elia was interrupted barely after a few hours, way less than I hoped to get, there wasn"t that much choice in the current situation. If one of my men bothered to send a messenger like that instead of waiting for me to get back to Tarnow or mining town, then the situation really had to require my utmost and immediate attention!
"Sir, Ostros family forces have burned down Ropian! The refugees are now escaping to the city of Pilzno! It was heard that the Ostros forces are following right behind them!"
Hearing the news, I understood where did the hurry come from.
"Those rotten b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!"
With my first smas.h.i.+ng against the wooden wall of the shed, I could feel the bits of wood tear through my skin and nail itself into the flesh of my hand. Yet the notion of what just happened, was way more than enough to pull my thoughts away from such an unimportant matter!
"Dear, what happened?"
Altered by my outburst of anger, Elia slowly came out of the shed, holding her belly with both of her hands as if worried that my reaction might have something to do with our current situation.
Seeing this maternal instinct in her action, I couldn"t stay angry any longer. Yet that didn"t mean I was going to just let those f.u.c.kers do what they wished!
"Men, we need to make haste! Increase the power of the engines, we are going to the mining town!"
If I wanted to have any way of retaliation against Ostros, I could only do so by bringing the peak of my fire force with me. Even if that meant risking the situation at mining town…
As I thought about how I was instantly willing to react to this unwarranted aggression, I realised that there was something wrong with the content of this message. Alerted by my own guts, I turned back to the sh.o.r.e, looking at the tired messenger.
"Man, dock the other s.h.i.+p near the sh.o.r.e, we will get this man onboard. No point in letting him tire himself on the way back."
Pa.s.sing the order to one of the sailors, I smiled nicely at the messenger before turning my head back to Elia.
"I don"t want to jump to the conclusions, but either Ostros really went overboard way sooner than I expected them, or the message we just received is a bust."
Thinking about this calmly, there was no way that such a powerful family would make their move so soon. It wasn"t even an entire day since I refused the offer of the country econom t.i.tle, which made it impossible for the main family to make their move, and the messenger to go all the way from there to our current location.
Unless this entire summon was just a ploy to divert my attention from the outskirts of my lands, then this message wasn"t true!
Just a few moments after I explained the situation and my thoughts to Elia in detail, the other s.h.i.+p that followed the one that I was boarding managed to recover the messenger from the sh.o.r.e. Yet just as he was boarding the deck, an avalanche of screams came from the woods surrounding the sh.o.r.e!
"KILL!"
BOOM!
Almost instantly, half of the sailors that were unlucky to be at the end of the deck facing the sh.o.r.e, fallen on the planks with blood bursting out of their ruptured bodies.
"AMBUs.h.!.+"
With how attentive I was toward the current situation, it wasn"t anything strange that I managed to be the first one to call out. Just as more and more men poured from withing the woodlands towards the s.h.i.+p, those few men of mine that suffered through the military boot camp were already aiming their rifles at them!
"FIRE!"
Even before I could give the orders, five of my soldiers kneeled down behind the elevated side of the boat, pulling their forefingers back on their respective triggers.
Tac, tac, tac.
Contrary to the uniform and single salvo that the attackers could create with their old type of guns, those new rifles of mine could shoot continuously! Even though it was nothing compared to the modern automatic firearms of my era, those d.a.m.ned attackers had nothing to compare to!
As if faced by the orderly unit of elite troops, they were falling one by one as the bullets pushed through their bodies, the bodies of their comrades behind only to end up snapping the thinner trees in half!
"Men, pull closer to the sh.o.r.e, we need to help them! Elia, back to the shed!"
Unwilling to risk the health of the most important person to me in this timeline, I wasn"t willing to listen to any of her excuses. Even if future feminists would burn me on the stake for privileging my own gender to be the only one risking our lives in the fight, with the first instances of this unreasonable ideology few hundreds of years away from the current times, I couldn"t care less about them right now!
"Sir, the currents…"
"I DON"T GIVE A f.u.c.k ABOUT CURRENTS! GET US CLOSER!"
Despite some of the sailors instantly protesting against my order, there was no way I would let just five men of mine fight off against the onslaught of at least a hundred of bandits!
Bandits… As if. Even if their clothes didn"t betray their allegiance, just the fact that nearly all of them carried at least some kind of a gun on them was enough to prove that they had to be connected to some kind of major force!
After all, even a simple gun wasn"t something a typical commoner or bandit could afford so easily!
Tac, tac.
By the time my s.h.i.+p managed to get close enough to provide real support to my men stranded on the other s.h.i.+p, only two of those rifles of mine continued to fire. Thankfully, the third one quickly rejoined them, just in time to replace another one that went silent.
"Sir, we are in an effective range!���
"Then what are you waiting for? FIRE!"