"Brothers, for the sake of the Kingdom of Tada, for the sake of the Duke!"

In a blood-stained hilly area to the north of the kingdom of Tada, about 10,000 soldiers were lined up in loose ranks, their banners crooked, their horses tired, their shields and weapons uneven, and even the weighted swords used by barbarians, and even the weapons of skeleton soldiers, all in the hands of these tired but full of morale. Their eyes were bloodshot, they hadn't closed their eyes for two days, their armor was tattered, and many of their wounds were still bloody, but they still stood here, because their morale and courage were their last support.

A general with bandages on his shoulders and riding heavily armored horses walked to the front of the line, their armor was the emblem of the Tada royal family, and his helmet was engraved with the texture of the nobles, and he took off the helmet to reveal a face that had been battered by the vicissitudes of life, and on his old but resolute countenance, with eagle-sharp eyes.

"For the kingdom of Tada, for the kings of the past!"

The general, known as the Duke, raised his spear and roared into the sky, and the troops began to shout, their voices rising like the morale of the troops.

These people were not part of the regular ranks of the Tada royal family, and the man was not a duke, and the equipment was not owned by his family. Until a month earlier, these troops had been poorly disciplined militias stationed in the north, with some young aristocrats and illegitimate children who could only talk on paper, and even many of them were peasants in the fields and poor artisans in the cities. And that man is just a city guard guarding a small city, and there are not even ten people who can manage it. The only thing that can be considered useful is the qualifications and experience he has accumulated over decades of fighting horses.

But it is these people who hold up the royal family of the Tada Kingdom, the last pillar.

"Ruckerman Scheer", that's the name of the veteran. He started as a small soldier and survived dozens of battles with the Tada army for more than ten years. But in the end, the nobles sent him back with only the empty name of the head of the village militia and a few silver coins of insufficient weight. Over the next twenty years, the kingdom became more and more corrupt and worse to the point of no return. In this small northern town in the middle of nowhere, this old man once became the supreme commander of the city's military, leading all the civilian forces in the city to fight the invaders and bandits. It's ridiculous to say, although he is called the commander of the soldiers in the city, but his subordinates have never exceeded a hundred, not a single horse, not a single piece of armor. The nobles stayed in the manor with their well-armed troops, watching them fight with the robbers from the same poor background, laughing at the militia who guarded the city and the property of the nobles like beggars. And when the crisis was resolved, these high-ranking old men put down their shelves and rewarded a few gold coins to the militia, who was almost dead, and the commander had a job to watch the gate.

But he didn't say anything, because of the ugliness and viciousness of those nobles, he had seen enough when he was in the army.

Originally, he thought that he would spend his life like this, which was not good, but compared to those poor people who were struggling at the bottom and inevitably starved to death, his life was good enough. It wasn't until that revolution and the constant "bad news" that his life changed.

The rebels in the South grew in power, the whole South was plunged into turmoil, and his son was forcibly conscripted into the army and torn to pieces by the undead in a battle, and he was sad because of his only son at that time. And his wife, who has been dead for several years. However, he did not resent the "terrible" rebels in the south, because he had participated in many counterinsurgency operations in his youth, and he knew how desperate the situation of the rebels who had been cornered.

Later, the kingdom of Tada fell apart, and the small city became borderless for a while, and the lords of the city also enjoyed the taste of being their own masters. Those accomplices of his raised the tax rate tenfold! Loot as much wealth as you can before other forces annex it.

But as in the case of the South, after two weeks of this near-looting tax, the poor and militiamen, who found that there were no more lords to send troops here, took up arms...

That night, the lord with the jeweled ring stopped at the gates of the city in a carriage, and a hundred meters away were the angry "mob" and his vulnerable "elite" warriors. At first, the nobleman ordered, reprimanded, and even threatened the old man, but the old man remained unmoved, and the eight gatekeepers also pointed their spears at the previous "adults". At last the nobleman began to weep, and in an almost pleading tone he opened the door, and stuffed him with a large bag of gold coins and jewels, including the ring on his own hand.

He hesitated, not because of the gold coins and jewels, but because of the children in the carriage. He finally chose to open the door, and then got to know this once high-ranking guy with his own hands. For he saw in the gratitude of that nobleman his grave resentment, and in the eyes of those children, fear, and... Disdain!

After that, the city had a new administrator, and that was him, the former gatekeeper, who this time had the support of tens of thousands of people and a militia of several hundred men under his command.

But it was the man of great repute who made up his mind, the king of the kingdom of Tada, the great Briusi III. In the process of the king's journey north to subdue the northern lords, he captured the city, but surprisingly, he did not convict and execute the people here, perhaps because he no longer had the spare troops to put him to death, but his heavy use of the old man was true.

He saw the talent of the old man, a monarch who had pretended to be stupid for more than ten years in a large number of absurd and powerful nobles, and at this time he used his advantage in appreciating talents. This time, the old man put on the armor of an officer and became a member of the royal army. The old man didn't think much of it, he was used to war, and he no longer feared life and death, and his reason for allegiance to Dabriusi III was probably just to have something to do before he died.

However, the old man did not live up to the king's expectations, and was the only general to have won more than two victories in the battle against the Republic. Yes, at that time he was already a general, albeit at a very low level.

But what shocked him was that when Tadawei had been holding out for a week and then falling, Dabriusi III did not go to any of the nobles of the royal family, nor to the lords with heavy armies, but to find the old man, and his cousin, who had been with the old man and had never been reused before.

When the old man saw the king, he was already badly wounded and was about to leave this world. At that time, the ruler of the kingdom canonized his cousin as the heir to the king, and the old man as a baron, the supreme commander of the remaining forces of the kingdom. When he was dying, he begged the old man to protect his cousin and continue the fight, telling the old man that after his defeat, no nobleman would continue to support the royal family.

The Great Briusi III died, in a wilderness, without a funeral, without ceremony, by a creek, decorated with flowers and the flag of the kingdom, in the hope that he would rest in peace, because it was not far from an old domain of the royal family, which was considered the doorstep of his house.

Later, as the Grand Brilius III said, all the supporters of the royal family defected, and no one was willing to support the so-called new king at all. Only the old man, who returned to the north with the new king, gathered the defeated troops who were still willing to fight for the kingdom, recruited some young men who were inexperienced but willing to fight for the new king, and the peasants and poor who were simply to help the old man.

The quality of this force is worse than that of any of the previous kingdom's formed troops, but their origins are not high, and the leader is also a civilian elder. Wang Shengzhe, who shouted the cry of liberating the poor, finally met his opponent and met another army from the bottom and had his own beliefs. They fought several battles and won several battles, leaving the troops of the republic with unexpected setbacks and difficulties. However, in the midst of this, the new king also died under Li Renjie's indiscriminate large-scale magic, and the new king's last will before his death was to make the old man the Duke of Tada and fight for the kingdom to the end.

It was just a sentence that had no practical meaning, but the old man accepted it. In the king's brothers, he found something that he had not been able to find in the first half of his life, and that was the respect he had always craved.

He put on the armor left by Dabulusi, put on the helmet of the new king, carried the last complete battle flag of the Tada royal family, commanded the last troops of the Tada Kingdom, and resolutely walked to the battlefield. Even Wang Shengzhe's promise to treat all Tada soldiers equally, and to give him the position of provincial governor or even commander of the legion, did not shake the old man's determination.

For the first time, as he walked out of the city gates, the nobles who remained loyal to the royal family saluted him and addressed him as a duke with true respect. From that moment on, he called himself the Duke of Tada, leading these unwilling soldiers to fight until the last moment for the kingdom that had been overthrown. Only then can his life be painted in a complete sentence. And those soldiers who volunteered to fight with him could be liberated.

"I am not a deserter, I am worthy of my heart, because I follow the Lord Duke and fight for the kingdom until the last moment," --- words of one of the Tada soldiers who volunteered to fight.