Chapter 17: The Woods

Behind me, there was the sound of a horn from time to time.

I don't know if it was the soldiers from Varan and Vecchia who were coming, and the barbarian soldiers had been looking nervously behind them. The soldiers became more and more irritable, and I saw one of the captives having his feet cut off on the spot and dumped on the side of the road because he tried to escape. The barbarians were now nervous, and the slightest hint of wind and grass would make them uneasy.

My feet were blistered, and I knew that if I didn't run away, I would probably be executed by these barbarian soldiers. I feel that although the barbarian soldiers have attacked the combined forces of Vicchia and Valan, they have not taken much advantage, because if they had won, they should not be in this mess now. Some of the bloodied barbarians walked past us by each other's arms, and some of the badly wounded barbarians were executed.

The soldiers fled in a southeasterly direction, and for a while I seemed to see the surface of East Lake, but before long, the view was blocked by tree branches. After the sun came out for a while, it was blocked by the damp mist, and formed a dark yellow circle in the sky, so I remembered the blurred appearance of the eggs in the oil and gas when the cook was frying them.

Joey glanced back at me.

His hair was pressed against his forehead, his eyes were cold, sweat was running down his forehead, and his face was dead gray. He licked his lips and looked down.

I looked at his hand and it immediately understood: his hand had broken free. The cavalryman beside him was struggling, and I saw blood drip down their wrists and drip to the ground.

"Can you hold a sword?" I asked him as we were being pushed through a bush.

"No," he whispered, "my hands are stiff. ”

The sound of the trumpet sounded again.

This time the horn sounded much closer than the previous ones, and I couldn't help but look back, and I even felt that there were already pursuing Vekia and Valan's soldiers lurking by a few trees behind me. I don't know what soldier has been able to pursue for so long, we've been carried for three hours straight, and we should be very close to East Lake by now.

After the sound of the trumpet, the barbarians changed their plans for escape, as if they felt that instead of fleeing, they should snipe the incoming enemy right here: since they could no longer escape, it was better to fight the enemy before their physical strength was exhausted.

The barbarians drove us to the edge of the woods and wanted us to be together. But when the barbarians had formed a formation and had set up simple stakes with their stakes, they changed their attention and drove us in front of the stakes.

A few barbarians beat us with sticks and tried to drive us into the forest, and they wanted to use us to lure out the soldiers of the forest. Inside the dark shadows of the forest, there seemed to be countless soldiers watching us, and it was definitely not a good thing to be caught between two armies. We were afraid to advance, and the barbarians immediately began to slaughter the captives with swords and axes.

My hands were tied and I was trembling with fear. A man next to me had a skull shattered, and the scum of the bones jumped in my face, and the smell of fishy smells came to my nose, and the man was not dead after falling to the ground, and he lay on the ground and convulsed a few times, and only did not move after excreting feces and urine.

A barbarian soldier slapped me the back, knocking me two steps forward. Then he went to pat Joey on the back beside me, and hammered him on the back with the handle of his axe, but Joey didn't seem to move at all, and at this time, several more captives were cut to the ground, and the rest of the captives were frightened and ran towards the forest.

The barbarians threw javelins and pierced the fleeers.

The barbarian soldier who had trampled Joey to the ground made a terrible noise in his throat, and I saw that he had just swallowed a sticky potion into his stomach. Many eastern soldiers, including the Valan soldiers, would have the habit of drinking hallucinogenic potions and fighting to the death. The barbarians, after being beaten badly in the morning, were in a state of excitement and despair: they themselves did not expect that they had lost nearly two hundred men in the first battle, that the same number had been scattered, and that it would take several days to regroup them, and that they felt that there was still hope of victory, and that the native Varan soldiers had a bad reputation and would be crushed if they were slightly defeated. At this point, they can't be compared to the Valan mercenaries at all. It is with this mentality that the barbarian soldiers will attack the Valans desperately.

The barbarian soldier roared into the sky, kicking Joey to the ground, then raised his massive axe, ready to slash him to death. At this moment, the Vekia cavalry beside Joey jumped over and pushed the barbarian away with his shoulder, and the barbarian grabbed the axe like a light wooden stick, and swept towards the Vekia cavalry, and the Vekia soldier fell backwards, dodging the blow. Seeing this, more captives fled, and the barbarians slaughtered the captives as if they didn't care, and drove the rest towards the woods.

"That Vekian cavalryman is going to die," I said to myself.

The barbarian soldier who was guarding us had already slashed at the foot of the Vecchian cavalry with an axe, and the cavalryman let out a scream, and the bloody ankles showed sharp bone stubble, and the barbarian soldier laughed, his eyes did not look like a living person, and he pulled back the leather coat on his chest, and bare his upper body, ready to give the cavalry the final blow. At this time, Joey, who was pale, stood up and held a wooden stick that drove the slaves. I saw his wrist dripping blood, and his hand holding the stick was shaking. He slammed the barbarian soldier's skull, and the barbarian soldier was struck, but he didn't care, and picked up his axe and slashed at the broken foot of the Vekian cavalryman, knocking his calf into mud.

Then, the barbarian soldier turned around.

His face was distorted, the smeared lines trembling on his face like writhing insects, his lips trembling automatically, and the cloudy saliva that flowed down. The barbarian soldiers in the distance scattered their heads one after another, like warriors in hell

Standing.

Joey, who seemed to be a head smaller than him, stood in front of me and said to me with a sideways face, "Victor, run!" ”

I sat on the ground and crawled backwards, and it took me a while to remember that my legs were movable, and I stood up, my legs shaking. I glanced back at Joey, who was holding his stick and facing the barbarian soldiers, and both of them erupted in rage at the same time.

"You're dead! Bearskin hat!" As I stumbled towards the forest, Joey yelled behind me.

There was a man next to me with an arrow stuck in his back, and he was panicking and shouting, "What should I do!" Oh, my God! I'm going to die! "He lost his judgment completely, and when he saw me running towards the forest, he somehow ran after me. I looked up at the darkened forest, and the screams behind me were like from another world.

"Run! Run!"

The voice suddenly turned into a fist that pounded on my skull, and my belly tensed like boiled cowhide, and my heart beat like a drum as I rushed forward. The forest is full of dead branches, and it seems to be a wide corridor with pillars rising to the sky. There was a boy whose intestines were dragged out and begged for my help, and he was so weak that he stretched out his hand to me, and I stopped out of horror and sympathy. I glanced at him and knew he wouldn't live. However, there was a dagger pressed under his body. The boy appears to be a cook, preparing food for the Burke officers in the barbarian army. Why did he run away?

I shoved him away with my foot, trying to take the dagger out. The man who followed me came crying and trying to save the child.

"Take out the dagger!" I noticed that the man's hands were not tied, so I shouted to him, "Untie me." ”

As if he hadn't heard, the man sat on the ground and wept to himself. I felt a flustery myself, I couldn't calm someone older than me, I panicked myself. I pulled the dagger out with a trembling hand, and I tried to cut the rope myself, but I found that my fingers were too clumsy to grasp the dagger. I kicked the man and told him to grab the dagger. He pinched the handle of the dagger with an uninjured hand in one hand, his eyes were red from crying, and the blood and sweat on his forehead stuck to the fragments of leaves.

The barbarians erupted into a frenzied cry.

From the sound of it, I felt like they were already in the woods.

"Let's go!" I shouted at the man and ran away.

The boy let out a sigh, he was too weak to curse me. When the man saw me running away, he got up and tried to run, but dropped his dagger on the ground. I turned back to him and shouted, "Take the dagger!" But the man couldn't hear anything, and followed me as if he was dizzy.

Then, a throwing axe slashed into his back. He fell to the ground, and several hunched barbarians screamed like monkeys and ran quickly under the trees.

I kept running, a tree, a clump of dead wood, a pond, and I threw them off

Behind you. The woods skimmed behind me. I could occasionally see captives who had escaped like me, but when they saw me, they ran faster and quickly disappeared into the woods. My hands hurt too much anymore. For a few minutes, I saw a sharp stone and stopped to cut the rope from my hand with the stone. But it's useless. When someone beat the drum in the distance, I started running again.

Through the trees, I saw a bright light in the distance. It could be a low-lying pine forest, or it could be a frozen East Lake in the distance. I don't know if I should run towards it. At this time, six men who fled in a panic passed through the woods in the distance. I immediately ran towards them, and I made the decision almost instantly. In a panicked situation, everyone, like the man just now, will immediately believe that others are right as long as they see someone with a clear purpose.

Those people are together, and they go in one direction.

It wasn't long before I saw them stop from afar, and I stopped myself, looking at them through the trunk. Then I found out the reason for their stop: a long column of cavalry was forming here, gray overcoats, high felt hats, shiny sabers.

This is the cavalry of the Iron Shield River.

"Is this your own?" Not long ago, I learned that prisoners on the battlefield are not regarded as friends by anyone, and everything must be said until the battle is over. The six men shouted, pointing to their wounds and pointing at the trees outside. The cavalry of the Iron Shield River looked at these people silently and did not say a word. When the men had finished speaking, the cavalry marched out.

The men were somewhat bewildered, and the cavalry neither took them prisoner nor showed them where to go.

"What are we going to do?" One of the men asked.

The other five felt that they had escaped from the barbarians, and that they were safe by this time, and they all sat down in their places, or begged for water from the soldiers around them. The soldiers of the Iron Shield River still walked past them without saying a word. While the cavalry all drove briskly towards the outskirts of the forest, more than a dozen cavalrymen stayed behind and formed a circle around them.

"What are we going to do?" The man asked again, "You guys don't understand."

Before he could finish his sentence, the cavalryman's saber split his face, and the rest were chopped to death by the saber before they could shout. As the cavalrymen's knives slashed down, the horses' eyes widened with excitement, their noses snorted, and they raised their feet to trample on the corpses. After a while, there was silence in the woods, and the cavalrymen wiped the blood from their sabers on their sleeves, and then spread out in different directions, inspecting the surrounding woods, the cavalry brigade had been opened, and they were responsible for monitoring the rear of the brigade, and any situation had to be 'dealt with' in time.

I lay on my stomach and rolled under a tree, and one of the horsemen coughed a few times and spat out as he passed me. I lay under the dead wood for a quarter of an hour

I didn't stand up until I was sure there was no one around me.

Following the smell of blood, I walked towards the slaughterhouse. I had become a little numb, and the great luck had made me want to live even more: if I had come out with them just now, I would have already begun to rot.

The corpses on the ground had a strong aura, and I stayed there for a long time. When I passed by the village the other day, the dead people had already shown me the cruelty of the battlefield, but this time, I faced it head-on, and it didn't feel the same at all. A few ferocious birds fluttered their wings and landed on the branches of the surrounding trees, waiting for me to leave.

It occurred to me that wolves, would they be attracted to them?

In the silence of the forest, a sudden wave of fear came: I heard footsteps.

I jerked my head back, and a dirty, sorceress-dressed girl stood not far from me. She carried a pocket with branches of many plants, from which the branches protruded. She also held a few handfuls of herbs and a few flowers in her hands, like a pagan praying to the gods. She also seemed to be lost in the forest, sweating profusely, but not at all as flustered as I was. Doesn't she know that there is a war going on around her? My first instinct was to run away, but I was so tired that I couldn't run.

She walked slowly over to me.

I couldn't help but retreat until I tripped over a shattered skull and fell to the ground.

She walked up to me, looked at me, looked and looked, her eyes full of confusion and trance, and even a hint of joy.

Is this a madman? I've heard that witches are crazy.

"I've been looking for you for a long time." I saw a glint in her eyes, as if she was sighing for something. I saw tears fill her eyes, and she whispered softly, "You're flying too far." (To be done.)