Mountain of the Immortals

I didn’t want to be responsible for them fighting and losing their lives. But now that I was here, I could see that there was room for improvement in the way they were set up on the field of the battle. Instead of standing out in the open field, they could move to a narrower point to better defend themselves against the greater numbers of their enemies.

Conscious of the hourglass on the periphery of my vision, I mentally tried to move one of the troops and saw that I was now essentially controlling a group of fifty soldiers. Whenever I tried letting the group I had selected drop onto an occupied space, the troops would fade and reappear in their initial spot.

* * *

Unit Name: Swords Unit C

Fighters: 50/50

Average Level: 19

Morale: Neutral

* * *

Now understanding how I would be able to control them, I started pulling all of them back and up a hill. The only way that the enemy would be able to reach them was via a very narrow uphill path. Up there, the people I was tasked to protect by whatever force had thrust this test on me, would have the advantage of fighting only a few warriors at a time in close quarters. This effectively counteracted the enemy’s advantage in having bigger numbers.

Next, I looked for groups of soldiers that were holding bows.

* * *

Unit Name: Bows Unit A

Fighters: 50/50

Average Level: 17

Morale: Neutral

* * *

I found four of those units and placed a couple on each side at the top of the narrow corridor where the melee fighting would be taking place. However, I still had a lot of troops waiting at the top of the hill who wouldn’t be able to participate in the battle, some of them on horses and others carrying long spears.

I zoomed out to get a better view of the terrain. The hill I’d placed my troops on was surrounded by a steep cliff, which was in turn surrounded by a dense forest at the foot of it. That would be the perfect hiding place for the rest of my troops. I started by placing the ones using horses.

* * *

Unit Name: Cavalry Unit C

Fighters: 50/50

Average Level: 21

Morale: Neutral

* * *

I could only fit one of those units in the forest on each side of the narrow path or else I would risk them being spotted and decimated. However, there was still space for some foot soldiers in there too. I looked at what I had still left at the top of the hill and rushed to select them as the sand in the hourglass had almost completely run to the bottom.

* * *

Unit Name: Spears Unit C

Fighters: 50/50

Average Level: 20

Morale: Neutral

* * *

I wasn’t sure whether I’d be able to control them after the battle had started but the idea behind this strategy was that the archers and sword fighters would create a bottleneck for the enemies on the narrow slope. Once the attackers were focused on gaining ground up the hill, the cavalry and spear bearers would surround and press them, hopefully into surrendering, or perhaps slaughtering them. Either way, the confusion of being attacked from two sides would work to our advantage.

Somewhere a loud bell tolled once and I glanced at the sand in the hourglass, which had now settled and was completely still. The collective screams of thousands of warriors filled the air as time unfroze. To my satisfaction, the troops I had placed in the forests didn’t move immediately but laid low as I had intended. And the troops up the hill were standing their ground, waiting for their enemies.

The enemy army marched forward, yelling loudly in an attempt to intimidate my troops. As expected, their armies formed a long thin column as they moved into the uphill corridor that led to my soldiers. The dark-blue wave that was the mass of attacking troops slowed down as they began moving up the hill, and soon after the first of them started falling to the ground dead, taken down by the arrows of my carefully placed archers.

The battle went on exactly as I had planned for more than ten minutes, during which time the army under the lightning banner lost only one soldier for every ten to fifteen that the crow army lost. However, those few of my troops that fell or were injured beyond the point of fighting were quickly replaced with fresh troops that were waiting behind them.

The bodies of the crow army on the other hand were starting to pile up and making their fellow soldiers’ ascent even more difficult. The ground was becoming so crowded with dead bodies in fact that at some point the attackers started dumping them to the side of the uphill corridor and down the small cliff they had managed to climb.

This was enough of an opportunity and signal for my concealed troops to come out of the forest and rush behind the enemy lines. The first to reach them were the cavalry, whose appearance was so sudden that the enemy soldiers barely had the time to react as horses’ hooves crashed into them and the swords of their riders cut through their ranks.

It took them a good two minutes to reorganize themselves and get into a formation that might protect them better from the mounted assault. When they did, they then found even more of my troops arriving to push them back, this time holding spears. The long weapons wouldn’t been a very effective way of fighting in close combat, but they were especially effective against soldiers who were trying to keep a tight formation, like the one the crow army had adopted to defend against my cavalry.

The soldiers of the crow didn’t seem to be giving up despite their quickly diminishing numbers, and pretty soon the whole field was painted red with their blood. I had expected them to flee for their lives once they realized the battle was lost, but they kept on fighting until none of them remained alive. When the warriors under the lightning banner went through all the injured and crippled enemies, making sure they stayed on the ground, they all raised their weapons to the sky at once and time froze again.

I zoomed in and out on multiple areas of the battlefield but the expressions of the soldiers were all frozen in place. Some of their faces were colored with pain as they held their arm above a wound on their body or pulled at the dead body of a friend. Others were celebrating their victory, while a few had a glint of greed in their eyes as they went through the pockets of the dead, looking over their shoulders to check if they were being watched.

And then, completely out of nowhere, a wave of fog rushed over the battlefield and no matter how much I zoomed in and out, I couldn’t see anything—no sign of the bodies, the weapons, or the blood of the battle. Once I was sure there was nothing more I could do, I zoomed out fully and waited.

I wondered what was happening down there and how real and final the deaths really were. Most of all, however, I wondered what was happening to my own body. Did I really fall into the heart of the mountain? Or was everything happening in my head while my real body was still holding on to the orb at the peak?

I only had a few moments of contemplation before the fog rolled away and the same battlefield was revealed to me. The two armies were standing there again, frozen in time. However, their positions had now been switched. The army I’d been commanding last time was now in the place the army of the crow had started before, and their enemies had taken position above the hill.