Viking: Master of the Icy Sea

Chapter 302: The Return Journey

After marching for over two hours, dusk began to settle, and Leif grew increasingly drowsy.

He glanced around. The soldiers were yawning endlessly, many leaning heavily on their spears just to keep moving, and the marching column had grown loose and disorganized. Realizing that the men were nearing the very limits of their endurance, he ordered them to halt and rest where they stood.

Sleeping straight through until dawn, Leif struggled to his feet and conducted a headcount. Because the sentries had been overly exhausted the night before, more than twenty stablehands had seized the opportunity to flee, causing their number of warhorses to drop once again.

"You fools! A single warhorse is worth over four pounds! Because of your negligence, the Marine Battalion has lost over a hundred pounds worth of spoils of war. That is money out of the pockets of every brother here!"

Leif looked around for a horsewhip, intending to lash the negligent sentries. However, Deputy Battalion Commander Ingvar hurried over to intervene. "Let it go, we can deal with this when we get back. The brothers have been working tirelessly for a full day and night. They can fall asleep standing up. It truly could not be helped."

"Fine, I will discipline them when we return."

Forcing down his burning anger, Leif ordered the convoy to resume their march. At noon, he suddenly noticed a massive flock of birds taking flight from the woods to the north.

'Are there enemies?'

Leif pondered for a moment before abandoning the twenty slowest carriages, positioning them across the center of the road as a barricade. He then arranged for two soldiers highly skilled in riding to stay behind.

"The moment the enemy appears, ignite the barricade immediately, then ride away as fast as you can.""Understood!"

An hour passed, and sure enough, a thick plume of black smoke billowed into the sky from behind them. Pursuers were closing in. Leif felt a surge of panic; his Marine Battalion soldiers were utterly exhausted, their combat effectiveness a fraction of what it once was. They would never be able to withstand an assault from the Frankish army.

To increase their speed, he painfully made the choice to abandon the grain, smoked meat, and military equipment loaded on the supply wagons. They dumped the resources haphazardly by the roadside and set them ablaze.

Instantly, pungent black smoke rose into the air, stinging the eyes of the nearest soldiers until their tears flowed freely. Leif had the men who knew how to ride select mounts, while the remaining troops boarded the carriages, fleeing desperately toward Hamburg.

However, this was merely a narrow forest path. The road conditions were far inferior to the two Roman-style main highways back home. The convoy bumped and rattled forward, and every so often, a broken-down carriage had to be abandoned on the side of the road.

As the sun gradually sank toward the west, the Marine Battalion was left with fewer than thirty carriages, and their formation fell into utter chaos. The soldiers on horseback rode faster and faster at the front until they disappeared from sight entirely. Meanwhile, at the rear, the Frankish cavalry quietly caught up, hunting down the clumsy, sluggish wagons.

The distance between the two forces rapidly closed. Ingvar felt a bitter pang in his heart. 'If I had known it would come to this, I would have stopped Leif from chasing after those damned warhorses.'

Crash!

Suddenly, the carriage lost control and flipped onto its side. Ingvar was hurled into the roadside bushes, rolling more than a dozen times before his vision went black, completely losing consciousness.

An unknown amount of time passed.

"Ugh, where am I? What happened?" he groaned.

Ingvar struggled to sit up from the bushes when he suddenly heard several sharp screams. Peering through the gaps in the foliage, he saw the Frankish army hunting down scattered Viking soldiers. Terrified, he immediately dropped flat to the ground, trying desperately to muffle his own breathing.

Not far away, a knight was busy gathering spoils of war. His attention was quickly drawn to a tin canteen. After taking a sip, he marveled:

"The quality of this canteen is quite good. The clean water has no foul stench to it, far better than those leather water skins."

He rummaged through the rest of the corpses, noting that every Viking had the exact same type of canteen. Furthermore, the canteens were uniform in size and design, with strange Viking letters and numbers stamped onto the bottom, likely indicating the manufacturer's name and production date.

"Standardized armor, standardized canteens... where does the Snake of the North get so much money?"

The knight muttered under his breath. Taking advantage of his comrades' inattention, he stuffed as many canteens as he could into his packs. In addition, he looted several small boxes. Upon opening them, he found needles and thread stored inside, with the back of the lids polished so brightly they could be used as mirrors.

Staring at his slightly blurred reflection, the knight was deeply shocked. 'The Snake of the North is this generous?'

Comparing this to his own treatment, the knight could not help but curse quietly. He did not dare insult King Charles the Bald, so he could only vent his anger on Prime Minister Lamberto, several other Cabinet members, and Gunnar, the Duke of Normandy.

After that, the knight searched the body of a military officer and found a peculiar wooden box. Opening the lid, he discovered a thin needle balanced on a vertical pivot. The knight reached out and flicked the needle. When he let go, the needle spun and then returned to its original position, stubbornly pointing in one fixed direction.

"Dark magic!"

In his panic, he dropped the wooden box onto the ground. Suspecting that the object carried a Viking curse, the knight hesitated for a moment before calling his retainer over. "Pack this away carefully. When we return to camp, we will have a priest perform an exorcism ritual on it."

Having shifted the risk onto his attendant, the knight resumed rummaging for spoils of war, completely unaware of the figure lying motionless in the nearby bushes.

Time passed. Urged on by their commanding officers, the knights finished their looting, climbed onto their warhorses one after another, and galloped off into the distance.

Confirming that the enemy had left, Ingvar crawled out of the bushes and ran desperately into the depths of the forest. Much later, as the setting sun vanished below the horizon, he leaned against a tree trunk, gasping for air. His lungs burned so fiercely it felt as though they might burst.

Right at that moment, a pair of dark green eyes appeared ahead, radiating cold, murderous intent. A gray wolf stepped silently out of the shadows. It crouched low, its muscles completely coiled, a deep snarl rumbling from the back of its throat.

The next second, the gray wolf lunged straight at him. Ingvar threw his entire weight into a desperate roll to the side, feeling the beast's foul, rancid breath brush past him.

The moment its paws hit the ground, the gray wolf whipped around with blinding speed, leaping for its prey's throat once more.

Unable to dodge in time, Ingvar could only throw his left arm up to protect himself. The beast's fangs caught on his bracer, unable to pierce his skin. With reckless abandon, his right hand drove a dagger forward, plunging the sharp blade viciously into the side of the wolf's neck. Hot, foul-smelling blood sprayed outward, coating his cheeks and chest.

"Trying to make a meal out of me, are you?!"

Using his weight advantage, Ingvar pinned the gray wolf to the ground, twisting the dagger with all his might until the beast's whimpers ceased entirely.

With the life-and-death struggle over, he collapsed onto the dirt, panting heavily. Then, he pulled out his compass, using the faint moonlight to find his bearings, and fumbled his way through the darkness until dawn broke.

As the morning sun climbed high into the sky, the terrible luck that had tormented Ingvar finally seemed to come to an end. By a stroke of good fortune, he stumbled upon a small stream. He greedily crouched down and took massive gulps, drinking until his belly was full of the freezing water.

After walking for another two hours, he was found by a Mountain Infantry Battalion that had come to receive them. Supported by friendly forces, he was evacuated to the rear lines.

The East Gate of Hamburg.

Seeing Ingvar's miserable state, Leif was so thrilled he nearly burst into tears. The primary reason was not their personal friendship, but rather what this meant for his own future prospects.

This operation had been an unauthorized excursion. Although they had brought back two hundred and seventy warhorses, it had resulted in one hundred and twenty of his subordinates being killed, wounded, or reported missing in action—including his own Deputy Battalion Commander!

Now that Ingvar had returned in one piece, the guilt and disciplinary burden weighing on Leif's shoulders was significantly lightened. Given the sheer number of precious warhorses they had secured, there was a very high probability that he would survive this ordeal unscathed.