"If you ask me, the worst thing you could face in battle as a strategist or tactician is being assigned to an incompetent lout for a commander. This is doubly worse if they also have lofty ambitions as well as delusions of grandeur and competence.

These complete morons get people killed by their utter incompetence and arrogance, and worst thing is there's usually nothing you can do to stop it. Then after you get beaten silly like a redheaded stepchild they'd pile the blame on you to top it off.

I honestly can't thank you enough for allowing me to attend this execution. You have truly granted me a wish I've had for a long time now." - Soran Hervelg, disgraced former strategist from the former Kriggaris Jarldom, on witnessing the execution of Jarl Snorri the Incompetent of Kriggaris.

Lars had not had a good day of late.

Not that he had had many good days in his life overall.

He was born an orphan in Zefirous, the southern city of the Holy Kingdom of Theodinaz. Yet he was fortunate enough to be raised in one of the few orphanages in the more affluent district of the city.

Children raised in those orphanages tend to be recruited by the local nobles for employment when they grow up. It was a dream to pursue, a realistic sort of a goal in life for them.

Lars himself, while he was far from the most physically fit boy, proved to possess good intelligence, and when he was sixteen, he and a few others were recruited by Leandra Larsen, second child and only daughter of the count who ruled the city, as her entourage.

He couldn't say he liked his mistress - she was far too much of a religious fanatic for his liking, as he had seen much of the priesthood's hypocrisy growing up - but working for her gave him a chance, and that was all he wished for.

While most of the others who were recruited with him were trained under the family's instructors to serve as her future bodyguards, Lars studied strategy and tactics in the library instead.

His mistress had a deep seated desire to contribute to their kingdom by feats of arms, and since he was rather useless as a fighter, he pursued a path where his intellect would be a boon instead.

Fortunately for Lars, he proved talented as a tactician. After several trials where he'd command the house's soldiers in mock battles and won by significant margins, even the kids who were recruited with him - some of whom used to bully him - showed him grudging respect.

They themselves had earned their place as the mistress's guards. Only three of them were left from the original seven. Two Lars saw working as servants in the house later. He never saw the other two again and had not asked.

For his own part, he had slowly recruited more orphans from the orphanage he was from, to form a retinue, for the mistress to ostensibly command. In reality, the boys and girls he recruited answered to him alone.

Everything went well for a while, life was better than he had expected. His retinue had slowly grown over the years to fifty, while Lars himself turned from a gangly, bookish sixteen year old boy to a healthy twenty-four man.

Then things went to shit. The emergence of a city built by the unliving folk - Lars himself didn't have anything against them, unlike the more religious members of the populace - caused the high priests to call for a crusade.

Lars was fortunate that the count had forbidden his daughter from participating in said crusade, because most who left on it, never returned at all. They were utterly decimated by the unliving they fought against.

Then they were invaded from the south not half a year later by their dwarven neighbors. This time Lars was not so fortunate, as all three of the count's children had been ordered to delay the invasion force. He embarked with his mistress with nervousness at his first real battle.

Of course, things had gone to shit almost immediately.

The count's two sons had disagreed with his mistress on how to best deal with the incursion, as they were adamant about defending Fort Prydwen south of the city and refused to budge.

His mistress had insisted on taking the battle to their enemies instead, a daring notion he favored since they had far better knowledge of the local terrain compared to their enemies.

They had sallied out, only accompanied by the mistress, her hundred-man personal guards, and Lars' retinue. Then they met up with the volunteer militia gathered from all the nearby villages.

He was faced with an exercise in frustration when they met with the priests who had gathered together the massive militia of over forty thousand men. Those idiots had no idea whatsoever about tactics, and in their fervor had advocated meeting their "infidel" opponents in open battle.

Even if they were zealous believers who do not fear death, Lars had no doubt that a proper army one third their size would have eviscerated their band of ragtag militia in an open battle. He tried his best to persuade his mistress to a wiser course of action. Fortunately, their long acquaintance made her listen to him.

Rather than a foolhardy open battle, the priests grumbled but listened when his mistress ordered them to set up ambushes deep in their territory. The majority of their force were set up for these ambushes, as they had learned that their enemies had sent out many detachments to scout their surroundings.

Lars, his mistress, as well as his retinue and their personal guards, had taken fifteen thousand with them, as they went through trails rarely used, deep in the jungle and only known to the locals. They circled around the enemy forces and snuck towards their base at Fort Ascher instead, which they planned to catch by surprise.

Using those trails cost them quite a bit. Over a thousand of their men never left the deep jungles, including five people under Lars. Nevertheless, they managed to reach near the fort undetected.

They struck with ferocity. The militia, while untrained, fearless in their advance. It took them many sacrifices, nearly three quarters of their men dead or dying, before they breached one of the fort's gates at last. By then the invaders were reduced to a paltry few hundred, who made their stand inside the building further within.

That was when things went to shit.

His mistress had counted her chickens before they hatched. Thinking victory close at hand, she took some of the men to "purge" the "infidels" from their kingdom over Lars' protests while she tasked him to finish off the invaders before him. She had not cared that those she was attacking were noncombatants.

However, she was instead defeated. From afar, Lars saw his mistress lead her personal guards into one of the fort's barracks. She never left that building. Instead its inhabitants - most of them women and older children - had stormed out, wearing armor and wielding weapons he last saw used by his mistress' personal guards. One of them even wielded the mistress' prized saber.

In despair, he saw how they struck the other group of militia attacking those noncombatants from behind, as they turned into a cohesive force over a thousand strong and struck at his detachment as well.

It took everything Lars could muster to get what few people remained with him to withdraw, at the cost of over half of his retinue. Most of them died when they tried to stall the enemy, only to get cut down by a woman wielding odd short swords with blades on its pommel.

It was a sight that occupied Lars' nightmares for days afterwards.

He tried his best regardless to salvage the situation. The remaining people, he arranged in a distant encirclement to keep the fort under their watch. They had planned to gather by the fort after the ambushes, so he hoped reinforcements were underway.

When some of the invaders returned first, clearly survivors from the ambushes he planned, he was not surprised. Many of those priests had chafed under his instructions. That they bungled up their ambushes was not unexpected.

Without his mistress present, he had no way to get the priests to heed his advice. All he could do was watch from afar as those fools wasted lives in their assaults to the fort.

He left and returned to Fort Prydwen in defeat the day the priests called for a final push, knowing that the battle would only end in mutual destruction at best. Of the fifty men and women in his retinue, only twenty remained by then. He was unaware that he had saved all their lives by leaving a day early.

When he reached Fort Prydwen a week later, he was chastised for returning without his mistress, as he expected. What he had not expected was for the first young master to withdraw the majority of the fort's defenders to Zefirous. His advice went unheeded, his words no longer given any weight.

He was told to follow them as they returned, as they needed every man they had to help defend the city from the invaders. His punishment was deferred until after the battle was over.

Even so, when he returned to the city, he found himself posted to the southern gatehouse with his retinue. It sounded like an important assignment, but in reality it was a dead-end assignment given to those who had no more prospects.

There he and his retinue, who remained loyal to him even with all that happened, languished even as the city was besieged by the invaders. They stomached indignities and harassment from people higher up on the hierarchy, as they simmered in resentment.

At least, until one night the door to the gatehouse was kicked open, and in walked the very same woman from the nightmare that plagued Lars for days after Fort Ascher. The woman with the odd shortswords who had so effortlessly butchered many of his companions.

There were eighteen of them with him at that moment - Lydia and Meryl, two of the girls who joined his retinue recently, was accompanying an officer who came to "inspect" the drawbridge's mechanism, which was just an excuse he made to harass them - and yet Lars knew they stood no real chance. He could see more people behind the woman, and even then she had butchered more people than what he had with him on her own back then.

So he did the only thing he could think of in the spur of the moment.

"By the god-king's shriveled warty dick… drop your weapons, all of you!" he heard himself say, as he unhooked his scabbard from his belt and allowed it to fall along with his sword within.

Several of his people looked at him questioningly, but obeyed when they realized that he meant what he said. He had no other choice. This, at the very least, gave his people a chance of surviving.

He refused to have more of their blood on his hands. They deserved better.

"We surrender," said Lars, as he slowly and carefully raised his hands.