“The hardest part about setting up a trap is to get your target to go where and when you want them to be. Once that part’s done, the rest is usually easy.” - Xaliburnus the Conqueror, First Emperor of the Elmaiya Empire.

Several things happened at once when those commanders from the Bostvan army advanced in a bid to control the situation.

From high above, Hannah had kept an eye on the situation below from a safe height, using a spyglass to further augment her sharp eyesight. She had not missed the advent of the Bostvan commanders, and immediately brought out an enchanted whistle - lent to her by Reinhardt for this express purpose - and blew into it hard, four times in succession.

Despite the distance, the shrill sound of the whistle reached the battlefield undiminished. The people who heard them and knew their meaning reacted almost at the same time as it was an agreed-upon signal, a signal that the prey had entered the trap.

Salicia reacted first as she stood up from where she hid behind a crenellation atop the fort’s walls. Her sharp eye quickly scanned the battlefield and located her target - though with how ostentatious the Bostvan commanders had dressed it was far easier than she expected to find them - and she brought her massive heirloom bow out.

The massive enchanted bow, a family heirloom made of yew heartwood and stringed with monster tendons, stretched as she brought it to a full draw in mere moments, and loosed her shot in the same instant as she created a spatial portal far ahead in the arrow’s path. The enchantments carved into the wood reacted at the same time and caused the arrow to fly ahead with a force double of what the bow would have given it physically.

Mere moments after the first arrow sunk into the portal and emerged back out from a second portal a hundred meters further ahead, Salicia loosed a second arrow that went for a different portal, then a third, fourth, and fifth, each one headed for their own individual portals, each aligned with a different target.

Since this time their employer wished to capture their targets alive when possible, she had not aimed for the commanders themselves, but instead aimed for their steeds. Her arrows accurately found the ears or eyes of the galloping steeds and pierced deep into their brains, killing the horses almost instantly and causing them to crash into a heap, often with their riders pinned below them.

Shortly after Salicia had fired her arrows, the young Duchess Andrea Utghwes commanded her cavalry troops to turn westwards, straight into the core of the enemy forces. It was a measured move, however, and they turned southwards and back out of the enemy formation after they covered some distance.

It was a calculated move to isolate the fallen commanders of the enemy forces from their reinforcements. The young Duchess herself led the charge, as she struck down with the battleaxe in her hand at the heads and shoulders of the Bostvan soldiers she passed by. Her cavalry troops’ lances had long been discarded after their initial charge.

At the rear of the cavalry formation, Soledad brought her own cavalry as she led them and followed the wake of her distant cousin’s troops. That said, her cavalry was not entirely like those led by her distant cousin at all.

Where the standard doctrine for cavalrymen in Posuin had them carry long, disposable lances for the initial charge and switch to a one-handed weapon and shield from then on, Soledad’s cavalrymen more closely aped foreign cavalry standards, and many of them carried heavy, two-handed weapons instead, often with some javelins or even bows and arrows as well.

Part of the tradition had come from Soledad’s mother-in-law, the previous commander of the small unit, who was a tribal orc from the north. The orcs had their own cavalry, but favored longer, heavier weapons over what most humans used. Mounted archers and skirmishers were also a common part of their cavalry, as many of the orcs had trained since young to hunt from atop their steeds.

Soledad herself wielded a glaive, a long pole weapon longer than she was tall, with a curved blade designed for chopping at its tip. She struck to either side, but mostly in front of her since she was at the point of the formation, while others behind her cleared their respective sides.

While the “heavies” amongst her troops - those who wore heavier armor for protection, up to and including cladding their steeds in heavy barding - formed the spearhead of their wedge formation, the more lightly equipped cavalrymen behind them, led by her husband, fired arrows or hurled javelins as they raced by, both to support the heavies clearing the way, and to keep those behind them from rallying.

The long line of cavalry had just exited the Bostvan formation, having caused casualties far out of proportion with their numbers with their charge, before the young Duchess had them wheel around, pass behind the Free Lances’ formation, and struck the Bostvan lines once more just a bit eastwards of where they struck the first time.

Then they repeated the circuit, as her cavalrymen barreled through the Bostvan formation once more and kept those who wished to reinforce their fallen commanders at bay. The long line they formed created a nearly closed circuit with only a small gap between the front and rear of the formation, where the Bostvans attempted to reinforce each other only to be shattered apart once more by the cavalry charge.

From atop the fort’s walls, Salicia had also commanded the archers near her, who were temporarily delegated under her command, to fire at those on the outside of the isolated region, hammering their reinforcements with a rain of arrows. She herself sniped out anyone she noticed giving commands to the enemy troops without mercy, further throwing their coordination into chaos.

As for the commanders that had fallen under their steeds, Reinhardt himself led his mercenaries straight towards them, as he shifted their formation from one that was intended for a stable, slow push, into one that was designed for their usual forceful breakthrough.