The style of how the Helvati, and the natives in general fought had been studied by the Margraves and their allies for centuries, and by now they had cracked the code down on how to deal with them to the tee.
Thus even though it looked like Metztil was making great progress and seemed to have his foot firmly on the pedal, suddenly, in almost the blink of an eye, the tempo began to rapidly change!
Lord Bakerfield had decided to turn the tables on the Helvait chief.
Hence the suppressed Margraves who appeared to be squarely on the retreat suddenly got their act and charged, and the result of the counterattack was greater than what should have been theoretically possible on paper.
The Margraves and Helvati were similarly numbered so any change in the lines should have been slow and steady.
Yet now, despite the latter's advantage, the fearless Helvati appeared to crack and buckle under the latter's great new push.
"Darn brutes... They are more an armed mob than an army!"
While observing all this from the back, Alexander let out this mutter of annoyance.
He had been of course observing how the natives fought all this time and quickly found the fault, The individualistic style of fighting made it so that it was quite hard for them to obey any complex instructions.
It was little wonder that they were beaten by the Margraves so soundly each and every time.
The Marquis family followed the much better path of- The whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
Now, to be fair to the natives, the reason for their style of fighting was not entirely due to them being foolish glory hunting hogs or egotistical maniacs.
There was a touch of pragmatism too.
That was that their environment pushed them towards such an outcome.
Living in poor, barren lands, the natives hardly had the resources to gather large groups of young men and teach them proper battle tactics for any length of time. These men were much more needed to tend to the fields lest all of them starve.
Furthermore, a lot of the individual tribes had their own distinct way of fighting. So it was hard for all of them to properly coordinate in the heat of battle.
Just see how much the NATO armies have to train and frequently rehearse what they had been trained just to make sure all of them were on the same page when the time came.
The same applied here.
It was just that these poor tribal folks did not perhaps have even a fraction of the advantages the world's greatest military alliance had.
Hence instead of trying to execute complex maneuvering orders that half the time would likely not even be understood and half the time only work to get in their own way, it was found to be far more pragmatic for the natives to just charge the enemy and break them using sheer power and ferocity.
And if there was something the natives were not lacking, it was sheer power and ferocity.
Indeed, there were many times when armies broke simply seeing the mass of huge, lumbering barbarians fearlessly charging at them with that distinct, ear splitting roar, a spear or axe raised high above their heads.
And Lord Bakerfield could sense such a similar thing waiting to happen here.
"Do not let up! These barbarians are close to breaking. Push! Avenge your brothers! Avenge your family! Slaughter these barbarians.
They are close to breaking! Do not let up now!"
He yelled repeating the words, still clinging onto the hope that Metztil would be too greedy for life and loot, thus not willing to fight too hard here.
And this did somewhat perk up the faltering Margraves army.
The problem was the grassroots Margraves troops did not have high morale to begin with, and expected that the loot laden Helvati would run the moment they found them to be a tough nut to crack.
So they were not ready to fight tooth and nail like them.
And they were especially not ready to fight them when supported by an even scarier contingent of 5,000 fresh men who fought even better than them.
'Who are these blue uniformed freaks? They seem even more heavily armored than us!' Many even cried as such, finding it very hard for their spears thrust to go through all the layers of the legionary's armor.
Compared to them, the naked natives seemed like they were made of butter.
Even compared to the Margraves men who considered themselves to be already lavishly equipped, Alexander's men appeared to be on a level of their own.
The short, lightweight spears wielded by them could not pose a true threat to the heavy legionaries, with a lot of the thrusts getting stopped by the chainmail before the surprised attacker was unceremoniously stabbed by the opponent's sharp, short sword and killed.
The Margraves did not strictly use the phalanx formation, with their huge, several-meter-long spears like the Adhanian forces. but preferred much shorter, agile weapons and shields.
The advantage of this type of fighting was it allowed them to be much more flexible, a boon when fighting a sneaky enemy like the natives who preferred hit and run tactics instead of directly meeting them head on.
The bane however was facing a heavily armored infantry formation head on... such as now.
And that was how Margraves had their counterattacks basically stopped...
Then Remus happened!
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