Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

"Hold them off!" Sateo screamed from the very bottom of his guts, trying his best for his scream to cut through all the noise of the ongoing battle.

And for what?

All for the sake of maintaining some semblance, a mere illusion of order.

'It's not a rout as long as officers stay in control!'

Following the mantra the training camp drilled into his mind, he kept poking with his spear, cutting with his knife, and shouting with his entire chest.

By now, Sateo couldn't care less about all the blood splattering down on his head. His face has long since been covered in a full, thick, and all-encompassing layer of blood, making him immune to the feeling of having a new layer of it plastered all over again.

"Kill them all!"

Cut, poke, slash, stab.

"Reinforce the second Barda!"

Poke, slash, stab, cut.

"Come on, you apes! Do you wanna live forever?!"

Save for Sateo's desperate attempts to keep his sector of the wall free of the imperial legionaries, his shouts didn't really have any meaning. Enjoy new chapters from empire

There was no actual difference between him shouting 'eggs, horseradish and potatoes!' over 'push them back and press them hard!'

In the mess of the battle, down where no strategy had any meaning and all the tactics were limited to the angle one would use their weapons, no one would be stupid enough to actually pay attention to his words.

It was all about voice. The signal that he was still standing.

When it came to actual orders, Sateo would cautiously retreat two steps back, as far as the fighting platform atop the wall would allow, and use his dagger-wielding left to gesture his orders instead.

And so, the cycle continued.

Poke, cut, stab, slash.

Sateo's arms burned with living fire from all the swinging he had done over the last few hours. A toil of no end.

And then, with a light tap on his right shoulder, it came to an end.

"Change!"

Someone screamed into Sateo's ears, only for several hands to pull him back.

Sateo nearly lashed out at those who somehow managed to move behind him… Only for yet another pair of hands to hold his arms down for long enough for the man to calm himself down.

"It's a change, man!" a commanding officer of the fresh Barda screamed right in Sateo's face. "Calm down and get some rest while you still can!"n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

It took Sateo an additional half a minute to properly calm down, reaching the state that allowed him to ignore the ongoing battle just a few steps away and casually descend down the stars.

Only now that he stopped pushing himself, did the middle-aged man realize just how tired he was.

His muscles were burning as if someone had both injected and splashed them with acid. His vision continued to blank out, making the man move on an auto-pilot.

It was at this point where the discipline deeply ingrained into his bones took over, allowing Sateo to march down the narrow route between fresh Bardas waiting their turn to join the battle.

The terrace below the wall's fighting platform was too busy for the man to get any rest there. And if he dared to just drop everything and fall down to the ground to catch some shut-eye, all the soldiers around would be sure not to ever let him forget such humiliation.

As such, ignoring his pain and exhaustion for just a little bit longer, Sateo walked over to the very back of the elevated approach before jumping over its edge, grabbing the scaffolding pipes, and sliding all the way down to the ground, where he could finally find some room to get some rest.

But he wasn't a mere foot soldier. Sateo was an officer, even if of a low rank. As such, regardless of the accomplishments he obtained in the past, he pushed himself through this last stretch, forcing his feet to carry him over to the designated resting area for his Barda.

"Leader," poking their eye from the mountain of bandages covering his face, Lull, one of Sateo's subordinates, called out.

"So you survived," Sateo remarked while falling down onto a simple log serving as a bench before stretching his hands out toward the small fire one of his soldiers already set up. "I saw it when you took the hit. And it looked really nasty," he commented, looking over to where his wounded man was trying to recuperate from his wounds just enough to have any chance to go back to the line.

"I only have that fucktard Banjay to thank for surviving," Lull sighed. "Him, and all the girls working back in the medicinal tents," Lull's face, albeit covered in bandages, brightened up so much at the memory of his experience back in the tent that not even his bandages could stop Sateo from noticing it.

"This has to be a first for me," Sateo sighed. Upon noticing Lull's inquisitive, curious stare, Sateo sighed again before dropping his shoulders and looking down. "Back in the day, the medicinal tent was the fate worse than being in the first line before the battle, for an enemy would only try his best to kill you while those damn scammers would be sure to do so."

As a veteran of the patriarchate's army of many years, Sateo saw first-hand how the army changed ever since Sir Salicious gained enough political power to push through with the reforms. Reforms that turned the beaten and exhausted army that kept losing its ground hard… into an army that only lost a little.

And now, as it turned out, a visit to the medicinal tent turned into a positive experience over a death sentence?

'They are spoiling those greenhorns too much,' Sateo whined in his thoughts. 'If they turn a medicinal tent into a good thing, what's there to stop those newbies from seeking injury? And how do we stop them from injuring themselves?'

Back in the day, if one wanted to avoid service by actively harming their own ability to wield arms or march, they would have to live with the consequences. And now?

Sateo shook his head.

"Oh, you are here already, boss!" one more of Sateo's soldiers appeared at their Barda resting place, only to become the herald to the whole mass of soldiers coming right after him.

"What's the headcount?" Sateo raised his eyes to scan the arriving troops, counting their number with a numbing feeling spreading through his head.

This was the worst part of the war for him.

Not the fighting itself, but the moment when he would have to come to terms with all the sacrifices his men made for his sake.

"Thirty-seven," Sateo muttered under his nose a mere moment before Lull, having nothing better to do given his current state, confirmed his count. "Twenty-three men lost…"

Sateo closed his eyes and took a deep breath, taking his time to come to terms with the losses.

'Death on the battlefield is nothing,' he thought, releasing a heavy sigh while accepting a cup of thin wine one of his men passed over to his hand. 'It is the living that comes tomorrow that's the hard part.'