With Berlin now in Roman hands, the soldiers of the Holy Roman Empire withdraw across the newly created border between them and Roma. Guerilla tactics and surprise attacks on random civilians spark and flare up. In response to this action, General Icarius Christophulus captures hundreds of German soldiers as well as thousands of civilans accused of helping the Holy Roman Empire. They are fettered together in pairs and forced to kill one another if they want to be free, a practice which has a fatality rate for all prisoners somewhere around ninty-six percent. Historical records of the Christophulus Judgement are few and far between, but it is said and mentioned several times in a variety of sources that the amount of bodies tossed into the Rhine River made it run black and red for seven days.
Aside from the massive amount of slaughter going on around the Holy Roman Empire-Roman Empire front, troops are forced to deal with the occasional sortie by the enemy soldiers that wish to retake Berlin. Already, Ulm and Bavaraburgh have been burned to the ground by marauding Roman troops in retaliation for the Germans attacks against the rightful sovreignity of Roma, with a little helping of the occasional theft, selling prisoners into slavery, and rape to go around. Unsurprisingly, the population of the slave class nearly doubles during this time frame, from seven hundred thousand to almost one million two hundred thousand.
The particular sortie by bands of horse archers shown above was conducted by the infamous Seneschall Fromm, also known as the Black Fox (Umbra Lupa). His constant attacks upon the Roman people occupying this section of German soil made him infamous for his brutality and hatred of Roman people, seeing almost three thousand people personally to the grave in a mass burial ground seventy seven miles from Berlin. Christophulus unsurprisingly orders his head to be taken off and mounted on a pike outside of Berlin as a show of force and what will happen to those that defy Roma, sending powerful armored knights to do battle with the Umbra Lupa.
At the battle of the Three Rivers, Seneschall Fromm leads an army of ten thousand against a Roman cavalry division of six thousand under the command of General Pierre Halych. Halych was the descendent of a line of prominent French generals, and was a staunch revolutionary, but grew steadily apart from radical French freedom fighters that dwelled in the black underground and decided to give his strength to Roma.
The battle was simply a rout. Fromm, who many had considered a fearsome competitor, was far from a tactical and strategical genius. Against Pierre, he ordered a constant barrage of arrows from the far bank from a force of about two thousand mounted men while he and his men crossed the rivers. The division of his forces would be the first nail in the coffin.
As Fromm and his men struggled through the turbulent waters, they took an occasional casualty as the Roman knights centered in front of them proceeded to take potshots at them with compound shortbows. Although inferior to the types of bows the Holy Roman soldiers were using, as the German soldiers attempted to cross the river, they were forced to try and restrain their horses from flailing about and taking them down into the river, leaving their only defence to be prayers and shouting at the Romans. Needless to say, it didn't work very well, and by the time Fromm and his men struggled out of the water, almost eight hundred men were dead and dying.
Fromm led his men in a charge to do a circular route round the Roman positions, shooting arrows in a tactic known as the Pinwheel. It was only after two minutes of shooting at the heavily armored Roman knights that he realized that the force was not nearly large enough. That's when the screaming on the other bank started.
Pierre had split a section of his forces off to find a ford around the river and sneak up upon Fromm's backup forces. With their lances dipped in oil and set aflame, the psychological effect of seeing that was enough to break the men under Fromm's command who had been set to guard their rear. The section that Pierre had split off from his own force had split into three parts, bringing three hammers down on the Holy Roman soldiers at the same time, driving them towards Pierre and his forces as they faced down Fromm.
Pierre used this distraction to great effect, having his knights take advantage in the lull of the battle to charge and start the slaughter of Fromm's troops. A rout soon ensued, with Fromm and his forces struggling across the river as men were sucked down into the thick mud or hit with flaming arrows and burned to death on their mounts, with the alternative being drowned in the river by armor proxy as it dragged them down.
All in all, the amount of deaths suffered was the near annihilation of almost all of Fromm's forces, leaving less than twenty men alive. Pierre retreated back to Berlin and prepared the city as more German armies marched on the horizon.
Then, COLONIZE AMERICA!
, not being specific there. My fault. Rearrange the order in which they occur.
