The night was thick with the kind of silence that feels wrong — too perfect, too smooth, as if the air itself was holding its breath. The Hausa camp lay stretched along the riverbank, lit by dying campfires and guarded by men with half-lidded eyes.
A shadow moved where no shadow should be.
One by one, the Nupe sentries slumped forward without a sound — throats opened by quick, efficient blades. The killers caught their bodies before they hit the ground, lowering them into the dirt like discarded clothes. The metallic scent of blood was swallowed by the night breeze before it could drift far.
The Hausa came like ghosts in the dark.
No banners. No war cries.
Only the sudden rush of feet in the grass and the hiss of torches splitting the night.
The nupe camp burst into chaos — crack of arrows through tent skins, thump of bodies hitting earth. The smell of burning goat hide and millet sacks thickened the air. Shadows danced on the walls of the tents, stretching into monstrous shapes.
Bubakar stumbled awake, hand instantly gripping his spear. The torchlight painted his face in sharp contrast — eyes wide, jaw clenched, breath short. His heart beat not in rhythm of glory, but in raw, alien fear.
For the first time, the young warrior understood — the night didn't care about heroes.
A Hausa raider leapt from the shadows. Bubakar's instinct took over — spear forward, twist, and the man crumpled at his feet. But the fight was a blur: men shouting in Fulfulde, horses screaming, flames biting the sky.
Through the chaos, he caught sight of Umaru — the half-brother who had mocked him only days before. Umaru was pinned to the ground by a fallen tent pole, his face contorted in terror, eyes darting between the approaching Hausa and Bubakar.
Bubakar hesitated a fraction — that hesitation filled with every insult Umaru had spat at him. Then, with a low growl, he moved.
"Get up, ka yi sauri!" Bubakar snarled, voice low but sharp. His tone carried the sting of an insult disguised as urgency — a reminder of the shame Umaru had brought on himself.
With one swift motion, Bubakar yanked the pole off him and shoved him to his feet. Umaru's face — pale in the torchlight — showed both humiliation and unexpected relief. The background burned in orange and red as a Hausa spear narrowly missed Bubakar's head, striking the dirt where Umaru had just lain.
The two ran side by side through a curtain of smoke, ducking past fleeing horses and stumbling over smoldering supplies.
When they reached the relative safety of the command tent, Bubakar's uncle stood waiting, his expression carved from stone. The old warrior's eyes reflected the fire outside.
He spoke low, almost drowned by the screams beyond:
"War is not won in the heat of the moment, Bubakar. It is survival. It is knowing when to give up glory… to keep breathing another day. Our bloodline—Manko's blood—endures because we endure."
Outside, the night still burned. Bubakar looked out toward the chaos, gripping his spear tighter — and for the first time, glory felt small.
Beyond the command tent, the remnants of their force dragged the wounded from the front lines, stumbling over debris and bodies alike. A riderless horse tore past, eyes wide, foam streaking its flanks. Men coughed through smoke as they tried to form a shaky defensive ring, shields overlapping like broken teeth.
Some fought just to stay on their feet, others fought to keep each other moving. The retreat was a crawl, jagged and desperate, far from the order Bubakar had imagined in his youthful fantasies of battle.
Umaru staggered beside him, one hand clutching a shallow gash along his side. He didn't speak, but the set of his jaw and the tense line of his shoulders told Bubakar everything — shame, fear, and gratitude all tangled in silence. Bubakar spared him a glance, then a small, almost imperceptible nod. It was acknowledgment without words, a truce forged in the fire of shared survival.
They fell into the flow of the retreat, dodging falling debris, helping others where they could, and inching toward the cover of the forest beyond the riverbank. Bubakar's mind weighed heavy with the lesson his uncle had hammered home: victory was never a single fight, and glory could wait. Survival — theirs, the bloodline's, the people's — came first.
And so they pressed on, through smoke and fire, into the darkened forest, carrying both the cost of the night and the fragile hope of dawn.