In the churning red mire, the Lannister cavalrymen made a fatal choice: they dismounted. But on the ground, they found themselves even more paralyzed. Every step required a Herculean effort to pull a leaden leg from the sucking mud. Their horses had once carried the weight of their steel; now, their own lungs and muscles had to bear it.
Hugo's light infantry, by contrast, were in their element. Their thin tunics and boiled leather offered no protection against a broadsword, but they didn't need it. They moved like water around stones, dancing across the surface of the quagmire while the knights sank to their knees. It was a sight rarely seen outside the treacherous marshes of the Neck—the proudest warriors of the West being systematically dismantled by peasants.
"To the flank! Outflank them!"
Gerion Lannister's voice was a clarion call, the kind of command that usually turned the tide. He had narrowly escaped being crushed in the initial trench-fall and was now trying to rally the survivors. He pointed toward a stretch of green that looked firm and harmless.
"Swamp! It's a swamp!" a rider screamed as his horse vanished into the earth up to its chest.
The farmers, knowing the land, skipped across the "solid" ground on hidden paths of stone or light brush. They descended on the trapped knights like crows on a dying stag, using heavy mallets and wood-axes to split open helmets and skulls.
Gerion watched in a mounting panic. His men were kneeling in the filth, surrendering to people they wouldn't have looked at twice in a tavern. Before he could wheel his horse around, the Sparrows were upon him.
Two men with seven-pointed stars carved into the skin of their foreheads rushed his horse. Gerion's golden armor made him a beacon—a prize too rich to ignore. A spear shaft slammed into the side of his head, rattling his brain inside his skull. An axe-blade bit into his calf, severing the stirrup leather and sending him tumbling into the muck.
Dizzy and gasping, Gerion reached for his dagger, fearing a blade through his visor. Instead, he felt his weapons being stripped away. A heavy gauntlet slammed into his helmet once, twice, three times. The world spun into blackness. His last thought was a strange relief: They aren't killing me. They want a ransom.
"Damn it, Gerion!"
Tygett Lannister couldn't see his brother fall, but he could feel the momentum of the battle dying. He forced himself to remain calm, channeling Tywin's cold logic. The road, he realized. The King's Road is the only solid ground.
"All troops, to the King's Road! Advance! That ground is solid!"
The Lannister infantry, the iron heart of the West, obeyed. Despite the exhaustion of their forced march, they quickened their pace, their boots ringing on the packed earth of the highway.
"They're coming as expected," Hugo noted, standing near a secondary line of defenses.
He watched as Long Snow and his farmers worked feverishly to lash merchant carts together, pinning them to the road with chains and heavy iron nails.
"Snow, you don't need to break them," Hugo said, his eyes on the approaching wall of crimson shields. "Just buy me time. Hold them until they're gasping for air."
The clash at the barricade was a symphony of splinters and screams. The Lannister "Lions," relying on their superior plate and mail, tried to vault over the carts. They were met by a forest of four-meter pikes and peasant axes. For a time, the barricade held. Every Lannister who crested the wood was skewered or bludgeoned back.
But equipment eventually told. The Lannister professionals began to hack through the wood and the men behind it. The farmers' cloth tunics offered no resistance to Westerlands steel. It began to look less like a battle and more like the Sack of King's Landing.
"Hold! The God-Chosen is with us!" Long Snow roared, his spear-point emerging red from a Lannister's throat.
Just as the line wavered, arrows hissed from the forest on the flank. Hugo's hidden archers had found their mark, sniping at the exposed necks and joints of the Lannister infantry. It wasn't enough to stop a thousand men, but it was enough to make them flinch.
Snow pulled his farmers back to the second line of carts as the Sparrows fought a fanatical rearguard action, dying to the last man to ensure the retreat.
Tygett Lannister, sensing victory, led the charge over the second barricade. He was at the very front now, an arrow bouncing off his helm with a sharp clack. "One more push!" he shouted, his voice cracking with fatigue. "A Lannister always—"
"Hey! Fools! Look here!"
Hugo's voice cut through the din. He emerged from behind the final screen of brush, leading his elite reserves—the "Black Blade" Karnathir at his side. These were the veterans, fresh and hungry.
Hugo didn't duel; he slaughtered. His longsword was a wide, sweeping blur, taking heads and limbs with terrifying efficiency. Beside him, Karnathir's black blade moved like a snake, finding the gaps in armor before the soldiers could even register his presence.
The exhausted Lions, who had fought through three layers of traps and miles of mud, finally broke. The sight of this fresh killing machine was too much. Men threw down their shields and ran.
Tygett tried to wheel his horse to stop the rout. In that moment of turning, Hugo saw him. He didn't have a spear, so he gripped his captured longsword by the blade in a half-sword grip and launched it with every ounce of "God-Chosen" strength he possessed.
The heavy steel hilt and guard struck Tygett squarely in the shoulder with the force of a ballista bolt. The Lannister lord was torn from his saddle, hitting the mud with a sickening thud of metal on earth.
Hugo didn't wait to see him wake. He grabbed a fresh sword from a corpse and turned back to the melee. The Lion was down, but the hunt wasn't over.