[color=A0A0A0][h2]Fleuri Jodeau[/h2][/color]

Fleuri assessed the enemy, watching as they assumed a defensive wall of shields and spears.  It'd be foolish to charge them on horseback again, they were clearly prepared for that.  No, these mercenaries would be best handled on foot.  If Fleuri and the others were to dismount and attack, it'd trap them between the knights and between Veileena's bodyguard, who was making short work of anyone who got close.

As Fanilly warned them not to overextend themselves, it reminded Fleuri that the problem with attacking from this angle would be that the knights' goal was not to maximize the Golden Boars' casualties, and the Golden Boars' goal was not to simply win the skirmish.  The mercenaries wanted to capture Veileena, and Fanilly wanted to prevent that.  If they attacked their foe from this angle, the mercenaries would have fewer opponents to go through to get to Veileena.  They certainly seemed ruthless enough that heavy losses wouldn't faze them so long as they completed the job, and if even a few of them were to escape with the girl in their clutches, they'd be victorious.

The situation reminded Fleuri a bit of one of his time as a squire.  He and his master had managed tracked down a body-snatcher who had been stealing corpses under the noses of both sides from the scenes of skirmishes during the War of the Red Flag.  The ghoulish thief had been working for a necromancer, providing her with fresh bodies to be raised.  The necromancer was hardly a fearsome opponent, nowhere near the power of the conspirator that Fleuri had fought in the Cal Mausoleum much more recently, and rather than try and fight the paladin and his squire, she ordered her undead thralls to keep them occupied while she fled.  Fleuri in particular struggled in this fight, the stab wounds and shallow cuts inflicted by his arming sword doing little to put the zombies down.  They managed to vanquish the undead and put the defiled soldiers to rest, but the necromancer managed to get away during the fight.

[i]In hindsight, the undead could have been dealt with later, but by failing to catch the necromancer we allowed her to continue her dark work of defiling the dead,[/i] he recalled.  As luck would have it, their fleeing foe never got the chance to raise more undead, but that was a story to reminisce on another time.

The lesson that Fleuri learned that day applied here.  It was more important that they prevent the Golden Boars from grabbing Veileena (at which point they would likely flee with her and leave their unfortunate fellows behind to prevent the knights from catching them) than killing as many of them as possible.  Depending on their foe's resolve and dedication to their mission, it might even result in even more of them being killed in their efforts to abduct Veileena.

"Gerard, Runa," Fleuri addressed his fellow knights, "As much as I'd like to cut these rogues down, the Captain's orders are to protect the Cal girl, and we don't want the Boars to separate us from her."  Fleuri spurred his horse on away from the Golden Boars' defensive position, cantering back around to where Veileena was.  Fleuri dismounted and took up a defensive position a short distance away, behind Haelstadt and just far away enough from the Cal girl and her serpentine protector that he would have enough room to swing his greatsword if the mercenaries were to surge forward.  From the look of how Veileena's bodyguard was butchering the Boars, however, they might not need to worry about that.

[@VitaVitaAR][@JessieTargaryen][@HereComesTheSnow]