The column didn't move for a long moment.
Then the order came from the rear and the front rank made their decision and the advance came off the bend.
I shifted my grip on the hoe.
The first soldiers reached me in a wedge formation. Three at the front spreading to five, the standard approach for clearing a single obstruction from a road. Clean. Practiced. The kind of formation that worked reliably against most things it had been pointed at.
I stepped into it.
The hoe came across low, catching the leading soldier's sword arm at the wrist before his blade finished its arc. He went down. The two flanking him had already committed to their lines and I was no longer where their lines were pointed.
I moved through the gap.
The second rank adjusted faster than the first had, four soldiers tightening their spacing, trying to close the angles. I put the hoe shaft across the nearest one's throat and used his own momentum to redirect him into the soldier behind him. The fourth came in from the left with a thrust I turned with my forearm, returned with an elbow to his jaw, and stepped over both of them before they finished falling.
"What in the-"
"Push forward! There's only one of-"
The press came. Numbers compensating for whatever quality problem the front rank had run into.
I backed two steps to the edge of the crossing and let them come to me.
The hoe was not elegant. There was no established technique for fighting with a hoe because nobody had felt the need to develop one. What I had was eight years of swordmaster training living in my hands and arms and feet, the understanding of distance and timing and pressure that didn't care what it was holding.
A soldier with a spear came through the press from the right, using the length to stay outside the hoe's range. Smart. I let him think that was working for two exchanges, drawing him forward, and then closed the distance faster than the spear could track.
He hit the ground.
"He's not even...is he even trying?"
"Stay in formation! FORMATION!"
The demon units came through next. Reading that something different was happening at the front and moving to address it. The mana pressure came with them, spreading out ahead of them the way it always did, settling into the air with that particular heaviness that had broken walls and bent soldiers and ended every engagement it had touched in the past month.
I walked forward into it.
Hit the first demon unit across the chest with the hoe head and sent it back into the two behind it.
They recovered fast. Faster than soldiers. Came back from different angles, coordinating without signals. The first one from the left, the second from the right, the third coming low.
I stepped left, let the first one's momentum carry it past me, used the hoe handle across the back of the second one's knees, caught the third by the collar on the way down and redirected it into the road surface.
Stood up.
Adjusted my grip.
"What is this." One of the demon units that had pulled back was staring at me from the edge of the press. Its voice had a quality in it that demon voices didn't usually have. "What is this human."
"Kill it." Another one. "Stop looking at it and kill it."
They came in a coordinated push from three angles simultaneously.
I covered two of the three angles and took the hit from the third across the shoulder.
It moved me sideways two feet.
I looked at the demon unit that had hit me.
It looked back with the particular expression of something that had put everything into that impact and was recalculating what the absence of a result meant.
I put it on the ground with the hoe head.
Moved to the next one.
"It didn't...that should have-"
"What rank is this human? What rank?"
"There's no rank. It's a FARMER. Look at what it's wearing."
I was not sweating. The morning air was cold and I was moving through it at the pace that felt appropriate for the morning, which was unhurried. The hoe was getting unwieldy, the join between head and handle developing opinions about the direction of force being applied through it, but it was holding.
This was, I had decided on the walk to the crossing, exercise.
Not war. Not strategy. The sword was in Eryndor's storage because using the sword ended things in seconds and ending things in seconds was not what this morning required. The past months of barrier building and artifact making and monitoring from rooftops had not involved movement and the body needed movement the way it needed rest and food.
A hoe was sufficient.
The press from the column had stopped advancing.
Not because anyone had ordered it. Because the information traveling backward through the formation from the front had reached a critical mass and the column had collectively decided that the road ahead required more consideration.
Soldiers talking in low urgent voices in the middle ranks, the ones who couldn't see the crossing directly, getting the account from the ones in front of them.
"He's putting them down one at a time."
"How many?"
"I stopped counting."
"Is he using magic?"
A pause.
"No."
Another pause, longer.
"Then what is he?"
The Commander had ridden to the front by now. He sat on horseback behind the forward ranks, looking at the crossing, at the soldiers and demon units on the ground, at me standing in the middle of it with a hoe on my shoulder and the particular expression of someone waiting for the next part of the morning to begin.
He looked at his second.
"The strongest fighter in Philantria was the Hero of Medalline." His second spoke quietly, like he was checking the math on something. "The Hero is dead."
"The Hero is dead." The Commander agreed. He didn't sound convinced by his own agreement.
"Then who is that."
Nobody answered him.
A horn from the rear. The Commander calling the demon units to concentrate. They came in from the flanks in a coordinated push, fifteen of them, a formation designed to overwhelm a single point of resistance from every available angle.
I moved through it.
Not fast. Not dramatically. Just continuously, always somewhere other than where the next strike was aimed, the hoe covering what needed covering and the rest of me doing the rest of it. The demon units hitting air where I had been, adjusting, hitting air again.
The formation broke apart in pieces.
A young soldier at the edge of the press, barely old enough to be holding a sword, pressed himself back against the flank of the column and watched with wide eyes as I put the last demon unit of the formation on the ground.
"It's the farmer." He said. To no one. To himself. "It's just a farmer."
The man beside him grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
I straightened up.
The road in front of the crossing was quiet.
Thirty soldiers down. Nineteen demon units removed from the engagement. The hoe still in my hand. The morning still cold. The river still moving behind me.
I looked at the column.
The column looked at me.
And they knew, I was a variable they haven't accounted for.