After finishing writing my enormous, 100-chapters story, i've started editing it. I'm correcting and expanding chapter 1 to better show some things and provide a better introduction to the story. One thing i originally spent very few words about is the description of the place where Killer becomes king and starts his own kingdom. Kendrew is actually a pretty special and awesome place, and Killer has a back story in the area, too, from the years before "Legend of a Warrior" (who knows if i'll ever be able to write out all those stories as well...). So, i've decided to draw a quick aerial view / map, and add the story, as will be written into the edited and reworked Chapter 1.


[…] Killer knew the area well. The road snaking its way northwards was one of the widest and most comfortable routes that from Northern Ire led up into the heart of the Northlands, eventually all the way up to Kesteven. It was called “the Highway”, even though it was nowhere near as large and capacious as one of the actual highways found in the south. The traffic of vehicles in the north was still not intense enough to warrant big, multi-lane motorways and when the southerners had repeatedly proposed to enlarge the road themselves with the excuse of trade, they had been firmly rebuked. The kingdoms of the North still hadn’t quite caught up with the big standing armies of the south, in particular with the colossal armed forces of Ire. Technology-wise, there were still big gaps and mechanization was still only partial for most kingdoms. Some were literally still clinging on to the old, traditional and honored way of the sword and spear. That meant that a larger road was not in their interest: a motorway risked becoming only an easy access point for the armoured divisions of the south.
The valley of Kendrew was a narrow but long stretch of nearly flat, fertile land squeezed between two mountain ranges. There were no roads on the massive, rocky, steep-sided mountains, but the valley in the middle was a little paradise not just for those who lived and farmed there, but potentially for the mechanized armies of the south too. The little town of Kendrew had been founded centuries earlier on a narrow stretch of “high ground” between a river, the Rapido, on the western side, and a large, incredibly deep lake on the eastern side, undoubtedly the result of some ancient glacier long gone. At its southern end, the water of the lake eventually became a river, the Spey, which rushed southwards down another narrow valley. A multitude of streams cascaded down into the lake and the Rapido from the mountains on either side. Some were permanent, while many other cascades only formed when the snow melted on the mountain tops, or when it rained heavily. The sight from Kendrew, in the middle of that scenery, was spectacular.
As soon as the southerners had started to have the upper hand in terms of military power thanks to their technological progress, Kendrew had turned into a defensive bastion for the Northlands as a whole. A castle had been built to guard the road, and once artillery had reached maturity as a weapon of war, the middle-age fortifications had become obsolete and had been supplemented by a new fortress with low, massive, sloped, triangular bastions topped by the first few cannons the tigers reluctantly rushed into service in their own lines.
Eventually, with the risk of invasion from the south becoming even more acute, the tigers had started a massive digging project north of the fortress, cutting apart the “dam” of high ground that separated the river Rapido from the Major Lake to the east. Opening that passage had changed the geography of the valley, flooding a vast area and turning it into the North Lake. The river Rapido had also been deliberately enlarged on the western side, forming a lake that had been unimaginatively called “Minor”, for it was much smaller the one to the east. What had been the rest of the Rapido river, snaking its way southwards, was baptized Sidewinder to distinguish it from the stretch to the north of the new lake.
The final result was that the fortress of Kendrew ended up surrounded by water on 3 sides. Four sides, effectively, but for a narrow isthmus of land between the two lakes. The isthmus was then cut by digging a deep and large canal that could be crossed only by virtue of two drawbridges, with a ravelin between one bridge and the following one.
The road leading northwards was routed over those drawbridges, across the fortress and then over another pair of drawbridges and onto a permanent, stone bridge, long and narrow, held up by 18 arches, each spanning 60 meters. Since the bridge had been built where there used to be the high ground that separated the Rapido from the Major Lake, the bridge has always been known as “the dam”.
With all that water, and the fortress in the middle, turned almost into an island, even the most powerful armoured division of the south could be stopped from making any further progression northwards.
That was the theory, at least. 8 years earlier, that theory had been called into question when the enormous armada put together under the New World Order Army banner by general Dark had launched a two-pronged assault on the north, invading through two different valleys. One had been Kendrew’s valley, and Killer had rushed in to guide the defence of the fortress.
Under the cover of a formidable line up of heavy artillery which kept both the fortress and the northern coast under constant bombardment, the forces of general Dark had bypassed the fortress thanks to a number of brigades of Marines, equipped with combat boats and amphibious tanks. The boats were carried on the back of trucks all the way up to Kendrew, and then launched into the lakes to provide covering fire for the amphibious armoured vehicles , much slower and clumsier while in the water, but dangerous once they managed to “beach”.
The fortress had been directly invested by the assault of the vehicles, but its sloped bastions were nearly indestructible: when the stone and concrete outer layer was crumbled by the bombardment and explosives, the loose gravel and dirt contained inside their spectacular thickness only resulted in mini-landslides and un-climbable slopes that the assaulters couldn’t quite overcome, not even with the support of assault teams landed by helicopter directly on top of the battlements. The tigers had torn those assault teams to shreds.
However, the assault had effectively removed the fortress’s artilleries from the wider battle, and the amphibious armoured vehicles of the other brigades had pushed right past “the island” and had beached on the northern shore. Those elite, heavily armed brigades had driven back Killer’s small army and had formed a front to defend the engineers while they started building multiple ribbon bridges right across the lakes, to allow even heavier tanks and artilleries to cross and continue their push northwards.
Killer’s artillery batteries were too few to open fire against the enemy bridges in build without being wiped out by counter-battery fire, so he only used them in the most desperate of situations, and only ever allowed the firing of a couple of salvos before ordering them to change position. He was also short of sensors to direct his artillery fire on enemy positions. He was nearly blind, having little in the way of unmanned vehicles, aircraft or helicopters. His observers up on the mountains were picked out one after the other when the enemy, technologically superior, intercepted their radio communications, triangulated them and then shelled their positions with brutal displays of firepower.
Despite inflicting terrifying losses to the NWOA. Killer had been slowly but surely forced to pull back several miles up the valley, leaving the fortress surrounded and isolated. He head immediately started to put together a plan to reverse the fates of the battle, however. During the day he was in the very first line, fighting bitterly in the plain to restrain the enemy from breaking through the front. He raced back and forth all along the front, bringing his tremendous, tank- annihilating strength were it was needed the most, but it was during the nights that he planted the seeds of victory. He started using the cover of darkness to haul his few artillery batteries on top of the tallest mountain to the west of the fortress.
There was no road, no street, no passage to drive trucks and howitzers up there, and even helicopters could not get there with a meaningful load, since at high altitude the air is thinner and lift capability rapidly drains out. Dark’s forces had many helicopters, but they never even tried to lift anything up there. The snowy mountain tops were too hostile to be of any use, they thought. Helicopters were only used to assault the fortress’s ramparts and to shuttle troops quickly across the lakes. Killer’s few helicopters were a key asset to beat back armoured assaults and to quickly evacuate the wounded, so they were always high in demand without dreaming of using them to shuttle artillery around.
Yet Killer did what friends and enemy alike thought impossible: he brought heavy artillery up on top of the mountain. Literally. In first person. He hauled the howitzers on his shoulders, two at a time, and climbed the steep side of the mountain, several times every night, to bring up guns and ammunition and lead up the gun crews and a force protection group with shoulder-launched anti-air missiles, to protect the guns from the inevitable reaction of Dark’s air force elements. During the day, the guns and the tigers were hidden in holes in the deep snow, under camouflage nets. During the night, Killer hauled up more guns and more ammunition, using his tremendous, unmatched strength.
In the end, he even led a raid deep past the frontline, getting to one of the sophisticated, lethal ground-launched missile batteries that the enemy had just driven across the lakes on the ribbon bridges. He managed to steal the best part of a missile battery: he and his Predators, his especially trained, carefully selected special operators, drove the massive launcher trucks all the way into friendly territory, and from there he hauled even some of those mammoth 10x10 wheeled trucks on top of the mountain.
From there, they dominated the entire valley and had direct line of sight on all their targets. He was going to open fire only once, and he needed to hit every target that mattered, almost simultaneously. The quicker they were, the better, because the enemy still had jets and helicopters to retaliate with.
The following morning, knowing that secrecy was not going to last any longer, “Killer’s battery” opened fire from the top of the mountain, raining utter devastation on the NWOA’s forces in the valley. They only needed the light of dawn and their eyes, pretty much, to pinpoint their targets.
The enemy artillery concentrations were hit first and showered with carrier-shells, each one containing dozens of sub-munitions, more or less handgrenade-like. The sub-munitions scattered above the enemy gun batteries and utterly devastated them, reducing almost to zero the counter battery fire while other guns and missiles targeted the ribbon bridges, smashing them to smithereens, one by one. The bottom of the lakes was still cluttered with the hulks of the vehicles that had gone to the bottom on that bloody day.
The shoulder-launched SAMs had then taken a terrible toll on Dark’s helicopters and jets when they had attempted to bombard the artillery that had suddenly sprung to life on top of the mountain, while the tanks and other vehicles down in the plain literally hadn’t enough elevation and reach to fire back. The guns had continued firing until the barrels literally glowed. The NWOA air attacks took out several of the cannons, but those that remained kept firing until the battle was won.
Killer had led the counterattack immediately after the successful artillery strike. The battle had been won decisively, and the NWOA troops on the northern shore, trapped with their backs to the lakes and with no bridges left to cross, had been completely annihilated. The fortress was rescued, and the remains of the NWOA army routed and fled disorderly down the valley and back into Ire, leaving behind a treasure trove of vehicles, stores, cannons, ammunitions. Of course, the kit of the southerners was not quite adequately sized for the imposing, massive tigers, but Killer had rushed into service anything that could be immediately useful and sent everything else to the laboratories in Kesteven for the reverse engineering of the enemy’s technology.
The war hadn’t ended that day, after all, since Dark had managed to smash through the front in the other valley. The other prong of the NWOA offensive was successful and it advanced all the way north into Kesteven’s territory, but that was another story. Killer had caught up with Dark’s divisions and had beaten them back again and again, until he had cornered his rival at Wicherley for one last, decisive clash. That colossal battle had been the end of the war, but the battle of Kendrew had been an equally pivotal event. Half of the ultimate victory had been won at Kendrew.
“Killer’s Battery” was still there. Kind of. Killer suspected that the name had been changed under the new management. Besides, what had been an untouched mountain back then had been completely reshaped in the years after the battle. Killer’s Battery was now a fortress with great triangular bastions and sloped walls, surrounded by literal abysses on all sides as it clung to the rocky tip of the mountain. The only entry was through two successive drawbridges and a ravelin facing westwards. A road had been opened to keep the fortress supplied: it came from the north, obviously, and snaked its way over the top of the other, lower mountains and their exposed flanks. Killer’s Battery had an unimpeded line of fire for miles, and could shell anyone traveling along the road into dust: sneaking up on the castle was impossible.
But military engineers had gone further to make that place absolutely invincible. They had carved a “titan’s staircase” in the flank of the mountain, going down from the top almost all the way down to the lake. Every “step” of the staircase was actually a solid bastion topped by its own artillery battery. The bastions faced south and north alike, just in case. A steep road and a staircase of literal thousands of steps snaked their way down in the middle of that incredible barrier, all the way down to a second fortress, built at the bottom of the mountain, on a stretch of semi-flat land that could pass for a plateau. An enemy could have possibly sneaked its way through that area, so the engineers had built a fortress there, with large barracks inside for a vast garrison. It was one of the most impressive constructions ever attempted, and it dominated the valley with its gloomy, glorious mass. It made Kendrew’s valley completely un-passable for an enemy, no matter how well equipped… at least as long as the sky could be defended enough to keep enemy aircraft from bombing the fortress into bits.
Killer was amazed to discover that Kendrew was now a kingdom in its own right. He struggled to believe that his father had allowed some kinglet to carve up a kingdom for himself in that place, of all places. The strategic importance of the valley was unchanged, and Kesteven had tried to keep it under direct control ever since the battle. It was true, of course, that the new kinglet would, by merely existing and occupying the place, become a shield for Kesteven. If the south advanced again, the new kingdom would certainly fight to defend itself, and thus effectively the north as a whole. But Killer still felt uneasy at the thought of someone else’s flag flying on the two fortresses. For sure, his father wasn’t pleased either. So why had he allowed it to happen in the first place…? Something else was clearly preoccupying his mind and his forces elsewhere, and Killer suddenly realized he had no clue what it might be.
That was when he realized that he had truly been away for too long. […]