Baron Kalang swam through his village. It was...not good. He had proven himself in combat against Baron Puana, but the other sahuagin had not gone down easily and had force Kalang to turn to general combat to prove his superiority. That had left the village weakened, then Prince Key’sa had called upon his services and those of his hunters and warriors against an incursion by triton filth.
In their absence, the women had been left to run things and the weak had been allowed to breed and most of the outer fishing areas had been lost to the merpeople. And now it was time for one of his village’s duties to the Low King. The patrol up into the freshwater of the river to make sure no new threat had appeared and discover whether there were any new settlements of land-folk suitable to be raided was an unpleasant formality. Occasionally they caught some merpeople, and once even an aquatic elf spy, but to get to anyplace inhabited by any people worth killing and anything worth taking you had to go so far that sahuagin breed in the depths of the salty ocean would truly suffer.
And fighting orcs was dangerous and unproductive. They couldn’t be made slaves, as they just drowned, they were hard to make sacrifices, as they fought to the death, unless stopped and they had nothing worth taking. Even worse, they were almost impossible to take by surprise, which made standard raiding tactics less than effective. They weren’t as bad as elves whose constant disgraceful use of magic only made it clear that the longstanding blood feud between their peoples was obviously correct.
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He had to send scouts up the river, unless he was willing to challenge the king. The question was, how few could he get away with sending and which ones? With proper braggadocio, he thought he could get away with 4, as surely no one in such a poor water would dare to challenge their great kingdom or warriors. As for who to send, he basically had three options, he could send one of his handful of competent subordinates who still survived. That was what the king would want. It would also make his life immeasurably harder.
Second, he could send one of his more cowardly subordinates, who he’d meant to punish for being notably slow to respond to his orders during the dispute with Puana. Kalang was not afraid of what might be found, but if anything was, he’d have to deal with it and his forces were not as prepared as he might like at this point. The cautious could be relied upon to not go any further than they absolutely had to...but they’d also run back the moment they spotted any trouble.
No, the better course of action was to send a handful of aggressive warriors who would just keep pushing forward until they reached the water elementals and got a bloody nose, or ran into actual trouble and tried to solve it. If they didn’t come back, no real loss and if they did come back with a problem, it would be a real one, not ‘I spotted something on the shore and swam all the way back here.’ And maybe it would even mature some of that mindless aggression out of them. Aggression was good, mindlessness wasn’t, even in a man.
