The Heroic Legend of Arslan vol. 18

All of the setup in the previous volume felt like it was leading to a big battle, and that’s what we get here.  Two, in fact, with the first involving a clash of 250,00 Lusitanians against 100,000 Parsians.  It sounds like a very lopsided battle – and the Parsians don’t even have the strategic genius of Narsus working for them (not directly, at least).  What they do have is something fearsome:  King Andragoras leading the charge.  If you’re wondering how this works out for them, the second major conflict in this volume involves 210,000 Lusitanians against 100,000 Parsians.  It’s a battle that has a bigger scope than the first, one that’s big enough to involve Arslan and his army as well.  Lurking in the shadows of all this is a force that seeks to utilize all of this conflict for its own ends:  Those of the Snake King Zahhak.

If nothing else, “The Heroic Legend of Arslan” continues to prove that it’s hard to get involved in a story when the good guys just keep winning over and over again.  While the Lusitanian army has numbers behind it, Duke Guiscard’s strategies keep getting torn to shreds every single time.  I’m not trying to spoil the events of this volume, as anyone who’s been reading the series up to this point will likely see how things are going to go before they actually play out here.  It’s to the point where I was actually glad to see Guiscard duck out of the narrative at the end as a more interesting conflict is promised.

That would be the potential Siege of Ecbatana as Hilmes readies his troops to take back the capitol he sees as his birthright, just as Andragoras makes his move to re-take it.  While the odds would seem to favor the latter in such a scenario, such a resolution would likely lead to a standoff with Arslan as he’s now committed to letting the Lusitanians go in peace if they retreat.  Whether or not we’ll see such a conflict with an unclear outcome in the next volume isn’t certain, but the potential is there and I’ll keep reading to see it through.