"Report, Caesar, the infidels have all been put to death." That evening, Barbaro Talostos, who had been promoted to a Philaka officer, led nearly a thousand Philaka Soldiers and soldiers under his command to salute their monarch as Caesar arrived with the main army.
Behind them were a group of Black Sheep soldiers captured in this battle and piles of corpses everywhere.
Facing the obvious great victory and the salute of his subordinates, Manuel nodded slightly in acceptance.
"What is the outcome?" Caesar, riding a snow-white steed, clad in armor and a purple cloak, looked towards the east and asked sternly.
"Reporting to Caesar," Barbaro paused, then continued his report, "According to the captives, they are a unit of the Black Sheep Dynasty, led by a Caucasian Persian named Salem, and were originally tasked with conquering Gremi, the last town in Kakheti."
Indeed, this Black Sheep unit, led by Salem and responsible for the mop-up operation, ran directly into a thousand-strong Bosporus detachment, a mixed force of Grand Company peasant soldiers and Philaka Soldiers, led by Barbaro Talostos.
As for how the whole thing happened, it began a few days earlier when Manuel received a reply from Prince George of Kakheti in Tbilisi.
When the messenger, having traversed mountains and ridges, brought Kakheti's response back to Tbilisi, it was exactly one and a half days after the reply was made, or several days after he had dispatched his envoy.
It was morning then, and after Manuel finished reading the reply in the Tbilisi Palace and issued the order to his subordinates and servants: "All prepare, it's time to go to Kakheti to save our kin," Bosporus and its vassals in Georgia mobilized.
Over seven thousand men gathered under Caesar's command and rushed to support Kakheti.
Due to the Bosporus Army's disciplined and swift march, coupled with local guides, they rendezvoused with the remaining Kakheti forces in Gremi just one day later.
After personally meeting with Prince George Bagration of Kakheti, who was holding out in Gremi with his remaining forces, Manuel quickly grasped the current battlefield situation and the fact that Black Sheep forces were in pursuit.
Given this, out of caution, Caesar dispatched Barbaro, a former Altzamtao who had performed well recently, with a thousand-man vanguard consisting of over a hundred Philaka Soldiers and nearly nine hundred peasant soldiers to ascertain the enemy's movements, while also giving this force the ability to fight in an engagement.
Then, after half a night of operations, Barbaro, who was supposed to be reconnoitering, unexpectedly discovered the Black Sheep unit in a state of extreme laxity.
After a rough reconnaissance, Barbaro boldly concluded that the enemy was no match for them, and immediately decided to risk disobeying his monarch's instructions to eliminate these enemies who had relaxed when they shouldn't have.
The final result was as described: before the well-prepared and high-spirited Bosporus Army, this Black Sheep unit quickly collapsed.
During this time, Barbaro even incidentally employed a tactic Caesar had inadvertently revealed to his generals: having about ten cavalrymen carry short muskets, pre-loaded with gunpowder and shot, to fire lead bullets at the enemy while fighting on horseback, utilizing the cavalry's mobility and the musket's power in conjunction with other troop types to achieve victory.
However, the results somewhat disappointed Barbaro; although some in this cavalry unit even successfully killed a Black Sheep general, the performance of most musket-wielding cavalrymen was not satisfactory.
Among these ten or so cavalrymen, some were mere extras in this battle due to the musket's poor accuracy, others had their warhorses startled and unable to perform their duties normally, and some even fell off their horses due to the considerable recoil of the matchlock, even contributing to the Bosporus Army's few casualties in this battle…
Overall, the performance of these arquebusier cavalry seemed to be more detrimental than beneficial.
After Barbaro reported and summarized these post-battle findings to his Caesar, Manuel fell silent for a moment.
He had originally planned to establish a dragoon unit for experimentation only after the relevant theories and corresponding technologies had truly developed, but he never expected his subordinate to implement his idea prematurely.
However, judging by the specific circumstances, such a unit truly could not fulfill the tasks he envisioned for it under existing conditions.
It seemed that the establishment of musket cavalry, or dragoons, would have to wait several years.
Manuel thought so.
After contemplating matters related to dragoons, Caesar turned his attention to how to deal with Barbaro.
Although he had indeed achieved merits such as annihilating the enemy's effective forces, capturing enemy soldiers to obtain confessions, and over-fulfilling his orders, all without suffering more than twenty deaths, Barbaro had actually disobeyed his military command, essentially being recklessly aggressive.
If those Altzamtao purged by the Komnenos Dynasty were all like Barbaro, or even worse, then Manuel could easily understand why they had fallen to their previous state.
If such behavior was not handled correctly, there was a high possibility of 'gekokujo' (subordinates overthrowing superiors), even if Barbaro himself was demonstrably loyal to him.
After much thought, out of appreciation for his talent, Caesar ultimately decided to temporarily overlook Barbaro's disobedience and hinted that he would be rewarded after the war.
At the same time, he also decided to keep Barbaro close to him during the upcoming Caucasus campaign and to transfer him out of the Philaka Legion immediately after the relevant hostilities ended, to prevent his own Philaka Imperial Guard from following suit.
Having dealt with the above matters, Manuel began to extract useful information from the captives' confessions.
Having first eliminated a Black Sheep unit, and given that these Shiite Turkmen seemed unaware that Bosporus had actually intervened in the Southeast Caucasus, he acutely realized that he was, in fact, the party holding the initiative from the shadows.
Through further analysis, he also roughly estimated that the remaining Black Sheep main force of over seven thousand men, led by Jahan Shah, should be waiting for good news from his subordinates in the vicinity of Ganja.
Based on this intelligence, coupled with his historical knowledge, Manuel seemed to have a divine insight into the situation Jahan Shah was actually facing: at this time, his cousin's husband was not yet the powerful ruler who would later sweep across the Iranian Plateau, but rather the "Governor of Azerbaijan" supported by the Black Sheep's old rival, the Timurid Empire.
That was why he chose to wage "Jihad" against Georgia when it was about to be overwhelmed by Bosporus, hoping to establish his own prestige.
Since that was the case, Manuel had to make good use of this situation to defeat the Black Sheep Dynasty in one fell swoop, making them abandon their ambitions for Georgia and shift their attention back to the east.
As he thought of this, an excellent plan began to form in his mind.
"Cousin's husband, you should just go back to the east and play Persian games with Timur."