A Knight's Valor Knows No Recklessness (4)
It was a saying passed down only in the South.
A knight is one who, alone, turns the tide of a battlefield.
Among the words men used for a knight, there had always been this: one who holds the strength of a thousand, a bearer of the valor to stand alone against a thousand foes. No knight, of course, truly possessed the power of one against a thousand. Even so, there were knights who could do the work of a hundred, at the very least.
Champion.
It was the title given to a knight who represented a domain and had taken victory in thirty formal duels. Sort the genuine articles even from among such Champions, and a man would likely be awake all night. And yet, to put it plainly, a Champion's existence could decide the whole course of a battlefield. When war broke out between domains, it was no exaggeration to say that the mere presence or absence of a Champion settled the soldiers' morale. That was the power of renown—the presence one knight had forged by winning thirty duels and more, and nothing else.
…In that sense, Mordred paid Champions little mind.
Not that they scorned knights. Was Ganok himself, leader of the Hundred Ghosts and the man they revered, not the very Champion in whom Mordred took pride? Even so, they did not honor the title. More than a thousand defensive battles had taught them something.
Individual strength has its limits.
However strong the knight, he was helpless before numbers, and before the might of a disciplined army even a knight's strength was bound to lose its shine. They had learned it in their own flesh. Mordred's troops, in particular, went armed with the latest weapons of the age. Five soldiers, working disciplined tactics and weapons of fire, could handily bring down a knight or two. And however high a name might soar, human fame did not reach monsters. Five years ago, perhaps, something in them might still have felt respect and fear toward a knight of great renown. Now, at least within Mordred, no one was left who feared a famous knight, or a Champion.
However great the knight, if the ground is a battlefield, we win.
Their fangs had been honed to pierce the nape of a great evil spirit.
…And yet.
"So they really do exist. Something like that…."
Someone's murmur, its meaning obscure. Strangely enough, the people understood at once in what sense it had been spoken.
BOOM!
Another hurled boulder swept the small-class monsters away.
Thuk!
Arrows and bamboo spears punched clean through the heads and chests of the medium- and large-class ones.
"M-more arrows! Bring more arrows!"
"Make more bamboo spears!"
"…Were bamboo spears always this devastating a weapon?"
One blow, one kill. Every time he moved an arm or a leg, monsters were swept off by the dozens. At some point a single man had slaughtered more than three thousand of them in ten minutes, and set the rest of the horde to faltering where it stood.
…….
They had been cowed ahead of time by the overwhelming presence pouring off one knight, and it was nothing if not proof that even a monster possessed a will to live. Just as dozens of thugs go meek the moment a gun barrel is leveled at them, a hundred thousand monsters watched a massacre unfold in the space of ten minutes, and their bodies locked—from the terror that if they so much as stirred, they might be next.
In a single word—
"A presence that overwhelms ten thousand."
One man against ten thousand. Not a thousand. A figure, rather, as if the valor of ten thousand had been compressed into one.
"Has anything ever stood this steady at a man's back?"
It was the moment they understood all over again why a Champion's existence held absolute sway over a soldier's morale. The warriors could not contain the elation surging in their chests, and so they gave that feeling form in action.
"How long are you going to just stand there and watch?! Help the Champion!!"
"Waaaaaah!!"
With morale enough to pierce the sky, they poured out gunfire and flame without restraint, putting the heat in their chests into every shot.
If there was one mercy in facing a great army of monsters, it was this: a monster host was, in the end, nothing but a rabble.
Else why call them evil spawn?
By nature they had neither cooperation nor any chain of command. The frame of their world was an ecosystem of eat or be eaten. The only monsters with anything like cooperation and command were those with the wits of a small child—goblins, gnolls, and their like. Had those two hundred thousand been nothing but goblins, or nothing but gnolls, they might have come on as a far more dangerous host. But once creatures of every kind and every grade had been thrown together, what stood there was merely a pseudo-legion with nothing to it but numbers.
The problem…
"Graaaaaah!"
"Blrp?"
…was that there were far, far too many of them. Enough to sicken a man past disgust, into that crawling horror of holes and swarming flesh.
The monsters known as frogmen—frog-humans—were crossing the marsh and closing on the fortress by degrees. Ghouls, monsters of the undead kind, sprinted through ground thick with poison weeds and traps. Flesh sloughed. Bodies tore. They did not care. They only drew nearer to the walls.
And every time—
"Fire!"
"Don't spare the fire bombs! Throw them!"
BOOM!
BANG!
Fire bombs with force to rival grenades came down, and monsters burst apart. But for every one that burst, more poured in to take its place, and some of them offered a grotesque sight: devouring their own kind to restore their bodies, or to regenerate them outright.
Worse still.
Crrrk—crack!
"A-a Giant Frogman!"
"Are you out of your mind?! It—it evolved?!"
Again and again, a monster devoured its own kind, or some higher specimen, grew, and evolved in a single leap from juvenile to adult. A thing that had been small-class became medium-class in a moment, or large-class. And the leaping power of a large-class frogman—
Fwoosh!
—was enough to clear a thousand meters in one bound. Which was to say it could slam straight into the fortress. Worse, there was the danger it might vault clean over the fortress itself.
A crisis. And yet—
Shhk!
"Since when does a mere monster presume upon our fortress?"
A frogman was sheared in two where it stood, and fell.
"Do not imagine you can break through us."
"Wheeeeeee!"
A baleful ghost-wail swept over the monsters once.
Those who had contracted with spirits—Mordred's guardian deities, an iron wall of defense under the name of the Hundred Ghosts—the Hundred Ghost Shield Knight Order, mounted on Ghost Horses, ringed the fortress as if to hold it fast.
"Do not let a single one cross this wall!"
"Wheeeee!"
As if in answer to the order, a ghost-keen cold enough to bite swept the field again. The Hundred Ghosts, with Ganok at their head, set helms wrought in the shape of ghosts upon their heads, and the Ghost Horses answered by breathing ghost-fire.
Soulsteel Armor, Ghost Horses, and the spirit-mediums with the gift to wield them. So long as those three were gathered as one, Mordred's knights held an absolute advantage against any physical attack.
However—
Crack-crack-crack!
"Graaaaaagh!"
The breed that overturned even that absolute advantage without a moment's hesitation was none other than the monster.
"Damn it all. If you're a monster, then act like one and stick to physical attacks."
"Frost Ghouls. Heh… they say running into one of those is rarer than running into a yeti."
"They aren't rare. Everyone who ran into one froze to death. That's the only reason the rumor calls them rare."
A minute ago the frogmen had been evolving. Now the ghouls were evolving as well, turning into ghouls that breathed freezing rime. Frost Ghouls—ghouls, of all things, that wielded the power of ice. Faces were already twisting in distaste, and then—
Fwoom!
"A Giant Ghoul!"
"D-do ghouls even have a kind that breathes fire?"
"They do. …As of today."
This was why a host of monsters was feared. Rabble though they were, empty though they were of even a scrap of cooperation, they never stopped growing. That they did not fear death was the least of it. They devoured one another, and so they grew, and so they changed. There was, for that reason, no end to the kinds of monster. However weak a thing might be for the moment, however small its frame, no one could predict how high a grade it might yet seize.
But…
This… the growth is too fast.
However grotesquely swift a monster's growth might be, growth this abnormal was a rare thing. Even evil spawn were living things. They ought to take time to grow. And yet it was as if, for the sake of that growth—
"Don't tell me they're spending their very life force?"
Forcibly evolving, even at the cost of life itself? The knight who arrived at that answer meant to carry it to the old knight at once. But—
"There is no need. I know already."
"Sir?"
"…You vile insect. Now, of all things, you stoop to every sordid trick there is."
The old knight stared straight ahead with eyes that were anything but calm. At what? There was no need even to ask so foolish a question. There was only one being toward whom their commander—the former head of the house, and Mordred's strongest knight—had ever bared resentment and hatred like that.
A voice erupted that no one could believe had come from that slight frame. It was no match for the Lion's Roar a certain knight had unleashed, but in sheer momentum it did not fall short of one. And the cry of a man who held great spiritual power exerted a mysterious force by that alone—
Crack!
—and dragged that thing's form forcibly out into the world.
What drove into their ears in that instant was a skin-crawling noise, five times the sound of nails dragged down a slate. The voice alone made ears ache. Some even suffered the illusion of a snake climbing their spines.
It let a small discontent show, and grumbled—because it had taught them a name, and still they called it that.