That Wouldn't Be Fun
“I heard you won the training simulation again this time.”
“Yes.”
“Your team didn’t lose a single member, and you wiped the entire opposing team.”
The Commander’s lips curved into a satisfied smile.
“I like your creed. Every time, you aim for the least damage on your side and the most on theirs. I heard you plan to use high-efficiency tactics in the subjugation operation as well?”
So Meursault already passed along the details of the subjugation plan.
When I nodded, the Commander continued.
“What was your strategy for this training exercise?”
He’s asking me directly this time.
Last time, instead of questioning me himself, he’d had Meursault gather the details from the cadets.
Is he planning to appoint me as operations officer for this subjugation and wants to study my style in advance?
If that was the case, there was no reason not to tell him.
“It was simple. I gave those cadets exactly the situation they were expecting.”
“You gave them the situation they expected?”
“Anyone tends to let their guard down when things unfold the way they anticipated.”
“Oh?”
The Commander leaned in, clearly ready to listen, so I went on.
“The opponent was a ten-year-old kid. And the rest of the team was made up of cadets who’d already lost to that same ten-year-old. Naturally, they expected a team like that wouldn’t run smoothly. Leaving Platon, the top student, off the team played into the same expectation. They figured without him, they’d win easily.”
“I received a report that you and Platon had a falling-out. Was that part of the operation as well?”
He knows about that too?
Just how many informants has he planted?
Still, I had ordered Platon to badmouth me openly, so…
I nodded and said,
“An operation should already be complete before you ever set foot on the battlefield.”
“You’re right.”
The Commander smiled.
“Then the condition that losing even one person meant defeat was also part of the scheme.”
“Yes. The moment they heard that rule, they stopped thinking about headcount. If the enemy team has eight people, they stop seeing numbers of enemies and start seeing numbers of ‘chances to win.’”
“Interesting.”
“So as soon as the exercise began, I ordered them to tie me up and dump me in the enemy camp.”
“……Hmm?”
“With seven chances left, I figured they wouldn’t bother taking the one they liked least.”
In truth, it had been close to a gamble.
But even if they had immediately seized that chance, it wouldn’t have mattered much. Winning by shooting a bound child wouldn’t have brought them any honor.
“After that, it was easy. While Team B, feeling sorry for me, escorted me back to their base, Team A followed and set up an ambush nearby. We eliminated the ones left to watch me first. Then my teammates dragged the eliminated ones behind the flag, covered them with blankets, and I buried them in snow.”
“So your teammates never actually left Team B’s camp to begin with.”
“Exactly. After disguising them as snowdrifts, I smeared paint on myself to make it look like I’d resisted to protect the flag, fired a signal flare, and waited for Team B to return. From then on it was just repetition.”
“Eliminate them as they came. Once you had the numbers advantage, victory was already locked in.”
“Yes. Killing the last remaining Lucas was so easy I nearly yawned. After I killed him to sow discord and then vanished myself, what happened next was outside my expectations. I’d figured they’d split at least two-to-three. They weren’t quite that stupid—only one of them went off alone. Still, eight against four. With the numbers already in our favor, we ambushed them immediately, camouflaged ourselves as snowdrifts again, and finished the exercise by shooting Bones when he came charging in a panic. That’s all.”
“You thoroughly toyed with both the situation and their psychology.”
The Commander looked generally pleased, yet something still seemed to bother him.
“However. Just like last time… your strategies rely far too heavily on being a ‘child.’ They’re not universal. On a real battlefield, I have no intention of putting you in that kind of danger.”
He’s worried the tactics can’t actually be applied in real operations.
Now that I’m an operations officer, I was supposed to show strategies that can actually be used?
But there was something the Commander didn’t know.
This strategy would be especially effective on the battlefields to come.
It was also the reason I had been using my child’s body to mess with the cadets all along.
“I’m not planning to use myself as bait on the battlefield.”
“Then what?”
“To prepare for the external enemies who will come using themselves as ‘bait.’”
“External enemies…?”
“The most dangerous things on the coming battlefields will be children my own age.”
The Commander’s brow twisted slightly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m speaking as a regressor.”
“……!”
“In the not-too-distant future, other zones will start using young children as bait. We need to prepare.”
Well, it wasn’t a lie.
Most players were ten-year-old kids just like me.
With the barriers between zones likely gone by now, we needed to get ready for players from other zones approaching.
After the amount of grief I’d put them through, they wouldn’t fall for another zone’s player pretending to be a child.
“If you say so… then we should prepare.”
Fortunately the Commander trusted me completely, and he promised to distribute the records of my training as instructional material to the other soldiers as well.
“Still… there’s one thing I’m curious about.”
“What is it?”
“During the initial ambush. Instead of pretending to protect the flag, couldn’t you have simply pulled it out and won easily? Why didn’t you take the flag?”
Is he seriously asking because he doesn’t know?
I answered with a look that said I couldn’t understand the question.
“That wouldn’t be any fun.”
“…….”
After the training simulation ended in Team A’s victory, the cadets of Team A, their honor restored, were practically bouncing with joy.
Once again the exercise had ended with the complete elimination of the opposing team.
Now no one would dare mock or dismiss Haydam—or those who had lost to him.
There may have been a time in the past when they had felt something less than fondness toward Haydam.
Now only boundless respect for him remained, along with the absolute dread of ever facing him as an enemy.
Still, joy was joy.
And they had something they absolutely had to do.
“I think I heard a hallucination before training started.”
“What kind of hallucination?”
“Someone saying they were going to wipe our team out.”
“Yeah, that was definitely a hallucination. The team that got wiped is right over there!”
“Heh heh heh heh!”
That something was mocking the cadets of Team B.
“Those son of a bitches…….”
Team B crouched off to one side, fists clenched and trembling, but they couldn’t really step forward. After all, they themselves had once piled every kind of scorn and ridicule on Team A for losing to Haydam.
But Bones, the foulest-tempered of Team B, finally took the bait.
“Fuck, you win by putting a little kid out front and then……!”
The moment the words left his mouth, Bones realized his mistake and tried to slip away.
But Team A, seizing the chance, swarmed him like a school of piranhas.
“Hey, you hear that? When we lost, they called us idiots for losing to a kid. Now that he lost, suddenly we only won ‘cause we put a kid out front.”
“Double standards.”
“Lucas is just sitting there quietly. Why’s he acting like this?”
“Leave him. Bones probably thinks the rest of his team dragged him down.”
Bones couldn’t hold back the boiling rage and shouted,
“Fuck! Let’s go again! Rematch! This time fair and square—”
“That’s enough!”
“Stop it!”
The ones who rose at the same time were Lucas and Platon.
They looked at each other, hesitated for a moment, then turned their heads in opposite directions.
Lucas spoke first.
“Bones. I know you doubted Lord Haydam the entire exercise, and that’s why the loss feels unfair. But this wasn’t individual training—it was team training. Are you going to act like this every time we lose a team exercise?”
“…….”
Bones still wore a sulky face, but he wasn’t so stupid that he failed to understand what Lucas was saying, so he shut his mouth.
Lucas turned his gaze to Platon.
“I apologize.”
“For what?”
“For my teammate causing a scene. And… for mocking your defeat.”
At those words, the cadets of Team A’s eyes went round.
Lucas is apologizing himself?
“Now that you’ve been on the receiving end from Lord Haydam, you finally understand how we felt, huh?”
One of the Team A cadets asked mockingly, but Lucas simply nodded as if readily admitting it.
“You must have fallen for a similar trick. I’ll retract calling you idiots. However.”
The word “however” made the Team A cadets start to scowl—until the next part of his sentence left their expressions complicated.
“I cannot acknowledge Lord Haydam. That thing is not a cadet.”
“What kind of sophistry is that?”
Platon demanded, face cold.
“Wasn’t the agreement that if you lost the training, you would acknowledge Lord Haydam as a cadet doing the work of one person?”
“Lord Haydam’s talent is clearly outstanding. I admit it. No one here can match his individual skill. However.”
Lucas spoke with a trace of contempt.
“A true cadet who cares for his comrades would have pulled the flag. Deliberately putting comrades in danger just to annihilate the enemy is not the path of a proper officer.”
“…….”
In truth, even the Team A cadets didn’t think Lucas was entirely wrong.
The training could have been won simply by pulling the flag, yet Haydam had chosen to toy with the opposing team for the thrill of it.
What Haydam pursued wasn’t so much victory itself as…
fun and stimulation.
Because of that, the Team A cadets couldn’t immediately refute Lucas’s words.
Then Platon’s voice, thick with rage and a vein standing out on his forehead, cut through.
“You lot… do you even know what condition Lord Haydam is in right now?”
“What are you talking about?”
Lucas had been about to frown, thinking Platon was simply trying to defend Haydam, but the next words froze him solid.
“Lord Haydam still hasn’t recovered from the injury he received not long ago!”
“…What?”
It wasn’t only Lucas who was shaken. Everyone present—Team A, Team B, and the other cadets who had been watching the argument—stared at Platon in shock.
“Injury…? Are you saying Lord Haydam was hurt?”
“Yes. He told me not to speak of it, but seeing the way you talk, I can’t hold it in any longer.”
“But… he’s not even enlisted yet. How did he get injured?”
“You didn’t know? Lord Haydam often goes outside the zone to hunt.”
At that, the cadets began to stir.
“Hunt? What do you mean, hunt?”
“I heard the rumor that he took down a hippo-pig……”
“That was just a rumor, right?”
“Wait, so instead of going to the tower he goes out and kills monsters himself?”
Platon ignored the murmuring and continued.
“The day he was injured, a furred crocodile’s corpse was brought in almost without a scratch. He must have been hurt in a life-or-death struggle with it.”
“A furred crocodile?”
“Those are large-class monsters.”
“So Lord Haydam is at the level of taking down large-class monsters alone?”
Of course Haydam had never fought a furred crocodile to the death; he had simply scavenged one that was already nearly dead.
But Platon, freely combining the stories he had heard from his father Anton, had decided it was an established fact that “Lord Haydam successfully hunted a furred crocodile alone.”
“The injury from that day still hasn’t fully healed, so he should have been resting longer… but when he heard we were being mocked by the other cadets, he came. To restore our honor!”
“No way…….”
The Team A cadets, who had known nothing of this, were thoroughly flustered.
Come to think of it, when Lord Haydam moved, one shoulder did look especially uncomfortable…….
So that was because of the injury?
And he never once let it show to us?
While Team A reeled from the shock, Platon pressed on.
“Not only did you fail to thank the person who dragged his injured body out to restore your honor—you used that very victory to mock other cadets all over again.”
“Th-that’s…….”
Team A’s faces flushed red. Platon’s gaze swung toward Team B.
“And as for you. You couldn’t even handle one injured child… and now you say you can’t acknowledge Lord Haydam as a cadet? Then tell me—can any of you drag an injured body onto the battlefield, using yourselves as bait, just to restore a comrade’s honor?”
“…….”
“You should all be ashamed.”
When Team B also fell silent, Platon clicked his tongue loudly, left those words hanging, and stormed off.
And as the uproar rapidly spread among the cadets, Haydam’s standing within the military academy began to grow into something no one could ever hope to approach.