Departure
Departure
Ranje could vouch for it.
She'd seen all sorts of utterly batshit crazy cases on the battlefield until she was sick of them, but this was one of the craziest even among those.
Her brain had already failed to keep up when the javelin with obviously extraordinary power supposedly pierced his skull but he suddenly had a helmet on, and when he ran diagonally up the fortress wall like he had his own personal set of stairs the moment he reached it, but the peak was what came next.
"Th-the spell interference on the right wall has weakened!"
"Break through!!"
Her body moved before she could even judge after hearing the mages' shouts. Ranje yelled out with firm certainty.
"You mangy little shits!! It's time to fuck some ass!!"
They could definitely break through this. Her battlefield-honed instincts screamed it. As the battalion commander surged ahead and gave the order, the siege ram troops—who, like the other soldiers, had been standing there dumbstruck, unable to believe what they were seeing—also started running on reflex.
Bombardment poured down on one section of the wall, but no one assumed Eldmia might have been caught in it and killed. When unbelievable events happened three times in a row, the brain simply gave up trying to keep up. Instead of considering it a coincidence that the enemy's spell interference cut off the moment Eldmia scaled the wall, they took it as his plan, and held the belief that the man who planned it couldn't possibly die stupidly caught in his own scheme.
And that went no differently for Raynel, who'd gotten slapped by Eldmia. Seeing absolutely no counter-fire coming in the entire time the ram unit crossed half the battlefield, he mounted his horse without hesitation.
"This will definitely break through! 2nd Regiment, prepare to charge! Prepare to chaaarge!!"
Ranje didn't know Raynel's reaction, but even without looking back, she could tell the battlefield had begun to heave.
Setting aside atmosphere and all that, the earth itself was physically rumbling, so there was no way she couldn't know. She glanced once at the siege ram chasing right on her heels, then used her massive blunt weapon as a support to leap high and land atop it.
"Goddammit!"
"It's already heavy and brutal work, must you do this!?"
Grunts of pain came at her landing, which had zero consideration for the ones carrying and running with it, but Ranje didn't give a single shit. In fact, she found their complaints galling. She hadn't climbed onto the siege ram simply drunk on the atmosphere.
"Anyone got a complaint, speak up! I'll take it as your firm resolve to claim the glorious vanguard position of charging the instant the ram goes off from now on—"
"The battalion commander riding on it actually gives us strength!"
"Run, goddammit!"
Goddamn shitty little pups, the lot of them.
Shaking her head and letting out a dry laugh, Ranje looked at the rapidly approaching gate and the side door that still refused to open and laughed heartily.
"If you don't blow through to the secondary gate in one hit, you're on your own!"
"Say that to the magic tool on the ram!"
Using that shout as a signal flare, the twenty knights simultaneously hoisted the siege ram they'd been carrying on their shoulders. Moving without a hair's breadth of error—Eldmia would have clapped and said it was blade-dance worthy—they gauged the distance, then swung the ram with all their might in the same instant.
And the moment the ram, swung wide like a clock pendulum tracing a great semicircle, scraped the ground, crashed into the secondary wooden gate and sent splinters flying, then was stopped by the iron gate and a heavy recoil was felt—they braced themselves and shoved the ram forward with all their strength.
So as not to be blown back, unable to withstand the explosion triggered by the magic tool at the ram's tip.
-BOOM!
Amid the deafening roar, flames, and scattering gate fragments, the moment Ranje confirmed the iron-reinforced gate was buckling inward and bending badly, she ran toward the tip of the ram without a shred of hesitation.
There was no time to worry about the thick smoke or the scorching heat wafting from the ram. Once again, she used the ram's end and her blunt weapon as a support to leap mightily, and she immediately identified which enemy she had to target. Any other time, having to figure out who the strong ones were would've taken a little time, but this time it wasn't hard at all.
Because the bastard squaring off with Eldmia while holding a massive boulder that looked like a chunk of the fortress wall was obviously the strongest.
"Long live the goddamn Silver Eagle Independent Combat Brigade!!"
Her blunt weapon swung down over the head of the Demonfolk member with a half-broken horn, who looked up with eyes full of shock and disbelief.
◈
Holy fucking shit. Ambushes really were goddamn righteous.
The siege ram blew like a cannon had gone off, the gate was utterly wrecked, and before the acrid smoke could even finish billowing, Ranje suddenly burst out. The blunt weapon she swung smashed precisely down onto the crown of Half-horn's skull.
A blunt weapon swung with full force by a knight wielding high-level aura, throwing technique completely to the wind—it was disgustingly fast, its massive size belying any expectation. If it looked like this from the side, needless to say what it felt like for the one on the receiving end.
As Half-horn's body crumpled hollowly, his head replaced by a result so ugly it made me instinctively frown, fear and chaos spread among the Demon King's Army. On top of that, the twenty knights who'd come over the ram began clearing the area, and with just a few swings of their blades, some of the bastards started fleeing in an utterly pathetic fashion.
"Enemies in the outer fortress confirmed as point-defense garrison troops! Threat level medium-low! Conventional infantry can be deployed!"
"Infantry deployable! Sending the signal!"
Within that chaos, the methodically moving knights were truly battlefield veterans. I had no idea what kind of fighting they'd done, but their actions seemed closer to modern special forces than soldiers.
"You classify threat levels?"
I asked Ranje, who was walking over with a fiercely imposing air against the backdrop of the rapidly secured surroundings and the enemies on the wall getting blown apart. She nodded calmly and explained.
"The Demon King's Army is thorough in that regard. The gap between their main offensive forces and defensive garrison troops is pretty huge, so if we don't identify them in advance, our soldiers die like dogs for nothing. Even right now... goddammit, wyverns spotted! Wyverns spotted! Twenty enemy fliers! Take cover!"
Ranje, who hadn't let her guard down even while casually scanning the surroundings, looked up at the sky behind me and shouted. I turned my head in admiration as they scattered in an instant—some between buildings, some boldly lifting enemy corpses as shields—and spotted about twenty wyverns flying in from far off near the inner fortress.
Seeing the ones that had been flying somewhat high gradually lowering their altitude, it seemed they'd originally intended to strike the main force but changed their plan to target us instead.
"Sir Ega! We lack proper means to check their wyverns! First we should fall back and take cover—"
"Ah, it's fine. I've got that covered. Once they get close enough, I can attack without any trouble."
"Excuse me?"
If they just spammed spells from a distance pretending to suppress us, that'd be one thing, but as long as it wasn't that, my needles were more than sufficient to deal with them.
Being mindful of the eyes watching, I whistled and drew a large needle. Ranje, watching beside me, asked without hiding her amazement.
"This is insane. What in the world... don't tell me you were able to run up the wall earlier because of that?"
"You're incredibly sharp."
"No, I just threw it out there, and it's actually true? You ran up there stepping on those thin little things?"
"Well, you just combine about two and use a bit of know-how."
As I'd been sensing since yesterday, she was a woman who'd built a thick wall between herself and any sense of tension in many ways. Having chatted briefly and reacted with utter disbelief, she—unlike my expectation that she'd take cover like the other knights—stared straight at a wyvern attempting something like a steep dive toward us, and casually adjusted her grip on her blunt weapon as if it were nothing.
"Not that I don't believe you, but you never know."
I stared blankly at that sight, and she just shrugged with a nonchalant face, adding only one more word. Was she planning to smash the wyvern's skull with that club if the needle attack failed? A different kind of reliability than Yekaterina, that's for sure.
But if my prediction was right, there wouldn't be any misses. In the first place, I was going to catch the first descending wyvern with an axe, not a needle.
-Skreeeek!
The wyvern that had been falling headfirst let out a screech impossible to describe as pleasant even in flattery and spread its wings wide, lifting its head. That alone caused its threat level, and the threat level of the Demonfolk riding it, to plummet drastically.
The reason wyvern knights are fearsome isn't because a wyvern attacks. They're threatening because the wyvern knight riding it leverages mobility to pour out magic, then physically exploits the gaps created by that. On the contrary, if a wyvern turns and thrusts its talons forward like that, its exposed target area just gets bigger, and it's practically a one-way ticket to the netherworld.
As I'd felt last time too, their wyverns were definitely less trained compared to those of Itisel. I smiled with satisfaction and gifted the wyvern my axe.
-Skree... ehk?!
A member of the Demonfolk might be one thing, but there was no way a mere wyvern could dodge a two-handed axe thrown with full force.
The axe blade flew in just under its raised jaw, splitting its skull and embedding itself, and the wyvern's head snapped back as it toppled over. As the wyvern's belly faced the sky and it began to plummet, the Demonfolk member on its back screamed, full of shock and terror—but I had no interest in a bastard who'd be crushed to death on his own anyway, so I leaped up and stepped right on the falling wyvern.
And drawing on the sensation of riding the back of the Archdemon that had transformed into a fake dragon beneath the academy, I pushed off.
"Wha—?!"
My target in the first place had been the trailing pursuer following behind, attempting a jet stream attack right after the wyvern I'd just killed.
I launched a large needle at the bewildered Demonfolk atop the wyvern that was still falling headfirst, its talons not yet extended. The moment I confirmed the Demonfolk died without any resistance, I planted a haymaker right into the wyvern's face.
Let's use this opportunity to find out just how much I need to beat the shit out of one before it listens to me.