Once Again, the Monster Subjugation
The moment she came back, Shari drifted around me in lazy, weightless circles, bobbing gently through the air. She had the look of someone bursting with something she needed to say.
"Where have you been?"
When I asked, she stretched both arms out to her sides and paddled them like wings, fluttering closer until she smacked against my stomach and stuck there.
She had actual little wings on her back, and being a ghost she didn't need to flap anything to stay aloft — so why she was paddling her arms was beyond me.
"Huh? This is..."
A moment later, Shari projected a handful of brief scenes into my mind. They seemed to be recreating the situation around Horn Canyon, where the subjugation force had made camp.
"You..."
She kept weaving together what she had seen, stitching the images into a panorama and feeding them straight into my consciousness.
I saw a horde of monsters — slimes, goblins, dire wolves, and ogres. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that pack. Even from here, you could see them with the naked eye. They were the decoy force.
Next came a place not far from where we stood: the far end of Horn Canyon, down beneath the cliff. It was a stretch of ground so densely packed with jagged, strangely shaped rock that even approaching it looked difficult. Behind a massive boulder bristling with spikes like a sea urchin, a wide cave opened up. Shari replayed the same scene over and over, as if to drive home exactly where that cave was.
Deeper inside, hunched humanoid monsters with the heads of dogs. Kobolds. There were twenty of them in total. They held large wooden staves that called to mind shamans, standing in groups of five atop magic circles drawn on the floor. Dark violet mana flowed from the tips of those staves, feeding four magic arrays inscribed on the ground.
These weren't ordinary kobolds. They were Kobold Shamans.
That was where Shari's vision ended.
"You said you wanted to help. Is that why you disappeared?"
I looked down in astonishment at Shari, who was clinging to my stomach as if she were hugging it. She floated up to my eye level and nodded.
The information she had brought back was important enough to turn the entire situation of the subjugation force on its head. We'd sent out scout after scout and come up with nothing. This had actually helped.
Come to think of it, Shari was the finest scout this world would ever see. As a ghost, she could ignore every scrap of terrain, and she could fly. She wasn't even visible. And when she came back from reconnaissance, she could lay the scenes she'd witnessed directly across my consciousness — a far more vivid report than anything she could have put into words.
Shari. You're something else, kid.
Marveling, I slowly reached out and stroked her head. My hand met her small skull, but of course I felt nothing at all. Even so, Shari nuzzled into my palm as if she could truly feel the touch, and gave me a bashful little grin.
The next day, I immediately pulled a few people from the subjugation force and assembled a separate search party. The goal was to locate the cave Shari had found at the end of the canyon and wipe out the kobolds performing whatever suspicious ritual they were conducting inside. I assigned them a rough search area, included a mage capable of shattering rock, and sent them out.
We dispatched the search party first thing in the morning. By afternoon, word arrived that they had found the cave with the kobolds Shari had described. The search party had smashed the boulder blocking the entrance and wiped out every last kobold performing the ritual inside.
Then a lookout stationed on a high peak came rushing down to report to me and Mireia.
"Th-this is bad! A massive monster army just appeared out of nowhere!"
Mireia and I confirmed the new monster force that had materialized beyond the canyon. Flanking the two monster units we'd already been able to see, a vast number of new monsters had revealed themselves.
"So the kobolds in that cave were hiding those monsters with magic."
Barely any time had passed since we'd dealt with the cave kobolds, and now a huge host of monsters had appeared as if they'd dropped out of the sky. There were flying monsters among them, creatures the size of houses, monsters mounted on skeletal horses — a whole crowd of them that looked dangerously strong.
"Yunoa... did you anticipate a situation like this?"
Mireia said it while watching the newly appeared monsters. The other members of the subjugation force, witnessing a monster army incomparably more powerful than anything they'd seen at the start, couldn't hide their shock.
"What the hell is that... If we'd split our forces and attacked like we originally planned, by now we'd be..."
"The man Lady Mireia brought was right..."
Even Damon, the knight representative who had first proposed splitting the force, had gone pale. He looked back and forth between me and the monsters, at a loss for words.
"The monsters are coming this way!"
"Battle stations! Battle stations!"
The massive monster army in the distance began advancing toward the canyon. Now that their deception using the kobolds had been broken, they apparently saw no reason to wait any longer.
"Yunoa, please give the orders."
Mireia drew the longsword at her hip and looked to me.
Orders? I'd set up the defenses, sure, but how was I supposed to give combat commands?
My mind went blank. I'd never commanded a battle in my life. Figuring out what orders would efficiently hold off that monster offensive was incredibly difficult.
Drawing on knowledge he did not possess, Yunoa had done his best to construct a defensive line. But with zero experience commanding a battle, he stood there uselessly as the real fight approached, with no idea what orders to give.
Did the subjugation force know that their lives now hung on this incompetent man?
It was truly pathetic.
Narration's criticism poured in at the worst possible moment, with a fight about to break.
Fine. Insult me all you want. But if you're going to help, then help me first and insult me after.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, Narration spoke again.
The wyverns racing in at the vanguard of the monster army could snatch people up as they passed, like birds of prey.
Even if you weren't caught, their claws and fangs carried a deadly venom — a mere graze was fatal. Ordinary arrows could not pierce their thick hides.
Against them, only siege weapons as powerful as a ballista, or ice lances hurled by mages, would be effective.
"All mages, take the high ground! We need to bring down those incoming wyverns with ice lances!"
I shouted it the instant I heard Narration speak.
The Skeleton Knights came charging in on skeletal horses, scattering curses in their wake. Unless their weapons were blessed with holy magic, they would rise again no matter how many times they were cut down. The blades they swung held centuries of accumulated grudges, condensed into curses.
If you met them in ordinary melee, the blood and flesh of anyone whose sword crossed theirs would rot from the curse.
A blessed weapon, however, would prevent that curse from taking hold.
"Is there anyone who can bless weapons? Start with the melee fighters — bless their weapons!"
Even after that, I listened to Narration describe the characteristics of the monster army and barked out orders to match. Mage adventurers climbed to high ground and began preparing ice lance spells. Adventurers who could use holy magic moved through the entire subjugation force, blessing weapons as they went. Regular soldiers were stationed along both cliff faces of the narrow chokepoint the monsters would have to enter, ready to drop rocks. Knights and adventurers alike were positioned to hold every pass in the canyon, their roles balanced against one another.
Mireia, the most powerful combatant in the entire subjugation force, stayed with me. In practical terms, she was this army's ultimate weapon.
"...The scale of the monster attack is considerable."
Mireia said it while watching the swarming horde.
"There are more monsters than I expected. I'm not sure we'll be all right."
"It reminds me of the old days."
"..."
The old days, huh. What was she thinking about right now?
"Bring them down!"
"Fire!"
The mages who had taken the high ground hurled magically formed ice lances at the wyverns closing in. Hideous things that looked as if they had tried and failed to become dragons began to descend on the canyon.
"Aaaagh!"
Some of the mages were struck by wyvern claws, screaming as they tumbled from the cliff. A wyvern hit by an ice lance folded its wings and spiraled down into the canyon below.
This was no one-sided "subjugation" of monsters. This was a war — one the subjugation force would have to bleed for.
Before long, the ground-bound monsters came pouring into the canyon on the heels of the wyverns. The numbers looked to be several times the size of the subjugation force at the very least. Plenty of powerful high-tier monsters were mixed in among them, so the gap in combat strength looked wider than I'd expected.
As the fighting with the monsters began in earnest, the surroundings dissolved into pandemonium in a matter of moments. Mireia watched the battle unfold in silence, then quietly asked me,
"May I go?"
You don't need my permission. Not in a situation like this... You're the real commander of this force.
I nodded, of course. And Mireia, longsword in hand, leaped straight down the cliff into the swarm of monsters below.