The Black Pursuit
For the citizens of the Barhart Empire, and indeed most people across the continent, the Ivestan Empire was a "little-known" country. This was only natural. To learn much about another nation, one first had to make contact with it in some way, but that came with far too many complications.
To reach the eastern reaches of the continent, one had to slip past the numerous outposts and defensive walls erected against Ivestan invasions and magic beast attacks. Escaping the joint patrols of the Barhart Empire and the Nahat Duchy was an added hurdle. Even if that proved possible, the Eastern Mountains themselves awaited—a treacherous natural barrier with no proper roads, where magic beasts roamed instead of ordinary animals, and venomous insects and poisonous plants thrived in abundance. Few could survive an environment harsh enough to claim even a mana user worthy of a knight's title in any ordinary fief.
Nor was there an abundance of related stories or documents to fill the gap. Just as the hunting tribes of the northern continent were dismissed as barbarians lagging behind civilization, the nations that had dominated the continent's center during the Hegemony Wars had shown no interest whatsoever in whatever lay beyond the Eastern Mountains. When the entire continent was unstable, with neighboring countries endlessly invading, annexing, allying, and betraying one another, it was only natural that a region offering neither military influence nor commercial gain would remain an afterthought.
The Ivestan Empire first revealed itself to the central continent during the Judgment War, and that encounter had been nothing but enemy against enemy. Naturally, most people's perception of Ivestan was heavily skewed: "enemy," "invader," "demonkin lackey." Among the rumors were countless unverified tales claiming that Ivestan's people lived as slaves to the demonkin or had been turned into grotesque experimental subjects bearing beast limbs or insect wings.
Those who had actually crossed blades with them, or the upper echelons running intelligence units, possessed somewhat more accurate information, but since civilian exchange was virtually nonexistent, even that knowledge remained severely limited.
Ironically—or perhaps inevitably—the same information shortage existed on the Ivestan side as well.
"So you're saying the Skewos—the new magic beasts—we were planning to transport back to the homeland after the recovery operation were all wiped out? Along with every single Incense Stone we had stored with them? And the culprits who pulled this off numbered fewer than ten, all looking like they're in their early twenties or younger? Hah."
At least, that was Lieutenant Colonel Brachios's first reaction upon hearing his subordinate's report. As commander of an Ivestan special operations unit, his initial thought was not "The empire's carefully nurtured academy talents must have carried out sabotage!" but rather "This fool either can't tell work from play and is joking, or he's eaten some strange drug and is spouting nonsense."
He dismissed the report as utterly impossible and refused to take it seriously at all. Only after laughing for a long while and noticing that his subordinate's face was growing paler instead of joining in did Brachios's own expression finally harden.
"Listen here. If you're going to bring me a report, it ought to at least make some sense. Even if the lower ranks sent up some bizarre report, you should have verified it yourself before passing it along."
Suppressing the irritation rising in his chest, he forced himself to continue calmly. Decades had already passed since outsiders from across the sea had reshaped the very foundations of the nation. In a place where human lives were casually consumed as resources, rational and cold judgment was essential for climbing to high positions.
"Perhaps there was a problem with the management of the Incense Stones. If they had been properly affected, those things should have rendered the beasts completely immobile. But if some gas leaked due to negligence, the concentration might have dropped low enough to cause hallucinations..."
Yet even his "reasonable" speculation only earned a shake of the head from his subordinate.
"No, sir! We've already repeated the checks multiple times and cross-verified everything. It's all true!"
"...You call that a report!?"
The answer was similar to before, but where the previous response had carried denial and disbelief, this one sounded more like a rebuke—or a scream.
This operation had been proposed by the true powers who stood above even the Ivestan Empire's upper echelons—figures so influential that those same upper echelons had to tread carefully around them. Losing every last one of the results they had provided was already catastrophic enough. On top of that, the very apparatus they had supplied had been destroyed? And not by some large-scale assault, but by a handful of brats?
The transport base's personnel would be the first to face interrogation, but as their superior, he would not escape unscathed either. If it ended with a mere demotion, that would be fortunate. At worst—
"P-pursuit?! You're tracking them, right!?"
"The field units are moving, but the enemy's strength is far greater than anticipated. They're struggling."
"Catch them! By any means necessary! Catch them no matter what! Mobilize every nearby unit! I'll even authorize crossing the border lines!"
"P-please wait a moment! If we do that, we risk a direct confrontation!"
"Do you not understand the situation!? If we lose them, both you and I are finished! This isn't a metaphor—tomorrow's sun won't rise for us!"
The subordinate who received the orders scurried away. A staff officer who had been watching Brachios's foul mood carefully finally spoke up.
"Lieutenant Colonel. What will you tell the Inspector?"
Brachios paused for a moment, then shook his head.
"She's the type to disappear at the drop of a hat anyway. We can report after she returns."
He could not let her know the current situation. Even if he had to beg for forgiveness, he needed some excuse to offer. Or perhaps... he could expand the scale of the incident and sweep the mistake under the rug.
The lieutenant colonel's bloodshot eyes gleamed.
"Shit, shit, shiiit! What the hell are those bastards, some kind of ant swarm!?"
Sometimes Crow was impossible to tell apart from a noble scion or a street thug. I had heard that the orthodox martial houses of Nahat drilled their heirs with brutal mental training and etiquette lessons, so how had someone like him slipped through? Or maybe that was it—his true nature, long suppressed in childhood, had finally been unleashed in the hellish crucible of the academy? Though, thinking about it, he had always been rowdy from the start.
"Damn thug! Shut your filthy mouth already! You were all excited when there were lots of enemies, and now you're throwing a fit because there are too many!?"
Unable to listen any longer, Igle snapped at him. Crow immediately fired back.
"That's when we're fighting them head-on! It's not the same as running away with our tails between our legs! Though I guess a guy who shows up on the battlefield wearing a fluttering robe like that wouldn't know the difference!"
"This is a formal magical tool passed down through the Fendebig family! It is nothing like the flashy trinkets those idiot nobles wear!"
"Both of you shut up, or I'll shut you up physically."
""......""
When Ligret and the remaining two finally emerged from the warehouse and rejoined us while we were still trading blows with the Ivestan soldiers outside, I had thought things would wrap up smoothly from there. The arrow volleys couldn't penetrate Igle's wind spells, and in an environment where Attribute Stones and mid-tier spells were flying everywhere, anyone without mana was nothing more than target practice. The few who actually had some skill were quickly diced and sliced by Crow the moment he charged in.
We had caused all that chaos with just three people. Now that our numbers had doubled, and our goal wasn't even to win but merely to escape, how could we possibly fail? We easily shook off their pursuit—only to immediately run into another unit blocking our path before we had gone far.
From that point on, it became a vicious cycle. Objectively speaking, the pursuers weren't stronger than our group. Most couldn't even properly approach the spells Igle, the Fendebig siblings, or I were using, and even the skilled ones rarely managed to block one of Ligret's strikes.
But no matter how superior our individual strength was, blocking attacks and responding still took time. We could dodge or ignore most attacks by maintaining speed, but situations where that wasn't possible kept occurring. And as those "small delays" accumulated, the encirclement grew thicker, and our movement speed slowed in proportion.
Run, fight, run, fight. When a frontal breakthrough would take too long, we detoured. Damn it, was this some kind of lesson about how "coming is up to you, but leaving isn't"? Even so, their reaction speed was absurdly fast. If they had something convenient like mass teleportation, I'd love to borrow it.
After entering the Eastern Mountains, I briefly hoped the enemy might hesitate to pursue, but unfortunately, that didn't happen. Instead, we were greeted by more magic beasts—ones that kept appearing as if they were being replenished no matter how many we culled.
"There they are! Get them!"
—Grrrrrr!
Staring at the enemies closing in from both front and back, I let out a sigh. I really wished things could be easy for once, but this world never made anything simple.