Thunder and Pikes
I relayed the order to my subordinate officers.
"Meyer's forces will advance as slowly as possible. The other allied armies have already gone half-mad with the urge to climb first. Competing with them under these conditions would only serve the enemy."
"What? But General! The enemy only has five thousand heads to take! If we don't go up first, they'll all be stolen out from under us!!"
That's assuming we get to take any heads at all, you fool. Frustration rose in my chest, but I reined it in as best I could.
"I will not say this a third time. Our forces advance as slowly as possible. Do not defy the order."
The officers under my command wore looks of open discontent. They had been counting on glory, and their lord telling them to abandon the chance at merit might as well have been an insult. But once the fighting was over, they would understand. This battle was not the free opportunity for distinction everyone else imagined. It was a crisis in which they themselves risked becoming someone else's free distinction.
When the battle began, Andeln had expected the enemy to dig in and hold the temporary fortress. Why else would they have built one?
But Andeln and the Four Great Houses had been completely wrong. And for good reason…
"I am the vanguard general of the Kruzenstein army! Clemens de Balboa!"
Clemens bellowed the words and led his entire force out of the fortress.
The unexpected sortie left the allied ranks stunned, but they seized what they took for an opportunity and charged.
"Ha! So eager to die, are you? I am Marco Endia of the Four Great Houses!"
"The Four Great Houses? You mean those empty titles with nothing to show for them? How laughable! Hahaha!"
"You bastard…!"
Endia, at the head of the allied vanguard, crossed blades with Clemens de Balboa. And in that first exchange, Endia understood.
We're not even in the same class…!
This man was on an entirely different level. Fortunately, Endia was not the sort to keep posturing once he knew the gap. And so…
"Kill Clemens! Knights, hear me! Kill Clemens!"
Endia fled and left the rest to his knights.
"Small fry!"
Clemens snorted and charged again. But among the allied vanguard, there was no one who could stop him.
"Lord Andeln. The vanguard is being pushed back."
A knight voiced his concern, but Andeln watched the scene with easy composure.
"Don't worry. This is five thousand against thirty thousand. Individual prowess will not decide it. Overwhelming numbers are not so easily overturned."
But there was something Andeln did not know. The Leona army that Clemens belonged to had already overturned a numerical disadvantage of more than two to one with ease.
Was Leona's victory at the Battle of Endora really just Clemens's personal might?
In premodern warfare, individual prowess certainly played a major role. All the more so in a fantasy world with sword aura and mana. But…
Leona's army is strong even without Clemens.
There was a reason Leona von Kruzenstein was the protagonist of this game. And that reason was…
"Musketeers! Fire!"
At Clemens's shout, thunder struck.
Thunder. There was no other word for it. Hundreds of muskets spat fire at once, and the sound was like a great peal of thunder rolling across the field.
And with that thunder, hundreds of allied soldiers fell as one. The men who saw it could only stare in horror.
"Th-the enemy commands thunder!"
"The god of lightning is angry! Angry at this war of invasion!"
Yes. Muskets.
In real history, there had been a war in which firearms were first used in mass. The Battle of Pavia, fought between the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France.
There, the Holy Roman Empire had for the first time introduced muskets in large numbers—weapons that until then had been used only sparingly—and the tactic had been a spectacular success, shattering France's elite cavalry.
That history was being reborn inside the game.
The soldiers panicked at the talk of a weapon that commanded thunder, but one man cut through the chaos. That man was…
"Pull yourselves together! That is a new weapon called a musket! It is no thunder god!"
Andeln von Setia. He took up his sword himself, stepped onto the front line, and began rallying the troops.
"That is a new weapon called a musket! It is no god!"
"What? Musket? Never heard of it."
"I have. Hunters use them to take birds, I hear."
"Ah, so that's what this is?"
"Then…"
"Doesn't that mean the advantage is ours?"
The soldiers began to recover their morale, and Andeln did not miss the opening.
"Charge! All forces, charge! Charge!"
If he could force a melee, superior numbers would win. An orderly fight might go against them, but a chaotic brawl would favor them. That was Andeln's thinking as he ordered the charge.
Thirty thousand soldiers surged as one toward the mountain summit. It seemed only a matter of moments before they would reach the musketeers who had hurled thunder at them. But—
Muskets were not the only secret weapon of Leona's army.
"Pikemen! Forward!"
"Yes, sir!"
In an instant, thousands of pikemen formed ranks.
They had clearly drilled their formations well. Standing in a single line, they leveled their long spears at the enemy.
A pike square forged by thousands of pikemen moving as one.
The phalanx tactics of ancient history had been revived here after a thousand years.
"What in the world is that…"
Even Andeln could not help but be stunned by the sight.
Pikemen had certainly been a mainstay of ancient warfare. But while they showed overwhelming power holding a fixed position, they were poor at movement and turning, and that was why, as Andeln understood it, they had been discarded by history.
And yet those pikemen had returned? After a thousand years? And in the thousands?
Andeln felt as though he had stepped into the pages of a book on ancient history. As though none of this could be real…
And it was not only Andeln who was shaken. The soldiers were just as lost. Faced with a pike square that had unfolded in moments, they had no idea where or how to attack.
"What is this? Spears above, below, left, right—everywhere. How are we supposed to get in?"
"I don't fucking know! Just go!"
A soldier in the rear shoved the man in front of him. The man who was pushed became a skewer on dozens of leveled pikes in an instant.
The pikemen had not particularly done anything. They had simply held their stance and stood still—and a man was dead. Helplessly.
"Fuck, what the hell is this…"
"Where are we even supposed to hit it? There's no gap!"
Pikes packed tight and leveled. They tried to force their way into a seam, but no seam could be found. Leona's pike square was that well made.
"D-d-don't panic! It's still a tactic discarded a thousand years ago! There must have been a reason it was discarded!"
"And what reason is that, my lord?!"
"The reason?"
The reason it had been discarded. What was that reason? Andeln thought for a moment, then his eyes lit up.
"Bows! Bows! Those pikemen have no defense against ranged attacks! Even the ancient records say that when slingers kept throwing stones and running away, the pikemen eventually collapsed!"
"Then let's try it at once!"
"Archers, forward!"
Hundreds of archers stepped to the front. And then…
"Archers! Loo—"
"Musketeers! Fire!"
—Tatatang!
Before the allied archers could even draw, the enemy musketeers—already reloaded—stepped forward and gunned them down in an instant.
Only then did Andeln understand.
The meaning of pikemen returning after a thousand years.
"The pikemen never needed to attack in the first place… Their role was to protect the musketeers through the long reloading time."
The musket's strength was its tremendous destructive power; its weakness was the long time it took to reload.
The pike's strength was its tremendous defensive power; its weakness was wretched mobility and turning.
So what happened when pikes and muskets met?
The pikes held the ground. The muskets fired from behind.
Each covered the other's weakness. A perfect tactic was born.
"This is… a fight we cannot win."
Even numbers would not make it possible. No matter how many of his men charged, those pikemen would hold their ground forever.
And while the pikemen held, the musketeers would kill every last one of them.
His army would be annihilated long before the enemy tired.
The enemy had built a perfect tactic that did not lose.
Realizing that, Andeln had only one thing left to say.
"All forces… retreat."
Only now did Andeln understand why Leona's six thousand had defeated Clozel's fourteen thousand.
It was not because Clozel was weak.
It was because Leona had discovered it. The victory formula that made winning inevitable.
"Well. The protagonist wins. That's the story."
Leona von Kruzenstein was the protagonist of this game. There was no reason for her to lose to the likes of Andeln.
More than that, the person who first invented the tercio—the tactic that had dominated real-world battlefields for over two hundred years—in this world was none other than Leona von Kruzenstein.
The tercio was a formation invented in history by a Spanish soldier named Gonzalo de Córdoba. The tactic he created was so unmatched that for more than two centuries everyone copied it, refined it, and built upon it.
It was also precisely in that era that the military power of Europe and other continents became asymmetric.
And so an army with the tercio had no reason to lose to an army without it.
Which was why I had told my knights to advance as slowly as possible.
So the battle would end before our soldiers died.
The knights who had been full of complaints at first were now looking at me with something close to reverence.
That had started the moment the allied army began to be one-sidedly crushed.
"How did you know we would lose, my lord?"
"Whew. We lived. Just thinking I might never see Sophia again made my heart drop."
"Our lord has the foresight of a prophet, no question. From now on, let's not doubt a word he says."
The knights nodded among themselves.
Meanwhile, Andeln's spirit was broken.
"There's no way to win. No way to win against something like that."
Andeln knew about muskets well enough. He also knew that Leona was raising pikemen.
Even so, he had not introduced muskets himself, for three reasons. First, muskets were far too expensive. Only a handful of craftsmen in the capital could make them, and without a mass-production line, each one had to be built by hand—which made them ruinously costly.
Second, he had no trade network to bring them in. As noted, muskets were produced only in certain parts of the capital. Hauling them overland this far was so distant that bandits and the like made plunder a real risk, and the transport costs alone were not trivial.
Third, he had thought muskets were nothing special. Even if Leona's army had crushed Clozel's force of twice its size, that was because Clozel was weak. If he himself took the field, it would be different.
And that expectation had been shattered beyond repair.
"But even if I tried to introduce muskets now… Kruzenstein is a port city, so they can bring them in by ship from the capital. We're a mountain region. Moving muskets produced in the capital all the way here is close to impossible."
Andeln bit his nails and bounced his leg—his habit when he was anxious. It was the first time he had shown it since the night before the rebellion.
"What am I supposed to do… How am I supposed to win?"
The moment the thought formed, a guard knight called from outside.
"Lord Franz Meyer of House Meyer requests an audience."
A thought flashed through Andeln's mind.
"Meyer… could it be…?"
If it was a son of House Meyer, the family that had served for generations as strategists to House Setia—perhaps there was a way.