The Time Has Come
"Lord Meyer! Excellent timing!"
Andeln threw his arms wide the moment I stepped inside. Things must have been going truly badly for him.
"My lord."
"Speak freely, Lord Meyer. We're friends, aren't we?"
Friends? What friends, you bastard… You stripped me of everything you could take, and now you want to play buddy-buddy.
"My lord. What strategy do you have in mind?"
"Well… I was planning to hear your opinion first, Lord Meyer, and then decide."
In other words, he has nothing. Figured as much.
"My lord. I told you this on the first day of the campaign."
"Hm?"
"That my time to step forward had not yet come."
"Ah… so you did."
"It seems that time has arrived. Entrust me with the vanguard. I will crush them."
"What? But the enemy is enormously strong. You saw it yourself. How do you propose to win?"
"If Your Lordship adopts my plan, victory will be ours."
"You have a method?"
"Would you care to hear it?"
I had been crafting this operation since the day we marched out—no, since the day I first began raising the pike troops.
I'll show you exactly what those pikes were for.
In the next battle, the Meyer forces took the absolute front. Directly behind them stood Adelheid von Ignati's two thousand troops, and behind her, Andeln's six thousand. Ten thousand in all pressed forward.
And the rest of the army? The answer was simple. They had been sent to the northern and southern flanks of the mountain—left and right relative to our own lines—to execute a three-sided encirclement.
A three-sided encirclement. It sounded impressive, but in truth it was a gambler's throw. If it worked, the results would be overwhelming. If it failed, our entire force could be annihilated.
Splitting an army into three meant dispersing its strength, after all.
"You mean to break through with a mere ten thousand what thirty thousand could not?"
Clemens sneered at the idea,
"My lord! This plan is reckless!"
and the Four Great Houses opposed it as well.
What allowed the plan to pass was that the Four Great Houses had been stationed on the flanks rather than the front. In other words, even if the frontal force was defeated, they could flee early. But…
If we lose, the Meyer family, the Ignati family, and the Setia family are finished.
It was, quite literally, a single throw of the dice on which the rise or fall of three houses hung.
Andeln accepted my gamble for one simple reason: he had no other option. There was more to it, of course—the plan I laid out was convincingly sound, and the Meyer family had accumulated loyalty and military merit since the days of the previous lord, Henrik. In short, it was not only my credit at work. My father, my grandfather, even my great-grandfather had all played their part.
Men whose faces I had never seen outside the portraits hanging in the castle, but still.
In any case, our forces began the operation, and we moved into a decisive clash with Clemens. Everything would be decided in this battle.
Meanwhile, Clemens de Balboa found the enemy's scheme so pathetic it was almost charming.
They couldn't win a frontal fight, so they split their troops three ways. What did that mean? They intended a half-encirclement from the front and both flanks.
But it was a joke. They couldn't even match him head-on—how were they supposed to encircle anyone?
If the Balboa army simply maneuvered properly, the three enemy columns would be crushed one after another. In other words, they could be defeated in detail.
Committing the elementary blunder of dispersing one's forces… Has the enemy commander never even studied the basics of warfare?
Do not scatter your troops lightly. It was written in every beginner's treatise on military science.
In this battle… I can earn a great distinction.
Clemens de Balboa laughed aloud at the thought.
"Hahahaha! Glory is ours!"
At that single cry, the knights around him roared as one.
"Waaaaaah!!!"
Their morale was sky-high after the victory two days prior.
Then a messenger shouted that the enemy was climbing the mountain.
The battle had begun.
When the Setia army of ten thousand began ascending the mountain, Clemens de Balboa's forces abandoned the advantage of the summit and came straight down from the peak.
The reason was simple. If they waited at the top, they would walk straight into the enemy's three-sided encirclement.
But this was not an age of telephones or radios. If Clemens descended from the summit and the fighting began earlier than planned, the enemy detachments scattered left and right would never realize it—they would arrive at the summit at the originally appointed hour.
And what would those detachments find when they reached the top?
An empty temporary fort with not so much as an ant in it, and the traces of Andeln's already annihilated army.
First, destroy the frontal force quickly. Then deal with the remaining ten thousand. That was Balboa's plan.
"Crush the enemy in front at once! Pike troops—forward!"
Balboa intended to wear down the enemy infantry with the invincible pike formation he had used before. Once the infantry was spent, a cavalry strike on the flanks would sweep them away in a single blow. That was the plan.
But there was one fact Balboa had never anticipated.
"Our pike corps—forward!"
At Franz Meyer's shout, a mass of pike troops wielding the exact same weapon appeared at the very front of the Setia army.
"What the fuck?"
The curse slipped from Clemens's mouth unbidden. Where the hell had a pike unit suddenly come from?
"Improvised?"
No—there hadn't been time. No one could have procured pikes in such short order. Which meant…
"They already had them?"
They hadn't deployed in the previous battle, but somewhere, a pike corps had been waiting in the wings.
"Why only now?"
Why hold them back last time and bring them out for this fight? The question tangled in Clemens's mind. But…
"Our training is still superior! Our men are elite veterans of dozens of real battles! They are a different class from the enemy's rabble! Show them that matching weapons alone means nothing!"
Clemens believed it, and he urged his pike troops on.
Franz Meyer, for his part, had something to say as well.
"Asilia!"
Franz Meyer called out loudly. Asilia stepped forward and dropped to one knee before him.
"Yes!"
"When did our Meyer family begin training pike troops?"
"Imperial Year 545, the twenty-first of June."
"And when did the Kruzenstein army begin training theirs?"
"Imperial Year 547, the twenty-seventh of July."
"Exactly! We have trained for five years—the enemy for a mere three! Shall five years of training lose to three?!"
The soldiers began to murmur. Come to think of it, it was true—the Meyer family's pike tradition was longer than the Kruzensteins'. It had been the unilateral decision of the heir, Franz Meyer, and nothing more. But how had Franz Meyer known to raise pike troops from that early date? Did the man truly possess some kind of foresight?
Such whispers rose from every side. Then Franz Meyer shouted:
"Never! Such a thing must never be! Moreover, the enemy has lost countless veterans through battle after battle! Our training is superior because we have not lost our veterans! Show them the power of the original!"
"Waaaaaaaaah!!!"
Our pike troops roared back, determined not to yield an inch. The sudden explosion of cheering made the enemy lines falter for a beat. Good. We had not lost the opening contest of wills. Even after our territory was cut in half, even after running deficits and taking on debt, we had not dismissed a single pike soldier—and now that choice was bearing fruit. From this moment on, I would show them. The harvest of every effort and every hardship until now.
"Charge!"
Clemens de Balboa bellowed,
"Do not give a single step!"
and Franz Meyer answered.
Both sides' pike troops advanced toward each other. Our men, facing their first real battle, were visibly tense.
"It is no different from training! Think of it as training! The only difference is whether cotton or a spearhead sits on the tip! Push and thrust! Have you not done this for five years?!"
At Meyer's encouragement, the soldiers' movements grew natural.
"Keep step! Advance on the count! One! One! One! One!"
With every shout from the officers, they took another pace forward. The enemy moved in much the same way. Before long, the pike tips of both sides began to meet.
"Hmph. Green boys with no real combat experience. As if they could fight prop—"
Clemens's muttered monologue cut off mid-sentence. His face went sour. And for good reason…
"Wh-what is happening?"
The Meyer family's pike troops were displaying tremendous skill in the tip-to-tip contest. They shoved aside and parried the Kruzenstein pikes, disrupting their points and claiming the center space as their own.
The clash of the vanguards was almost anticlimactic. The Meyer pikes shoved the Balboa pikes back in an instant.
"How…?"
Where had elite troops of this caliber come from? Had they hired some famous western pike mercenary company? No—by every measure of dress and equipment, these were eastern troops. They could not possibly be renowned western mercenaries.
And yet their training alone rivaled any western company. As if they had done nothing but drill for years on end.
It was a craft made possible only because the Meyer family had spent five years training standing troops and nothing else. The Kruzenstein family's pike history was shorter than Meyer's. On top of that, they had lost their elite soldiers through countless real battles. A gap in pike proficiency was inevitable.
"Just as planned."
Franz Meyer, for his part, was smiling. The seed sown five years ago was finally bearing fruit. Like ascetics refining themselves deep in the mountains, they had done nothing but train inside the castle walls. And now, at last, the results of that training were on full display.
Before long the contest was decided. Our pike troops had won. But…
"Musketeers! Fire!"
Clemens did not panic. At his order, hundreds of muskets belched flame, and dozens of soldiers dropped in an instant.
"Right. We have pikes—but no muskets."
That was the sole weakness. The enemy had guns; we did not. There is a Japanese word for it: muteppou. Teppou means gun, and mu means without. It describes a reckless fool who charges an armed enemy without a firearm of his own.
We were muteppou in the truest sense—trying to face a gun-armed enemy with none of our own. But…
"Weapons aren't everything."
We had broken the enemy's frontline pike corps. That invincible defensive wall had shattered. Now it was our turn. Or more precisely…
"All forces—charge!"
A voice rang out from the rear. Franz Meyer knew exactly whose it was.
Fortunately, he inherited his father's sense of command, at least.
Andeln von Setia. He fell far short of the previous lord, Henrik, but having followed Henrik since childhood, he had learned a great deal—enough to know precisely when to commit and when to withdraw. My inadequate lord had given the correct order at the correct moment. The instant both sides' pike lines collapsed together, the instant both shields were stripped away, the Setia family's six thousand infantry hurled themselves at the enemy.