To the Maslantia Battlefield (6)
An afternoon under a sun that beat down with unusual intensity.
The demons stared at the human before them, and a chill crawled up their spines.
Short black hair and black armor, standing in stark contrast against her ghostly white skin. Her pale face, smeared with blood, looked more demonic than any demon's.
"Ha. Honestly, I was planning to kill every last one of you, but it's getting boring. Listen, kids — would you mind stepping aside? Then I'll let you live."
Her name was Sophia Grace.
She had reached the realm of a 5-Star Expert, an exceptional talent capable of handling mana at a considerable level.
"Don't make me laugh, human!"
"Do you have any idea how many of our kin you've cut down? Today, you die. I swear it."
Grace toyed with her ear and spoke with the air of someone utterly bored.
"You're going to kill me? What an adorable little dream."
"Silence, you wretched girl!"
The demons lunged at her, savagery written across their faces.
Any ordinary soul would have cowered before such a horde, swarming like a human tide — but not a flicker of disturbance crossed her expression.
"Pests."
Shhk!
A demon's body split cleanly down the middle.
Another charged in hot on its heels. It changed nothing.
A blade lodged itself in his throat, and he gurgled as blood came gushing out.
"I really do hate you all. You're morons. Honestly, I wish you'd all just collapse like that guy over there."
Grace's eyes darted to the side.
The Resistance soldiers of her own faction were fighting other demons at a careful distance from her.
The reason was simple: nobody wanted to die merely for rubbing her the wrong way.
"Then again, that would be boring."
Her figure vanished in an instant.
The demons nearby fell, one after another.
Psshhh.
Shhk!
Demons perished without even managing token resistance. This was a slaughter so one-sided it could no longer be called a war.
"What's the difference between you and cockroaches?"
Grace wrenched her sword free from the neck of the demon before her.
Was that thing actually capable of speech?
As she pondered this with a snicker, it happened.
"Everyone — clear a path!"
"Clear the path! That is an order!"
The thunderous voices of the demons in the rear began hammering unbearably at her eardrums — a roar that could shake the mountains themselves and send avalanches cascading down them.
"You know I hate loud noises, kids."
Scowling, Grace threw herself into slaughtering the demons with all the more vigor, as if to show off her displeasure.
But their movements had grown strange.
One by one.
Like the Red Sea parting, they shifted sideways, opening a corridor straight ahead.
"What? Now you're making way for me?"
Whatever the reason, it suited her fine. It saved time, didn't it?
So the demons moved with flawless discipline, and just as the path finally opened in one clean, unbroken line—
"Huh."
Grace's eyes caught the silhouette of a man, half-hidden against the glare of the sun.
He shaded his eyes with one hand, brow furrowed.
Thud. Thud.
There was Gerard, walking straight toward them.
She knew it instinctively.
This man was the commander of the enemy line.
Grace began walking toward him as well.
Her steps quickened little by little — and then she was sprinting, at a speed that could have covered a hundred-meter dash in mere seconds.
No words were necessary.
Grace kicked off the ground and hurtled toward Gerard.
He, expressionless, raised a single pinky finger.
—CLANG!
The instant the two collided with savage force, sparks flashed and scattered.
"—!"
A frigid silence fell over the entire battlefield.
Everyone, frozen solid, stared at the same spot.
"Wh-what…?"
"Th-that's impossible!"
"…Is he a monster?"
Demon and human alike wore the same stupefied expression.
An attack from Grace — one that tore straight through thick armor — had been stopped by nothing more than a single pinky finger.
"Not an ounce of manners in you, is there."
"!"
At Gerard's words, Grace's face went slack with alarm, and she tumbled backward three full somersaults to put distance between them. Then she studied him up and down, as if probing for something.
"…Who — what are you?"
Grace's pupils trembled faintly.
Her last strike carried enough force to slice clean through a boulder. Blocking it with a single finger should have been impossible.
"You'll be dead soon enough. Why would you need to know?"
Gerard waved his hand about lazily, an air of perfect ease about him.
It was his way of saying: come at me properly.
"The sheer arrogance…!"
Grace bent her knees and launched forward like a bullet.
A faint blue sword aura shimmered along her blade. It wasn't yet at the level of true aura mastery, but it was more than enough to lop the head off a minotaur without effort.
One thing was self-evident: in moments, his body would be shredded into ribbons.
She bared her teeth in a grin and carved a diagonal slash.
Tiiing!
"—!"
Her sword spun high into the sky, then plunged point-first into the ground.
"GYAAAAAH—!!!!!"
Grace let out a shriek.
And no wonder — her hand, the skin stripped clean from the bone, lay rolling on the ground.
The culprit was inertia itself. Her ferocious strike had, in effect, stabbed her own foot out from under her.
But Grace had no way of knowing this.
Understanding nothing of defense stats, she could only conclude that an exchange of blows too fast for the eye to follow had taken place.
Her eyes began to seethe with killing intent.
"I'll kill you—!"
"By all means, try."
With that, Gerard spread his hand.
The ring on his index finger glowed yellow, blurred — and in an instant transformed into the shape of a gun.
"Of course, you'll be dead before you get the chance."
Gerard closed the distance to Grace at blinding speed.
Sensing instinctively that something was terribly wrong, she retreated even faster.
Her severed hand — when had she grabbed it? — was clutched in her left hand.
Grace exhaled a deep breath, then pressed her right hand against her own arm.
"Ghhk—! What are you all staring at?! Heal me, damn it!"
No sooner had she shouted than the Resistance battle mages who'd been watching the spectacle rushed over.
A soft green light spread across her arm, and her hand slowly began to reattach itself.
"Just like filthy humans—! Healing in the middle of an ikkitousen!"
"Hah, you ignorant fool! Of course it's allowed!"
"Says who?!"
"Says the humans!"
Grace shook out her freshly reattached hand and bellowed,
"QUIET—!"
Then, with an expression brimming with hatred, she turned her glare back on Gerard.
But he wasn't paying her the slightest attention. Head turned to the side, he was chatting with a demon.
Crack.
It was a moment that wounded her pride to its very core.
Grace snatched a sword from the belt of a soldier standing beside her.
Shring!
She kicked off the ground and surged toward him. The surrounding soldiers blurred past her in streaks.
It took hardly any time at all to reach his vicinity. The voices of Gerard and the demon drifted faintly into her ears.
"What's this about an ikkitousen?"
"I beg your pardon? Were you not engaging in single combat with that woman?"
"…When did I ever say I'd do that? I told her to move. That's all!"
Grace raised her voice and roared.
"Arrogant wretch! You dare look down on me?! Atone with your death!"
Without so much as sparing her a glance, Gerard lazily extended the gun.
Grace had no idea what manner of weapon it was.
She charged on without slowing.
"DIE—!"
The moment she closed to within arm's reach of Gerard's nose—
He pulled the trigger.
FWOOOOM!
With a thunderous detonation, light flared from the muzzle, and compressed mana tore through the air in a violent surge.
The mana round traced a perfectly straight line and drilled through Grace's skull in one breath.
Unable to manage even a scream, she died instantly, her face frozen in disbelief.
"—!!!!"
Horrified shock flooded the faces of every onlooker.
What manner of figure had Grace cut on this battlefield until now? She hadn't blinked even when hundreds, thousands came rushing at her all at once.
And yet — she could die this easily? This anticlimactically?
The soldiers were watching it with their own two eyes, and they still couldn't believe it.
Clang.
Thud.
The Resistance soldiers dropped their weapons to the ground.
Believing or not believing no longer mattered.
Robert, the original commander, lay unconscious — which meant the leader of this battlefield, beyond any doubt, had been Grace.
And that leader was now dead, lifeless and limp.
She had been defeated in an ikkitousen.
And more than that, there was an even greater reason.
"We've…"
"…lost."
None of them had the slightest confidence they could stand against the monster who had felled Grace.
The watching demons murmured in disbelief among themselves.
"…Did we win?"
"Us?"
—UOOOAAAH—!!!!!
A roar of celebration tore through the air at the top of a thousand lungs.
The demons began leaping about as if a festival had broken out on the spot.
It felt as though years of pent-up anguish had all taken flight at once.
The agonizing memories of comrades lost to humans. The bitter recollections of starving day after day in their stronghold while waging an endless war. In this moment, it all felt repaid a hundredfold.
"My Lord! We've won!"
They turned their eyes toward the hero who had carried this war to victory.
Without the 7th Legion Commander, they were certain, this war could never have been won.
"…Haah."
Yet the man himself looked anything but pleased. A shadow had settled over his face.
"My Lord…?"
He spoke in a voice like ice.
"Everyone who thought this was an ikkitousen — put your faces in the dirt. All of you."
The demons' expressions darkened in a heartbeat.
An ikkitousen — a single combat — was a simple enough custom: when armies met, the enemy commanders would face off one-on-one on horseback, and the duel would decide the outcome of the entire war.
Its chief purpose was to raise the soldiers' morale or to minimize needless losses in manpower; supposedly, the Japanese of my old world were particularly fond of the practice.
Anyway. That isn't the point.
The point is—
'Damn it, I only ever intended to help the demons up to the point of killing Grace…'
I had never planned to lead them to victory in the war itself.
Grace had already whittled the demon ranks down to almost nothing. If she alone were taken off the board, the script would have read: the demons lose a very, very narrow defeat. That was the design.
So how on earth had it come to this?
'I should have realized it back then.'
Now that I thought about it, things had seemed oddly quiet around us from the moment I first clashed with Grace. Why wasn't the war going on — why was everyone just standing around spectating so leisurely?
But who could have guessed it was because they all thought I was dueling her?
"M-My Lord… could you not find it in yourself to forgive us now?"
Seated atop Sirius's back, I answered with grim finality.
"No."
"We are truly sorry… but when we saw you face her so heroically, we naturally assumed you were fighting an ikkitousen. And as proof — even the human soldiers… surely they believed the same?"
"Commander. You're trapped in black-and-white thinking. Does every heroic-looking moment count as an ikkitousen now? You still don't grasp the gravity of your crime. Thirty additional minutes."
A collective groan went up from the soldiers. Then the Resistance troops, still lined up with their foreheads pressed to the ground beside us, spoke up.
"Th-then why must we press our heads to the ground?"
'You lot are the worst offenders of all.'
I had clearly given them three chances. And still they refused to cooperate, pulling their shameless troll antics — how was I not supposed to be frustrated?
Truthfully, I wanted to punish them far more severely, but even with Maslantia fallen, the Resistance wouldn't simply disband, so I let it slide.
"No speaking. Unless you want thirty minutes added too."
"Glk!"
I let out a sigh — and then, all at once, a thought struck me.
'Wait. Did this actually turn out for the better?'
The Archdemon's order was to annihilate the humans. In other words: retake the Maslantia battlefield and win the war.
Which meant my choices had been one of two paths. Lose the demons' trust by engineering their defeat — or secure victory by letting the humans be massacred.
To put it plainly: I'd just caught both rabbits with one stone.
It wasn't that there had been no casualties at all, but the humans hadn't died at the level of an outright massacre. And either way, I'd led the battlefield to victory — which meant the Archdemon's trust came along with it as a bonus.
What made it even more astonishing was that I hadn't deliberately moved a single piece this entire battle.
'…Now that I think about it that way, I'm in a pretty good mood, actually.'
I couldn't say whether it was good luck or bad, but fisherman's luck like this? There's no luck quite like it.
With a faint smirk, I climbed down from Sirius's back.
Mission complete. Time to go shake down the Archdemon for my reward.