The Cat Tribe (2)
Barbed wire.
An invention credited with rewriting the paradigm of military history. One of the three pillars of trench warfare that, during the First World War, produced nearly sixty thousand casualties in a single day—and the thing I had spent the past week mass-producing with every blacksmith inside the castle.
It's surprisingly easy to make, actually.
Barbed wire is nothing more than strands of spiked iron wire coiled into rolls. Each individual strand is thin and looks almost harmless, but wind them into coils and the defensive power is enough to stop even tanks from closing in.
Technically they snag the tracks and tear them apart.
Proper heavy-tracked armor can sometimes force its way through on raw power, but anything less gets cut off cold at the wire. And if the monsters nesting on Jangbaek Mountain couldn't match the durability of a heavy armored tank no matter how hard they tried, their limits would be plain as day.
The strange way technology developed here was a big help.
Architecture and construction in the North lagged far behind, but metallurgy was surprisingly advanced. Well—when your blacksmiths spent every waking day forging weapons and armor for the front, it would have been stranger if they weren't good at it.
So for a full week I worked those smiths as hard as I could, ordering them to turn out as many coiled rolls of barbed wire and spiked strand as possible. Once finished, the coils went stacked onto carts, hauled out to the field base, and strung into place. Done. At roughly twenty kilos apiece they were no light load, but still far lighter than hauling concrete bricks of the same bulk—and that was the beauty of it.
Hell, the Northern warriors, strongest of the strong, could drag them over by handcart without breaking a sweat.
I hadn't had the time to run a proper defensive test and show the men what the wire could do…
"This ought to be proof enough of its power."
What better demonstration was there than a live-fire trial?
I shouted at once.
"Now! Order them to spear every last snowfield saber-tooth tangled in that wire!"
"Hahaha! Excellent!! Sweep them all!!"
Darius threw his head back with a booming laugh and roared like thunder. The cry snapped the soldiers out of their daze; they thrust the spears already in their hands.
"Kraaagh!"
"Kyaaaang!"
Spearheads punched deep into the hides of snowfield saber-tooths that had charged the wire and found themselves stuck with nowhere to go. Perhaps because they had just watched the wire's power with their own eyes, the soldiers wouldn't even think of closing in—they only stabbed from a distance. That alone was enough. One by one the saber-tooths went still and slumped limp against the coils.
"Splendid."
An unexpected skirmish, but by any measure a clean victory.
Snowfield saber-tooths repelled.
The fighting to come would not end with this one clash, so depending on how you looked at it the win might or might not count as anything special. Either way, the harvest had been real.
"You there—string it denser!"
"The ground's too uneven to set it properly!"
"Aigoo, how is this so hard?! Dig harder, I said! You're all strong as oxen and this is the best you can do?!"
In short: I had secured an iron grip on fortification construction.
I snatched a field shovel from one of the soldiers and for a moment sank into pure nostalgia.
"Ahh… that cool weight in the hand. Time to go back to the days they called me the god of fortification work…"
I had spent most of my military service in forward units rather than cushy urban special detachments or Ministry of Defense direct commands, so every spring and autumn I had memories of swinging a field shovel like a madman.
Not just the shovel. Pickaxes, hammers, saws, stretcher carries, cutting sod, hauling materials by hand… a man who had mastered every corner of fortification repair.
That was me.
"The embankment can't be that steep. You—if a sudden blizzard hits it'll collapse, so ease the angle!"
And following those memories, I set about building individual fighting positions as by-the-book as humanly possible.
Even if this is only the foot of Jangbaek Mountain, we've already been hit once. That means I have to treat this place as the front line.
Of course, raising fortifications from bare dirt was never easy. Unlike the work I was used to, there was no existing structure at all—we started by cutting a rectangle straight out of the frozen ground. And in this medieval world there were no scrap tires or empty drums to lean on; trench walls had to be packed with nothing but logs and cement-mixed mud bricks. Support posts driven in at intervals, roofs framed by pure backbreaking labor—all of it.
But it was worth every drop of sweat.
"Huh… a military camp this perfect."
Darius let out a low whistle of admiration at the finished result. Max, the old veteran of a hundred campaigns, was no less impressed.
"I've been deployed to the field more times than I can count, but I have never seen a field base of this caliber. And to raise it in so short a time…"
Well, of course.
This is the distilled essence of thousands of years of war history.
These long, stretching trench lines were the perfected doctrine written in blood—doctrine bought by grinding human lives through two world wars. And the country I came from had been virtually the only divided nation left in that world, so the patch notes had kept rolling out with special enthusiasm.
Put that doctrine in the hands of Northerners, strongest of the strong, and of course the result had no flaws worth naming.
In a proper setup you would mount gun rests along those trench lines and carpet them with machine guns—but this medieval world had nothing of the sort. As a stopgap I tore down and rebuilt the mechanical crossbows that did exist here and used those instead.
I hear they use them on The Great Wall too.
A kind of ballista that lobbed stones instead of arrows; even Northerners had to plant them in the dirt to fire, so the power was nothing to sneeze at. The one regret was that the ground elevation wasn't high enough to make approaching monsters taste a true hell of a defensive siege—but even so, the position was still damn near impregnable.
"This is revolutionary, Young Master. Leave these works standing and the next time something like today happens, a little maintenance is all it will take. We'll have a semi-permanent defensive installation!"
Well, true enough.
Field fortifications were never meant for long-term occupation. They were temporary spaces raised with advance or withdrawal in mind—and in a place like this, lingering too long would only over-aggro the monsters of Jangbaek Mountain and bleed manpower for nothing. So we would only use them when running exploration ops like today. Even treating them as consumables for those windows more than paid for the investment.
It's not as if these are reinforced concrete strongpoints.
Above all else, fortification work done this way was cheap. The greatest virtue of barbed wire was its absurdly low cost. In a North that was already broke, if you could cut expenses to the bone—what else would you call that if not innovation?
"Anyway, everyone worked hard. Time to gather up. We've got to eat if we're going to work."
After fortification work came field cooking. Only there were no field kitchen trucks here, and no combat rations either. Well—there were brick-hard hardtack that passed for combat rations, but—
How the hell are you supposed to fight on that?
I had a few men dig a pit and tear open the sacks we'd brought, scattering the contents inside. Well-dried straw, charcoal, and powdered quicklime. Quicklime, produced by roasting limestone, spikes to two hundred degrees Celsius the instant it meets water. People use it in heating packs—and when mishandled it can start fires—but I put it to work as a cheerfully straightforward fire-starter.
Then I set a cauldron over the heat and poured in drinking water drawn from nearby, along with rice.
"Eat first, then work!"
"Wooooah!"
If people are going to put out real effort, they need meat. And where was the meat supposed to come from?
Hanging right over there.
And just like that, the snowfield saber-tooth became our next meal. Tiger-meat gukbap, of all the things in the world.
Does eating this give you tiger strength or something?
I was idly turning that nonsense over when the camp around me grew noisy. Looking up, I saw Darius and several others clustered together in discussion.
"Looks like they're about to start."
"Start what?"
"The exploration."
"Ah."
I had been so buried in perfect fortification work that it had slipped my mind—but of course all of this was only the foundation for exploring Jangbaek Mountain.
A short while later Darius seemed to reach a decision. He scattered the men he had gathered and walked over to me.
"Little brother."
"You've decided, then?"
"Yeah. Thanks to you we ate well and rested well, so our combat strength is as intact as it gets. I'm starting the reconnaissance ops."
Normally even a simple recon would have meant a mountain of decisions—what to do with the main body, how many to leave behind to guard it, and on and on. But with the barbed wire covering the hard parts, those complications had been swept aside and the whole process shortened dramatically.
"I'll go first myself."
"Please be careful."
"You brat. Worry about yourself more than me."
Fair enough. I had never properly seen him fight, but the man standing in front of me—Darius Wintershield—was said to be one of the strongest in the entire North. He had started making his name more than ten years ago, and by the time he was my age he had already crushed a host of Northern champions by force alone.
They called him a once-in-a-generation talent even inside the Northern Grand Duke's house, didn't they?
Well—anyone who could walk home with a house-sized bear on his back had long since left ordinary human limits behind.
After that, Darius and a handful of soldiers headed out as a kind of advance party. From where I stood it wouldn't have mattered if the whole force left, but it looked like they had deliberately left a large number behind to keep an eye on me.
Even if I tell them there's no need…
The trench lines had already proven themselves, and at my side stood Max—the Slayer of the Seventh Night.
"…Young Master, your eyes look rather strange."
"I still can't forget the sword work you showed in Jemili Village last time, Butler."
"Haha. That much is nothing special."
"Come now, no need for modesty."
"I mean it. I was a soldier who mainly trained in tracking and survival, not a proper martial artist. Especially in this North, where every last member of the other races is a monster in their own right—I truly am nothing."
"Other races?"
Interest pricked at me. The fire we had lit for warmth was crackling away, lending the whole camp a campfire mood. Remembering something I had heard before, I asked the question.
"Come to think of it, I heard about dwarves last time. Are dwarves other races as well?"
"Dwarves… yes, they count among them. Along with the elves, they are one of the great long-lived races."
Elves? So they existed too.
"But when I say other races, I mean those of the North. Elves and dwarves are not peoples who mainly range here."
"Then there are ones who do?"
"There are. The beastmen would be the foremost example."
Beastmen. Races with human frames mixed with animal traits. They belonged to the North, yet they were another indigenous power—not subjects of the Wintershield Grand Duke's house.
"Their numbers are not great, but each one is a tremendous powerhouse. They are scattered across the North, however, so under ordinary circumstances you would be hard-pressed to meet them."
"The way you say that, it sounds like you've met them under less-than-ordinary circumstances."
"…Long ago. Very long ago, I met them once."
The old soldier's eyes chased a past that had already run far ahead. The look in them was tangled with too many feelings at once, and the weight of the negative far outstripped anything warm.
"It was not a pleasant meeting. The beastmen themselves are a people driven out by humankind, so all the more so. Their very nature differs from ours—it would be best if you avoided contact with them whenever possible."
Reading between the lines, there had been blood. Max clearly wanted me to have no point of contact with them at all—but I felt the opposite. My interest only rose.
"Who should be avoided the most?"
"Hmm… every beastman tribe has its own fierce character and quirks, but if I had to name the ones to avoid above all others, it would be the Cat Tribe."
"The Cat Tribe?"
"Yes. Beastmen who carry the traits of cats. They are natural-born assassins—but what makes them truly troublesome is their capricious nature. They will act as if perfectly content, then for no reason at all turn around and destroy something."
Isn't that just pure bitch-cat behavior?
That thought was still floating through my head when—
"Catfolk?"
An unfamiliar voice spoke from right beside me.
"?!"
I whipped my head around—
"You talking about me-nya?"
Twitch!
At some point, a girl with cat ears had flattened herself on top of the cauldron.