The Secret Path to Eurosola
"Go on ahead."
I channeled strength into both arms and hoisted the spear shaft upward.
Squelch!
Chronos's body, hoisted high with my spear impaling his heart, sprayed a crimson mist into the air.
Deprived of its rider, Chronos's black stallion buckled under its own momentum, its front legs collapsing as it tumbled violently into the mud.
With Chronos's corpse impaled on my spear and held high, I spurred my horse forward, riding back and forth across the front lines of the Europian army.
Then, right before their very eyes, I swung the spear with a violent sweep, discarding his body into the mire like a piece of trash.
Splat!
"Chronos is dead! Impaled by my spear and cast into the dirt!"
My roar echoed across the battlefield.
Having witnessed the death of their commander-in-chief, the Europian soldiers threw down their weapons, screaming as they began to scatter in all directions.
"Waaaaah!"
"Long live General Lasen! Long live General Sabre!"
Soon after, Sabre's main army arrived, shaking the very earth as they swept over the remnants of the collapsed Europian forces.
The battle was over.
Eufront, the foremost defensive line of Europia, had fallen.
"Father... at long last, I stand... upon the soil of Kalsten..."
Kalsten, the ancestral land of the Kalista family that Sabre had yearned for so desperately, fell into Valerian's hands overnight with anticlimactic ease.
The collapse of Eufront signaled the downfall of the entire Europia Kingdom.
With nothing left to obstruct them after reclaiming Kalsten, the Valerian army swept southward like a raging torrent.
The inland plains of Europia, stripped of their defenses, became a virtual highway for our cavalry.
In a mere fortnight, we reached the gates of Eurosola, the massive capital and beating heart of Europia, with ridiculous ease.
Towering white walls, dozens of meters high and incredibly stout, encircled Eurosola.
It was the final pride of the Europia Kingdom, an impregnable fortress said to be absolutely impenetrable.
We pitched hundreds of tents around the colossal fortress, sealing it in a tight blockade.
Now, all we had to do was cut off their food and water supply, waiting leisurely for the rats inside to starve and open the gates themselves.
However, as the war shifted from rapid maneuvers to a tedious siege, my position became incredibly awkward.
"...Sigh. I'm going to die of boredom."
Slouching in a chair outside my tent, I let out a massive yawn.
My detachment, whose strengths lay in mobility and guerrilla tactics, had virtually nothing to do in front of these towering walls.
Scaling walls and pushing battering rams was infantry work, not a job for cavalrymen like us.
While the main army's engineers constructed massive catapults and siege towers, I was assigned to patrol the outskirts of Eurosola under the pretext of guarding against potential enemy reinforcements.
But even this was a meaningless task—essentially a leisurely stroll—concocted by Sabre, who was so deeply mired in his affection and misunderstandings that he couldn't bear to let his Holy Spear sit idle.
The real problem lay elsewhere.
As the construction of siege weapons dragged on and the standoff at the walls lengthened, the soldiers' war of steel began to wind down, making way for the politicians' war of abacuses and schemes.
Just as Chronos once pushed me into a death trap for his political calculations... this situation smells fishy too.
Every time I went on those peaceful, idle patrols, a foreboding sensation crept over me.
A few nights later, that premonition materialized and tightened around my throat when Sabre summoned me secretly to his tent for the first time in a while.
"Ah, you've arrived, Lasen."
Inside Sabre's tent, the candlelight flickered.
Sitting across the table, Sabre looked nothing like the boisterous commander who had conquered Eufront; instead, his face was lined with fatigue and worry, resembling a sickly old man.
"General. You don't look well."
When I asked cautiously, Sabre toyed with the empty goblet on the table before speaking in a heavy tone.
"If we cannot breach Eurosola's walls immediately and take the King's head... the longer this drags on, the more endangered we in the Valerian military—specifically you and I—will become."
My heart skipped a beat, and I swallowed hard.
"What do you mean by that? Victory is already in our grasp, and the enemies inside are starving. Surrender is only a matter of time."
"Yes, they will surrender. But the manner of that surrender is the problem."
Sabre slammed his hand on the table.
"King Ades, that cunning old fox, is not the type to fight to the bitter end. Before their food runs out, he will undoubtedly send a secret envoy to the Valerian royal court to negotiate a conditional surrender. He will offer to dissolve the Kingdom of Europia and reduce it to a vassal duchy under Valerian, paying taxes and tribute in exchange for survival."
I furrowed my brow.
"Surely the Valerian royal family wouldn't accept such a compromise..."
"No, they will accept it gladly."
Sabre's confident voice cut me off.
"As you know, His Majesty plans to declare a unified empire and ascend the throne as Emperor once this war ends. However, a bloated empire requires vast administrative and military resources to govern. From the royal family's perspective, it is far more efficient to keep King Ades and the existing Europian nobility alive to rule by proxy, sucking them dry of taxes without spilling a single drop of Valerian blood."
Sabre let out a hollow chuckle.
"Moreover, if the war ends with such a peaceful treaty, they can save on the massive post-war rewards and territories they would otherwise have to grant to soldiers like us, who bathed in blood to break the enemy's walls. No, in fact..."
Sabre's gaze darkened ominously.
"Once the Valerian royal family establishes the empire, they will never tolerate anyone possessing enough military might to threaten the imperial throne. A war hero with the absolute support of the populace? To the imperial court, that is merely a seed of rebellion that must be nipped in the bud. They are highly likely to suppress and purge generals whose achievements are too great, using whatever pretext they can find."
Boiling the hound once the rabbit is caught.
The classic tale of discarding the hunting dog once the prey is caught.
Sabre, who had worked himself to the bone and dedicated everything to his country, now faced the threat of abandonment and purge for political convenience.
His plight mirrored the tragic fate of the original Lasen, who had been discarded by Chronos and forced to kneel before the executioner's block.
Expendable tools tossed aside in the dirty games of the powerful.
I felt a strange sense of kinship and sympathy for him.
Wait a minute. If Europia remains as a duchy and King Ades keeps his life, just as Sabre said... what about me? What happens to me?!
I had killed King Ades's brother, Chronos, and decapitated his nephew, Jupiter, with the sole intention of destroying Europia.
To the people of Europia, I was public enemy number one—a traitor deserving of a thousand deaths.
And now King Ades was going to sit at the negotiating table with the Valerian Emperor as the ruler of a vassal state?
It was painfully obvious what his very first condition would be...
The Valerian imperial court would sell me out in a heartbeat.
I had done all this just to survive, yet the moment a peace treaty was signed, my head would roll.
Furthermore, although I had originally planned to dump them, I had grown terribly attached to the men of my detachment after bleeding together on the battlefield. Their safety would be forfeit too.
Branded as the lackeys of a traitor, they would likely be buried alive en masse.
"General... are you saying we must sit idly and wait for our heads to be taken?"
When I asked in a trembling voice, Sabre slammed his fist onto the table.
"That is precisely why I am so anxious! Before the envoys start scurrying back and forth and political negotiations begin, we must tear down those damn walls and storm the city to take Ades's head! We must wipe out the royal bloodline entirely so those fools in the imperial court abandon their absurd delusions of proxy rule!"
Sabre was right.
The most definitive way to shatter this tedious political deadlock was to erase King Ades, the very subject of the negotiations, from the face of the earth.
But breaching Eurosola, a fortress protected by layer upon layer of defenses, in a single stroke was nigh impossible.
It would take at least another fortnight for the siege weapons to be completed.
Returning to my tent, I paced the cramped space all night, biting my nails.
What do I do? I can't scale the walls, I can't dig a tunnel, and I certainly can't fly. Please, there has to be a way...
As I squeezed my brain cells to their absolute limit to survive, minor details from the original novel began to flash through my mind.
"Hmph. It's a beautiful place that a Valerian prince like you could never dream of visiting."
"What? Princess Yuno! What kind of rude remark is that to a business partner... Wait. Th-this place is...!"
...Huh?
I froze in my tracks.
In the original novel, on the night before she was to leave her homeland of Europia for Valerian after their arranged marriage...
...a romantic scene flashed in my mind where the female lead, Princess Yuno, snuck out with her husband, Prince Mikael, for a secret date.
Fearing she might never return to her homeland, Yuno had taken Mikael to visit the nostalgic places around the palace where she used to play hide-and-seek as a child.
It was a dreamlike secret cave where the surprisingly cowardly Mikael had been startled by the squeak of a rat, leading him to hold Yuno's hand for the very first time.
The name of that place.
Eurosola's Abandoned Waterway.
According to the novel's lore, it was a site where construction of a massive new waterway—intended to run from the outskirts of the capital, underground, and straight into the palace—had been halted decades ago due to ground subsidence.
At the time, the Europian royal family realized this unfinished waterway could serve as a backdoor for intruders to infiltrate the castle.
Thus, they sealed the outer entrance with massive boulders...
...and to ensure absolute secrecy, they locked the hundreds of workers who had participated in the construction deep inside the waterway, burying them alive.
Since then, the existence of the abandoned waterway had been a secret passed down only by word of mouth among the Europian royalty.
Princess Yuno had stumbled upon its map in the royal library as a child and turned it into her private hideout.
In the original story, it served as a romantic plot device where Yuno, despite her tsundere attitude, accidentally revealed the path to Mikael, allowing the two leads to build trust and share their first intimate secret.
"...Pfft."
A chuckle escaped my lips.
It was an infiltration route leading straight to the royal bedchambers, completely unguarded by a single sentry.
Thank you, Author! Your setting just saved my life!
There was no need to break down those massive walls.
I could lead a small assassination squad through the abandoned waterway and slip into the palace undetected.
All we had to do was storm King Ades's bedchambers in the dead of night and slit the old man's throat.
A snake cannot move once its head is severed.
Once King Ades was dead, the negotiating party would vanish, and Eurosola would crumble like a sandcastle before the morning sun could rise.
"General!"
I threw on my coat and rushed straight to Sabre's tent.
To Sabre, who was startled by my sudden midnight intrusion, I roughly unfurled a map of Eurosola on the table. I explained the existence of the abandoned waterway known only to royalty, pointed out its exact entrance, and proposed an infiltration plan to decapitate King Ades.
"Th-this is unbelievable...!"
Sabre's eyes widened progressively as he listened to my explanation.
He was astonished that such a backdoor existed beneath the impregnable fortress, but a look of profound awe also spread across his face, wondering how Lasen—a general of commoner origin—could possibly know an absolute secret guarded by the highest royalty of Europia.
"Just how did you... Ah, of course. You were Chronos's right-hand man."
Sabre conveniently rationalized how I possessed this secret himself.
Thanks to that, I only had to offer an awkward smile in response.
Sabre approved the operation immediately.
In the early hours of that very morning, I quietly gathered exactly fifty of my most trusted, battle-hardened elite detachment.
Under a shroud of darkness where even the moonlight was veiled by clouds...
...we wore blackened armor and bit down on wooden gags, pushing through the dense underbrush of a deep forest miles away from Eurosola's walls.
Before long, just as described in the novel, the entrance of a gloomy, damp cave—cleverly camouflaged by a massive, moss-covered boulder—gaped open before us.
The stench of stagnant water and the lingering resentment of the buried workers wafted out, making it feel like the entrance to hell itself.
"General... is this truly the path to the palace?" one of my lieutenants whispered, his voice tight with tension.
Gripping the hilt of the dagger at my waist, I took my first step into the darkness.
"Yes. Tonight, we open Eurosola's gates. We dine at King Ades's table."