Respect for the Captive
The guerrilla campaign through the jungle had succeeded. The Eastern army had been herded into a single kill zone and wiped out in one stroke.
Unable to withstand the relentless missile barrage from thirty MLRS units, Ruben's Eastern forces had lost seventy percent of their strength and sent word of surrender. The surviving thirty percent were taken prisoner and dragged before me.
"I gave you a chance to surrender. You should have taken it. The Southern army was the same way, and so are you people. I genuinely don't understand why none of you grasp how precious human life is until you've spilled blood by the barrelful—and only then start listening to what I have to say."
Forced to his knees, Ruben roared back in a voice that seemed to cough up blood.
"What… what in the world was that monstrous attack, Isaac?! How is that something a human being would do?! What was the purpose of such indiscriminate fire?! You just kept pouring it on until everyone was dead because you couldn't tell whether you'd hit anyone or not—isn't that right?! Even in the middle of a war, don't you have so much as a shred of respect for your opponent's honor?!"
I cut him off with a single word.
"No. I don't."
"......!"
"Honor? Where is there honor in war? Edmund alone decided to start this war, and you people blindly followed his will as if it were your own, dying and killing like a pack of lemmings—is that honor? If that's honor, then I don't know honor."
"How dare you insult chivalry—"
"To me, honor means upholding the will of the citizens who trust and follow me, building a world where they can receive equal treatment, and crushing the relics of a bygone age who try to stop it. That is honor. As for you lot—aside from the single fact that Edmund wants something, what purpose do you even have? Do any of you possess a head capable of thinking for yourselves?"
My words sent Ruben into a fury.
"What… nonsense is this?! Fulfilling one's lord's desires is the very essence of the knightly spirit! I may have been defeated and surrendered, but I have not abandoned chivalry! Do not insult my lord any further!"
"You can't stand your lord being insulted, yet you can tolerate that same lord going mad over a woman, exploiting the people of the East, and pouring the money into luxury goods to present to her? Closing your eyes to your lord's wrongdoing while following him into war—is that Eastern chivalry? Looking at it now, this 'chivalry' of yours doesn't amount to much."
"......"
Everyone knew that outside the West, the archdukes had all gone mad over Eleanor, competitively crafting every manner of jewel and luxury good to present to her. And everyone knew that, as a result, the livelihoods of the people in each region had grown desperately hard.
Ruben, finding nothing to say even by his own reckoning, hung his head low. Then, in a small voice, he made one last attempt to drag me down to his level.
"Kh… and you… you, Isaac, aren't you keeping Eleanor at your side because you covet her as well?! If you hadn't been greedy in the first place, my lord would never have decided on war—"
"No. I extracted Eleanor and locked her away because I was certain that if she remained in the imperial palace continuing her parasitic existence, the very foundations of the Empire would be torn out. Right now that woman is confined to a solitary cell, forbidden all outside activity, and provided with nothing more than the same meals our ordinary soldiers eat. No fine clothes, no ornaments, no jewels or gifts. And if you still don't believe me…"
I drew the pistol from my belt and fired a single shot at a nearby tree.
Bang—!
The Eastern soldiers flinched hard at the sound—so similar to the weapons the Hoin and Pyoin tribes had used, a sound they had grown thoroughly sick of hearing in the jungle.
The bullet punched a small hole in the tree. Looking at that hole, I asked Ruben:
"If you believe I spirited Eleanor away because I was as smitten with her as the rest of them, would you believe me if I dragged her here tomorrow and blew her head off with this right in front of you?"
Looking at Isaac's utterly casual demeanor, Ruben felt terror.
H-he's serious. That madman genuinely means to kill Eleanor. The thing in his hand is smaller than what those barbarians carried in the jungle, but…
Judging by the clean little hole left in the tree, an ordinary person like Eleanor would die on the spot if hit by that thing. Even in the Great Rainforest, weapons like that had killed people with a hit to the abdomen alone. A hit to the head would be far worse.
Crushed by Isaac's mad intensity, Ruben hung his head and muttered:
"Th-there's no need… I will take you at your word."
Having thoroughly crushed Ruben's spirit, I pressed him for other information.
"Then, as the victor, let me ask you, the prisoner. Are there any other Eastern forces inside the Great Rainforest that we haven't accounted for? Or any units scheduled for imminent deployment?"
"......"
"Ah, don't want to answer? I won't force you. I won't threaten or torture you until you talk. I'm simply giving you a choice, so don't worry. If you don't want to answer, you can just sit there."
For a moment Ruben stared at me with an expression of pure incomprehension.
"You're saying you won't even interrogate a prisoner? Then why ask me at all?"
"I'm asking as a formality. If you had been the victors, you would have slaughtered and trampled us without mercy—but unlike you, I don't go in for massacres."
Ruben's eyes seemed to ask, You just killed that many people and you're saying what?—but he didn't actually voice it.
"Well, if you provide proper information, we won't have to waste firepower unnecessarily and can end this with less bloodshed… but from our perspective, if we don't know something, we have to use every means at our disposal to eliminate variables. So if another unit does get deployed, the only option will be to mobilize every scrap of firepower we have and wipe them out completely—not so much as a single ant left alive."
"N-no! My son is in the next unit—"
Ruben got that far before hastily clamping his mouth shut, but it was already too late.
"Oh? There's a next unit, is there? The East prepared quite thoroughly. Or did the Center provide substantial support? Doesn't matter either way. And your son is scheduled to throw himself into this front as well—a father and son pair serving the East with such wholehearted devotion. I'm genuinely moved."
"Wait—"
"But we can't exactly fight while making allowances. We've already taken as many prisoners as we need, and if the prisoner count grows any further, management becomes difficult and more mouths mean more food wasted for no reason—so we don't need any more prisoners. When we encounter the next unit, the only option will be total annihilation. Ah, but since you're a commander, even if you're the enemy, I'll at least arrange for you to meet your son. Assuming there's a scrap left to salvage from his corpse, that is."
The moment he heard that, Ruben slammed his forehead into the ground. Then he abandoned everything and prostrated himself before me.
"Please… please, just stop that. He is my only son. I will tell you everything I know. If a follow-up force is deployed, I will advise them not to fight. So please, just that…"
"C-Commander!"
"Commander, you can't!"
"Let's fight them again! We may have lost, but the next unit will surely—"
The Eastern soldiers, seeing Ruben completely bow his head, recoiled in horror and tried to stop him. But there was no stopping a man who, for his son's sake, could no longer afford to be picky about cold leftovers or hot meals.
"You're saying that after what we just endured?! Were we able to counter that attack?! Or even defend against it?! Just dealing with the barbarians' guerrilla warfare was enough that we couldn't expand our operational area and had to sit fattening ourselves up inside our garrisons! And with all that bulk we still couldn't withstand the attack just now!"
At Ruben's blood-soaked howl, every Eastern soldier fell silent.
"You feel it too, don't you?! That winning is impossible! We were hit without knowing where the attack was coming from or what it even was! We're only alive right now because they stopped firing—not because we were skilled enough to survive! You all have family, friends, lovers in the units that will be deployed next! Do you want them to end up like us—completely annihilated?!"
At Ruben's words, the Eastern soldiers' morale crumbled. They hung their heads as one and wept.
"Kh-hhuh…"
"To end up… looking this pathetic…"
"I'm sorry, Commander… uhhk…"
Having thoroughly broken Ruben, I sat in my chair, crossed my legs, and assumed the posture of a victor.
"Well then—why don't you start by laying out everything you know, from the Eastern army's current organization all the way to the strategies and tactics Edmund ordered. Best not to deliberately feed us false information. We're not the sort to be shaken by something as trivial as bad intel, and every time a lie is exposed, ten of your men's heads will roll."
"Y-yes… I understand. I'll tell you… everything, without leaving out a single detail…"
And so, through Ruben, I obtained extremely detailed information on every Eastern tactic, unit size, and how much additional support was scheduled from the Center.