Pressure, Obsession, Gamble (5)
Swish! The female knight’s attacks continued to fly toward me with unrelenting ferocity, threatening my life at every turn.
“Ahahaha, what’s the matter? Why don’t you run that mouth like you did before?”
Swish! Clang!
“Ugh!”
I barely managed to bat the strike aside with my dagger once again. In truth, the reason I was still standing was split evenly between the enemy toying with me and the fact that she wasn’t mounted.
‘In this situation, should I consider her vicious personality lucky or unlucky?’
Well, lucky is the right call.
If she hadn’t been playing with me like a cat batting at a sparrow out of pure malice, I might have been dead already. Of course, I wouldn’t have simply taken the beating lying down.
And while it looked like merciless cruelty born from her temperament, it also felt like a calculated restraint—an action wrapped in caution, careful not to cross a certain line. Still, dodging was getting harder. Time to test something.
“Auntie, with a personality like that, isn’t that why you’re still a spinster at your age?”
“I-I’m not a spinster! How would you know something like that!”
Swish! Swish! Swish! Shashashashasha!
Whoa, her sword strikes just got a lot easier to read.
It seemed my provocation had struck home. Her heightened emotions were bleeding into every swing.
The wild, sloppy slashes were far cruder than her earlier techniques, giving me noticeably more breathing room to evade. I thought I was dodging with ease, but each movement sent fresh pain lancing through the first wound I’d taken.
Stumble!
It was a deep cut. I had no time to apply a potion or pressure bandage, and the injury wasn’t light enough to ignore while dodging——.
Slice!
“Kgh!”
So moments like this kept happening, where I couldn’t quite get away in time.
This one caught my left shoulder. Not deep, but every new gash sapped more strength from my body. I was clearly inching closer to severe blood loss. I needed a solution before that happened… but was it even possible?
After several more minutes, I finally reached my target.
Whoosh! Clang! Whoosh! Thud!
The clash of sword against sword and sword against shield rang out, followed by familiar voices.
"Fire Ball!"
⟨ FIRE BALL ⟩
"Fire Ball! Fire Ball!"
⟨ FIRE BALL ⟩
Shwoooong! Kwaaaaaang!
They belonged to Hans and Sir Levenstuhl.
I guessed Sir Levenstuhl had finally finished his thirty-minute Altar Cannon barrage and linked up with the others.
‘If you can’t win, join forces. Yeah, that’s a solid maxim.’
Exactly. The solution I’d found was to regroup with my allies. …But you guys are still fighting just one opponent?
Why hasn’t it been settled yet?
“Hans! Can you hear me, Hans!”
“Huh? Squad Leader? Where are you—— ugh! Helmut!”
Thud!
Sounded like the knight had closed the distance and charged in. I couldn’t see them yet, so I could only guess from the noise.
“Oh? I wondered what you were scheming by running off. All that effort just to join up with the leftovers?”
The female knight laughed mockingly from behind me.
Hah, leftovers. …I can’t exactly deny it, but our leftovers are a little different. At least now that I’ve joined them, we’re at full strength.
Swish!
And I really wish she’d stop smiling brightly while swinging that sword. It’s actually driving me insane.
"Fire Javelin!"
⟨ FIRE JAVELIN ⟩
I launched the spell directly at the female knight’s front.
Swoosh! Kiiiiing!
She once again deftly caught the magic on her aura-wrapped blade, but it bought me the time I needed.
“Grrrrk!”
Clenching my teeth, I poured every ounce of strength into running.
The gash on my thigh burned as if a red-hot iron from hell was searing straight into the muscle. Still, I grit my way through the pain and kept sprinting. After covering a fair distance——
Clang! Clang! Clang! Thud!
“Sir Varenfelt! I need covering fire!”
“You don’t have to tell me! And address me with proper decorum and respect, commoner!”
Sigh. When is that elitist attitude of his going to drop?
He must be throwing his weight around with the squad members who are still technically commoners in my eyes.
“Helmut!”
Thud!
“Hup! You okay, Bruno?”
“Thanks to you!”
…Or maybe he’s only burning with rivalry toward Hans specifically?
What a weird guy.
“Elena! Get over here and help me!”
“Y-yes!”
Elena came rushing toward me with quick, pattering steps that sounded like they could tear the ground.
“Potion and bandage—no, just slap the potion on my thigh, quick.”
Riiiip!
I spoke while grabbing the torn fabric around my thigh and ripping it wider with force.
“Hiiik! Oh my goodness… You ran like that earlier with an injury this bad?”
“Well, you can see a bit of bone, but it’s no big deal. If you endure it, you can still run.”
Besides, I had reasons to trust that. This world definitely let me worry less about wounds than my previous life.
Siiiiizzle!
“Urgh!”
The moment Elena applied the fast-acting potion, the wound on my thigh began closing at a visible rate. At first an excruciating pain surged through me, then it dulled into a fierce, maddening itch that tormented the regenerating flesh.
Probably because the nerves had been overstimulated by the rapid healing. Just a layman’s guess, of course.
I also drank the potion I’d been carrying.
‘This should prevent any lasting damage to my leg. Yeah, it was expensive as hell, but the effect is undeniable.’
While the healing took place, I looked at the rest of the squad. They were struggling more than I’d expected.
I’d specifically called for the group whose absence would weaken our fighting strength the least, yet the moment Elena left the line, the already precarious balance of the battlefield had tilted sharply toward the knights.
Bruno and Helmut were tiring faster than when I’d first returned. Hans and Sir Levenstuhl didn’t look normal either; they seemed to have burned through a lot of mana. Exhaustion was written all over them.
Tsk. Can’t be helped.
My steps were still unsteady while the healing continued, but I had no choice but to join the fight.
“Elena, support me and get me over there.”
“What? But your wounds are still healing!”
“Doesn’t matter. Support me, please?”
“Y-yes!”
The wound on my thigh itched like crazy while also feeling like it was being stabbed by a hundred needles, but with Elena’s help I endured the pain and kept moving.
Before long we reached the battlefield. I immediately shouted.
“Squad! Everyone switch to anti-knight formation! Treat me as the artillery battery and build the formation around that! Sir Levenstuhl will support me. Everyone else, return to your original positions. Understood?”
“Yes!”
Despite their exhaustion, they answered vigorously and began forming up.
Even with the silent male knight’s interference, the squad’s hard work let them complete the formation in no time.
I stood at the very rear, Sir Levenstuhl in front of me, Hans and Elena in the second rank acting as spearmen while supporting with magic, and Bruno and Helmut at the front line holding the defense with shields and swords.
Portable or not, the Altar Cannon still needed to be planted before firing and couldn’t move afterward. That was why I had designed this formation.
‘Of course, it would be complete with palisades or simple trenches, but with this manpower and time, wishing for that is pure luxury.’
The core idea was to avoid proactive close combat against dismounted knights and instead annihilate them with concentrated firepower from the rear.
I only planned for dismounted knights because if a mounted knight could charge a mage in full condition, the main camp would already be breached. At that point we wouldn’t be thinking about counterattacks—we’d be fleeing on horseback ourselves.
The one saving grace in this damned medieval fantasy world was that mage plate armor was prohibitively expensive, like it had been dipped in gold, so they couldn’t afford full steel horse armor on top of it. If they had, it really would have been a medieval tank. Lucky for us.
Anyway, if you compared our current formation to the era just before early-modern trench warfare, it was roughly similar. Think of it as a spoonful of early modern tactics added to the Spanish tercio. The numbers were vastly different, but the concept was close enough.
As we finished forming up and stared down the enemy, the female knight who had been fighting me joined her companion. Now there were two.
They stood a short distance away talking, and they looked fairly close. Even so, they never dropped their guard toward us. Both still held swords ready and kept glancing in our direction.
‘Unlike the male knight I retired earlier, these two might belong to the same organization.’
It seemed like a very plausible guess. If the male knight’s words before he went down were true… they were probably from the Eastern Knight Order.
‘Even the regional knight orders have joined the 2nd Prince’s faction. This is getting quite troublesome.’
Of course the great nobles’ knight orders were strong, but they paled beside the regional knight orders that maintained security across large swathes of the kingdom. The regional orders were top-tier within the kingdom; their quality was on an entirely different level from run-of-the-mill groups.
‘I’ll think about that later.’
It wouldn’t be too late to consider it once we linked up with the Weistenfel territorial army. Setting the question of their affiliation aside for now, I focused on reading the enemy’s next moves.
Since no further reinforcements appeared, it was likely that most of the forces sent into the forest had already joined the fight against our knights. The fact that we hadn’t encountered the enemy mage unit even though we knew their approximate location only reinforced that conclusion.
The enemy commander apparently considered the knights more important than us, even though we were openly bombarding them from range. I sensed a flaw in their judgment, but from our perspective it was fortunate.
‘Our own knights… probably won’t escape annihilation.’
…A regrettable outcome.
I offered a silent prayer for their souls. If things went badly, their bodies might not even be recoverable.
‘At least may their path be peaceful.’
It was thanks to their sacrifice that we had this opportunity at all. If even more enemy knights had swarmed us, survival would have been nearly impossible.
So we must return. At the very least, we have to give meaning to their sacrifice. How utterly futile it would be if the overwhelming results they achieved simply faded away with no one left to tell the tale.
“Everyone, prepare for combat!”
I raised my voice to sharpen the squad’s focus.
Now… should we call this the third round?
The battle between the mage unit and two knights was about to begin.