The Female Knight Airen
The Brans Army's Second Barracks bore the official title of a recruit training camp, yet in truth it was hardly a facility of any real importance.
What took place there was nothing more than basic military drills. The true forging of soldiers—the real training that turned raw conscripts into proper troops—happened at the First Barracks, and that was the only place where a full curriculum was ever followed.
This place served as little more than a sieve, a filter meant to weed out those who would never amount to soldiers. Of course, given the age they lived in, "weeding out" rarely meant much; unless a man had some glaring physical disability, he was conscripted all the same.
In short, the importance of this post was vanishingly low—and so, naturally, the ranks of those assigned to manage it were little better than dead-end sinecures.
And it was here, in this backwater of a post, that Airen Juliette—once famed as one of the Brans Army's finest female generals—was carrying out the duties of an instructor.
The female knight Airen Juliette.
Long crimson hair cascading free, skin that still gleamed porcelain-white no matter how mercilessly the sun beat down upon it. The silver armor she wore was engraved with the crest of House Brans—the house to which she still longed to give her full loyalty—in elegant, striking relief.
Anyone looking at her would have thought, without hesitation, that she was a knight made flesh. And yet there was one single dissonance that no armor could hide: the lush, full curves of her body.
Those proud, generous breasts alone declared, with unmistakable force, that she was not merely a knight but a woman. Firm, well-honed muscle clung attractively to her frame, only serving to emphasize the fullness of her chest still further.
Had any of the gossips of the realm witnessed a woman of her caliber reduced to instructor's duties in a place like this, they would surely have clicked their tongues in pity.
Instructor's duties, they called it—but all she actually did was decide whether the new recruits passed or failed their basic combat tests. Nothing more.
Anyone could see she had been demoted after earning the displeasure of her lord, Lin Brans. Yet neither she nor those around her ever spoke that truth aloud.
"That will be all for today. Well done, everyone."
"Yes, ma'am!"
After a stretch of "training" so empty it was almost embarrassing—little more than standing watch—Airen left the training grounds without the slightest change in expression.
Good. Time for my personal regimen again today.
She had been cast down to a place where she could accomplish nothing. But if she truly did nothing, the body she had tempered so rigorously would begin to rust. Airen harbored not a single complaint in her heart toward the lord who had sent her here. She simply waited for the day she would be summoned again, and devoted herself wholly to her training in the meantime.
In truth, given the unjust treatment she was receiving from Lin Brans, if she simply resigned from the Brans Army, her exceptional abilities would have drawn scout offers from half the feudal lords scattered across the continent within days. That much was certain.
But she had been born a warrior, and her character was iron-straight. Perhaps because of that nature, once she had decided to serve Lin Brans as her lord, she had no intention of ever leaving her side.
Even if she has no need of me now, the day will come when she does again. When that day arrives, I need only prove my worth.
Just as she was about to leave for her private training, a man's voice called out to her from afar.
"Lady Airen!"
The speaker was the overall commander of the Second Barracks.
"Good day, Barracks Commander. As I have told you before, I am merely an instructor—your subordinate. There is no need for you to address me so formally."
In terms of official rank, Airen stood far below the man. Yet he understood, by instinct, that a small fry like himself and the woman before him lived in entirely different worlds. If he was an ordinary man who would live and die as a conscripted soldier, the woman before him was the sort who could lead such soldiers by the score, stand at the vanguard, and win glory.
"No, how could I possibly speak casually to General Airen… No—that isn't what matters right now."
He drew a letter from his breast and held it out to her.
"What is this?"
"You are being summoned, Lady Airen. By our lord…!"
"…!"
Airen's pupils contracted at those words.
She is calling for me? Lady Lin Brans is calling for me?
"At last our lord has recognized you, Lady Airen…! Every day I watched you train in the back, and it pained me that a general of your caliber could not spread her wings… Surely she deliberately sent you here so that she might put you to important use later!"
"…"
Honestly, she had hoped that someday she would be sought out again—and yet at the same time she had never truly expected it. She had earned her lord's dislike. She did not know the precise reason, but Lin Brans simply did not care for her. Airen was human; she could not fail to sense such feelings. She had simply continued to offer her loyalty as a warrior and as one of her subordinate generals.
…No. If I achieve merit, she will surely come to recognize me.
Lin Brans was shrewd, cunning, and at times even cruel—yet she was not evil by nature. And Airen firmly believed that in an age of chaos like this, a ruler like Lin Brans would bring true peace far more surely than any soft-hearted monarch. Who else but her own lord could stand against the tyrant Serpina, whose infamy already shook the entire continent?
"…Understood. I leave this place in your hands for the time being."
"In my hands? You honor me far too much. You need never return to a place like this again. Please—please go and win glory…!"
Airen exchanged formal farewells with the man who bowed so deeply to her, then left the barracks at a measured pace. For the first time in a very long while, she set her feet toward the castle where her lord awaited.
"My lord. Airen Juliette has arrived."
"Send her in."
"Yes, ma'am!"
Lin sat in her chair with a bored expression, legs crossed, and answered with careless indifference. A moment later Airen strode forward, dropped to one knee, bowed her head, and spoke in a solemn tone.
"I, Airen Juliette, have come in answer to my lord's summons."
"Yes, yes. Enough with the greetings. I need you to fight for me."
"Without question. Command me as you will. I will accomplish it even at the cost of my life."
It was a display of perfect loyalty—yet Lin answered with the same listless expression. Even between lord and vassal, the scene was thoroughly unnatural.
"I want you to take Zeiland Castle. I'll give you twenty-three thousand men. Can you do it?"
"Zeiland Castle…"
Even while devoted to her personal training, Airen had kept herself fully informed of the situation surrounding the realm. Zeiland Castle was the sole territory of the minor Lunarien Army nearby. Not long ago Kalintz had marched on it with eight thousand men and suffered the most humiliating defeat the Brans Army had known since first appearing on the continent.
Twenty-three thousand was nearly three times that force. She had heard a mercenary company had joined the defenders, but even so, with numbers like these the fight looked more than winnable.
"What? You don't want to? Then don't."
"No, my lord."
Airen immediately bowed her head.
"I will see the banner of the Brans Army flying over Zeiland Castle without fail."
"Good. If you've nothing more to say, go. Ah—right. I can't give you much in the way of provisions. The front is split in too many directions. You'll get about a week's worth. You can manage somehow, can't you?"
Lin spoke with a bright little smile, but the conditions were frankly absurd. A siege force with only a single week's supplies. Considering how vastly more difficult a siege was than a defense, the terms were outrageous.
Yet Airen raised no objection and answered in a clear, ringing voice.
"Yes. I will take the castle as swiftly as possible. Do not concern yourself."
"…"
Under ordinary circumstances, such unswerving loyalty should have left her satisfied. For some reason, though, Lin simply could not bring herself to like Airen. There was no plausible reason she could pin on the feeling. Sometimes people simply disliked other people for no particular cause. They were oil and water. At a purely physiological level, Lin Brans found the woman distasteful.
"Fine. Go."
"Yes. Await word of my victory."
After Airen had slowly vanished from her sight, Lin twirled a lock of hair beside her face around one finger and sank into thought.
I can't stand her, but her skill is the real thing… She'll manage, won't she?
There was no special reason she was using a woman she disliked so thoroughly. She simply had no other choice if she wanted to win.
First, the fact that there was only a week's worth of supplies was not some petty torment she had invented to harass Airen; it was the literal truth. Lin was not so foolish as to let personal feelings ruin an operation. Having confirmed that mercenary forces had joined the enemy, she needed to field more than twenty thousand men—and the absolute maximum amount of grain she could scrape together at present was exactly this much. That was simple fact.
She therefore needed a general certain to take the castle within that window. There were only two commanders bold and powerful enough for the role. One was her elder brother Chel—but he was still tied down on the southern front and could not be recalled. That left only Airen, the one she had deliberately sidelined because she had no desire to employ her.
Moreover, Airen Juliette had once been called a master of siege warfare.
Practicality. Practicality. For the greater good. Right.
Still wearing an expression of thorough displeasure to the very end, she was once again launching an invasion of Zeiland Castle.
Two mercenary companies had joined our Lunarien Army, true enough—but that only meant the companies themselves had come under our banner. It did not make their members "soldiers of the Lunarien Army." Even if they had walked in of their own free will because they currently favored Luna for some reason, the true masters of those mercenaries were still their respective captains, not Luna. And since those captains' hearts could change at any moment, I wanted to recruit proper soldiers of our own while we still had a stretch of relative peace.
"Conscription… is that what you are proposing?"
"Yes. This time I would like both Lord Kane and Lady Tifa assigned to conscription duties."
Luna fell into thought at my words, then spoke carefully. There was no one else around, so she was using formal speech with me.
"But the shadow of the typhoon still weighs heavily on the people of the domain… Will it be all right?"
To conscript meant to sweep every young man into the ranks of the army. That, in turn, meant the state was taking away the very youths needed to rebuild the villages. Even so, we could delay no longer. We could not keep relying on lucky breaks forever.
"Thanks to the recent relief efforts, the people's sentiment is not so bad. If we miss this timing, we may never be able to raise troops at all. Even with two mercenary companies under our command, so long as our own direct soldiers number only three thousand, the domain remains exposed to far greater danger. I ask you to decide."
Luna listened, sank into deep consideration—then slowly nodded.
"…If that is what you advise, Lord Swen… then we shall conscript soldiers this month."
Good. In any case there was nothing particularly useful for the two of them to be doing right now. Luna always asked me what tasks she ought to assign, so if there had been something more pressing, my Intelligence of 100 would have noticed it.
And then—
"My lord!! Are you there!!"
A soldier came sprinting toward us, shouting in urgency. One could have made an issue of him bursting into the castle like that, but Luna paid it no mind and answered in a cool, even tone.
"What is it?"
I studied the soldier's appearance. More precisely, I looked at his arm. And—just as I expected—a vivid strip of red cloth was bound tightly around it. He was a messenger.
Haa.
In Garand Eternity Saga, the CPU only began launching invasions after a full year had passed from the start of the game—that is, after four turns. If you played a minor power, once that year was up the enemies came pouring in from every direction without end; it was no exaggeration to call the spectacle a defense-game stage.
And now, even in this world where the cumbersome one-year restriction had vanished and everything had become real, the fate of a minor power—the necessity of playing that defense game—could not be avoided.
"The Brans Army… is marching on Zeiland Castle with a force of some twenty-three thousand men!"
…Fuck.