The Tongue That Moves Ten Thousand
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The thunder of marching boots shook the very earth. The air hung taut with tension, and the murmur of trembling, fearful voices rose from below.
Twenty thousand soldiers of the Khan Kingdom had swarmed up to the fortress like a tide of black. And somewhere among them were fifteen students from Kizen.
Before long, the great army split apart, its feet moving swiftly until it had encircled the castle entirely. The assault on all four gates would begin any moment now.
"Chik! Chak! Do not be afraid!"
"Fight to the very end! Chak!"
Beastman officers scurried along the ramparts, rallying the soldiers on the walls. Simon watched them quietly for a while, then turned his head toward Meilin.
"You okay?"
Her expression had frozen stiff.
"……I'm fine. It's just—twenty thousand. I had no idea a number that big could actually look this overwhelming."
"Ehehehe!"
Out of nowhere, Dick popped up beside her with a sly, lopsided grin.
"Meilin's scared, huh? Scaredy-cat?"
"Gah! Would you take this seriously for once?!"
She smacked him across the back without missing a beat, but Dick didn't clown around as usual. He just laughed, low and gloomy.
"The nerves only last until this moment. Once the war actually starts, you won't have the presence of mind to spare. It'll be—"
Dick craned his neck forward, eyes gone wide.
"Utter madness."
Fwoosh!
Meilin grabbed his face, frost crackling off her expression.
"Your face is the only madness here, you lunatic."
"Aaaagh-aaaah!"
Dick flailed about, howling in agony.
Watching the spectacle, Simon smiled quietly. That was Dick's own peculiar way of loosening up his friends, no doubt.
And it seemed to work. Meilin drew out a handkerchief with an elegant gesture, dabbed her hand clean, and stared straight ahead. The look in her eyes told him she'd firmly gathered herself.
Kuuum! Kuuum!
Just then, an enormous set of footsteps came crashing through the surroundings.
The Khan Kingdom's formation split down the middle, and through the gap appeared a massive carriage drawn by a colossal elephant. Atop it sat a twin-tailed girl, a white uniform coat draped over her shoulders, legs crossed with imperious ease as she lazily waved a folding fan.
"Oh, come on."
Meilin narrowed her eyes.
"That's the siege team?"
"This round just got brutal."
Dick leaned against the wall and rubbed his chin, his face grave.
"Special Admission No. 7, Elisa Celine of the Ghost Ships. No named student that big has ever shown up to a siege game before."
Chrrk!
The elephant came to a halt.
Elisa unfolded her crossed legs. A knight of the Khan Kingdom, who had been attending her at her side, respectfully took her hand and helped her to her feet.
Ahem.
Elisa cast an amplification spell upon her own throat.
"Ah— ah—"
Into the battlefield of steel and blood, thick with suspended tension, the girl's clear voice rang out.
Meilin narrowed her eyes to slits.
"Come to think of it, of course she wouldn't let her best weapon go to waste."
"……Weapon?"
"Did you forget? Her father is the sitting Prime Minister. That family has been ruthless politicians for generations."
Elisa's mouth opened.
"I am Elisa Celine, Grand Commander of the Khan Kingdom. As a Guardian sent by the Creator, I have taken the field to see to it that the Khan Kingdom claims victory."
At those words, an uproar broke out among the beastmen of the Aon Kingdom, the defenders.
"Chik! Chak! Was not the Guardian given only to our kingdom?"
"Why does the Khan Kingdom have a Guardian too……!"
Elisa let the murmuring along the walls churn for a moment, then spoke.
"Hear me, all people of the Aon Kingdom."
Her single sentence carried across the field with perfect clarity.
"You are dead already."
"!"
A new layer of tension settled over the battlefield in an instant.
"If you have eyes, then look. If you have a mind, then judge. Is this truly—"
She spread her arms wide.
"—a gap in strength that can be overcome?"
A heavy stillness fell over the allied lines. The soldiers of the Khan Kingdom, by contrast, erupted in threatening roars.
"The anxiety you feel is the truth. The fear you feel is reality. This war was decided the moment it began. That ancient, rotting fortress will not protect you, and the forked tongues of the treacherous ministers who feed your patriotism alone will drive you into the jaws of death. You were—"
Elisa continued.
"—deceived."
She was a monster that fed on uncertainty.
"And yet you stand there all the same—is that patriotism? Patriotism is the tyrant's tool, the hypocrite's tongue. Why must the people die for the failures of their king's diplomacy? Why must the people accept, as a matter of course, that they owe the nation their lives in war?"
Voice tightening, she pressed on.
"Surrender. Bring me the men who drove you toward that fate. Do so, and I will annihilate the ones who deceived you with treacherous patriotism and trapped you in this corner—and your lives, and the lives of your families, will be guaranteed. So declares I, Elisa Celine, descended in service of the Creator's will!"
Elisa's voice rose to its crescendo.
"No Creator desires the blood of her own creations. Surrender, and open the gates! That is the path that sheds less blood. Refuse, and the only choice left to us is annihilation."
A politician's daughter indeed.
A silver tongue.
With a single speech, she could feel the allied soldiers wavering. What was truly frightening was how she redirected the soldiers' hostility away from the Khan Kingdom and toward their own ministers, quietly prying cracks into the enemy's unity from within.
"Whoa, this is dangerous."
Dick, reading the mood among the soldiers, clicked his tongue.
"In all the past sieges, no student ever gave a speech! It always ended with some beastman commander stomping out, shouting 'Glory to the kingdom!' or whatever, and then everyone just fought!"
"Meilin."
Simon turned his head.
"Can you use amplification magic?"
"Hm? Ah, well. I learned it in the Pure Magic club, so I can cast it, but……"
"What are you planning?"
Simon flashed a faint smile.
"Speeches are an important element of war too, you know."
If the enemy's grand commander intended to fight with words, he intended to answer in kind.
"Dick, do you happen to know any unique Aon greetings or famous phrases?"
"Ah— yeah, actually. Before Aon fell and their king died, he said something like this."
While Dick recounted it, Meilin conjured a magic circle floating in the air before Simon, tuned for amplification.
Simon studied the circle quietly for a moment, then reached out and let a thread of Jet-Black flow into it.
Meilin jolted in shock at the sight.
"Hey, wait! That thing runs on mana only—if you do that—!"
KEEEEEEEENG!
A piercing, deafening boom split the air. The clamoring crowd suddenly clapped their hands over their ears and whipped their heads toward the source of the noise.
"Hm."
Simon, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this, stepped up to the magic circle.
"I am Simon Polentia, Grand Commander of the Aon Kingdom."
Every gaze on the field turned naturally toward him.
"I have descended at the Creator's command to protect the Aon Kingdom."
This time it was the Khan Kingdom's soldiers who began to murmur. It seemed their side, too, had assumed that they alone had been granted a Guardian.
"?!"
Elisa, sitting in her carriage and fanning herself with a satisfied expression, jerked her head up in astonishment.
'Simon Polentia!'
So he had come to the siege game too. And now he dared to challenge her—with a speech, of all things!
She rose quickly from her seat.
"I hear you urging surrender on the grounds that patriotism is nothing but the tongue of the powerful."
Simon's voice pressed down heavily over the field.
"That is an insult."
The ability to seize an atmosphere in an instant and command every ear present—it existed in someone other than Elisa as well.
Elisa hardened her expression and cast the amplification spell on herself again.
"Are you saying I'm wrong? This entire farce—goaded on by hollow patriotism, purely for your own safety, driving your people to their deaths—"
"The will to protect."
Simon cut her off.
"The anxiety and fear you feel before a war is utterly natural. No one is free of emotion. But then—why do you think we stand our ground here, treading down that very fear?"
Strength gathered in Simon's voice.
"To protect my family."
Each word, weighted and deliberate.
"To protect my friends."
As though spitting out emotion, as though pouring out everything that boiled within him.
"To protect our home, our property, our way of life. We are not fools who would leave what we hold dear to the enemy and lay down our weapons. Your words are an insult to all of us of Aon—"
Simon brought it to a close.
"—and I will not suffer them."
Thud!
Someone stomped their foot.
Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud!
Before long, every soldier on the ramparts began stamping the ground, their faces solemn to the extreme. Flushed scarlet, eyes bloodshot, they glared straight at the enemy.
"Your kingdom plundered its way here along the road to our capital—and you dare put the word 'guarantee' in your mouth."
Thud!
"We will not be deceived. We will protect it with our own strength."
Thud!
Simon raised his arm high overhead and shouted.
"Aium Aon!"
The soldiers were taken aback that a Guardian from another world knew their cry—but the shock turned to elation in a heartbeat.
Every soldier planted their spear and roared until their throats tore.
"Aium Aon!"
"WAAAAAAAH!"
A thunderous cheer erupted like a bolt of lightning.
The soldiers cried out wildly, laughing and weeping at once. Their hostility toward the enemy and their will to fight surged ever higher.
"That's our Simon!"
Dick hollered, grinning ear to ear.
"The morale of our troops just shot right back up!"
Meilin's eyes were locked on Simon. She watched him lower his arm and rub his throat, and when their gazes met, he flashed an embarrassed smile.
"Ahem. That was a little embarrassing. Got a bit too into it, maybe."
"No."
Meilin took a light, steadying breath and gave him a smile.
"That was cool, Simon."
WAAAAAAAH!
The cheers were still thundering on.
"Y-you—!"
Elisa's face burned crimson with rage and humiliation as she shrieked something or other, but not a single soldier of the Aon Kingdom was listening.
"Aium Aon! Aium Aon!"
Their morale climbed higher by the second, in real time.
"Elisa."
Then, dropping down onto the carriage where Elisa stood, came a male student wearing an eyepatch, an enormous longsword strapped at his waist.
"Stop sulking and come back. You've made him very angry."
"Ugh, seriously!"
Elisa pounded her own chest in frustration, thump thump.
"These beastmen definitely have mouse-sized brains! Idiots! What's more precious than your own life? How does a speech like that raise anyone's morale?! In the end, Simon Polentia's words were just emotional manipulation too!"
"I am but a humble scholar and know little of politics."
Jules let out a long sigh and went on.
"But I have heard that when a man stakes his life, he follows his heart, not his reason. Your defeat lay in appealing to cold logic in a war speech, if I may say so."
With that, Jules seized Elisa by the nape of the neck. Her body lifted lightly into the air.
"Wh-what are you doing?!"
"Retrieving you before our Grand Commander embarrasses herself any further."
"Aaagh! Let go of me! I haven't lost yet!!"
The war had begun.
The Khan Kingdom had no time to spare either. They divided their forces and launched a full-scale assault, attacking all four gates simultaneously.
"Here they come!"
Dick shouted.
Enemies came surging toward the south gate, which Simon had been assigned to defend. The sight of the Khan Kingdom's beastman army swarming up like a black tide carried a crushing, oppressive weight.
Still, the south gate had its own defensible ground. Long since dried up, it appeared to have once been a moat.
Because of the sunken moat-bed beneath the walls, the enemy would need tall ladders to climb, and above all, there was only a single approach leading up to the gate itself.
And the Simon of today was more confident than anyone at choking off a narrow defile.
"Let's begin."
Standing atop the ramparts, Simon raised both arms the way a pianist lifts his hands before the keys.
All eight Skeleton Mages thrust their staves toward the sky in unison.