X. The Battle of Schapendorf (3)
X. The Battle of Schapendorf (3)
Come back victorious.
That was the command of the young, immature heir. Already wearing his helmet, Keldric gave a dismissive snort.
'If only he knew when to shut up.'
As Sir Lothar had said, they had to win this battle no matter what.
Not that there was any such thing as a battle one could afford to lose, but this one was especially important.
If they lost this battle, they would undoubtedly be pushed all the way back to Bellam.
They had established Yalta behind them as an intermediate base, but if Baron Gofrit's army pressed the attack while they were retreating, they would be helpless and have to flee all the way to Bellam.
'Return victorious without fail! See to it that those wretches never again live to see the light of day!'
Sir Lothar had probably said it while seething over the messenger's insolence, but defeat would plainly put them in a disastrous position.
Keldric did not waste time worrying about defeat.
It was not arrogance. Starting the battle by dwelling on failure would only get in his way.
"Sir Keldric. Nervous?"
Sir Rutger, fully armed like Keldric, rode up beside him.
Keldric glanced down at Sir Rutger.
Keldric was already enormous, and mounted on the large Aveline, he stood a full head taller.
"Not at all."
"You certainly don't look it. Then again, it would be strange to see a knight your size trembling with nerves."
"I'll take that as a compliment."
"It is. I'd heard Sir Volfen had three sons, but you are plainly the finest of them."
Sir Rutger appeared to have known Keldric's father, Sir Volfen.
That was only natural. Vassal knights did not spend their lives without ever learning one another's faces.
Keldric glanced back over his shoulder at the encampment where the knights had gathered.
Come to think of it, Hilmer—undeniably one of Baron Yaven's vassal knights—was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps it was because Carlton Village had been attacked so early. Keldric did his best to hide his unease.
A vassal knight was obliged to serve in his liege's army, though Baron Yaven could have exempted Hilmer.
Even then, Hilmer was unlikely to have been absent for any good reason.
Beyond that, the fates of Fritz and Joseph were also in question. What had become of those two? Had they, too, been executed by Baron Yaven's judgment?
'Damn.'
He knew nothing, yet wanted answers to so much—none of which had anything to do with the battle directly ahead.
To steady himself, Keldric lightly bit the inside of his cheek.
"Let's move over there. We should have a much better view."
Sir Rutger led the way, and Keldric turned Aveline's reins to follow.
Sir Rutger was right. From the gently sloping rise, the entire battlefield lay before them.
Keldric pulled off his helmet. He would not be fighting just yet, and it only obstructed his vision.
"Exactly how many troops do we have?"
"Two hundred and thirty-six."
Considering they had already suffered one defeat, it was a decent enough number. Keldric's gaze shifted toward the army drawn up ahead.
Soldiers and mercenaries in mismatched equipment stood intermingled.
There were signs that someone had tried to arrange them into orderly ranks, but it was still better not to expect too much.
Once battle began, it would most likely devolve into a vicious melee. Perfect files and ranks would mean nothing then.
"I should be going. I look forward to the honor of charging beside you."
"Likewise."
Sir Rutger turned his horse and rode off.
He was the eldest of the knights. To be the eldest without yet being decrepit meant he possessed that much more experience.
Sir Lothar seemed to trust him greatly for that reason. Keldric also appreciated a levelheaded knight.
"Sir Keldric."
As Keldric stood on the low rise surveying the soldiers, Alisa rode up to him.
Arno and Helga trailed behind her, both looking anxious.
"Alisa?"
"...I'll pray for your safe return."
Tension showed plainly on Alisa's face.
That was understandable. This was her first battlefield too.
Keldric patted her shoulder twice, then tucked his enormous bucket-like helmet under one arm.
"Do I look like I'll lose?"
"No. But..."
"Then that's enough."
The thought of losing had never entered his mind. Keldric intended to press forward with victory as his sole objective.
Even in a small battle, giving everything he had would not betray him; the proper reward would follow.
That reward was called glorious victory.
"By the way, I heard they have a wizard as well."
Keldric's dark-blue eyes shifted toward Baron Gofrit's army encamped ahead.
He could not make out the command tent where Baron Gofrit and his closest men would be, but if the rumors were true, a wizard like Alisa was somewhere over there.
"How should a wizard be dealt with?"
Keldric asked casually. Alisa considered it for a moment, then shrugged.
"The best method is to close the distance and subdue the wizard immediately. If that isn't possible, there are two alternatives."
"What are they?"
"Close the distance while staying out of the wizard's sight, or have another wizard disrupt the spell."
Magic, as Alisa had explained it, involved comprehending a truth of the world and borrowing its power.
She was describing a way to interfere with that process.
"For example, it's common knowledge that fire is needed to boil water, correct?"
"It is."
"If I were boiling water with fire and a wizard of the Floating Water School extinguished that fire through magic, they would have disrupted my spell."
A wizard intervened and prevented the expected result: the water boiling.
The same principle applied to magic itself.
Alisa often invoked the truth that extreme friction produced fire. If a hostile wizard reduced the friction instead, her spell would fail to activate.
Keldric nodded once he had grasped the idea. A duel between wizards was complicated indeed.
"Then can I leave their wizard to you?"
"That is..."
"I'm joking. We should deal with the wizard together if possible."
Keldric had never faced a wizard in his life.
But a wizard was still human. Who would not die with a longsword through the body?
"The stronger one's willpower, the stronger the resistance becomes."
There was a reason wizards had failed to displace knights from the estate of those who fought.
Knights were creatures bound together by pride, honor, and conviction. That counted as willpower too.
Keldric nodded in understanding. In that case, it should not be a problem.
Still, a wizard could kill many people at once, making it obvious that the enemy wizard had to be targeted first.
"You be careful too."
"Thank you for your concern."
"Don't brush it off. I mean it. Things would become rather difficult if you were gone."
And I'd be sad. Keldric muttered the last part under his breath.
Whether she somehow heard him or not, Alisa turned her head away to hide her face.
"Anyway, I should go."
"I wish you fortune in battle, Sir Keldric."
Keldric answered with a brief wave, then headed straight for Sir Lothar's command tent.
"Sir Keldric! Prepare for battle at once!"
The battle was upon them.
☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩
Jorgen struggled to steady his trembling breath.
The soldiers stretched across his path like a tidal wave. Their numbers could not be much greater, yet somehow they looked overwhelming.
'Fuck. Don't be such a coward.'
He spat a wad of thick phlegm and readjusted his rough grip on the sword hilt.
Everyone grew tense before a battle, veterans and greenhorns alike.
With their own necks liable to go flying at any moment, no one boasted merely because they had killed a few men before.
One thing was certain: when knights charged in, the best response was to shut up and get out of their way.
Knights existed to kill mercenaries.
No, better to be precise. Knights existed to massacre mercenaries.
"Fuck... Whew..."
"God, whoever I face, let me win and let those bastards die..."
Breathing roughened with tension, while half-baked prayers sounded here and there.
Mercenaries and soldiers jostled shoulder to shoulder, filling the air with scraping and clattering equipment.
"Jorgen, did you drop your prick or something?"
"What?"
"You keep looking around, so I wondered. Want me to find it for you?"
"Fuck off, Anton."
Anton, one of the veteran mercenaries, had forced out the joke. The men around him snorted with laughter, easing the tension a little.
Jorgen gave a dry laugh of his own, then reset his stance.
'Toben, that little shit...'
The company's idiotic youngest member suddenly came to mind.
The little bastard had stubbornly survived the last battle. Surely he would make it through this one too.
NEIGH!
At the neigh and the clatter of hooves, Jorgen glanced back. Six knights and several cavalrymen stood in a single line behind them.
Jorgen fixed his attention on one particularly massive knight among them.
Sir Keldric—without question, the strongest and calmest knight Jorgen had seen in all his years living by the sword.
With Keldric there, he felt safer. The tension that had built inside him eased slightly.
BRAAAM—!
A horn blast shook the battlefield, followed by large banners rising one after another.
Then, as if on cue, the mercenaries and soldiers erupted in shouts.
"Move, you slack-jawed bastards!"
"Those bastards are all pissant trash!"
Once battle began in earnest, it became difficult to distinguish friend from foe.
The soldiers and mercenaries therefore had only one task: advance.
They watched the banners planted behind each formation and pushed blindly toward the enemy colors.
They killed anyone who blocked the way. Brutally simple, but highly effective if one wanted to survive.
The two armies advanced slowly, then halted at a set distance from one another.
"Archers!"
As always, the archers announced the beginning of battle.
"Draw—!"
Sir Rutger's voice thundered across the field. The other side answered with equally loud shouts as their archers nocked arrows.
Jorgen swallowed. A single unlucky hit could kill him in an instant.
"Loose—!"
The sharp hiss of arrows cutting the air struck his ears.
It almost resembled birdsong, which made it all the more chilling when he remembered that each sound came from a weapon made to kill.
"Shields up!"
Jorgen snapped his shield up and desperately crouched beneath it.
A hit outside the upper body might not kill him, but an arrow through so much as a toe would still be fucking miserable.
THUD-THUD-THUD!
Arrows kept slamming down. Calling it a rain of arrows would have been generous, but a hit could kill him all the same.
After impacts drummed against his shield more than a dozen times, Jorgen lowered it and chopped through the embedded shafts with his sword.
The ground trembled. The enemy moved first, and Jorgen's bloodshot eyes glared murderously at them.
"Hold them!"
"Hold the line, damn it!"
Apparently, his side would be defending.
☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩
The battle began. Watching steel clash across the field, Keldric bit his lip.
'Damn it.'
The small skirmishes he had experienced before scarcely deserved to be called battles. A true battle was different from the scale alone.
And this involved slightly fewer than five hundred men in total. The thought of a greater battle was enough to make his whole body tense.
"Sir Keldric! I am... beside myself with excitement!"
"Sir Henri."
Sir Henri stood beside Keldric, breathing hot and hard through his teeth. The other knights, Sir Rutger among them, were the same.
Knights facing battle were human too. They also knew fear and tension.
The difference between an ordinary mercenary and a knight was the ability to transform that fear and tension into anger and exhilaration.
A knight turned even tension into strength. Otherwise, there would be no tearing those lowborn mercenaries apart.
'This is insane.'
Keldric let the tension spread through his entire body as well.
Every sense sharpened, and strength overflowed from his muscles.
"Vermin. Let's kill them all."
"Those lowborn bastards! How dare they inflict the humiliation of defeat upon His Lordship...!"
As the battle wore on, the knights' exhilaration reached its peak. Bodies trained over a lifetime contained martial skill honed to its absolute limit.
They waited in that feverish state until mounted troops finally began moving in the enemy lines.
"Knights!"
Someone shouted from the battlefield, the words carrying clearly to Keldric.
As the man had said, the enemy knights had finally appeared: seven knights in all, accompanied by eight poorly equipped cavalrymen.
Their side had six knights and ten cavalrymen. They had one more rider overall, but only the number of knights truly mattered.
"They're coming!"
BRAAAM—! BRAAM—!
As soon as the enemy knights formed their line, two majestic horn blasts sounded. Sir Lothar had ordered the charge.
Keldric lightly pressed his heels into Aveline's flanks, and the other knights set their mounts moving as well.
Warhorses packed with muscle advanced abreast, straight toward the heart of the enemy formation.
As the enemy knights formed up, Sir Rutger raised his lance high.
"Charge! Chaaarge!"
"For honor! For victory!"
"May God grant us glorious victory!"
The warhorses dug into the snow and thundered forward. Thick cloth serving as makeshift barding streamed behind them, and the frigid north wind cut past their ears.
The landscape swept past faster and faster. The battlefield, already locked in vicious combat, rushed toward them.
"Lances down!"
The knights lowered their lance points in unison. Terrified soldiers ahead scrambled to clear the way.
Keldric did not stop. None of the knights did. They had no reason to stop, and at this speed, no way to do so.
They raced like a single violent gust until the enemy was suddenly right before them.
The soldiers who noticed the charge too late went deathly pale.
"Uh... ah...!"
"Fuck! Move!"
"Knights!"
But by then, there was nowhere left to escape the explosive charge.
CRASH! CRUNCH! SNAP!
A tremendous impact thundered out as several grown men were hurled into the air.
The knights' charge ripped the enemy formation apart. At the same time, enemy knights were doing the same to their allies.
With no time to look behind him, Keldric drove his lance forward on instinct.
CRUNCH!
"Aaaagh!"
There was no time to retrieve the lance. Keldric drew the ink-dark longsword at once.
"Kill them all! Sweep away every last one of these lowly dogs!"
The enraged knights' cries were terror itself. Their supremely honed martial arts swept through the field as irresistible violence.
Enemies surrounded Keldric on every side, but that felt entirely natural.
A knight's purpose was to smash through the heart of an enemy formation.
"Sir Keldric!"
Keldric was swinging his longsword frantically when Sir Henri called out. He twisted the blade's path on instinct.
CLANG! The sword thrust at him flew aside.
A mounted knight had closed in before Keldric realized it.
"Hup!"
Wham!
Keldric threw a punch without hesitation. It struck the knight squarely in the faceplate and knocked him from the saddle.
Keldric had no intention of stopping there. Rage and exhilaration drew out every measure of his strength.
As the knight fell, Keldric's huge hand clamped around his throat.
The heavily armored knight rose into the air. Everyone who saw it stared in shock.
"Ghk! W-wait...!"
SLAM!
Keldric drove him straight into the frozen ground.
The knight tried to rise, but his body failed him and he collapsed face-first.
As shock and terror spread around him, Keldric drew his mace with his left hand.
"Come on—!"
The Battle of Schaffendorf had only just begun.