The Empty Walls of Denver
A brief confusion swept the room, but Baron Passio soon brought everyone back to order.
"That's impossible, and you know it. If he were Ahental's Knight Commander, he would naturally remain at the viscount's side. All the more so if he were a Sword Master."
Crombell had Alan Aster. True, the man was sitting this war out — but how would Ahental know that? So long as each side remained wary of the other's Sword Master, the only sensible course was to keep those powerhouses at their lords' sides and look to their own safety.
"But... a strange rumor has been circulating among our men. They're saying Sir Raysik was killed in a single blow..."
"Raysik? That Poison Spider who reached Brillant?"
Crombell's knight order had a handful of names that carried real weight. The most prominent of them was Loatan von Wake-Loven, who had died by Messi's hand. There was also a knight named Raysik, a common-born soldier who had clawed his way into knighthood. With no backing of any kind, he had reached Brillant through sheer, venomous stubbornness — and that was why people knew his name.
And they were saying a man like that had been cut down in a single stroke.
That would take someone at the very peak of Ablaze, at minimum...
Did Ahental even have a knight capable of that? One name did come to mind, of course.
Baccilus von Hawire.
Damn it... anything but that.
Why would a Sword Master even come to this battlefield? He ought to be sitting quietly at the viscount's side, where he belonged. The baron soothed his unease with the sedative of common sense. If even he was entertaining such an absurd possibility, how much worse must it be for the others?
If the rumor were true, the only ones who could even trade a single blow would be knights who had reached Ablaze. But there were none here. Not now. To be precise... there had been one. And then there wasn't.
Viscount Hiwork, that damned bastard — if he hadn't cooked up one of his useless schemes...
A few days ago, an operational order bearing Count Crombell's seal had arrived without warning. It instructed him to let the Ablaze knight be seen around the territory for a time, then send the man back to the count. The intent, it seemed, was to deceive Ahental's eyes and deploy him somewhere in secret. It was unmistakably an order from Viscount Hiwork, the count's brain. Knowing that didn't mean he could refuse it.
Following the order to the letter, the Ablaze knight who had come to Passio territory made himself conspicuously visible for several days — then vanished without a trace. The problem was that the moment they needed that knight had arrived, and he was gone.
"Adjutant. How many knights have we gathered?"
Knights were the key to any battlefield. As long as the knights were intact, he figured they could scrape together a fight.
"We've issued a summons to every village in the territory. Knights, soldiers, and mercenaries are assembling quickly. However, the villages that were attacked were all major ones, so the losses..."
"Give me the exact numbers."
"If we assume there were no survivors from the encirclement and annihilation of Padberry and Nildir... our estimated losses are over sixty ordinary knights, four Brillant, and twenty Lavish dead."
Baron Passio slammed his fist down on the desk. The damage was far worse than he had imagined. They had lost too many knights, too early. This was what the enemy had been after.
"So their goal from the start was to thin our knight numbers through encirclement and annihilation..."
"I believe so as well. The way they've been hunting down village after village for annihilation battles makes their purpose quite clear."
They had ambushed unarmed, unsuspecting knights and picked them off one by one. That greenhorn commander was probably humming a victory tune right about now.
As a baron, he had only two options left. Gather what forces remained and gamble everything on a pitched battle for a single, desperate reversal — or hole up in the castle with whatever he had left and hold out as long as possible.
The baron made his decision.
"We have to preserve whatever forces we have left. Gather the summoned knights and soldiers inside the castle. The high walls of Passio Castle will protect us."
Two Brillant. Ten Lavish. Fifty-four ordinary knights of the Brave Stage. That was every Crombell knight they had left. If he couldn't keep at least these men alive for another day, there would be nothing left for House Passio to do. Losing them all — combined with those already dead — would mean a third of Crombell's entire knight order gone.
Losing troops to a surprise attack at least left room for excuses. Losing everything in a pitched battle would cost him his head.
I will not let that happen...
Ereb's 2nd Army drove through Passio territory without rest. The goal was to ambush Crombell's knights and kill as many of them as possible, and they hurried from one large village in the barony to the next. In the same sweep, they ruined five of the territory's most substantial settlements. They put the lumber yards and quarries that fed Passio's income to the torch, and they set fire to village market streets on the pretext of flushing out knights in hiding. They had smashed the economic foundation itself.
Places like these were where a territory's operating money came from. With them gutted, even after the war ended, Passio would need a long time to rebuild.
By the time they encircled the last village for annihilation, there were no knights or soldiers left who even tried to resist.
"Messi, looks like they ran before we got here."
"We've been turning the territory upside down since before the sun was high. They either heard the rumors and fled, or a summons was issued."
"So what now? Planning to take the lord's castle too?"
Ereb wanted more military merit, but he had already decided that if Messi shook his head, he would drop the idea cleanly. Messi liked that about him. After a moment's thought, however, Messi pointed in the direction of the lord's castle.
"We've come this far — shouldn't we at least see the lord's face? And there's something I need to confirm."
"Confirm? Confirm what?"
"It's still only a suspicion. I'll tell you once I'm certain."
"Fine. And look at that — the sun's sitting right over our heads. The 2nd Army moves out! Let's go have lunch at the lord's castle! Kahaha!"
He talked of lunch at Passio Castle, but Ereb and the 2nd Army had to take their meals on the move. The menu was jerky. There might still be a pitched battle ahead, and they needed the strength. On top of that, the infantry had wrung themselves dry chasing along at a quick-step for hours on end. Without something in their stomachs, they simply couldn't hold.
The one mercy was that some of the soldiers and mercenaries had begun using warhorses plundered from the knights during the village raids, which made the march both faster and easier. Reaching the very doorstep of the lord's castle did not take long.
A village under the baron's direct rule sat around Passio Castle — the largest settlement in the barony — but it was already hollow, as if every last resident had fled. Messi swept his gaze across it, then approached Ereb.
"Young Master, rather than assaulting the castle, could we burn the surrounding village to the ground?"
"Those? If we set fires carelessly, they'll just get in the way when we attack the castle... and besides, it looks empty."
"The goal is to wreck the village as thoroughly as possible and provoke Baron Passio."
"Ah, a provocation? Heh. Now that's my specialty."
He seemed to have grasped exactly what Messi wanted.
Ereb had Ramang form the knights into a separate unit and ordered them to respond the instant the enemy poured out of the castle. He took the rest himself and set about destroying the village at the castle's doorstep. Oil met timber, and a settlement built almost entirely of wood was swallowed by flame in moments.
Ereb's voice, swollen by a spell of amplification, rolled across the field. It was the voice of a demon.
Up on the walls, Baron Passio heard every word. His face trembled with shame.
"That— that animal..."
"Endure it, my lord!"
His adjutants rushed to restrain him. But Ereb was not the only demon on the field.
"Think we might've killed the bastard's father? Looks like he's too busy arranging the funeral!"
"Kahaha, is that right? Wiping out two generations in a single day — I almost feel bad!"
Hulan and Ereb fell into perfect, infuriating rhythm, launching into a shameless routine of family-destroying insults. The baron's eyes went blood-red.
"Whether it's the father or the son, they ought to die together. At least they can hold hands on the way to the other side, don't you think?"
"Then why not grab the brats too and send all three generations along? Even better, no?"
"Damn, Young Master! Now that's vision!"
Wherever one went, insults aimed at a man's father sat at the very peak of verbal abuse. The two of them cheerfully dragged the baron's father, his children, and — when they got around to his wife — three entire generations through the mud, and they did it without a shred of shame. By the time the talk reached his wife, the baron wanted nothing more than to draw his sword and order a sortie.
He held himself back only by remaining conscious of the other unit watching them hungrily from the village outskirts.
"B-Baron! Let us fight those savages!"
"Our homes are burning, my lord!"
Residents and soldiers shouted up at him with faces twisted in rage. Their own houses were on fire; that kind of hatred did not run light.
"Bwahahaha! Does the lord of this place not even have guts? I never imagined he'd still refuse to crawl out!"
"Oh — wait a moment. Come to think of it, I killed a fellow who looked just like him earlier! He was calling for his mother... you don't think that was him, do you?"
"Hahahaha!!"
The two demons' voices kept rolling across the field. The baron still could not give the order to march out.
The man who appeared to be Baron Passio offered no response even as the insults reached him. Instead, he was sending his people back inside. His face, however, was twitching so violently that the routine had clearly not been without effect.
Even at that distance, the scene was vivid in Messi's eyes. Still, the gates of Passio Castle did not open. Messi frowned.
"Sir Ramang, sound the retreat."
"Hm? What are you talking about?"
"I'll explain in front of the Young Master."
Because it was Messi who had spoken, Ramang asked nothing further and had the war horn blown.
A deep blast rolled out across the field. Ereb and Hulan's routine cut off at once. It did not take long for Ereb's unit to come back in.
"Messi, what's going on? It was just getting good."
"We've been played."
"Played? Us?"
They had burned an enemy territory and carved a deep reduction into Crombell's knight numbers. What, exactly, was there to have been played about?
"Why did we bring Master Frox with us?"
"Well, we needed someone who could handle Crombell's Ablaze, so—"
Ereb answered without thinking, then his expression changed.
"The baron I can understand. But why hasn't that one shown so much as a hair of himself?"
"Until we were attacking the knights in the villages, I thought it was possible. They wouldn't have been ready. But for him to stay holed up in the castle even while we burn the village at its doorstep is strange. The baron isn't reacting either."
Worse, the knight presumed to be Ablaze had not appeared on the walls at all.
...He isn't in this territory, is he.
Why had the man vanished? They were supposed to be raiding Engaldar Baron Territory; he could not have gone off on some pleasure trip. Which meant he had disappeared with another purpose in mind.
"This isn't good. We'd better get to Father as fast as we can."
Ereb's instincts had turned sour as well. If the enemy was not in Passio territory, there was only one place they would be.
Ramang felt the weight of it too and hurriedly pulled out a map.
"Young Master, to reach Denver Baron Territory from Passio, we would have to cross the Tolid Mountains to the southwest. Even without rest, it would take a full day."
"Son of a bitch..."
The 2nd Army had already spent itself heavily in today's fighting. To ask them to cross a mountain range for an entire day on top of that? Morale would crater, and then some. There was no guarantee they would even arrive in time. From torturing several captured Crombell knights, they had learned that tomorrow at dawn was the day agreed upon for the surprise attack. Which meant they had to be there before then.
At the very least, we have to get word to them.
Messi and everyone around him clutched their heads and groaned. Unlike the twenty-first century, this was a world where a horse was the fastest thing alive. Closing a gap like that was simply impossible.
If there were a way to shrink distance that dramatically, it would be nothing short of magic...
...?
Every head turned toward Frox at the same instant.
"W-why are you all looking at me like that? You're scaring this old man..."
Frox, who had not yet grasped the situation, made a faintly uneasy sound.
Melta Barony, where the land met the border of Denver Baron Territory.
In the dead of night, the sound of countless footsteps filled the air. It was no hour for travelers, and there was a discipline to those steps that marked them as anything but ordinary men. Relying on moonlight alone, they moved in formation and entered the castle.
Then bonfires flared to life all around the walls, and their figures were revealed: a host of knights, sheathed in well-fitted steel. As the wide training grounds of Melta Castle lit up bright as day, their numbers became clear — nearly one hundred and fifty. And the three knights who stood at their head radiated an aura so fearsome that anyone would have known them for what they were: true powerhouses.
Count Crombell looked down on them and smiled, satisfied.
"You've done well, Hiwork. Thanks to you, it seems I shall taste another glorious victory."
"You honor me unduly."
"This is why I trust you and keep you close. You always show me the path."
The count clapped him on the shoulder, and Hiwork bowed his head.
"A truly fine scheme. Leak the information, scatter the enemy's forces, lure the Sword Master away — and then take the Viscount of Ahental's head."
"Even without me, it is a paltry scheme Your Lordship would have conceived on your own. Against a Sword Master, there is no other way to win a war."
Hiwork passed the credit back, and the count smiled as if well pleased.
"Keep doing it this way. And stop going looking for that Alan fellow, would you? I was starting to feel unappreciated."
"...Understood."
It sounded like praise. In truth, it was a warning. He had served the count long enough that reading that much was elementary.
Count Crombell put on his armor and drew his sword. He intended to take part in this battle himself, and he meant to put a decisive end to it in the very first clash.
Roan. I'll take that bastard's head myself.
Kill him, and the whole affair was over. Wars between noble houses were always like that. Honor? Vengeance? One should assume that no one who talked that way would actually fight to the bitter end. Ahental in particular was full of men waiting with open mouths to devour the fruit the moment the viscount fell. Kill the Viscount of Ahental, and the house would collapse into a cauldron of chaos.
That is the limit of men who know nothing but wealth.
Crombell raised his sword high as he cried out, and the knights inside the castle and the soldiers beyond its walls lifted their weapons in silence. It was a magnificent sight. Between the bonfires, thousands of blades of cold iron thrust toward the sky as one.
Count Crombell could not imagine defeat.
"...?"
Gazing at the distant city of Denver, Count Crombell tilted his head.
"No matter how unexpected a surprise attack might be... with war on the doorstep, shouldn't there at least be a watch?"
"What would those money-grubbers know about war? They're probably carrying on as they always have."
A retainer behind him sneered at Ahental. He had reason enough — on Denver's low walls, there was not a single soldier, nor a single bonfire.
For Count Crombell, that absence produced the opposite of confidence. A sense of wrongness he could not shake.
Something was strange...