Chapter 185
Chapter 185
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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 185
Chapter Title: Death's Functionality
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*
"Snow is falling."
Aeren gazed at the tiny snowflake settling on her axe blade. Tension rippled through the eyes of the warriors arrayed behind her. The north's fierce winter gale tousled their hair.
"Are you afraid?"
Aeren faced the demons and their minions approaching her, along with the Kazalid clansmen glaring with murderous intent. Those deeply blessed by the demons would surpass the level of ordinary clan warriors, each and every one.
She had drastically reduced their numbers, but that didn't guarantee victory. Aeren knew it, and so did the ragtag alliance of defeated soldiers following her. The surprise raid had pushed right up to Erik's doorstep successfully, but the number of warriors in Erik's main camp was far from insignificant compared to theirs.
"Are you afraid!"
Thus, Aeren bellowed at the top of her lungs. Her rough, husky voice pierced sharply into the warriors' ears. She wheeled her mount around to face them.
-Whoooosh!
The wind scattered her hair. Like a lion with its mane bristling, like a beast pouncing on prey. Aeren's blue eyes gleamed in the darkness.
"Fear not death! Fear only shame and dishonor. Warriors of the North! Our lives are already in the hands of the gods!"
Courage bloomed in the warriors' eyes. Aeren regarded them with satisfaction before wheeling back around. The enemy was closing in.
"Fight with all you have, and stand proud before our ancestors! Better to die honorably in a moment than live a day as a loser! No one—"
"No one lives forever!"
"Good! Warriors of the North, children of the gods! Do not kneel to demons or those monsters! Charge! Advance!"
"Waaaaah!!"
As she raised her axe high, the warriors surged forward. The earth trembled as enraged horses and men advanced as one. Advance, advance—straight ahead. Beyond strategy, beyond tactics, toward something even narrower.
Tactical considerations meant nothing here, in this moment, on this battlefield below. Only a barbaric, purely primal charge.
-Thud thud thud!
The ground quaked as the two forces collided at this point—devoid of strategy, tactics, mind games, or schemes. Pure struggle alone.
"Yaaah!!"
Aeren ran with them as one, swinging her axe to cleave the head of the foremost charging demon. Brains and blood sprayed. It was a battlefield where blood and flesh melted the snowy tundra.
*
"Look at that, friend. Isn't it magnificent?"
Beside Fernandez, who crouched atop a tree perch staring fixedly at the front lines, Loft appeared slowly and whispered.
"That scene—that's the Einherjar we dreamed of. The essence of pure struggle against demons, against the end times. That's the ideal image of warriors we all aspired to before the corruption."
"A fabricated ideal."
"Exactly, a fabricated ideal. We shaped the entire North to our tastes to create those pure warriors."
Loft spoke bitterly, his blue eyes glowing.
"How many of them will survive, friend?"
". . . Not many."
Fernandez watched the warriors being chewed, trampled, and torn apart by demons. They scattered powerlessly like moths flying into flames. They inflicted equal damage on the enemy as they fell, but it could hardly be called a fair trade.
The enemy's main force was drawing closer by the second even now. This was a race against time. A time fight until the forces thrown in to hold Erik's attention evaporated completely.
They had laid countless traps, leaking information to Erik and Bard that this battle was their last hope. They had even placed Aeren at the vanguard. Seeing the leader of the ragtag alliance appear, Erik would sense victory.
"Freya. How much longer must I wait?"
-Pop!
A small petal burst from the tree stump. Red. Not a positive color. Fernandez gazed up at the cloudy night sky blanketed in snow, lost in thought for a moment.
"What an era where death is commonplace."
"Was it ever not?"
"Once, death was unfathomable, mystical, grand, and dramatic, friend. Before the afterlife turned from awe and mystery into vulgar terror. Look at them."
Loft raised a bony finger, pointing at the demons charging the front lines. Contempt overflowed in his eyes.
"Behold those monsters devouring souls. What do you think death means to the warriors down there? A vulgar, miserable sacrifice. Nothing more, nothing less."
That's why I'm just this powerless drifting wind now. Loft shrugged. The birth of new life is always blessed across cultures and times, making Freya's authority relatively potent by comparison.
But Loft, the god symbolizing death in this north, had lost most of his power, crumbling amid faded faith.
Compared to the absolute authority of death gods in other cultures, it was a pathetic end. Yet Loft smiled with bitter eyes, refusing to despair.
"Well, don't pity me. If it's the consequence of our own follies, it's no unbidden tragedy, is it?"
The trickster god chuckled and turned his gaze away. The snowfall thickened; now the battlefield faded from view amid shouts and screams alone.
"Snow is falling. . . . May the haze not lead them astray in the tundra, friend."
With that, Loft slowly vanished. Fernandez stood still for a long while, eyes closed against the snowflakes, thinking of the lives flickering out beyond the curtain of night and blizzard.
"Don't be late. Kirhas."
Slowly, he traced the sign of the cross. Not for himself, but for the fallen dead.
*
-Pssh.
Erik swung his axe, severing the neck of a trembling demon. The demon spewed black mist and scattered into the night sky somewhere. He jerked his head, and a shaking warrior was roughly dragged forward, collapsing before his eyes.
-Shing.
The axe rose with a chilling ring. The warrior trembled violently, clutching at Erik's trouser hem.
"Yarl, Yarl! Rather than this, send me to the front lines! Th-this kind of death is too much. . . ."
"I won't forget your sacrifice."
"Yarl!!"
-Crack.
The axe slipped and severed the warrior's neck. The warrior's mouth gaped as his head dropped. Blood poured out in the meantime, and the shamans standing beside Erik simultaneously formed mudras.
-Whoosh.
Before the warrior's corpse could cool, hands and feet—and a scaled head—sprouted from the blood puddle. Erik wiped the blood splattered on his cheek roughly and looked down at it.
"Speak."
"The raid on Wolf Canyon failed to pursue and is returning. Estimated five hours. The camp at Ganilan Mountain has collapsed. They decided to retreat immediately upon detecting the enemy raid. The roughly 400 dispatched cavalry in that area are lost."
The demon clacked out the infernal report. Erik listened silently, nodded once, then raised his axe.
"Order Syriard to return. Tell Charstros to continue pursuit. If Sven is with Darasil, tell him to advance south here as fast as possible."
"Understood."
"Go."
-Slash.
The axe cleaved the demon's crown. It sank back into the blood without leaving a corpse. Erik rubbed his weary eyes and jerked his head again.
Another warrior was dragged forward. Tedious. Erik raised his axe with a blank expression. The terror-filled eyes of the clan warriors, the nameless one dragged here wetting himself.
This corpse pit turned to blood and minced meat. The cackling shamans and demons watching it, and even that fallen god. All of it—utterly tedious.
"Yarl!"
Then a messenger dashed in from outside the camp. The man delivering frontline updates to Erik. Erik paused mid-swing and looked at him.
"Are we being pushed back?"
"Still stalemated! But. . . morale has hit rock bottom. We'll be overrun soon."
A surprise raid in a situation without numerical superiority, enemies forming a death trap with resolve to die. Normally, they'd prepare for siege around the camp palisades instead of field battle.
Compounded by nonstop conscription of warriors from the rear as sacrificial fodder causing force leakage, the frontline warriors couldn't recover their plummeting morale.
Without the rampaging demons on the front, they'd have shattered already. In truth, with main forces dispatched outward, the camp's remaining warriors were mere chaff.
This could be called the most desperate moment since starting the unification war. Moreover, this battlefield shift was utterly unpredictable for him.
With nearly all northern clans scattered and hiding under his watchful eye, foreseeing this sudden focal point and simultaneous organized resistance would make one a prophet, not a strategist.
"You came all this way just to say that?"
"Ah! No, Yarl! Troops are approaching from the eastern ridge!"
"East?"
How many had he dispatched east? Who led there? Erik stroked his chin, deep in thought. From here east were allied camps heavily fortified, and no signal fires had risen warning of raids.
So approaching from that direction must be friendlies. No orders given there, making this approach all too sudden.
*
"Put Sigsten up against the enemy. We need to pin down their detached forces. Have Sigurd ignore the first enemy they encounter and strike the follow-ups. Make the raids sporadic and our numbers seem vast."
Kirhas narrowed her eyes, whispering to the flowered wooden plank. She continued without slowing her pace. The warriors chasing behind her marveled at the sight.
She had spent nearly three sleepless nights commanding the battlefield. The difference from other commanders? She did it all while constantly on the move or in combat.
As if she had two extra heads compared to others. Her battle command and direct melee were nearly flawless, but what amazed most was how she never dropped strategic thinking amid it all, exerting influence across the entire North.
Even now. She had fought her third group battle, led legions, and simultaneously maneuvered troops in entirely different regions. Like precisely moving calculated chess pieces.
"Valten must retreat. But not fully disengage from the field. Have them raid the nearest camp again. Sow confusion in the enemy's response forces."
At this moment, Kirhas's tactical command harmonized perfectly with Freya's intel relay. Kirhas finished speaking and hung the plank on her tactical belt. She drew a pipe from her sleeve.
"Hoo. . . ."
Most enemy return forces would now be lost in the North's darkness and blizzard. The forces Fernandez had scattered across the North wouldn't amount to much normally, but under Kirhas and Freya's command, they operated as perfect guerrillas.
Thus shaking the board. To flip the turtle. Kirhas spurred her horse faster, eyeing the distant twinkling camp torches. Acrid smoke filled her lungs deep. The scent of battle, of the hunt, saturated her nostrils and mind.
'Kirhas. What do you need to win on the battlefield?'
'More troops than the enemy, right?'
'Simply put, yes. And troops are always relative. The total spread across the front doesn't matter. What truly counts is the number and quality at the moment of contact.'
Kirhas recalled what Fernandez had taught her long ago, seated on his lap. Mostly she remembered the feel and warmth of his lap, though. Her tail swished.
'You're right, Silver Lord.'
The enemy's total forces overwhelmingly outnumbered theirs. The northern ragtag alliance wasn't a cohesive force, inferior in both quality and quantity.
But on one battlefield. If they could seize superiority in a very narrow local engagement. . . and if that field held the enemy's high command.
Impossible in normal circumstances. Core enemy sites would have stronger defenses than elsewhere.
But right now, with the board Fernandez created, allied forces scattered atop it, enemies dispersed chasing them. Intel chaos and command misjudgments. Freya's ability to issue simultaneous commands. And. . .
The greatest field commander of the Great Wilds decided the battlefield's fate.
'I'll definitely turn it around.'
He had left her with Freya because he had to. And it stemmed from trust in her. Fernandez trusted her. On this vast board, in this North, she alone could match his steps and deploy forces.
So she simply followed. Fulfilling the trust and mission her lord had given.
-Shing.
The blade slid free. She shook ash from her pipe with one hand and regripped her sword. The enemy lines loomed close.
"Break through!"