Chapter 199
Chapter 199
The Iron Emperor — Chapter 199
Of the seventy thousand troops who had first marched into this place, fewer than thirty thousand remained.
The Gauri horsemen who fell upon them without fail every night...
The Roselin soldiers, who had been about to make soup from the horse meat they'd recently seized, found their spirits steadily worn away by the unrelenting Gauri cavalry. One noble, unable to endure it any longer, led out a rearguard of some five thousand men—and not a single one of them returned. Then there were the mornings after sleepless nights of constant attack, when the smell of food unfailingly drifted over them.
Soldiers continued to desert, and the Roselin command steadily lost control. Their one consolation was word that the supply unit had come within two days' march.
The command deliberately spread that news among the men. It was meant to halt further desertion, but the more urgent reason was that they no longer had even horse meat left to make soup.
"The ground is shaking?"
A soldier shuffling forward without strength muttered the words unconsciously as the vibration reached him through his numbed soles.
The tremor swelled, sharpening until it was distinct enough to reach the ears.
THUD-THUD-THUD!
The unmistakable pounding of hooves.
It was not nighttime, and it was not mealtime either.
Nor was it the muffled sound of cloth-wrapped hooves, deliberately muffled as before. Hoofbeats that seemed to announce their own arrival...
Unlike the earlier raids, a feeling of utter despair wrapped itself around the soldiers' hearts.
"The enemy cavalry has appeared in the rear!"
Even without the knight's breathless report as he raced in, the clearly audible thunder of thousands of hooves made it plain: these were the same Gauri cavalry who had tormented them so relentlessly.
"We must hold them—at all costs!"
Count Keosillian's booming voice washed over the startled nobles. The sensation was wholly different from the usual raids—a sound one heard only when full-scale battle was joined.
And that was not all.
"Wait—from the front as well?"
It was not only the rear; the noise of thousands of thundering hooves began to rise from the front too.
"Could it be our supply unit?"
A noble's voice, trembling with hope, squeezed through his quivering throat. But Count Keosillian's face twisted into something horrific. The magic communication saying they would arrive in two days had come only last night—there was no way they could already be this close.
"We're surrounded..."
A despairing voice fell from another noble's lips, and Count Keosillian tasted defeat even before the battle had begun.
'So the reason they kept striking and pulling back during those night raids over the past several days wasn't just to drain our strength.'
Inside Count Keosillian's shattered heart, every piece of what Gauri had been aiming for fell into place.
Shring.
Count Keosillian's sword slid slowly from its sheath. His resolve rose from deep within and burst out through his throat in a shout.
"Prepare to fight to the death!"
What met the fear-filled Roselin soldiers first—not behind proper heavy anti-cavalry pikes but a tangle of ordinary spears hastily planted—was, as always, a rain of arrows.
Thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack!
"Aaaagh!"
The screams of soldiers collapsing as their bodies turned into hedgehogs under the arrow storm.
In the minds of the men who tried to shelter behind their comrades' corpses, the shields they had secretly discarded to lighten their load felt more desperately needed at this moment than even food.
The anti-cavalry formation collapsed in an instant; it was no longer a threat. Even if that flimsy line had held, it could never have offered the slightest resistance to the Black Armored Ghost Cavalry charging at the head. Go Jin-cheon, astride Gangsoe, crashed in first, and the one-sided slaughter began.
Craaash!
Gangsoe's massive frame tore through, swatting soldiers aside like straw.
"Kuaaagh!"
From the mouth of a Roselin soldier impaled on Jin-cheon's lance erupted a scream so loud it seemed to shake the world, born of a strength that came from nowhere. Under the hooves of the Black Armored Ghost Cavalry that surged in behind him, Roselin soldiers who had stood frozen moments ago were trampled like weeds.
"Kree-hihihing!"
Had it inherited the ferocity of its dam, the Pukel?
Though it bore a horse's face, the Puma spread the fangs jutting from both sides of its mouth and screamed, baying for blood.
This was not a battlefield of crushed bone and spraying blood so much as a slaughterhouse—hunting and being hunted.
"The knight order—hold the enemy advance!"
The knights, who in ordinary times would have presented a magnificent sight, looked infinitely small compared to the charging Gauri cavalry, who came on without so much as disturbing their formation.
"Lances!"
At the lead knight's cry, lances were raised skyward. At his follow-up command, the lances lowered and were braced firmly against their sides.
"Knights—aaand!"
At his long, drawn-out shout, the knights hunched forward as one and readied themselves to charge. Then at last the order fell.
"Charge—forward!"
"Uwaaaah!"
There was even a solemn grandeur in the sight of the knight order charging head-on. But reality was cold.
The arrows loosed by the Gauri archer cavalry while the knights galloped forward unhorsed countless men before the collision even began. Fired nearly flat from galloping mounts, the power of the Maekgung bows punched through thick armor like paper.
In the clash that followed, every last knight who had broken through the arrow rain was laid flat upon the ground. After a single crossing, all that remained were upturned horses rolling on the earth and the gruesome sight of knights with their limbs broken at grotesque angles.
"How can this be...!"
The annihilation of the knight order they had trusted was enough to strip the souls from the nobles who had been crying out for a fight to the death. Though they had been outnumbered by the charging Gauri riders, no one had imagined it would end so utterly. If they had understood the Gauri cavalry's tactics from the start, perhaps—but against an opponent whose ways they knew nothing of, the outcome had been all but foretold. What was the reason knights armored themselves so heavily in the first place?
Was it not to burst through a rain of arrows and shatter the enemy's ranks?
That their armor had been pierced not by crossbows but by ordinary bows—and that they had been broken by archer cavalry, a thing nearly nonexistent on the continent—was despair itself.
'Could those rumors really have been true?'
Count Keosillian, having witnessed the unbelievable with his own eyes, dredged up the stories of mounted archers he had heard whispered during the last unification war. And the tales of the demons who rode demon steeds...
The moment the savage mount with five horns entered Count Keosillian's sight, the memory he had dismissed as the idle nonsense of children came flooding back.
"Uwaaaaah!"
A hollow sense of futility, the crushing knowledge of how thoroughly he had been toyed with, and the thought that this entire war might have been engineered by Gauri from the beginning—all of it churned together and erupted from Count Keosillian as a frantic, flailing scream.
"My lord Count!"
Behind Count Keosillian, who was charging with bitter resentment toward those terrifying, accursed war mounts, the desperate voices of his escort knights clung after him.
"Kuh-up!"
Crunch.
A soldier who twisted aside from Jin-cheon's kick had his neck snapped and tumbled away limp. And every time the Hwandudaedo rose and fell, alternating left and right without pause, another life was snuffed out.
"Uwaaaah!"
As Jin-cheon was deep in the slaughter, someone's battle cry rang in his ears. Reflexively turning his gaze, he saw a single rider in ornate armor charging at him with sword raised.
Behind the man, knights were following and calling out as if trying to restrain him. Jin-cheon did not need to confirm to know that he was a man holding a key position in the Roselin army.
"Let's go."
As if speaking to a close friend, he lightly touched Gangsoe's neck. The great beast, eyes bloodshot and blazing crimson, moved its legs in answer to Jin-cheon's will and surged forward.
"Uyaaaah!"
At the long, drawn-out howl, Jin-cheon smiled, thick with killing intent, and spat out a brief word as he charged to meet him.
"Come!"
The sight of Jin-cheon galloping over the surrounding corpses was like a death-god approaching from hell. Perhaps it was that image that goaded him—
From the sword of the charging Count Keosillian erupted a blue blaze of Aura. That power which could only be unleashed once one attained the rank of Sword Owner. But to Jin-cheon, it was mere child's play.
WHOOSH!
The blow, tearing through the air with an ugly sound as it spat Aura, was blocked far too easily.
Clang!
Count Keosillian's eyes wavered as he stared at his own sword, deflected upward.
'How!'
The blade Jin-cheon had struck against his Aura-laden sword was an ordinary dao, sheathed in no Aura at all. Before the thought could even finish crossing Count Keosillian's mind, a great fist came hurtling in, blotting out his vision.
Crunch!
As he felt his face cave in with vivid clarity and crumpled from the saddle, the last thing Count Keosillian's eyes registered was the sight of his own escort knights charging toward him, shouting something.
As bad luck would have it, his head had snapped backward the instant he fell from the horse.
Go Jin-cheon, having finished Count Keosillian with a single punch, charged on without slowing toward the knights rushing at him with screams. Three knights were riding straight at him.
He shook the Count's blood from his fist, then immediately drew one of the hand axes holstered on his saddle and hurled it.
Thwack!
With a sound like a watermelon splitting, the knight charging straight at him was thrown backward, his head simply gone.
Two knights left.
The instant Jin-cheon's Hwandudaedo split the left-hand knight's shield and torso in a single stroke, the knight on the right—untouched—had his body snapped backward and torn in two as he flew away. A familiar, broad-bladed axe head that had bitten clean through to the horse's flank: it belonged to Eulji Buru, who had recently taken a liking to throwing that axe of his.
"Your Majesty!"
Jin-cheon bared his blood-soaked teeth in a grin at Buru, who rode toward him beaming. The cavalry Jin-cheon had led into the rear and Buru, who had detoured through the forest days ago to strike the front, met in the middle.
This battle had been scripted from the very beginning.
The Roselin army, exhausted past exhaustion and starved past starvation, could offer no real resistance. Driven mercilessly by the Gauri cavalry, they were herded this way and that like sheep fleeing wolves.
As that continued, the Gauri cavalry could be seen over and over again passing by Roselin soldiers who had either lost the will to raise their weapons or dropped them and fled. The men who instinctively grasped the message began to appear one by one.
Throw down your weapon and you live!
No one had to utter the tired line about sparing those who surrendered, yet that very impression had burned itself into the Roselin soldiers' minds. And from the start, that had been the intended effect.
Without a single command being given, the soldiers who dropped their weapons survived, while those next to them who lifted theirs in terror were killed. Faced with such starkly clear results, the Roselin soldiers hurriedly began flinging their weapons to the ground, every last one of them. After Count Keosillian, the acting supreme commander, died with his neck broken on the dirt, what shreds of the chain of command remained could no longer be found.
It was inevitable.
Those who could still fight properly were mostly the nobles and their attached escort knights—and those enemies were inevitably the highest-priority targets of the Gauri cavalry.
The surviving nobles and knights were too busy fighting fiercely for their lives to have the leisure to bully their men forward. So even if someone had driven them to fight, the soldiers, who could barely decide whether to fight at all, had only one conclusion to reach.
As the number of men hurling down their weapons and pressing their heads to the ground—or crying out their surrender—steadily grew, the battle was all but over. Eulji Buru judged that no further slaughter was needed, drew a deep breath, and shouted at the top of his lungs.
"All of you...."
"Drop your weapons and surrender, all of you! Those who surrender shall live—those who resist will find only death!"
"......"
At the shout that rang out before his own, Buru stood momentarily slack-jawed, then turned his head toward the source of the sound.
A single spearhead branching into dozens was pouring down upon the enemy.
Unlike Buru and the other commanders, who favored killing in a single strike, a man who always favored showy spear-work. At the end of Buru's gaze, Mong Ryu-hwa was roaring with laughter and continuing to press the demand for surrender. Thus, without even knowing it himself, he had earned Buru's ire.