Chapter 212
Chapter 212
The Iron Emperor — Chapter 212
In this battle, the greatest contribution had come from the Hawk Corps. Tasked with nothing more than buying time, they had reduced the enemy's numbers by over a third and then struck the scattered enemy's rear in a coordinated attack, providing the opening for the assault on Tremble Castle.
"What of Belwan Castle?"
Gowin looked to Go Jin-cheon for his thoughts.
"There is no time to strike that as well. What is the status of troop replenishment at the capital?"
"Ten thousand new conscripts have already been deployed to the Conrad region, and an additional ten thousand are marching this way."
At Marquis Baikal's answer, Jin-cheon spoke to him.
"Marquis Baikal, once the ten thousand reinforcements arrive, you are to take five thousand South Roselin soldiers and capture Belwan Castle. If resistance is stiff, there is no need to take it. Your role is simply to wear down the Conrad region's forces and, at the same time, keep Belwan Castle's troops too occupied to consider anything else. We will use that opening to advance straight on the capital."
"What of the other castles?"
"Ignore them. We will smash only the capital. Then we shall withdraw the army."
At Jin-cheon's words, King Alsein wore a regretful expression. With a bit more gathered strength, this was a situation where South Roselin could occupy North Roselin and achieve unification. Yet Jin-cheon's plan was merely to strike the North Roselin capital and pull out.
"Is it a shame?"
"Frankly, yes."
King Alsein nodded as he answered Jin-cheon's question. Anyone in the current circumstances would have nodded.
"Right now, unification would be poison for South Roselin."
"That is so."
Marquis Baikal seconded Jin-cheon's statement. He began to explain in a quiet voice to King Alsein, who looked curious.
"If we were to annex North Roselin now, the Holy Empire would not stand idly by. At present, they refrain from directly intervening due to checks from the other empires, but once that happens, the Holy Empire will no longer care about such things."
"Correct. North Roselin currently also serves as a shield. King Alsein, once this war ends, focus your mind solely on reconstruction."
"Then I would like to know why we are striking the capital."
Alsein assumed a serious posture and put the question to Jin-cheon.
"It is simple. To smash their heads in."
Jin-cheon raised a finger and tapped his own head as he spoke. King Alsein nodded and spoke as if understanding Jin-cheon's meaning.
"For the effect of punishment, and to ensure they are unable to provoke war for a time."
"And on top of that, we must make them destroy themselves."
"You mean...?"
King Alsein's eyes widened, and Jin-cheon smiled coldly as he spoke.
"This time, we will sweep away as many of the North Roselin royal family as we possibly can."
"..."
The air around them grew chilly.
"We smash the head, then show generosity. We will bestow the grace of allowing the state to continue, but in return we shall extract a heavy price for the blood we have shed. Then North Roselin will inevitably begin to fracture. Isn't that so?"
"Th-That is so."
"The more reparations we scrape out of them, the more impoverished the lives of the North Roselin commoners will become. Meanwhile, South Roselin will plant spies in a few villages and incite riots. After such a long war, they are bound to be so devastated that just a little prodding will easily spark a rebellion. That is a far easier method than waging war to the end with blades and subjugating them."
It was a statement that he did not care in the slightest what became of the people of another country.
"This, too, is war."
At the cold conclusion, King Alsein understood yet could only shake his head. And he thanked the heavens that they had not become enemies of Gauri.
* * *
The Gauri-South Roselin allied advance on the North Roselin capital.
At the terrifying sight of the Gauri and South Roselin allied forces swarming in to break through by the shortest route, King Vain Cadel Roselin of North Roselin grew desperate.
While gathering troops to the capital, he also issued defense orders to every castle positioned along the route.
As he listened to the communication from the capital, Viscount Roun's face flushed bright red.
"After scraping together every last damned soldier, where did you squander them all to issue such an order now!"
[This is unavoidable. It is also the royal command of His Majesty King Cadel.]
"Where are the soldiers supposed to come from to block them!"
Viscount Roun's protest had its reasons.
How many soldiers could a kingdom, not an empire, possibly field? The manpower lost in the previous unification war, combined with the forces already conscripted for the expeditionary army, meant their human resources had long since run dry.
Even when they had scraped together and dispatched the men who should have been farming to suppress unrest in South Roselin, promises had been made to distribute locally produced food to the domains of the nobles who had sent the troops.
The problem was that even those troops had collapsed. Worse, word had flown in that the middle-aged men and youths hastily rounded up and sent had been entirely expended in the battles of Conrad Plains, Tremble Castle, and Belwan Castle. Nationwide, the forces consumed just in the short term exceeded two hundred thousand.
That was a massive force even an empire could not ignore.
What, then, must be the state of the domains that had bled out such armies?
"Damned..."
After the communication ended, Viscount Roun stood on the terrace, gazing at the sunset, his heart utterly drained. Across the wide fields, there was no one to work; only women moved about here and there, and even old people who could barely move had come out to lend a hand.
"Kal."
"Yes, my lord."
The knight standing at attention behind him took a step forward at Viscount Roun's call and bowed his head.
"Issue conscription orders to the lords of the surrounding minor domains."
"Even if we call for troops, only the minimal forces to guard the domains remain."
The chief knight, Kal, spoke with a strained voice at Viscount Roun's command. But there was no way Viscount Roun himself did not know that.
"Is there any need to guard the domains when the country itself is on the verge of falling? Pull out every last garrison soldier as well!"
Viscount Roun's fiery temper flared.
For a moment, Kal could not speak. Quietly, he offered a military salute and withdrew from the room.
Under Viscount Roun's orders, the barons and baronets under his command began to gather even their private soldiers at Duran Fortress. The forces assembled, after emptying even the troops that maintained public order in the domains, numbered eight thousand.
In truth, with no young men left to disturb local order, the absence of policing power was not an issue. The problem was how to stop the approaching combined forces of Gauri and South Roselin.
The barons and baronets of the neighboring minor domains were deep in deliberation with Viscount Roun over a response plan.
"Information on the enemy?"
"The force led directly by the King of Gauri numbers forty-three thousand, and the force led by King Alsein of South Roselin numbers thirty thousand."
Seventy-three thousand troops in total.
Faced with a force nearly ten times their number, the seated nobles could say nothing. There were limits to how much of a difference you could work with; this exceeded what was manageable. It was a disparity that made even defending the fortress difficult. Nor was Duran Fortress, where they were positioned, well-suited to stop a force ten times larger.
"Earlier I heard that the allied army's strength dispatched from Gauri was originally around twenty-five thousand. Is it accurate intelligence that the Gauri soldiers alone now number forty-three thousand?"
Viscount Roun asked again, perhaps to confirm accuracy or because he found it hard to believe the information from the capital.
"The initial expeditionary force was roughly that size. Afterwards, the force of twenty thousand that the King of Gauri personally led through the Haian Kingdom is said to have joined."
"So you're telling me now that, in advancing all the way here, their total losses amount to only around two thousand?"
"That is..."
Though it was not his fault, Kal could offer no answer before Viscount Roun's fierce voice.
"What kind of men are all those commanders! South Roselin alone had thirty thousand troops, and Conrad had over fifty thousand! Was that all? Tremble and Belwan each had twenty thousand—forty thousand soldiers in total. And while all those troops were being routed, the damage they inflicted was a mere two thousand?"
"..."
Viscount Roun's anger gave way to a hollow expression as he shook his head.
"In any case, the Gauri forces inevitably suffered few losses."
Viscount Roun stared at Baron Iban, who sat to one side. With connections to the capital, he was someone who could access fairly high-grade intelligence.
"Explain in detail."
Viscount Roun's tone had softened slightly.
Baron Iban composed himself a little and carefully began to speak.
"In practice, our forces dispersed throughout South Roselin for reasons such as maintaining order numbered approximately eighty thousand. The problem was that these forces were spread broadly."
"Indeed."
Viscount Roun rose with his hands behind his back and nodded.
"However, at the time the Gauri and Roselin allied forces arrived, it is said that the war with our punitive army had still not concluded. From the very beginning, they felt no threat whatsoever from our punitive army. In that situation, our troops, subjected to a surprise attack, had neither the capacity nor the time to regroup and could do nothing but suffer. The problem was the prisoners taken in this way..."
As Baron Iban trailed off, Viscount Roun glanced at him and pressed.
"Speak."
"Yes. The prisoners were, half through coaxing and half through threat, armed and then placed at the vanguard wherever an assault was needed. Naturally, since a rain of arrows would pour down from behind upon any soldier who fled, those soldiers would have had no choice but to attack our own side merely to survive."
As the explanation continued, Viscount Roun trembled with fury.
The prisoners kept swelling in number, and those captives had continually been forced to the front as arrow fodder for the enemy, against their own comrades.
"In the case of the Conrad Plains, however, though it was only confirmed later, it was a force of merely fourteen thousand that faced our fifty-five thousand troops."
"Fourteen thousand?"
He had heard about the Battle of Conrad Plains as well. It was a battle in which over fifty thousand soldiers had suffered nearly twenty thousand casualties across two engagements in a single day.
It was that drain of soldiers and the consequent loss of mobility, he realized, that had pinned them down. The reason this fact had likely not been disclosed to the front-line nobles was to avoid responsibility for the central nobility's misjudgments, and out of concern for declining morale.
"The commander at that time was Baron Gowin—no, the man now called Daesaja Gowin—who led the Hawk Corps."
"Hawk of the Battlefield..."
He could not be unaware of the name Gowin, said to be unmatched on the continent in his ability to read the flow of battle. He had also heard the report that Gowin had defected to Gauri.
"In the end, that single factor caused not only Conrad but also Tremble and Belwan to be defeated in detail. A triangular defensive system whose encirclement collapses might as well be fodder."
"Do you happen to know at whose hands Count Krian died in South Roselin?"
"I have heard he fell to a Gauri warrior called Samdopyo."
"Hmm."
"Samdopyo is nearly two mir tall, wields a massive all-black steel staff, and is said to ride a saber-tooth tiger, though no one knows how he tamed it."
"A saber-tooth tiger?"
Viscount Roun was dumbfounded at a story he had never heard before. Yet, in a situation where information was scarce, Baron Iban's explanation was genuinely helpful. Far better for grasping the enemy than the mere number games sent from the capital.
"So in Gauri, all we need be wary of is the Hawk Corps and this one called Samdopyo..."
Viscount Roun mused quietly. After his monologue, Baron Iban spoke cautiously.
"Ah, this is by no means confirmed, but..."
"What is it?"
At Viscount Roun's question, Baron Iban, who had brought it up, hesitated slightly before raising his head and continuing.
"Stories have reached us from the survivors of Tremble Castle and Belwan Castle that there is a devil in Gauri with horns covering its whole body."
"A devil?"
"I attempted to dismiss it, but it also lines up with the tale of a five-horned devil that was said to have appeared during the earlier unification war..."
"Details."
Viscount Roun, his expression grave, demanded a more detailed explanation. At his request, Baron Iban, without any further hesitation, continued to lay it out.
"It was a rumor that spread among some soldiers during the unification war. They said the man who rode a horned monster horse had horns on his head and body. They also said he roamed around with people skewered on his spear and had a bizarre habit of throwing children into the air. What matters is that the same devil appeared again at Tremble Castle. Reports say he single-handedly broke through the Ulves Knight Order and took the head of the lord, Viscount Kayon. Then he leaped into the soldiers' formation and completely shattered their line. The capital command did not believe it, and neither did I, but..."
Perhaps due to speaking at length, Baron Iban moistened his dry lips with water and ended his account.
"There are rumors that he is the King of Gauri."
"..."
Viscount Roun could understand why Baron Iban had been reluctant to speak. He let out a scoffing laugh, sat back down in his chair, and tossed out a remark.
"In all the world, what kind of mad king would wander around with an enemy soldier skewered on his spear, toss children into the air, and single-handedly rampage through the enemy's ranks? Pay it no mind. It is merely an exaggerated rumor about some blood-crazed madman."
Viscount Roun drew that conclusion.