Chapter 221
Chapter 221
The Iron Emperor — Chapter 221
"Move it, move it! Get it cleared!"
The shouts of the knights battered the soldiers' ears, as if desperate to make up for every moment the advance had been delayed.
Beads of sweat rolled down the foreheads of the men hauling logs out of the road and shoving boulders aside.
They had been denied rest during the relentless march, and now they were forced to work with exhausted bodies. It was hellish.
The long barricade of logs was cleared away, and several soldiers stepped forward to remove the smaller pieces of timber.
Shhk.
"Hurk!"
The soldier felt his foot plunge through empty air and sucked in a sharp breath. He had no time for a longer scream before he vanished into the earth.
"Get clear!"
"Aaaagh!"
Crash-rumble.
The warning cry rang out, but by then five soldiers had already been swallowed by the ground.
"Are you all right?"
A soldier who had edged cautiously toward the dust-shrouded pit was forced to shut his eyes at the grisly sight.
"Damn it."
"Ughhh..."
They were anything but all right.
The five soldiers who had fallen in were impaled on a dense thicket of sharpened stakes that filled the pit. Their bodies were pierced through, and they clung only faintly to their final, flickering breaths.
"Hell. An enemy...?"
Count Sunhand, who was leading the Northern Region forces toward Partean Fortress, took in the scene before him, frowned, muttered a few words under his breath, and then issued a cold-blooded order.
"Watch for traps. Shove any stones and boulders into this pit."
"And the—and the soldiers?"
A knight ventured the question cautiously, but the only thing he got back was a thunderous roar.
"No time to pull them out or any such thing! Get moving!"
Even a quick glance told him these soldiers were beyond help. Yet all five still produced faint, agonized groans, and one of them—perhaps having heard the exchange—glared with bulging eyes, retched blood, and worked his mouth wordlessly.
"What are you waiting for!"
A knight bellowed when the soldiers hesitated.
A short while later, the soldiers who had finished off the five dying men resumed the march with heavy hearts.
Thud-thud-thud.
The mounted scouts ranging ahead never slackened their pace, as though trying to make up for lost time. Since they had already encountered a trap, however, they drove their horses on while keeping a sharp eye on the ground and surrounding terrain.
"Huh?"
One of the cavalrymen, his eyes sweeping the ground and the surroundings, suddenly shifted his gaze to the empty air before him.
He had caught a faint glint of reflected sunlight where nothing should have been.
'Probably nothing.'
He wanted to dismiss it and keep riding, but his head was already sailing through the air.
SLASH!
"Everybody halt!"
The head of the man riding directly ahead of him had abruptly separated from his body and flown upward.
Swish.
"Kihihing!"
"I said halt!"
The urgent cry to stop the cavalry column rang out, but by the time the formation shuddered to a halt, seven men's heads and two horses' heads had already been launched skyward.
"You rotten bastards!"
A red line, wet with blood, hung suspended across the empty air.
Baronet Haupeu, who approached and identified what it was, stared down at the rolling corpses of his subordinates and let out a stream of curses. Stretched across the main road was fine steel wire.
At a galloping horse's speed, it was no different from the men slicing off their own heads. The wire was so thin that spotting it while riding fast was all but impossible.
"Report this to the main force. From now on, we move on foot."
"Understood."
Baronet Haupeu seethed with anger at the unseen enemy who had driven his soldiers to such pointless deaths.
"I'll kill them."
The lead reconnaissance unit all dismounted and began to advance on foot. As soon as they entered dense undergrowth, the scouts' nerves went taut.
"Trap!"
"Watch out!"
A soldier who spotted a snare rigged with vines—a bent sapling designed to whip back and strike anyone who brushed against the trip line—called out a warning to his comrades and hacked it apart with his blade.
That was the beginning.
Trap after trap lay planted across the entire path ahead, as though daring them to come forward.
By now, the distinction between a reconnaissance unit and the rest of the army had already blurred.
The pace slowed to a crawl among the traps strewn everywhere, and the vanguard merged back together with the main body of troops.
"No choice."
Faced with a situation that could no longer be taken lightly, the supreme commander, Count Sunhand, had to make a decision.
"The entire army is to advance while scanning the front and flanks. There may be an ambush. Traps have also been found on the road, so every man is to proceed with caution!"
They could not afford to wait for the reconnaissance unit to deal with every trap.
At Count Sunhand's command, the relief force began to move forward at a far slower pace.
"What is this?"
A soldier advancing with a spear in hand came to a halt and let out a baffled exclamation. A snare lay splayed across the ground in front of him, brazenly unconcealed.
Was a trap that could only catch a blind man actually planted right in his path?
"Damn it."
He slashed it apart with his sword and started walking again.
It was the same for the other soldiers.
They advanced on full alert—yet some of the traps they found were only half-built, and others didn't function at all.
"Well, now."
One soldier actually found himself thinking this might be a good thing.
Ironically, the traps were easing the fatigue that had accumulated during their relentless forced march.
Bit by bit, the majority of the soldiers' vigilance was dissolving.
"Is it because they lacked the time, do you think?"
Baron Ninben asked Count Sunhand cautiously.
The soldiers had started clearing the traps in a perfunctory, half-hearted manner and moving past them. Baron Ninben had been about to call them out on it—until he, too, spotted a shoddily built trap and scowled.
"It's not so much that they lack time. Their goal clearly isn't to attack us directly but to slow us down. That's why they're doing this."
"Are we to disregard them and press on?"
"Hrm."
Ever since the traps had started appearing, the army's rate of advance had been halved.
In a situation where every moment counted, the presence of these crude, hastily built traps was enough to give Count Sunhand and the other nobles a serious dilemma.
"Even if we take some casualties, we advance—"
WHIZZ-WHIZZ-WHIZZ!
As if to interrupt Count Sunhand's words, a sharp, keening noise burst forth in an instant.
"Gaaaagh!"
"Aaaagh!"
In the blink of an eye, screams erupted from the vanguard—and then from all sides.
"Ambush!"
"Get to cover!"
Hundreds of arrows poured down in a sudden deluge, and soldiers scrambled to raise their shields in panic. Some tried to run clear of the arrows, only to blunder into one of the crude snares and go rocketing up into the air.
"Calm down!"
In moments, close to a hundred soldiers were writhing on the ground. Arrows even flew at Count Sunhand himself.
Tang!
"Khraaaagh!"
Count Sunhand blocked the shot with his shield, but he could no longer contain his surging rage and let out a roar.
It had lasted only an instant, yet a rough count showed that the number of casualties exceeded a hundred and was approaching two hundred. The fallen soldiers' bodies were each studded with three or four arrows, and in the worst cases there were men who had breathed their last with several dozen shafts embedded all over their corpses.
"We've been completely played."
Baronet Haupeu, who had been examining the cause, delivered his report to Count Sunhand with a grave expression.
The arrows that had rained down on the soldiers were not an enemy attack. They were a giant, pre-set trap.
This was nothing like the crude traps they had seen so far.
It was a sophisticated apparatus, so well hidden that you could only recognize it for what it was after you had already sprung it and looked back at the mechanism—rigged to simultaneously release volleys of arrows from the trees in the area.
On top of that, there were traps that had been left blatantly exposed, yet in the chaos soldiers were still being launched skyward and plunging into pits to be skewered on stakes.
* * *
"Let's move fast!"
"We're plastering the whole place with traps."
When the laborers had first been dragged here, they had trembled with fear. But once they realized that their job simply consisted of slapping together crude traps as they moved along, a certain ease had settled in.
"Now this one's a masterpiece!"
"Whoa, that's cunning."
Was it the cumulative effect of installing so many traps?
Among the crude ones, traps of genuine cunning had begun to appear with increasing frequency. The truly well-made traps were the work of the Dwarf soldiers and a small number of penal laborers who moved under Yeon Hwi-garam's direct orders, but by now even the decoy traps were starting to include ones that could genuinely be dangerous.
As Hwi-garam was directing the troops and plastering the terrain with traps, several soldiers came running down the ridge in a hurry. They snapped to a salute and then prostrated themselves before him.
"Grand General Yeon. It appears our effort to lock down the enemy's advance has succeeded. Seen from a distance, the relief force's movement has slowed to a crawl—it's barely budging, as good as pinned in place."
"Heh-heh."
At the soldier's bright-faced report, a smile stole over Hwi-garam's lips.
Setting traps normally required a great deal of time.
But setting a rudimentary trap—without any concern for camouflage—was easy work.
First, they had sown wariness. After that, they advanced while roughly building traps that could be dangerous if triggered, but which could also be spotted with just a little care. And periodically, they produced one or two traps carefully and painstakingly designed to kill in large numbers, before moving on to create yet more stretches of shoddy, false traps.
The traps that three thousand five hundred men scattered like seeds—alongside the meticulously hidden real ones—had cunningly exploited the enemy's psychology.
Strictly speaking, what Hwi-garam was doing was less about using traps to slow the enemy than waging sophisticated psychological warfare.
"Good. Move out quickly and then take a brief rest."
With the psychological upper hand, the Gauri troops moved quickly despite their exhaustion from building traps—toward the sweetness of rest....