Chapter 222
Chapter 222
Iron Emperor — Chapter 222
Though he knew he ought to be moving even a single step faster to reach them in time, Count Sunhand had ultimately covered less than a third of their usual marching distance before ending the day's advance. His face was dark as he listened to his nobles' reports.
"...In total, three hundred twenty-six soldiers are dead, and two hundred seventy-one have been wounded. Of the wounded, about one hundred ten are lightly injured and should recover within a day or two."
"......"
Even after hearing the full report, Count Sunhand was so incredulous he forgot what he'd meant to say. In all his tactical study and examination of countless battle records, he had never once seen or heard of an engagement fought so thoroughly through traps alone.
Without so much as swinging a sword or spear, their losses—including the dead—were approaching five hundred.
That was more than one percent of the entire thirty-thousand-strong army. Losing so many men without so much as glimpsing the enemy was no small blow.
What worried him even more was that the soldiers had begun to fear taking each step.
Because the enemy had used crude, half-finished traps as camouflage for genuinely lethal ones, the men now spent more and more time eyeing even obvious or unfinished traps with dread. Had they not, the casualties might have approached a thousand.
"You are dismissed. We will depart a little earlier tomorrow."
"Understood."
That night, Count Sunhand felt an unusual weight of exhaustion settling over him.
* * *
Whoosh.
A chill wind shook the undergrowth, twisting through the trees and wailing with an eerie sound.
Rustle.
The rustle of paper vanished beneath the wind.
Moonlight filtered through the clouds.
Its pale blue gleam caught upon a head of silver hair.
Yeon Hwi-garam stood alone atop a tree overlooking the North Roselin relief force.
The tree was so massive that even four or five grown men, arms spread wide, could not have encircled it. From Hwi-garam's hands, slips of paper drifted away on the wind.
"Phantom Ghost Technique (幻鬼術). Release (出)."
The words slipped out at the end of an unintelligible murmur.
Yet the paper showed no change, simply riding the breeze toward the encampment of the North Roselin relief army.
"Heh."
Hwi-garam smiled as he watched the paper drift, still as if he had become a part of the tree.
"Ugh."
One North Roselin soldier, his body prickling with goosebumps as the wind swept over him, shivered briefly before straightening up again.
"The wind's getting cold."
"Yeah."
The soldiers standing watch flinched as gusts slipped through the trees and washed over them.
"Dammit, you think there'll be just as many traps tomorrow...?"
"Who knows."
One soldier grimaced as if the nightmare of the daylight hours had come back to him.
"Forget it."
"Dammit, Johnny... couldn't even dodge like a fool..."
The soldier was thinking of a fellow villager who had died earlier that day after taking a hail of arrows.
"Huh?"
As he shook his head to drive the memory away, something flickered across his vision.
"Al, what's wrong?"
Seeing that his companion Al looked as though he had spotted something, the soldier asked uneasily in a low voice.
"Nngh..."
"Wh-what's wrong?"
Despite his companion's question, Al went pale and his teeth began to chatter. He stared fixedly in one direction; unnerved, his companion followed his gaze.
"Wh-what is it?"
There was nothing but darkness where Al was staring. There was no trace of anyone there. Puzzled, the soldier called to him again.
"Al, what the hell's wrong with you? Snap out of it!"
"A-aaaagh!"
Al's trembling only grew worse, and their raised voices drew the attention of a knight patrolling nearby.
"What is it?"
"W-well..."
The baffled soldier glanced anxiously back at the deathly pale, trembling Al as the knight approached.
"J-Johnny!"
"What?"
"What are you talking about?"
The name of the fellow villager who had died that day slipped from Al's mouth.
Neither the soldier, who could not understand why Al was talking about a dead man, nor the knight, who had no way of knowing who Johnny was, understood. They moved closer, slapping Al's cheeks and trying to snap him out of it.
"Johnny, don't come any closer!"
"Snap out of it!"
His comrade called desperately to Al as he crouched on the ground, clutching his head.
"Forget it."
"Dammit, Johnny... couldn't even dodge like a fool..."
Al had been thinking of Johnny, who'd died under a hail of arrows right in front of him that day, and despite his comrade's consoling, he couldn't erase the image.
When he shook his head and lifted it to refocus on his watch, something entered Al's vision.
"Huh?"
"Al, what's wrong?"
Al couldn't answer his comrade's call. He froze on the spot.
"Nngh..."
A whitish figure in the darkness was drawing closer.
It wasn't a person—but it was a being he recognized.
A shape advancing slowly, arrows dangling from its entire body.
'Johnny!'
Johnny was approaching Al, painted in blood, his eyes full of sorrow. The comrade beside Al looked toward Johnny, but then turned back and shook Al.
Al wanted to tell his comrade that Johnny was coming, but his voice wouldn't work.
"A-aaaagh!"
Between the arrows embedded all over Johnny's approaching body, red blood kept streaming down. Even the knight who'd come over didn't seem to see Johnny; he looked around, then started slapping Al across the face.
One step.
Then another step closer came Johnny.
"J-Johnny!"
Al's mouth finally managed to open.
'I died because of you...'
'No!'
Johnny was closing in, reproaching Al.
An arrow that had been driven deep into an eye socket had apparently grown heavy enough that it sagged downward. But what came out with the arrow was Johnny's eyeball, and the optic nerve still tethered to it held both eyeball and arrow dangling, refusing to let them fall free.
'You bastard, you always liked my girl!'
'Johnny, that's a misunderstanding!'
'I can't die alone. Let's die together...'
Johnny's hand stretched toward him.
The chill sensation brushed his cheek.
"Johnny, don't come any closer!"
Al screamed at Johnny, and the shriek carried far into the darkness.
* * *
Count Sunhand found himself at a loss for words as the situation spiraled from bad to worse.
"How many?"
"Fifty-six dead, and eighty-two men who've lost their minds. On top of that, one knight under my command has gone mad as well."
Baron Ninben's face, too, was rigid as he delivered his report to Count Sunhand.
During the night, an unprecedented calamity had unfolded: over a hundred men had suddenly gone into convulsions, fifty-six of them dying, and the rest going insane.
Looking down at the corpses, Count Sunhand recognized one common factor.
'Fear...'
They were bodies that had died in the grip of extreme terror.
From one side, a knight led a soldier over.
"Do you know why he died?"
"Up until I was talking with him, he was perfectly fine. But then that friend, Al, suddenly started calling the name of a comrade named Johnny who died yesterday, and in the end..."
"They're all similar."
The testimony of those who had witnessed the dead men was nearly identical.
"I can't make sense of it. It's not battle fatigue, and... wizard, have you found anything?"
Count Sunhand directed his question toward the wizard examining the bodies.
"Hmm."
The wizard, his expression hard, shook his head and rose.
"It is absolutely not poison. The most likely possibility is some kind of magical illusion. They say they saw ghosts, but it makes no sense for an entire group to see different ghosts at the same time."
"Is that possible?"
"The conclusion is that they saw illusions, but I have never heard of magic capable of inducing such potent illusions. Even if it exists, it would require a medium, and there is nothing around here that could serve as one."
"This grows more serious by the day."
Count Sunhand closed his eyes, unable to dispel the tightness in his chest.
Fear was slowly eating away at the soldiers' hearts, creeping in and consuming them.
* * *
"Did you sleep well?"
"I slept well. And you?"
"Us? We slept fine, of course."
The labor conscript set a meal before Yeon Hwi-garam, bowing incessantly. At having a noble as lofty as the sky ask after his well-being, the conscript answered only with bowed head until he had withdrawn from the tent.
"Hoo."
What Hwi-garam had done after slipping out alone the night before was a form of talisman magic called the Phantom Ghost Technique.
It could deal no physical harm, and under normal conditions it had no effect whatsoever—but if a few specific conditions were met, it produced an entirely different result.
First, it had to be night.
Second, the minds and bodies of the targets had to be worn down.
Third, they had to be thinking of someone's death.
After the previous day's unrelenting Gauri traps, the North Roselin soldiers' spirits and bodies had inevitably been pushed to exhaustion.
When comrades around you were dying to an invisible enemy, and you could no longer tell which traps were real and which were false, the pressure a human feels is immense.
In a pitched battle, even if someone beside you dies, you can't afford to take your eyes away from your own survival. But the day before, there had been no attacking enemy at all, so the sight of trapped comrades breathing their last was seared into every man's memory. The circumstances had aligned exactly as Hwi-garam had anticipated—and produced exactly the result he'd expected.
"My head aches a little."
Any sorcery that takes a human life always carries a backlash. The caster has no choice but to absorb a measure of the target's fear or pain.
In the end, the Phantom Ghost Technique, though devastating when employed skillfully, was something few could actually use. Only a person capable of keeping death always at their side could manage it.
"Well then, shall we head out...?"
As Yeon Hwi-garam stepped out of the tent, his eyes took in the dwarves, each standing with pickaxe or shovel in hand, and the labor conscripts bustling about to pack up camp.
* * *
"Get clear!"
A warning shout must be fast.
A late warning is as good as none. Yet the knights' cries rang out only after many soldiers had already been struck.
"Aaaagh!"
Crrrrumble.
Stones the size of a grown man's fist—and boulders the size of a child's head—poured down like rain.
"They even set traps here! How far ahead are they reading us?!"
Count Sunhand's howl echoed toward the gorge where the rockfall was crashing down.
Even in a valley far removed from the main line of march, the traps raining down on them were undoing all their efforts.
When they reached the foothills of the mountains they had to cross to reach the capital—their objective—Count Sunhand felt a sense of utter hopelessness.
From the very entrance, the place was brazenly plastered with traps far worse than anything before. Forced to decide whether to press through or turn back, he had boldly chosen to take a longer way around.
Alternative routes existed, but he'd made the call to force his way through a valley that might prove just as dangerous.
No matter how he looked at it, the traps laid along the path they'd been meant to take seemed designed to funnel his force toward another route.
And if that were true, it was obvious that the most viable nearby routes would also be trapped.
After all, no commander who'd encountered traps and recognized an enemy's presence would ever be foolish enough to shove his men into a risky, winding valley detour.
Having reasoned that far, Count Sunhand had boldly driven his troops forward—and up to the midpoint, he'd felt his judgment had been correct. But as they reached the halfway mark, the boulders came crashing down as if mocking him.
Because the rocks weren't especially large, relatively few men were killed outright, but injuries both minor and severe inevitably mounted. Manpower aside, turning back now would cost them something even more precious than soldiers' lives: time.
"We force our way through! Wizards, mobilize all offensive and defensive magic to punch through the traps! There will be no further detours!"
"My lord Count!"
"Even if it means we have no magical power left when the real battle begins, we must break through here and advance on the capital as swiftly as possible!"
At Count Sunhand's command, the dozen or so wizards reluctantly began their incantations.
As the spells were completed, blades of magic erupted outward, shearing through the forest ahead and beginning to destroy the traps. The cascading stones and boulders were deflected by shields conjured by several wizards.
"Wind Blade!"
Magic devastated the gorge without pause as the soldiers ran for their lives, their pace quickening as though to make up for the advance they had lost.
In truth, it was a desperate struggle to escape a living hell.
"Hmm."
Watching this scene from a mountain peak, Yeon Hwi-garam's face hardened for the first time.
They had held the enemy back well enough for three days. But now the enemy's pace was suddenly quickening. He hadn't expected them to unleash spell after spell while minimizing their soldiers' losses just to keep moving.
"At this rate, we won't have time to set any more traps."
As the dwarf who'd accompanied Hwi-garam to assist him said, even if they laid traps haphazardly, if the enemy kept charging forward like this, they would soon have no choice but to retreat.
"We've bought... about two days, I suppose."
Hwi-garam murmured to himself, then slowly shook his head.
If you added together all the time they'd bought so far, it might indeed total two days. But seeing how the enemy was racing forward, burning through every scrap of their magical power, Hwi-garam judged they would more than make up the lost distance—likely quickening their pace even further.
"Do we withdraw?"
At the dwarf's question about withdrawing, Hwi-garam closed his eyes as though sinking into meditation.
For a moment, he remained that way, then raised a hand into the empty air without opening his eyes.
"Abandon the traps. We'll set fires."
A chill began to seep into Hwi-garam's gaze.