Chapter 33: First Subjugation (4)
Chapter 33: First Subjugation (4)
As soon as they arrived at the encampment, the preparations for a banquet began in the tent of the wealthy knight Galia.
"Sir Osram! I would be most pleased if you would grace the occasion with your presence."
"Sir Kain! My master earnestly requests that he might meet you and share a cup."
Galia's servants hurried about inviting the knights. The other knights also sent servants back and forth to exchange greetings.
Yet no one sent a servant to Eugene, who was probably the most famous knight present.
"Do you find it strange that no one has come?"
Varda asked as she massaged the legs of Might, who was at rest.
Perhaps there really was something different about an elf's eyes and touch, because Might lay there completely relaxed.
"I had thought they might at least send a greeting. It is somewhat unexpected."
"The knights still left in the city are desperately hungry for fame. Of course they avoid you. Standing beside you would be like holding a candle in front of a brazier; whatever they did, no one would notice."
"A brazier, you say. You flatter me too highly."
"There is no need to be modest. Anyone who leads others needs a certain amount of arrogance. Sometimes that arrogance prevents unnecessary bloodshed."
"Still, would knights truly behave so pettily?"
"Bravery aside, surprisingly few knights possess true generosity. Men like these, who have failed to catch the eye of any worthwhile noble, have little room in their hearts to spare."
Just then, a knight who had stepped out of his tent to stretch happened to meet Eugene's eyes. Eugene started to raise a hand, but the knight jerked his face away.
"..."
"Even if you approached them with a greeting, it would only make both sides ill at ease."
"I had no intention of seeking them out."
He was a knight himself, but he did not particularly care for other knights.
'I am already starting to miss Karas.'
The people Eugene truly clicked with were oddballs like Karas.
The subjugation force kept close to villages and roads, buying supplies from residents and traveling merchants as it went.
"How dare you try to swindle me? Must I bleed you a little to sharpen your wits?"
"You're not actually going to stab me, are you? If you don't want to buy it, then don't. I've got plenty of other customers."
"Wha— are you insane?!"
People who normally groveled now stood their ground. Other major mercenary companies were present, along with the captain of the guard and several knights, and the merchants knew there were too many powerful witnesses for the mercenaries to use violence.
"You there! Come over here. We'll buy it."
"Mercenary sir, you saw that, right?"
The peddler walked away with a smirk. The mercenary captain wanted to kick the obnoxious bastard in the ass, but he had to restrain himself.
To stir up trouble right before a great battle could get a man singled out. To make an example of someone for the sake of discipline was a thing he himself often did.
"Hold your temper, Captain. You know the tale of One-Armed Jackson."
It was the incident in which a mercenary named Jackson beat a farmer who had come to the camp to sell apples. The farmer had hidden five rotten apples at the bottom of a basket of twenty.
But the noble lord in command at the time cut off Jackson's arm. The charge was that he had stirred up needless trouble and made merchants shun their camp.
It was a story the captain of the guard told every time he got drunk—an episode he envied greatly.
"Hey, idiot. That commander was a noble. This time the commander is a guy who used to work as a mercenary just like us."
"There are five knights around. What are you going to do if those men come over and start growling at you?"
Thunk!
The mercenary captain rapped his subordinate on the head with a knuckle for offering unwelcome but sound advice.
"Ow, what was that for?"
"You were right, so you deserved it."
"Damn... it's hard making a living as a mercenary."
"If you don't like it, you be captain then."
After taking his frustration out on his subordinate, the mercenary captain spat on the ground. For this job, keeping his temper in check was clearly the wise choice.
The nobles made their camps lavishly. The wealthy did so as befitted their wealth, and the poor did so even if it meant going into debt.
The place where the greatest number of merchants thronged was Eugene's encampment. That was because, whether in renown or in the size of the force he led, his was the largest.
"All of them, you say?!"
"Yes. Sell me all the chicken you've got. And give me two bottles each of salt and spices."
Eugene spent money freely, but only toward the merchants who brought meat.
-Bill the city later for whatever you spend on supplies. I will reimburse all of it.
Because Panis had made that promise before their departure.
-You are looking after me so well that I almost feel apologetic.
-Are we strangers? Please keep it a secret from the other knights.
Thanks to this, Eugene could feed his men their fill of meat.
"Put away the field rations and jerky. Let's grease our bellies with fresh meat for once."
"Thank you, Sir Knight!"
The dark elves grinned as they gathered firewood and prepared the meat. Eugene was equally pleased. What could be better than feeding people meat bought with someone else's money and getting all the credit for it?
"This perfumed oil came from Roman. With your prowess, Sir Knight, you will surely be bathing in enemy blood. Surely you will need something fragrant afterward?"
"I have no need of it."
"Sir Knight! Look at these candles from our trading company. We commissioned them from the Alchemy Guild, so they even smell pleasant. It looks as though you are burning rendered animal fat for light, but these are far more dignified..."
"I have no need of it. Go offer them to the other knights."
Eugene had at least some sense of shame, so he had no intention of spending someone else's money on luxuries as well.
The merchants left grumbling, then immediately brightened and hurried off when a servant from another knight called to them.
"If you spot a merchant who has brought meat, do not let him slip away—bring him to me."
"Leave it to us, Sir Knight. No one takes meat more seriously than we do."
Rex answered with a laugh.
Unlike the cold first impression he had given, he quickly warmed to Eugene.
'There is no value more noble than strength.'
It was a motto shared by dark elves. Born into a warrior culture, they naturally viewed Eugene's strength with great favor.
He was practical and unpretentious in a way knights rarely were, and he even cared about feeding his men. It was only natural that they grew close quickly.
After eating, most of the mercenaries relaxed. Some played cards or dice, while others sat with women who followed armies on their knees and laughed boisterously.
"Oh?"
Eugene, who had been strolling about the perimeter as if out for a walk, returned to his own encampment and came upon an interesting sight.
The dark elves had changed into ordinary clothes and were warming up in unusual poses. Some focused on working specific muscle groups.
'They know stretching and weight training?'
In this world, aside from himself and Homi, these were the first people he had seen doing such things.
'Tch!'
Rex clicked his tongue inwardly as Eugene studied them. He was all too familiar with the looks of people mocking his tribe's traditional training as ridiculous clowning.
"Sir Knight, do our methods look strange to you?"
His pride was still stung, and a slight edge entered Rex's voice.
"No. I'm just glad to see people who know how to train properly. Exactly! Swinging weapons around like a brute isn't enough. You need to know how to work and control your muscles the way you do."
"???"
Rex's eyes widened. The Chief Magistrate had been right: this knight was definitely a little strange.
Ten minutes later.
"There are exercises like this too?"
"Should I bend my arm this far?"
The dark elves formed a circle around Eugene. He was the first knight they had ever met who genuinely appreciated their tribe's traditional training methods.
What was more, the muscle-training methods Eugene demonstrated were by no means inferior, even when compared to their own, which had been honed and refined for generations.
"You called it a plank? It is so simple, yet I can feel my entire body working at once. This is an incredible training method."
Rex lay prone beside the others, unable to hide his admiration. The posture was humiliating for a proud warrior, but because Eugene had demonstrated it himself, everyone accepted it easily.
"As expected of someone from an assassin tradition with such a long history. You understood how useful this is immediately."
"Sir Knight, this is the first time I've learned that the compliment 'long tradition' can be used in the same sentence as 'assassins.'"
The dark elves laughed.
Creating a one-on-one situation in an unexpected place was easier than breaking through hundreds of enemies to kill a commander.
To make those opportunities possible, the Black Hand Tribe had researched secret methods of twisting their bodies into unnatural shapes and stripping away fat until little but muscle remained.
The tribe's traditional conditioning methods, developed in that process, resembled stretching, yoga, and weight training on Earth. It was a kind of convergent evolution.
"Do other assassin groups have similar methods?"
"Assassins rarely organize into groups in the first place. There has certainly never been another case like ours, where an entire tribe banded together and made it a livelihood."
Assassination was work taken up by people at rock bottom even among wanted criminals, robbers, and bandits.
What was unusual was a case like the Black Hand dark elf tribe, which had researched and honed assassination techniques to their limits as a martial discipline.
"That's fortunate. It'd be troublesome if everyone and their brother knew such excellent training methods. Good things ought to be monopolized by those on close terms, don't you think?"
"Calling us close... I am honored."
Beside the delighted Rex, now more than ten dark elves were doing planks.
"This is really quite good."
"It requires little space and makes no noise."
The dark elves who tried it were amazed by how efficiently the static exercise worked muscles throughout the body at once.
"We've only covered one exercise. It's far too early to be amazed."
"Please show us the rest!"
"I'm truly looking forward to it, Sir Knight."
Within a single day, Eugene was laughing and talking comfortably with all twenty dark elves. He took hold of their legs, shoulders, and forearms to correct their form.
"Do this part like this. Make sure your shoulder blades don't lift."
"Ah, that's the feeling."
Dark elves didn't merely dislike humans touching their bodies—they loathed it. Yet everyone accepted Eugene's touch with smiles, as if it were only natural.
After several days of smooth marching, the subjugation force managed to capture a bandit scout alive.
"You'll come to a fork with a large boulder! Th-there, if you go left, there's a large encampment. If you go right, there's a sm-small encampment and a bandit knight."
"How many at each, roughly?"
"Uh, w-well, so... the large one has about sixty?! About sixty. The small one has about twenty."
"Where are the rest of them?"
The adjutants asked, thrusting their swords forward.
The bandits' total numbers should have been seven or eight times that.
"Eek! That's all I know! Please! Please, just spare my life!"
"Take him away and continue the interrogation."
The captain of the guard gave a generous reward to the mercenaries who had captured the scout, then sent out messengers.
"Inform the knights. Tell the mercenaries to clear a path for them."
The rules of engagement had already been agreed upon. The heavily armored knights and their followers charged straight through the gaps opened among the mercenaries.
"Crush those bandit scum!"
"Honor to the knights!"
The mercenaries cheered on cue, and some of the knights raised their weapons in answer.
The mercenaries were happy to have the knights slaughter the enemy for them, while the knights were happy to monopolize the glory. Everyone benefited.
After the knights departed, the guard captain was startled when he saw Eugene's camp.
"Did you inform Sir Eugene of the discovery of the enemy positions?!"
"Yes! He said that enough knights had already sortied and that he would remain at camp to observe the situation."
"Whew!"
The captain of the guard sighed in relief. If a subordinate had forgotten to report the news and left the All-Conquering Knight behind by mistake, the captain would have been the one to bear all of Eugene's wrath.
"Thank you for letting us make easy money, good sirs!"
"Go work your fucking asses off for honor in our place!"
Once the knights were far enough away, the mercenaries' cheers turned insolent. Some lowered every finger of their waving hands except the middle one.
Meanwhile, the guard captain could not rest easy.
"I've made them promise again and again not to use torches, but I have no idea whether they'll listen."
The knights' victory was a given; what worried the guard captain was a forest fire.
The art of the surprise attack lay in causing initial chaos, scattering the enemy in all directions, and then trampling them.
Throwing torches onto tents could kill people and create chaos at the same time, so it was a standard tactic in surprise attacks.
However, when fighting in a forest, if it was overdone, it could spread into a forest fire. This place was especially dangerous, with frequent winds and many trees that caught fire easily.
"I experienced it before, when I participated as a mercenary elsewhere. It was a spectacle—I'd barely swung my sword a few times and more than half the enemy burned to death."
An adjutant who had come from the mercenaries shared his experience.
"Then wasn't it a good result in the end? You routed the enemy easily."
"The subjugation force nearly burned to death too. Then the fire spread into the neighboring lord's mountains and burned his hunting grounds to the ground. The employer went bankrupt paying compensation."
"What the hell!"
Everyone was still laughing at the absurd ending when the order to advance finished making its way through the subjugation force.
"What are you dawdling for? Move out at once!"
"Do you think you were paid good money just to take a stroll?"
The mercenary captains hurried their men along. Hanging too far back and doing nothing would look bad, so they at least had to show some energy.
"Sir, is it all right if we continue moving with you?"
Following the marching orders, Eugene had approached the guard captain's side.
"No one knows how the situation will unfold, so at least one knight ought to stay with the main force. I've already earned more than enough honor, so I'll focus solely on the success of the subjugation."
"Thank you!"
Trailing after the knights obsessed with glory would only sap his strength with little to gain.
The guard captain, never imagining that a knight of Eugene's caliber harbored such shallow self-interest, was simply moved.
As they all marched together, a faint trumpet sound came from beyond the forest.
"It seems they've swept away the bandits' encampment."
"Isn't that obvious? It's not just one or two, but four knights. Four!"
"..."
While everyone else laughed, only the captain of the guard and a few sharp-eared adjutants went rigid.
"What's the matter?"
Sensing the unusual atmosphere, Eugene asked.
"That is not the trumpet call for victory. It is a call for reinforcements."
The guard captain spoke with a face full of disbelief.
"The knights are struggling against bandits from the very start?"
"I don't understand it either. Sir Galia has once cut down ten mercenaries by himself, and Sir Kain is a knight who single-handedly subjugated a goblin den led by a hobgoblin."
Even in Eugene's eyes, those knights were by no means mediocre fighters.
"First the dhampir knight dies in the opening clash, and now this. It feels as though something is cursed about this subjugation."
Eugene's muttering was cut off by another trumpet call for reinforcements that rang out. It seemed he would have to abandon his plan of earning money the easy way.