The Pirates Have Lost Their Minds
So the pirates had gone mad.
The report caught Johan off guard as well. What on earth was going on now?
Yet once he heard the details, even Johan had no choice but to believe it.
"...So the pirates have lost their minds, then."
A handful of the pirates — men of minor noble birth — had fled to him. Crying out their surrender, they insisted that their rights and their safety be guaranteed.
Had they been mere pirates, it would have been nonsense. But as nobles, it was a plea that could be honored. More important than any of that, however, was something else entirely.
Why had they fled in the first place?
"Chaos has broken out! They opened the castle gate and the fortress has finally fallen—"
"The fortress has fallen?"
"Yes."
Astonishingly, the pirates had taken Idra Castle, the Marquis's own seat. The same fortress that had stood unblemished through more than a month of relentless assaults had been taken.
Not by honest means, of course. The pirates had scoured the surrounding area, hunting down the relatives of everyone who worked inside the walls, then hammered away at them without pause. Intimidation, bribery, persuasion...
Even so, it had been a hard road. These were heathen corsairs, after all — persuasion was harder still. But in the end, a traitor emerged. One of the Marquis's own chamberlains.
The post of chamberlain to a magnate like the Marquis was itself reserved for men of noble birth, which made them acutely sensitive to the rumors swirling around them. And ironically, it was Johan who had pushed the man to turn his coat. Mistaking Johan's host for a pirate relief force, the chamberlain had surrendered in a bid to save his own skin.
"If the fortress has fallen, shouldn't they be plundering it by now? Why come here to surrender?"
"Well, you see..."
The Nusad brothers had long harbored grievances against Ahir. It was only natural that the scions of an old and storied house of the Baccilid Kingdom should resent handing command to an outsider.
And when Johan's scheming set that resentment alight, the brothers began to move more boldly. Their plan was to seize Ahir and his loyalists and strip him of command.
They hadn't intended to kill anyone. The idea was merely to take them captive and coerce them into surrendering authority — a thing well within the bounds of what they could manage.
...Except that the day they chose to act happened to be the very day Ahir opened the castle gate and took the enemy's fortress.
Ahir, for security's sake, had told no one — not even his own men — about the bribery. The result was that everything tangled itself beyond repair.
The fortress had fallen first. When the gates swung open and the enemy's banners rose over the walls, the Marquis nearly went mad with terror.
He fled with nothing but his bodyguards, and the remaining soldiers, their will broken, collapsed at once.
Then civil war erupted inside the walls.
The Nusad brothers led their warriors in an assault. Ahir met them with his own men, but he was too unprepared to hold. In the end, he too fled somewhere with only his guards.
At that, the pirates who had followed Ahir or stood with his faction began fleeing in fear as well. The Nusad brothers tried their best to talk them down, but such words were never going to hold.
The fugitives were no better off, of course. Enemies on every side.
"So they came to me to surrender?"
It was better to surrender to a proper noble's army, after all. Fall into mercenary hands, and one might die soaked in every humiliation imaginable.
"Yes..."
"......"
However fog-shrouded the battlefield might be, no one could have predicted a mess like this.
Even his vassals were too stunned to find their voices. The change had come far too suddenly.
For now, the only one who could make a decision was Johan. He cried out with iron resolve.
"Summon the vassals! We attack the pirates at once!"
"...As you command!"
The vassals who followed Johan shouted with brightened faces. In chaos like this, the one who shone brightest was a lord one could trust. To them, Johan seemed overflowing with certainty.
How could anyone hold such conviction in a moment like this, unless God had willed it?
Ugh. What a filthy, tangled mess.
Johan ran through the situation in his head. So much had happened at once that even he felt his head spinning.
First — if we don't take the Marquis's seat now, this becomes a headache. If those pirate bastards hole up inside... what if we can't crack it? The Marquis absolutely has to be caught. And Ahir too.
However tangled his mind, his body moved without a flicker of hesitation. In no time at all, the vassals had roused the army and readied it to march.
"By the sacred charge the Lord has granted me, we shall root out these pirates. Follow me!"
A thunderous roar answered him. Across the plain, a great host began to charge.
However much the pirates had bled each other thin, they still held the castle. Johan was hardly reckless enough to simply hurl his men at it.
He picked out a few dozen of his best-turned-out men and galloped ahead. The pirates, startled by riders bearing down on them out of nowhere, panicked.
"Envoys?"
There were still plenty of pirates outside the walls, but they uncertainly stepped aside. The riders simply did not look like enemies, no matter how one looked at them.
"Open the gate!"
At Johan's booming command in the Eastern tongue — so bold, so supremely confident — the pirates hesitated, then opened the gate. Surely no enemy would come marching up that brazenly? Besides, there were only a few dozen of them.
"The gate is open. Charge!"
"!?"
Johan drove straight through. At the sight of cavalry smashing through the gate passage and thundering toward them, the pirates scattered in terror.
Right on cue, the main host led by Johan appeared from the far side of the castle. At the sight of a force numbering in the thousands advancing in perfect order, the pirates outside the walls nearly jumped out of their skins.
"Seal the gate! The enemy is upon us!"
The pirates, it seemed, had never properly secured the castle at all. Even with the gate standing open, not more than a few dozen had poured out. They were clearly still lost in plunder and drink.
Johan cut them down, smashed them, trampled them. When Karamap howled savagely and raked with its claws, a pond of blood bloomed before the gate.
"I yield! I surrender!"
"Kill any man still holding a weapon!"
"My lord! We have come! Let us stand at the fore — we fear for your precious body!"
The vassals came galloping up, shouting as they took in Johan's blood-drenched figure. Johan paid it no mind.
"We push into the inner keep! Pin them down so none can escape!"
The inner keep of the castle was entered through a long, winding stair of gates — a design meant to deny any easy approach by an enemy. The Marquis's seat had honored that tradition faithfully.
Johan dismounted and, together with his knights, plunged into the keep's entrance. Pirates who had heard the news too late came out weapons in hand, only to scream.
"Drop the portcullis! The gate—"
The winch came loose and the great door began to plunge downward — but Johan caught it with one hand and heaved it back up.
CRUNCH.
As the impossibly heavy gate rose under a single man's strength, several of the pirates wet themselves.
"Aaah... it's a demon! A demon has entered the castle!"
"Charge!"
At Johan's cry, the knights and mercenaries behind him surged forward. The pirates scattered through the keep were cut down where they stood.
"Hiiiik!"
Johan striding grimly out of the darkness looked like nothing so much as a demon spitting fire as it advanced from the black depths of hell itself.
The Nusad brothers had been plying the other chieftains and centurions who followed them with drink. The men were merrily, roaringly drunk.
"Pay no mind to that coward from House Mulke who ran! He was a useless dog either way. Tonight, let us enjoy this victory!"
"What's that noise outside?"
Puzzled by the commotion, the pirates opened the door — and a severed head came flying in. It belonged to one of the guards they had posted outside.
"What in the devil's—?!"
The centurion went white and drew his sword. He was a swordsman so gifted that few alive could match him blade to blade. But before the centurion could so much as swing, Johan's shield came around.
In the instant of impact, swordsmanship and finesse alike abandoned him; he simply went tumbling across the floor. Johan kicked the fallen centurion under the jaw. The man shuddered violently, then went still.
"Are you the nobles of House Nusad?"
"Wh... what is the meaning of this! Were we not in negotiations!"
Johan looked at the pirate who dared protest. The pirate suddenly felt a chill of dread.
Shhk!
The man's head parted cleanly from his body. Johan spoke with perfect calm.
"Since when do thieving dogs who live by plunder presume to address the Count of Yeats with such insolence?"
Questioned closely, it was admittedly a tangled matter. They were pirates, yes — but they had been in unofficial negotiations, technically...
Then again, ambiguous questions like that had always ended the moment one side won. There was no one left to appeal to, so what exactly was the problem?
Rather than give a long, convoluted answer for no reason, Johan had simply decided to shut their mouths for good.
After all, when one man dies, the rest tend to grow very quiet.
The knights standing behind him nodded with satisfied expressions. Their lord's authority was not something pirate scum had any right to trifle with.
"The... the soldiers outside...?"
The Nusad brothers asked with a flicker of hope. Perhaps the centurions commanding the pirates outside might somehow bring relief.
"They all surrendered or fled a long time ago."
"......"
The pirates' souls left their bodies. True, some of their number had fled or been wounded — but did any of this make sense?
There were hundreds inside the castle, and over a thousand outside it...
The battle was not fully finished until a full day had passed — the enemy's remnants were simply too numerous.
Pirates who had belatedly grasped the situation and tried anything at all were crushed where they stood, and those who tried to run were run down by the pursuit squads.
A force of near four thousand pirates had collapsed so utterly it was hard to believe they had ever existed.
And the easier the victory, the higher the vassals' loyalty and reverence soared toward the heavens.
"Congratulations on your great triumph, my lord!"
"Had it not been for you, who else could have defeated these godless pirates and delivered our brothers in the faith!"
When the pirates' tide was at its height, even the vassals had been too frightened to set foot beyond the walls. And now that host had scattered like dust on the wind in the space of a breath...
To the vassals' eyes, all of it could only look like the work of Johan's power. No feat short of divine favor could have accomplished it.
Even the vassals least devoted to Johan could not deny it. If it were not so, how could so vast a host of pirates have crumbled this easily?
Johan raised a fist, lightly. The vassals fell silent at once.
Their expectations are getting dangerously high...
Johan could feel the weight of the vassals' gazes and their hopes. They looked at him as though he were some god of war. Loyalty was welcome; excessive expectation did him no favors at all.
Frankly, taking the Marquis's castle had been closer to luck. Had the pirate bastards mounted a proper defense, he would never have cracked it.
Johan had originally planned, in the event he couldn't take the fortress, to simply lay siege and go hunting for the Marquis or Ahir first.
They'd gone and left the gates wide open celebrating their capture, so he'd pocketed an easy win — that was all this was.
But now that things had come this far, he had to satisfy the hopes his vassals had built up. Well, I wasn't expecting much either, but the castle just kind of fell into my lap was not the correct answer.
"I knew from the start that it would come to this."
"Oooh...!"
"As expected..."
"Days ago, I dreamt that a holy symbol fell from atop the castle walls. That dream revealed to me the coming of victory."
At Johan's words, the vassals crossed themselves as one. What had always turned an impossible victory into a plausible one was faith.
Not merely Johan's ability — the protection of God Himself!
And that was a story that suited the vassals' tastes far better. A capable lord was one thing, but a lord under divine favor was so much easier to follow, was he not?
"My lord. Marquis Crucho is a coward and a fallen man who conspired with pirates, surrendered, and handed over his own castle. A man like that has no right to rule this land."
"He speaks truly, my lord!"
The men who had once been Marquis Crucho's own vassals stepped forward most eagerly of all.
They meant to drive the wedge in deep, to make certain the Marquis could never return. The bishop of the Marquisate, seated among them, added his voice — he had clearly already received word from the Church.
"Well said, my lord. If you do not take this land under your rule, its countless brothers will suffer at the pirates' hands once more."
"We beg you — fold this land into your county and govern it!"
"Every vassal gathered here desires it!"
The voices merged, the fervor mounted. It was a kind of madness.
Madness-laced loyalty — the kind where any single vassal who dared speak a word of dissent might be torn apart on the spot!