Over the Wall
“What are you talking about? Is your employer some kind of god?” “He did have strength like a god’s, sure... But he still bleeds when a spear runs him through, and he dies when an arrow hits him. Scaling a wall with a handful of men? However much they're paying, that's insane.” That was how experienced mercenaries judged it — the whole attempt looked like suicide.
Yet the mercenaries who followed Johan didn't waver, as though bewitched by something.
Faith was never rational to begin with. Nor was it something you could explain to another person.
The mercenaries who had trailed Johan all the way from the city carried a strong faith: that if they stuck behind this knight, they would never lose.
A conviction that solid didn't spring up overnight just because the man kicked down a tent pillar with his bare foot. It was forged by working alongside him, matching his rhythm, watching and experiencing each and every one of his actions up close.
Mercenaries who didn't know that could only see the ones joining the raid as lunatics.
The weakest point of any castle was its gate. That went without saying — it was built for people to come and go.
Which was precisely why so many methods were deployed to protect it: raising the gate's position higher, digging a moat beneath it, throwing up a small barbican nearby...
Saint-Darge Castle wasn't built to that standard. Its moat was on the shallow side, and its towers were crude.
But a castle was still a castle. Anyone who charged straight at the main gate — Johan included — stood a very good chance of becoming a bag of meat.
Climb the wall, then open the gate.
“Fog's coming in.”
Suettel had stepped out to speak, his face gone pale from preparing the spell. In the distance, fog was rolling in to blanket the castle.
The soldiers on the wall were visibly flustered by the sudden blanket of thick mist.
“When do we attack?”
“We'll repeat this a few times, then go in just before dawn.”
“Wouldn't midnight be better?”
“The darker it is, the harder it gets for the ones attacking. The terrain, too...”
Johan was betting on the hour just before sunrise — the time when vigilance slackened the most. The others had been thinking of night, but to Johan's eye, night was the more dangerous window.
A shield on his back, a mace, longsword, and dagger at his belt.
Everyone on the raiding party had stripped their load down to the bare minimum. Johan even considered ditching his chain mail over the noise — but he didn't think it would come to that.
He led from the very front, cutting through the fog. It seemed wisest to be up the wall before the pale light of dawn arrived.
Clamp—
A powerful grip wasn't only good for swinging weapons or tearing the arm off a troll. It worked just as well for crawling up a castle wall.
“...!”
The mercenaries following below were awestruck by the speed of Johan's ascent.
Climbing bare-handed, without a single piece of climbing gear — and that fast!
Now they finally understood why he'd refused the siege ladders as dead weight. With strength like that, they were simply unnecessary.
All that remained was for Johan to reach the top and throw down the rope.
“Huh?”
At the top, Johan froze solid. Two soldiers were leaning against the parapet, yawning.
The spot on the wall they'd chosen to climb hadn't been picked at random. Behind it lay Gerdolf's hard work.
“You talk. Good spot.”
“What the... GYAAAAH! KHHAAAAH! Get that thing away! I told you to take it away, you crazy bastard! I'll talk! I'm talking! GYAAAAH!”
Gerdolf, it turned out, had a surprising talent for interrogation.
By the time the captured raiders had been worked over, they were a wreck, spilling everything they knew about the castle's interior — the location of the sally port that led outside, the rough layout of the keep. Johan strained to commit every detail to memory.
The soldiers' deployment, however, was beyond even Johan's reach.
The rotations shifted constantly, and with the raiders captured, they'd surely have changed them again. Foolishly trusting outdated information could get a man killed.
And yet here they were, the very first thing he met at the top.
Luck, it seemed, had abandoned him completely.
“...What the hell?”
The seated soldier blinked up at Johan. The fog was thick, and he was dead tired after an all-night watch. A man suddenly vaulting over the wall out of nowhere couldn't have looked anything but absurd.
That slow reaction cost him his life.
Thud.
The mace came around and the soldier crumpled. The one beside him finally snapped out of it and scrambled for his spear — but Johan's boot came down on it first.
“Intr—”
One blow to the chest, one to the throat.
The thing Kaegal had drilled into him most relentlessly was the human body's vital points. An assassin couldn't kill his targets honorably in the open like a battlefield knight. More often than not, he had to kill quietly, in the dark.
That was where these techniques came in — not hacking a man down with a sword, but snuffing out his voice with a quick dagger thrust to a spot that made screaming impossible.
“Kkheh...”
The soldier gurgled like a deflating bellows. Johan shoved the body aside and swept his surroundings. There was no one else.
Thump.
The rope came down from above, and the mercenaries exhaled in relief. Johan's sudden disappearance had set their hearts pounding.
Once every mercenary was up and over, Johan gave the order.
“To the sally port. Open the gate.”
The main gate was enormous, and opening it was loud. There was no way to do it without drawing every eye in the castle.
Seize the sally port before the enemy caught on, bring the soldiers waiting outside in — and that would be the end of it.
“Isn't it a bit too quiet?”
“Maybe they're all asleep?”
“They haven't been touched in days. Wouldn't surprise me...”
Johan and the mercenaries descended inside the wall and ran through the outer bailey. The dead silence was what set their hearts racing.
They were moving toward the sally port when shouts erupted behind them.
“We're under attack! We're under attack!”
“The wall's been taken!”
“?!”
Johan and the mercenaries — who had taken no wall whatsoever — couldn't help but gape at the cry.
“Are those bastards out of their minds?!”
“No. They must have found the soldiers missing. We move fast!”
Johan pushed the mercenaries onward. They nodded, faces taut with tension. From here on out, it didn't matter where the enemy came from. Nothing would surprise them.
“Who goes there! Identify yourself!”
“!”
The men they ran into didn't attack first — they demanded to know who Johan was. The fog was thickening by the moment. Past a certain distance, you simply couldn't tell who was who.
“...Cut them down!”
At Johan's command, the mercenaries surged forward like beasts. A wolf pack led by a lion flattens a flock of sheep in the blink of an eye.
The soldiers who had called out thinking they were friends went down screaming.
“Move! Unless you want to eat an arrow!”
Even without Johan's urging, the mercenaries already knew.
Inside the outer wall stood another, smaller inner keep.
Compared to the outer wall, it was embarrassingly small for something called a castle — a ring of wall barely two or three stories tall around a tower — but it had everything a proper defense required.
A gate, walls, towers and walkways built to strike at enemies who breached the bailey.
In a situation like this, arrows flying their way was nothing to be surprised about.
“K-Knight, sir.”
“?”
“I don't think this is the sally port...!”
The thick fog had thrown Johan and the mercenaries into confusion just as thoroughly as the enemy.
They should have been headed for the sally port's location. Instead, there was an open low gate right in front of them. One look told them it was the inner keep's gate.
Don't tell me we circled back to the inner keep's gate?!
The inner gate stood on the opposite side from the main gate — completely the wrong direction from the sally port.
Johan weighed his options.
Turn back and hunt for the sally port? Or find some stretch of wall right now, climb it, and run?
The enemy will have caught on by now and started moving too...
But there wasn't even time to deliberate. Soldiers began pouring out of the open inner gate.
Fortunately, the fog seemed to have kept them from noticing Johan.
“Boss. That man there look like noble.”
Gerdolf pointed at a man standing in the middle of nearly twenty soldiers. The gaudy outfit, so unlike the others, and the commanding gestures marked him as at least a centurion.
“...Right. Grab him first!”
Johan made the call on instinct. The fog had everyone scrambling in blind confusion — and just as Johan couldn't make heads or tails of things, neither could the enemy.
“Kill them!”
With a short battle cry, Johan charged in behind his shield.
When enemies materialized out of the fog with no warning, some of the defenders shrieked and dropped their weapons outright.
A spear was batted away with a screech of metal. The distance closed, and the mace crushed someone's bone. Two men fell, bleeding.
Fog or no fog, Johan overwhelmed his opponents. Any spear thrust at him got swatted aside with brute force and then answered with a single, bone-shattering blow.
Fear began to spread through the soldiers. And the impenetrable fog — impossible to read, impossible to know what was happening — only magnified it.
“Fight, damn you! There aren't many of them!”
The man who seemed to command them screamed himself hoarse, but five or six were already slinking toward the shadows to flee.
They had no idea what was really happening, but the wall had apparently been breached, and the enemy soldiers had apparently made it all the way here...
Wasn't it better to just run?
Thwack! Thwack!
One knight was making that decision considerably easier for them. Gerdolf swept his greatsword in a wide arc and took the head clean off a soldier who'd hesitated at the front. Blood fountained, and terror spread through everyone nearby like plague.
“Move. You die.”
Gerdolf growled it at the soldiers. The words came out clumsy — and that made them all the more effective. The soldiers found themselves backing away without meaning to.
“Protect me! Anyone who runs will be executed! Anyone who runs—!”
As the two knights — Johan and Gerdolf — carved through the soldiers like a prow through waves, the garrison commander went white to the lips.
He'd assumed his numbers would be enough to hold. But the momentum coming at him was anything but normal.
“You! Run and get reinforcements! Gasro! Earn what I paid you and your friends in silver! Hold those bastards!”
“Understood, my lord.”
Even as soldiers broke and fled, a handful held firm around the commander. They wore different gear from the common soldiers — and longswords at their hips.
Swordsmen from a sword guild?
Poor soldiers and mercenaries rarely carried longswords. A spear or a shield was simply more practical for men like them.
Merely wielding a longsword was proof of training.
Gasro stepped forward, sword raised.
Each man's crossguard bore an identical ornament. Sword guilds sometimes marked their members that way — these men were clearly from the same one.
Johan tensed. Kaegal's warning came back to him.
“Watch yourself around swordsmen from the sword guilds. They're skilled with a blade, and they know how to fight men stronger than themselves. They deal with monsters too — you don't think they can't handle you?”
Skill within a guild surely ran the whole spectrum, but a truly exceptional swordsman could be dangerous.
Tang!
Johan struck first — probing the man's skill. His mace shot out from behind the shield, slashing down at the swordsman's torso on the diagonal.
What a brainless knight.
The swordsman grinned inwardly and cut sideways with his longsword. Deflect the brute's strength, redirect his swing off-line, then seize the initiative.
Crack.
With the sound of a skull bursting open, the swordsman dropped.