Delivering Glory
"Let's just kill him, Sir Knight!"
The warriors' reaction was only natural. A man they'd dragged in amid all that chaos suddenly reappearing and offering to reveal Boriska's location? Suspicion was the only sane response.
And honestly, Johan was a little nonplussed himself.
He'd released Sir Botan with the intention of sending him off to bite and claw until his old companions tore each other apart—not because he'd banked on an actual betrayal.
Freed, the man had scurried straight off to commit treason. It had unraveled so smoothly that Johan himself half suspected a trick. Aclada was staring at him with an expression of mingled awe.
"This wasn't what I was aiming for."
"Even so, it's remarkable, Sir Knight. Fortune clearly favors you."
"With the werewolves running mad all around us right now, I could do without the..."
"Sir Knight! May we shoot?"
"No. Hold your fire. I'll hear him out."
To Johan and the warriors, it looked absurd—surely even so, a betrayal this easy?—but from Botan's side of things, it made perfect sense.
It had started with being chosen—a knight who barely knew the Eastern language, picked for nothing more than a nimble body and thrown into a deadly infiltration—and it ended with him returning in failure to insults and jeers.
"Did that knight even go where he was sent? Or did he just lose his way somewhere and come crawling back? Look at him, dressed like a beggar."
"See, that's why you pick a man who actually speaks Eastern. Castle-bred types are useless."
Even with blades a breath from being drawn, Boriska had held Botan back. The stated reason was that no fight could be allowed before the hunt, but his heart thought otherwise.
"Where did he take a hit? Where did he lose his weapons?"
Boriska suspected Botan. Johan's intent had landed precisely where aimed—and layered on top of Boriska's born-and-bred suspicion, the effect multiplied many times over.
For Botan, Boriska and Johan could not help but be weighed against each other.
One had fought with honor from the tournament onward and shown mercy even to a captured prisoner. The other...
Johan's face, as he listened, twisted into something strange.
'...So that's how it looks from the outside!'
"Wouldn't running have been better than betraying?"
"Done openly, an arrow would've found my back. Sir Boriska is no fool. I had to behave so as not to be suspected..."
"I'm not all that curious how you shook off suspicion. Tell me this: how you got here, and why this bedlam is happening."
Aclada, who had been listening, cut in.
"How did you tail them?"
"Tail them...? I did no such thing."
"That's impossible..."
But it was the truth.
The reason Boriska's company could enter this forest at all was no pursuit—it was Galambos finding werewolf spoor. Or to be precise, hunters friendly with Galambos returning with word of the beasts.
Humiliation washed across Aclada's face. A centaur, out-tracked by a human—on the steppe, no less. The hand around his bowstaff trembled.
"His skill's better than I expected."
"Only this once, Sir Knight. Normally..."
"Fine, fine. So why are the werewolves raising hell?"
"That, too, is the work of that Eastern Ranger!"
Done properly, a werewolf hunt should have unfolded with the caution the centaurs described: slipping in and out of the forest, striking only in the hours when the beasts were weakest. Whittled down that way, even the werewolf's master would have had no answer.
But that was a campaign measured in long spans of time.
Never knowing when interference might arrive, Boriska had wanted to drag the Werewolf King out quickly and finish him.
Pressed by his knight, Galambos had worked strange wonders, passing them off as Eastern Ranger secrets. He turned loose a few pigs—hauled in from who knew where—into the forest, then declared with total confidence that the werewolves would shortly descend into frenzy.
Not only the knight but the mercenaries had thought, does that even make sense? And yet, remarkably, the werewolves had begun raving from the stroke of midnight.
"Is that a known method?"
"No... the Eastern Rangers' secrets run strange and peculiar enough..."
"And Boriska?"
"Sir Boriska and the rest are lying in wait on the far side. When every last werewolf bursts out, the Werewolf King will come with them—they mean to take him then. Those people don't even know you've come."
"How do you know that?"
"I've done nothing but watch for my chance... Every opening I got, I circled the area and looked."
In truth, the two companies hadn't arrived all that far apart. That Botan had spied Johan's party from a distance was pure luck.
The moment he saw them, he had seized a horse and ridden flat out.
"Trust me!"
"How am I to trust a man who crept into someone else's camp?"
"He's worth verifying. I'll go and see for myself."
The warriors startled at Johan's words.
"It's dangerous for you to go alone, Sir Knight!"
"If there's a trap, going alone makes it easier to slip out of. I raised the matter, so I'll be the one to check it."
Johan's confidence crushed the objections clean out of them. They nodded and offered no further protest.
"Sir Knight. Take Euclia at least. She'll be of use."
Euclia, sensing her moment, strained to demonstrate her worth in what she imagined was fluent Imperial.
"Imperial knights, I tear all. Tear very well."
"...Right. Two should be manageable. Botan. Lead us to where they're camped."
"Now that's damned clever. How'd you do it?"
"You know how much werewolves love the moon?"
"Everyone knows that."
"Heard it once from a Ranger I used to run with. That man was a veteran hunter who'd put down more werewolves than I can count, and he swore the beasts lose their minds over moonstone."
"Huh. Really?"
"Really. Monsters are sensitive to scent as it is, but moonstone hits them worst of all. So I mixed ground moonstone into a lure scent, the kind made to draw monsters in."
"I see. So that's why they've gone berserk like that."
"That's it. A pig goes loose in the forest, the werewolves pounce on it—and every wolf smeared with that scent rubs it off on the next..."
Galambos preened, showing off his learning. Even the savage mercenaries of the Arrowhead Company listened in open wonder.
"No wonder the knight rates him so highly."
"Don't go coveting it. You reap what you scatter."
"When the werewolves come, it's us who fight—isn't he getting a bit above himself?"
At the grumbling, Galambos waved his hands as if fending off a blow.
"None of your clumsy threats. Push that, and I may bolt on the spot."
No mercenary alive wanted a running duel with the Eastern Rangers—in pitch darkness, with a forest at their backs besides.
And Galambos's part was not yet finished.
"...So. When's this Werewolf King of yours due?"
"Soon. You'll know him by his howl. Follow that sound and you'll find him."
"Is he so different from the common ones?"
"Bigger, and different in color. Leader monsters each have their own quirks—hard to generalize. But he's far faster, stronger, and cleverer than your ordinary werewolf."
Galambos moistened his throat with a swallow of beer and went on.
"But a beast gone mad is easy to bait into a trap. Just do exactly as I say."
"That one. Can't we kill him once this is over?"
"Why not? We vouched for him, and now his arrogance scrapes the sky. Son of a bitch."
"So it wasn't a lie, then?"
"......"
Botan's face soured. And here he had believed Johan trusted him...
"You move wrong, I pluck eyes out."
"Your Imperial is coming along nicely."
■ ■■■.
At the praise, Euclia waved her hands with a bashful expression. Botan listened, utterly at a loss, then spoke.
"I told it true. That's their camp."
Like the centaurs' camp, this one was laid by practiced hands—wrapped so that hardly a thread of light escaped outward. Had Botan not led them in, they might never have found it.
Now that the enemy's position was truly in hand, Johan found himself hesitating.
The timing was delicate.
With werewolves rampaging all around, falling on these men could, if luck turned truly sour, end in mutual destruction.
Just now the beasts were mad, howling at nothing but the moon—but monsters were creatures that could turn in an instant. The scent of blood and the clamor of battle might well draw them in a flood.
'Report the position, and the warriors will strike these men before they deal with the werewolves.'
Johan deliberated. Beside him, Euclia fidgeted, asking '■? ■■?' over and over. He patted her back as if to say all was well.
"Hold. Come no closer."
"?"
"The Eastern Ranger said traps are laid. Walk only where I walk."
"Ah. So this path was meant to draw the werewolves in... wait."
At that instant, Johan felt a wicked notion graze past his mind.
■- ■■■■!
Johan and Euclia circled the outskirts, calling the werewolves out. Johan outright drew his bow and loosed at the beasts' arms and shoulders.
"Balkalmur!"
Johan was learning to handle the demon's power with growing precision. Balkalmur conjured the optimal outcome even where a true aim seemed impossible.
The werewolves nearby broke off mid-howl and crowded in thicker and thicker. Johan signaled to Euclia.
"This is—this is truly..."
"What. Thinking of changing sides again?"
"Do not insult me with such nonsense!"
Botan, caught up in the work, was dumbfounded—then dead serious. Whatever else, he had no thought of crawling back to Boriska.
But Johan's idea was genuinely staggering.
He meant to herd every werewolf pack in the vicinity and drive them straight into that camp!
"This way! This way, you wolves! Come on, this way!"
Ever since he had learned magic, a strange force had settled into Johan's voice. Each time he roared, the werewolves veered as though lashed by a whip and followed.
"Let's go! Let's carry glory to Sir Boriska and his knights!"
■■■!
Euclia howled after him, thundering at his heels, face lit with pure delight. Unlike Botan, for a centaur this sort of thing was joy itself.
"Hold up. That sounded like a human voice."
Galambos was on his feet in a heartbeat. Something wrong was threaded between the werewolf howls.
"Bad beer?"
"Quiet. A human voice, I tell you..."
"The beasts howl like that—anyone could mishear."
"...Someone's here! The centaurs, it has to be!"
"What? You—didn't you swear you'd be the fastest?"
"Centaurs can be fast too! What law says I'm the only one?"
"We'd best report to the knight."
"The knight would have a shit fit."
"...Wait."
"What, now you say don't report?"
"No. Hoofbeats..."
The thunder rolling through the ground was swelling. Galambos's face began to curdle.
"Werewolves!"
"Damn it all!"
The sentries circling the perimeter spotted them first, and they screamed themselves hoarse.
"Are those fucking wolf bastards out of their minds?!"
"Hey, hunter! You said they wouldn't come this way!"
"Shut your mouths and get ready to fight!"
Galambos was rattled too. How in all the world—?
But the werewolves were already upon them, hurtling in hell-bent. The mercenaries drew steel from behind their barricades.
"Scatter! Scatter!"
"Shouldn't we group up?!"
"When they're maddened, you scatter, you idiots! Stop arguing and listen for once! And fetch the knight! Tell him to come try his hand at a werewolf!"
With the werewolves hauling every eye toward them, Johan slipped unopposed into the heart of the camp. One mercenary, gaping blankly at the onrushing beasts, met Johan's gaze.
"Where would Sir Boriska be?"
"Uh...?"
Thwump!
Put a hole in a man, and he grows talkative. With a scream, the mercenary pointed the way with his hand.
"Much obliged!"
Johan drove his horse onward. Faces came running toward him from the direction he'd been shown, torchlight first—Sir Boriska and the other knights.
"Boriska of House Petteo! Come at me. I'll grant you your chance to wash away the disgrace!"
"?!"
Boriska nearly jumped out of his skin. The very man he'd been itching to take his revenge on, appearing before him out of nowhere?
But shock had not stripped him of his judgment.
"Wheel to the sides and cut off his escape! I'll take him myself!"
■!
Euclia flung her spear with a curse. The knight wheeling to flank doubled away from its shriek and threw himself aside.
"You cursed centaur bastard..."
"Balkalmur!"