Chapter 2 – The Valtrune Administration and the Three-Front Operation
1
Kingdom Calendar Year 1241, October.
Roughly a month on from Valtrune’s accession to the throne, in the hour the morning star rose, it was decided: the operation we’d been readying step by step under the new administration would be put into motion.
The Three-Front Operation: troops deployed on three fronts at once, against the Kingdom, the Republic, and the Empire’s northeast.
To the Kingdom side and the northeast, where fighting was all but certain, we’d send the main strength of the Imperial army and the Provisional Elite Corps both; to the Republic, Valtrune would go with the barest escort to hold talks with Raquel.
“…Word is the ship’s ready at the harbor city of Nocto.”
“Then the moment we’ve finished the final check on the Three-Front Operation, we set out.”
“Yes.”
Gathered in the room, besides Rune-sama and me, were the senior commanders of the units bound for Philnotes.
“Then let us begin the council. The Philnotes front first.”
Of the three fronts, the one with the greatest urgency was the deployment to the Kingdom side. This time, holding Philnotes, encircled by the Kingdom’s army, out of the Kingdom’s hands was the single most important item in her mind.
“Ritziareite. A week ago a request for relief came to the Empire from Philnotes. How stand the Provisional Elite Corps and the Imperial army since then?”
“Yes. Preparations for the march on Philnotes are already under way across every unit. Within six hours, the whole force earmarked for the Kingdom front can be made to leave the Imperial capital.”
“Good… The Kingdom’s army is said to have arrayed itself in an unbroken ring around Philnotes. Your task is to drive the Kingdom’s forces encircling Philnotes into retreat. Bear in mind: I am by no means telling you to annihilate them.”
“Understood.”
She laid a hand softly on Ritziareite’s shoulder as she nodded gravely.
“If Philnotes falls, it becomes a bridgehead for the Kingdom’s army to invade the Empire. That, above all, we must prevent.”
“Ha! I’ll hold Philnotes without fail, if it costs me this life.”
The Empire had already declared war on the Kingdom. And now, for the Kingdom’s army to set its sights on Philnotes, which had, if only tacitly, bound itself in cooperation with the Empire, was the natural flow of things. Philnotes was the heart of the continent, its borders meeting all three great powers: Kingdom, Empire, and Republic. Whether we surrendered it to the Kingdom or held it would tip the whole course of the war to come.
“Forgive me. I keep handing you the heaviest of loads, every time.”
“Not at all. I take it as proof of how far you trust me, Lady Valtrune, and I only wish to answer that faith. Whatever the order, if it is your word, I will give everything to see it done!”
Ritziareite declared it, her voice ringing.
“It’s a genuine comfort to have you. Until I return from the Republic, I leave the Empire’s defense and the support of our allies in your hands.”
“Leave it to me.”
Ritziareite, who had held overall command of the Provisional Elite Corps, now stood over the greater part of the Imperial army as well. Keeping to the distribution of troops to each region that Linos, as Military Lord, had drawn up, she was making the fullest possible use of the numbers given her to carry out the most vital of tasks.
She turned her eye, too, to Petra, standing at Ritziareite’s side.
“Petra. You support her as well.”
“Yes. Take care on the road, Your Majesty.”
Petra didn’t spin the words out long; she answered with a flat, even expression. She, too, was the linchpin of the offensive when the mage units moved. To establish the upper hand in this Three-Front Operation’s all-out clash with the Kingdom’s army, her maneuvering would bear directly on the result. A rolling wave-attack from the overwhelming firepower of the dragon-mount units and the mage units together. Set the Empire’s two greatest strengths working in balance, and it would be possible to overpower the Kingdom outright, to leave it helpless.
The strength was more than adequate. If there was one point to worry over—
“The choke point in the Philnotes relief would be the area around Laivan Ravine, I take it?”
“It would. If the Kingdom’s army has read our movements and stationed troops, that’s the only place they’d do it.”
Past the Empire’s Dyrst region, over Laivan Ravine set along the Imperial border, lay our objective: Philnotes. There were detours, true, but if the Kingdom’s army had seized every road in the vicinity, the danger of them was little different from driving straight through Laivan Ravine.
“Just before we push into Laivan Ravine, we’ll set aside time to sweep for the enemy. We mean to move with all caution, so as not to be taken by a one-sided ambush.”
“If the mages are cut down, the Empire’s only effective blow against the Kingdom becomes the dragon-mount soldiers. Keep that in your head as you march.”
“Understood.”
The points of concern reconciled, Ritziareite, surely brimming with confidence, laid a hand to her chest and bowed her head to Emperor Valtrune.
“This time we were given ample time to gather and train our troops. That is all thanks to you, Lady Valtrune. Our thanks. The present Military Lord reckoned that in the fight at Philnotes our strength stands even with the Kingdom’s army, or the Empire a shade ahead. There will be no oversights.”
When she passed on the substance of her talk with Linos, a faint tinge of relief settled into Rune-sama’s expression.
“I’m glad the troops are in perfect order. And it makes me happy to see Linos giving his all as Military Lord.”
The final say on the Imperial army, Valtrune had entrusted wholly to Linos. It wasn’t that she stayed clear of military matters altogether and left them untended. Short a span as it was, she’d watched the workings of Linos, the man she’d set in the Military Lord’s seat down to the fine detail, satisfied herself, and judged him a man she could hand the Imperial army to in full. That was what her trust rested on.
“Al. Linos is exceedingly capable, but he’s not long in the Military Lord’s post. So if ever you think he needs a hand, tell me at once.”
“Of course.”
That she meant to see Linos supported by way of me was, in its own way, her particular thoughtfulness. Linos was a man hard on others and harder still on himself. His pride as a first-rate Imperial noble ran high too, and having been named Military Lord on the strength of his ability, he’d find it difficult to breathe a word of complaint to the Emperor.
His appointment had come of dismissing Duke Felsdorf, long seated in the Military Lord’s chair, in the grandest terms. Linos bore the weight of succeeding an old hand who’d wielded tremendous sway within the Empire. Given his own temperament, and under the Valtrune administration besides, he could not afford to have the impression take hold that ‘the present Military Lord is short on experience, not to be relied on.’ I fixed it in my mind to give him every support I could.
And the talk shifted to the matter of the civil war.
“Next is the confrontation with Duke Felsdorf in the Theresia region. Al. Could you explain how the deployment of troops to the Theresia region stands?”
“Yes. As to the Theresia region, General Epika set out for the Theresia front before dawn today, at the head of the strength required.”
“Wasn’t the departure set for tomorrow?”
“It seems that information leaked to the outside, so to catch the enemy off guard she moved the departure up by a day.”
“Information leaked… I see. If that’s how it is, then her changing the departure time makes sense.”
The battlefield that mattered was not Philnotes alone. The northwest of the Valugan Empire. The Theresia region, home to Duke Felsdorf’s domain and to many of the nobles of his faction. By the revolt of the Duke Felsdorf who’d been stripped of the Military Lord’s post, the great majority of the domains in the Theresia region had, in effect, slipped entirely out from under the Empire’s rule. Leave the powers who defied Rune-sama’s will to run loose like this, and before long the running of the state itself would suffer. Nothing so showy as Philnotes, but in the Empire’s northwest too, between the Duke Felsdorf who sought to reclaim the Military Lord’s post and us who sought to unify the Empire’s will, the signal fire of war was quietly beginning to rise.
“Lady Valtrune. May I speak?”
“Of course. Say anything.”
“Then, presuming to… this becomes my own subjective opinion, but hearing the distribution of forces from the Military Lord, the impression I got was that the strength sent to the Theresia region is a touch too thin. Duke Felsdorf, I hear, has all but the whole of the Theresia region in hand and has readied numbers to rival the Imperial army. Are we truly all right?”
At Ritziareite’s counsel, she nodded too.
“It’s true, there’s no denying the strength we spared for the Theresia region is very small. It will surely be a hard fight. But as things stand, forced to split our strength across so many fronts, we simply come up short somewhere no matter what.”
I could understand Ritziareite’s worry, but it was also a fact that we couldn’t throw further troops onto the Theresia front. That the weight of force leaned toward the Philnotes front, where we absolutely had to win through, was only natural; crushing the rebel powers of the Theresia front ranked below the defense of Philnotes in priority. Winning both fights was the best outcome, but the order of priority must not be mistaken.
“Rotten as he may be, Duke Felsdorf is a man who served long years as Military Lord. He won’t be handled by any simple means, I think.”
“Yes. That’s precisely why I set Epika, who ran one division of the Imperial army under him, as supreme commander of the Theresia campaign. She, of anyone, has a high chance of reading the old Military Lord’s thinking through to the end and steering the fight to our advantage.”
“And if Duke Felsdorf proves the better…?”
“Then that will be that. As I am now, I can only believe Epika will seize the victory. The same as I believe you’ll bring back good news from the fight at Philnotes without fail.”
There wasn’t the faintest waver in her eyes. That the old Military Lord, Duke Felsdorf, was a cunning man was a thing one heard often. If anyone could go toe to toe with him as an equal, it would be someone of the same strategist’s cast, one who understood the reality of it deeply and wouldn’t be swallowed by the schemes he laid. The choice for supreme commander came down to two: Rudolf or Epika, the division commanders versed in the Imperial army’s inner workings. Of the two, Epika, the strategist, was judged the fittest, and chosen.
“…Duke Felsdorf, who held broad knowledge as Military Lord, and General Epika, who has fought through any number of fierce battles at the practical level. Since their roles in a fight are of different kinds, which of them stands the higher in the Theresia region can’t be judged in full as things are.”
“Just as Al says. We decided we could stake it on Epika.”
“The threat is great, but it’s by no means a bad wager.”
The Emperor, the present Military Lord Linos, and I had arrived at this together. On top of which, it wasn’t even certain that Duke Felsdorf himself would come out as the enemy commander facing Epika. As a placement of personnel, we’d drawn out the best we could conceive. In the result from here on, there was nothing to do but believe in the ones we’d chosen.
2
While the discussion of the Three-Front Operation went on at its height, Fadi, now serving as the head of the intelligence corps, had, in a gap in his work, made his way to the Central Hospital in the Imperial capital.
The Empire’s largest medical facility. His aim, of course, was to look in on Dorothea, the older-sister figure to him. Struck by the Saint’s magic in the Dyrst region and gravely wounded, she’d been diagnosed as needing a full month to heal and had had convalescence at the Central Hospital forced upon her.
‘A scratch like this is totally fine. I’m going home to sleep.’
…So Dorothea had balked at being admitted from first to last, but after persuasion from those who looked up to her, me chief among them, and a pain fierce enough to disrupt even the business of daily life, she’d chosen, grudgingly, to be admitted.
Stepping into the building, I asked the woman at reception in an easy, friendly manner.
“Excuse me. I’m here to visit my boss, the one who got hurt. Which room’s Dorothea in?”
“Certainly. Forgive me, but might I have your name?”
“Fadi.”
“Master Fadi. Understood. I’ll go confirm whether she can receive visitors, so please wait a moment in one of the seats there.”
“Sure thing~.”
The receptionist whispered to another attendant, who whisked off at a quick step into the depths of the ward. Perched on a chair near reception, I was a little surprised. I’d assumed I’d just be shown straight to the room, but today was the first I’d learned there were several steps to go through.
“…Huh. Nothing like the private clinics in the slums.”
In the private clinics, where you were never stopped at a desk to begin with, anyone could walk into any room they liked. Put that way, the Central Hospital lived up to its name: the security felt strict.
“Master Fadi, permission for the visit is granted. I’ll show you to the room.”
“Comiiing.”
Led by the attendant, I was shown to Dorothea’s room. Up the stairs, the room at the far end of the ward. That was hers, it seemed, and on the wall by the door a nameplate reading ‘Dorothea’ had been fixed.
“Then I’ll take my leave here. If anything comes up, don’t hesitate to call.”
“Got it. Thank you!”
I gave the attendant a nod and set my hand to the door handle. To loosen the nerves of seeing Dorothea for the first time in a while, I took a breath, then put my weight into the hand on the handle.
“Dorothea~, I came to see you~.”
I opened the door and stepped in to find Dorothea up on a pure-white bed, staring bored out the window. That striking long silver hair swayed in a light breeze blowing in from outside.
“Fadi, what happened to your work?”
“Mm. Skipped it, obviously.”
“Figures. Today of all days you’d be busy…”
She met me, come all this way to visit, with a flat, offhand manner. She could’ve looked a little happier about it, I thought, but for Dorothea, who loved her freedom above all, hospital life was apparently torment itself. She kept her expression fixed in the very picture of composure, but from the edges of every small gesture an irritation she couldn’t quite hold down came seeping out.
“Fadi. Listen. Today’s day five of quitting smoking… ahh, the itch won’t stop. I feel like tearing something apart.”
Seemed she’d built up a fair store of stress from hospital living. How many years had it been since a forced smile scared me this much?
“Day five off cigarettes, huh… but wait, when I came the other time, weren’t you all smug about it, going ‘I snuck off to the roof for the sweetest smoke of my life’?”
“Those medical people here… ‘bad for your health,’ they said, and took my cigarettes off me. That I, who ruled the underworld as boss of ‘The White Smoke Lizards,’ should suffer a humiliation like this. I never once imagined it…!”
Dorothea spoke in earnest tones, but—
“Ah, sorry. The Dorothea in front of me right now is not cool in the slightest…”
—to me, honestly, I couldn’t find it in myself to care in the least.
“I mean, come on. Getting this worked up just because you can’t smoke seems way over the top…”
“Over the top? Fadi, you’re still a child, so maybe you don’t get it, but to a smoker, a day without a cigarette is about as agonizing as three days with no food or water.”
“W-wow.”
For all the fervor, the scale of the thing was awfully small. Where had the old dignity gone? The pathetic sight of a former boss in despair as though the world had ended, all for having her cigarettes taken away… honestly, I’d rather not have seen it.
“Fadi. There are times when a person has to protect the thing that matters to them. If there is anything you will never yield, then you must never bow to it.”
“Yep. You’re putting on this whole wise-saying air, but that’s just about cigarettes, right? You thinking of switching careers to, like, a traveling minstrel?”
“…Haah. Youth is nice, being so unencumbered. A life bound to something is nothing but suffering, after all.”
“…That’s not deep or anything, that story.”
“Haah. So this is youth.”
She wasn’t listening to a word of what I pointed out. With the far-off eyes of someone who’d transcended it all, she gazed up at the ceiling of the room. Anything she didn’t want to hear she shut out completely, like an invincible person you can’t reason with.
“Dorothea, you’re still in your twenties, y’know. Drop the enlightened-sage thing. And you’ve circled right back to cigarettes again. Aren’t you a bit too dependent?”
“Cigarettes are my life. If I’m to live unable to smoke, then I’ll die.”
“…Ahh, is that so.”
No good. This heavy smoker’s dignity had shattered to bits because whatever the cigarettes topped up in her had run dry. The Dorothea sitting on the hospital bed wasn’t the boss of the shadow organization I knew. Every time that lovely silver hair swayed, that sorrow-touched face looked like nothing but an addict driven frantic by not being able to smoke.
—Like this, she’s just a selfish patient.
“Tch. If only I hadn’t gotten hurt, I wouldn’t be locked up in a place like this.”
“It’s an honorable wound, so it’s a normal thing to be proud of.”
“Hmph. I’ve no use for honor. What the me of now wants is a cigarette that hits just right.”
Once you got this far, you couldn’t tell anymore whether it was devotion or sheer greed.
“A hospital’s a stifling, unpleasant place through and through…”
So Dorothea grumbled, but to me there was no place so blessed with comforts.
“…Personally, I think a hospital’s a surprisingly comfortable spot. Long as you’re here you get out of working, no strings; being with the Provisional Elite Corps means the bills cost nothing; three proper meals laid out for you; and you can lie in bed all day… compared to the poverty we knew back when, that’s ridiculously well-off, if you ask me.”
“…Hmph. I know that much without being told. This place is peace itself. No pointless conflict, devoted support from the staff all day long. For a lazybones it’d be a heaven of a place.”
“Then what’s your complaint?”
“Haah. That’d be not being allowed to smoke, obviously! Don’t mess with me!”
“It’s cigarettes after all! I never should’ve asked something so stupid.”
I’d been half sure I’d get a somewhat deeper talk, but from start to finish all I got was a long lament over her lost cigarettes. As I turned an exasperated eye on her, Dorothea heaved a great sigh and opened her mouth.
“Well, enough joking. This place really is stifling to me. I’d sooner be on a savage battlefield or in the filthy slums… stick me somewhere with no tension to it at all and I feel like I’ll die of boredom.”
The slums she’d lived in all this while had been a life pressed up against the danger of death. The losers who’d fled to that dumping ground grew desperate over nothing but scraping through to tomorrow. Food and money fought over; pointless brawling an everyday affair. Threats and extortion carried out openly in the streets, and, at the far end of it, armed shadow organizations waging turf wars night after night; order collapsed to that degree. In those days a moment you could sleep easy was as good as nonexistent.
“Me, I hated the old days, the hard-to-live-through ones, always on edge.”
“…Well. That suits you fine.”
She spoke as if to say she herself was different. Dorothea turned her eyes back to the window.
“Grown-ups feel easier, sometimes, when they’ve talked themselves into shouldering some responsibility and are pushing hard at it.”
“What’s that mean?”
“…Nothing but self-satisfaction. Spend your hours doing nothing and the unease comes at you instead. You get caught up in that answerless question: what is my worth as a person.”
It was a fairly knotty thing to say. An answerless question, huh. A fool like me had never once thought about such a thing, but maybe people who lived turning their minds over all manner of things day by day thought too deeply about how they lived.
“Dorothea too?”
“Who knows, hm?”
“?”
“…Well. Being the only one left out of the loop at such a crucial time does chafe at me somewhat.”
Dorothea answered quietly and gave a bored yawn. For the Emperor, now that she’d taken the throne, it was a bitterly hard time. The Kingdom, the Order, Duke Felsdorf and the rest: hostile powers thick on every side, a beset-on-all-fronts situation. Dorothea, too, was perhaps galled at having to sit quiet and useless while it went on.
“It’s fine, Dorothea. Lady Valtrune’s got no shortage of allies now. Plenty of enemies too, maybe, but she’s not going down that easy.”
“…I hope you’re right.”
“You’re worried?”
“I threw away my rank as boss of a shadow organization to join the Provisional Elite Corps on that girl’s word. If she’s brought down and loses her power as Emperor, we’ll be left out in the cold.”
“Then shall we make a run for it?”
“Hah, don’t be absurd. I bet everything on her having the makings of a ruler, so I’m resigned to going down with her if it comes to it.”
For all she said it so flatly, the shadow of unease she carried wasn’t wiped clean away.
3
The deployment to the Theresia region was, to me, one great turning point. A fight that meant a break with the past.
From the moment I was granted the name Epika von Darius, this family name had clung to me and never let go, like a curse. The gazes of expectation turned on me as a daughter of the nobility. Nowhere in that ideal image was there so much as a fragment of me as a soldier.
“Lady Epika. It’s nearly time.”
“The hour to set out… all present, ready?”
“““Ha!”””
“…Very good. Then the march begins.”
Just before daybreak, the sky dyed a blue-violet. From half past four in the early morning, with the daytime-bustling Imperial capital fully asleep, our rebel-suppression force began its march toward the Theresia region.
The numbers themselves fell far short of the great host assembled from Duke Felsdorf’s underlings, but the ones I’d called up were the many mages I’d raised with my own hands and the fine troops the present Military Lord had culled with care. The enemy facing us, by contrast, was a rabble mustered for sheer headcount, amateurs with no combat experience mixed in among them. So long as I kept wielding the right command, there would be no defeat in the fight for the Theresia region.
“Duke Felsdorf means to send his close retainers Count Darius, Viscount Elisenne, and Baron Teje against us as his vanguard. How shall we proceed?”
“Let whichever house sends troops send them. All we do is crush them one by one, in order.”
I’d no intention whatsoever of honestly taking on all three nobles at once. I’d scatter, plainly, the bait each of them would bite at, and sink them into the abyss in turn. Besides, a rebel force without Duke Felsdorf himself at its command was nothing to fear. There was no need to over-guard and blunt the speed of our march.
“We make no change to our route. As planned, we drive straight for the kill zone they’ve made.”
“That would put us in a head-on collision with the enemy… don’t tell me you mean to break their spirit outright, in a fair, open fight?”
“I won’t make an honest, blockheaded charge. But I’ll deliberately give battle on ground the enemy favors, and there, with an overwhelming gap in strength, break their will to fight.”
A person whose spirit is broken can be buried with ease. There’s no exception to it. However mighty a warrior, destroy the part at their core and they become at once no different from the rank rabble. This rests on my own hard-won rule. It was by this method that I’d buried so many until now. The more brittle an organization’s foundations, the easier it collapses, and the smoother the cleanup after. For those of us short on strength to keep winning efficiently, there’s nothing for it but to snare the enemy in stratagem. This time no different. Not cowed by the enemy, a bold posture, and I crush both heart and body. That’s the conclusion for the fight to come.
“You’re merciless as ever, Lady Epika.”
“Well, yes. This isn’t some fair, upright civil war to me. It’s nothing but a purge to sweep the trash away.”
Peering into my violet eyes, Cornelia murmured.
“You mean to lay hands on your own father as well?”
“Naturally. He’s the enemy.”
“Is that because that’s what the mission is?”
“No. It’s a reckoning of my own.”
This was a fight to prove that I was Epika von Darius and no one else. In this great work of sweeping away those, my father among them, who looked ill on the Emperor Valtrune’s administration, if I could leave a solid record of achievement, then I’d shake off the curse of Darius in name and in fact, and be able to walk my own life in the truest sense.
Kill my father and take the headship of House Darius for myself. Blood ties mean nothing to me. Even should my kin beg for mercy, I’d bring my hand down without any. —To crush an absolute evil, I’ve the resolve to become a necessary one.
The one to smash every useless old commandment and set a new age moving would be neither the new Emperor Valtrune von Felsdorf nor the new Military Lord Linos von Gerreschiff. I would be the revolutionary who worked the dramatic turn in the tide.
“Cornelia. We liberate the Theresia region ourselves, and ourselves alone. Before any reinforcements can arrive, we crush the enemy swiftly, at maximum efficiency.”
“Do as you please, Lady Epika. That suits me well enough too.”
Riding along at my side, rocking with her horse’s gait, Cornelia only nodded, her answer flat and mechanical, her blue hair stirring. Not a scrap of her private feeling entered into it. Cornelia was a subordinate obedient to me… so she played it to the outside world, but her true master lay elsewhere. Just as I put her to use on the battlefield as an excellent mage, she too wished for me to wage a fierce fight against Duke Felsdorf and the rest in the Theresia region. Whom Cornelia served I hadn’t determined, but so long as she wouldn’t get in my way in this fight, at least, I’d nothing to say to her.
“…I’ll have you work to the fullest.”
“By all means, put me to good use. It would trouble me to see you lose here, Lady Epika.”
Quite the boast to throw down. It would trouble her to see me lose… would it, now? I’ve been made light of. I’ll have you know, I’m the excellent mage who became the youngest woman ever to hold the post of Imperial army Mage Division commander. No small-fry to fall behind some run-of-the-mill nobody.
“There’s no chance I lose. Rather than be beaten partway down a road like this, I’d sooner die clean.”
If I can’t seize the future with my own hands, then I was only ever a person of that much. Even should I meet a wretched end, I’ll burn the flame of my life so fiercely it carves itself into someone’s memory. I will never, ever bend the way I live. How I live and how I die, both, I decide for myself, properly. Or I could never live a life I found any peace with.
4
Nine hours after the departure of the Theresia-region force under Epika, the main body of the Imperial army bound next for the Philnotes front had entirely finished its preparations to march. Departure came when Ritziareite gave the word. For now, there was a slim stretch of leisure allotted us.
“Mia’s off, apparently. Sheesh, taking leave at a time like this, same as ever.”
“Mia’s been a free spirit since way back. That’s just how she is.”
“Ambros. You’re way too soft on that idiot. You could stand to learn a little from Petra and give her a lecture or two.”
The march in formation was beginning. There was still distance to our objective, Philnotes, and we still had room enough in our hearts to trade idle chatter.
“You two. Thinking about Mia’s fine, but don’t go forgetting we’re headed to a battlefield after this.”
When I warned Steano and Ambros, whose minds were off wandering somewhere far away, the two nodded at once.
“That much I’ve got, obviously!”
“Yes. The resolve is already made.”
“Hmm. If you say so.”
Their answers were passable enough, but honestly I was uneasy whether they truly understood. The Kingdom’s army encircling Philnotes was exceptional among the exceptional. The Kingdom was throwing itself frantic at taking the fortress city of Philnotes, which had declared its neutrality, into its grasp. The measure of the effort was, without question, different from the recent fight in the Dyrst region. Most likely they’d hold nothing back, throwing in the elite of the royal court mages and the cream of the Kingdom’s army, in securing a bridgehead for the invasion of the Empire. And if anyone stood in the way to prevent it, the Kingdom’s army would surely put up a fierce resistance with every ounce of its strength.
“Get yourselves genuinely braced. …One misstep, and not a single one of us may come back alive.”
It came out sounding like a threat, but it wasn’t overstated. The next battle, for us, was the one where death would come closest.
“You two.”
“Hm?”
“What is it?”
“This time too, we win without losing a single one.”
After the usual bracing rally, I told them, this time in a low voice.
“…And put your own lives first. If it gets dangerous, don’t rule out breaking off and running.”
Even I felt I’d said something pathetic, but that was how carefully this fight ought to be handled.
“Uncharacteristically faint-hearted. Not like you.”
“Oh? Don’t go filing it under something as simple as ‘faint-hearted.’ I learned something recently. To snatch the win at the very end, a strategic retreat is sometimes necessary too!”
So I explained, but Steano’s and Ambros’s reactions weren’t encouraging.
“That was definitely Miss Epika who taught you that. I can picture the whole scene, her rattling off trivia at top speed…”
“Mm. Cunning maneuvering doesn’t suit Petra, I think.”
“Right, right. She’s bound to slip up somewhere. Petra’s way of fighting, up to now, has been all straight-ahead, honest tactics.”
“You two…”
Just as I was about to fire back at the pair saying whatever they pleased—
“All present, form up. We leave the Imperial capital in two minutes!”
—the order came down from a Ritziareite whose voice was pitched a notch lower than usual. The tension that ran through the ground took less than a second to spread to everyone, and I drew a deep breath too.
“Time to move out.”
“Seems so.”
“…Let’s go.”
The idle chatter ended here. From now on, it was time for serious work.
“Petra. I leave command of the mages to you. Take the utmost care not to scatter in trying to encircle the Kingdom’s army and end up encircled yourselves.”
“Yes. Understood.”
Having given me my orders, Ritziareite’s gaze left me and flowed on in turn to the others.
“I’m counting on the hard fight of each and every one of you bound for Philnotes. Let’s all live to carry good news back to the Imperial capital.”
At the powerful rally, everyone nodded and raised a battle cry. Amid the clash of armor ringing metal on metal all around, Ritziareite turned a quiet gaze on the troops.
The place of battle was the outer ring of the fortress city of Philnotes, where the Kingdom’s soldiers swarmed. For a surprise strike on a Kingdom army absorbed in the siege of Philnotes, it was the ideal situation.
“We encircle the enemy from the outer ring, and when the Kingdom’s army turns its will to fight outward, if there’s an action from the Philnotes side, we crush them between inside and out and press the life from them…”
What mattered was completing the encirclement of the Kingdom’s army without their catching on. Honestly, covert action wasn’t my strong suit, but there wasn’t much time to shelve what I was good and bad at and think it over at length.
“Steano. I leave scouting the surroundings to you. Report the Kingdom army’s movements moment by moment, the same way you did on Marquis Rigel’s lands. Don’t let the enemy catch on.”
“I’m not a handyman, y’know… but, well, understood. I’ll survey the enemy’s state good and careful from a safe distance.”
“Ambros, take the heavily armored troops and swing around to guard Steano. In the worst case, if the scouting party’s presence comes to light, I want you to buy them time to get away.”
“Understood. Only, if heavy-armored guards go with the scouting party, the defensive line protecting the mages goes thin.”
“That side of the problem I’ll handle on our end.”
“If you say so, Petra, then I’ll move with Steano as told.”
“Yes. Above all, take every last care that no blow lands on the scouting party.”
By the book, protecting the mages, hopelessly weak to a close-range strike, should have been the guard unit’s single most important task. But for this fight, it had been given out ahead of time that a top-class scouting party, the likes of Fadi and Dorothea, couldn’t come to the Philnotes side. Our information-gathering was shaky enough as it was, and if the scouting party we’d assembled took a heavy blow, the Empire’s side would tip all at once into a losing position. However dire a corner we were driven into, a loss in this one fight could not be allowed. The Philnotes force held the greatest strength the Empire could currently move. Leave no result here and breed heavy casualties, and it would be a mortal wound to the Empire.
“…You all right?”
“Yes. Just a lot to think about, and my head started aching a little.”
“If I’ll do, I’m here for whatever you need: advice, anything.”
“Then lend me a bit of your wits. Let me hear your honest opinion, from your angle.”
Thanks to Steano’s consideration, the load on my shoulders felt just a shade lighter. Rather than brooding alone, sharing a problem with someone makes the thread of a solution easier to find.
—There’s plenty I want to talk through, but there’s ample time before we reach Philnotes. First, calmly, let me put the thoughts inside me in order.
Win this one fight for certain, and carry it into the next. The task laid on us was not to fail. It was an utterly simple thing, and an exceedingly difficult one.
5
War, to me, is nothing but one of the trivial little events in a life.
Gnawing at a strip of dried meat, I dropped a cold gaze on the fortress city of Philnotes, still showing not the slightest sign of opening its gates.
“…Haah~. Just staring each other down forever is so boring~!”
A deadlocked front. Waiting out an enemy who’d shut himself in with no sign of coming forth. A hollow, wasted stretch of time, enough to draw a yawn and a sigh out of me at once.
What I want is a tense, prickling kill-or-be-killed where life and death get mixed together. To beat a merciless, starving beast down from above with overwhelming force. And then, after savoring the crying, despair-blurred face like I’m licking it clean, to kill it the most painful way there is. That is the finest entertainment I could ask for.
“Hey, hey! It’s gone all tedious. Mind if I just go kill every last one of them myself?”
I asked the burly, shaven-headed man standing beside me, but he didn’t so much as twitch, eyes shut.
—Here I am, begging so sweet and cute, and he ignores me. Seriously gross.
“…Haah. You really are a boring man. Want me to lop that pointlessly thick head of yours off?”
“Lily. The suppression of Philnotes is the lords’ doing. It is a wholly different thing from a make-believe game you may move about on your private whim.”
“You’re slow to open your mouth, dumbass. Don’t go irritating me too much, yeah?”
“We are pieces on the battlefield. We move as we are told from above. No exceptions are permitted.”
“Yes, yes. As my nation’s little puppet commands.”
Stubborn types you can’t reason with. I seriously hate them. Worthless, aren’t they, the play-the-good-student sort who can’t move without an order from above, standing around waiting to be told.
—Kingdom this, Empire that. I’ve no interest in such trifles. I only want to live doing the things I want to do. And what I want to do right now is butcher someone as gruesomely as instinct moves me to. Not that it’ll be allowed, most likely…
Complaints I had beyond counting, gripes I could air without end, but say what I might, the stubborn man before me would never take it in. He’d only line up his pieties about discipline and the lords’ commands and go on sitting enthroned here until the moment the order came down. My chest went tight. It was uncomfortable to the bone. I’d sooner spend a day in a cesspit rank enough to warp your nose. That’s how little I wanted to breathe the same air in the same space as this man.
I made my sweet, wheedling voice again and put on a display of full-frontal adorableness.
“Hey, heyy? Then, say. Staring each other down in a place like this forever, my legs are going to rot, so… mind if I go make a patrol around the encampment, hm?”
“Do as you like. Only, if you go out on some offensive of your own accord, I’ll have no choice but to put you before a court-martial. Bear it in mind.”
“Ye~s. I’ll take you up on it and go on my little patrol! Bye-bye, then. Mister trash-heap dead-weight stubborn baldy♪ …Don’t you ever talk down to me again. Next time I’ll kill you, got it?”
“Off you go, quickly.”
I spat on the ground, and the bald man didn’t move so much as an eyebrow. If anything, he waved a hand as if to shoo me away.
—Haaah. If this dour, spiteful stubborn man weren’t a person of note, one of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites the same as me, I’d have killed him without a second’s hesitation.
“…Someday, for sure. I’ll chew through that stupid neck of yours.”
I muttered my spiteful little grudge under my breath and left the spot.
One of the Kingdom’s Ten Elites: ‘the Hedonist, Lily.’ I was fond of the moniker they’d pinned on me. Because it fit me perfectly. To chase after pleasure without end and live life to the hilt. This, precisely, is my way of living. Anyone who denies this creed of mine and gets in its way, whoever they are, I slaughter, every one.
And the one I want to kill most right now isn’t the cowards holed up in sturdy Philnotes, nor the small-fry of the Imperial army. It’s that stubborn son of a bitch nearest at hand, who thinks he’s put a collar on me. For now I’d play meek and follow orders, but let the chance come and I’d make him, quite literally, a bloodless doll that couldn’t run its mouth.
Without so much as sending a glance after my departing back, he simply faced Philnotes in an eerie stillness. This man never spoke plainly; always he only mumbled his monologues under his breath. A gloomy, hateful sort, enough to turn your stomach.
“…Honestly. Do something unnecessary and it becomes my task to dispose of you. A slip of a girl who only barely scraped into the Ten. I do wish she’d hold her arrogance to some limit.”
The schemes of each and every party swirled in every place, poison upon poison mixing to breed chaos. How it would all work upon the war, surely not even a god could foresee.