The Imperial Army must have realized that their feint had failed — they launched a swift attack. Thanks to our nightmare scouts, we pinpointed exactly which position the Imperial forces intended to strike. Every unit on the right wing converged on that point. After about an hour, the two armies finally clashed.
Laura and I gamed forward.
"They're coming in textbook fashion."
"That's exactly why they're powerful."
The first to charge, naturally, was the knight order. The plan was for the knights to carve through our front line, then send in the infantry to deliver the killing blow.
The knights charged fearlessly into our fortifications, thick with wooden stakes and sharpened spikes. The sight of them bursting through the mist less than a hundred meters away in an instant was truly terrifying. They rolled forward like war chariots. So ferocious was their charge that the first line nearly crumbled from the very onset.
"You stupid pig-fucks! Get your spears up! Get your spears up! Where's the guts you had when you were raping humans with your clubs, you cowards! All of you, pigs!"
The lizardman NCO kicked the orc soldiers in their backsides, bellowing at the top of his lungs. A few orcs toppled over. They scrambled to right their helmets and gripped their long spears. The Demon Lord might relay his commands, but that didn't mean the monsters suddenly grew brave or that their fear evaporated into thin air.
"Grrk, grroop, grrk!"
The orcs planted their long spears upright. While ordinary humans wielded spears five to six meters long, the far stronger orc soldiers used spears exceeding nine meters. Nearly ten-meter-long pikes stood packed together like the quills of a hedgehog. On top of that, the shafts were thicker than their human equivalents. Even a knight — a human war-machine fueled by aura — would have a hard time piercing this dense thicket of pikes.
"Graaaaah!"
Of course, there were always monstrous humans. One knight erupted with a sudden burst of aura and destroyed six or seven spears with a single swing of his sword. An opening appeared in an instant.
"The top honor goes to me — Sir Friedlich of the Wild Boar Knights!"
The knight roared and charged straight for the gap. Immediately, an ogre waiting in reserve rushed forward. With a deafening clang, the knight's lance met the ogre's axe head-on. The ogre had deliberately equipped a massive axe for this purpose. Anything less than a hefty steel axe would have been shattered by the knight's aura. The knight's charge faltered for the briefest of moments. And that tiny window was enough for us.
"Grrk, grrooop!"
The orc soldiers of the second line surged forward in unison and thrust their spears. Aimed at the knight's steed. In this world, knights rode warhorses specially bred with traces of monster blood, so those military mounts were already formidable assets in their own right. But when spears rained down without end, even warhorses of monster lineage couldn't endure. Spears pierced through thighs and sank deep into flanks.
— Eeeeeiiih!
The horse reared and smashed its head into the ogre in front of it. A warhorse two to three times the size of a normal horse delivering a full-force headbutt was enough to stagger the ogre's stance. That was its final act of desperation.
"You are steel indeed! Novae Copiae!"
Magicians stationed at regular intervals dashed forward and hastily chanted their spells. It was a formula that temporarily amplified the cutting power of blades and spears. Empowered by the magic, the orc pikemen drove their spear tips forward once more with renewed force. Several pierced through the knight's chest and waist. One of them drove straight into the knight's warhorse's skull. Blood sprayed everywhere.
"Graagh—!"
Perhaps it was thanks to his body being reinforced by aura. Despite spearheads lodged in his chest and waist, the knight drew his longsword and hacked through the spear shafts. Terrifying vitality. But despite his desperate struggle, the knight fell. While he had been occupied with the spears, the ogre had swung its axe. The axe blade crushed the knight's helmet along with the skull inside. Brain matter splattered in every direction.
"Graaaaaah!"
The ogre roared. It had taken down strong prey and now proclaimed this territory as its own. The orc pikemen responded with cheers of their own. The gap torn in the first line had already been sealed by reserves from the second line. The fortifications held firm. That knight had earned the distinction of being the very first Imperial soldier to break through the Demon Lord's army's first line, but the price was anything but cheap.
The first knight charge ended just like that. The fortifications were battered here and there. Fortunately, there wasn't a single section that had been completely breached. As the knights wheeled their mounts and retreated, the monsters cheered as though they had already won the battle.
"For such a fierce charge, they sure pulled back rather lightly."
I stood with the fourth line, watching the situation unfold. The Death Knights were already lurking in formation within the first line. It wasn't their time to move yet. That meant there was nothing for me to do, either. All I could do was watch and pray for our side's success.
"That was only the first one. They were probably probing our defenses, testing how we'd respond. It's going to get brutal from here on out, my Lord."
I nodded at Laura's words. The attack had been successfully repelled because the enemy knights had been conducting a reconnaissance in force, and because we had planted countless wooden stakes and sharpened spikes across the front. The knights had been forced to slow down, even if only slightly, to remove or navigate around the stakes and spikes. That would have significantly blunted the knight order's breakthrough power.
"What are you doing, you sons of bitches! Get out there and stop dicking around!"
"You slacking off so we all die, huh!?"
The NCOs drove the goblins forward with kicks. The goblins, who had been hiding behind the orcs, scurried forward as soon as the NCOs cracked the whip. Over a hundred goblins sprinted out all at once.
"Kerrek!"
"Kerp, kehrrek!"
The goblins formed teams of three. One carried stakes on a wooden frame, another received the stakes and planted them in the ground, and the third swung a heavy hammer to drive the stakes deep into the earth. These were the goblins serving as combat engineers for this battle. The sound of stakes being hammered into the ground suddenly filled the entire battlefield. In less than a minute, a fresh row of sharpened stakes stood in place along the front. The goblins completed their task and raced back to the fortifications at a speed even faster than they had dashed out.
"Excellent."
Laura expressed her admiration.
"Perfect division of labor. Goblins are deployed to hammer in stakes and blunt the knight order's breakthrough power as much as possible. Orc pikemen counter the knights directly. If the line is ever breached, ogres standing by rush in to hold the gap. The second-line orcs join in to encircle, and finally the magicians help finish the job… General Zepar is truly capable."
"Mm. He specializes more in defense than offense."
I spoke as the game came to mind. Zepar, ranked sixteenth among the Demon Lords, was the polar opposite of Beleth, ranked thirteenth. Where Beleth was an overwhelming brute-force fighter, Zepar was a tactician — and a genius at defensive warfare at that. The reason Zepar had been registered among the upper-rank Demon Lords was simple, in my view.
The Demon Lord's Castle had been a damn nightmare to conquer.
Upper-rank Demon Lords share one particularly prominent trait: each favors a fixed species of monster. For example, Barbatos's Demon Lord's Castle contained nothing but undead monsters. So while defeating the boss monster Barbatos himself was difficult, breaking into the castle was relatively easy — all you had to do was bring along Saints, who were supremely efficient against undead. In Dungeon Attack, you first identified the opposing Demon Lord's type and then assembled a raid party tailored to counter it.
But Zepar didn't favor any particular monster type. None at all.
Among the top ten Demon Lords, he was the only one who used orc soldiers. The others, being top-tier Demon Lords, all built their armies around monsters at least two tiers above orcs. Zepar even had goblins! F-rank goblins! Whether orcs or goblins, Zepar maximized each monster species' strengths in his deployments and succeeded in constructing an impregnable Demon Lord's Castle.
From a player's perspective, it was infuriatingly annoying. What gives players the advantage over NPCs in RPGs? It's the elemental matchup. If slimes appear, use fire skills; if fire lizards appear, use water skills — problem solved. The enemy, meanwhile, can only use techniques aligned with their race's attributes. Naturally, the player holds an overwhelming advantage.
Zepar completely dismantled that "elemental player advantage" by blending monster species in just the right proportions. The player is left flabbergasted. What can you do? All you can do is rack your brain and force it into a battle of tactics versus tactics. Or grind your level through the roof. Well, to put it another way, once you break into the Demon Lord's Castle, the boss monster Zepar himself is easy to kill — but…
"Look. The knights are coming back."
Laura pointed a finger toward the front.
"They seem flustered by the new stakes. There's no difference from the first charge."
She was right. The knights charged bravely and actually breached several spots. But because of the stakes, they were forced to charge with gaps between them, and even if they broke through, only one or two knights could squeeze through each opening.
The result was inevitable. Emergency ogre deployments, second-line pikeman support, enhancement magic from the magicians. The exact same scenario that had played out moments before was replicated in the second knight charge.
That wasn't all. During the first charge, we hadn't found the right timing and had been forced to hold back, but this time the orc javelin-throwers and goblin slingers hurled javelens and stones with vicious intensity. A knight trained in aura could deflect a javelin flying straight at him with a single swing of his sword.
But he couldn't catch everything that flew at him from outside his field of vision. Several javelens struck the warhorses. A mount that had been galloping at full tilt suddenly lost its balance. The knight was thrown violently from the saddle. The harder the charge, the greater the impact of the fall.
Just within my line of sight, I counted six knights killed or injured from falls. For reference, one particular knight got up as though nothing had happened. And then — could you believe it — he started trundling back toward the Imperial Army. I stared in disbelief until he disappeared into the mist. As if his body were made of iron…
The right wing of the Sixth Legion had defended perfectly against the second knight charge.
Monster morale soared to the heavens. The fog meant we could see barely a hundred meters of our own formation, but every direction rang with the monsters' battle cries. The goblin engineers, in high spirits, rushed out to hammer in more stakes.
That was when the military band struck up a tune. Made up of horns and gongs and the like, it was a wretched excuse for a military march — which is to say, it was perfectly suited for a monster army. Ogres, orcs, goblins, lizardmen, Tiger Tribe, Cat Tribe — monsters of every species stomped the ground to keep time. Each screamed out the martial song handed down in their own race and village. It was a grotesque, eerie choral symphony.
The Imperial Army's third attack did not come in the form of a knight charge. The horse archers had returned. They must have been ones my units had failed to catch earlier. They repeated the same tactic: firing arrows from a distance, then retreating. Since the knight charges had already toppled most of the wooden stakes, the monsters were now fully exposed to volleys of arrows.
I clicked my tongue.
"Tch. Should we bring the Death Knights back into play?"
"No. My Lord, look over there."
The horse archer tactics that had seemed on track for success were immediately thwarted. The situation had changed drastically from a few hours ago. Back then, the Demon Lord's forces had been widely dispersed, but now they had converged. In other words, there were plenty of ogres deployed here, and the magicians had joined them as well.
When the magicians cast an illumination spell to widen visibility at the front, the horse archers' positions were clearly revealed. The ruler of this mountain did not miss that opportunity.
"Kraaala!"
An ogre snatched a javelin from a javelin-thrower's hands and hurled it at the horse archers. The javelin flew like a bullet and pierced through a horse archer's torso like a skewer. It still had enough speed to carry the impaled corpse a considerable distance further. Of course, this scene played out across the entire front. The horse archers, unable to sustain their losses, tucked their tails and retreated.
The ogre's roar echoed long across the battlefield.