"......"
I swallowed. I could sense that a chaotic battle was about to unfold.
Neither the concentrated assault using the knights' breakthrough power nor the ranged strikes using the cavalry archers had worked. The Imperial Army had only two options left. The first was to retreat as things stood. No general would choose to withdraw when they had accomplished nothing and would gain absolutely nothing by doing so. In truth, there was only one option.
A wave of pitch-black shadows surged forth from the wall of fog. Accompanied by the disciplined military music peculiar to the human race. Unlike the time mountain villagers had blared gongs and cymbals in a clamorous racket, the Imperial Army relied mainly on trumpets and drums. The thin wail of horns echoed through the fog-shrouded expanse.
"They've started."
Close-quarters combat, with infantry leading the charge.
The Imperial Army's halberdiers advanced in formation, closing in step by step. Orc spear-throwers and Goblin slingers hurled their weapons without pause. But after smashing into the thicket-like wall of raised halberds, both spears and stones lost their potency. The Imperial Army was unfazed by the missile attacks, as if a stone dropped into a pond settles quickly. Damn it.
Just then, our catapults at the rear began firing. They were the very same catapults that had given us such grief in the mountain fortresses of the Black Mountains. Their range was drastically shorter, but they could fling massive boulders, making them perfect for field use rather than siege warfare. Commander Zepar had looted every last catapult from those fortresses for this very moment.
Ten boulders streaked across the sky all at once. They sailed over the wall of fog and crashed into the enemy lines. Halberdiers by nature of their class formed tightly packed formations, and such arrangements were extremely vulnerable to bombardment. Since cannons had yet to develop in this world, catapults were the natural nemesis of halberdiers.
"Graaah!"
"Dodge! Get out of the way!"
"Don't dodge! Don't you bastards break formation!"
The boulders tore through the Imperial halberdier formations at will. The physical damage was considerable, but the psychological terror was far worse. Just imagine it—rocks raining down from a fog-shrouded sky like meteors. Very few humans could maintain disciplined formations with boulders crashing down on their heads.
Laura delivered her succinct assessment.
"Hmm, leaving all their catapults behind to pin down the center and left flank of our Demon Lord's army—that was their fatal mistake."
"They insisted on a strategic victory and ended up suffering tactical losses."
The Imperial Army naturally had catapults of their own. But in conditions where visibility was limited by the fog, deploying them effectively proved difficult, so they had resorted to indiscriminate bombardment in order to tie down the Demon Lord's army's center and left flank. The Imperial Army had achieved their objective, but in exchange, they were now taking a beating from us unopposed. Every strategy, I suppose, comes with its own trade-off.
I quietly observed the enemy and clicked my tongue.
"Tch."
I had expected the catapults to scatter the enemy's ranks. My expectations were betrayed without ceremony. The Imperial forces faltered but their formation didn't collapse. They maintained a steady pace and drew ever closer to our positions. I'd never seen such lunatics.
"The garrison troops at the mountain fortress and now these ones too—is the Imperial Army made up entirely of superhumans or something? They simply don't retreat. It's absurd."
"They're probably not conscripts but regular soldiers. The standing army of the Habsburg Empire is renowned for its valor. …Perhaps they're a personal unit under Count von Rosenberg. Trained always under the banner of protecting humanity. They'd be a cut above the rank-and-file."
"That 'humanity' of theirs!"
I growled.
"For humanity. To protect humanity. Every last one of those slogans reeks of decay. Let me tell you the truth, Laura. If there isn't even a sliver of personal gain, no lofty ideal can ever move masses of people. The Habsburg Empire made sure to provide proper rations for its soldiers in this expedition."
This war had been staged by me, if you looked at it closely. For months I had borrowed the intelligence network of the Kunkuska Trading Company to map the continental situation in as much detail as I could. What propaganda the Habsburg Empire's leadership had deployed—I had seen through all of it.
"Starting this year, every nation on the continent began harvesting Black Herb in large quantities. And yet the common folk are still writhing under the Black Death. Do you know why? Because Black Herb is distributed to the military first. Every government grew it with desperate effort. Enough to cure every standing soldier with surplus left over in the warehouses. And still they won't open those warehouses … If you want Black Herb, enlist in the army—that's the message!"
No nation fights a war on regular soldiers alone. In this age, conscripts serve as spearmen or meat shields. To conscript, you face the stubborn resentment and resistance of every village, and going door to door eats up enormous amounts of time. Rather than all that, a majority of nations decided—use Black Herb as bait and accept volunteers.
And so people leave their villages behind and march toward the muster points. To feed medicine to their families. To protect their homes. Among them, not a few crawl out on trembling legs carrying the last shred of hope—invalids, barely alive. But the chances of a sick person covering that distance to reach the muster point are vanishingly small. Their strength gives out on the roadside and they die alone. On every highway across the continent, the futile march of the dying is playing out even now ….
"It's nothing more than a pretext—'protectors of humanity' and whatnot. If the lords had responded properly in the beginning, fewer of their people would have been suffering from the Black Death. They invested taxes to cultivate Black Herb, and now they threaten: unless you become soldiers, you won't get medicine either. The lords bear none of the responsibility or the damage—the people bear it all. And then to dress it up under the name of humanity … there's no bigger pile of nonsense than that!"
Count von Rosenberg was no different. He distributed Black Herb exclusively to the knightly orders and his elite troops. That was why, even as the count abandoned his territories and retreated, almost none of his elite deserted. He had spread his beneficence among them.
From the count's perspective, it must have been a wise choice. But what about the people left behind? In the name of protecting humanity, he had abandoned them. Humanity for whom? Such a question could not help but arise. If the people are not part of the 'humanity' that the Empire and the count claim to protect—then only one kind of humanity remains. The aristocratic state. The royal household. How could that possibly be called humanity! The people would want to scream: don't make me laugh.
And so the common folk simply swapped one master for another—from a human noble to the Demon Lord.
Black Herb that the count refused to give, we distributed through our Sixth Legion under my initiative. The Kunkuska Trading Company had contracted with herb fields in the Demon Realm and had been growing Black Herb on a massive scale since last year. According to my contract with the company, I held ownership of five percent of the total harvest. I released it. Families that had been waiting only for death were brought back from the brink. The people cheered our legion. They voluntarily accepted Legion Commander Barbatos as their count … Who, in the end, had protected humanity?
The Habsburg Empire, in the end, merely hides its thievery behind pretty words. I'll shatter that fine mask of yours.
Not yet. But not too far in the future either. What I enjoy most is grinding the pride of hypocrites like you—who parade lofty ideals as a front—face-first into the mud. I look forward to that day with great relish.
Laura caught the expression on my face and furrowed her brow, visibly troubled.
"Hm. My lord is having some sort of terrible thought …."
"Don't slander me. There is no Demon Lord as pure and wholesome as I am."
"I feel as though I just heard the word least befitting my lord, but am I merely imagining things?"
"You're imagining things. Completely imagining them."
Laura let out a huff of derision. Her respect for her sovereign seemed to be dwindling by the moment. Truly, what an impudent and irreverent vassal. After this battle was over, he would have to thoroughly teach her the proper etiquette between lord and subject—between the sheets.
"Groooargh—!"
"Push through! Push through, dammit!"
At last, the orc pike soldiers clashed head-on with the imperial pike soldiers. It was an utter brawl. You could plainly see the enemy bracing their pikes forward, yet you still had to hurl yourself into that morass of spearheads. In such a scenario, the side with the longer pikes held a natural advantage. In both length and thickness of shaft, the orc-forged pikes were vastly superior to those used by humans.
To overturn this disadvantage, the imperial army mobilized a large number of dismounted knights. Gripping two-handed swords instead of lances, the knights took the vanguard of the pike line. They hacked through the orc pikes with their aura swords as though cleaving through radishes, desperately fighting to carve out an opening for their own pike soldiers to exploit.
The tactic proved remarkably effective. The proper counter to knights would have been ogres, but while the knights nimbly severed pike shafts and wove between rank and rank, the bulky ogres could manage no such feat of agility. Riding the momentum of their knights' prowess, the imperial army was steadily forcing the orc pikes back.
He had been waiting for this very moment.
He issued a silent command from within his mind. The instant the order was received, Death Knights lurking in the shadows of the orc pike soldiers burst forth. The sudden appearance of those dark knights caught the imperial knights completely off guard, allowing the ambush to land. The knights were pierced clean through the torso and killed without fanfare. Ten imperial knights crashed face-first into the dirt in a billow of dust.
The enemy immediately dispatched a fresh company of knights. Despite the countless orcs thrusting pikes at them, they charged bravely into the fray to challenge the Death Knights to duels. Watching that scene, he laughed.
"Utterly futile."
He issued another order. Infiltrate. Just before the imperial knights arrived, the Death Knights all assumed their ethereal form and melted back into the shadows. The imperial knights let out furious shrieks, apparently incredulous at what had just happened. Cries of "Cowardice!" and other such platitudes rang out.
"The highest compliment, truly. We win because we're cowardly, and they lose because they're not. The price of their defeat is the mass death of their soldiers. Which of the two qualities is the greater virtue hardly needs saying."
"They can't truly mean what they're saying, either.... Be that as it may, my lord, those aren't exactly words the man who just proclaimed himself 'pure' should be putting in his mouth."
"I am purely cowardly."
He said it with a completely straight face. Laura stared at him with an expression gone cold, but so what? The ways of the world had always been one thing in theory and another in practice.
The knights stabbed uselessly at the shadows with their sword tips, but it was nothing more than a waste of time. They gave up and returned to their original duty—busily sawing through the orc pike shafts. The imperial pike soldiers began to seem as though they were overwhelming the Demon Lord's army, but then—
"Toccata."
He hummed the word in a cheerful tone, as though conducting a symphony orchestra. Death Knights surged from the shadows. The imperial knights, preoccupied with the orc pikes, once again allowed themselves to be ambushed. The imperial knights screamed in exasperation. That scene repeated itself over and over again.
The imperial knights had to remain hyper-vigilant, watching for Death Knights to strike at any moment while the orcs jabbed their pikes at them. From a knight's perspective, it must have been absolutely maddening. As if dodging dozens of greatspears rushing toward his face wasn't enough, he also had to watch his own feet? It was practically impossible. In the end, they either exhausted their Aura and were struck down by orc pikes or were killed by Death Knights.
Aura wasn't something that could be maintained indefinitely. Unless you were a Swordmaster, you could only sustain it for a short period, but cleaving through the thick shafts of orc pikes required Aura. The imperial knights burned through their Aura at a terrifying rate. A knight who had run out of Aura was hardly a threat anymore. The imperial knights, resigned to death, swung their two-handed swords ceaselessly.
The imperial knights fought with a valor worthy of their fearsome reputation. Their sheer ferocity forced the ranks of orc pikemen to give ground.
Exactly five meters.
From their original position, the orcs had retreated five meters. For those five meters, more than fifty imperial knights had fallen on the front line alone. To put it simply, it took the sacrifice of ten knights to advance a mere one meter.
No one knew exactly how many knights the imperial forces had committed to this position. But one thing was certain: trading ten knights for one meter of ground was, from the empire's standpoint, an utterly unacceptable exchange rate.