We were anxiously watching the bloody battle unfold on the plains.
In the five-hour engagement, the queen's cavalry had taken quite a beating. Perhaps because their armor was thick, few enemy soldiers had died — it was the warhorses that had fallen in droves. Thanks to that, our forces now held the edge in cavalry strength over the enemy.
"Heave-ho!"
"What are you waiting for, pull them out already!"
Near the palisade, horses that looked one and a half times larger and fiercer than any from the original world lay on the ground, gasping for breath. Our pike soldiers carefully stabbed them to death. The carcasses were then dragged through the gaps in the palisade and used as yet another barrier.
"...Queen Henrietta has succeeded in breaking through."
"...Yes."
It sounded like some distant story, I thought, nodding along with Jeremy.
Dust blanketed the battlefield. The figure who appeared to be Queen Henrietta raised her sword high and disappeared once more into the cloud of dust. This was my first time witnessing a large-scale cavalry engagement. Still, allowing a breakthrough was hardly good news.
"Will our army lose?"
"...It might."
I let out a sigh. That was tantamount to saying there was a very real possibility of defeat.
"Are those people monsters? We outnumbered them. No — we held the advantage on the battlefield, too. Excluding the horse archers, we were clearly superior in every single factor. Are you telling me strategy can actually lose to something as lowly as tactics?"
"......"
Jeremy hesitated, faltering. He probably thought I was angry. I wasn't. I wasn't feeling rage at all.
The reason I had felt anger surge when the horse archers struck was that, despite clearly realizing during the bloody battle at Austerlitz that cavalry could be deployed as horse archers, I had made no preparations against it in this battle. In other words, it had been my own blunder.
Now was different. Queen Henrietta's army was dominating the battlefield through sheer ability alone. There was nothing to be angry about here. Just unsettled.
"Jeremy, summon Jacques-Lee."
"Yes, sir."
I am the commander. Sighing endlessly forever would be a sorry sight.
Ever since I joined the Crescent Alliance Army, I had devoured every military treatise I could find. It was said that a commander's ability was most starkly revealed not in victory, but in defeat. From now on, I needed to prepare for that possibility……
"You called for me, sir?"
Jacques-Lee approached. The stout dwarf mercenary captain had come drenched in blood, as though he'd showered in it.
The reason we had managed to repel the Bretagne forces on our left flank—where the ratio of archers was overwhelmingly low—was, in my estimation, entirely thanks to the mercenary company. My speeches were nothing more than a footnote on the battlefield. It was the mercenary company that had controlled the peasant infantry's formations and volleys, and that was what allowed us to hold.
"Jacques-Lee. Be honest, hold nothing back. Do you think our cavalry will lose?"
"……Victory and defeat are hard to judge so simply, but in my opinion—yes."
Jacques-Lee spoke with dispassionate calm. Perhaps to a dwarf mercenary who had rolled through over a hundred years of battlefields, victory and defeat held little thrill.
"Henrietta de Bretagne is undoubtedly the most formidable cavalry commander of our era. The continent will bow to the Queen's martial exploits for at least the next twenty years. Her epithet will probably end up something like Henrietta the Bloodstained."
"Bloodstained Bretagne, is it."
I too nodded impassively. Not exactly an inaccurate nickname.
A queen who stood at the forefront ahead of everyone else, her crimson hair streaming behind her—she was the very image of that pejorative. She would gorge herself on the blood of the Franks and the Bretons alike, and in the end, she meant to become the continent's supreme ruler.
I had wanted to eliminate Queen Henrietta early on. Times of chaos were crises, but they were also opportunities for heroes. If left to her own devices, Queen Henrietta—just as she had in Dungeon Attack—would seize upon Frankish turmoil and rocket to supremacy. That was why I had to crush her from the very start.
I had believed it was entirely possible. Both the justification and the strategy favored me—now was the time. But perhaps I had overreached……
Or maybe Queen Henrietta had been thinking the very same thing. Perhaps she had decided she needed to crush the 'talented nobles'—men like the Duke of Guise—before they could grow, and so she had deliberately manipulated us into believing we held the advantage, luring us to gather at this very spot……
"I'm envious."
Henrietta had a mighty army. She didn't need to weave intricate schemes or stratagems—her forces were overwhelming enough to simply grind us into dust. In game terms, that was a level advantage. A kind of absolute metric.
I didn't have that. I was the weaker party. I had to stir up the populace, forge alliances and counter-alliances, and patch together every scrap of strength I could muster. But against a truly powerful army, it had apparently fallen short. Such was the limit of the seventy-first ranked Demon Lord, I suppose.
I spoke.
"Jacques-Lee, if our cavalry rout, there's only one place we can fall back to."
"Yes. They'll fall back this way."
The river blocked us on the left, the woods on the right. Bretagne's forces held firm to our front.
Our cavalry, utterly routed, had nowhere to flee but straight to the rear — directly into our stockades.
The horsemen would come screaming for sanctuary and crash right into our own barricades. If only they were enemy troops — then we could simply hold them off like we always had. But these were our own men pouring in. We couldn't cut them down.
The stockades would be thrown into utter chaos, and the pike phalanx would dissolve into panic. Our own forces destroying our own lines. You could call it the worst-case scenario. Queen Henrietta would seize that exact moment to charge.
I let out a dry laugh.
"Looking at it this way, it's almost absurd. It's as if the Queen waited until we committed our cavalry before making her move. She'd been saving the Saint card all along, it seems. The plain of Saint-Denis will become a hell where our own troops are crushed by our own troops…"
"What shall we do? We could withdraw first."
I shook my head.
"If we retreat now, we risk shouldering the blame for the defeat. Jacques-Lee, press our forces tight against the woods. Use the trees as another wall and hold the line to the very end. Queen Henrietta will offer us terms of surrender."
"Yes, Commander-in-Chief."
We moved quickly. We deployed the militia into the forest. The woods were the worst possible terrain for cavalry to attack through, which made them the best defensive line we could ask for. We stripped the stockades and hauled them forward to the edge of the tree line.
The problem was that our cavalry started fleeing before we had even finished setting up. I had hoped they might hold out for another ten minutes or so, but the panicked screams of the retreating horsemen told me otherwise.
"Lord— Lord Guise has fallen!"
"Retreat! Fall back and regroup!"
Commander-in-Field Henri de Guise, the supreme commander, had been killed.
It appeared that he had, in a stroke of glory, crossed blades with Henrietta de Bretagne herself — champions dueling in single combat — and lost his head. The beautiful Queen defeating an enemy commander in a duel. Every gossip across the continent would be buzzing with excitement. Had I not been one of the losing commanders, I might have been willing to take a crack at it myself. Damn it all.
Sure enough, the retreating cavalry tore our own camp to shreds. The pike formation that had held so valiantly against the enemy crumbled when it was our own troops crashing through it. And right behind them, Bretagne's cavalry was closing in at full gallop.
"You might as well have died fighting. Tsk."
The Frankish nobles' cavalry crushed through our infantry lines as they fled. But that only applied to the center and right flank. I ordered the militia to chase off any horsemen — friend or foe — who approached the stockades.
The cavalry shouted in confusion.
"We're on your side! We're not the enemy!"
The militia thrust their pikes forward, jeering "Booooo!" in unison.
"Screw that! Defeated allies aren't allies anymore!"
"Get lost, you cowards! You still got your dicks attached, you fucks!"
They had originally joined the army, moved by my speech. High-value forces like cavalry were mostly comprised of nobles or their retainers, and the militia harbored deep hostility toward them. The cavalry wore expressions of utter disbelief.
"What the hell! This is insane!"
"Let's go somewhere else quickly!"
Spitting curses, they wheeled their horses around.
The left flank, where I served as commander, suffered minimal damage. We drove off the friendly troops while methodically setting up barriers toward the forest.
However, the areas held by the Empress Dowager's nobles or the Batavia Republic told a different story. There, natural obstacles like the forest were absent. Besides, the cavalry belonged to the same forces as them. What commander in the world would drive away his own troops?
The infantry formations collapsed.
Retreating allied cavalry trampled over them, and immediately after, the Bretagne army surged in, launching another mounted charge. Under these circumstances, it was unreasonable to order the infantry to hold their ground.
The pikemen were gradually pushed back from the stockade defensive line. Among them, quite a few infantrymen, sensing defeat, fled together with the cavalry. Cracks began to appear here and there, like a weakening dam starting to burst.
When the Bretagne forces crashed into them with a lance charge, it was all over. The dam broke. The pikemen and archers could hold on no longer and continued to retreat.
"……"
"……"
A silence descended upon the militia. It was natural. A massacre was unfolding right before their eyes.
The defensive formations were crumbling by the moment. Infantrymen unable to maintain their ranks were nothing more than prey for the cavalry to hunt.
A few infantrymen struggled desperately to keep their formations, but the knights charged in, emitting their Aura as if to exact payment for the suffering they'd endured. Blocking the knights with only a small number of infantry was impossible. They could only die.
At a time like this, the only person capable of taking control of the situation was the commander-in-chief. But Duke Giz's head and body had already been separated. Once the soldiers realized defeat was certain, they ceased resisting and fled.
"Fools…"
I muttered under my breath.
To flee was to turn your back on the enemy cavalry. Infantrymen running on foot, pursued by horsemen at full gallop. The outcome here was self-evident. They would have had a slightly better chance of survival if they had simply lain flat on the ground and played dead.
There were still a handful of mercenary companies that burned fiercely with the will to resist. The one bitter truth for them was that willpower alone could not stop Aura. Without exception, those mercenary units were slaughtered to a man.
The Bretagne troops busied themselves looting the dead enemy soldiers. They plundered carts and stripped the corpses of their weapons and armor. Every bit of it was profit. It seemed Queen Henrietta had ordered that soldiers who fought bravely were free to pillage as they pleased, as a reward for their valor.
Once the battlefield had been somewhat tidied up, the gaze of the Bretagne army naturally turned this way.
The only unit still holding its position behind hastily built defenses. Our volunteer corps.
A knight who looked to be of fairly high rank approached the area.
"Hm."
The knight swept his eyes over the wooden palisade, then looked toward the forest beyond. Perhaps he had judged that a direct assault would not be easy. He shouted out.
"Hand over your commander! Surrender your commander, and the crimes of the common soldiers will not be pursued!"
For a moment, my stomach dropped. That was almost certainly a lie. They intended to annihilate us the moment they received the commander. It was a basic ruse, but if the peasant soldiers fell for it, it would be the end of us.