As Bretagne seized the first round.
On the right flank, the cavalry under Baroness Juliana de Blanc crashed into the enemy cavalry. The two edges of the plain were dressed in the thunder of hooves. Letting that roar wash past their ears, tens of thousands of infantry pressed steadily forward, one step at a time.
The battle flowed seamlessly into its next phase.
"Have them sing the military songs."
My adjutants echoed the order. At once, four thousand citizen militia raised their voices in unison. The melodies that spilled from the lips of militiamen born and raised in Sardinia were, naturally, Sardinian songs.
The closer the enemy drew to us, the more flustered they became. They had burst out of their cities and marched onto a perilous battlefield to fight foreign invaders — not to slaughter their own kin. The wavering in the enemy's ranks was plain to see.
"We are not your enemies! The traitor is the Duke of Milan!"
"Brothers, do not cut down those who share your blood!"
"Laspezia has been abandoned!"
Our own militia bellowed the cries, clustered around their sergeants. This sapped the fighting will of both sides simultaneously — because our soldiers genuinely did not want to fight their brothers. As morale cratered on both fronts, my first line and the Royal Army's first line collided.
"Nonsense! They are all traitors!"
"Let us punish those who betrayed their own kind!"
The Royal Army's provosts screamed their hearts out.
Spears and swords clattered in a furious dance.
As our troops genuinely tried to avoid combat and pulled back in slow increments, the provosts shouting "That's a lie!" lost whatever persuasiveness they had. Only a minority of soldiers were actively trying to kill the other side. The hands gripping their pikes were visibly lacking force.
At this rate, whether it was my Imperial troops or the Royal Army, here on the first line at least, all we were doing was buying time. Actually routing the opponent decisively would be postponed indefinitely.
And this was precisely the delaying action Laura had ordered me to execute.
"Don't fall back too fast! Slowly. Maintain solid coordination with your comrades, and retreat on the sergeants' commands!"
I moved personally between the ranks, urging the soldiers on. If men falling back step by step in a deliberate delaying action lost their nerve, the withdrawal would turn into a headlong rout in the blink of an eye. I needed to impress upon them the fact that their commander was right there alongside them.
From time to time, I raised my crossbow and blew an enemy soldier's head clean off. It wasn't just words — I was fighting alongside you with actions too. That's what I wanted to show them. Every time my bolt found its mark, the soldiers around me roared with cheers.
"Fire!"
They must have spotted me. The royal army's archers concentrated their fire right on my position. The royal guards raised their shields to cover my body.
"My lord, it's dangerous! Please fall back for a moment!"
"What's flying at me — you think those are anything but toothpicks? Leave them be."
I ignored them and stayed at the front, fighting alongside my soldiers. Of course, it wasn't because I was particularly brave. I had invested a fortune in my helmet and armor to prepare for this war. Enchanted with layers of magic, the armor could shrug off arrows all day long without a scratch.
But, damn it.
As always, my luck on the battlefield was absolute garbage.
An arrow slipped through the gap in my left thigh that the armor couldn't quite cover — it had punched past the forest of pikes, slipped past the royal guards' shields, found the gap in my armor, and buried itself in my thigh!
"GRAAAAH!"
I screamed and doubled over. The royal guards were horrified.
"My lord! Dammit, get the lord out of here!"
"Not needed!"
I replied reflexively. The pain was so blinding my vision went red, but the instant that damned arrow pierced my thigh, the one thought that flashed through my mind was: 'Act like nothing happened.' If I, the commander, went down here, the first battle line made up of citizen soldiers would collapse beyond all hope of recovery.
"Kgh — kphhghh!"
I grabbed the arrow, gave it half a twist, and ripped it out in one motion. I could feel my muscle tearing apart. If it wasn't an illusion, my eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets. It was truly not something any sane person should do. If I hadn't slit my own belly open two or three times before, if I weren't the Demon Lord, I would have died twice over by now.
Damn arrows! Arrows are the worst thing in this whole world!
"GRAAAAAAAH!"
I yanked the arrow out in the dumbest, most brute-force way possible and then held it up high. With my right hand, I drew the longsword from my hip and raised it with a thunderous roar. The soldiers who saw me went absolutely wild.
"Yeeaaah! Long live the General!"
"Long live Sardinia! Ten thousand years to Sardinia!"
I didn't want to be called their general in the first place, and "Long live Sardinia" sure as hell wasn't a slogan that suited me! Either way, the militiamen cheered as loudly as they pleased. Morale that had been about to nosedive straight into the ground bounced back and punched through the sky.
I briefly cut the voice-amplification magic and hurled a string of curses at the royal guards.
"You useless, brain-dead idiots — were you planning to just gawk at me until I dropped dead?!"
"Y-Your Highness, we are deeply sorry!"
"It hurts like a bitch. Damn it all."
I pulled a potion from inside my coat and let it trickle down onto my thigh. I'd even gone so far as to deliberately twist the arrow half a turn deeper before yanking it out, just to keep the arrowhead from snapping off inside the flesh. The hole it had left was more than wide enough.
"Hssss… Kuuuh… grrahh!"
As the potion seeped into the wound and triggered a second wave of agony, it dawned on me that this was hardly the first time an arrowhead had grazed or lodged in my thigh — this was the third. Once from Rip's adventuring party. Once from Count Rosenberg's hussars. And now, the third time.
Three times in my entire life had an arrowhead made contact with my body, and all three times it had French-kissed my thigh. There must have been some inconceivable romance between arrowheads and my thighs in a past life. And naturally, since I was the one stuck bearing the full brunt of the pain, nobody else had to deal with any of it. Those bastards.
I fixed the elf royal guards with a terrifying glare.
"You're… done for. I'll deal with you after the battle is over."
"Y-Your Highness, we are deeply sorry!"
The guards were so flustered they had completely forgotten that the crowd was supposed to address me as "Your Majesty," not "Your Highness." Or perhaps they were unconsciously flattering me in hopes of softening whatever punishment I might dish out.
I knew it, too. What fault did the guards really have? That arrow had raped my thigh through sheer, improbable coincidence. It was just that when pain made your eyes roll back, you wanted to scream at whoever was nearby.
"Haa."
I took a steadying breath and picked up my spyglass.
Looking around, not only was the first line — where I was positioned — already locked in combat, but virtually every infantry unit had engaged as well. The allied infantry units apart from ours were, unsurprisingly, not citizen militia. So unlike ours, which was hesitating out of a sense of kinship with the enemy, they were pressing the fight with fierce intensity.
Next I scanned the left flank and the right flank in turn.
The left flank — the zone held by Queen Henrietta — had already been reduced to rubble. Even though both sides had committed roughly equal numbers of cavalry, the Bretagne cavalry had crushed the enemy in a single devastating charge.
The reason I was saying this was because there was nothing left on the left flank but corpses. The enemy was already fleeing in utter disarray beyond the rear. The Bretagne cavalry was hard on their heels, no doubt determined to crush them completely so they couldn't regroup.
"Tch. At least getting shot was worth something."
I muttered irritably, swinging my spyglass around to the opposite side.
The right flank. In the zone held by Baroness Juliana de Blanc, the cavalry battle was still raging. At a glance, though, our forces outnumbered the enemy by at least two to one. It shouldn't take long to wrap things up. From here on out, barring any unforeseen developments, we could safely call the cavalry engagement a decisive victory on our side.
"Y-Your Highness!"
"Your Grace!"
Just as I had gotten a handle on the situation and was about to resume command, a great commotion erupted behind me. I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin. Laura — who as Commander-in-Chief should have been with the center army — was charging toward us with her aides in tow.
"Laura!"
I scowled fiercely.
"What's going on! Why is the Commander-in-Chief here?!"
"..."
Laura dismounted and, without a word of explanation, threw her arms around me. Pressing her face into my chest, she murmured.
"M-My Lord... My Lord..."
My expression stiffened. I had heard this tone before — the same voice, the same trembling resonance as that night when Laura had entrusted everything to me.
I turned my head and glared at the Royal Guards. Using my Demon Lord abilities, I ordered them: *Shield us, now.* To their credit, the guards had enough sense to quickly unfurl their cloaks, surrounding Laura and me in a wide circle and blocking us from outside view.
"My Lord... hkh, thank goodness you're safe..."
"Laura. Calm yourself. I'm perfectly fine."
I ran a hand slowly down her back, gradually lowering myself to the ground. The two of us ended up kneeling on the earth, holding each other. Laura's tears were streaming onto my breastplate.
"When I heard you'd been hit by an arrow, my mind went completely blank... so I..."
"I'm all right. Here, look. I am the Demon Lord, after all."
I whispered calmly. In truth, my thigh was still throbbing fiercely, but I didn't let it show. It was as if Laura's sobs had snapped my thoughts wide awake. The thoughts in my head and the pain in my thigh became entirely separate things, and I could easily put on my usual voice.
"A little wound like this won't even register, Laura. Your lord is a man with a tenacious grip on life. If I were going to die from something like this, I would have died three times over by now."
"Thank goodness... I'm so glad you're the Demon Lord..."
I reached up and wiped Laura's tears away with my hand. A gentle smile sat at the corners of my lips. Laura couldn't seem to stop crying, but as I kept stroking her face and pressing my lips to her forehead, she finally began to calm down.
"The battle is far from over yet, isn't that right?"
"...Yeah."
"I appreciate you worrying about me, but if you truly want to protect me, you need to win this battle. Go back to where you belong. Your adjutants are probably anxious enough as it is."
Laura nodded.
The two of us pressed our lips together. Right beside us came the sounds of metal scraping against metal, shields shoving shields aside, screams drowned in blood. A brief moment passed, and we broke the kiss. I gave her a warm smile.
"I'm counting on you, Laura."
Only then did the focus return to Laura's blue eyes.
She broke into a radiant smile.
"Okay. My lord."
Laura took off running back toward the center army. I watched her figure grow smaller and smaller, and for a while I said nothing. What truly infuriated me in that moment was the fact that the war cries sounded so impossibly close.
I didn't know why, but it genuinely made me angry. Everything was loud. Lances, shields, hooves, soldiers — each one was doing its absolute best to produce as much noise as humanly possible. Everything was just far too loud......
"......"
For some reason, the royal guards were watching me with uneasy expressions. I let out a little snort.
"I trust your discretion will save your lives."
It was a tacit threat: if any of you go running your mouths about what you saw here, I will chase you to the ends of hell and kill you. At the very least, they had enough sense to understand my meaning — the guards bellowed in unison, "Yes, Your Highness!"
I turned my gaze back to the battlefield. The fight was far from over......
Afterword
I'll put a map in the settings section.