WeTried Translations x Flame Comics
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
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Chapter 145: The Rebellion of the Three Counts (5)
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* * *
Murderous intent swept in from every direction, along with hot breath, hot blood, and hot bodies.
-Screee!!
Ivan slid the axe plunging straight down before him along the flat of his sword. Then he raised his arm and struck. With a sharp slash, the creature in front of him took a deep cut across the throat.
Blood poured from its neck as if it had grown gills, yet even in its final moments, it swung an arm to block Ivan's path.
Then another thick forearm came crashing down. It was thicker than an ordinary person's thigh, packed with muscle.
His nerves, tensed to the point of snapping, reacted at once. He could perceive even the tiny air currents scattered as the wind split apart.
-Clang! Screee!
At this point, every moment of battle was no different from acrobatics. The instant he allowed even one clean hit, his ability to fight would plummet.
A person died when struck by a blade. Torn muscles made movement impossible, and ripped ligaments made it difficult even to lift an arm.
And blades were always stronger than human flesh.
But.
-Grrugh!!
-Shhk.
The longsword began to dance again. He could not use the method of shutting off certain senses to heighten others right now. He needed every sense at full capacity.
His nose tracked the beasts' stench, his ears caught the noise of approaching weapons, his sense of touch followed the eddies of the faint breeze like antennae, and his eyes took in the ever-changing battlefield.
A tidal wave of information crashed into his mind. Fighting many opponents alone was always like this.
It was exhausting. The mental strain was harder to endure than the physical fatigue.
But not yet.
-Clang! Screee!
He deflected an axe, slipped away, sliced through an approaching creature's forearm, pulled back again, evaded a swinging war hammer, and stepped on it.
“Grrk?!”
He sprang up, planted a hand on its shoulder, then stabbed twice into the inner trapezius, following the grain of the muscle. He severed the artery precisely and withdrew. He did not need to finish it. The creature was already dead.
So, the next one.
Ivan threw himself at the next enemy.
-Clang!!
His dagger broke. That was fine. He still had two more.
-Krrk! Clang!
He threw his chipped longsword into one creature's hamstring and immediately shot forward. The creature's flailing movements looked painfully slow.
Grabbing the fallen axe, he tested its weight for a moment.
Eleven kilograms. Its center of gravity was a mess for a human weapon. It was practically a lump of iron.
Just right.
If you were slaughtering cattle, you used a butcher's knife.
Ivan raised the axe and began to swing it. An axe had to be used on different principles from a sword. This time, he did not deflect and slip inside. He battered and crushed.
He walked.
“Huff... Huff...”
Forward.
Forward through the ravine. Toward the enemy's front line. Slowly knocking down the creatures that came at him as he advanced.
He opened a path. He did not look back at the dead, the dying, or the mortally wounded. He went forward again.
A scout's duty was to forge a route through the center of the enemy formation.
Forward.
He ignored useless information: the calories burning away through intense exertion, his feverish body heat, the sun slowly tilting overhead.
The fatigue cried out from muscles producing lactic acid, his lungs panted for even a little more oxygen, and tension stretched to its limit pressed a headache into his skull.
He ignored all that useless information and went forward again.
He killed them and made a path.
That was his role. His steps always faced forward.
“Hah... Hah...”
He copied Einar's way of fighting, followed the martial prowess Maximilian had shown, and imitated the stance Gilles Ver had taken.
He pieced together the wartime maxims scattered throughout his past like a mosaic, fitting them into the situation like a puzzle.
Forward.
* * *
“Vargadal's warband has disappeared?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Where? Where were they last confirmed?”
“Vertomang.”
“Then they have been like this since the first day! Are you out of your mind? Why am I only hearing of something this important now?!”
Guillaume shouted as he flung aside his helmet. The chief attendant bowed deeply and retreated.
No matter how urgent the dispatch, not every development could be reported in real time. Naturally, there could be a discrepancy of a day or two.
But it had been four days. For four days, every estate except Vertomang had remained intact. They had even gathered soldiers, claiming they would handle the situation themselves.
“There shouldn't be anyone they would willingly unite behind.”
Mere barons mobilizing private troops and even cooperating to build up a military force? Any military action not approved in advance could reasonably be treated as treason.
At the news that they were willingly gathering soldiers and preparing local defenses despite that risk, Guillaume clutched the back of his neck and trembled.
He and the other two counts had begun this plan after accepting that failure would mean arrest for treason anyway. There could be flaws, but there was no chance their grand design itself would go wrong.
They had both the confidence and the circumstances for it. If not now, they would never even have been able to attempt it.
But what were those people? Dirt-scrabbling provincial nobles, local gentry hardly worthy of being called nobles. What great honor could they possibly seek that they would risk treason to join hands?
Guillaume ground his teeth and shouted.
“Head for Vertomang!”
The plan to tour the devastated nearby estates and then exterminate the demonfolk at the proper time had already fallen apart. He did not know why the demonfolk had suddenly settled in Vertomang, but operations had a way of collapsing the moment they began.
A fine commander had to be able to press ahead with the next plan even then.
‘If it has come to this, I have no choice but to use treason as leverage and coax them into compliance.’
They had gathered troops and stirred up trouble. If he moved the House of Nobles on that basis, he could overturn country barons as much as he pleased.
What could they do if he used that to force them into line?
“Oh, right. How many did they say had gathered?”
“At least two thousand infantry, a little over three hundred cavalry, and more than twenty knights.”
“That is all?”
“When they were last checked, there were signs that all the nearby estates intended to gather as well, but the troops assembled so far are believed to number about that many.”
“Good grief.”
That number of troops during the farming season meant they had scraped together virtually every fighting man in their estates. And it was not just one or two estates. Even estates that did not directly touch the front had mobilized them?
That would be difficult without a royal command.
Gnashing his teeth through his doubts, Guillaume turned his horse. His orders spread through the camp, and soon the soldiers began marching after him.
* * *
“You. Name.”
The voice sounded like iron grinding against iron. It was clearly human speech.
Human language was too delicate and complex to be formed by their broad, thick tongues and the structure of their mouths.
Most Tauruses therefore could not speak. At least, the ones Ivan had encountered spoke among themselves in their own native language.
So Ivan did not answer the first words he heard.
He swung his axe instead.
-Crunch!
A Taurus that had been alive and gasping lost its head and rolled across the ground. Ivan was mechanically butchering the creatures that still twitched when he raised his head at the voice that came again.
“You. Name.”
It was the one with line-of-fire detection. The strongest and most troublesome one. The creature that had actually managed to drive a blade into Ivan's body.
It was difficult to assess precisely, but even by the standards of that time, it was not the sort of creature one saw often. It was beyond the level of a centurion, perhaps even an adjutant-level officer.
Ivan poured a healing potion over the long wound stretching from his chest to his forearm and looked at it.
“Name.”
Its limbs had been severed, and blood poured from its body, yet it stared at him with a smile. Its bloodshot eyes burned as they fixed directly on Ivan.
As its mouth moved and it spoke again, Ivan picked up his axe and approached.
“Ivan Petrovich Yermof.”
“Ivan. Remembered.”
The creature nodded and pulled back its lips. Yellow teeth clotted with blood showed through. It was smiling in its own way.
The axe blade rose straight into the sky, blocking out the morning sun that had climbed overhead.
With its face in the axe's shadow, the creature mumbled.
“My name.”
“I don't care.”
-Crunch.
Its face still wore a smile as it fell and rolled across the ground.
“Hah...”
Ivan dropped roughly to the ground and rummaged through his clothes. His last Nutrient Bar was soaked in blood. It was not in a particularly sanitary state, but unless he wanted to tear into demonfolk flesh, there was no choice.
Taurus meat tasted disgustingly bad.
Ivan roughly wiped off the Nutrient Bar and chewed it down.
He was tired.
Still.
“I was ten times better than you, Gilles Ver.”
From the ravine to this spot, this forest probably held more Taurus corpses than trees.
* * *
“We aren't too late, are we?”
“We couldn't have prepared any faster.”
Serthe answered with a snort to Noar, who had spent the last few days growing increasingly restless. They had done everything they could over the past three days.
They had gathered troops in such haste that there had barely been time to sleep. Lords had been brought together almost by threat under the name of the Grand Duke of Etakrikh.
They could not even consider supply lines, so they could only sustain combat for a few days. After that, the army would naturally disperse or vanish through desertion.
That was better, if anything. If an army of this size remained together for long, it would truly look like an indefensible treasonous plot.
“Fire! I can see fire!!”
“This direction has nothing to do with the main road.”
“Let's go and see. Who knows where the fighting took place?”
“Entire army, prepare for battle!!”
Black smoke rose beyond the forest. Vertomang had been completely swallowed by the demonfolk, so it was certainly not idle slash-and-burn farmers clearing their fields.
That fire most likely belonged to the demonfolk. It was probably some kind of camp.
That man really had held them in this forest for five days. Alone.
Baron Noar led the soldiers on, quietly impressed. The soldiers, made up of tenant farmers, gripped their old spears and struggled after them.
“Signs of battle!”
“It must have been a fierce battle...!”
After about an hour, they found the first corpse. It was a Taurus corpse already beginning to rot. Its severely mangled state, the blood scattered around like paint, and the shattered nearby trees gave some sense of how serious the battle had been.
Five, perhaps. He killed five in one place.
That meant he had faced five Tauruses head-on without riding a horse.
“The path continues!”
A knight at the front shouted. A path wide enough for roughly two thousand infantrymen to pass through had been carved out.
The soldiers trudged through the ruined forest, gripping their spears tightly with frightened faces.
They could not help but feel fear when they saw the dead demonfolk and the path that had clearly been made by them. Tauruses were little different from nightmares to farmers.
The deep forest swallowed the afternoon sunlight in a dark glow. Though the path was wide open, the sides of the forest were wrapped in darkness, as if demonfolk might leap out from between the trees at any moment.
After comforting the frightened farmers and traveling farther, the vanguard called out that they had found more corpses.
“Battle took place here too...”
“Judging by the traces, this seems closer to a pursuit.”
“Did he use the forest terrain to fight them bit by bit and buy time? For five days? It gives me chills.”
Serthe swallowed hard as he looked over the corpses. Taurus bodies torn to pieces lay scattered everywhere.
The vanguard raised their voices again, reporting more corpses. They had walked only about ten more minutes.
Five minutes later, they shouted that they had found more bodies, following even larger traces of battle.
Again, and again, and again.
No one in the group spoke now. Even the vanguard could no longer make a report.
“What in the world... is this...?”
They were in a forest.
Just not one made of trees.
They stood on a path where, no matter where they looked, all they saw were the remains of dead Tauruses.
The afternoon sun leaned toward the west.
“One person... did all of this...?”
A path had been opened. A narrow, precarious path stinking of blood.
A path of bodies, with entrails, muscles, flesh, and blood scattered everywhere, while countless crows pecked and tore at the corpses.
At the end of that muddy path, paved with Taurus corpses, a small campfire burned low.
“Lord above.”
Serthe made the sign of the cross and muttered. The tendons in the hand that had unconsciously moved toward his sword hilt twitched.
“Mountains of Corpses and Seas of Blood...”
“I'm not at the level to claim that title.”
That was Einar's epithet.
Ivan, who had been sitting before the campfire, slowly rose to his feet.
Footnotes:
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