WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Abood

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◈ Friedrich's Battlefield

Chapter 53: The Recapture of Ostburg Fortress (2)

A battalion of the Bachstein Ducal forces was closing in on Ostburg Fortress. Though not yet confirmed, it was best to treat them as enemies and prepare accordingly.

During the impromptu military meeting hastily held on the road, Friedrich listened quietly as Gregor and the battalion commanders discussed. Meanwhile, he contemplated the situation alone.

First, it was impossible for the Ferdinand Regiment to rush to the fortress’s aid. No matter how you looked at it, they couldn’t arrive faster than the battalion advancing on the fortress.

Second, the roughly thirty-strong transport squad stationed at the fortress couldn’t possibly mount an effective defense. The disparity in forces was hopeless. Ordering them to defend to the death and sending them to die pointlessly was out of the question.

That left the realistic option of abandoning the fortress once to let the enemy take it, then quickly retaking it afterward.

However, launching a frontal assault to reclaim a fortress held by three hundred soldiers was a near-impossible task. Ostburg Fortress was sizable enough that three hundred defenders could fully utilize its defensive strength.

Moreover, in a brute-force siege, the skill level of individual knights and soldiers mattered little. Even if the Ferdinand Regiment committed their entire thousand-strong force, retaking the fortress would still be extremely difficult.

What’s more, simply retaking the fortress regardless of losses was not a viable option.

If Friedrich’s analysis was correct, the battle over the fortress would only be the opening engagement before the arrival of the main forces from the Ducal army and the Kingdom of Arelia. If the Ferdinand Regiment suffered devastating losses in this initial fight, the entire campaign would be jeopardized.

Given that, Friedrich knew they had to somehow exploit the enemy’s weaknesses or catch them off guard. Using a clever strategy to retake the fortress as swiftly as possible with minimal losses was imperative.

With that premise, Friedrich pondered deeply. He racked his memory for elements from the many history books and tales he had read, accounts of countless sieges, to find anything that could be applied here.

About two hundred years ago, during a time of turmoil, when the Edelstein Counts were expanding their power to build the kingdom, there was a battle where a small unit disguised as enemy troops infiltrated the opposing force’s castle.

In the era of Queen Hildegard Edelstein, they secured two attack routes against a Novakian fortress and launched simultaneous assaults, ultimately capturing it.

In the ancient unified Lutetian Kingdom, during border disputes with the Rigald Empire, they thoroughly hunted down messenger knights to completely isolate and besiege the enemy fortress, forcing its fall.

Combining those elements, Friedrich finally devised a single plan.

Whether it would succeed was a gamble, but absolute victory in war didn’t exist, nor did any strategy guarantee success. Any move carried an element of risk.

Matthias seemed to think so as well. As regiment commander, he chose to adopt Friedrich’s plan.

・・・・・・

Friedrich volunteered to command the crucial separate detachment himself. Having proposed a strategy that would place this small force in extreme danger, he could not simply remain with the main army.

Matthias acknowledged his resolve, and so Friedrich set out with a few riders. Yurika, Oliver, and Gunther.

They first followed the main road, then made a wide detour around Ostburg Fortress, heading northwest. They took local paths frequently used by residents, allowing them to bypass the fortress without being detected by the enemy who had seized it.

Oliver proved invaluable as their guide. As an officer of the cavalry battalion, he had memorized the roads around the strategically important Ostburg Fortress and had actually visited the area during training. He knew the geography far better than Friedrich, who only had a rough map memorized from Gregor’s lessons.

Thanks to Oliver’s guidance, Friedrich and his group reached a point several kilometers northwest of Ostburg Fortress by dusk the following day. The larger the force, the slower the march; a small mounted unit could move at least twice as fast as the entire regiment.

The following day after that, Friedrich and his group hid within a forest bordering the road. There they waited, watching for the enemy’s messenger passing through on the way to Ostburg Fortress.

If he were the commander of the battalion that had seized the fortress, he would send a report of their success back to the main force, likely stationed at the ducal capital Remscheid. Since only the kingdom’s army maintained a communication system using falconers, the duke’s forces relied on mounted couriers for messaging.

Then, the messenger would return from the main force carrying reports.

For a commander isolated at the front, having as much information as possible about the main force’s situation and the expected timing of reinforcements was crucial—for his own command and to maintain his troops’ morale.

Friedrich calculated that the enemy’s messenger would pass along this road in the afternoon. The messenger would have set out the morning after the fortress was taken, reached Remscheid within a day to report to the main force, and today, the day after, would be carrying a reply back.

His prediction proved perfectly accurate. Capturing the messenger was easy.

The enemy courier, feeling secure within the duchy’s controlled territory, let down his guard. Suddenly, Gunter leapt from the forest by the roadside and struck him cleanly from his horse. Before the horse could flee, Oliver secured it. Yurika quickly tackled and subdued the fallen rider. The capture was over in seconds, without Friedrich needing to intervene.

The captured knight who introduced himself as Roman, provided valuable intelligence on the current state of the duke’s forces. Friedrich’s suspicions were mostly confirmed: the duke had betrayed the royal family and invited the forces of the Kingdom of Arelia, and Prince Konrad was indeed conspiring with the duke.

By evening that same day, a convoy led by Knight Yarg, traveling the same route that bypassed the fortress, joined them. With two covered wagons carrying about twenty infantrymen, they spent the night together. At last, the day to execute the fortress recapture operation arrived.

The plan from here was relatively straightforward. First, Friedrich and his group would approach the fortress’s west gate disguised as the duke’s transport unit. At the same time, the Ferdinand Regiment would appear from the east, with only the cavalry detachment advancing first to feign an attack on the transport convoy.

This ruse would cause the enemy to hastily admit the transport unit into the fortress, eager to assist their ‘allies,’ without thoroughly inspecting them.

Once inside, the transport unit would reveal their true identity, secure the area around the west gate, and hold it at all costs, opening the gates to let the cavalry forces in. Meanwhile, the main body of the Ferdinand Regiment would launch an assault from the east gate.

Though Ostburg Fortress was fairly strong, it would be impossible to defend the east gate if the enemy had already infiltrated through the west gate. With attacks from both outside and inside, the plan was to swiftly overwhelm the enemy forces.

Capturing Knight Roman was extremely advantageous for increasing the chance of success. It was one thing to have the enemy believe the approaching force from the northwest was a friendly transport convoy, but it was far more convincing if the lead of the convoy was a knight wearing the armor of a messenger. The enemy would be far less suspicious. It was easy for them to assume Roman, returning from his mission, had been ordered to lead the wagons.

Roman was small and slight for a man, likely due to the demands of running as a messenger. Because of this, the armor taken from him was given to Yurika, whose build was closest to his. She would impersonate Roman. Wearing a lightweight leather helmet and covering her face with a cloth to shield from the wind, she looked like a typical messenger. Until she spoke, it was unlikely anyone would notice she was someone else.

Roman himself was kept alive. As a captured knight who honestly revealed information, he was a prisoner for now. Whether he would eventually be executed for treason was a matter for the royal family to decide. Friedrich and Oliver agreed on this as Roman was bound and lying on the floor of a wagon.

The coordinated arrival time with the main force at Ostburg Fortress was set for precisely noon. The main force had been marching at a pace that would have allowed them to arrive by the previous day, so there was virtually no concern about delays to the plan’s execution.

As expected, when Friedrich’s fake transport unit reached a point visible from the west gate of the fortress, they spotted scouts from the main force circling around from the eastern side.

The scout hastily returned to report that a transport unit from the Bachstein forces was approaching the fortress from the west. Acting on this, Count Matthias Hosenfeld, commander of the regiment, ordered a cavalry detachment to ride out ahead to ‘intercept’ the transport unit. Under this pretense, a hundred cavalry led by Baron Eugen Stamitz, the cavalry battalion captain, circled around toward the fortress.

Friedrich and his group staged a faux escape chase with the cavalry, and, seen as comrades in need of rescue, the ‘transport unit’ was allowed into the fortress by the Bachstein soldiers without suspicion.

As one of the enemy knights approached, still mistaking the lead rider for the scout Roman, it was Yurika who gave the answer. Not with words, but with her blade.

Footnotes:

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