WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Asakusa
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Veteran of the Northern Front ◈
Chapter 18: Operation Frostfire (5)
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I cheered inwardly at Gilbert’s declaration that he would split the troops in two.
‘Nice!!’
Just as planned.
Everything I had done by visiting Gilbert last night had been for this moment.
The subjugation force’s defeat was already inevitable. To minimize the damage, we needed to prepare for the enemy’s attacks and wait for an opportunity.
But as long as Gilbert was the commander, that was impossible.
So I had decided to split the troops.
‘They’ll all be ground down if things continue like this anyway.’
It would be better to divide them and prepare for what came later.
‘Of course, that’s only my opinion.’
Under normal circumstances, dividing the subjugation force in this situation would be foolish.
But our potato-chip man Gilbert did not care about such things.
“Split the troops? What do you mean...?”
“As you said, the enemy may strike our rear. So why not divide the troops? The vanguard can search for the barbarians, while the rear detachment rests before covering our rear in case of trouble.”
Gilbert gave Berun a faintly mocking smile.
“You will command the rear detachment, Berun. It was your suggestion, was it not?”
Being sent to the rear meant being prevented from earning military merit.
Under normal circumstances, Berun would have protested such unfair treatment.
Nod, nod! At my signal, Berun accepted it without complaint.
“...I will obey.”
“Good. I shall temporarily grant you the rank of three-hundred commander and place you in charge of the rear detachment. Do your best.”
With that, Gilbert turned away.
“Now then, we advance!”
Having forced the troops apart, he left with a triumphant air.
‘It was roughly what I expected, but he’s abusing his authority to retaliate just because Berun criticized him.’
How had such a petty bastard become a Commander of a Thousand?
Once Gilbert departed with the troops, Marcus approached and muttered,
“He selected only regular soldiers and took them with him.”
“Seems so.”
“Honestly... I have nothing to say.”
Marcus shook his head, looking as though he could not believe such a person existed.
“Thanks to that, only penal soldiers remain with us.”
“There are still about fifty regular soldiers.”
“Aren’t they all regular soldiers under Centurion Berun?”
“That is true.”
Leaving those regular soldiers behind had been my intention as well.
‘He probably doesn’t want to share military merit with the ones who talked behind his back with Berun.’
Either way, I had separated Gilbert as intended and gained troops Berun could command. It was a satisfactory result.
The 250 penal soldiers and 50 regular soldiers left in the rear detachment watched Berun and the place where the main force had departed, looking uneasy.
They believed their overall commander had abandoned them.
Berun asked me quietly,
“I did as you said, but I have earned Gilbert’s displeasure.”
“Didn’t you find it uncomfortable to remain with him as well, Centurion Berun?”
“That is true, but... Ahem! In any case, what should we do now?”
“First, we should reassure the soldiers.”
“How?”
“Wouldn’t you, their commander, know that better than I do?”
Berun glared at me briefly, then let out a short sigh and shouted at the soldiers.
“Our rear detachment will rest for three hours as Lord Gilbert ordered, then move out. Understood?”
“Hooray!”
“We’re saved.”
“Centurion Berun, you’re the best!”
The soldiers relaxed at the word rest. As expected of a model commander, Berun knew what the soldiers needed.
‘At least they won’t desert or refuse orders now.’
Besides, though we were called the rear detachment, we had practically been left on our own. Moving flexibly like an independent force would not cause much trouble.
Three hours later, the rested rear detachment began following the vanguard.
Gilbert had taken every commander with him except the squad commanders who had served under Berun and two newly appointed centurions with the least influence in the thousand-man unit. We had no choice but to reorganize how we deployed our forces.
Berun divided the troops into three large groups, assigning the new centurions to the left and right wings while personally taking command of the center.
“Ubel, stay beside me in the center with Pellon.”
“Yes, sir.”
A formation that kept the troops clustered together while watching both flanks.
‘This is the best we can do right now.’
Our numbers were small, which worried me. But unlike charging forward in a stupid straight line, positioning left and right wings would let us scout our surroundings and prevent the barbarians from ambushing us.
‘It really is much better with a different commander.’
We had been moving under Berun’s orthodox command for about two hours when someone spoke.
“There are traces of the vanguard ahead.”
“Hm.”
We found a village that appeared to have been burned by the vanguard.
Pellon and the other squad commanders showed no particular reaction, but after examining the village’s condition, I sighed inwardly.
‘Hoo...’
It had begun.
“Centurion Berun.”
“What is it?”
“It is far too cold for the vanguard to have burned this village. Look. These partially burned trees have become solid blocks of ice.”
The gap between us and the vanguard was only three to four hours. It made no sense for burned wood to freeze so thoroughly in that short time.
“And there are no signs of battle.”
“You mean...?”
“Yes. I believe the barbarians, not the vanguard, burned this place.”
Berun’s eyes widened.
“The barbarians burned their own homes? Why would they... Wait. Do you mean the enemy noticed our presence and fled first?”
“That is likely.”
This was terrible news for the subjugation force.
If the barbarians had noticed us, it meant they had time to gather their strength and counterattack.
‘Until now, we have barely managed to win through numerical superiority, but...’
The barbarians had recognized the subjugation force and withdrawn to gather their forces. The fragile balance would now be completely overturned.
＊＊＊＊＊
As I expected, it did not take long for bad news to arrive.
As the sun sank and the sky slowly turned red, battered soldiers began appearing one by one along the rear detachment’s route.
“Y-you are...”
“T-the rear detachment!”
“P-please save us!”
Berun calmed the rambling soldiers and asked what had happened.
“What happened?”
“The v-vanguard was defeated by the enemy. Right now... the barbarians...”
“The vanguard was defeated? What do you mean? Where is Lord Gilbert?”
“Lord Gilbert... died in battle.”
Berun was shocked to hear that the highest commander of the thousand-man unit had died.
“D-died in battle?! Explain exactly what happened!”
“T-that is...”
The messenger described what they had seen and heard.
A few hours earlier, Gilbert’s vanguard had continued forward without hesitation.
“We kept searching for barbarians, but there were only villages that had already been burned. We could not find a trace of the enemy.”
Gilbert, desperate to earn military merit as quickly as possible, could not have liked that situation.
“Did he force the troops onward to pursue them?”
“Yes.”
I could guess the rest without hearing it.
Gilbert had finally found the barbarians and likely charged in blindly, thinking they were another small group like before.
“T-there was an enemy ambush.”
Oh dear.
He really had to go out in style.
“We tried to hold them off somehow, but there were too many enemies. We could not contend with them at all.”
“How many could there have been for a vanguard made of regular soldiers to be defeated?”
“I cannot say exactly, but there seemed to be more than two thousand.”
“W-what?”
Their strength far exceeded my expectations.
With that many, it would not be unreasonable to think every barbarian tribe in the area had joined forces.
The barbarians had their own conflicting interests, so they rarely united.
There was an exception.
When the survival of their tribes themselves was threatened.
If the subjugation force had killed only the men and spared the elderly, women, and children, the barbarians would never have united into such a large force.
But...
‘They killed not only the men, but even the women and children who would have carried on the tribes. They had no choice but to unite for their survival.’
This was the result of crossing into enemy territory and shedding blood without showing mercy to prisoners.
The consequences caused by one idiot’s snowball had been far from small, but there was no use regretting what had already happened.
Now was the time to discuss a response.
“Two thousand barbarians... That is only the number confirmed. There may be even more.”
“Centurion Berun...”
Berun pondered the worried looks of Pellon and the squad commanders, then suddenly turned to me.
“Ubel, what do you think we should do?”
All eyes turned toward me.
Perhaps Berun had told them that I had arranged the rear detachment on the way here. They stared at me with shining eyes.
‘Do these people think I’m some sort of machine that gives them answers when they press a button?’
I felt as though I had accidentally become an adviser, but there was nothing to be done.
I cleared my throat beneath their gazes and spoke.
“Ahem! There are two options available to us.”
“Two options?”
“Is that true?”
I nodded at Berun’s question.
“Yes.”
“Tell us quickly.”
“First, we can retreat as we are.”
“Retreat?”
“Yes. The barbarians will not stop at annihilating the subjugation force. They are highly likely to press their advantage and launch a counterattack against the front where the Northern Army is stationed.”
“...That certainly makes sense.”
“Headquarters does not yet know what has happened here. If we retreat, report the situation, and prepare for the enemy’s offensive, we can prevent further losses.”
If we succeeded in only that, the Northern Army’s losses would be greatly reduced.
However,
“If we retreat now, this subjugation operation will be confirmed as a failure, and every member of the subjugation force except us will be annihilated.”
“Hmm...”
Berun’s expression darkened at the word annihilated.
Berun was worried about the soldiers still alive.
The centurions and squad commanders urged Berun to decide.
“Centurion Berun, there is no time!”
“That is right!”
“It pains us to leave the remaining soldiers behind, but if we hesitate, we don’t know when the enemy will attack. We must retreat at once and report the situation to headquarters.”
Berun clenched his teeth briefly at their words, then looked at me with resolute eyes.
“Ubel.”
“Yes.”
“I know it is greedy, but I want to save as many soldiers as possible. Is there any way to save them?”
“Centurion Berun!”
“There can’t possibly be a way in this situation...”
“There is.”
The protesting commanders startled and turned their eyes to me.
“What?!”
“Is that true?”
“Yes. Didn’t I say from the start that there were two options? There is one way to save the soldiers without letting this subjugation operation end in failure.”
Berun urged me on at the mention of a solution.
“Tell us. What is this method?”
“Before I explain, this plan carries an extremely high risk.”
“In other words, we must be prepared for everyone to die if it goes wrong.”
“That is correct.”
Berun smiled faintly and looked at the other commanders.
“So Ubel says. What do you think? Are you afraid of death?”
“How can you say something so disappointing?”
“Ha ha, we are Northerners.”
“We have been prepared to die since the day we joined the Northern Army.”
Born in the North, die in the North.
It was a creed unique to Northerners, one unseen in other regions.
“What do you think, Ubel? Is that enough for you?”
“...It seems I spoke out of turn before such brave Northerners.”
I thought I could trust these people and fight alongside them.
“Then I will explain the second plan.”
My plan was simple, yet complicated.
“The enemy does not know that the subjugation force has split in two.”
We had killed every barbarian we encountered, so the enemy likely did not know the subjugation force’s exact size.
“After defeating the vanguard, they will believe they have defeated the Imperial Army. They will scatter to hunt the survivors and prevent them from returning to the front.”
I presented it as a hypothesis, but this was what had truly happened in the Frostfire Incident. I had focused on that point.
“To save the soldiers, we must turn that to our advantage and hunt them instead.”
“...If we pursue the enemy, we can naturally gather the scattered survivors.”
“That is right. And to make this operation succeed, we must adjust our formation.”
I drew on the ground and explained the formation and strategy we would use.
“First, we will divide the rear detachment into east, west, south, and north.”
“Divide the troops? Would that not make it easier for the barbarians to discover us?”
“That would be true if we divided them without any countermeasures. But it is different if we move in an organized formation.”
The formation I drew was a kind of search formation shaped like a diamond.
“We will place the smaller, quick-footed soldiers as scouts at the furthest points in each direction. Then, if we watch our surroundings while moving with the center as our base...”
Berun’s eyes lit up as he listened.
“The scouts on the perimeter would serve as watchtowers, allowing the entire formation to move like one living creature. And since we would watch every direction as we move, it would be easy to avoid the enemy or ambush them as we wished.”
Was it because Berun was well versed in military strategy?
Berun immediately understood my intent, while also raising a question.
“Then how do you plan to relay information to soldiers in the other directions?”
“We will place guard teams and runners to relay messages between the scouts. If we keep about fifty paces between the ends of the formation, communication should not be difficult.”
“Ah...”
“So that was it.”
Only then did the other commanders understand my strategy, letting out sounds of admiration.
Berun looked at me with astonishment.
“Huh. Impressive. Did you devise this formation?”
“Well, it just happened somehow...”
“Once this matter is safely resolved, I should propose introducing this formation throughout the army. It is an innovative strategy that could be used for guard and scouting duties as well.”
“Ha ha ha...”
In truth, I had only adapted the formation and strategy of Jeg, my favorite character in the game, who was known as cold-blooded.
I felt sorry for stealing an idea that would be praised in the future, but...
‘This is no time to worry about that.’
We would use the fact that the barbarians had not yet recognized our presence. Like ghosts, we would hunt the enemy, gather the scattered survivors, and strengthen our forces.
That was the only way to keep the Frostfire Operation from ending in failure.
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