by Funa
The so-called Order of the Crimson Blood was keeping busy, traveling to all of the larger villages along the main roads of the county of Cesdour, which abutted the national border, and which the Empire had already conquered. To the smaller villages, they sent on the villagers who had already been persuaded as messengers. The message they carried was, “Hide your food and everything else, and then hide yourselves.”
Ascham was now in the hands of its army. If they were following the directions outlined in the letter, Mile calculated, then they should be making the same preparations there around now. They didn’t have access to Mile’s inventory, but with their forces concentrated together, they should be able to manage well enough. And of course, the Crimson Vow had no reason to doubt a single particle of Juno’s resolve. After all, at Pauline’s suggestion, they had included a single line at the end of that letter:
Juno, you must protect Ascham!
It was quite the wicked gambit…
***
“Damn it! Where are all of those Ascham bastards?!” the colonel of the imperial regiment growled, not even attempting to hide his aggravation.
The troops had begun their fruitless march to requisition supplies from the locals and had now assaulted countless villages, only to come up empty-handed every time. All signs of the villagers had vanished, including their food and water. Not a single scrap had been left behind. They couldn’t seem to find a trace of any wells, either. It seemed they had been buried, and all ropes and drawing apparatuses dismantled, leaving no indication that they had been there at all—to prevent the imperial troops from using them.
If all they had done was bury them, then re-digging them later would not be much of a task. With the combined efforts of all the villagers, the reconstruction would take no more than a few days. However, at present, the imperial forces did not have the time to spend days looking for the dig sites and then days more re-digging them themselves. Such time would be far better spent continuing to advance and tearing the capital down. Additionally, there was no telling how much longer it would take to build the simple housings required over the tops of wells—or if something more elaborate was needed, how long it would take to find the devices. For now, they had no choice but to press on.
“Where are all the Ascham troops? Don’t tell me they all got together and circumvented us to stage a coordinated sneak attack…”
“No! If they did that, then there would be no one to defend against us invading the capital. It would be impossible for them to completely evacuate the city and hide all of its resources in the way that we’ve seen in these villages. If they lost their capital, then no matter how many hundreds of soldiers they had left, it would be the death of Ascham.
“Even if they managed to recruit all of the peasants, they would still have only a few hundred more soldiers at best. There would be nothing they could do against us if we’d already set up in their home base. They’d never go so far as laying waste to their own capital, after all.”
The colonel nodded at his officer’s words.
“In that case…”
“Well, sir, I believe we should ignore this clever ruse on the part of our enemy and proceed toward our destination.”
“Indeed. Apparently, we were foolish to think that we could interrupt their chain of command with a surprise assault and move in to occupy the capital unscathed. Had we simply overwhelmed them with force from the get-go and moved straight in, we would have been relaxing and drinking fine wines by now,” the colonel said, a bit disdainfully.
The officer shrank back. He had been the one to propose the surprise attack in the first place, but of course, it was the colonel himself who had judged this plan of action to be the correct one, and had directed his men to proceed with it, so the officer couldn’t take all the blame.
“All right, men, roll out!”
After taking an extended break for lunch, the imperial troops began to move again. The only ones who had been provided meals—scraped together from the scanty food they had stored outside of the supply depots and the minuscule amount of wild grasses they had managed to harvest along the road—were the officers. For the rest of the soldiers, it was merely a long rest.
Initially, they had planned to hunt wild animals and monsters along the way, but for some reason, they could not catch anything. No doubt, moving with so many men kicked up too much of a ruckus, the officers assumed, thinking nothing odd of the situation.
***
“Gah!”
“Gwaaaah!!!”
The screams of soldiers rang out once more.
“Damn it, these bastards are persistent!” The officer in command of the vanguard troops let out a cry of rage.
Indeed, his men had just fallen into yet another trap.
First, they had come across what they had thought was the usual sort of crude pit that a child would trick someone into, but at the bottom of the pit were sharp bamboo spikes, slathered with poison. Then, they had stumbled upon what looked to be bothersome little rocks and tried to kick them out of the way, only to find iron rods embedded in the ground—iron rods, which had broken the men’s toes. When they had tried to move a fallen tree that was blocking the road, and the men moved to put their hands under the trunk to lift it, they found the underside lined with innumerable thorns—naturally, covered in poison. When they tripped over an imperceptible wire, arrows came flying towards them, and they were assailed with great force by bamboo and shrubbery that had been bent for tension, with pointed stakes attached.
Most of these tricks were crudely made, hastily and clumsily fashioned, so there were of course misfires. However, there were others along this gauntlet that were elaborately and skillfully crafted, and these were no laughing matter—there were times they took fatal damage head-on. Thanks to those traps in this latter category, they had to treat every one of these traps with caution, and they had no choice but to proceed with great care.
Normally, in such a small fief as this, it would take them no more than a matter of hours to reach the capital from the border, but thanks to the traps, their movement was many times slower, and they still had a long way ahead of them. Having to make such a wild detour for the sake of getting water had not helped matters either. For the soldiers who were becoming overwhelmed with hunger and thirst, and would rather get to the capital as quickly as possible, all this was highly irritating. Of course, their irritation further clouded their attentiveness, causing them, yet again, to fall into a trap.
When looking at their numbers as a whole, it seemed of little consequence if they lost a battle-ready man here or there, but that still did not mean that they could afford to go around ignoring the traps’ perils. And so, the average marching speed of the imperial forces fell to a halting crawl, less than even what a wobbling eighteen-month-old could muster…
The requisition troops that they had sent back to the occupied lands a few days prior had already returned. The men had found each of the villages along the highways completely deserted, devoid of food and water. Furthermore, it was not until they arrived—bringing with them the barrels that they had picked up from the villages and filled with water from the river where the regiment had previously stopped—that they found that almost none of the water they had put into the barrels remained.
Yet again, the bindings were warped, and the wooden panels were cracked with notches cut into them. Every single barrel had been compromised.
***
“The imperial troops should be arriving about now,” said Reina.
“Yes,” Pauline agreed. “We laid out plans for a lot of traps in that letter. Even if they couldn’t put them all together… I think they should be arriving now.”
The two of them stood at the top of an elevation from which they could see the Ascham capital. As mentioned, there had been a secondary sheet in the letter that Mile delivered, which contained blueprints for all of the plans that the Ascham troops had utilized to build their traps. It seemed that those men had followed their
instructions exactly.
The imperial forces were exhausted, starving, and thirsty, and their usual cooperation was stunted by the discord sewn among them. Even so, the odds were still stacked against the Ascham forces.
5,000 vs. 300. That was seventeen imperial soldiers for every Ascham man. No matter how weak they were, winning against a force seventeen times your own in number was simply not possible. Furthermore, no matter how exceptional the fighting abilities of the Order of the Crimson Blood may have been, 4 vs. 5,000 was still just a little too much to ask.
Of course, if Mile were to get truly serious—if she were to fight without limits, without restraint—if she set out with the intent to slaughter every single one of those 5,000 men, then maybe, just maybe, it might not be so impossible. However, to do such a thing would leave Mile unable to retain a shred of happiness—with respect to neither her own mental health nor to international relations.
300 vs. 5,000.
4 vs. 5,000.
Both were utterly unbeatable odds.
So then, what of 300 + 4 vs. 5,000?
No matter how strong they were, it would be difficult for just four people to cause a ruckus among 5,000 men and defeat them all.
However, if those 5,000 men were weakened, and had already grown sloppy from the commotion caused by the four, and then 300 elite soldiers jumped into the fray…?
It was for the sake of just such a possibility that the Order of the Crimson Blood had put all their efforts into undermining the enemy on so many fronts. Now, they were on the cusp of the final, decisive battle. They would strike the imperial soldiers from behind even as they faced off against the men of Ascham, who would keep their own capital at their backs.
The imperial forces would not be setting a single foot in the capital!
“They’re here. It’s the imperial army!” announced Mile.
“So they are,” Reina agreed as the two lingered in the shadows of the trees, observing the highway.
“I can see the imperial troops,” said Mavis, “but where are the Ascham soldiers?”
There was silence. The four of them had all come to the same realization, but no one could drum up the nerve to put their concern into words. Finally, it was Mavis who voiced it.
Silence fell again. Indeed, in between the capital and the advancing imperial forces, there was no sign of the Ascham army… In fact, there was no sign of the Ascham army anywhere at all.
“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what do we do…?”
“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what should we do now…?”
“C-c-c-c-calm down, everyone…”
“That’s awfully strange…”
Reina, Mile, and Mavis were babbling nervously; Pauline alone remained calm.
“I know for certain that we wrote in the letter that they should remove all of the people and supplies from the villages along the enemy’s approach route, and that the final battle would take place at the capital. Even if this place is called a ‘capital,’ it’s still really just a little country town, not a walled city. The lord’s manor is just an estate, not a castle or a fortress, so it’s not the sort of place where siege tactics would come into play. Judging from what happened before, I doubt they would ignore any part of a letter from Mile, and they’ve done pretty well in following all of our other instructions up until now…”
The other three were silent. Pauline was exactly right. They had all gone over the letter fastidiously before sending it, so there could be no mistake. They scratched their heads as they tried to imagine what the absence of the army might mean, but they came up with nothing.
They could not possibly have abandoned the capital and run.
“Oh! The imperial army is sending out a recon unit!” said Mavis.
Sure enough, the Albarnians, too, had found the lack of any military defense peculiar and had sent out a reconnaissance team of around thirty men to investigate. The men had just entered the capital and proceeded a short distance when…
There was a shout as arrows and spears and rocks suddenly came raining down from out of the windows up on the rooftops. The imperial soldiers fell one by one. And then, men armed with melee weapons came pouring from the doorways.
“What…?”
It was no surprise that the girls should be so bewildered. The men that appeared from the buildings were not armed with swords and spears, but with kitchen knives, hoes, what appeared to be mop handles, and the like—numerous objects that were clearly not weapons suitable for a soldier in any professional sense.
“Most of those men aren’t soldiers, are they? They’re just citizens of the capital and the villagers who took refuge there,” said Pauline.
“Ah.” Suddenly, something occurred to Mile.
“It’s urban warfare. When Juno read that the final battle would be at the capital, instead of interpreting it as a battle taking place in front of the capital, defending it to the last, he must have thought that we meant that the battle itself would take place in the capital…”
“Wh-what are you talking about?!” Reina sputtered.
Mile explained:
“On an open battlefield, with no obstacles, the side that has the greatest number has the overwhelming advantage—even if it’s an enemy that’s been weakened a fair bit. So, Juno decided to move the battle to a place where it’s difficult to leverage that advantage. You can’t carry on a battle with any large numbers in a place full of obstacles, with obstructed views, and in narrow back alleys. On the contrary, the Ascham side knows the placement of all the buildings and the lay of the land—and they can get all of the peasants involved in the fighting…”
“Th-that’s ridiculous! Fighting is a job for soldiers! What are they thinking making normal people engage with enemy forces?!” Mavis shouted. “If an army is defeated and a battle ends, then the country that claims a land and the people that govern it may change, but the citizens still live on. That is the nature of battle—of war! At this rate, all of these civilians—the wives and the elderly, the sick and invalid—all of them will all get caught up in the fight and die!”
Mavis could protest all she wanted, but the wheels were already in motion.
“That’s what true, all-out war is,” Mile said softly. “War doesn’t care if you’re a civilian or a soldier. It’s not something that takes place just between governments and armies. Every citizen of a nation contributes to the war effort, whether it’s economically, through labor, or in some other way. And sometimes, the contribution they make is their life,” Mile finished. This world was not one where such notions had yet to become commonplace.
Pauline spoke. “The poison was too effective.”
“What?”
“We leveraged the fact that they had mistaken you for your mother, risen to godliness. They must have thought that no matter what method they used, they were certain to win. They likely told the civilians something similar.”
“So…this is all my fault…”
Mile began to pale.
“No, Mile, that’s not true. I was the one who proposed that you write that in the letter in the first place! I hadn’t expected them to go as far as this, so I failed to include any language prohibiting it. The fault is all mine. And so…”
“So?”
“So I will take responsibility. If I run straight into the enemy lines and spread my ‘hot’ magic all around, then I can probably cause enough confusion to—”
What she proposed was a suicide mission. No matter how much chaos she planted amongst the soldiers, it was a gambit from which there would be no return.
“Permission denied!” Mile swiftly shot down Pauline’s harried words.
“The lands we stand on are the property of Viscount Ascham and one named Adele von Ascham. These are my lands, and those are my people. Therefore, they are my responsibility! And furthermore…”
A wicked grin flashed across Mile’s face.
“Everyone’s going to call Juno a liar if the Goddess herself doesn’t appear at this final battle. Consider the
poor man’s reputation! I’ll be right back!”
Whoosh!
The next moment, Mile had vanished.
“Mile…?”
“Mile…? Well, all right, let’s follow…”
“Okay! Let’s get ready to run!”
“What?”
Reina’s enthusiastic reply shocked the other two. However, Reina gave no pause, continuing with a casual lilt, “Mile’s getting serious. If we go now, we’ll just get in her way. Plus, there’s nothing else we can do, is there? Mile’s gonna blow it somehow and come running back before we know it, all, ‘Oh nooooo, I messed up again!’ Am I right?!”
“…You’re totally right,” said Mavis.
“Th-that’s probably true…” Pauline agreed.
Mavis gazed off into the distance and then spoke, “Anyway, it seems like she’s getting along just fine down there…”
“Lattice Power Barrieeeeeeer!!!”
With a lattice barrier surrounding her body in a one-meter radius, Mile went charging through the middle of the imperial soldiers at high speed.
“Geh!”
“Gah!”
“Waaah!”
She continued plowing forward, knocking soldiers back one by one, all the way to the front—the space between the soldiers and the capital. Once she reached that point, she stopped, turning on a dime, and started that. Yes, that.
“Goddess Formation Mile, transformation activate! Refract and diffuse the light. Gather moisture into ice! Neutralize gravity and maintain formation…and complete! Final Fusion!!!”