9

“What is that man’s name?”

“I have heard rumors. Lord Fred scoffed at them, but it was my duty to know about Sword Experts, so I remembered the name. His name is… Mihoff… I am certain it is Rainer Mihoff.”

Louis tilted his head at a family name he had never heard before and quietly murmured the words “Rainer Mihoff.” Sensing Louis’s thoughts from that alone, Jodan added more explanation.

“The House of Rainer is a fallen noble line with nothing to boast of except Mihoff himself. He became a Sword Expert before he even reached the age of majority, which caused a stir. The rumor was later declared false, but seeing how things are, I suspect it was Marquis Gangpireu’s thorough deception.”

“Can you be sure the man you saw on the field was Mihoff?”

“As far as I know, among Sword Experts under 170 cm, there is only Mihoff. The shortest otherwise known is Sir Boltin at 177 cm. Above all, it was his appearance. He had a face like a woman’s — ill-suited to the battlefield. Thanks to that, the instant I saw him I knew he was Mihoff and that he had cornered Lord Fred. Had I not prepared at once, it wouldn’t have been my left hand that was cut off, but my head.”

Even as he listened to Jodan’s account, Louis found himself coveting this Mihoff. What began as a simple resolve to be cautious grew into a sharper thirst the more he heard. The feeling was strange as well. Strictly speaking, the one who killed Fred — the target Louis had set his sights on — was not Marquis Gangpireu but this fellow, Mihoff.

It might have been a two-edged inclination, but people sometimes took a liking to someone for reasons they could not explain. Though he had never once seen the man’s face, Louis felt from this swordsman Mihoff the aura of a great Sword Saint. And “Sword Saint” meant a realm at least two steps beyond a Sword Expert.

‘No, that’s foolish…’

Realizing for a moment that he had indulged in a grotesque fancy, Louis wavered between two explanations: was he over-valuing the killer of his admired brother because he could not bring himself to belittle him, or was it that uncanny intuition — which sometimes startled even Louis with its accuracy — drawing him close to the truth? Either way, for now Mihoff was not someone to recruit but a mere obstacle to be slain, so Louis gathered his thoughts and calmed Jodan.

Because Marquis Gangpireu had taken Grad by storm, the city walls of Grad were in ruins. It made no sense to settle matters with Louis amid such shoddy structures. There were three or four holes big enough for Louis’s cavalry to pour through like rats. So Marquis Gangpireu chose again a place where life and death could be contested — a proper field. In other words, he meant to pit tactics against tactics. The one bit of fortune was that the vast plain Louis might have exploited had been wrecked by Fred’s pitched battle. The ground there was now worse than a forest terrain. Piles of corpses formed hills; because they had not been properly cleared, jackals and rats swarmed, and birds had had their share as well. The earth was still uneven.

In a way, it was an artificial terrain that Hades might favor; to move cavalry over such ground risked a horse breaking a leg mid-charge and causing a catastrophe, so cavalry could not be used. The idea of forming a battle line here was considered, but there were dozens of reasons a proper formation could not be established, so Marquis Gangpireu soon dismissed it from his mind.

In any case, if he tarried too long, encirclement here would be inevitable, so to seize a better option he set the army in motion, and they crossed the field of death.

A long column of soldiers was marching across the plain of corpses. No one sane could deny that they themselves had caused the bodies strewn in every direction. Even those whose morale had been high not long ago could only shake their heads — or rather, cover their noses — before so inhuman a place. Cremations had begun early on, but there were too many dead to keep up, and thanks to a letter from Louis that arrived mid-way, the bodies had been left even more neglected.

The scale of decay had surpassed human measure. The gases rising here dealt a subtle harm like the poison clouds conjured by mages. More than that, the psychological pressure — the thought that if they failed to turn the next blade they might end up like these — made men gag even when they tried to forget. Most who glanced to the side even once turned ashen. There were always exceptions, but those were the types common in any group — a hollow bravado meant to show others, “I’m fine.”

It was all too obvious, so no fool believed such bluffing. Here and there, rats, jackals, and monsters tore at meat so viciously that curses like “You damned bastards!” burst out from all sides. When such voices began to echo, the officers — the centurions and chiliarchs — first barked at them to be quiet, but soon enough they too hurled curses at the red-eyed fiends glaring from the dark, and some, not satisfied with that, soothed themselves by loosing arrows to kill a few.

In this confusion, the only person who truly kept his composure was a single man: Mihoff. Narrowing his eyes, Mihoff looked about again and again. There was no fear or disgust in him — only a steady gaze and observation. This young Sword Expert, because his family had fallen, had drifted through the harsh back alleys since childhood and had grown numb to death. Small wonder: he had never really felt death upon his own skin.

From the moment he took a sword in hand he instinctively knew how to swing it to kill a person easily, and once he knew that, he had, in truth, regarded people like toys. Thus what lay spread here looked to him like a heap of broken playthings. To him, those who could be treated as people rather than toys were those of rank above his own, his younger sister, and men like the Sword Expert he had killed not long ago.

‘There will be one here as well, surely.’

With a look of interest, Mihoff glanced up at the darkening sky. Rain seemed about to pour. He disliked fighting in rain because of his fastidious nature, but he could not pass up the fun either, and the corners of his mouth lifted.

Louis bent and gripped the earth. The ground was moist, heavy with water. Clutching soil that filled his fingers, Louis smelled the earth. A living land — the scent of his own domain. This was land that had been handed down to House Pontina for centuries, land he could yield to no one.

Tok tok.

The rain that had started and stopped since earlier was about to fall again. The sky was so full of black clouds they overflowed. By coincidence, it was about to become another battle in the rain, just like when Louis had won his first victory. Having gone through it once, Louis knew somewhat how to make use of rain.

The raindrops that had been wetting his skin suddenly stopped — but only around Louis. A nearby slave girl had raised a cloak to shield him from the rain.

“You may remove it.”

When the cover vanished, raindrops again poured onto his skin. At a glance, the place looked peaceful. But ahead, flesh was already rending flesh. On the battle-status panel only Louis could see, terrain and the busy points moving upon it spread out before him. They were Louis’s chess pieces.

First, he had to fix the overall outline. War was not merely a matter of pushing forward. Even in a full frontal battle, it must not be left unattended. There were always units to pull back and sectors to press harder, so the person at the top who made those decisions — the commander — and the staff who assisted him were crucial. In this situation Louis had no proper staff. There was no one of that caliber free; the few generals who could fill the role — and had even volunteered — had all been deployed to the front.

For a domain-scale war, Louis judged that the battle-status panel alone sufficed. He also knew Marquis Gangpireu ran everything himself without staff. Even that much gave Louis, with his secret tool, a large edge over the marquis. Yet Louis did not wish to remain here indefinitely. To receive the battlefield bonus, he too had to draw steel and fight to some extent. But when the victory was not yet secured, such action would only invite death, so what Louis awaited was the ripening of the field.

Through the panel Louis was searching with all his power for Mihoff’s position. Even from the overall flow one could tell: somewhere, someone would be dealing extraordinary slaughter, and that would be where Mihoff was. In sheer count, each side had one Sword Expert — the same as Marquis Gangpireu — but Louis, short only of mana, commanded two more assets of comparable weight: Kaiser and Boromir.

Because he had absorbed talents his brother had long cultivated, he now had no shortage of reliable commanders. In the center — the post requiring crafty judgment — he placed Gaion with the archers to handle fine orders. On the far left flank he set Kalbang, mixed in with the remnants. On the right, the one-handed Jodan commanded his formation. Behind all these placements Louis hid his trump: the medium cavalry. Into that formation he poured every elite arm at his disposal — Anok, Kaiser, and Boromir. Boromir, capable of cool decisions, held command; Kaiser and Anok, of course, were the two at the point. They were not yet fighting — only moving — sweeping around the terrain at tremendous speed under Louis’s orders.

The target, naturally, was the king — Marquis Gangpireu’s head. The marquis’s position was still in the dark, but Louis judged he would soon divine it through the panel. Unlike Fred, who had thrown himself in by feel, Louis’s judgments had almost no chance of error. The question was whether the marquis could swiftly realize that Louis was now wheeling his medium cavalry around for a flank strike.

If he did, then with his superior infantry numbers he would attempt a penetration on the flank — and Louis, who had spread his own infantry thin, would lack the mass to hold it. But the absolute reason the marquis was not overreaching in the current engagement was his fear that medium cavalry might spring from somewhere. At the very least he had to identify which side they were on first, and since Louis had not shown his card yet, the meticulous marquis dared not move rashly.

Besides, the situation was developing quite amusingly: thanks to the many able commanders, they were actually gaining even in a slightly disadvantageous state.

‘Perhaps we can have some fun.’

“Bring me my horse.”