9 (4)

The centurions shouted for a charge on all fronts. Since Louis’s order to advance had fallen, every soldier had only one option left. Advance.

There were those who were afraid, those who hesitated, those who fell into terror, but they were not individuals. A group came with countless inconveniences, yet in war it easily granted the most important thing of all. Courage. The hope that the one who might die in this very moment might not be me became a driving force that could push the group forward.

Above all, the centurions leading each soldier already had experience of fighting one battle under Louis. Because of that, the number of centurions who doubted Louis’s tactical judgment could be counted on one hand. With the leaders brimming with confidence, the soldiers’ movements became all the more precise and swift.

Louis flicked his gaze to both sides to check whether his orders had been properly conveyed. Through the intense curtain of rain, the soldiers were coming down in quick, regular waves. It was like watching the surf crash in. Of course, it was a wave he himself had raised, and Louis had no doubts about the timing of his attack. Gaion seemed to think it was a little early and hesitated to move. He apparently questioned Louis’s judgment, but the overall commander was Louis, and Louis had not granted him the position of staff officer, so he started to fulfill his duty to obey orders after almost speaking up and then stopping himself. Besides, to say anything he would have needed to be close. Louis was not at his side.

Louis had already leaped forward with his quiver filled to the brim. Snatching out an arrow in one swift motion, he drew the bowstring back with all his strength. In the direction the bow pointed, the banner of Marquis Gangpireu’s house was fluttering in the wild wind and rain.

Holding his breath, Louis drew up mana in one surge and poured it into the arrow. The arrow that left his hand cut through the storm and buried itself in the neck of the soldier holding the banner. The man spewed a froth of blood and collapsed forward on the spot. After a moment, another soldier beside him picked the banner back up. No sooner had he done so than he dropped it in shock at the sight of the arrow that had pierced straight through the cloth. When he seriously agonized over whether to pick it up again and finally did so, rain was drumming down through the neat hole torn in the banner.

Marquis Gangpireu’s infantry, who still were not sure why Louis’s army that had been crouched down suddenly came out, decided to simply take the advance head-on, thinking it was better to meet force with force. They were already grinding their teeth at Louis’s troops, who were sitting tight on favorable terrain while they themselves kept taking losses. In a short span of time, the infantry of both sides became fiercely entangled. Above them, the sky turned into chaos as arrows, black with mingled rainwater, fell down in torrents.

The soldiers under the arrow shower instinctively raised their shields over their heads. The heavy impacts falling on them were chilling enough to make their guts go cold, and those whose luck was bad had their shields pierced; once the arrow struck home and broke their posture, their entire bodies soon sprouted holes and they died.

That lasted only a moment. Once the battle moved into full-fledged hand-to-hand combat, the archers abandoned shooting and drew their swords. It was the beginning of close-quarters combat. Catching whiffs of the thickly mingled stench of blood, Louis tossed his bow aside. The moment he drew his sword, the battle status window showed that the cavalry had at last reached the enemy rear.

Boromir saw the square formation that had been set up in the rear and was startled, but it was not as if he had failed to consider that things might go wrong in some way, so he calmed his pounding heart and shouted to Jerome.

“Wizard! It’s your time to step up! You can do it, right?”

There was no other choice anyway; they had to send the heavy cavalry charging into that solid formation as they were. It was impossible for the first impact to inflict no damage. Hearing Boromir’s voice, Jerome barely came to his senses, looked ahead, and was shocked. Even so, he knew that this very moment was when he had to step forward.

While Jerome hesitated, Anok and Kaiser were adjusting their helmets as they rode. Neither of them imagined for a second that they would be the ones to die. They gathered mana purely to deliver a ferocious blow. There was not a trace of stray thought in it. It was a terrifying focus, to the point that they had forgotten Jerome’s very existence.

That did not mean everyone had the courage to simply ignore that square formation. The heavy cavalry were the bravest among the brave, but in that instant even they were almost scared out of their wits by how thoroughly the wall of shields had been formed ahead of them. When they crashed into it, half of the riders in the foremost ranks would die. Up until now everyone had despised the frail, flimsy wizard, but now, more than ever, they desperately needed a wizard’s power, and they fervently wished for him to show them something.

In that situation, Jerome’s frail voice slipped out through the storm. Without even one of the gagging fits he sometimes had, he told everyone in a relatively clear voice to clear the way in front. Boromir had not given that order, but in that moment Jerome had somehow become the leader, and the heavy cavalry blocking the front split to the left and right. Only then did Kaiser and Anok, who had been focused solely on what lay before them, notice Jerome and step aside. Anok’s anger flared at the thought of what a wizard could possibly do in this situation, but even for someone as headstrong as he was, the unspoken mood bore down on him like an absolute command. Sure enough, cold mana was gathering around Jerome, and feeling the chill pooling there, Anok instinctively twisted his body to the side.

The front cleared wide. Jerome saw ranks of soldiers forming a broad, powerful, and meticulously arranged square formation. But he was so deeply immersed in his own casting that he did not fully register the sight. Once he had gathered enough mana, he murmured a single phrase:

“Ice Ball.”

The mass of cold formed in Jerome’s hand radiated such chill that it seemed to freeze even the falling raindrops, and some of the heavy cavalry who were seeing true magic for the first time were so astonished they nearly bit their tongues.

That was how spectacular, even awe-inspiring, the sphere called Ice Ball was as it unfolded amid the pouring rain. Confirming that it had formed, Jerome hurled it toward the front. No one but Jerome knew exactly what would happen, and some of the riders even judged it would not amount to much, but in any case, the mass of cold infused with powerful mana skimmed along the rain faster than the heavy cavalry themselves.

When he heard the hoofbeats behind him, Marquis Gangpireu shuddered as he realized, with a fearsome clarity, how accurate his premonition had been. Perhaps because he had spent his whole life competing with House Pontina, those around him had always pointed fingers and said that Marquis Gangpireu was secretly suffering from delusions, but this was the second time it had been proven that this was no mere delusion. Louis was, astonishingly, maneuvering the heavy cavalry in an outrageous way.

To wheel heavy cavalry around so boldly required immense nerve. If things went wrong and the enemy realized the heavy cavalry were gone and launched an all-out attack, the main force could be overrun. That fact left Marquis Gangpireu feeling a little uneasy. Even so, it was not a bad situation to secure the rear and then move on to the next step, so for the moment, Marquis Gangpireu felt satisfied simply to be safe.

Mihoff, on the other hand, had already moved to the rear even though Marquis Gangpireu had not said a single word. True to his iron-nerved nature even in the midst of war, Mihoff, who had been sitting with a bored expression, felt the heavy cavalry thundering into position through his senses and snapped his closed eyes open in sheer surprise. Had he been sitting awkwardly on his chair he might have fallen backward—though even then he would have recovered his balance—but that was about how startled he was. Just a moment earlier he had been feeling more than mere displeasure at the Marquis’s incompetence, but in an instant, everything he had just been disparaging turned into foresight.

His bored face shifted into one of interest, and though Mihoff was not particularly talkative and did not say a single word, the fact that he had somehow climbed up into a tree to see farther and was now leaning forward, beginning to radiate killing intent-laced mana, left not a single soldier uncertain about the gravity of the situation.

The soldiers who had built the square formation, like Mihoff, had been quietly whispering that Marquis Gangpireu must have damaged his head in Fred’s last attack, that anyone could see he was not making sound judgments and that they might all be annihilated by Louis at this rate. Their fear was welling up.

Yet the actions of the young Sword Expert above them served as indirect proof that Marquis Gangpireu’s judgment had been correct, and so the soldiers, whose fear had been steadily mounting, were at once astonished by the Marquis’s foresight—and beyond astonishment, they were ready to praise him.

Morale reversed in an instant, and when the rough heavy cavalry burst through the curtain of pouring rain before their eyes, there was not a man who did not swallow hard. Their exhausted morale returned all at once, and thanks to the Sword Expert’s earlier action, they had already braced themselves; they now tightened up the loosened square, forming it into a thorough and precise formation once more. That much was good.

Then the heavy cavalry at the very front split left and right, and when a scrawny, feeble-looking man in an ambiguous posture—whether he was riding or just hanging off his horse was unclear—did something, one of the soldiers cried out,

“A wizard!!!”

It was a wizard. A wizard embedded in a cavalry charge was a tactic so bizarrely rare as to be unheard of. Who would dare to handle a wizard that way, and who would dare to operate cavalry like that? As the soldiers realized once again that the man they were facing was a lion, the expressions on their faces went beyond excitement into sheer shock—just as a centurion shouted to steady them.

“Ridiculous antics! Maintain formation!!! I don’t want to see any cowards who break ranks over some petty low-rank wizard!”

Then, from the center, an immense surge of mana built up once, so powerful it made their flesh crawl, and a mass of energy shot toward them—so great that one of the soldiers muttered,

“That’s no low-rank wizard…”

Dodging would have been the right choice, but a group made it impossible for an individual to break away at will, so the soldiers simply swallowed—whether it was rain or their own saliva—and stared at the mass hurtling toward them. The Ice Bolt that flew toward them, freezing the raindrops in its path, created a scene so artistic they would never see its like again in their lives, as it advanced while turning the rain to ice—only to slam into them in the blink of an eye.

Wadeudeudeuk!

A chillingly vivid sound rang out on a massive scale. Those who were hit felt a flash of cold and then lost consciousness, while those watching could only gape at the spectacle unfolding before their eyes. The extreme cold toyed with the front-line pikemen, turning them into blocks of ice in an instant. Raindrops pelted down hard on the soldiers who had become ice dolls, but the drops simply bounced off; the ice remained so solid that it showed how powerful the spell was.

Moreover, it did not end with a single shot. In the midst of it all, two more struck the formation in staggered succession.