9 (7)

Marquis Gangpireu screamed. He tried to get up, but instead rolled across the ground. When the sharp pain surged from the place where the arrow had driven deep into his flesh, he bit his tongue. The word death began to rush toward him, fast and terrifying. Above all, the most humiliating thing was that he had, in the end, been defeated by House Pontina.

Marquis Gangpireu had once fought a small-scale territorial war even against Duke Remitri. To speak of the result first, he had lost back then as well. He had taken that wound as a lesson and honed his abilities ever since. In his current state, he had judged that he would surely be able to topple House Pontina.

But he had been wrong. The Pontina Fred and Pontina Louis he now faced in succession were not on the same level as the Pontina Remitri of the past. Fred alone possessed skill a step above Remitri in his younger days, and Louis’s skill surpassed even that. No—his level was absurd.

“Hrrrk… h-heuk…”

Rain poured into his mouth, forced open by pain. Marquis Gangpireu was now seized by belated regret. It had been delusion. He had deluded himself into thinking they were an opponent he could suppress. If he had known it would come to this, he should have sought mutual benefit—no, he should at least have bowed his head.

“Marquis Gangpireu has been hit!!!”

Someone shouted, and the reaction came swiftly. The word “been hit” was vague, but there was not a soldier present who failed to grasp that the situation was dire, and many assumed Marquis Gangpireu had died, not simply been wounded. Those who came to that conclusion stopped fighting and bolted for the forest.

At first it was only one or two, but before long it became a torrent. There were no soldiers left who could stop them. Even the soldier who had been supporting the fallen Marquis was seriously debating whether to flee, and a few were already running. But the fugitives, unable to find any escape route, were cut down one by one; before long, there were hardly any friendly soldiers left, and Louis’s infantry were packed densely all around.

Marquis Gangpireu was not a ruler who personally took part in the fighting; he was a schemer type. For that reason, his chances of escaping from here were effectively zero. Operation concluded. The King had been taken. Even the last remaining soldiers fell one by one, skewered on spear shafts like figures in a painting.

The soldiers parted to the left and right, and Louis appeared. Every soldier’s gaze turned to him. The excitement of victory was shared by all. For all the people present, the surroundings were nearly silent. Only ragged breathing remained, proof of how fierce the fighting had just been.

At this moment, the only person who could speak was Louis, and he drew his sword as he trudged toward Marquis Gangpireu. Gripped by terror, the Marquis kept groaning as he dragged himself backward through the already thoroughly soaked mud.

Louis hesitated for only a moment. Marquis Gangpireu was one of the factions responsible for the outer reaches of the Duchy of Eron. Naturally, if Louis spared his life and demanded a ransom from his children, he could reap enormous profit.

On top of that, the longer time passed, the weaker his justification for killing Marquis Gangpireu—a lord who ruled such a large stretch of land—would become. After all, in legal terms, a lord who was not a king had no formal grounds to execute another lord.

Of course, that was a mere pretense of legitimacy. In the Duchy of Eron, everyone still did whatever they could get away with by clever means, and it was enough simply to know that such laws existed on paper. In any case, looking at the outcome, this was the perfect moment—while the war of territories was still ongoing—to claim a righteous cause for killing Marquis Gangpireu.

In a territorial war, if a lord died in the midst of battle, what tricks could anyone plausibly object to? In the end, it came down to two choices: squeeze more money out of him, or take revenge here and now. Louis chose revenge for his house. Looking coldly down at Marquis Gangpireu, he spoke.

“Been a while.”

Strictly speaking, this was only the second time they had faced each other directly, the first being when Louis had personally visited the Marquis’s city for negotiations.

“…Are you going to kill me?”

“…”

“Then spare me. I’ll give you anything you want. City, money, daughters—whatever you ask, I’ll hand it over.”

“The blood oath cannot be undone.”

It might have sounded like a ridiculous reason, but Marquis Gangpireu knew House Pontina’s pride was unusually high. His eyelids quivered, and then he accepted it. That was what a blood oath meant. As Louis drew near, the Marquis closed his eyes. He had resigned himself. Louis took the head of Marquis Gangpireu, who waited with eyes shut. High or low, people died in much the same way.

The severed head fountained blood like water from a spring. The gushing red mingled with the rain. The body, thrown off balance, crashed into the mud. The lord of five cities, head of House Haidek—Haidek Gangpireu—was dead. Now Louis of Pontina, head of House Pontina, had completely crushed the territorial war that had followed the succession war.

When Louis lifted the Marquis’s head from the ground, there was a single moment of silence, and then a storm of cheers. Hundreds of men roared and called Louis’s name again and again. There was no need to pass on the news separately; the soldiers somehow knew at once that Marquis Gangpireu was dead—and that a new wind was blowing.

The soldiers began pounding their spear shafts against the ground. With thousands doing it, it was like an earthquake. One soldier shouted to the man next to him,

“I told you from the start it would end like this! I told you not to worry!”

His comrade nodded furiously, replying that he had been foolish to worry at all.

Gaion, who had arrived late, saw Louis holding Marquis Gangpireu’s head aloft. Could Fred have produced the same outcome, had he been in Louis’s place? The veteran answered himself simply: no. The strongest lion did not always survive. But in this case, Gaion judged, it was the strongest lion who had survived.

Even if they had faced one another as enemies in the succession war, Fred’s chances of defeating Louis would not have been especially high—Louis’s ability was that exceptional. That thought sent a chill down the old soldier’s spine. Without the wildcard of Marquis Gangpireu, one of the corpses cooling on the field might very well have been his.

The first thought Kalbang had upon hearing that Marquis Gangpireu had been struck down was that heaven’s luck was with him. It was still vivid in his mind—Louis, who had nothing at the time, had stood before him and asked him to swear fealty. It had been only a short while ago. Judged objectively from that moment, siding with Louis had been a foolish choice. And yet Kalbang had been drawn to him on instinct.

That instinct had been sharp enough to save Kalbang’s life again and again through his rough mercenary career. Of all the benefits those instincts had brought him, he considered serving Louis as his lord to be the greatest—greater than anything. It was like hitting the jackpot in a crooked gambling den and sweeping the table clean ten times over.

Meanwhile, Jodan, still fighting at the time, saw that after a tremendous commotion, the enemy had begun to throw down their weapons and flee. The speed at which they faded into the forest was like watching mice chased by a cat. He had been in a fairly even struggle with them, so he could not help but wonder why they were suddenly running—

Just then, the news reached him that Duke Louis had personally taken Marquis Gangpireu’s head.

Hearing that, Jodan felt like he might fall straight on his backside in shock. The first words out of his mouth were,

“Already?”

And no wonder—only a few tens of minutes had passed since Louis had ordered the full advance. For them to punch all the way through to the Marquis’s rear in such a short time meant the timing between the heavy cavalry’s strike on the back and the infantry’s push on the line had been perfect.

Everyone tried to judge the timing. But there was always only one winner. This was not something one could easily learn, and considering how young Louis was, it was practically innate. Jodan’s thoughts ran along the same lines as Gaion’s. If I ever had to stand against a commander who could seize such a moment… The thought gave him goosebumps.

But that feeling lasted only a moment, and Jodan found himself grateful to Louis. Marquis Gangpireu could have been kept alive in pathetic fashion, used as a bargaining chip. It was rare for a territorial war to reach such a blood-soaked extreme; usually, the victor captured the opposing lord and demanded a ransom from his lands, a choice that brought considerable financial gain.

Yet by decisively beheading the Marquis himself, Louis showed that he valued something far greater than monetary profit—something anyone with even a little experience in this world could recognize.

To be honest, after losing Fred, Jodan had planned to withdraw from the front lines once this war ended. But now he felt something new rising in his heart—a desire to support Louis with all his strength.

The remnants of Marquis Gangpireu’s army who had survived all began to kneel and surrender. In the sector hit by the heavy cavalry, however, survivors were rare; it had been all but annihilated. In any case, Mihoff—the man Louis had considered the greatest variable—was now on his knees in front of Louis. Captured.

Bound, Mihoff looked up at Louis. Louis, standing right in front of him, drove his fist into Mihoff’s gut. The impact lifted his back. Mihoff let out a long groan and toppled backward. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

Amid the pouring rain, Mihoff felt fear of someone for the first time. Whether one against two or one against three, Mihoff had never been driven this hard before. That was how talented Anok and Kaiser were—enough that even Mihoff acknowledged their gifts.

‘If it had been one-on-one…’

Not once in his life had Mihoff ever indulged such a complaint, but now the situation was too bleak. More than that, he was growing ever more afraid of Louis, who commanded men like that as if they were merely his hands and feet. Seeing him up close made that feeling only stronger. Marquis Gangpireu, usually charismatic in his own right, was no minor figure—but compared to Louis, he fell several ranks short.

Strictly speaking, because Mihoff could handle mana deeply, he was influenced more strongly than ordinary people by Louis’s Military Charisma trait.

But since he was unaware of that, there was only one direction his thoughts could take. Talent.
In any case, the moment the unusually tense and foolish Marquis had been surrounded by his own soldiers earlier, Mihoff had tried to run. That had been the problem.

In a battle that had already been hanging in the balance, the mere fact that his resolve had wavered had opened a huge gap. This was the result. It had been a close thing; one of Louis’s “hands and feet” could easily have been severed. But by somehow avoiding every path that might have given him a mortal wound and instead cracking his head on a warhorse, he had simply blacked out.

Mihoff did not know it, but if not for Boromir, his corpse would likely be nothing but unrecognizable chunks of meat by now. In one sense, Boromir’s actions had been excessive. Even so, as he served at Louis’s side, Boromir had picked up on Louis’s muttered remarks and realized that Louis coveted Mihoff.

And from what Boromir had seen with his own eyes, if it had been one-on-one, both Anok and Kaiser would have died.