Chapter 145 - The Rebellion of the Three Counts (5)

Killing intent swirls in from every direction, along with hot breath, hot blood, and the heat of bodies.

CLANG!!

He lets the axe plunging straight down before his eyes slide along the spine of his sword. Without pausing, he raises his arm and swings.

SLASH!

With a sharp sound, he cuts deep into the foremost creature's neck.

Blood pours from the wound as though the creature has sprouted gills. Yet it swings its arm to bar Ivan's path until its very last moment.

Immediately afterward, another thick forearm comes crashing down, packed with muscle and broader than most men's thighs. His nerves, stretched taut enough to snap, react at once. He can perceive every tiny eddy in the air as it parts and scatters.

CLANG! CLANG!

At this point, every moment of combat is an acrobatic feat. The instant he allows even one clean hit, his ability to fight will plummet.

People die when cut with a blade. Ruptured muscles cannot move, and a torn ligament makes even raising an arm difficult. And steel is always, at any given moment, tougher than human flesh.

And yet.

GRRKH!!

SLICE.

The longsword begins to dance again. Blocking one sense to amplify another is difficult to use here. He literally needs every sense working at full capacity.

His nose catches the beasts' scent. His ears follow the noise of approaching weapons. His sense of touch traces the eddies in the breeze like antennae, while his eyes survey a battlefield changing violently from moment to moment.

A tidal wave of information burrows into his head. Fighting alone against many is always like this.

Exhausting. The mental fatigue is harder to endure than the physical strain. But for now.

CLANG! CLANG!

He deflects an axe and slips away, slices an approaching creature's forearm and slips away again, then sidesteps a swinging war hammer and plants his foot on it.

“Grrk?!”

He leaps from it, braces a hand against the creature's shoulder, and stabs twice with his dagger along the grain of the muscle inside its trapezius. He severs the artery precisely and pulls away. Even without a finishing blow, it is already dead.

So, the next. He throws himself toward the next one.

CLANG!!

His dagger breaks. That is fine. He still has two more.

CRACK! CLANG!

He hurls his chipped longsword into the back of a creature's knee, then immediately darts forward. Its flailing movements look slow.

He catches the falling axe and briefly gauges its weight. Eleven kilograms. Its balance is atrocious for a human wielder. It is practically a lump of iron.

Just right. After all, slaughtering cattle calls for a butcher's blade.

Ivan raises the axe and begins to swing. An axe demands different principles from swordsmanship. This time, instead of deflecting blows and slipping inside his enemy's reach, he batters and crushes.

He walks a path.

“Hah... Hah...”

Forward.

Forward, with the gorge at its center. Straight into their ranks. Slowly bringing down the creatures coming at him, farther forward.

He clears a path. Without looking back at the dead, the dying, or the mortally wounded. Forward again.

Opening a path through the heart of the enemy could be called a scout's duty. Forward.

Calories depleted by violent exertion, his body burning hot, the sun overhead already beginning to sink—he ignores all that unnecessary information and moves forward again.

The fatigue his muscles plead through lactic acid, the pain of gasping for even a little more oxygen, even the headache of tension pushed to its limits bearing down on his mind. He ignores all that useless information and moves forward again.

Kill them. Make a path. That is his role. His steps always carry him straight ahead.

“Hah... Hah...”

Imitating Einar's battles, following the martial prowess Maximilien displayed, copying the stances Gilles Vert took. Piecing together the scattered lessons of past battles like a mosaic, fitting them to the situation like puzzle pieces.

Forward.

* * *

“Vargadal's warband has vanished?”

“Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Where? Where were they last sighted?”

“Bertomont.”

“Then you're saying they've been missing since the very first day! Are you out of your mind? You only tell me something this important now?!”

Guillaume hurled his helmet away and shouted. The chamberlain bowed deeply and stepped back.

No matter how excellent the express dispatches were, not every development could be relayed in real time. A discrepancy of a day or two was only natural.

But it had been four days. For four days, every domain except Bertomont had remained intact. They were even gathering soldiers, proposing to handle the situation themselves.

“There can't possibly be anything to rally them into willingly joining forces.”

Mere barons mobilizing their private armies, even cooperating to build up their strength? Any military action without prior authorization could quite reasonably be treated as treason.

At the news that they were willingly taking that risk to gather troops and prepare a regional defense, Guillaume clutched the back of his neck and trembled.

He and the other two counts had begun their scheme prepared to be arrested for treason if it failed. There might be flaws, but there had been no possibility of the grand plan itself going awry. They had both the confidence and the circumstances to justify it. At any other time, they could not even have attempted it.

But what were those people? Country nobles who did little more than scratch a living from the land. What great honor could those provincial magnates, barely worthy of the name nobility, hope to gain by joining hands at the risk of treason charges?

Guillaume ground his teeth and shouted.

“Head for Bertomont!”

His plan to tour the ruined neighboring domains and exterminate the demons at just the right moment had already fallen apart. He did not know why the demons had suddenly settled down and encamped at Bertomont, but plans fell apart the moment they were put into action.

A competent commander had to be able to press ahead with the next plan even then.

'In that case, I'll have to use treason as leverage to bring them around.'

They had indeed gathered troops and begun to act. If he used that to sway the House of Nobles, he could remove any number of country barons. What could they do if he used that as leverage to persuade them?

“Ah, yes. How many have they gathered?”

“Reports say a good two thousand infantry, around three hundred cavalry, and more than twenty knights.”

“Is that all?”

“At our last check, there were signs of mobilization throughout the neighboring domains, but we believe those are the numbers assembled so far.”

“Ha. Really.”

During the farming season, that many troops meant scraping together practically every soldier their domains could muster. And it was not just one or two domains doing this—even those not directly bordering the front had mobilized? That would be difficult without a royal command.

Grinding his teeth in suspicion, Guillaume turned his horse. His order spread through the camp, and soon the soldiers began marching after him.

* * *

“You. Name.”

A sound like grinding iron reached him. It was unmistakably human speech.

Human language was too delicate and complex for their broad, thick tongues and the structure of their mouths. Most tauruses therefore could not speak it. At least, those he had met had conversed in their own native language.

So Ivan failed to answer the words the first time he heard them. Instead, he swung his axe.

CRUNCH!

Another taurus, still alive and panting, lost its head and rolled across the ground. Ivan had been mechanically slaughtering the twitching creatures, but he raised his head when the voice came again.

“You. Name.”

It was the one with Line of Fire Detection. The strongest, and the most troublesome. It had even succeeded in driving a blade into his body.

It was difficult to judge precisely, but even back then, its kind would not have been common. Beyond the level of a centurion, perhaps even an “adjutant.”

Ivan looked at it as he poured a healing potion over the long gash running from his chest to his forearm.

“Name.”

Even with its limbs hacked apart and blood pouring out, it grinned and glared at him. Its bloodshot eyes blazed as they stared straight at Ivan.

As its mouth worked to force out the words again, Ivan approached with his axe and spoke.

“Ivan Petrovich Yeremov.”

“Ivan. Remembered.”

It nodded and peeled back its lips, revealing yellow teeth caked with blood. That was its way of smiling.

The axe blade rose straight into the sky, blocking the morning sun that had risen before he knew it. With its shadow across its face, the creature mumbled.

“My. Name.”

“Not interested.”

CRUNCH.

The still-smiling head dropped and rolled across the ground.

“Whew...”

Ivan slumped onto the ground and rummaged inside his clothes. His last nutrition bar was soaked in blood. Not exactly hygienic, but unless he intended to tear into demon flesh, he had no choice.

Taurus meat tasted fucking awful. He gave the nutrition bar a cursory wipe, then chewed and swallowed it.

He was exhausted. Still.

“I did ten times better, Gilles Vert.”

From the gorge all the way to this spot, there would now be more dead tauruses in this forest than trees.

* * *

“We're not too late, are we?”

“We couldn't have prepared any faster.”

Serte answered with a faint smile. Noire had been fretting like this for days. They had done everything they could over the past three days.

Troops gathered in such a rush that they had barely slept. Lords assembled through something close to threats made in the Grand Duke of Etakrich's name.

They had not even been able to consider supply lines, so the army could fight for only a few days. After that, it would vanish, whether through natural dispersal or desertion.

But that was actually fortunate. Keeping an army this size together for any length of time would look like a plot to rebel, with no possible excuse.

“Fire! I see fire!!”

“That direction... It's nowhere near the highway.”

“Let's take a look. Who knows where the fighting took place?”

“All troops, prepare for battle!!”

Black smoke rose beyond the forest. Bertomont had been completely overrun by demons, so this obviously could not be slash-and-burn farmers leisurely clearing a field.

The fire, then, most likely belonged to the demons. A campsite or something of the sort.

That man really had held them in this forest for five days. All by himself.

Baron Noire led the troops on with a quiet murmur of admiration. The tenant-farmer soldiers gripped their old spears and struggled to follow.

“Signs of fighting!”

“It must have been a fierce battle...!”

They saw the first corpse after about an hour's march. It was a taurus, already beginning to rot. Its severely mutilated condition, the blood spattered like paint in every direction, and the shattered trees around it gave some measure of the battle's ferocity.

About five. He had killed them in one place. That meant he had faced five tauruses head-on, without a horse.

“The path continues!”

The knight at the head of the vanguard shouted. A path had been opened wide enough for the two thousand or so infantry to make their laborious way through.

Trudging through the ruined forest, the soldiers clutched their spears with terrified faces.

They could not help being afraid at the sight of dead demons and this path, which the demons must surely have made. To farmers, tauruses were nightmares made flesh.

Beneath the afternoon sun, the deep forest swallowed the light. Despite the broad, open path, darkness shrouded the woods to either side, making it seem as though demons might spring out at any moment.

After they had spent a long while pressing on and reassuring the frightened farmers, the vanguard shouted that they had found bodies.

“There was fighting here, too...”

“Judging by the tracks, this looks more like a pursuit.”

“Did he use the forest terrain to fight them a few at a time and buy time? For five whole days? It gives me chills.”

Serte swallowed as he looked at the bodies. The dismembered corpses of tauruses lay strewn about.

The vanguard raised their voices again: more bodies. They had walked barely another ten minutes.

Five minutes later, another shout announced more corpses, following the traces of a battle even greater than the last.

Again. Again. Again.

Now no one spoke. Even the vanguard could no longer bring themselves to report.

“What... is this...?”

They were in a forest. Only, it was a forest made of things other than trees. On a path where the remains of dead tauruses filled their vision wherever they looked.

The afternoon sun sinks westward.

“One man... did all this...?”

A path lies open. Narrow, precarious, and reeking of blood. A path of entrails and muscle, flesh and blood, and corpses with countless crows scattered over them, pecking and tearing at their remains.

At the end of the sodden path paved with taurus corpses, a small campfire burned.

“Lord.”

Serte murmured, crossing himself. Tendons flexed in the hand that had strayed to his sword hilt without his noticing.

“Mountains of Corpses, Seas of Blood...”

“I can't claim to be at that level.”

That was Einar's epithet, after all.

Ivan slowly rose from his seat before the campfire.