Chapter 530 - Anxiety and Conviction

Contrary to appearances, Varnas Hurrier knew how to calculate. He might look like a dog that charged in drooling at the mere sight of a battlefield—and being a wolf Beastman, he did rather look the part—but inside, he harbored not a wolf but dozens of cunning serpents.

He looked at the two knights facing him and finished his calculations in an instant.

'I've won.'

Why? He already had a rough count of the Naurilian force that had entered the Penn-Hanil Mountains, and now it would not matter even if every last one of them was a knight.

Finding out their numbers had not been difficult. His side commanded a Fairy unit that roamed the mountains with ease, and had even used them to lay bait. On top of that, he had sent the Fairies forward and observed the enemy's response.

Had they all rushed after the bait, he would have judged that they had few knights and a coward leading them. Instead, they had split up to attack as though they had read his intentions. The arrival of two knight-level opponents here proved as much.

Even so, Varnas had to face two opponents. Why was he so certain of victory? Even with fifty ironclad meat shields, wasn't he still outnumbered two to one?

That was seeing only half the picture.

Beyond Abnaire's and Varnas Hurrier's own efforts, the Ekkins family, which handled affairs of state, and every other available diplomatic channel had dangled bait and run themselves ragged like dogs. All of it was to keep one particular knight of Naurilia's Scarlet Cloak Knight Order from coming here.

'You think all knights are equal?'

People who saw only half the picture often assumed one knight was much the same as another. Utter nonsense. Soldiers were not all equal, either.

To those beneath them, knights might all look alike, but once you reached their level, the differences became clear. That was why the fake knights Count Molsen had created could never rival the real thing. Split-second judgment, breadth of vision, how they used their strength—everything operated on a different plane.

For that reason, all Varnas needed was for Cyprus not to come here. Then no one would be able to stop him.

In truth, it would not have mattered if another bitch or bastard had joined the pair before him. Even with one more opponent of similar caliber here, Varnas would have predicted his own victory. Not all knights were equal.

In any event, two had come. If there were two knights here, he could roughly picture the other battlefields as well.

'So, is this how the board looks now?'

Three routes, three battlefields. That was the arrangement Abnaire had devised and Varnas had personally put in place.

Why divide the battlefield into three? That was a separate matter. Splitting the enemy was secondary; the main purpose was simply to let their own fighters perform well.

'Knights aren't good at fighting together.'

Varnas knew that from experience. Put knights together and they tended to get in one another's way rather than make each other stronger. It might be different against an enemy relying on sheer numbers, but his side was a small, superior force. Joining forces would not double their strength.

'Well, it'd be another story if they'd spent a long time learning to work together.'

Twin knights, for instance. Apart from exceptions like that, they would all be much the same. As if people so overflowing with talent that they had attained knighthood would bother practicing coordinated attacks.

Even the poetry-spouting lunatic serving under him said his goal was to catch up to Varnas within ten years.

Was that wrong? No. Varnas believed his judgment and his choices were right. He had deliberately set those with the potential to become knights in competition with one another. It would endlessly spur their desire to improve.

Of course, he sat firmly above them all. That was how he raised his pupils and juniors.

Under these circumstances, fighting separately was naturally advantageous. Besides, following Abnaire's advice, their side had brought troops to wear the enemy down. They had decisively abandoned an all-out frontal battle and concentrated their strength here.

The battlefields he wasn't on? They would be fine.

'That bastard won't lose.'

One of his subordinates specialized in duels. Apart from Varnas himself, that man was their most reliable blade.

His mind kept working through the calculations. What if the enemy broke away or fled from one of the three battlefields and upset the arrangement?

'Oh, please do.'

From the outset, they only needed one of the three forces to reach the enemy's rear to end this battle. It would not matter if the enemy groups joined up into a larger force, even if they did so somewhere other than here.

In any case, the enemy would not leave any of the three routes unguarded. Neither would he in their place. Leaving one open would expose their rear. They might have ruled out an all-out battle, but having their rear torn apart would change things.

'No strategist would take everything the enemy says at face value, would he?'

So, he had one battlefield. A pretentious subordinate and a newly trained knight had another. At the last was a knight who had done something idiotic because of an oath, but whom even Varnas could not be sure of defeating in a duel. The Frog general was there as well.

The third battlefield would be the trickiest. That Frog was one of the rare few capable of fighting in tandem with a knight.

"This really is fun."

Varnas murmured the words just before the fight began.

* * *

["There will be a lot of knights. That's my prediction. There might be as many as five. Is this really the sort of fight where you should be greedy? And even if we're lucky enough to match their numbers, what will you do about the variables that numbers alone can't resolve?"]

Krais had spoken loudly and emphatically. It was just before Encrid had said that he wanted to be greedy. His words merited careful attention. He was describing just how bad the situation could become.

He had put particular force into his words when discussing numbers. This was the point: could a knight's martial might be measured in numbers? If one assigned a knight's power a rough value of ten, did every knight wield only ten units of power?

Of course, Giant or human, they all had two hands and two feet, so there were clear limits to what they could do. But not all knights possessed the same strength. Oara was a wonderful, exceptional, beautiful knight, yet Cyprus was Naurilia's strongest. Not all knights were equal.

Krais knew that, and so did Encrid. Krais understood it through the astute mind with which he viewed the world; Encrid understood it through personal experience.

Through Rem and Ragna, through watching Sinar, through facing the King of the East and the monsters of the Gray Forest, and through Aker, who had helped him trample his limits once more and move forward.

Thus, no battle's victory could be guaranteed. Ordinarily, that would have been the conclusion.

["I see."]

Yet that was all Encrid said, despite having experienced it for himself. Which made Krais terribly anxious.

Abnaire believed that he and his counterpart had set up the current situation by mutual agreement. But that was not so. Krais had arranged this entire board. He had reduced the enemy's approach to a single path, then let them enjoy free use of it.

Make good use of the road. We'll meet like sworn enemies on a narrow bridge with nowhere to pass. Oh, you know you're supposed to bring a small elite force, right? How many knights do you have again? Three? Then just bring those three. Things are a little tough on our end, so we might have to do our best to stop you with numbers.

If that was what Krais had said, Abnaire's simple reply had been the equivalent of: Fine. Let's do that. See you then.

Why had Krais done this? Why else? This way, the enemy would do exactly as they pleased.

They said a sage could predict events on the far side of the continent without leaving his seat. Krais did not consider himself a sage, so he did not attempt to predict events on the far side of the continent.

"Honestly, what good would predicting that crap do?"

That was all he would have said.

He might not know what was happening on the other side of the continent, but he had predicted how events would unfold on the board he had laid out—the battlefield where the coming fight would take place.

["Our side will have to expend troops as well."]

Would the enemy strategist honor their understanding out of good faith? Was it even a promise to begin with? The problem wasn't the lack of a notary. It was an agreement reached through reading between the lines. There was nothing to stop either side from breaking it.

That was why Krais had believed they would have to demand sacrifices, but...

["Rejected."]

His proposal had been rejected. One look into his captain's eyes as he said it made it obvious that nothing Krais said would sway him.

The enemy wasn't likely to come quietly. They would try something. Yet he had to do as his greedy captain said. He could not break that stubbornness, so the discussion was already over.

But that did not change who had laid out the board. Every ten breaths, anxiety sent an ache through Krais's heart. What if everything went wrong and they all died?

'At this rate, I'll never live out my natural lifespan.'

If Krais had set up the board, Encrid was a piece upon it. He might have made the final choices and decisions, but that did not change the underlying premise. Abnaire knew that too.

The two strategists were watching the battle unfold from different places, with different hearts. One was consumed by anxiety. The other believed victory was certain.

No one knew whether the pieces the two strategists had sent were knights, queens, bishops, or merely pawns. Only victory or defeat would determine whether the paths they had chosen were right or wrong.

* * *

While Varnas calculated and Krais's leg trembled with anxiety, those destined to meet were, naturally, meeting on the other battlefields as well.

"Why do people hate one another?"

Rem heard the bastard blocking his path speak, then turned his head from side to side to survey his surroundings. Quite a crowd, wasn't it? Sinister killing intent pricked his skin from within the dense brush.

Well, only moderately sinister. This much killing intent hardly seemed enough to scratch him.

'Isn't Ayul scarier when she's angry?'

The man blocking his path was an Aspen knight. Paying no heed to what the gray-haired, beastlike man was doing, he lowered his eyes and continued speaking.

A melancholy gaze and a calm, deep voice, perhaps? At least, he seemed thoroughly intent on giving that impression. He angled his gaze toward the sky, lifting his chin just so.

Rem wondered what the idiot was looking at. Didn't the light hurt his eyes?

"Perhaps it is a trial the world has given us. A trial we must overcome."

Rem rested a hand on his axe haft and shifted his weight onto one leg. He felt like letting out a big yawn, but he wasn't sleepy. He had run here in earnest after hearing Encrid's words, only to find these fools. An uninformed observer would have thought neither side intended to fight.

"Who are all the kids hiding around us?"

Rem asked without straightening his slouch.

"The Swamps of Montterre."

The answer came from behind the speaker. Two men stood in Rem's way, and the one at the rear had eyes as red as rubies.

They did not look like ordinary human eyes. The vertical slits called a beast's eyes to mind, and it was not just their color: the unmistakable ferocity of a predator emanated from his entire body. There was a whiff of spells about him, too.

Rem was now certain of something he had suspected for a while: some bastard in Aspen was tampering with spells. Judging by their origins, these did not seem to come from the West. They seemed to have developed along a somewhat different path.

He had felt something was off ever since they had used The Fog of Annihilation on that battlefield. Now, at last, a freak like this had turned up. What sort of bastard was behind these spells?

Rem scratched his head with his right thumb as he thought.

'The Ageless Madman is dead.'

That bastard's specialty had been fighting, not researching spells. And yet he had meant to perfect a spell of agelessness, one that would keep him from growing old. What utter nonsense.

So what Rem sensed from the red-eyed fellow was probably not the legacy of that idiot who had taken shortcuts to learn spells and died. Then what was it?

In the space of a few breaths, during the brief stretch in which the man in front spewed bullshit, a quick examination let Rem grasp some of the tricks at work.

'Divine possession?'

A method of manifesting spells using the body as a medium. Similar to his own—but what happened when someone tried it without the innate talent? Beyond hacking great chunks off their lifespan, wouldn't they fall desperately ill every time they used it? And that was if they were lucky.

Or had they put some kind of safeguard in place? The presence emanating from him was more orderly than expected. This was probably not an unrefined technique, then. They were using it while controlling its side effects or backlash.

Watching it naturally made him curious about the technique's origins and source. Rem had a great interest in spells, after all.

'Still, it's more sophisticated than that idiot Molsen's work, or whatever his name was.'

It looked better than creating knights through chimera research, at least.

That concluded Rem's assessment of the enemy's strength. In front, a knight barking like a dog while pretending to recite poetry. Behind him, Red-eyes, who had attained knighthood through spells.

'And about a hundred other bugs.'

Surrounding him was the assassin organization called the Swamps of Montterre. Whereas Georg’s Dagger was an assassins' guild renowned across the continent, the Swamps of Montterre held sway only in and around Aspen.

Its members had enjoyed the support of Aspen's king and nobles since the guild's inception. In a sense, they were the bastard offspring of king and nobility. Neither an assassins' guild that had arisen naturally nor a unit properly belonging to the kingdom.

But just as circumstances sometimes prompted a father to bring a bastard into his household, they had now been absorbed into the kingdom and reorganized into their present form.

Every last one of them held weapons—toxin-coated daggers, darts, poisoned sand, nets, and rope-tethered harpoons—and glared at Rem. Their staring eyes seemed almost to sting. Even without seeing them individually, he could feel it.

Being assassins did not mean they all fought with their emotions excised. The tension they radiated heated the air. Of course, Rem, who did as he pleased, could not have cared less how hot the air became.

"I grieve, and grieve again, that I must kill yet another gifted soul beloved by the gods."

The bastard in front of him was rather self-indulgent, too. He was clearly certain of victory and looked down on Rem, spouting so much nonsense that one had to wonder if he was on drugs.

Lost in his own little world, he spewed words as though verbally masturbating, and it grated on Rem's ears. Naturally, if something grated on him, he had something to say about it.

"Been sharing a dinner table with a Ghoul? What the fuck did you eat?"

Rem, tempered by Encrid, spat his venom.