Chapter 540 - War’s End

Clemen of Border Guard’s light infantry saw a man’s back before her. It grew broader and broader until it filled her vision, then became a wall barring her way.

She saw a wall standing between friend and foe, like a vision. She knew it was an optical illusion, a trick of her mind. Even so, Clemen perceived that wall. It held back the enemy, standing firm as a rampart for her allies.

Beyond that illusory rampart, she saw the enemy soldiers facing her own army drop to their knees, one by one. Had they seen the same thing she had? She did not know. Nor did she need to. Nothing happening around her seemed to matter in the slightest, not even where she was.

The vision faded, leaving only the man standing there. Clemen knew the epithet of the man who had suddenly appeared before her, placing himself between the two armies.

Demon Killer.

She knew his name, too.

Encrid.

And she knew his station: lord and general of the surrounding lands named the territory of Border Guard.

He had said this was as far as it went. That they should stop. And with that, the fighting ended.

The sun had not yet set, and its rays illuminated the earth, bringing everything around them into vivid clarity. Just as clearly, the knowledge that the fighting was over impressed itself on everyone.

This was the end.

“War’s end,” Clemen murmured. Why had it come to mind? The Knight Who Would End the War, that old song Bards so often sang. She knew it too. Its lyrics told of those who could stop a battle without using their swords.

Something fit only for a Bard’s song had unfolded before her eyes. At some point, a thrill had begun coursing through Clemen, setting her whole body trembling. It raised the fine hairs on her skin and left her eyes fixed on one man alone. Even after the vision vanished, she could not look away.

‘The knight who would end the war?’

The murmur never made it past her lips. In fact, no one made a sound. They simply watched as even the wind gently enfolded him and the sunlight upheld him.

Without realizing it, Clemen broke formation and walked forward, then stumbled and fell. It was a mistake she would never ordinarily have made, but she landed hard, twisting her ankle in an unlucky fall. Her knee was bleeding, too. She might have cried out, yet she felt no pain. That thrill was still shivering through her.

Clemen felt something boil over, heating her heart. She was on one knee, her head raised. What was this emotion she felt? She did not know. It did not matter.

“En-crid!”

She simply spoke her hero’s name.

And she was not alone. The entire allied army cried out the name of the man standing before them.

“Encrid!”

The name of the man who had brought everything to a halt upon a land where nothing remained but death upon death, steel and blood.

* * *

Clemen was not the only one. Many among the enemy had been similarly moved.

One of them was among the few commanders who had realized along the way that something had gone wrong.

‘Crazy bastards.’

He cursed the high command for letting matters come to this, but it was already done. Even if he defied orders now, there was no turning back.

With Border Guard’s well-prepared army before his eyes, certainty struck him.

‘We’ll lose.’

Not merely lose. They would suffer a crushing defeat. Of every ten bodies piled on the field, seven or eight would be Aspen soldiers. His men.

But the arrow had already been loosed. The water spilled. The leaf fallen.

Most of the commanders and soldiers who had charged toward the enemy lines as though bewitched came to their senses. More precisely, fear beat their reason awake by force.

You’ve been told you’ll die if you attack, so how about you wise up and behave?

Would that not be a somewhat crude way of putting what had just happened? Rem might have described it that way.

In any case, even the commanders who had initially expected their knight order to strike the enemy’s rear and secure victory once battle began had all stopped in their tracks.

At a moment when they had no choice but to fight, Aspen had seen a man worthy of respect despite being their enemy. Even if they did not realize it now, they could only come to respect him when they reflected on this later.

That man had barred their path to prevent needless bloodshed. Had they fought, the battle would only have ended in Aspen’s crushing defeat. Whose blood would have filled that field of slaughter? The question needed no answer.

“Wow.”

One of the assault troops at the front of Aspen’s army let out an awed exclamation, his mouth hanging open.

“Hey. It’s over.”

A quick-witted assault commander said it outright. Their momentum was broken. If they attacked now, they would be wiped out without even hurting the enemy. No commander, however idiotic, could attack in a situation like this.

And so Aspen’s commanders and soldiers alike gazed at one man. The man who had barred the battlefield alone. A knight was said to be someone who could cut down a thousand. What, then, should they call someone who had single-handedly stopped an army of more than a thousand?

“The birth of a hero.”

Voicing what he had instinctively understood, one commander quietly laid down his weapon. The war was over. Only what came after surrender remained.

Farther back, watching the battle, stood the man who had merely stared blankly as his superior died and was now supreme commander. The instant he saw one man appear and halt a vast army alone, he felt something inside him crumble. Awe had nothing to do with it.

‘He’s stopping them? Not killing them?’

It was like bringing a galloping horse to a halt through sheer strength, simply by seizing its reins. Having the strength to catch the horse was astonishing enough, but ordinarily, would stopping it so forcibly not make it fall and break a leg or snap its neck?

‘Fuck. How does that make any sense?’

Yet here, both horse and man were unharmed.

From a distance, it looked as though he was stopping the entire army utterly alone. As the supreme commander watched sunlight fall upon the man standing alone in the battlefield’s center, fear gripped his heart.

What was crumbling? His future. Everything he had somehow managed to build until now. It would have been better to fight and lose.

Even if the corpses piled into mountains!

Then he could say they had fought to the end, that their commander had fallen in battle, and that he had done his utmost to obey a knight’s orders. He might suffer for it, but it would not be a capital offense.

But what would happen if they stopped here? Who would bear responsibility if the fighting ended like this? Having the whole truth exposed would be trouble, too. The knight was at fault, but so, surely, was he for meekly obeying.

Fear had simply overwhelmed him and frozen his mind. He hastened to flee. Forget salvaging the situation. For now, running seemed his best option. All that awaited his army was slaughter, and there was no guarantee he would survive afterward, was there? Was his own life not the most important thing in the world?

‘First, I have to survive.’

Where some spoke of duty and responsibility, others were their exact opposite.

He fetched a horse and fled headlong, only to encounter a mounted allied unit along the way. Unable to skirt around them, he stopped. Abnaire promptly emerged from their midst to meet him.

“What happened?”

The fleeing man blinked. Breathless and panting, he could only stare, unable to answer. Why was Abnaire here?

The commander had failed to send his regular report, and Abnaire’s Sixth Sense kept making the back of his neck prickle. That was why he had set out. Despite his faith in Varnas, a lingering unease had driven him to the battlefield. Even as he left, he had thought that nothing must go wrong. Yet events had twisted in an unforeseeable direction.

“Uh, well...”

The man poured out one excuse after another. They were shoddy excuses. Watching his eyes dart about, Abnaire realized he was hiding something.

“From now on, answer any question with a lie, and I’ll cut off one of your hands.”

He neither raised his voice nor seized the man roughly. His tone was calm and level. It was effective nonetheless. Abnaire was a man who kept his word. Even the man who had abandoned his troops and everything else knew that much about him.

“What happened to your immediate superior?”

“H-he’s dead.”

The man answered as he caught his breath, cold sweat streaming down his back as he spoke.

The truth followed. After hearing the account, Abnaire closed his eyes.

‘We’ve lost.’

He did not yet understand everything, but defeat was certain. Otherwise, why would an enemy knight have appeared where the armies were fighting head-on, while Varnas had not even returned to their lines?

‘Ha.’

Stopped not by the Scarlet Cloak Knight Order, but by Border Guard’s standing army. What did that mean? It was evidence that the martial strength of Border Guard’s standing army surpassed that of the entire Principality of Aspen.

Counting soldiers and comparing every other factor, that could hardly be true. But...

‘Knights.’

Their forces known as calamities had been outmatched.

Abnaire gazed up for a moment. At the blue sky, the white clouds suspended in it, the shafts of sunlight breaking through them. The breeze stirred his hair. He removed his helmet and nodded.

“Kill him.”

“... Why!”

The commander tried to flee. A foolish act. Flee? Where could he possibly go now?

Defeat? That could be forgiven. Losing a commander to a mad knight’s blade? That could be forgiven, too. But abandoning the remaining army and fleeing alone was unforgivable. The absence of the man in supreme command could lead to a massacre.

THUNK!

One of the guards thrust his spear. Its blade pierced the back of the man who had hastily turned to flee.

“Urk!”

The impaled man pitched forward and struck the ground face-first. Without so much as a glance at the dead man, Abnaire and his guards rode on.

“Have we lost?”

Rather than answer the guard commander’s question, Abnaire stated what they had to do.

“We take as many home alive as we can.”

Would the enemy leave their withdrawing troops alone? Someone had appeared and stopped the battle itself, he had been told. What did that mean? It was time to see with his own eyes and do what had to be done.

Abnaire arrived at the battlefield and took in the situation. He saw the man who had stopped the enemy alone. He knew his face and name. Once, he had been willing to grind his own troops away to kill him. How could he not know?

Black hair and blue eyes. A man who alone held the sunlight. A man who had now become a knight, he ought to say. Abnaire lacked the eye to judge his skill, but the scene brought home the extent of his power.

“Demon Killer.”

Abnaire spoke the man’s most famous epithet.

What should he do now? He meant to save the troops, even at the cost of his own head.

“All of you, head back.”

“We began this together. We’ll stay with you to the end.”

The guard commander refused to obey. Abnaire could not spare the time to persuade him. The moment Border Guard’s standing army attacked, his own troops would be annihilated. The enemy even had a knight.

He was about to step forward when the enemy spoke first.

“Withdraw.”

“He’s just letting us go?”

Too far away to be heard, Abnaire murmured to himself.

Incredible as it seemed, it was true. The man had stopped the battle, plunged the battlefield into silence, and sent Aspen’s army back. They needed no promise that he would not pursue. His word itself was proof enough of his trustworthiness. Indeed, he was the first to turn his back.

Watching Encrid turn away, Abnaire considered everything he had learned so far. He thought he understood why Encrid was leaving.

‘Needless bloodshed.’

They could fight. They could weigh victory against defeat. They could kill and be killed. That was what a battlefield was. Taking up sword and spear and marching onto one meant accepting those terms. Yet if he deemed it unnecessary, he would bring it to a halt. Abnaire almost thought he could hear Encrid saying it.

Watching him, Abnaire felt a shiver of awe as well. Greater even than that felt by those who had seen the wall of Will and intimidation.

‘Can such a person truly exist?’

Abnaire had seen many people. Perhaps not those hailed as heroes without equal, but he had seen kings, knights of the Empire, and knights of the great southern kingdom. The King of the East, far away, was said to be more than worthy of being called a Hero. But how would he compare with the man before him now?

At the very least, these men lay beyond Abnaire’s capacity to judge. He had no right to appraise them. Their ideals would be lofty, their convictions unshakable, their determination harder than anything he had known.

“Let’s go back.”

It was time to return and answer for the war.

The Frog general had intended to die to save his men, but had returned alive. The commander who abandoned his men and fled had died along the way, cut down by an allied knight. The new commander, who had ordered an all-out advance in the confusion, had died trying to save only himself.

Abnaire meant to fulfill his responsibility, whether this latest defeat condemned him to a lifetime in prison or to death. That was the end of this battle, and the war’s end that Aspen had faced. No, that it had yet to face.