'If slaughter is necessary, then it will be done. But if there's no particular reason?'
If there was no reason to make a river of blood and stack a tower of flesh, he would not do it.
That was Crang's thought. In that sense, what that madman named Pel was doing was quite pleasant to watch.
It might be better for the future to reduce the number of soldiers by even one. The enemy soldiers spared now might kill his soldiers, his people, in the future.
'Feels like I'm walking a single rope strung over a cliff, Enki.'
Crang repeated the words inwardly.
Choosing the lesser evil instead of the worst was easy, but one had to throw away the easy road and choose the hard one. One who walked the best path, better than the lesser evil, had to perform feats like a tightrope walker, always.
Just as Crang was doing now.
'Hoo.'
He let out his sigh only inside. Outwardly he showed only a smile and confidence. That was a king's job.
The king knew he was not a brilliant strategist. Instead, he was someone who knew very well what he had to do in his position.
If armies fought armies, both Naurillia and Rihinstetten would end up with fatal wounds.
'If the two of us fight this fiercely, who'll be the one laughing in the end, High Pontiff?'
Crang asked the ruler of the south who would be far away. Needless to say, there was no answer. He had asked only in his heart, and the man could not have heard it.
He did not need the answer. He already knew it without hearing it.
Neither he nor the southern High Pontiff would find it easy to laugh. Perhaps only the emperor of the empire up north, hidden behind the veil, would be pleased.
For that reason, slaughter was unnecessary. That was why he was so satisfied with the current situation. It felt like he had set down his first step on the tightrope very well.
Pel had done that for him.
'That doesn't mean it's time to relax.'
The battle wasn't even over. Crang kept turning things over in his mind, thinking of what would happen afterward: what he had to do in his position, what he had aimed for in coming this far, how to prepare for anything that might sharply diverge from his expectations, those who had been sacrificed for this.
The king's head was a tangle. He was not in a place where he could simply be glad.
***
"So your comrade is, shall we say, a little short in the head?"
Galluto asked, watching Pel knock away arrows and dodge them in succession. Lawford nodded vigorously in agreement. He agreed with the other's words to an excessive degree. Truly, this was an opponent who said exactly what he himself wanted to say.
The man had an eye for things. Enough that it felt a shame to kill him here.
That didn't mean he could be spared and sent back alive.
Before entering the fight, Enkrid had said what needed to be said.
"Subdue all the knights. You can take them alive, but it won't mean much. Do as you see fit."
As always, it was a line that respected everyone. In most things, it meant they could do as they wanted.
"Take alive, my ass. I'll just chop their heads clean off with my axe."
Rem had answered those words.
Knights fought on the basis of oaths and vows. Just because they were southern knights didn't mean that, if things went badly, they would change the king they served or the land they lived in. Even if that happened, it would be exceedingly rare. At the very least, it was only right to say there was no room for such leisure on this battlefield.
Therefore, taking them alive was meaningless.
That was the second reason Lawford had stepped up in Pel's place. That bastard Pel would definitely have gone wild about showing off his skill and insisted on taking them alive.
'We're at a disadvantage.'
Lawford went beyond observing the small battlefield in front of him and weighed the flow of the war as a whole. It was a conclusion he had reached with help from the words Kraiss had added.
That was why they couldn't half-heartedly talk about sparing the enemy because their skill was a waste.
Of course, the first reason he had shaken Pel off was to have at least one more chance to tease that bastard.
When this fight ended, he planned to call him slow as hell, lazy like Sir Ragna, and mock him.
"Right."
Lawford opened his mouth and added his own words. Galluto narrowed his eyes. Several thoughts flickered through, and he reached a single conclusion. Ordinary provocation wouldn't work on this one.
"A knight speaks with his sword."
Galluto spoke. It was a moment to settle things with skill, not taunts.
Just because he took composure as his weapon didn't mean his skill was lacking. Quite the opposite. Elma fought the best in the Amethyst Order, but if you only counted sparring wins and losses, Galluto had won more often.
He knew how to fight winning battles. He gauged the situation and seized the high ground. He forced the opponent into a battle of calculations and drove them into a battlefield he had already worked out. The way he led a unit and the direction of his personal tactics were the same.
'Open the doors to all possibilities and prepare for them all.'
The sword that blocks, the sword that holds, the swamp-like sword—that was Galluto's epithet.
Within the Amethyst Order alone, the number of knights who could beat Galluto could be counted on one hand. Repeating calculations and drawing out his insight to the extreme—that was Galluto's specialty.
His eyes sank down like ground where you couldn't tell whether it was soil or swamp until you stepped on it. They were dark brown eyes.
They were like a swamp made from clumped rotten leaves and earth, decayed animal bones, and layers upon layers of sediment. Things not yet completely rotted had massed together and looked like a black lump.
The brown color faded from Galluto's eyes, leaving only a dull, sooty shade.
He kept on calculating as he looked at the opponent's posture and center of gravity and the like. He peered ahead at the action the knight of the continent standing before him would take. He saw the future.
'A single-point thrust.'
That was the move his opponent would take.
'Evade and counter.'
The duel would not be decided in a single blow. What would happen afterward was also clear in his head.
Lawford simply stood with both feet planted on the ground, steadying his breathing. He made no preparations, no calculations.
He gauged the opponent's skill and openly watched what the man was doing. This was someone who, by nature, fought in a way similar to his own tactics.
After grasping things to that point, Lawford stopped thinking. He boiled down what he would do next to a single thing. Leap out and thrust his sword. He bent his knees and put strength into the foot pressing the ground. His right foot dug halfway into the earth.
Crunch.
When the lump of soil compressed by the pressure hardened like stone, it was enough to serve as a stepping block. As Lawford placed his right foot on that stepping block and leaned his body forward, he bent his knee further and then straightened it. Every motion was lightning-fast.
Boom!
The ground burst.
Thud!
Flesh burst.
Galluto stayed where he was, and Lawford brushed past him. Their positions had reversed. Each could see only the other's back.
In a single strike, the fight's outcome was decided. Blood trickled from both of them.
Only, the one whose neck had been pierced died, and the one whose shoulder guard flew off and who took only a wound to the shoulder lived.
Tong-.
A fragment of the shoulder guard, split in half from taking the force carried on the blade, fell to the ground. It was made of good-quality iron and monster hide, but it was not enough to endure a knight's sword.
'Even so, it did well.'
If not for the shoulder guard, the wound would have been deeper than this. Lawford felt that part of the flesh on his left shoulder had been shorn away where the blade had slanted past.
It was hard to call it light, but on the premise that he had beaten a knight, it was a wound he could afford to call light.
"In our unit, we've got a monster who keeps you from even getting an attack off no matter what you do."
Lawford said.
A faint light still remained in Galluto's eyes, even with the hole in his neck. He was on the verge of death, but his ears would still be open.
The reason the fight had been decided in an instant? It was simple. Galluto had fixed his aim on a long fight and focused on protecting his own body. Had he seen what happened to Elma out of the corner of his eye? That too must have had an effect.
Lawford, on the other hand, had fought like Pel. He entered the fight with Enkrid's mindset. He acted as if it didn't matter if he died today.
The dying Galluto pawed at the empty air with his hand. Did he have something he wanted to say? It was hard to hear now. A knight wouldn't have the trick of speaking with a hole in his neck.
He flailed his hand and then fell forward.
Thump.
Galluto, fallen on the ground with his face turned to the side, gasped for breath. It was not hard to guess what he meant to say.
A gamble, something like that—that was the guess. Reading his mouth, it looked that way.
Blood gurgled out of his neck. The red blood was proof that he was human.
Leaving aside winning and losing, life and death, did he feel wronged? Because he died in a single moment on what he thought was a gamble?
To the opponent, it might have looked like a gamble.
"It wasn't a gamble."
Lawford muttered.
Really, it wasn't. It was the tactic he had found with the sense he had gained through countless spars and battles, the one with the highest probability of success. He had simply chosen the best move to win.
'If the fight had dragged on, every factor, including stamina, would have come into play.'
The opponent excelled at that kind of fight. It was a style that drove the enemy with calculations, the very form of battle Lawford also enjoyed.
The difference between Galluto and Lawford was that Lawford could fight like Pel as much as needed in order to win. He had no hesitation about throwing away what he usually favored and doing something bold if it meant winning.
Naturally, at the root of all this were the things he had learned so far. In particular, what the captain had told him had left a deep impression.
'A round circle.'
It was Enkrid's teaching. After putting your outstanding specialty at the forefront, train until that specialty looks ordinary again. Lawford confirmed that all his hardship until now had not been in vain by the corpse of the knight fallen before his eyes. The blood pouring from the man's neck turned the soil a dark red.
Almost at the same time Lawford's fight ended, Dunbakel also struck her opponent's neck.
The scimitar in her hand drew a bold arc. She stepped back, then sprang forward and swung; the blade tore the air. A zzzzzzit— sound hung in the air, and the enemy neck caught in between was cut through.
"Secret art, quick cut, you brat."
It was nothing like a secret art. She had just watched the opponent's tactics and specialty, backed off, then suddenly rushed in and cut.
Not that there was anyone left to answer her. The knight whose neck had been severed fell to the floor on his knees and toppled over.
Dunbakel held her breath as she swung, then only spoke after taking two or three light steps forward. In doing so, she avoided the venom lingering in the air. Her sense of smell was on a different level even from ordinary beastmen. Through her nose, she could even see the traces of scent. Her nose was so keen that no one would believe it even if she said so.
The fight was one-sided. It was something both the madmen and Crang had expected, but for the enemy it was a truly absurd moment.
***
Enkrid kept his balance atop Odd-Eye and surveyed the battlefield.
While he had been rampaging in the sky, he had seen part of the Mad Order of Knights—specifically Rem, Dunbakel, Lawford, and Pel—rush out and butcher the enemy knights. At the same time, he had seen Pel's acrobatics.
"Why do you think that one is like that?"
He asked Odd-Eye for no real reason, and it only tossed its head with a whinny—hiiiiing.
Right, you wouldn't know either.
You can't know what's inside a person unless you become that person. Even a Dragonkin like Temares only read part of a mind.
'If you put a lie at the front of that inner heart, even a Dragonkin gets fooled.'
It was a simple but firm principle. For knights, deceiving their own inner feelings was commonplace. They would act as if they meant to decide things in a single blow while demanding a battle of endurance, or act like they were going to fight long and then settle it in a single strike.
It was advantageous to deceive the enemy. There would be no one who didn't know that simple truth.
'Deceiving the enemy by deceiving yourself first.'
That was the basis of the Valens mercenary sword. He now knew that sword style contained the essence of a deceptive blade.
You could call it the parent of Enkrid's own orthodox swordsmanship.
'Everyone is good at deceiving.'
Among them, the best were fairies. Shinar even used Dragonkin to make jokes. Fairies, whose specialty was distorting truth, had the knack not only of keeping their hearts from being read by Dragonkin but of using them.
The thoughts came to him as he watched. Applying pieces of passing thoughts to his swordsmanship was a habit.
In any case, the fight was one-sided. The tide of battle had tilted. It was only natural that the unit which, just a few days ago, had been pounded by the Demon-lands' downpour together with the gryphons now let out cheers.
"Uwooooo!"
"We are!"
"Guardians!"
"We are!"
"Guardians!"
Each unit had its own traditional battle cry. For example, in the Border Guard they shouted, "The flower of the battlefield is the infantry." The enemy shouted that they would fight on even in hell.
Because their main strength was the many infantry rather than the few cavalry, the Border Guard's cry had settled that way.
The enemy's cry had probably taken that form because it touched on the south's spirit.
'The place that created tactics where they cling to a knight even after death.'
Put more simply, the south was where a knight's "thousand-man slaughter" first happened. The knight who cut down a thousand soldiers, who charged in drugged and ready to die, still lived down there, weapon in hand.
Lastly, the cry of this place that called itself the southern bulwark was simple and clear.
We are guardians, we are Guardians.
It was a cry imbued with the pride of those who had endured southern invasions and incursions from the Demon-lands over long years. Enkrid was only a helper; he had no intention of belittling what they had accomplished so far with a single finishing blow.
Even without him, even without the Mad Order of Knights, the Red Cloaks would have won.
All the more so.
'That level isn't enough.'
There were only four knights. The number of soldiers was a bit high, but compared to Cypress's fame that had held until now, they were too few and too young.
'Why?'
The doubt was brief. Just as he was about to follow the thought further, he saw a few dots approaching the rear of their own forces. It was an enemy detachment. Strictly speaking, they weren't people, so he couldn't call them an army.
Galluto had not died for nothing. He had thrown in every card he had, including his secret measure.
In truth, he had probably begun expecting victory, but the arrow he loosed had still reached the allied camp. That was what Enkrid now saw with his own eyes.