The red-burning sunset at last vanished beyond the rugged mountain range, and a deep, heavy darkness began to settle over the plain before the first wall of the Laurent Kingdom.
By the time the imperial army had formed ranks at the far edge of the plain, exuding a weighty killing intent, the Laurent Kingdom’s army facing them had also finished giving its soldiers a hearty meal just before sundown and completed a massive iron-wall formation with the fortress wall at their backs.
The deployment of the defensive force, numbering one hundred thousand in all, was solid.
Atop the safest place—the wall—twenty thousand archers and siege-defense troops were stationed, while on the plain directly before the wall, sixty thousand heavily armored infantrymen were packed into square formations to receive the enemy charge with their bodies.
And the remaining twenty thousand cavalry were deployed some distance from the wall.
To strike the flank of the imperial army when the great armies became entangled.
A plain thick with the air of war.
In the left wing of the square formations, where soldiers waited with shields and spears gripped tightly, a young officer swallowed dryly, unable to hide his tension.
“Kyle.”
Just then, a deep and gentle voice sounded from behind the young officer.
It was General Henry Alfonso, commander-in-chief of the defensive army and Kyle’s father.
“……Father. No, Commander-in-Chief.”
As Kyle Alfonso hurriedly saluted, General Alfonso gave a hearty laugh and clapped a thick hand onto his son’s broad, stiff shoulder.
“Don’t be too nervous. It’s only natural for your hands and feet to tremble in your first battle. Decades ago, on my first battlefield, I nearly pissed myself too.”
At his father’s warm encouragement, a faint trace of color returned to Kyle’s face.
But deep unease still lingered in his eyes.
“But Father, they’re going to charge at night, aren’t they? In this pitch-black darkness, without even moonlight, how are we supposed to know when the enemy cavalry has reached right before us and prepare? We may be able to receive your signal, but I’m afraid that by then it will be too late.”
At his question, General Alfonso smiled softly and patted his son’s shoulder once more.
“Of course I’ll give a signal... but don’t try to see with your eyes. Listen to the ground scream.”
“The ground... scream?”
“Yes. When tens of thousands of heavy cavalry charge across the plain all at once, the earth will begin to tremble madly and howl. Put your ear to the ground, or feel the vibration through the soles of your feet. When the sand starts to leap, have the archers loose.”
“When the sand leaps.”
“Yes. That is when you shoot.”
The general’s gaze took on the sharpness of a veteran who had fought a hundred battles.
“And there will come a moment when the rumble of the earth that sounded far away grows stronger and stronger, until at last your ears ache as if your eardrums are about to tear. That means they have reached right in front of you.”
“When my ears begin to ache……”
“That is when you fire the crossbows. After you pour a volley of crossbow bolts straight into their front, plant your shields firm, raise your spears, and hold your ground. It is not a difficult operation. As long as you maintain the formation and endure, our cavalry, waiting in the darkness after making a wide detour around the wall, will appear and tear into the imperial army’s flank.”
Stop the cavalry charge with an infantry square, then strike the enemy’s flank with allied cavalry.
It was a classic and perfect hammer-and-anvil tactic, one difficult to stop even when one knew it was coming.
“You can do it, my son?”
“I will keep it in mind. Even if it costs me my life, I will hold their horses’ hooves in place!”
“When the battle is over, let us both live to share the news of victory.”
General Alfonso shared a brief, fierce embrace with his son, then watched for a long while as Kyle’s back receded toward the command post of the left wing.
Then he turned on his heel and headed for the center army—the heart of the square formation—directly before the wall he had to protect.
#
The sun had completely set, and a terrible darkness without a single point of light swallowed the world.
The imperial army’s camp had melted into that darkness.
Warhorses clad in jet-black barding snorted and pawed the ground, while cavalrymen in black helmets and breastplates exuded a grim killing intent, like reapers crawling up from the underworld.
“Engineering commander.”
At the foremost line of the imperial army, Victoria, a massive black greatsword resting on her shoulder, issued her order in a heavy voice.
“At the sound of the gong from the rear—the gong that will ring exactly three minutes after the cavalry begins its charge—launch the stones from the catapults without the slightest error.”
“As you command!”
After giving her final order, Victoria turned her horse’s head and faced the beasts of the imperial army, who were holding their breath.
Even in the darkness, her violet eyes alone shone brilliantly like blazing flames.
“Warriors of the Empire.”
Her cold yet overwhelming voice rang across the plain.
“Two hundred years! For a full two hundred years, we have tucked our tails and fled before the stone walls of those arrogant mountain bumpkins!”
The soldiers’ rough breathing grew heavier.
“Today, we will smash that mass of iron they call a formation, and shatter that haughty wall. Do not fear the darkness. We are the darkness itself that will swallow them!”
“Waaaaaaaah!!”
After the blood-boiling speech ended, Victoria took her reins and approached my side.
I had been waiting in the rear of the battlefield.
“Ian.”
She looked down at me and smiled faintly.
“Let’s meet again alive.”
With those words, Victoria bent down and pulled me by the neck.
Along with the cold, rough touch of her armor, her hot, soft lips pressed fiercely over mine.
Dozens of high-ranking officers and staff members around us were watching with wide eyes, but as if she cared not the slightest bit for anyone’s gaze, she mingled her tongue with mine deeply and stickily.
“Puha.”
When the suffocating kiss ended, she rose with a satisfied smile.
Victoria roughly wiped the saliva from her lips with the back of her hand, then leapt lightly into the saddle.
Shing—!
She raised the black greatsword high into the sky.
“All forces, charge!!”
With Victoria’s roar, fifty thousand of the one hundred fifty thousand imperial troops mobilized for this expedition—the vanguard, and among them thirty thousand heavy cavalry boasting overwhelming mass—began to surge madly forward, tearing through the pitch-black darkness.
Dudududududu—!
The left wing of the Laurent Kingdom’s line.
Through the pitch-black darkness, the earth began to howl like an enraged beast.
“They’re coming! Do not panic! Raise your shields firm and thrust your spears forward!”
Kyle Alfonso shouted until his throat felt ready to burst as he reorganized the soldiers’ ranks.
The vibration transmitted through the soles of his feet grew steadily stronger, until it became a physical terror that seemed to twist his entrails.
At the instant the sound of tens of thousands of hooves shaking the very axis of the earth transformed into an overwhelming roar that seemed about to tear his eardrums apart, Kyle swung the sword he had drawn toward the front.
“Now! All forces, fire! Break their momentum!”
No sooner had Kyle’s command fallen than the archers behind the shields loosed thousands of arrows into the darkness.
The crossbowmen, whose range was still insufficient, gripped their weapons tightly with trembling hands.
As the rumbling of the earth grew closer and closer, Kyle judged that the time had come and gave the order to the crossbowmen.
“Fire the crossbows!!”
At that moment, a sound of something slicing through the air came from the impossibly high sky overhead.
Thousands of stones painted pitch-black and perfectly hidden in the night sky, along with sharp metal fragments and shards of broken pottery, poured down like a torrential rain.
“Kraaaagh!”
“Ggh!”
A massive catapult bombardment engulfed the square formations.
Fortunately, the heavy infantry at the front of the ranks, clad in thick, solid steel armor and bearing enormous shields, were unharmed.
Unless they were struck directly by stones the size of houses, light metal fragments or pottery shards could not pierce their iron wall. But the problem lay behind them.
“The archers……! The archer units are taking severe losses!”
“...What?”
A mass of sharp shrapnel poured down over the archers, who carried no shields and wore no armor in order to focus solely on shooting.
Metal fragments and broken pottery shards scattering through the air mercilessly tore apart their unarmored bodies.
Archers who had been nocking arrows screamed and collapsed, and the initial network of firepower that the Laurent Kingdom’s army had ambitiously prepared was riddled with holes in an instant.
Less than half of the arrows and bolts they had originally planned to fire ever left their strings.
“Ghk, even if only the survivors remain, shoot! I said shoot!”
At Kyle’s urging, the surviving crossbowmen and archers desperately drew their strings.
Shiiiik—!
Thousands of arrows flew through the darkness toward the charging imperial cavalry.
But as Kyle watched the sight, his eyes filled with shock.
“……This can’t be.”
The Empire’s black cavalry did not stop. They lowered their horses’ heads and covered only their faces, charging on while taking the rain of arrows with their entire bodies.
Arrows struck the heavy steel plate armor wrapped around the knights and bounced off powerlessly in showers of sparks.
Mere arrows could not stop those black masses of iron, in which the vast wealth of the Great Empire had been concentrated.
To pierce the cavalry’s armor, they had to use crossbows, which had shorter range but overwhelming destructive power. Yet before the enemy cavalry had even entered their range, many of the crossbowmen had already been rendered unable to fight by the fragments that had fallen from the sky.
Here and there, cavalrymen struck by crossbow bolts could be seen screaming and tumbling down, but the majority of the cavalry reached the front of the formation as they were.
Due to the bombardment, ugly gaps had opened throughout the square formations, and the imperial cavalry, having passed through the baptism of arrows as if mocking it, was now upon them.
“Shields! Lock shields! Please……!”
Kyle’s desperate cry was swallowed by the tidal roar pouring from thirty thousand black cavalrymen.
“Trample them—!”
At last, thirty thousand armored cavalry surged over the cracked infantry formation of Laurent.
Together with the sound of hooves crushing the earth, the two-hundred-year iron wall in which the Laurent Kingdom took pride began to tear apart amid screams.