Chapter 256: Descending from the Sky (3)

Whoooooooo…….

Wind pushed in over the ridgeline. The smell of gunsmoke and powder and blood and mana, all tangled together.

KABOOOOM—!

Another cannon blast like distant thunder rang out from beyond the horizon.

“…….”

The general standing before the command tent looked up at the sky in grim silence.

Would reinforcements come?

Probably not.

The high command hid its information, and none of the soldiers taking part in an operation ever believed they were the ones meant to die. No soldier ever marched onto a battlefield knowing he would die.

Since no one thought of himself as the bait, every one of them died willingly.

That was how this battlefield had always been controlled.

So the promise of reinforcements might well be a lie. Perhaps the soldiers here were the ones buying time with their deaths, while victory went to another corps somewhere else on the map.

“General. If the real plan is to attack the south instead of Gandela.”

At his staff officer’s cautious words, the general answered in a low voice.

“……That would be the worst-case scenario.”

Unless the elite forces in the south turned back, this ridgeline would be broken through in the end. And if this place fell, the south would be cut off too, and the elites there would wither and die as well.

But whether that judgment was right or wrong, not even he, the general, could say with any certainty.

The Royalist military command now consisted of ‘new blood’, freshly appointed after the informants and the corrupt officers had been rooted out.

The purge had cleansed the military, but it had also made it younger.

On a battlefield, youth was never a compliment.

──Whoooooosh!

Then, all at once, a wind of a different kind blew through. An inexplicably fierce current whipped the tent canvas and the hem of the general’s uniform.

Air plunged from above as if pushing the gunsmoke aside.

The general instinctively looked up at the sky.

“……?”

A full moon.

Across that pure white disk illuminating the night sky appeared a single streak.

No, two.

Three.

Four…….

Streamlined shadows of unknown origin plunged down at an angle, and the moment one of them sank toward the ground──

───!

It exploded like a falling meteor.

The Royalist field camp froze solid, all of it at once.

The signalman holding a receiver remained frozen with it in hand, the staff officer sticking pins into the map stopped with a pin still between his fingers, and everyone twisted their heads toward the same place.

The lights and the gunfire along the ridge, sector after sector, were going out.

Wherever a shadow fell, the battlefield healed shut.

“……Reinforcements.”

Someone’s cracked murmur broke the unnatural silence.

…….

A battle was not something a soldier carried out alone. Behind the infantry crawling up the slope was an entire machine that kept them alive and moving.

The artillery positions pounding the Royalist Faction from below the ridge. The field communication stations linking the front lines to headquarters. Supplies crossing the river all night over pontoon bridges, and the distribution points that received them and carried them to the mouth of the front.

The corps’ heart, nerves, and veins.

Onto those vital points── the Knights descended.

Cliff. Dropping into the middle of a valley where twenty-four howitzers had been spewing fire, he carved his way through the gun line alone.

KRA-KROOOOM!

Gun barrels crumpled under bursts of mana, and the artillerymen burst apart in the very postures they had been loading in.

Julian. He caused no commotion. He merely infiltrated silently beneath a hill where bundles of Mana Stone Lines converged, and the lights in the exchange station, where operators frantically plugged cables into sockets, quietly went dark.

All along the front, signalmen clutching their receivers each heard the same sounds.

Snip. The sound of scissors closing.

Click. The signal dying.

KRUUUUMP──!

Royce and Dare Tan. The two Knights landed back-to-back at ‘Point 3’, one of several riverside positions receiving supplies.

“Fire──! Fire─!”

The enemy soldiers pulled their triggers in desperation, but an Aura Sphere blocked them.

Royce charged first. When he scattered the firing line, Dare Tan split through the opening, and when Dare Tan drove them back, Royce sealed their escape route.

FWOOOSH─!

The supply boats that had reached the bank burned before they could unload, and the row of carts waiting for offloading was overturned.

The two battalions responsible for supply were wiped out in less than thirty minutes.

Whooooosh──.

Hannah Usar was still flying through the night sky.

Her talent was ‘Awl’. The ability to compress mana into an exceptionally sharp point. Power that could cut down a hundred people when spread wide was sharpened to the width of a single needle and concentrated onto one point.

Armor, barricades, Spell Formulas, the plating of a tank, and even a Superhuman’s Hardened Body.

Anything that relied on a surface for defense was equally helpless before her point.

Assigned to Point ‘7’, Hannah circled overhead like a hawk and swept the area with her eyes.

“……Found you.”

A quiet murmur. The ground magnified through her helmet visor.

A giant of a man. He stood well over two meters tall, three or four heads above the soldiers beside him. Six steel Lances were crossed over his back, while the soldiers accompanying him each carried two of their own.

─Swoosh.

Hannah folded her wings. The instant she did, she entered a falcon-like dive. A high-altitude plunge toward her prey.

She came in like a bolt of lightning just as the giant was drawing a lance back over his shoulder.

SHWAAAK!

She sliced through the crown of his head. The Superhuman’s Hardened Body, thick muscles and bones, split beneath her blade.

The giant, still frozen in the posture of raising his lance, came down slowly, like a collapsing tower.

Thud.

Hannah did not stop once she landed. Enemies still remained. Before they could so much as draw their guns, dozens of thread-thin lines of mana fanned out from the tip of her sword.

Shhrk─

Black threads too fine for the eye brushed the night air, and the soldiers’ heads floated gently up off their shoulders.

It was not long before ‘Point 7’ disappeared from the map.

Thus, the Republican Faction first lost its artillery fire. Then its communications, supplies, and reinforcements were cut off, and finally its Superhumans were eliminated.

Of course, the battle for the ridge was still continuing, but the body no longer had blood flowing through it.

Which was to say, nothing but the twitching of a corpse…….

Whoooooo──

The knights of the main force had already reached the ground, but Maximilian was still in the sky.

It was, in effect, proof of his ability.

The transport aircraft approached only as far as absolutely necessary. Such a massive object was far too easy a target in the air, so how deep a Knight could be deployed depended entirely on that individual Knight’s aerial assault capability.

Fwoooooo…….

He passed over a bridgehead that had begun to burn and crossed the Iber River.

As he glided beneath the moonlight, the river wind brushed against his mana wings with a low hum.

And then── he looked at the place.

Across the river stood the Republican Faction’s field camp. Beside it was a prisoner detention facility surrounded by barbed wire and makeshift wooden barricades.

The last Knight’s final strike point.

* * *

The moment that unidentifiable ‘force’ was dropped, the collapse of the battlefield became plain to see.

“Communications! Communications are down!”

The signalmen at the switchboard shouted, clutching dead receivers.

A mud-covered messenger came running from somewhere and spat out the names of fallen positions, and before he had even finished his report, another messenger arrived screaming about another destroyed sector.

The artillery fire faded one battery at a time.

The night sky beyond the river turned an ugly red.

At some point, one soldier looked up at some distant stretch of sky and murmured.

“……Knights.”

Knights.

Knights of the Empire.

That simple word spread from mouth to mouth faster than any wildfire.

Beyond the front lines, the entire camp stirred over a single word.

“Prime Minister Frank! Get in!”

Frank and his staff hurriedly boarded the retreat vehicle. The details were still unknown, but reports of defeat rang out from every point their forces had penetrated. Now the head of the Republic had to be protected.

“Go, quickly! We’ll hold this place.”

Ben, deputy commander of the Ezenheim Volunteer Corps. He and the Superhumans under his command volunteered to remain behind.

“…….”

Frank only looked at them, saying nothing. A half-dazed panic had filled his head.

They would stay behind to buy time and delay pursuit. Someone had to remain, and there was no time to dissuade those offering themselves willingly.

“……Understood.”

Elton nodded firmly in his stead.

“For the glory of our people.”

“For our people.”

Frank stared blankly at them as they exchanged those words.

Once again, warriors of a persecuted people were staying behind for someone else’s homeland.

“Prime Minister. I ask that you decide what is to be done with the prisoners.”

At Ben’s request, Frank stopped moving.

“…….”

The prisoners were bargaining chips, but the moment they were released, they would become enemy strength.

Most of the prisoners were key figures of the Royalist Faction. Nobles, officials, officers, and several thousand soldiers besides.

If all of them returned alive to the enemy…….

He knew.

He knew, but he could not bring himself to say the words.

“Will you hesitate?”

Elton asked quietly.

There was neither reproach nor urging in his voice. It was calm, as though he were merely confirming Frank’s will.

Frank closed his eyes and made his decision.

“……Dispose of them.”

──THUD!

The sound of the vehicle door closing was the period at the end of the sentence.

“Yes. It will be carried out.”

Ben moved at once. Exercising the full authority Frank had delegated to him, he ordered his soldiers to execute the prisoners.

“Drag them out!”

“Move! Get moving─!”

The remaining soldiers hauled the prisoners out of the camp.

“Get all of them out!”

A few who resisted were shot where they stood, and a few who could not walk crawled out.

“I said drag them out─! There’s no time─!”

Most of the prisoners were lined up in rows on a wide stretch of open ground by the river.

Hands bound behind their backs. No wall before them, only darkness and the rippling river as they stood in rows. Ragged breaths and muttered prayers.

“Ready!”

Ben shouted. Rows of rifles were leveled at them. Clack-clack. The sound of bolts being worked filled the night air.

“Take aim!”

Then.

“Fi-“

Before the order could be completed, moonlight flashed in the air.

For one instant.

A single point.

It bloomed at once into a great radiance, like a wave rolling in from the horizon—

──!

A silent silver-white tide swallowed the entire firing squad. Rifles fell from hands that no longer had owners, and Ben’s head flew through the air. The Superhuman who had promised to buy time never even sensed his own end coming.

Thud.

A Knight bathed in moonlight landed on the battlefield.

At the center of countless gazes. In the very heart of the battlefield. There, he spread his arms wide and hurled his pure white longsword.

───KRRRAKKK!

The blade flew.

It spun violently, tracing a silver arc. The atmosphere split thinly before it with a low moan. Like a scythe sweeping through a field of wheat, it tore through the enemies’ heads.

Aaargh─ Aaaaaagh──!

Their formation disintegrated. Screams scattered everywhere.

In the meantime, the knight crooked one finger.

──.

The longsword circling through the air suddenly stopped dead, then leveled itself like a spear and shot straight toward a target.

The target was another Superhuman, holding his breath among the soldiers.

“……Kuh-hkk!”

Thunk! The longsword buried itself in his chest.

He tried to grip it with both hands and hold on, but the knight had already kicked off the ground.

───.

He crossed the distance in an instant, seized the hilt with both hands, and swung upward.

KRRRZK─!

The Superhuman’s body split apart. Blood and flesh scattered through the air.

A crimson spray had already become a river, yet not a drop stained the Knight as he lowered his longsword.

“…….”

A fastidiousness that permitted not even a speck of filth. His appearance was scarcely different from before he had arrived, and at the end of all that violence, silence settled over the field.

It was a strange sight.

At least, that was how it seemed to the prisoners watching him.

The Knight still seemed draped in flowing moonlight. There was no sound to his movements. Not when he had glided down from the sky, nor even when his longsword had crushed his enemies.

All the noise had come from everything around him.

─Step.

The Knight took a step forward.

As the prisoners flinched, he bent down and picked up the rifle of a dead enemy soldier.

Step.

Without hurrying, he crossed the ground littered with gunpowder and pieces of human flesh.

Step.

He came to the very front of the packed prisoners, tore the rope tangled around a man’s wrists, and freed him.

Gulp.

The prisoner swallowed.

A helmet that revealed nothing within. A cold surface that reflected no color.

Then, the Knight suddenly placed a hand on it—

and removed his helmet.

“Ah…….”

For an instant, the breath of countless prisoners caught in their throats.

No elaborate description was necessary.

His features were simply noble.

Beneath lustrous blond hair was a spotless face that made it impossible to believe this was the man who had slaughtered an army moments ago. Standing with the flames of the battlefield behind him, he looked as though he had stepped out of a sacred painting.

……Beautiful.

Standing amid a field where the slaughter had yet to fade, the prisoners found that thought surfacing in their minds without realizing it.

“Listen.”

Speaking in the Zerphan language with the diction of royalty, the Knight placed the rifle into the prisoner’s hands.

“Take the gun.”

Gulp. The prisoner swallowed again and nodded as though spellbound. Then he turned and undid the bonds of the man beside him. The newly freed man untied the next prisoner, who in turn freed another.

One by one, the freed prisoners picked up the rifles scattered across the dirt.

One by one, light came into the prisoners’ eyes, eyes that had been like a dead fish’s.

“Fight to survive.”

The hunger from days of starvation, the terror of facing execution moments ago, none of it even crossed their minds anymore.

Drunk on the simple fact that they were alive, they erupted into cheers for the Knight of the Empire.

…….

“Attack──!”

The Zerphan general had already taken the field himself. The enemy had been stripped of its morale by what had descended from the sky, and every soldier surged over the ridge in an all-out offensive.

“The knights are on our side──!”

Shouts like that spread across the slope.

Trenches lost over four days were retaken in four hours, and the fleeing enemy were run through with bayonets.

The battle raged through the night.

The Republicans’ resistance flared briefly, but with their line of retreat broken, it guttered out one piece at a time.

Those who tried to swim away were swallowed by the current, and those who stayed threw down their guns as dawn came up.

They knelt.

“……Come on, walk faster.”

“Move it!”

“Hey, quit your yapping! Before I shoot you!”

In the breaking dawn, a long column of prisoners with their hands raised stretched from the foot of the ridge all the way to the river.

──Crackle, crackle.

Sunlight fell upon the burning wreckage.

The Royalist Faction captured more prisoners than could easily be counted, while the Republican Faction’s corps suffered losses bordering on annihilation. A river crossing was, by its very nature, an operation with nowhere to retreat.

“……General. We’ve won.”

The general looked through the reports that had arrived throughout the night. At the center of every eyewitness account was the existence of the ‘Knights’.

Reinforcements descending from the open sky.

The words he had taken for a lie were now written into the paperwork as official results.

“It’s difficult to believe even while reading it.”

The Battle Report. A formal document the staff had stayed up all night preparing.

The course of the battle by time. Losses on both sides. Tallies of prisoners and captured materiel. And even an entry labeled [Intervention by Allied Superhuman Forces], one that historians would revisit time and again in the years to come.

WHAM!

The general stamped his seal on the document announcing the victory. He folded it neatly, sealed it with wax, and handed it directly to the messenger officer.

“Deliver word of the victory to His Highness the Crown Prince.”

“Yes, sir!”

The messenger saluted and withdrew.

…….

The next day, at a grand estate in Highland.

Arthur Winston received news that struck like lightning out of a clear sky.

“……Knights?”

Arthur asked back.

“Yes! They say knights appeared in Zerpha!”

Word of the Zerpha Republican Army’s all-out offensive had reached the continent as well, and everyone had been on edge over it, but there had been no ‘visible’ military action from the Empire.

And yet on that unseen night, everything had broken loose.

“Knights…… carried out an aerial assault?”

“Yes! Eyewitness accounts are spreading everywhere saying Knights came raining down from the sky and carved through the entire battlefield! I just received the telegram from a war correspondent in Zerpha!”

The result was the annihilation of the Republicans’ main corps. The southern front was passing into Royalist hands as well.

At this rate the fall of the Republican Faction was only a matter of time.

“Knights…….”

Arthur pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. It was a turn of events he had never once imagined.

Not only the decision to deploy Knights, but the fact that the very existence of Knights had overturned the course of a war in an instant.

“The word going around the Royalist barracks now is that this is all a diplomatic victory. Alonso, that Crown Prince of diplomacy!”

That was the nickname Crown Prince Alonso had earned. Having secured the Empire’s support through some uncanny negotiation and settled a reasonable treaty, this time he had moved the knights themselves.

But what on earth had the Empire gained?

“……How many knights were there?”

“Sorry? Ah, that’s…… well. Quite a lot, I’d imagine?”

True enough, if the number had been only a dozen or so, the rumor could never have spread like this. It certainly could never have crossed all the way to Highland in a single night.

On top of that, the Republican forces, so full of themselves, had been annihilated in the span of one night.

Which meant they had poured in more firepower than was needed. They had not deployed merely what was required for victory, but had gone in at maximum output.

And the reason for that was probably.

“A live-field test.”

They had devised and trained a new method for employing Knights as a military force, and at last, a proving ground where they could measure its effectiveness had appeared─someone else’s civil war, the cheapest stage imaginable.

“Oh!”

The reporter clapped his hands and went on.

“Could Crown Prince Alonso have known that when he conducted the negotiations?! Did he realize before anyone else that the Knights needed a battlefield and take victory as payment for providing one?!”

“……If so, then he handles a scale rather well.”

Arthur bit down hard on his pipe.

“Weak and bland as the boy was, it seems he’s a patriot after all. Going by how it took the country coming to the brink of ruin before he showed that kind of grit.”

“Wow~ You’re right. No wonder his approval ratings are so high in Zerpha.”

Perhaps the continent had badly underestimated the man called Alonso.

“Not yet. Zerpha has merely chosen to sit inside a tiger’s jaws.”

In truth, Zerpha itself was not the problem.

Why did the Empire need to test its forces, manuals, and doctrine?

Because it was preparing for the real test.

And the real test they were preparing for was…….

“I need to inform Parliament about this Knight business.”

Arthur rose to his feet, leaning on his cane.

~~~

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