“I wish you had directed that determination into something that wouldn’t make Liscia sad.”
“There’s nothing I can say in response to that,” Carla said. She added in a discourteous tone, “Don’t you dare… Urkh!”
“Carla?!” Liscia cried.
In the middle of her sentence, Carla groaned in pain. The slave collar had tightened. It looked like this item wouldn’t tolerate any disrespect towards the master. It seemed pretty harsh.
Some seconds later, once she was released from the pain, Carla turned to Liscia, who was looking at her with concern, and said, “I–I’m fine.” Then, looking back to me, she bowed her head. “True, I wasn’t as polite as I could have been. Let me rephrase that. King Souma, I ask that you not sadden Liscia the way I have.”
“…I know,” I said.
As we were talking, Hakuya and Tolman entered the office. Tolman stood before me, giving a military-style salute before beginning his report.
“Your Majesty, we have finished calling up the Air Force.”
“Good,” I said. “Well, then… let’s get going.”
I rose from my seat and gave everyone their orders.
“Hakuya, I’ll have you handle the cleanup here. Also, use this place’s jewel to get in contact with Excel while she’s staring down the Amidonians in Altomura. Tell her she only needs to hold out until this evening.”
“By your will,” Hakuya bowed.
“Tolman, lead a unit from the Air Force to bomb Randel in the Carmine Duchy,” I continued. “However, your only targets should be the anti-air repeating bolt throwers on the castle walls and Randel Castle itself. Don’t you dare drop even a single gunpowder barrel on the people’s houses! If anyone is found to have killed a civilian, I’ll see to it that they will face punishment after the war. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir! I understand!” he said firmly.
“Liscia and Aisha, come with me,” I added. “We’ll join up with Ludwin and his group.”
“Okay,” said Liscia.
“Understood, sire,” Aisha agreed.
Good. After giving orders to the others, I turned to look at Carla.
“Carla, you come with us, too.”
“I can’t have that much value to you as a prisoner at this point,” Carla said. “Please, just throw me in a cell somewhere,”
She seemed to have no strength remaining, but I shook my head in silence.
“You should see how this ends. See just whose strings you were dancing to.”
“Huh?” She looked startled. “What are you talking about? Nobody was making us dance…”
“Oh, no, you were dancing,” I said. “After all, we were, too.”
“What?” Carla asked, giving me a dubious look, to which I responded with a sigh.
“It’s not like we have a complete grasp of the scenario. Still, if we play our roles in it out to the end, I think we’ll start to see. We’ll see just who it was that wrote the script for this battle.”
— The same day, a few hours later, in the city of Randel in the Carmine Duchy.
There was a relaxed atmosphere on the castle walls surrounding Randel, the central city of the Carmine Duchy. The Army and Forbidden Army were engaged in hostilities, but that battle was being fought entirely at the fortress the Forbidden Army had built near Randel.
Because of that, there wasn’t so much as one arrow flying over the walls of Randel.
“Sure is boring…” one of the Army soldiers muttered to himself.
One of his fellow soldiers happened to overhear and looked at him with a frown. “Hey, we’re at war with the Forbidden Army right now, you know.”
“That’s what they tell us, but… all the fighting’s going on over by that fortress, isn’t it?” he complained. “Is there any point in us being on guard here?”
When he said that, another of his comrades laughed heartily and said, “What’s wrong with boring? Would you rather be on the front line against the Forbidden Army?”
“I–I never said that.”
“If anything, I’ll bet the guys on the front line wish they could trade places with us,” the other soldier continued. “If they resist the Forbidden Army, suddenly they’ll be being called rebels and part of a rebel army. On top of that, I hear there are a number of Army soldiers being led by Sir Glaive Magna, who parted ways with Duke Carmine, mixed in with the enemy. Who would want to fight against men they once ate from the same pot as?”
“You’ve got that right,” another soldier said, joining in on the grumbling. “I’ve heard talk that the Amidonians are on the move down south, too. What are the king and Duke Carmine thinking?”
“When you look at it that way, nothing beats guarding the castle walls,” the second soldier said.
“…You could be right,” the soldier who had been complaining at first said, starting to sound convinced. That was when it happened.
“Hey, look at the sky in the east! Something’s coming!” someone shouted.
Hearing that, they all turned to look at the eastern sky.
When they narrowed their eyes, it was true, they could see what looked like a swarm of mosquitoes in the sky to the east. For a moment, they thought it might be a flock of birds, but there were too many. There had to be close to a thousand of them.
As the swarm closed in, they realized it was the Air Force’s wyvern cavalry.
As soon as that became clear, a wave of relief washed over the soldiers.
“…Good. Duke Vargas is our ally.”
“The Air Force is coming to support us!”
“If they are, then the battle’s already over. That fortress of theirs will fall easily under aerial bombardment.”
Everyone nodded sagely in agreement.
…Yes, the end of this battle was most certainly near. However, that end was to be precisely the opposite of what those soldiers expected.
The Air Force passed over the fortress built outside Randel where the Forbidden Army were holed up, then dropped barrels filled with gunpowder on the anti-air repeating bolt throwers on the walls of Randel.
The wyvern cavalry flew over the walls of Randel. Their leader Tolman looked down as an explosion rang out, flames flew around, and black smoke rose. Their targets, the anti-air repeating bolt throwers, had been blasted away without a trace, along with chunks of the wall where they had once been.
The gunpowder barrels used by the Air Force were similar in design to the fire arrows pirates had used during the Sengoku Period to sink enemy ships. To explain it quickly, they were like firework shells.
The time it took for them to explode could be adjusted with the length of the oil-soaked rope used as a fuse. Once the fuse was lit and the bomb dropped, it would go off after the set amount of time. They weren’t like incendiary bombs, which explode with the force of the impact, but the Air Force could adjust their fuse length based on the altitude they would be dropped from, so they could be used in a similar manner.
Incidentally, because the gunpowder from those barrels that failed and impacted the ground would scatter, then be set off by the gunpowder barrels that succeeded, the extent of the damage inevitably grew.
How many Army soldiers have died in that blast now… No! Tolman shook his head, forcing down the depressing feelings that were welling up inside him. I will not ask for forgiveness. This is for my master and the princess.
In order to lighten the situation Castor and Carla would both surely find themselves in after the war, he needed the Air Force to achieve as much as possible here. As if trying to raise his own morale, Tolman shouted orders to the rest of the Air Force.