“North of the Star Dragon Mountain, in the Nothung Dragon Knight Kingdom, there are dragon knights who’ve formed contracts with dragons from the Star Dragon Mountain Range,” Liscia said. “A dragon knight takes a dragon as their partner, and in exchange for helping them to produce offspring, the dragon lends them their strength on the battlefield. Basically, they get married to the dragons.”
“Hmm… Can I think of them like an upgraded version of the wyvern cavalry?” I asked.
“They’re similar, but dragon knights are an order of magnitude more powerful. When a dragon and its knight become husband and wife, they’re in perfect sync with one another. Even 1,000 soldiers from the land force would be no match for them. I hear they even managed to turn back an invasion by the Empire when it was at its peak once, even with the Empire’s griffon units.”
“Well… they definitely have the strongest air force, then,” I said.
So they went into battle like a married couple running a three-legged race… No, in their case, I guess it would be a five-legged race.
By the way, dragonewts, like Air Force General Castor Vargas, were a race born from the union between those dragons and their knights. When a child was born to a dragon and knight, it might be a dragon, it might belong to the knight’s race, or it might be a dragonewt. There was no way to predict which it would be. It was totally random. On the other hand, a dragon couldn’t be born from a dragonewt. And if a dragonewt married someone of another race, there was a 50–50 chance a dragonewt would be the result, so they were fairly numerous.
“Wait, huh? Why did we start talking about this again?” I asked.
“Because we were talking about how it’s hard for wyvern cavalry to be the deciding factor in battle, remember?” Liscia stared at me, appalled.
Oh, right, right, that was it.
Next, Liscia drew a picture of a castle on the blackboard. “That’s a trend that becomes especially apparent in castle battles. At first glance, you might think the air force could fly over castle walls, directly attacking the castle and town, but it’s actually impossible.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because there are what you could call air force killers, anti-air repeating bolt throwers, installed on the castle walls.”
According to Liscia, from practically the moment wyvern knights first came into this world, there had been research into countermeasures against them. That was because, if the wyvern knights were allowed to fly over the walls as they pleased, it was a threat to the security of the state.
In order to counter the wyvern cavalry, the anti-air repeating bolt thrower had been invented.
Inside a large rectangular box, there were small compartments, like a honeycomb, and in each of them was a thick, stake-like bolt. The bolts had their flying distance extended with attached spells, and they would also trace anything moving in the air. The anti-air repeating bolt thrower could fire dozens of these bolts simultaneously.
If any wyvern knight carelessly got too close to the wall, the bolts fired by the anti-air repeating bolt throwers would attack them like homing missiles.
“That’s why, in order to bomb a city, it’s first necessary to attack the castle walls from ground-level and destroy the bolt throwers,” Liscia explained. “Up until that point, the air force’s job is just to guard the air above the land force.”
“I see… castle battles are like a three-way deadlock,” I said.
Land forces were beaten by air forces, air forces were beaten by bolt throwers, and bolt throwers were beaten by ground forces. It was because of those inter-related strengths and weaknesses that Liscia said coordination between the air and land forces was important. Basically…
“Setting aside the navy for the moment, in the present situation, where we don’t have a land or air force, if the Principality of Amidonia were to invade, we would have no way to deal with them, huh?”
Liscia was silent.
The Elfrieden kingdom had a total manpower of around 100,000 troops.
To break that down, the king’s personal army, the Forbidden Army, had over 40,000.
40,000 in the army, led by Duke Georg Carmine.
10,000 in the navy, led by Duchess Excel Walter.
1,000 in the air force, led by Duke Castor Vargas.
First, when it came to the king’s personal army, the Forbidden Army, in reality only around 10,000 of those troops could be mobilized. Publicly, the Forbidden Army was said to be more than 40,000 strong, but those numbers had included mercenaries dispatched by the mercenary state, Zem, as well as the personal forces of nobles not attached to the army, navy, or air force.
Of those, I had already terminated our contract with the Zemish mercenaries. This was partly to save expenses, and partly because of Machiavelli’s advice against trusting mercenaries. On top of that, while things might be different in a battle against Amidonia, in the upcoming conflict between myself and the three dukes, many among the nobility were going to be fair-weather allies. If it actually came to war against the three dukes, I probably wouldn’t be able to count on using their personal forces.
As such, the number of troops I could deploy would be only 10,000 or so, made up of the royal guard and the forces I controlled directly.
My directly-controlled army was almost entirely made up of infantry (800 members of the royal guard were heavy cavalry), but because I had put them to work on infrastructure projects recently, all of them also had the skills required to be combat engineers. Furthermore, in my personal forces, there were also 500 earth mages like Kaede.
Now, as for the three dukes, if I were to give you the quick rundown, this is what it looked like.
First, there were the 10,000 in the navy. Most of these were the crew of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, or torpedo boats. There were only about 2,000 marines who could go ashore and fight. So, even if we had to fight them, because it would be on land, they weren’t much of a threat.
However, their admiral, Duchess Excel Walter, warranted caution.
She was an incredible woman, possessing not only wisdom and courage, but political savvy as well. I’d heard that she had overcome the food crisis that had struck the whole kingdom using her own independent plan. If I made an enemy of her, she would probably come up with surprising ways to take advantage of my weaknesses, even from outside the battlefield. Personally, of the three dukes, she was the one I least wanted to make an enemy of.
In contrast, the air force had a leader who would be easy to handle, and soldiers who would be dangerous to fight.
Each of their soldiers generally came paired with a wyvern, and there were around 1,000 of these wyvern cavalry. Wyvern knights were every bit as strong as Liscia had explained earlier. With the Forbidden Army having only a few wyverns used for relaying messages, it would be hard to fight them straight up.
Air Force General Castor Vargas was a dragonewt, and it was no exaggeration to say that he was a peerless warrior. Also, being a dragonewt, even without a wyvern he could fly using his own wings. He was hot-blooded, impulsive, and had a distaste for using any sort of petty tricks. While his actions would be easy to read, he had a tendency to put his beliefs before his own interests, so if I were to attempt to persuade him based on what was to his advantage… he was the one that would be least likely to work on.