Beautiful even in the simple act of brushing her hair back, this was the kingdom’s lorelei, Juna Doma.
When she’d appeared before Souma, she’d been the lorelei Juna who worked at a singing cafe, but in the Navy she had become Canaria, the leader of 2,000 marines, the sole unit intended to fight in amphibious operations.
Yes, the true identity of this commando unit was the Marine Corps, which reported to Excel Walter.
Juna was relieved to have successfully accomplished her task.
Grandmother handled her part well, she thought. I can’t be the one to screw this up.
By “Grandmother,” she meant the Admiral of the Navy, Excel Walter. In addition to being a lorelei and Canaria, Juna also had her face as Excel’s granddaughter. Of course, with Excel’s long life and many loves, she had birthed many children, and if she were to count all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren… well, she had enough relatives to populate a small village.
With a family that big, it would be possible to overthrow the kingdom using only her own blood relatives. That was why, to avoid needless suspicion, Excel had kept the “Walter” name to herself. When her children reached maturity, she would disown them and send them off to marry into other houses. Juna was the child of one of Excel’s sons who had married into the Doma family of merchants.
Juna, who had inherited Excel’s beautiful face, looked at the cruelly abandoned corpses of the Amidonian soldiers and frowned. “…If we leave them be, the local beasts might develop a taste for human flesh. That would be a problem. Let’s rescue the survivors and take them prisoner and bury the rest.”
“You’re going to help Amidonian soldiers?” her subordinate asked.
“After being abandoned by their own king, His Majesty King Souma, the king of an enemy state, will save them,” she said. “It could improve His Majesty’s reputation, and it can’t possibly hurt it.”
“I see.”
Like the aura she exuded, Juna’s thought process was mature, as well. After giving the orders to her subordinates, Juna looked towards the north-northwest. That was the direction she expected Souma and the others were heading in right now. After this, Souma and the others would be entering the final battle with the Principality of Amidonia.
Juna placed a hand on her ample bosom, closing her eyes in meditation. Your Majesty… Please, stay safe.
That she prayed for his safety, not his victory, was due to her feelings as Juna Doma, Souma’s lorelei, peeking through.
The ambush in the Goldoa Valley largely killed the Amidonian forces’ marching speed. When they tried to reorganize themselves into ranks after leaving the valley, the 30,000 troops had been reduced to 15,000. This indicated that, in addition to those that had been lost to the ambush and those that had been trampled when they’d sunk into the swamp, there had been a considerable number of soldiers who had fled, too.
Furthermore, because the wagons had had no choice but to drop their supplies and run in the chaos, the forces of the principality were now stricken with both exhaustion and hunger.
The soldiers’ stress had reached its peak and they were ready to blow at any moment. Even if they made it to Van with 15,000 troops, and then managed to launch a pincer attack with the defenders, it would be difficult to win against the Elfrieden Kingdom’s force of 55,000.
In response to this situation, Gaius VIII first had the captain of the wagon teams take responsibility for the loss of their provisions. He decapitated the man in order to pacify the other soldiers.
Next he gathered provisions from the nearby villages and towns, drafting their people into service to bring his total troops up to 25,000. Of course, this caused some resentment, but with the very existence of his country on the line, Gaius didn’t care.
While this had let him secure the number of troops he would need, his forces were gathering provisions and soldiers as they advanced, so they moved slowly. It had been some days since the retreat had begun, but they still had no idea when they would arrive at Van.
After spending yet another day, the Amidonian forces finally came close enough that they would likely reach Van within the day. However, the Amidonian forces had been making a fatal mistake all this time.
They’d rushed their advance too much.
You may question what’s wrong with that, or you may even think that Sun Tzu himself said that “Soldiers value haste.”
However, when Sun Tzu speaks of a “soldier,” he means “war.” In the original text, it says, “Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.”
What he means by that is: “War (because it’s a thing that exhausts countries) is most beneficial when resolved quickly, and there is no country that has benefited from a lengthy war.”
That was why the principality’s armies should have paid heed to the following words in The Art of War’s chapter “Maneuvering”:
“Maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous. If you set a fully-equipped army in march in order to snatch an advantage, the chances are that you will be too late. On the other hand, to detach a flying column for the purpose involves the sacrifice of its baggage and stores.”
“Maneuvering” is the competition between two forces over which will claim strategically important locations first.
In the case of the Battle of Yamazaki between Hideyoshi Hashiba and Mitsuhide Akechi, that had been Mount Tennouzan, while in the Russo-Japanese War, it had been 203 Hill.
Certainly, if you can secure those important points before your opponent, the battle will be to your advantage.
However, Sun Tzu says developing a fixation on those points and competing with your opponent over them is dangerous. If you send your entire army, you’ll likely arrive too late, but if you send a fast unit ahead to do the job, they’ll end up leaving the team that carries their supplies behind.
If that happens, even if you do capture the point in question, it’s pointless.
Furthermore, Sun Tzu says that if you march one hundred li while maneuvering, only one-tenth of your army will reach their destination, and the leaders of all three of your divisions will fall into the enemy’s hands. If you march fifty li, only half of your army will reach the destination, and the leader of your first division will be struck down.
In other words, if you exhaust your soldiers trying to seize strategically important points, and you lose your supplies in the process, there’s no point.
If you look at what the armies of the principality had done, you’ll see that they had grown overly fixated on the strategically important capital city, Van, abandoned their supply wagons, and needlessly exhausted their soldiers.
In other words, they’d done exactly what Sun Tzu cautions against.
What the army of the principality found when they reached the open plain ten kilometers south of Van was a fresh army from the kingdom waiting for them.
When Gaius saw the forces arrayed before him, all of the power left his body and he nearly fell from his horse. “This is absurd… You can’t mean to tell me Van has already fallen…?”
There was no one who could respond to his mutterings.
To jump straight to the conclusion, no, Van had not yet fallen at this point.
When the forces of Elfrieden under Souma arrived a day before the Amidonian forces, they didn’t do anything stupid like try to attack the 5,000 elite soldiers holed up in Van. They split off 10,000 troops to monitor those soldiers, while the main force moved to the open field ten kilometers south of Van, waiting for the main force of the principality’s army which would no doubt be coming.