“Yeah, I guess they would.”
Maybe Carla had gotten bored just standing by my side, because she responded surprisingly easily. As a former commander of the Air Force, she must have had a better grasp of the situation than I did.
They’re being stubborn because of their inferior numbers, huh. That could be a little troublesome, I thought.
“Our left and right wings, which is to say the units under Liscia and Glaive, don’t look like they’re moving that much,” I said. “If they were a bit more proactive about encircling them, don’t you think they could wipe them out?”
“…If you think that, why not send a messenger on a fast horse with that order?” asked Carla.
With the tone she used, it was like she was asking “Is that your final answer?” It made me stop to think about it a little. However, I couldn’t come to any conclusions.
“…I don’t know,” I said. “My knowledge of war is purely theoretical, so Liscia should know far more about commanding troops than I do. Rather than open my mouth when I shouldn’t, I’d better leave the decision-making to those in the field.”
Carla laughed a little. “Ha ha ha. That’s probably a good idea.”
It looked like that was the right answer.
“Carla, do you know the reason?” I asked. “Care to fill me in?”
“It’s the number of troops the enemy has,” she said.
“The number of troops?”
Carla pointed towards the battlefield. “I only know what I’ve heard from listening in, but those are the 30,000 troops that laid siege to Altomura, right? They were ambushed while they were withdrawing, too.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“It doesn’t look like their numbers have decreased that much, considering all that’s happened.”
“Hm? Now that you mention it…”
With such a large force, it was hard to tell anything at a glance, but they looked to be about half the size of our own force, which had 55,000 troops. I guessed they had around 25,000 troops.
It was true that, considering that they’d been ambushed by Juna’s marines in Goldoa Valley, it didn’t look like they had taken many losses.
“Did the ambush not achieve anything?” I wondered.
“No, from what I see on the battlefield, there are varying levels of morale in the different units of the principality’s army. They likely made up the troops they lost to the ambush by taking in conscripts from cities along their route here. That would be why some of them appear to have low morale.”
“I see…”
Countries in this world generally had standing armies.
In a world where there are giant animals that, from a person back on Earth’s perspective, might as well be monsters running rampant, it was necessary to have troops that could be mobilized at any time. In Elfrieden, the Army, Navy, Air Force and the troops that were under my direct control in the Forbidden Army were standing troops. Of course, in times of need, levies could be raised from the common people. In our case, most of the personal armies of nobles other than the three dukes were made up of levied troops.
After the war, I planned to create a unified army which would incorporate the various nobles’ forces as well, but I intended to release the people from military service and have them return to their towns. Right now, raising productivity was a more urgent concern than a decline in military power.
Naturally, the army the principality used to invade us would also be made up of a combination of standing troops and levied troops. They must have raised all the levies they could by now.
So, after the ambush, the levies they’d raised must have come from those they couldn’t have conscripted before.
For instance, they might be the elderly, the feeble, or even adventurers who had happened to be in their domain. (The adventurers’ guild offered a contract that allowed countries to conscript all adventurers who were in their territory in a time of crisis. In return, the country needed to pay a fixed sum to the guild every month, so I had already terminated that contract.)
Carla was pointing out that they couldn’t have high morale if that was the case.
“If you leave people like that alone, they’ll eventually break on their own,” she said. “On the other hand, if you encircled them, it would risk causing them to unite as one. That’s why both Liscia and Glaive are waiting for them to break ranks and flee.”
“I see,” I said. “So I was right to let my field commanders make the decision.”
I realized that, in a situation like this, rather than pretending to know what I was doing and making pronouncements from on high, it was better to trust the people in the field and leave it to them. I had capable people out there, after all.
“I’m just a figurehead, so I should stay back in the main camp, twiddling my thumbs,” I said.
“I think that’s a problem in its own way…” said Carla. “You are the king, aren’t you?”
“There’s only work for a king before and after the war,” I said. “Other than that, well… If it comes to it, maybe I can offer up my own head and beg them to spare the lives of my troops and commanders.”
When I said that, Carla’s eyes went wide. She looked at me as if she was seeing something completely unbelievable.
Huh? Why was she looking at me like that?
“Did I say something strange?” I asked.
“You… Aren’t you afraid to die?” Carla demanded.
What was she talking about?
“Of course I’m scared to die. I’m not suicidal.”
“Still, just now, you said you’d offer your head up if it came to that, didn’t you?” she asked. “Have you already accepted that?”
“Huh? Ah… I guess I did. That’s weird…”
Carla was right. Now that she mentioned it… it was weird.
Why had I said I’d offer my head up like it was completely natural?
I knew it was something expected of a king. Power was concentrated in my hands as the representative of this country, so I had to bear just as much responsibility. That was what it meant to be king.
But why did it feel “natural” for me to do it?
I mean, I’d always been… a bit of a coward, hadn’t I? I valued my life, didn’t I? I’d taken the throne and worked so hard at internal affairs in order to avoid being handed over to the Empire, hadn’t I?
— When had I stopped holding my life dear?
Carla looked at me anxiously. “A-Are you all right? Are you feeling unwell?”
I was silent.
Unwell… that’s not quite right. Broken…
There was something broken about me as a person.
Yeah. That made a strange amount of sense.
Only now that it had been pointed out did I notice that my current mental state was messed up.
I felt that I had been taking life too lightly. My own life, and the lives of others.
That was how I was able to do simple arithmetic with people’s lives. I had been subtracting the lives saved from the lives lost, and choosing any option where the sum was a positive number.
As if I were a system that handled that sort of computation.
That was when the words I’d once said to Liscia crossed my mind.
“Even if I don’t want to do it, I have to. Because I’m the king now.”
Oh… I see. So that’s how it is…
“At some point, I became a king…” I murmured.
“What’s this all of a sudden? You’ve been a king all this time.”
Carla didn’t seem to understand what I was saying, but it made sense to me now.