“Just make sure it doesn’t. All we have to do is take extra care defending it. It won’t be that easy to destroy it if our guards are up.”
“R-Really…? It won’t matter how careful we are if the enemy has a capable enough spy working for them! I’ve heard that the Duke of Seitz, Ashude, is personally commanding his army, too. He’ll be sending the best agents in all of the duchy to disable the ship, I’m sure of it!”
“Doesn’t matter how good they are, unless they’re better than Pham and his people─and spies like that aren’t so easy to find. It’ll be fine, trust me!” said Mireille.
She was approaching the situation with an awful lot of optimism, but speaking as someone who came within an inch of being assassinated just a short while beforehand, I wasn’t content to think that having Pham around meant that we were a hundred percent certain to be in the clear. For all we know, Seitz could have other spies working for them who had the skills to get the better of the Shadows.
“And besides,” Mireille added, “if they really did have someone that good, they could send ’em in to destroy the airship whether we use it in battle or not. If it’s gonna get broken either way, then better to get our money’s worth out of it first, right?”
“I-I’m not so sure about that,” said Rosell. “I mean, sending it into battle means it’ll be more likely to break, right? There’s no arguing against that! They might be setting something up in Fort Sokan to deal with it, too! Sure, they won’t be able to hit it with any magic all the way up in the sky, but it can’t keep flying forever. We’ll have to land it in the fort after it falls, and they might use that as their chance to spring an ambush on it! It won’t last a second!”
“What sort of ambush are you even talking about?” asked Mireille.
“A magical trap, probably!” said Rosell.
“Okay, so we just look through the fort after it falls and make sure we disable any traps we find. Easy.”
“Except it’s not easy at all! Some traps can be hard to find, and there isn’t even any guarantee we’ll be able to disable them if we do!”
Rosell and Mireille descended into a heated debate. Personally, I was in favor of any strategy that would bring the fort under our control sooner rather than later. I also wasn’t very excited about not using the airship since that would mean our own troops would suffer more casualties. Even if the fort didn’t have many defenders, some of them could be manning a mage’s tower, and the sort of bombardments that one of those could dish out had the potential to slaughter masses of soldiers all at once.
Even if the enemy learned a little more about our airship, I didn’t think it would be enough for them to figure out how to counter its attacks. It would be a huge problem if it was destroyed, of course, and like Rosell said, there was a chance they could booby trap the fort itself. If we did use the airship, we’d have to make sure it was stocked with rations so that it could stay floating above the fort for quite a while after we’d conquered it, giving us enough time to search for and disable any traps that might be left around. Though of course, if we didn’t use the airship, we could take our time searching the fort and only move the ship after we were certain it was clean. And all of this was assuming that they were capable of setting a trap that could destroy the airship to begin with, which I had my doubts about.
“What sort of trap, specifically, do you believe the enemy could set?” Rietz asked Rosell.
“Hmm, well… They could hide a spy who can use magic in a secret room, then have them blend in with our soldiers and set fire to the airship? I guess they couldn’t set an explosive trap, since Seitz doesn’t have access to explosive aqua magia…”
“That’s believable, yes,” said Rietz. “The reinforcements King Couran sent mean that we can’t be familiar with the names and faces of every member of our force, at the moment. Slipping in an agent would not be impossible. That said, I believe that tightening our security around the airship should resolve that problem handily. Even if they were to hit it with fire magic, as long as we managed to put the fire out, I’d think the airship would not be too damaged.”
“What if I use my power to make sure that all the soldiers around the ship are on our side?” I suggested.
“W-We could never allow you to do something so dangerous!” Rietz shouted without missing a beat.
Okay, fair enough. Going somewhere that might be full of enemy agents would be pretty risky for me. They might try to kill me the second they realize who I am.
I also knew from painful personal experience that my skill could be fooled. There was a chance that Seitz knew the technique that was used back then, so I couldn’t put total faith in the results of any appraisals. It seemed like not relying on my skill would be the wiser decision, in this case.
We kept discussing our options for some time, and in the end, we decided that we would use the airship. Minimizing our casualties during the attack on the fort was a high priority, and as long as we guarded the airship well, I didn’t think our enemies would manage to destroy it. They’d learn more about it, sure, but that didn’t matter to me─there was no way for them to mount a perfect defense against it. Seeing an airship in action wouldn’t teach them anywhere close to enough to make one of their own. Once we took Fort Sokan by storm, we could bunker down and prepare for the attack on Castle Kuat while we waited for Couran to arrive─or at least, that’s how I expected things to play out.
I called the meeting to a close, and directed our army to set off once more.
One day later, I figured that the airship would be departing from Fort Purledo at any moment. Shin would be flying it once more. He wasn’t a formal member of our army, and I felt terrible for dragging him into battle like this, but he’d been willing to take on the job, mostly because we needed a capable pilot at the helm to show what the airship was capable of. One victory could be a fluke, while two would prove conclusively that his invention was something truly special.