“I know how talented you are! How did this happen?!” I asked.
“I’m sorry... I saw an ally...about to be speared through...” he replied.
Crap, crap... He’d pushed himself to save one of his own and had been tossed aside! Martyn’s senses on the battlefield were sharper than most; I’d wondered how someone like him would have gotten injured like this...
“Enough talking. It seems like your ribs have punctured your lungs,” I said. “Someone take him to Kaya!”
The Fellowship’s most talented swordsman was out of commission, and everyone who had held the line was terribly injured. Considering the scale of the enemy assault, this was a magnificent victory worthy of toasting to, but we weren’t soldiers—just a small unit of adventurers. The sight was painful to look at.
It was nigh-on a miracle that no one had died, but our forces were pretty much decimated. This damage had been due to my own lack of foresight. I had been able to make up for it in the thick of things, but it wasn’t nearly enough to hold my head up high. Enough of that, I thought; this wasn’t the time to moan about my own shortcomings.
“This isn’t over! There’s more to come!”
As my allies held up their weapons and cheered for their victory, I called out over them and raised the Craving Blade to gather their attention.
“We need to take them on!” I went on. “We have one horse spare for anyone who can ride! I need whoever is capable to follow me!”
“A-Another assault? What do you mean, Boss...?” Etan said.
He had followed me in the cavalry charge—I’d given him the mightiest horse belonging to the knight I’d dueled, so he’d just about managed—but I pointed my sword to the forest cloaked in night as I carried on.
“The necromancer is nearby! Our charge confused them and caused the enemy formation to falter. In other words, these zombies were being controlled by a person, not some fire-and-forget spell! We need to flush them out now! Anyone who can ride, follow me! If you don’t feel confident about riding through the forest at night, then cede your place to someone who can.”
I understood how it felt to have someone rain on your parade after you were celebrating a victory snatched from the jaws of death. I thought that this final charge would have marked the end of it all. Dammit, GM, how could you stick us with another climax after all this? Give us a break! If this’d only been a tabletop battle, I’d have slipped a d4 into the GM’s shoe before they left.
“Gimme the reins!” came a shout and a clang.
It was Siegfried who had roughly pulled off his helmet and tossed it aside. His face was still caked in blood, but he didn’t bother to do anything about it and instead grabbed at the reins of an unmanned horse. My comrade must have really pushed himself in that assault, for his limbs—left bare, since he’d gone without armor—were covered in wounds. He looked like he was one hit away from defeat.
“Siegfried, you’re far too inj—”
“Shut up! I don’t wanna hear it! I ain’t gonna step down after all this! The bastards gave me another damn facial scar!”
With reins in hand, Siegfried pulled out a potion from his pouch and doused his head in it, before pulling out another and downing it. Both were Kaya’s own creations, but her potions only activated the body’s own natural restorative capabilities. If he chugged so many in such a short amount of time, he’d be hit with some painful side effects later—lethargy, hunger, insomnia, physical pain akin to growing pains. Kaya had warned us not to take more than two per day, but here he was using two at once.
With this, I couldn’t really talk him down. How would a man react after having his resolve spat on? I was a man too—I knew exactly how. The only paths left would be an irreparable parting or a duel to the death.
“You’re so stubborn... Fine! Come!” I said.
“You don’t need to tell me! Save the explanation for later, so lead the way and let me kill the bastard myself!”
Siegfried was blatantly furious, and I worried whether it was the right decision to bring him along. The others around him were positively calm in comparison. In a way, I felt a bit more uneasy about leaving him here to mop up.
“Kaya, I’m sorry, but can I leave this to you?” I said.
“Of course, Leader. I’ll take care of everyone as best I can,” Kaya replied.
She was a far more approachable person than me, so I was sure she’d do a good job. But, man, she was really serious about this. In her waist pouch of potions, I noticed a bottle marked with red paint. This potion, marked with a hazard symbol, was some of the leftover napalm catalyst from after we ran out of boxes for the mines. It looked like she had packed it with her stock in the event that escape was impossible, so that she could cremate everyone around her. If this was powered up by her own magic, the explosion would encompass a blast zone dozens of meters wide.
I breathed another sigh of relief for having made it in time. With it, I felt the churn of my anger at myself rising. Siegfried, I thought, you might be ticked off, but I’m well past my limit too.
“Toss aside your spears; they’ll do nothing for you in the forest!” I said. “Drink some water, because we’ll be going full pelt until we find the bastard! Anyone with free hands, get some water for these horses—I don’t care if you use your helmet!”
As we prepared for our pursuit, I decided to pull out another trump card.
“Ursula, Lottie,” I whispered.
I felt my pouch shake. I opened it up and saw the rose I always kept with me open up to reveal Ursula, whose silver hair was shinier than usual. She leaned on the opened petals and gave a smile that indicated she’d been waiting to be called. The gentle breeze that licked my neck wasn’t the night air. Lottie couldn’t bury herself in my hair while I had my helmet on, so instead she allowed her breeze to stroke my body.
The moon was waning—a dark form, close to a new moon. It was as if the False Moon had its mouth open, waiting eagerly until it became full.
In other words, the perfect time for alfar magic.
“You called for us, Beloved One?” Ursula said.
“Hmm... It smells of stinky iron... It’s not fluffy soft at all!” Lottie said.
Whereas Ursula seemed perfectly happy, Lottie was disappointed that she couldn’t touch my hair. They were complete opposites, but they both readily accepted my call for their help.
I got Lottie to test the perimeter for signs of life. Only my comrades and I were nearby, but deep in the forest she had picked up a squirming group of a few people.
“It’s gross and ew! They’re people-shaped, but they stink of medicine!”
Thanks, Lottie. That settles it.
I had been worried about a few possible scenarios. With the perfect timing of the enemy’s assault, I’d been concerned that there was a mole in the canton or that the necromancer had been lurking among us. There were a few suspicious people I’d marked, but I’d leave that for now. To be honest, paranoia of this kind had been fostered in me thanks to countless traumatic events from TRPG campaigns long since past.
Even I would be able to detect someone with enough magical ability to control this many zombies at once, or even their minion. I had undergone so much antimagic combat training with Lady Agrippina that it had made me sick. If there were any suspicious mana waves, I would’ve picked up on them. I’d been making plans to be doubly, triply sure in the case that we were dealing with a real pro who could hide from me, so I was glad that my anxiety had been for naught.
I pushed aside my desire to breathe a sigh of relief. I asked Ursula for her blessing and received a kiss on my eyelids. Just like in that ogre-haunted manor, the darkness lifted. My eyes were so keen that I could see the sweat from the hardworking horses and even the features on my exhausted allies’ faces. It had gifted me sight far superior to any night vision sorcery could have conferred on me.
This would allow me to dash into the forest without fear, even without Kaya’s flares to guide me. My allies could follow my back, so we would be fine. This little meeting under the moon had swept away my lingering worries.
All that was left was to hunt and kill. Our bloodlust was more than enough. We had barrels’ worth of hatred—enough to buy out the whole Empire.
“Boss...”
While the horses cooled off and fueled up, I went to see to the injured.
“You did a great job,” I said.
I went around the group, shaking people’s hands and talking to them, but some didn’t even have the strength to grip back.
In particular, Martyn’s breathing was shallow, and his face was as white as a sheet. Martyn had said that he wanted to return home with riches so that he could buy land for the girl he promised to marry and take her as his wife. His dream was to have land for his whole family. Some of the Fellows laughed at him, saying his goal was short on grandeur, but he furiously argued back that there was no manlier dream.
“Don’t you dare die over something as ridiculous as this, Martyn,” I said. “I’m gonna make sure we get paid our dues, okay?”
“Okay, Boss,” Martyn said before he was too consumed with coughing to speak.
I looked over to Kaya; she clenched her fists tight—her face told me she would do everything she could to save him. There was nothing else to worry about.
We had our job to finish. It was time to say thank you to the assholes who did this to my subordinates and my comrade.
[Tips] A cavalry charge can create an advantage for a few minutes. Victory can be decided by whether this opening is well utilized or not.