“Lord Raoul, we’ve lost contact with another squad!”
“Damn it! What the hell is going on?!” Raoul’s frustration was reaching its limit. Reports continued pouring in, each saying that another unit he’d sent to look for different routes had vanished without a trace.
They’d split into squads of several hundred to stay safe even in the event of an ambush. Those numbers should’ve given the squads enough manpower to fight back, or at the very least to survive long enough to call for backup.
But they’d just disappeared.
“I know this is a ridiculous thing to say, b-b-but...”
“Spit it out already!” Raoul shouted.
“W-Well, some of the soldiers are reporting...that the walls are moving, my lord.”
“What?!”
Rrrruuummmbbblleeeee...
As if on cue, the earth quaked beneath them. Raoul’s warhorse snorted beneath him and stamped its hooves nervously.
Come to think of it, he’d heard this same rumbling multiple times now. They just hadn’t figured out what was causing it.
“Is that the sound they were talking about?” Raoul asked.
“Possibly...”
A chill ran down Raoul’s spine. If the maze’s walls could move, they might never reach the goal.
“N-No, don’t be stupid!” Raoul snarled. “There’s no way something that big could move!”
Suddenly, he lashed out and kicked the messenger in the stomach.
“Argh!”
They were down to about a thousand men. Everyone was exhausted, both physically and mentally. They’d just come off a multicity siege campaign and now had to navigate this seemingly endless maze.
But they couldn’t rest. Not here. And Raoul would never give the order to retreat.
Even if their morale was in shambles, they had no choice but to push forward.
Only after their army dwindled to five hundred did someone finally shout, “A gate! There’s the gate!”
“Look! I can see buildings over there!”
“That’s the city, then, right?”
For some reason, the gate was wide open. About three hundred armed defenders were waiting in the open space beyond it.
Raoul immediately recognized the face of the person standing in front.
“Luke!” he called out. “We meet at last!”
Of course, this whole setup seemed odd.
Instead of holing up behind their proper fortress, with real walls and a gatehouse, they’d sallied out to meet Raoul’s army with this tiny force? Even though Raoul’s army now numbered fewer than five hundred, it was nothing less than suicide. But at this point, he was too angry to think clearly. He didn’t care if it was a trap or not. He was going to crush them all.
“Charge!”
He snapped his riding crop and charged ahead of his men, leading the assault himself.
And then, once they were a mere two hundred meters away from the enemy, the ground disappeared.
Raoul had no idea what had happened. One minute, he was galloping full speed across flat terrain; the next, both he and his horse were submerged in water.
“Bwuh! A moat?!”
It must’ve been camouflaged to look like normal ground.
He whirled around with wide eyes and realized the moat was over a hundred meters wide and encompassed the patch of ground they’d just been running across. That could only mean one thing: The moat definitely hadn’t been there before.
The rest of Raoul’s five hundred soldiers were now splashing into the moat one after the other, as if to confirm his theory.
Thankfully, the water wasn’t that deep. Raoul abandoned his floundering horse and began to swim forward. The rest of the soldiers followed suit, kicking through the water after him.
“Luke, you bastard! How dare you!”
Right after Raoul shouted that, the water vanished.
“What the—?!”
With nothing below them, the soldiers fell and slammed hard into the bare ground. Raoul instinctively broke his fall, but most of the others landed so hard that they couldn’t stand up afterward.
“What the hell is happening?”
“I’m done. I can’t take any more.”
“What kind of monster are we fighting?!”
The next attack came immediately, giving the groaning soldiers no time to despair. Forty archers lined up at the edge of the moat above them and drew their bows. They were elegant and graceful, arranged in a perfect row like something out of a painting.
“Elves?!”
“Why are there elves here?!”
“Forget that! They’re firing! Get down!”
The arrows whizzed toward them. The soldiers were too exhausted and battered to react properly, and the first volley took out over thirty of them.
The second came before anyone could recover.
“Move! Break through! Just force your way out!!!” Raoul shouted from the vanguard, deflecting arrows with his sword as he charged ahead.
Roughly four hundred troops had made it this far, but by the time they scrambled out of the dry moat, that number had dropped below three hundred.
That made them even with the enemy forces.
But the survivors were Raoul’s elite, battle-hardened men who’d fought alongside him in the last war.
“Tch! We’ve still got enough to wipe them out and kill every last one of—”
Roooooooooooaaaaaaar!!!
An earth-shattering roar interrupted Raoul, and then a massive, scaly creature barreled into their ranks like a battering ram from behind.
“A dragon?!”
✦ ✦ ✦
Raoul’s army had finally made it through the maze and reached the village, but we’d whittled down his force to a tenth of its original size. Even though they still outnumbered us, a clash now would’ve left both sides wrecked, so I figured I should lay a few more traps.
First, I lured them into the village and dropped a hidden moat beneath their feet, just like I had with the bandits.
“That sudden drop is terrifying, you know...” one ex-bandit said as he watched.
“I still have dreams about it to this day. And every time I wake up in a puddle of sweat...” another replied.
Both went pale just remembering it.
Raoul’s troops fell straight into the moat. I’d given them no chance to evade or see it coming.
Last time, Seren had frozen the water, but that wasn’t practical for this many people and this much water. So instead, I let them swim a bit and then, at the right moment, deleted all of the water. They all slammed into the bottom of the empty moat.
The bandits continued muttering back and forth.
“They’re going to be traumatized...”
“They’ll have flashbacks every time they try to cross a river after this...”
I was starting to feel a little guilty, like I was bullying them or something.
They had attacked us! I thought, trying to justify it.
“Philia!” I called out. “Now, while they’re stunned!”
“Got it!”
The elven archers stepped forward and loosed a volley in perfect unison.
“Move! Break through! Just force your way out!!!” Raoul shouted, swatting down the arrows with his sword. He even deflected Philia’s, which just went to show how powerful Raoul’s Sword Mastery Gift was.
There were three hundred enemy troops left. They looked exhausted, but Raoul still had enough people behind him to believe they could win.
“Tch! We’ve still got enough to wipe them out and kill every last one of—”
Rooooooooooaaaaaaaar!!!
Unfortunately for him, he’d have to deal with the tree dragon first.