I hope you can forgive me for not being able to look her in the eye as she laughed. While I wasn’t so much acting when I interacted with Nia, it was true that I was still on my best behavior. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to act more casual around her, but, y’know, I hadn’t really had an opportunity to change.
And while I was thinking all that, Nia kept on calling out instructions, and Laura flew around disarming the traps.
“Honestly, at first I wasn’t really on board with this plan, but now I’m thinking it was the right call to have you two come with us. To think we’d be getting through these traps so quickly,” I commented lightly, only for Nia to drop into thought for a moment. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.
“No, it’s, um,” she said, hesitating. “It’s going too well.”
At Nia’s words, I, no, we all stopped. It was precisely when things were going well that one needed to be on one’s best guard. Seeing as how that ironclad rule had been beaten into our troops, they also reacted quickly.
“You mean to say that we might be walking into the enemy’s trap?” I asked.
“I can’t really say that either,” Nia said. “I said before that the methods to disarm these traps are time based. Every trap we’ve encountered so far has been set at the easiest method for disarmament. But since they’re all governed by complex mechanisms, it wouldn’t be easy at all to change them.”
“So we’re doing so well it can’t be a coincidence, but it’s also not something that could be done intentionally?” I asked to confirm, getting a nod back from Nia.
Then what was happening? We were disarming traps as we went, so there was no sending a scout ahead. All we could do was stay on guard as we went along, but that wasn’t the most pleasant solution here.
An unexpected viewpoint emerged in the middle of my thoughts.
“Perhaps the castle is welcoming Madam,” Laura said, walking back to Nia’s side after she finished disarming a trap.
For a moment, I marveled that even she could crack a joke, but with some thought I decided that what she said wasn’t actually so lighthearted.
“You might not actually be wrong there.”
With a little concentration, you could feel the flow of air. Even though there shouldn’t have been anything blowing through these underground passages, my senses could feel it going in a certain direction.
“Nia, would the spot we’ll be coming out of in the end be in that direction?” I asked, pointing.
She looked shocked for a moment before nodding. Now it felt like even the movement of the air was the castle beckoning to us.
But whatever the case may have been, I was currently the commander of this squad. I couldn’t let myself think so optimistically.
“All units, proceed with utmost vigilance. You five, be ready to move ahead of us at my signal.”
“Understood!”
When I spoke to the five knights right behind Nia and myself, they responded immediately. It was unfortunate, but we would need them to protect us if anything went wrong.
If I died, the chain of command here would go out of order, and if Nia died, then there would be a chance that we would set off a trap as we retreated. So basically, if the two of us died, so would the other hundred people here. It was because of this fact that these five could respond without hesitation to my orders, but it still gave me pause.
“It’d be nice if those orders would be all for nothing,” I murmured to myself. Even though I knew that would never happen on the battlefield. But I couldn’t stop myself from wishing it.
So when nothing actually happened, and my orders turned out to be for nothing, I figured I couldn’t be blamed for looking a bit let down.
And so, we successfully sneaked into Sylvario’s royal palace.
Since we were sneaking in, we had to take the bare minimum of one hundred knights selected from the Special Battalion, but you could say the fact that we got the whole way there without losing a single man was a miracle. We had decided that one hundred knights would be enough to take the palace based on observation from the last time we’d been there, on top of insight from Nia.
But it was weird. There were supposed to be about five hundred Royal Guard knights and soldiers guarding the palace, but... It was kind of sad that my intuition matched the reality here.
But it wasn’t like the Royal Guard were completely gutless. Since they were spread out throughout such a huge palace, we’d calculated that if we crushed each group one by one, we’d be able to take them all.
And, of course, it wasn’t like there were going to be one hundred of them in one place. The most we’d see in one grouping would be about ten, which our entire group of one hundred would attack at once. Considering the difference in numbers between us, it wouldn’t take even a minute to take each sector. Then, all we had to do was do it over and over again.
And over and over again we did. So simply that it was a little bit disappointing. We even split into two groups partway through; it was that easy. If we’d all stayed together while going to capture Sylvario’s king, then there was a chance that their Royal Guard could converge on us, so we split up into two, with one group headed for the central area and one to take out the ones on the perimeter.
And that turned out to have been the right choice. While there were some guards who noticed something was wrong and came running, they were all sporadic and unorganized. Since my men were all doing so well under my command, they were no threat, and we mowed them down more easily than grass.
In pretty much no time at all, we had the central area of the palace so completely under our control it was like the place had never been inhabited.
“This is weird,” I muttered to myself as we tied the king up.
The weird thing wasn’t that we’d captured the king so easily. It was that someone who should have been here wasn’t here.
“Why isn’t the commander of the Royal Guard here?”
The Special Battalion knights who overheard what I said looked around us. The commander of the Royal Guard, who should have been guarding the king, was not here.
“Take the other members of the royal family into custody!”
At my order, the Special Battalion knights split themselves into groups of five in an instant, running off in the depths of the palace.
If the commander was a selfish bastard with a brain, then there was a chance he was escaping with another member of the royal family. If that was the case, then there was a chance of them trying to regroup. It was honestly an unlikely idea, but we still had to consider it as a possibility.
I didn’t even have to say a word of those theories out loud. The Special Battalion knights moved out all on their own. Which meant that there was no chance Nia hadn’t understood what I meant.
“I believe the commander of the Royal Guard should be with Olivia, the third princess.”
Nia’s knowledge of the palace’s inner workings allowed her to share some insights with me.
“Ahh, so it’s like that, then.”
I was trying to keep my voice level, but I wasn’t sure if I’d managed it. Nia was a tough one, and her expression didn’t change, so I really didn’t know. But for me, my guts were close to boiling.
The third princess had been the one who started abusing Princess Sonia. And the commander of the Royal Guard, despite being in charge of the security of the entire palace, had been holed up in the palace with her? Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to hold myself back here. If it really happened—if I really did lose my control—would my desire to shield Nia from bloodshed restrain me at all? It probably wouldn’t, but I wanted to believe it would.
I followed Nia to the chambers of the third princess, Olivia, while my feelings remained in flux.
“E-Eeek! Wh-What?! You insolent fools!”
“You bastards! Have you forced your way inside here, knowing that these are Her Highness the Third Princess’s chambers?!”