“Just what I expected from Count Farlon. They’re following the battle plan perfectly,” I murmured, impressed, from a short distance away.
The foot soldiers had been sent forward to build the anticavalry palisades and retreated immediately after they finished. Then, the Sylvarian mercenaries charged on in, only to get overrun when their formations were broken. While it might’ve been easy to explain, getting several thousand foot soldiers to actually accomplish it was an incredible feat. And Count Farlon had done it brilliantly.
“If we mess up now, I could never show my face in front of the count again. I’d be way too humiliated.”
“Seriously. What are you gonna do about this, Commander? You’ve raised the hurdle too high.”
“Don’t call me Commander. I’m a viscount now. Or wait, I guess I am the captain right now, huh?”
I gave the knight beside me a wry smile as he sassed me. He was one of the members of His Highness Prince Alphonse’s Special Battalion that he had sent out to me for this battle, and he had been one of my subordinates from back when I was company commander.
“Shouldn’t ‘Commander’ be fine, then? You’re not the type to be a full-on commander, and this is all on a much smaller scale, anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t be able to handle things if there were more people.”
I turned as I replied, and my eyes fell on the ten knights in armor, including this guy. I also saw the rows of stiff-faced soldiers lined up behind them. They’d all been equipped with the same spears and shields, but their equipment and physiques were all over the place. They were not Brigandian soldiers.
“Well then. You all can address me as Commander as well.”
“My lord, such a thing is impossible!” screeched the man standing at the very front of the line.
He was the leader of the soldiers, but he was a commoner. And, as you might’ve guessed from his response, he was also one of the citizens of my territory. From his point of view, or rather, from all of their points of view, they could never bring themselves to be anything less than totally formal. The proof of that was how the men behind him all nodded, looking like they were about to die. I couldn’t blame them; they were all my citizens, after all. But for just this moment I needed them to loosen up a bit.
What do I do?
“Yeah, that’s true. For you guys, I’m your lord,” I said, sounding as understanding as I could be. They all nodded back, so I must have been right. It was good of them as citizens, but I’d need to get their hearts pointing a different way.
“But I’d like for you to forget that fact for the moment. After all!”
I upped the force in my tone before intentionally pausing as I looked at the soldiers. They all looked surprised into silence. But that was for only one or two seconds. Once I paused, their surprise seemed to lessen, and the look in their eyes changed, as if they were waiting for my words.
I didn’t let the opportunity slide, opening my mouth once more. “Right here, right now, we are on the battlefield, where death could come at any moment! But you all knew that! You all volunteered for this!”
As my voice rose another level, the soldiers—volunteers—all straightened up. Being a soldier wasn’t their job. They were all volunteers who’d come forward from places Nia and I had visited, like Stonehunt and Diamoncut, as well as Stonegaze.
“Attention!”
At my command, they all stood at attention. That was the product of about a month of training, and really, all they had achieved: the ability to respond to my order immediately and straighten themselves up. But that was enough. As long as they could respond immediately, that was fine.
“And right here, right now, I am not your lord! I am here today to lead you through the vanguard! Something we can do only because of you!”
Their eyes had been trembling, but at my words the volunteers started to settle. Strength had returned to their eyes, their faces. And seeing that, I pretended not to notice as I continued speaking.
“You are all brave warriors, acknowledged by Saintess Nia! That is why I can trust you all to watch my back! Because you are worthy of that trust!”
Their eyes changed when I mentioned Nia. They all knew of Princess Sonia’s achievements. It had also been explained to them that the viscountess was Princess Sonia’s best friend, and a Saintess whom the princess had entrusted Stonegaze to.
It was all clever talk. But to them, it had real meaning. They were the kind of people who couldn’t let a favor go unpaid, and they dearly wanted to protect their homes.
And there was a reason I was reminding them all of this. Rationally, I could never trust in a citizen’s militia with nothing but a month’s worth of training behind them. Some of them had served in the military before, but the other half were just normal people with a lot of stamina. Under normal circumstances, they would never be relied on as a fighting force, and normally, I wouldn’t dare trust them to support me in battle.
The operative word here was “normally.” In this moment, for this battle, I needed the abnormal to take precedence. And I was sure I could; their stance, their energy, had clearly changed. But it still weighed on my conscience that they were here at all.
“When I die, you die, and when you die, I die! To hold back in times like this because of things like ‘commoners’ and ‘lords’ is unnecessary. No, it is a burden!”
I’d thought about getting into all the fancy rhetoric, but decided against it. Simple was best in this case. It wasn’t my logic, after all, that they needed to understand.
“We are comrades! Brothers-in-arms who will repel these invaders as one!”
It was that idea that was truly important, truly needed, right now.
They were getting heated up. I could feel something I could only describe as heat coming off of them—tangible proof that I’d wound them up. If they were already feeling this much, then I just needed to give them one more push.
“Remember why you’re here! Remember the people you want to protect! Remember the homes you want to save!”
I kept my sentences short and simple to give them ample time to digest what I was saying. It was common knowledge that people who had something they wanted to protect—and truly understood the weight of that desire—could do extraordinary things.
“What you want to protect, I want to protect! We are comrades!”
“Uoooooooahhhhh!!!”
I spoke just a bit louder, and they roared in reply.
Okay, full disclosure: The first person to roar was someone I had planted in the crowd to do just that. But the others who roared in response did it out of their own free will. They roared with the heat springing forth from their hearts. Now that they’d come this far, all we needed to do was go forward.
The hearts of these volunteers were like charcoal: While they were hard to ignite, once lit, they wouldn’t go out easily. It was because they had that fuel in the depths of their hearts that they volunteered to fight in the first place.
“You’re still just as good at riling people up as ever,” quipped the knight beside me.
“Don’t tease me. This isn’t something I can brag about,” I responded, a bitter smile on my lips. His Highness probably could’ve done it a lot better. I was nowhere near as good. But he wasn’t here. We would’ve actually been in trouble if he was. I was responsible for what happened here, so the role fell to me.
“Just how many of these guys are gonna make it?”
Don’t say something so ominous! You think that I, as their leader, haven’t thought that exact thing?
Some people die in battle. It was a simple fact. Which was why...
“All of them,” I said, smiling, to my subordinate’s shock. I must have looked as fierce as a wolf. “I won’t let a single one of my men die, you included. This pointless battle shouldn’t cost even one single man.”
I had no intention of dying either, of course. The Sylvarians couldn’t kill me.
“I’ll remind them what the Black Wolf looks like when he gets serious,” I declared, baring my fangs.
When I took a step forward, the knights around me took one step backwards. Then, they moved to their positions. The knights who’d been sent from the Special Battalion would be commanding the volunteer militia, while I would be the supreme commander.