“Looks like you managed to make it in time,” I murmured after seeing Spinoza assist Leobolt.
“Sorry we’re so late,” Bolton responded, the guards who had deserted together standing behind him. “Roundin’ these guys up and scrapin’ together some weapons was a real pain in the neck.”
“No problem,” I said. “I’m just glad you showed up.”
When I had heard that Rebirth’s forces were coming to attack the capital, I had gone to Bolton to ask him if he would help us out, and he had agreed immediately. He had then rounded up every guard who had been fired by Leobolt, and they had all rushed to our side together as reinforcements.
“I appreciate everyone else coming back too,” I told all the guards who had left the Corps in one form or another.
They smiled sheepishly.
“It was a favor for Commander Bolton, y’know.”
“That, and we couldn’t just stand by and do nothin’ while the capital’s in trouble.”
“We may be out of jobs, but we still consider ourselves guards.”
Just then, an arrow struck the head of a slime soldier that had been about to attack me. Apparently, Fam was covering us from the rear as well.
With everyone together, the offensive capabilities of our forces had increased dramatically.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right, though, Commander Bolton?” I asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Hasn’t retirement put you out of practice?”
“Who do you take me for, eh?” Bolton said, sporting an aggressive smirk. “I’m always ready for a fight.”
The guards gathered behind him seemed to feel the same way. They all had the eyes of fighters.
“Also, you got one thing wrong, Sieg,” he added.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“I’m not a commander right now. I’m just your average volunteer militiaman.”
With that, Bolton turned to the fighters he’d brought with him to fire them up.
“All right, men! We’re movin’ in as a group! Let’s tear those slime soldiers some new assholes! There’s not a damn thing out there we can’t thrash!”
With a war cry vigorous enough to shake the very air, the guards all charged in at once, with Bolton at the lead. Their intensity was truly an impressive sight to behold.
“Then it’s my job to keep them out of harm’s way,” I murmured to myself.
I activated Iron Target and forced the enemy’s attention onto myself. While I was doing so, Bolton and his men tore through slime soldiers one after the other.
With the addition of Spinoza, Fam, Bolton, and the others, the Guard Corps’s offensive capabilities had absolutely skyrocketed compared to before. The slime soldiers’ regeneration couldn’t keep up, and their front lines suffered a collapse.
“Look for the slime leader! Find him and strike him down!”
Rebirth was commanding the rest of the slime soldiers, and destroying his core would have secured our victory. We searched for a slime that seemed to have something core-like, but couldn’t locate anything of the sort.
If he had been too great a distance away, he probably wouldn’t have been able to use his core’s energy to control that many copies. There were no obvious hiding places on the plains of the battlefield either. He had to be lying low, hidden among the many slime soldiers...
Eventually, the slime army began to retreat—most likely having realized that even if they had kept on fighting, they weren’t going to win.
“Don’t let them get away!”
We tried to chase after them, but a wall of slime soldiers lined up to defend their escape route. In the end, we were unable to take down Rebirth.
“Tch. He got away,” Bolton grumbled, clicking his tongue in disappointment. “Unless we put Rebirth down, he’ll just keep generatin’ an endless supply of soldiers for his immortal army. If they keep comin’ at us like this, eventually we’re gonna get overwhelmed.”
“If only there was some way to tell which one the real one was...” I muttered, though locating him hidden among the countless soldiers would’ve been like finding a needle in a haystack.
At any rate, we had managed to get through our crisis for the time being. After the slime soldiers had withdrawn, we regrouped with Leobolt and his men. The guards who had been working under Leobolt ran over to Bolton.
“Commander Bolton!”
“You were awesome out there!”
“We don’t want any commander but you!”
“Look at all these suck-ups,” Bolton cracked a weak smile, then turned to Leobolt. “Been a while, huh, Leobolt,” he said. “That wasn’t like you at all, gettin’ all caught up in the heat of the moment and runnin’ out there on your own. What, were you in a hurry to take all the glory for yourself or somethin’?”
“Why...?”
“Hm?” Bolton asked.
Leobolt turned a questioning gaze to Bolton, Spinoza, Fam, and all the guards who had left the Corps. “The only reason you all became guards was to earn your daily wages—meaning you had no reason to come running to our aid.”
I assumed Leobolt was trying to ask something along the lines of this: The guards had been expelled, meaning they weren’t getting paid for participating in battles any longer. The logical decision for them would have been to feign ignorance, turn tail, and run away. Why, then, did they come running to the battle in spite of that—one that wouldn’t earn them a single coin?
“Yeah... That’s true,” Bolton said with a nod. “You’re right that we didn’t join the Guard Corps with motives as pure as yours. We just picked a job so we could afford to eat.”
“Then, why—”
“But that sure as hell doesn’t mean we have zero desire at all to protect the royal capital.”
Leobolt’s eyes jolted open in shock.
Bolton continued, voice subdued, “It might not’ve even been genuine at first. But sometimes when you start working, you end up finding something that feels rewarding to you while you’re in the thick of it. It’s true that we work to earn pay to feed ourselves, but we genuinely want to protect the capital too. I want to protect the happy life my wife and kid have, and that means protecting Astaroth.”
He smiled, then turned to look at the rest of the guards who had come to help.
“These guys feel pretty much the same way, so when I asked ’em to help out, they came running. If they hadn’t felt that way, I doubt they woulda risked their lives.”
They might not have been as pure as Leobolt, but it was an indisputable truth that Bolton and the other guards had a deep desire to protect Astaroth.
Leobolt stood there staring at Bolton in silence, a sheepish expression on his face. The authority his presence had commanded up to that point had vanished entirely.