novelraw Chapter 170 : Chapter 170
Chapter 170 : Chapter 170
170
From a distance, all that registered was the sheer enormity of their numbers.
The dust kicked up by men and horses billowed into the sky, spreading wide enough to blanket the entire horizon.
The sound of their footsteps filled every direction, and weapons of all kinds — long spears among them — bristled densely between the ranks.
Even at a rough glance, the crowd appeared to number around thirty thousand.
It was a force that a capital stripped of weapons and soldiers stood no chance of stopping.
"Wow~."
And yet Sihan grinned at the sight of those ranks.
"A rabble."
He was not wrong.
The closer they drew, the more their imposing presence shrank, replaced by an atmosphere bordering on farce.
Properly equipped soldiers among them were few and far between.
One lacked a helmet, another lacked armor, and yet another had no sword.
They had forced such a grueling march that over half the soldiers were gasping for breath, their stamina spent.
The knights were no better.
Knights typically carried a great deal of gear for combat.
Maintaining their large frames required ample food, and they needed attendants to transport armor weighing dozens of kilograms.
That meant they required numerous retainers — and many had come without their retainers properly arranged.
"Not a single step in sync. Look at that. They need to start over from formation drills."
Moreover, this was not the army of a single noble.
Nobles from every corner of the Belmein Kingdom had rushed here in haste, advancing together while keeping each other in check.
'Everyone must be eyeing the throne and wanting it for themselves.'
Not a single step was in unison, and their formation was a mess.
The sight of them competing to fly their house banners higher than one another was laughable.
War criers who spotted the ruined Royal Castle raised their voices, but the soldiers' morale refused to rise.
All of it was observable with the naked eye.
"See? This royal court deserved to collapse. Look at them. The moment a crisis hits, hm? The ones who show up are that pathetic? These are the half-wits who were calling themselves nobles and running the monarchy!"
I had heard from Rozalin about the future of the Belmein Kingdom.
The Belmein Kingdom had, in fact, maintained its power for a reasonably long time.
That was not because its nobles were outstanding or its royal court was exemplary.
It was because every other nation and the Belmein Kingdom were in roughly the same sorry state.
"If you view the world too idealistically, you will never change anything."
I am inadequate and you are inadequate and all of us are inadequate.
That was the world.
Ideals could exist only on paper, and precisely because of that, those who studied were prone to dreaming of ideals.
This world was full of people striving earnestly toward those ideals.
And those people were the ones who ultimately changed the world.
Inadequate as they were.
"Politics is about guiding people like those in the right direction."
"So you are telling me I have to take those dimwits and make them live well and prosper."
"Well, compared to those dimwits......"
I glanced at our side.
Along the wall stood students of Akarind Academy, arrayed in a line.
Since the wall itself had been reduced to rubble, the heights at which they stood were uneven and mismatched.
Every one of them carried one of the cylinders Sihan had made on their shoulders, and their number was thirty.
Of those, only half actually functioned.
That was more than enough.
"Are we not the better option?"
"Comparing them to you lot is cheating. Every last one of you is an Aura user. Could you not just wipe out that many people without breaking a sweat?"
It was not an impossible notion.
Just a useless one.
"Every one of those people is a resource of the Belmein Kingdom. You should value them."
"Fine, fine, so just deal with it already. The sooner we wrap this up, the sooner we can head back down to Akarind."
"As you command."
I raised my hand.
The students adjusted the angle of their firearms in unison.
They had spent the night mastering how to use them.
"Fire!"
I swept my hand forward.
Simultaneously, fifteen cannons discharged their rounds in a volley.
A staccato of booms echoed, and a few seconds later, explosions erupted just short of the enemy formation.
With a thunderous crash, mounds of dirt launched skyward, and the people scattered in every direction in blind panic.
The barrage was deliberately aimed at a range that minimized casualties among the rank and file while ensuring they could viscerally feel the destructive power.
Thanks to that, the advance toward us ground to a halt.
"Prepare second volley."
I raised my hand again, and the students immediately reloaded.
"Fire."
And again.
"Fire."
Again.
Again.
After about five volleys.
On the other side, figures who appeared to be nobles could be seen milling about in confusion, shouting amongst themselves.
And soon, an envoy bearing a white flag began riding toward us.
"Good. Let us go welcome them."
As it happened, we had just run out of shells ourselves.
It seemed like the perfect time to hear what they had to say and open negotiations.
Beside me, Princess Charlotte shot me a sidelong glance and sighed.
"I suppose I should be grateful. That you are on the royal court's side."
Was I a loyal retainer siding with the Crown?
I considered it briefly, but that did not seem right.
It was more like.
"I am on your side, Princess Charlotte."
To be precise, it was less about being on Charlotte's side and more about siding with whatever was more rational and moral.
The best possible move for keeping the Belmein Kingdom intact and maintaining order.
If nobles clumsily seized power while the royal court was weak, the kingdom would simply cease to exist.
"Oh. Am I that charming?"
Charlotte looked at me with unexpected surprise, her eyes sparkling.
It was the first lively, age-appropriate expression she had shown since arriving here.
And almost simultaneously, Rozalin barged in.
"You are not that charming!"
"......What?"
"What our Teacher said did not mean that, so do not misunderstand, do not get the wrong idea, just literally — take the words at face value — input, output, okay?"
"Rozalin."
Why was she suddenly getting angry?
I grabbed the scruff of Rozalin's neck as she bared her teeth and growled like a guard dog out of nowhere.
We needed to get down from the wall and prepare to greet them.
"Oh ho. Oh ho ho?"
Behind us, Princess Charlotte pursed her lips into a small circle, as though she had discovered something amusing.
Something felt ominous, so I decided not to pay attention.
By the time we made our way outside the wall, the enemy envoy had also arrived near the wall.
He was a knight who appeared to be in his forties, and judging by his posture on horseback, he seemed reasonably skilled.
"I am Perso, envoy of the Belmein Capital Reclamation Force."
Capital Reclamation Force.
They called it reclamation, but was it not just a coup force using reclamation as a pretext?
Above all, the premise was flawed.
Claiming to reclaim the capital presupposed that the capital had fallen.
"I am Cassian, acting as interim representative of the Capital Defense Force under Princess Charlotte."
"Cassian, as in the one from Akarind Academy......?"
"You know of me."
"Bad luck on my part."
Our side had the princess.
On top of that, as we had just demonstrated, we possessed formidable military might.
Above all, this man knew who I was.
What settled across his face was a thick sense of dismay, tinged with a measure of fear and dread.
Which meant he knew exactly who I was.
"When you guard the border, you hear all sorts of rumors. From drifters to smuggling merchants to refugees......"
"Where do you serve?"
"I guard the border with the Kingdom of Namress. I have seen everything — you people coming and going."
Perso clicked his tongue.
If he had been stationed at that border, there was no way he did not know about me, or about Akarind Academy.
After the events of that day, the Kingdom of Namress had been supporting Akarind Academy in every possible way.
They selected their most talented youth and sent them here as exchange students, funding not just tuition but scholarships worth ten times that amount.
It was a form of bribery — a plea to stay in our good graces.
A knight who had witnessed that process at the border crossing would certainly be easy to reason with.
"What will you do?"
"Damn it......"
This knight, at least.
Perso turned around with a look like he had swallowed dirt.
Beyond him, countless knights and soldiers watched this direction with terror written across their faces.
Among them, only the nobles — mounted on the tallest horses with their heads held most rigidly upright — glared at us with expressions full of rage.
"The purpose of sending me was to assess the state of weapons and forces here, and to intimidate you into halting hostilities."
Perso sighed.
"I intend to go back and tell them this war is reckless and that defeat is certain. Whether they will listen, I cannot say. I am not even sure I will keep my life."
Starting from Commander Palmer to the King of Belmein himself, they had failed to properly assess the situation and still raised an army.
There was no reason to believe that nobles who had been living comfortably in their own territories would make sound judgments.
Even now, they were failing to read the situation, just like that.
"Then let us do this."
A knight losing his life because of incompetent nobles.
That was simply too pitiful.
"We will demonstrate such overwhelming force that they will not dare look in this direction."
"......Is such a thing possible?"
"If it is merely a show with no practical value, then yes."
***
After Perso departed, I called for Sihan.
"Help me just this once."
"Damn it...... You worked me to the bone all night, and now you want me to cast large-scale magic on top of that?"
"So you do not want to use the Iron Eater Fantasy?"
Sihan grumbled as he gathered two Fantasies in both hands.
The two Fantasies he took were the Iron Eater Fantasy and the Ocean Hall Fantasy.
"Hell, using these is going to leave me bedridden for a week."
"In return, you will enjoy years of blissful research with the Iron Eater."
Sihan continued to mutter complaints as he walked toward the center of the Royal Castle.
He set the Iron Eater Fantasy and the Ocean Hall Fantasy on the ground, then drew a long, steadying breath.
Almost simultaneously, the surrounding mana began to vibrate.
"What is he about to do?"
Charlotte, who had been watching from beside me, asked.
"He is going to build a castle out of iron."
"......Excuse me?"
The teachers of Akarind Academy could not rest just because it was a break.
Since the buildings themselves were old, collapsed structures had to be repaired during every vacation.
And how were those repairs carried out?
Sometimes it required genuine manual labor, but most of the time the mage Berlis shouldered the work.
She used various elemental spells to mend fences and fill in walls.
So then — what about a 6th-circle mage who had mastered alchemy, among those elemental disciplines, to the absolute extreme?
RRRRRUMBLE.
The ruined capital was littered with countless fragments of debris.
Wood, stone, earth, iron, glass......
All of those fragments began to slowly rise into the air, carried by a vast current of mana.
"Wow......"
Citizens who had come out to see what was happening stood with their mouths agape, staring blankly in every direction.
The debris of the ruins floated around living beings, forming slow currents as they rotated.
Glass and iron scattered sunlight in every direction, and countless grains of sand and stone produced glittering shadows.
It was a spectacle.
The attraction and repulsion generated by the Iron Eater.
And the currents generated by Ocean Hall.
A flow created by pushing both to their absolute limits.
"Construct!"
At Sihan's declaration, every fragment of debris hovering in the air traced a great circle and began building an outer wall around the capital.
Unlike the past, when walls had been stacked from stone alone, this was a wall sculpted like a mosaic masterpiece.
BOOOOM!
The wall, formed with a tremendous roar, encircled a span as wide as the original capital of the Belmein Kingdom.
Its height stood at three meters.
I walked up close and rapped it with my fist — it was reasonably solid.
Fitting for the work of a high-level alchemist.
"Ta-da. The capital has been fully reclaimed."
Now that there was no capital left to reclaim, what were they going to do?
Our gazes turned toward the nobles.