Chapter 2: The Myard Invasion

The assembled Highserk Imperial Army couldn’t fit inside the fortress’s drill ground. It had spilled out onto the vacant lots and main roads nearby. The Liguria Battalion, the parent unit of Walm’s Duwei Squad, had arrived early, and as a battalion rich in combat experience against the Commercial Trade Federation of Liberitoa, it had been given the honor of standing in the drill ground to receive a few words from the commander of the Myard Area Army.

To an outsider it probably looked like a glorious posting, but Walm had resigned himself to the fact that it was basically a principal’s speech. The Three Idiots had apparently made a lavish night of it, and their faces were green from lack of sleep and too much drink. No wonder. Between the direct sun and the heat bouncing up off the ground, their armor was being roasted, and it was only a matter of time before the men inside cried uncle.

On a real battlefield Walm might have let a curse or two slip, but this was a ceremony before the Myard campaign. A modest one, sure, but it was still a ceremony. It wasn’t hard to imagine what would happen to anyone who stepped out of line. The soldiers, lined up in full kit, kept their eyes fixed on the podium where the commander would appear.

The attention would have made an idol go pale. The stage dressing was weapons that had drunk deep of blood and nine battalions tempered in the jaws of death: eighteen thousand soldiers in all. Then, up on a podium set on high ground, a single man, the star of the show, stepped forward.

Even from a distance, the white hair, weathered by long years, stood out. His build was average, yet he gave off a strange, overwhelming pressure that left no room for argument. His eyes held the unshakable confidence and intelligence that only experience could give. The moment the star appeared, every sound died. The man slowly opened his mouth and began to speak.

“Thank you all for gathering. I am Gerald Berger, commander of the Myard Area Army.”

He was the War God of the Highserk Empire, a man who had fought in, and won, every major war for thirty years, since the days when Highserk was a small state. Neighboring countries called him the Demon of Highserk. The Aleinard Forest Alliance, the Galmud Archipelago States, and the Meilis Republic, the three immovable great powers, looked down on the wars that had dragged on around Highserk as petty scuffles between weaklings. Even so, it was said that not one of them would dare make light of Gerald Berger.

“Veterans who have won every skirmish against Myard. Hard cases who taught the Liberitoan moneybags how to fight. Strong men who beat monsters to death every day in the demon territory. All of you are gathered here in the city of Sarria. You are the symbol of our empire’s martial might.”

He was using a magic tool, but his voice carried beyond the drill ground, out to the surrounding streets and vacant lots. It wasn’t only the Highserk army listening. The citizens of Sarria leaned out of their windows or stood in the main road, hanging on every word.

“As you all know, five years ago the old Kanoa Kingdom fell for the honeyed words of the Kingdom of Ferrius and went to war with us. Has the war ended? Has life gone back to what it was before?”

Gerald let two breaths pass, then continued.

“No. It has not. Because the traitor Grand Duke Myard and the Kingdom of Ferrius betrayed the old Kanoa Kingdom. What they did, I need not say. You who make up the battalions from Sarria know it well enough. But today I will say it anyway. When the tide turned against them, they abandoned more than half their own countrymen. They burned the fields that feed the people and carried off every scrap of food and every head of livestock.”

The textbook scorched-earth tactic, repeated throughout history, had been used in the old Kanoa Kingdom too. They had burned not only military facilities but homes, fields, and forests, stripped the land of food, and fallen back, the Myard troops and the Ferrius army together, to a defensive line chosen in advance. Highserk had victory almost in hand, but hauling supplies deep into enemy territory was difficult, and it had no choice but to forage locally.

Inside Highserk, they had built what could be called a rear supply line, a chain of river routes and warehouses with depots along it. But in enemy territory, the linchpins of logistics, magic bags and wagons, were in short supply, and any further advance became impossible. Ferrius and Myard had meant to draw in a Highserk that had failed to forage and throw it back. Instead, the rear communication lines Highserk had prepared carried enough supplies to keep the army from collapsing. On top of that, Highserk had fed the people of occupied eastern Kanoa, enough that they went hungry but did not starve, and had spent five years rebuilding the occupied land.

Neither the Kingdom of Ferrius nor Grand Duke Myard had simply stood by. They had sent armies several times to retake their territory, but the carrying capacity of Highserk’s supply routes exceeded their expectations, and Highserk held and beat them. Their attempts to provoke defections among officers and men, and uprisings in the cities, failed too, because the people wouldn’t back them.

“With the elite of Sarria, we will put an end to this five-year war. Do not be afraid. Trample the enemy. Everything you want lies in Myard territory. Show Myard and Ferrius whom they picked a fight with. Death to them!”

“Death to them!”

When Gerald Berger struck the podium, the drill ground exploded. The soldiers shouted, stamped the ground, and raised their spears. Some clashed sword against shield. Walm read the mood and joined in. There were probably others like him who were only going along, but plenty of them meant it from the bottom of their hearts, and more than half looked caught up in the heat.

The speech had pushed morale to its peak. The old commander was masterful at stirring a crowd, a true prodigy born of a military state and the struggles of war. It felt as though the whole city were shaking with the fervor of the people. The claims of militarist Highserk had an overbearing side, and for all the defensive wars, it could fairly be called aggressive.

Walm didn’t think all of it was right, but if Myard and Ferrius were dealt with, this war that dragged on like an endless hell might finally end. Even knowing he was being played, he felt that hope starting to sprout. All through the unit, still carrying the afterglow of the speech, the march began. Bloodthirsty soldiers and excited warhorses started to move like a single body. The curtain was about to rise on the Myard campaign.

---

The Highserk army marched out of Sarria and split into three large forces. The border fortresses, the key points, couldn’t each have a huge army pinned to them at once, and all three routes leading into Myard territory were targets. Walm’s unit was assigned one of the fortresses blocking the main road. Myard apparently intended to wait for reinforcements from Ferrius itself.

Another detachment was tasked with taking the outlying castles one by one and thinning out the Myard troops before the Ferrius reinforcements arrived. The fortress rising before Walm’s unit was a mountain castle guarding the border. A gate and walls sealed the pass, and strongpoints had been built on the hills to either side. According to the scouts’ advance reports, three thousand soldiers held it.

From the camp, set up beyond the range of bows and magic, you could see how massive the wall was. Perhaps three meters high and six or seven wide. Sieges came down to two kinds, short and long, and Walm judged that this one would be short: a forced assault leaning on sheer numbers. The Sarria Battalion had the gate. Walm’s Duwei Squad, and the Liguria Battalion above it, had the left wall.

“Walm, Jose, you two take mantlets. I’m giving you the new replacements, Noor and Barito. Use them well. Willart, hit the guys on the wall with fire magic. Everyone else, same as usual.”

What Squad Leader Duwei had just slapped hard was a mantlet big enough to hide two soldiers. Walm had relied on them in fortress assaults before. In a world where individual firepower varied wildly with magic and Skills, they were essential gear for closing in. Like ammunition, mana was finite. Dig in, make them waste shots from far off: it was an effective tactic.

Identical ones were being unloaded from the wagon beds, along with bundles of bamboo lashed together. Walm lifted one to test it, and the weight dragged at both hands. Heavier than he had expected. When he peered down into the bamboo, he saw the trick: the joints had been hollowed out and packed with earth.

Bamboo bundles had been widely used in the Warring States period of Walm’s old world, too. They had stopped even matchlock balls that could punch through armor.

“All right, form up.”

At Jose’s call, the recruits hurried over. Walm was used to working with Jose, but a foursome with recruits was new. They weren’t trembling, but both the boy and the girl were pale. Barito, with his cockscomb of red hair, looked about to throw up. The girl, Noor, was stiff, but she was managing to keep her expression under control. Jose grinned and suddenly grabbed Barito by the crotch.

“Eek! W-what are you doing!?”

Barito protested, but Jose didn’t look remotely sorry. Walm smiled wryly, exasperated.

“Yep. It’s shrunk.”

Apparently he had been checking the condition of Barito’s little soldier to see whether he was dangerously tense. Then Jose turned toward Noor.

“N-no, I’m fine, thank you! Besides, I don’t have one.”

Turned down, Jose looked a little lonely. If he had actually touched her, it would’ve been flat-out sexual harassment. Even Walm would stop that kind of barbarism.

“Me too, this is my first proper siege. But we’ve prepared carefully this time. And we’re going to the front, but as laborers, basically. The squad leader’s orders from above are to fill in the dry moat and bring down the height of the wall. It’s not straight into melee, so relax.”

The two recruits looked at each other. Some color came back to their faces. The plan was to fill the moat, bank earth up against the wall, and use that together with ladders to take the mountain castle in one rush. Done by hand, it would take forever, but unlike the world Walm had lived in before, this one had the handy thing called magic, so sieges went fast.

“And if the enemy shows up, Walm will cut them down. He looks like he came from some village, but he’s a melee pro who’s killed dozens without breaking a sweat. All the gear he’s wearing came off men he killed.”

Jose clapped Walm on the shoulder, pleased with himself. When Walm looked over, the two recruits’ faces twitched and they edged away. They looked as if they had just learned that the harmless neighbor they had trusted was a serial killer.

“Don’t make me sound like a combat junkie. It couldn’t be helped. We conscripts never got decent gear. Besides, none of the previous owners complained.”

Ironically, since being thrown into the war he had been better dressed and had more money. Walm could see why the third and fourth sons of poor farming villages all wanted to go to the front, dreaming of striking it rich in one go. Reality wasn’t that kind, though.

They started out full of swagger, but once the fighting began, plenty of them spilled their guts calling for their mothers, or failed to stab the enemy and got stabbed instead. Having lived a civilized life in his previous existence and studied human rights, Walm found it deeply ironic, for better or worse, that he had gone through that rite of passage and adapted.

“Finished with your ladylike social hour? Time to go. Move out.”

Before Squad Leader Duwei finished speaking, a brisk trumpet rang out.

“There’s the start. Put your backs into it.”

After the trumpet, drums sounded from the rear, the signal to advance. Walm lifted the mantlet in both hands and moved out. Behind him came soldiers carrying straw sacks, the kind normally used for millet or salt. Every one of them was full of earth.

The heavily reinforced mantlet was terribly heavy and his whole body rebelled, but he couldn’t let go. Walm knew from experience that it would prove its worth within two hundred meters. The first volley was arrows, fired in high arcs for range. They landed scattered, depending on each archer’s strength and Skills, but grew more accurate as the distance closed.

“Ugh-”

An arrow trailing a faint glow, clearly a cut above the rest, came in dead straight. A soldier from the neighboring squad grunted and went down.

“Don’t expose your vitals! Watch out, they’ve got a 《Strong Bow》 user!”

The veteran squad leader shouted. It was a Skill that came from innate talent or from the far end of long training. Learning that the enemy had people like Squad Leader Duwei, with power beyond human limits to rival magic, Walm reluctantly steeled himself.

Arrowheads bit into shoulders and upper arms, and soldiers swore. Still mild. From his battle experience, Walm figured this was only the cheerful archers’ welcome party, and the real thing, with the other branches joining in, was yet to come. He gritted his teeth. Sure enough, within minutes, spells, mana made manifest, began pouring in one after another. 《Fireball》s, 《Ice Spear》s, 《Earth Shell》s, all sorts.

“Incoming!”

A few seconds after Jose’s warning, a 《Water Ball》 slammed into the mantlet. The impact ran through the hands bracing it. Noor, the recruit, nearly dropped hers, and Walm barked at her.

“Even if your arms get torn off, don’t drop that shield! It beats dying.”

Cold water splashed everywhere and rinsed the sweat out of his steaming armor. It felt great, actually.

“Considerate of them. They’re giving us a splash party as a welcome gift.”

Walm’s bravado went over fairly well. The Three Idiots and the soldiers around them let out laughter through clenched teeth. The recruits, Noor and Barito, even smiled faintly. The mantlet never stopped clanging. Arrows and stones, of course, but also spells, and they even threw excrement. What filthy bastards, Walm thought indignantly.

They were closing to a distance where enemy faces were visible. The Highserk soldiers weren’t about to just sit there and take it. They fired arrows and spells back through gaps in their shields. When a soldier swallowed by a 《Fireball》 went tumbling off the top of the wall, Walm cheered.

“Nice one, Willart!”

Willart, the magic user who had thrown the 《Fireball》, answered Walm’s praise with a faint smile instead of words. To take out a strong firing position, probably, the enemy’s attacks converged on Willart’s area.

“You’ll pay for that.”

The squad leader, furious, hurled a fist-sized stone that sank into an archer’s face and knocked him cold.

“Stay right there, you idiots! I’ll yank out all your guts and stuff you full of filth!”

Squad Leader Duwei’s roar had a tremendous effect. As if he had killed their parents, the enemy’s firepower converged on him.

“Now! Fill it in, quick!”

Unfazed by the barrage, the squad leader gave the order. He was usually crude and all muscle, but when it came to war, his head worked. Earth magic filled the dry moat and buried the wall halfway. Walm anchored his mantlet to the ground and took the sacks bucket-brigade style, tipping them into the moat. Another squad had an earth user and was scooping soil from the foot of the wall to fill the moat.

The enemy was desperate not to have their defenses broken. A 《Fireball》 flew through a gap in the mantlets and swallowed the soldier two places down. The blast scattered flesh and blood, and a man wrapped in flames rolled on the ground. His comrades smothered him with dirt, but arrows and stones converged on the hole in the defense. “Be the first to do what others hate.” It was one of the truths of the battlefield, and Walm remembered a teacher in his old world saying it to him all the time.

Through a gap in the shield, he spotted a thrower. Noor, working caked in dirt and sweat, was probably the target. The rock came flying straight at her, aimed dead true.

“Huh-ah!?”

He grabbed her by the scruff and yanked her back. The rock sailed through where her head had been a moment before.

“Th-thank you!”

Noor, eyes wide, thanked him. Walm answered only briefly and warned her.

“Don’t mention it. And quit staring at your feet. The enemy’s above you.”

Noor nodded over and over. Somehow it had become natural for Walm to take Noor while Jose, his usual partner, looked after Barito. With Jose handling everything so smoothly, Barito was in safe hands. Walm made sure not to get his first junior killed.

The work went on without end. Two hours after the battle began, the moat was filled and the wall was a third buried. The squad was exhausted. Only Squad Leader Duwei looked lively. Walm couldn’t help wondering whether he had some other Skill besides.

“Here they come. The storming party.”

The squad leader muttered. When Walm looked toward the edge of his vision, a fresh battalion was closing in from the rear. Unlike the others, it had been held back.

“The Sarria infantry battalion, right?”

Jose squinted and identified the unit.

“Sending a storming party against their own former countrymen. Commander Berger has a nasty streak.”

The soldiers around them agreed.

“The wall isn’t filled in yet. Are they going in by ladder?”

Noor asked. Before Walm could answer, the answer was demonstrated. A group sheathed head to toe in armor dove at the foot of the wall.

“They’re right underneath it!”

The soldiers on the wall walkway shouted warnings, but it was already too late. The group’s earth magic piled soil up to the height of the wall, and the Sarria infantry battalion poured in, using it as a foothold.

On top of that, the neighboring section of wall caved in for dozens of meters from the aftershock of the cavity the earth magic had hollowed out underneath. A textbook sapping assault with earth magic. Walm grunted inwardly. Their efficiency deserved praise.

“Bring the hammer down on the traitors! The squad that strikes first gets a reward from Commander Berger!”

As if answering the Sarria battalion commander’s voice, the battalion attacked like demons. The squad that struck first skewered the guards on the walkway with spears and hurled them off the wall. The defenders didn’t go down for nothing. More than half of the first squad over the top was cut down, but the stream behind them never stopped. A messenger came running up to Walm’s group, still hard at work.

“Order from the Liguria battalion commander! Don’t fall behind the Sarria Battalion. All-out assault. Break through the wall!”

Walm agreed. With the defenders rushing to one spot, now was the chance.

“All units, go!”

When the Liguria battalion commander’s voice thundered across the battlefield, the signal for a simultaneous charge went out. They snatched up the ladders they had hidden behind the troops and ran for the wall together. The enemy began to counterattack, burning mana without a thought for exhaustion, but their fire was thin.

“Noor, stay behind me!”

Walm swung the round shield from his back around and charged. With a high ring, a shock ran through the shield. Arrows, and stones too. Something hard struck his shin guard and bounced off. He couldn’t tell what it was. Soldiers climbed the ladders that had been set against the wall, only to be thrown back by spears thrust from the walkway. Other ladders were shoved off the wall, and men halfway up came tumbling down.

He picked out an intact ladder and climbed. The soldier ahead of him, one foot on the ladder, took an arrow in the side from the flank and fell to the ground, writhing. The enemy archer tried to nock an arrow for his next victim, Walm, but an 《Ice Spear》 drove into his face and he thrashed on the walkway.

“Willart!”

He knew who his backup was. Grateful to his silent, hairless comrade, Walm climbed the ladder using only his legs. Maybe they were distracted by the spells landing, because no one nearby interfered, and he stepped down onto the walkway. In the same instant, he drove his longsword into the neck of the soldier in front of him. The man froze, stunned, but the hole in his throat was fatal.

The soldiers nearby hadn’t reacted yet. Walm swept the longsword sideways and took off a head, helmet and all. The blade was cutting better than ever, and he felt exhilarated. Having dropped two without so much as chipping the edge, he finally faced a soldier who had noticed the intruder.

“They’re climbing up!”

The soldier warned his comrades and cut at Walm. Guys like this usually had tricks. Walm knocked the first strike aside with the longsword, but the man followed with sword thrusts. On the fourth, as the enemy stepped in, Walm closed the distance too. He knocked the thrust away with the round shield and slammed the shield into the man’s wrist. The man kept hold of his sword, which was impressive, but Walm’s right arm, hidden behind the shield, had already finished its move.

The longsword, driven up from a low guard at point-blank range, went in through the eyeball, smashed the skull, and spilled brains. Walm looked away and searched for his next enemy. Several allies were coming up the ladder. One of them, of all people, was Noor. She had started a desperate swordfight with a soldier who had rushed over, but with her inexperience and a gap in her armor exploited, one arm was bleeding.

“Senior!”

Noor’s voice, on the verge of tears, reached Walm’s ears. She had drawn a bad opponent. A soldier in full plate with no gaps, no, it was a knight. He had already put two Highserk soldiers down on the walkway, and in a few seconds Noor would join them.

“Can’t handle anything but rookies, can you, small fry?”

Walm spun around and hurled the round shield at the knight. The knight blocked it with his halberd and squared up to him.

“Dirty tricks, Highserk savage! You will not set foot on Myard soil!”

The knight surged in all at once, shield thrust forward. It was a cramped walkway, and giving up his round shield to save Noor, necessary as it had been, hurt now. Biting down, Walm steeled himself, took the shield strike on his gauntlet and shoulder without flinching, and dug in.

The impact was bigger than he had figured, and his face twisted before he could stop it. His left arm throbbed, but it still moved. The halberd came in from the side. He deflected it with the longsword and knocked it back, and a high screech of metal on metal rang out.

He had turned one blow, but there was no time to rest. The knight’s attacks were linked. Without a pause, the round shield came at Walm again.

Walm swapped his pivot foot, shifted his weight left, dodged the shield and circled in. The knight followed, bringing the halberd down. Walm had no shield, but gripping the longsword in both hands gave him the edge in force.

He pressed the halberd away and landed a blow as he pulled back, but it only left a fresh scratch on the shoulder plate. The enemy defenders who had rallied were piling onto the Highserk soldiers, Noor among them.

Where’s the squad leader? Walm caught himself searching. As it turned out, Duwei had stood out so much at the start that every time he tried for a ladder, he was getting singled out and blocked. A tough customer like this knight was normally the squad leader’s dance partner. Walm cursed his luck, but he couldn’t abandon a junior.

Scratches piled up on the enemy’s armor, but Walm’s gear was getting cut up too. The knight’s joints were better protected than his, so he was at a disadvantage whatever he did. As they passed, he landed a blow to the torso, but the plate armor kept it from hurting the man underneath.

The halberd grazed his cheek and blood welled up. If it had caught an eyelid or his forehead, the blood would have blinded him, and that would have been the end. His lips went terribly dry. He forgot to blink as he tried to predict the enemy’s moves. Another scratch on his armor. The halberd hooked and tore away part of his shoulder plate.

“Futile, you grunt!”

The knight shouted, but the cuts to his torso were deeper than before. Something was different from usual. Walm was on the back foot, cornered, and yet his bleeding arm swung the sword lightly. Something, something was about to click. A feeling of everything useless being scraped away, of everything running smoothly. The longsword he swept on the pull back struck the knight’s greave. A piece of the plating was cut. The knight seemed to sense it too, and roared at Walm as if to vent his fury.

“Just die already!”

The clash, middle guard against high, was even. Using the recoil, he sprang back, and the distance between them opened. He had had the longsword in a high guard, but it wasn’t enough somehow. Walm moved into a stance he had never used in battle or in training. His arms rose and came to rest overhead. The topmost guard: wide open, unsuited to a melee.

“Don’t mock me. You think a bluff like that works on me?”

True to the textbook, the knight drove in with his shield out front. The chaos of the melee was in Walm’s field of view, but he looked at what needed looking at and stepped in at exactly the right distance. It felt different from all the days he had swung a sword since being sent to the front, yet the arc was a familiar one, and he followed it.

The sword gave off a faint glow, and he could feel mana flowing from his gripping hand into the blade. If he missed this one, the counter would be fatal. The risk didn’t even register. He just wanted to give himself over to this feeling. It may have been the first time on a battlefield he had smiled from the heart. The blow cut through the round shield and sheared on from shoulder to chest. Time stopped. Or rather, it seemed to flow slowly. The knight dropped his halberd and muttered in a shaking voice.

“Sk-Skill… 《Heavy Strike》? Why… a grunt… why can he… why can’t I u-”

He never finished. He fell into the pool of blood on the walkway.

“N-no, the captain!?”

“Lord Elmer has fallen!”

He must have been the knight in charge of the surrounding walkway sections, because the soldiers around him were thrown into utter confusion. What dealt the finishing blow was the squad leader finishing his climb to the walkway. Every time Squad Leader Duwei swung his war axe, enemy limbs went flying.

“Got the foothold! Listen up, don’t let up! Wipe out every last one of them on the walkway!”

Other squad leaders answered Duwei too. Far from the walkway, Walm could see Platoon Leader Kozul rejoicing at the secured entry point. Duwei hated the idea, but he really wasn’t a man to leave at squad leader. Not that you could talk him into a promotion in the middle of a battle. Clearing the walkway came first.

Walm picked up his round shield and helped Noor to her feet, checking her wounds. She had cuts at her side and on her arm, but neither was deep.

“Watch the bleeding. This isn’t over yet.”

“Y-yes, Walm!”

The tide had tipped toward the Highserk Empire, but plenty of officers and men were still trying to retake the walkway. While the earlier feeling hadn’t faded, Walm swung at the nearest enemy soldier. As before, he knocked aside the man’s sword and cut through torso and armor together. Walm was stepping into the realm of power beyond human limits.

He didn’t like killing, but this was the first Skill he had gained since being born into this world, and now he couldn’t help testing how far it would go. The enemy’s round shields and armor couldn’t stand up to 《Heavy Strike》. An ordinary longsword became the blow of a giant war axe. He had made 《Heavy Strike》 completely his own.

Before he knew it, he had reached the stairs at the end of the walkway. It wasn’t his strength alone. Jose had slipped in behind him and was covering him with clever spear work.

At the same time, he felt the concentration he had wound to the breaking point slip away. His body was terribly sluggish, too. Even though he had learned 《Heavy Strike》, overusing an unfamiliar Skill had him on the verge of running out of mana. The enemy soldiers defending the stairs only feinted and menaced and wouldn’t close. By Walm’s estimate, there were more than ten left. He steeled himself and was about to step in when a reassuring voice rang out from behind.

“Walm! You’ve picked up 《Heavy Strike》? Not bad. Take a breather for now. I’ll handle the rest.”

It was Squad Leader Duwei, drenched in blood from head to toe without a gap. Ah, even an amateur could see it, Walm thought, and let his shoulders drop. He was the kind of man you never wanted to meet on a battlefield as an enemy. When the squad leader charged, the enemy soldiers swung at him with screams that were half threat, half cry for help. One swing, and two men vanished from the walkway.

It didn’t look like the same Skill Walm had. A soldier who had hidden behind a shield to stop the charge was kicked off the walkway and hit the ground in a flower of blood.

“A!? Ah, aaah-”

“Damn it! Why is there a guy like this-”

“Don’t flinch! Don’t flinchhh!”

The stairs filled with corpses. When a soldier gone desperate took Duwei’s helm-splitter and showed a cross-section that shouldn’t exist, the remaining enemy turned their backs and ran.

“Screw this!”

“Damn, ogres are better than this!”

Reinforcements flooded in one after another from the center and left walls. Their momentum didn’t stop. Walm was sure the battle was decided.

“Gather the men. The worst is behind us, but let’s move before we lose our share!”

That call sounded less like a squad leader’s and more like a bandit chief’s. With Duwei in the lead, they cleared the buildings along the walkway. Resistance was light. The remaining enemy had holed up in the forts to the left and right, or fled in droves. When the gate was opened from the inside and more than twice their number poured in, it was settled.

A few enemy soldiers who had failed to get into the forts and were cornered showed signs of fighting to the death, but they were slaughtered in short order. The surrounded forts offered to surrender soon after. A battle that had begun in the morning ended before sunset.

Even so, it was only a forward skirmish at the border. Walm had plenty of work left. Cavalry that had been held back galloped through the fortress after the fleeing troops. Many enemy soldiers were sure to be cut down in the pursuit.

---

“Guess we made it out alive.”

After sunset, the Sarria and Liguria Battalions, who had played the biggest roles, took over one of the fortress’s barracks to spend the night. Smoke from the cook fires rose into the sky. In a corner of the wall, enemy prisoners, stripped of their weapons, had been gathered in one place.

In the past, prisoners had often been sold off as slaves to bring in foreign currency, but now they were released after working a fixed number of years on construction in Highserk or as farm serfs. People with ties to slave traders and some of the soldiers had objected, but the land was slated for annexation, and more enemies were surrendering than before, which kept losses down, so the practice was becoming standard.

Noor, whom Walm had looked after in this battle, had survived, wounded as she was. She had killed a man in that melee and come through her baptism of fire in fine style. Barito, whom Jose had looked after, had survived too, though his cockscomb was wilted. Right in front of Walm, the two newbies were comparing their kills and loot.

“Look at this, Walm! A medium gold coin! I can’t believe it. Gold!”

“Hey, that’s off the soldier Walm cut down, isn’t it? That’s cheating.”

What Noor held was one medium gold coin, enough for a poor man to live on for a year. A huge sum to someone from the countryside. Seeing her face go slack and goofy, Walm was a little put off. Jose, meanwhile, had quickly gone through the dead soldiers’ pockets, found an ale keg in the barracks, and secured drink and beds for the whole platoon. Walm praised Jose’s resourcefulness.

On top of the taste of victory, the battalion commander had apparently handed out a reward, and the portly Platoon Leader Kozul was in a good mood the whole evening. There were wounded, but with no deaths in the squad after a fight like that, the atmosphere was bright. The two full moons seemed to be blessing the victory, but they also drove home to Walm that this was another world. In a corner of the room, Willart quietly raised his cup to his lips.

“Willart, that 《Ice Spear》 was beautiful. You saved me.”

Walm, in high spirits and cup in hand, thanked him, and Willart lifted his own cup slightly in reply.

“Yeah… Walm, are you interested?”

For once, it was Willart who had started the conversation. Walm answered eagerly.

“Of course I am. Who doesn’t want magic?”

It was Walm’s own selfish opinion, but he doubted there was a boy anywhere who didn’t love magic.

“I see.”

Willart looked away from Walm and slipped back into his own world. He returned to his bed, which doubled as his seat, and went back to downing his drink. Having packed it in, Walm felt his bladder lodge a protest. Maybe he had gotten a bit carried away, he thought ruefully.

He couldn’t let it go inside the building, so he left the din behind and looked for a suitable spot. He had finally found a deserted corner and was letting it go when he heard a small cry.

He had been drinking, but this was enemy territory, after all. His longsword still hung at his hip. Hand on the hilt, he stepped into a room in the building and found a woman with her limbs pinned and her clothes torn off. Standing around her were soldiers of the Sarria Battalion.

“What are you doing?”

Walm asked with anger in his voice, and the soldiers answered without a hint of shame.

“Isn’t it obvious? We’re about to have some fun.”

“Want in? You can go last.”

Women soldiers being violated was common enough, but this one was obviously a civilian. Probably the family of a soldier stationed at the fortress. It wasn’t unusual on a battlefield. Even so, Walm couldn’t accept it.

“The men in the fortress surrendered on conditions, so looting and rape of civilians aren’t permitted this time. It’s a violation of military law. If you’re caught, you won’t escape a flogging.”

Treat cruelly an enemy who had surrendered on terms and the rest of them would fight to the death, and it would damage future governance too. Even the Three Idiots drew a line when it came to military discipline.

“What are you, a saint? Playing knight?”

“Don’t get cute. I’ve killed plenty of men on the front line.”

Two of the soldiers came up to Walm. Moonlight showed bodies that were well built. They would probably make good soldiers on a battlefield.

“…So you killed a few. So what?”

The old Walm might have flinched, but after countless exchanges of life and death, this was not even a tense situation to him now. The fight on the walkway had been far more dangerous. He answered in a flat voice and the soldier stopped. It seemed he had finally got a proper look at Walm. Without armor, his body bore countless scars, proof of his battles.

“…Tch. Killed the mood. Let’s go drink some more.”

The staring match went on until the leader folded. As the soldiers left the room, Walm turned to the woman. To civilians, he was no different from them. Walm had no intention of getting more involved than he had to.

“Go home and lock the door tight. If someone tries to break in or drag you off, scream as loud as you can. Understand? …Did you get that?”

“Y-yes!”

The woman hastily pulled her clothes back on, nodded over and over, and ran off. It was pointless, a thought drifted through the back of Walm’s mind. This was going on all over the place. What would it change? Sure, he had killed plenty of people, but he didn’t remember ever throwing away his decency.

When he got back to the room, the squad was singing. A familiar tale of a pure and spotless hero rising from the commoners. It was absurd to compare, but it was a world away from what Walm looked like now. His eyes were still the same color, but he could tell for himself that they were clouding over, from killing and being killed on the battlefield, and from the violations that came after. It was a violent, warped age, but the drunken soldiers were enjoying life as if the killing of the day had never happened. Maybe they would go mad if they didn’t make noise. Walm, used to it by now, switched his mindset and joined the circle.

---

The road through the forest wound on as if it would never end. The Highserk army’s supply train marched without rest. Moving supplies by magic bag had revolutionized logistics. High-speed transport, with magic bags passed along by relays of fully armed cavalry, now let large quantities of supplies reach the front lines.

Even so, the supply troops never disappeared. Magic bags, rare like magic tools, were used to haul goods to the depots, and whatever didn’t fit in them had to go by wagon or on human backs. Hody, one of the supply soldiers who carried those loads, was hauling a cart alongside the pack horses.

The fighters on the front lines sometimes mocked supply troops as failed soldiers, as livestock. But Hody took pride in his work, and he had seven years of service as a supply man and nothing else. Once, only once, the War God of the Highserk Empire, Commander Gerald Berger, had spoken to him. It was a night of cold rain, when he had been hauling supplies all night, pulling a cart.

While he was unloading after checking his cargo, someone suddenly tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, thinking a guard had come to needle him again, and there stood Commander Berger. As Hody froze, forgetting even to salute, the commander took his hand and said, with a serious look in his eyes:

“Working late, I see. …The supply corps is a vital pillar of our army. We can fight because of men like you. You are a credit to this country.”

Ever since, Hody had considered this the best job there was. Even if the masses didn’t recognize it, the War God had. That was enough.

“Looks rough.”

The man Hody spoke to had joined the unit only recently. He had lost an eye in combat, lost his sense of distance, and been drifted into the supply corps.

“Of course it is, pulling something this heavy.”

There was no sarcasm in it. The one-eyed soldier just sighed.

“Put some of your load on my cart. Mine’s so light I’m getting rusty.”

The one-eyed soldier took it for a joke and laughed it off, but Hody blocked his path with his cart and started shifting part of the man’s load onto it.

“Hey, hey, are you serious?”

“I’m a supply specialist with seven years on the job. Siege towers, battering rams, dead fish, I’ve staked my life on all of it. Liberitoa, old Kanoa, Myard, Highserk, anywhere you like, I’ve been there and hauled whatever you want. This is nothing.”

Hody thumped his chest, and the one-eyed soldier burst out laughing.

“What is that? …Thanks. Let me buy you a drink some time. Honestly, with my age and my eye gone, I figured I had been shunted off to the supply corps as a nuisance. I was wrong. It’s harder work than most soldiers have.”

After that they said nothing more, and hauled their carts in silence. The column came to a slope and its speed dropped off naturally. Hody was looking ahead to see what lay beyond when a wind came through the gaps in the trees.

The head of the escort soldier walking in front of Hody flew off into thin air. That was the cue. Arrows and spells rained down on the column all at once.

“Enemy attack! Here they come!”

One soldier shouted, and Ferrius soldiers came charging in from both flanks of the column. With them came adventurers, not regular troops. An adventurer with a tower shield, in a horizontal shield bash, literally smashed a soldier’s head apart. A friendly who had closed to swordplay took an arrow in the throat from the side and fell to the ground.

They were classed as military personnel, but merchants and civilians hired on a temporary basis were attacked too, without distinction. Hody hid behind his cart and drew his short sword. He wasn’t without combat experience. He had swung a blade at a few monsters and some stupid bandits.

“Raaaaah!”

A Ferrius soldier came charging in with a shout. On instinct, Hody jabbed the short sword into the ground and heaved the cart at him. Unable to dodge the cart that suddenly filled his view, the Ferrius soldier was pinned underneath. Hody had escaped, but he had made a fatal mistake. His size and his strength marked him as a threat.

A blue-haired adventurer closed on Hody, sliding in like water. Before Hody could pull the short sword out of the ground, a longsword came at his throat. His eyes went wide and he was certain he was dead. The moment never came. Instead he heard the screech of metal on metal and a voice he knew.

“Run, Hody! Tell the ones behind us!”

The one who had cut in against the adventurer was the one-eyed soldier he had been talking to just a moment ago. Their swords crossed at a speed too fast to follow. Hody didn’t want to think about running and leaving a comrade behind.

“B-but!”

“Go! Hurry, go!”

Their swords crossed again, too fast for the eye, and the one-eyed soldier’s whole body began to turn red. Hody looked around. The escorts were being killed one after another. The merchants who tried to flee and the supply troops were all being killed too.

“I’ll do it. I swear I’ll carry this news. On the name of the supply corps!”

Hody kicked off the ground without looking back. A Ferrius spear thrust nicked his shoulder, and a sword grazed his cheek. The last to block his path was a girl adventurer, still childlike.

“Get out of my way!”

The roar rattled her eardrums and her movements slowed. Hody didn’t feel the pain of the short sword in his arm. He barreled into her, using his size and strength, and the girl rolled across the ground again and again.

“Leethia!”

An adventurer called her name, as if checking she was all right.

“If she’s so precious, put her in a box! Beaten soldiers and adventurers, who do you think you are? Keep up with a supply man’s legs if you can! These legs have carried Highserk. They don’t come cheap!”

The one-eyed soldier’s death cry reached Hody’s ears. Arrows flew without end. Tears streamed down his face, but Hody kept running without stopping.

---

The Myard troops, who had failed to hold the border, were gathering at the capital, Aidenberg. The expected scorched-earth tactics were not carried out, and the Highserk Empire was taking an undamaged granary region. The Sarria Battalion, made up of former Kanoa citizens, was now seen as a problem. They had contributed greatly to taking the key mountain castle, but looting and rape, of citizens and soldiers alike, were rampant among them.

The enemy were certainly traitors and kin-betrayers, but they had gone too far, and monitors had been dispatched to the battalion. Even so, the Sarria Battalion’s existence served as the whip, and it helped in winning over villages and towns one by one. With the problems of governing after annexation in mind, the Highserk Empire didn’t want to play the villain and wanted the Sarria Battalion to pull its chestnuts out of the fire.

After the siege, Walm was sweeping a forest in a skirmish line. A unit that had escaped encirclement was waging guerrilla warfare. Their raids, aimed precisely at supplies, were skillful and accurate, and the surrounding villages were surely feeding them information and food in secret.

They had already lost a platoon’s worth of soldiers, and the non-combatants of the merchant caravan carrying the supplies had suffered casualties too.

“This has got to be magic.”

“Yeah, wind and fire attributes.”

The squad leader and Jose, crouched over the laid-out bodies, identified the attributes of the spells from the wounds.

“…There are at least two magic users.”

Willart, the magic soldier, who had been watching from a short distance away, joined them.

The wounds on the bodies came from slashes by wind magic and burns from fire magic blasts. Walm considered the possibility of one user with two attributes, but given how much magic had been thrown in so short a time, it seemed more natural to assume several.

“Ugh, is this magic too?”

“What is this? His face is crushed.”

The newbies, Noor and Barito, were grimacing at a different body. Among the many with their vitals slashed or pierced, the body the two had found had a crushed face and a missing piece of skull. It was obviously blunt force.

“Not a halberd. Too wide a dent for a war hammer.”

Walm was used to bodies beaten to death with war hammers. He had been using a halberd himself, captured in the last battle, and knew exactly what kind of wounds it made. While he was working out what the weapon was, an answer came from behind him.

“A shield.”

It was the squad leader, who had looked at bodies on battlefields for years.

“A shield? But that doesn’t look…”

Noor muttered in disbelief. Walm felt the same. It was too much power for a shield. He couldn’t imagine what kind of giant could swing a shield and do this.

“Could it be a Skill user?”

Jose, who had been thinking, asked the squad leader.

“Yeah, probably. I’ve seen bodies like this before. Back then I saw a man’s head vanish from a plain shield bash. Like 《Heavy Strike》, it has plenty of users: the Skill 《Iron Wall》. Even a wooden shield gets heavy as solid iron.”

Since he had started using 《Heavy Strike》, Walm knew from experience just how powerful a Skill was. Even with the same iron, the one with the Skill could tear the other apart at will. The advantage was beyond measure.

“Ugh, beaten soldiers, and still such a pain.”

Jose muttered with real distaste.

“A few adventurers are mixed in with them. A prisoner we took talked. Odd fellows, to join a losing war. But watch yourselves. A seasoned adventurer has better Skill and gear than your average regular soldier.”

“So beating them gets us good loot.”

The recruit, Barito, said with a laugh. His face was stiff, and Walm could tell he was clearly putting on a brave front.

“Hey, hey, Barito, we’re talking about a Skill user and a magic user. Say Squad Leader Duwei, Walm, and Willart all came at you at once. Think you’d win?”

“Nah, not even if there were twenty of me.”

“Right?”

Jose nodded, satisfied, as Barito admitted his mistake. It was admirable that Jose, as the teacher, was doing his job, but it bothered Walm that he was counted among the inhuman crowd.

“By the way, what’s that…”

Noor pointed timidly. It was the body of a man hanging from a tree. He had been stabbed all over, and apart from his head, there was little left to show he had been human.

“Hm, that? A villager. Sold information about us and fed the beaten troops.”

Jose said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Walm had asked the same question back when he wasn’t used to this.

“Oh… I see…”

Noor looked as though she wanted to say, you go that far? It was in terrible taste, but in war it was sometimes needed. At least, if the villagers hadn’t given information and food, thirty soldiers and eight laborers and merchants would not have died. Armies in every age had been plagued by popular resistance in enemy territory. Whether to annihilate the populace itself or execute a few as an example depended on the time and the situation. The surviving Highserk troops had tried to use a few executions as a deterrent.

“Get ready. We move out soon.”

At Squad Leader Duwei’s call, the squad members stepped deeper into the forest. A search by a few men was hard going, so a whole company was sent in at once, and the squads searched in a skirmish line spaced twenty meters apart. Even skilled opponents, Walm thought optimistically, might be settled quickly. He stepped into the forest like the other soldiers.

---

On the second day of the search, one squad was ambushed and twelve were killed. Traps and arrows wounded seven during the search, and four sentries went missing. Fortunately Duwei’s squad had taken no losses, but the whole company was on edge, and with the rough ground of the forest added in, hatred of the unseen enemy was growing. The search dragged on, and the squad gathered, leaning against a big tree during a short break.

“This is bad.”

It was Jose who spoke up.

“Yeah, a whole company searching and nothing to show for it.”

Two hundred fifty men had been looking for three days without finding them. The time to march on the capital for the decisive battle was drawing near, but they couldn’t leave the threat to their supply lines alone.

“They’re local, but they hide their tracks too well. They really know forests.”

The squad leader had been studying the ground, but he looked up ahead.

“Skilled scouts, maybe?”

Noor, standing near Walm, asked.

“Even if they’re scouts, there’s more than one. There are at least two good ones, watching their main force and us.”

The enemy was mostly beaten soldiers, and it was hard to believe they had been a unit capable of advanced guerrilla warfare from the start.

“Less scouts than adventurers who took Myard’s side.”

The squad leader gave his conclusion in answer to everyone’s doubts.

“…Adventurers.”

The recruit Barito said the word. Adventurers were the general term for people who worked in the demon territory covering half the continent, hunting and dismantling monsters, clearing dungeons and ruins, and also guarding roads and supply trains. The guild that managed them had bases in every country on the continent and stated outright that, as an organization, it did not intervene in wars.

In practice, in the name of individual free will, local adventurers were often hired as mercenaries. Gear made from relics and rare monster materials was enormously powerful, and some adventurers were monsters who could change a battle single-handed. Rumors also ran deep that the guild’s private troops were committed to conflicts that hurt the guild’s interests.

Walm’s homeland, the Highserk Empire, put weight on military buildup, and surplus troops did the adventurers’ work in their stead, so adventurers had little room to be active there. In other countries, though, they were a common sight.

“Adventurers would be better at watching and scouting than regular soldiers, that’s for sure.”

Jose nodded in agreement. He had been born the fourth son of a small merchant and had been on the hiring side. While resting, Walm had been busy chatting about the enemy’s identity, but the other squad members were eating their field rations or busy smoking army cigarettes.

Walm took a cigarette he had bought from Jose, drew on it, and slowly let the smoke out from his lungs. The purple smoke spread slowly into the sky. Savoring it, a stray question came to him and he let it out.

“You think they smell the tobacco?”

“Don’t be stupid. Our body odor stinks worse than tobacco. Go bring a wolf. Even wolves don’t come near us because they hate our smell.”

Jose laughed it off and took another drag.

“Should we put on perfume?”

Barito said, half serious, half joking.

“Great idea. While we’re at it, let’s put on skirts.”

Squad Leader Duwei, having had a laugh, tossed back a joke. Walm’s mouth eased and he smiled faintly. There wasn’t much time left to enjoy stupid jokes. In five minutes, Walm would have to go back to the game of hide-and-seek in the forest that looked like it would never end.

He had just started reluctantly thinking about getting ready to move when a scream went up, followed by several fiery blasts. The soldiers resting on the ground leapt up and drew their weapons all at once.

“Three, four hundred meters out. They’ve hit our search line!”

Everyone agreed with Jose’s words.

“Swing wide to the right and surround them. Don’t let them get away. Follow me!”

The squad leader burst out and the Three Idiots followed. The rear guard was the recruits, Noor and Barito. Walm pushed aside branches clinging to his body and trampled weeds underfoot. A forest without paths was a natural obstacle course. As he pushed through by force, the sap of the tall weeds smeared across his body. It had a sharp green smell that got in his nose.

The fight was still going. The enemy, who had acquired a taste for it last time, seemed to have underestimated them. They had probably meant to annihilate the squad or hit it once and withdraw, but two more squads besides Walm’s had rushed to help and were pinning the enemy down.

The company meant to end this fruitless game of hide-and-seek here. The enemy numbered about thirty, a bit more than expected. Walm sank his teeth into the middle of their line. The enemy, hit suddenly from the flank, was slow to respond.

“Damn it, reinforcements!”

An enemy soldier shouted. Walm brought down on him the halberd he had taken from the knight a few days earlier. It was a sturdy weapon, well suited to showing off 《Heavy Strike》. The soldier desperately thrust a spear he was carrying at Walm, but the halberd broke the spear, reinforced tip and all.

The soldier threw away his now much shorter spear and tried to draw a short sword, but he was a step too slow. Just before the blade cleared the scabbard, his head flew into the air.

Walm stepped in further, snapped his wrist, and used the recoil to cut at a second man. This one was caught completely on the back foot. He made no real attempt to dodge, and the blow, going in from the side of his breastplate, cut halfway through his torso. Then the rest of the squad made a literal flanking attack, and more than ten enemy soldiers were killed or wounded. Among the regulars, a group dressed differently came into Walm’s view.

“There they are. The adventurers who’ve been leading them!”

Jose shouted, having spotted who they were. There were five: a blue-haired swordsman, a big man with a tower shield, a woman with a bow, a lightly armed man who was probably the scout, and a brown-haired girl with a sword and shield. An adventurer party, as they were called.

Walm cut down confused enemy soldiers as he headed for the group, but a blade of wind, made by magic, came at him. Normally he would have dodged or taken it on the round shield, but this time Walm didn’t dodge. He swung the halberd down. 《Heavy Strike》 met the instantaneous spell, they strained against each other, and 《Heavy Strike》 won. The remnants of the spell scattered as wind.

Walm swept his gaze to find the attacker. The one who had cast the spell was an adventurer. A girl, nearly a child at that. She was about chest height to Walm, and her pale brown hair reached her shoulder blades. Her gear was an ordinary short sword and round shield. He tried to take out the dangerous magic user, but three Myard soldiers blocked his path. Two of them came at him with simultaneous spear thrusts.

Walm turned slightly to the right, deflected the spear tips, and closed with the soldier on one side. He turned a thrust aimed at his face with the halberd and jumped into the man’s guard. The soldier hurriedly guarded his throat with a gauntlet, but Walm activated 《Heavy Strike》 and cut him down from shoulder to hip, armor and all. Bone parted, and blood sprayed from the gaps in the armor.

“You bastaaaard!”

With his friend down, one soldier was gone, but with the distance closed, the remaining man dropped his spear and came at him with a longsword. It was a bold move, but Walm leaned his upper body back and dodged the horizontal swing. When he brought the halberd down from the upper left, the man stopped it with his sword before it had picked up speed. Walm kept pushing with force, knocked the longsword aside, and jumped back a step. Then, without a pause, he thrust the halberd in.

The soldier tried to recover his broken stance, but there wasn’t time. The halberd thrust went behind his knee and cut the ligament.

“Gah-aah!”

The soldier fought on desperately with one leg, but he couldn’t hold his ground, and the halberd pushed through the longsword and tore his throat. The last one hesitated, unsure whether to retreat or attack. Walm didn’t hesitate. He slammed the halberd down, forced the guard open, and struck the belly.

“Wait, no, help me!”

A second blow was unnecessary. From the abdomen torn open in one straight line, his guts spilled out. The ground was stained in no time. He would never survive the infection, either.

“Give up. You can’t be saved.”

If only he had run or surrendered before it came to this, a thought flickered through Walm. This soldier, too, might have been tangled up in country, friends, family, land, everything, and couldn’t pull back. Walm must have looked ridiculous, muddling through all that while he finished the man off.

He was about to cut down his next target when someone spoke to him. And it was an enemy. Not the usual curses or the ramblings of a dying man. A question, aimed at Walm.

“Why? Why do you kill people so easily!?”

Of all things, he was being asked why he killed on a battlefield. It would take a long time to explain, and the answer was different for everyone. Why was she asking him? He couldn’t understand it. Even so, Walm answered.

“Because it’s necessary. That’s why you killed too, isn’t it? …Well, it’s a pointless conversation to have in a place like this.”

Walm, who belonged to a community, had been given the role of soldier, and in carrying out a soldier’s duty, he killed because it was necessary. At her feet lay the body of a Highserk soldier. He had passed the man once or twice on the march, and they hadn’t been close, but he was without a doubt Walm’s comrade. This girl too had been driven by some necessity and had killed Walm’s comrade. What was the difference?

Whether the answer displeased her or she realized the talk was pointless, she aimed another spell at Walm.

He had seen this one already. Same trajectory, too. Keeping low, he broke his center of gravity and slid in. The distance closed, and the girl’s eyes went wide with shock.

“Leethia!”

The older adventurer with the shield shouted. The gap was already gone. Walm’s halberd swept sideways, straight for the girl’s neck. She reacted, sharp as if her earlier sluggishness had been a lie. She folded her left elbow, angled the round shield up and out, and braced the back of it with her right hand, still holding the short sword.

Walm had probably been underestimating her a little, because of her looks and the way she talked. Even in an instant, the guard was ideal. She had trained, and she had fought real fights. And yet she had been dull enough to get absorbed in conversation and let him exploit it.

Something was off, Walm thought, puzzled, but then he saw through it. She was a fool on the battlefield, and in a way Walm even envied her for it. Simply put, she wasn’t used to killing people.

If this could have been settled with words, it would have been very civilized. But this was a war between nations. The fighting was still going on, and the enemy hadn’t surrendered. Without letting up on the halberd, Walm activated 《Heavy Strike》. The blade, wrapped in a faint light, bit into the round shield and tore on through.

“Ah, ugh, uuu-”

She must have let go on reflex, because the round shield rolled across the ground, away from her hand. She had been wearing a gauntlet under the shield, and the arm wasn’t severed. Even so, she couldn’t bleed off the shock. Every time she moved her left arm her face twisted in agony, and she held the short sword in one hand.

“Broken.”

When Walm spoke, her brows drew down and she looked badly confused. It seemed to be her first time taking a Skill. She backed away from him in fear, which was a mistake on the broken ground of a forest. She kept stepping back to open the distance, then trod on the “soldier that used to be” lying on the ground and lost her balance.

“Remember where you killed a man, at least.”

Walm couldn’t help a wry smile, and the girl’s eyes went wide and she screamed as if she had met a monster.

“Aaah, aaaaaah!”

Walm jumped in, hooked the short sword with his halberd and sent it flying. Using his size, he rammed her with his shoulder; the breath left her lungs and she rolled across the ground. He thrust the halberd at her throat as she lay there. She was a girl, after all. Better than crushing her head or her face. Something flickered at the edge of his vision and his heart leapt. He had kept his guard up all around, but the blood-stained blade tip was far too fast.

“Hrk-!?”

Walm tilted his head and jumped back. Some of his hair was taken and his cheek was laid open. The shadow kept coming. Walm brought the halberd down, and the other man took it. The blue-haired swordsman, one of the adventurer party. As they broke from the clinch, Walm dragged his blade along toward the man’s wrist, but it was neatly stopped by the guard.

“Should you be bothering with me?”

Walm asked it pointedly, and the young man was enraged. It was a psychological jab, but with him pulled off, one fewer man was holding the squad.

“Shut up, invader!”

Handsome features, shoulder-length blue hair, eyes the same color as his hair, a young man who in another time would have put an idol to shame. Practical gear, a two-handed sword stained with blood, Highserk soldiers cut down around him. He was without doubt the party’s leader. Walm thought he was a fitting partner for the squad leader, but the squad leader was fighting the tower-shield adventurer.

That one was probably the shield user with the Skill. 《Heavy Strike》 and 《Iron Wall》 had collided, and the men around them couldn’t step in and just stood there. Walm would have wondered about helping, too. This had turned into a mess, Walm grumbled. Whatever happened, he had to fight this adventurer.

---

Leethia was an adventurer from a farming village in Myard. She had a gift for magic, and the physical ability her mana reserves gave her stood out even among her peers. She had made her adventurer debut full of spirit and moved up the ranks steadily, clearing the ranks known as Scrap, E and D, and reached Bronze, C-rank, where she stalled. For Leethia, who had taught herself and had no regular companions, stagnation may have been inevitable.

The one who rescued her from that rut was Al, an A-rank adventurer she met by chance on a large-scale job. Al was an adventurer from Myard, and his party was made up of people from the same region. As they took job after job together, Leethia grew close to Al and his companions, and was finally welcomed as a party member, as she had always hoped. Escorting caravans, hunting monsters, clearing dungeons, they worked widely inside and outside Myard, and she lived an exciting, irreplaceable life.

In the middle of that life, Leethia developed a faint crush on Al. It was her first love, and she didn’t know where to put her feelings.

Leethia knew. Not only Leethia. Everyone in the party and every adventurer they knew knew. Al and Amy were together. When she recognized the feeling, she sank into self-loathing, thinking what a fool she was. It was Amy who had patiently taught her, an inexperienced newcomer, the ways of adventurers.

She knew it in her head, but when she saw Amy cling to Al’s arm, Leethia’s heart churned. It was a feeling she wasn’t supposed to have. The night she overheard the two of them in a room at an inn, she cried all night, and as a result she failed a job.

Ironically, the ones who cleaned up after her without so much as a frown were the party members, Al and Amy first of all. That was when Leethia made up her mind. She would take this feeling to her grave. Some loves can’t come true. So she hid her feelings and tried to give them up.

As she lived out those days, an event rocked the adventurers of Myard. The Highserk Empire’s second invasion of Myard. In the war five years ago, when Kanoa fell, the Myard territory that had been part of the old Kanoa Kingdom had sought the protection of the neighboring Kingdom of Ferrius in the final stage of the war. Myard and Ferrius had taken in the small number of Kanoa refugees who escaped and had fought hard, but the result was holding the line at best.

Al and Amy’s hometown lay on the border, and if invaded, it would suffer enormous damage. The two declared they would go home to fight and defend it. The party was dissolved for the time being, but the other party members and Leethia said they would fight with them, and joined the war as volunteer soldiers.

Through a guild job, Leethia had killed one human being. He was a member of a bandit gang who had committed every kind of atrocity, a man who liked to torment people, and the citizens he had held captive and the villages around had sent words of thanks and praise, and her companions had comforted her. Even so, Leethia still couldn’t forget the feel and the smell of it.

After three border fortresses fell, she had joined up with Myard troops who had escaped the pursuit and laid an ambush at one of the roads facing the deep forest. The attack, arrows and spells followed by a charge, brought Myard a victory.

It was a small victory, but for soldiers and adventurers who had been losing and losing, it was without doubt the victory they had been waiting for. Leethia felt joy at it too, but she couldn’t take her mind off the soldier who had died by her own spell.

A wounded enemy soldier who would survived begged for mercy, but a Myard soldier cut his head off to silence him. It was war, it couldn’t be helped, everyone said. She couldn’t write it off so easily, and she agonized alone. Even when Highserk sent reinforcements to wipe out Leethia’s group, the fighting went on. She killed two more. She was glad that Al was concerned about her, but at the same time she hated herself so much for having feelings like that.

On the second day of fighting against the Highserk company, he appeared. A devil. A devil was there. His face was an ordinary, plain man’s. Only his eyes were different. They were black, but she could only see them as muddy. Without changing expression, he was just coldly cutting down the Myard troops one after another. As if he were mowing weeds that were in the way.

“Ah-!?”

Compared to the sky blue of Al’s eyes, she felt nothing but terror. Leethia gathered magic into both hands and released it. The blade of wind that flew from her short sword went straight for the man, but it scattered in midair. A Skill. With a single swing he had erased a spell, a thing said to change the laws of nature with a single swing.

It was easy to say, but angle, timing, blade pressure, none of it was easy to pull off. It was hard for Leethia to believe, but it had happened before her eyes.

“Damn you!”

Sensing danger, two soldiers cut in between Leethia and the man and thrust their spears at once. It was a skilled combination, aimed at the neck and legs together, and Leethia had assumed he would dodge or go on the defensive. She had intended to back them up with spells to match, but what her eyes caught was unbelievable.

《Heavy Strike》 broke the spears and cut the soldier from shoulder to hip. The other soldier drew his longsword in an instant, but he lost the clash, had his leg cut, and with his movement slowed, the halberd tore his throat open.

The soldiers around them were cut down one after another and fell to the ground. The young man who had talked at night about the family waiting at home, the squad leader who had spoken of his love for his country and sworn to destroy the enemy, the recruit who had murmured that he was afraid of battle, all were cut down alike.

“Wait, no, help me!”

A fellow soldier, guts spilled, begged for rescue. The man followed behind him. Leethia was too terrified to move.

“Give up. You can’t be saved.”

The man drove his halberd into the throat of the soldier begging for his life. Leethia backed away, shaking, but the man kept closing in without changing expression.

“Why? Why do you kill people so easily!?”

At Leethia’s question, the man frowned as if puzzled for the first time, and muttered.

“Because it’s necessary. That’s why you killed too, isn’t it? …Well, it’s a pointless conversation to have in a place like this.”

Leethia had certainly killed. After the first time, she couldn’t eat for two days. Even now her hands shook. She hated killing. What was the man in front of her? She couldn’t understand. But she understood, to her horror, that he was cutting the conversation short and was about to kill her.

Leethia screamed and focused her mana into a blade of wind. It was aimed at his torso, but he dodged it by sliding to the ground. A halberd filled her entire field of view. It was red with her comrades’ blood. Her breathing was ragged and her thoughts were not in order, but her body moved on its own.

She bent her left elbow, angled the round shield up and out, held the short sword and braced the back of the shield with her right hand, and readied for the coming impact.

“Ah, ugh, uuu-”

What came was destructive pain. Though she had done everything she could to defend, the round shield was cut through and the short sword was knocked away. And, incredibly, her gauntlet was crushed and her left arm was broken.

“Broken.”

In that instant, it wasn’t only her arm that broke. It was her heart too. She backed away on reflex, lost her balance, and fell. What lay there was a Highserk soldier she had attacked and killed herself.

“Remember where you killed a man, at least.”

The man smiled for the first time. Why was he smiling? She couldn’t understand. She couldn’t understand.

“No, nooooo!”

Her breath was ragged, and she was drowning on dry land. Leethia’s mind was on the edge of collapse. Forgetting shame and pride, she screamed at the death closing in. No pain came. In her blurred vision, the back she always looked at was there. She let out a voiceless scream, but realized she wasn’t dead.

“Get back, Leethia!”

Al, the party leader, had come to her aid. That alone settled her frayed mind. Out of place as it was, she found the blue hair streaming in the wind beautiful.

“Should you be bothering with me?”

“Shut up, invader!”

Because of her own inexperience, the Highserk soldier Al had been fighting was now free, and Leethia could see the Myard troops falling into trouble.

“…Ugh, I hate this.”

The man gave a sigh of deep reluctance and went for Al. The party members tried to cover him but were blocked by the troops that followed. Even so, Fleck, the sub-leader, swept three Highserk soldiers aside with his tower shield and pushed forward, but a single soldier stopped him.

“No way, stopping Fleck head on-”

Fleck had the Skill 《Iron Wall》 and was a seasoned adventurer. Leethia couldn’t believe he was being pushed back by one soldier. A war axe blow cut a gash into the tower shield, which had 《Iron Wall》 active and could bounce even an ogre’s blow.

Amy and Lefty were holding off the enemy soldiers who were gathering, together with the allied soldiers, but to Leethia’s eyes they were clearly losing. Shielding her broken arm, she cast a spell. Her target was the man attacking Al. She released a killing blow, but he dodged it by a hair while parrying Al’s attack. Al was a wind user like Leethia, but he used 《Burst》, which Leethia couldn’t.

She had seen that spell, which momentarily accelerated the whole body or part of it, make rings around bandit lords with bounties on their heads and even ogres, and cut through armor and thick muscle and bone. And now it was being handled with ease, and Al was on the defensive. Leethia gritted her teeth against the intense pain and readied herself again.

“Fleck!”

It was Lefty who shouted. He worked alone as a scout, was good at setting and disarming traps, and good at interrogation, the one party member Leethia even found cold. And now Lefty was crying out in a voice more anguished than ever. When Leethia followed his gaze, Fleck’s tower shield, which should have had 《Iron Wall》, had been smashed, and one of his eyes had been crushed.

“Gu, aaaaah, aaah!”

Leethia realized she had her priorities wrong. She couldn’t imagine Fleck losing a clash, and she had put the person she loved first. Fleck’s opponent had muscle and bone to match an ogre. From his decorations he was of squad leader rank. Leethia had been taught what Highserk’s officers and commanders looked like by the Myard troops.

Cold sweat ran down Leethia’s spine. The one Al was fighting held no rank, just an ordinary soldier. The enemy company still had more than two hundred men scattered through the forest. Not to mention an encirclement, just one more squad joining in would mean there was no future. Aware of her friends’ deaths, Leethia’s face went pale.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Amy start rapid fire with arrows to make space between Fleck and the enemy squad leader. At the same moment Leethia noticed a 《Fireball》 closing on Amy’s flank.

“Amy, dodge!”

At Amy’s usual nimbleness, it was a distance she could have dodged. Their attention must have been pulled away by her own and Fleck’s wounds, and Leethia could never regret it enough.

She avoided a direct hit, but half her body was wrapped in fire and she rolled across the forest floor, bouncing. This is war. Leethia had believed they could protect their homeland themselves. She had believed an A-rank party was rare and special. And yet in reality everyone was about to be killed.

“Amyyyyy! Damned invader! You’re worse than monsters, you beasts!”

“After all the killing you’ve done, why did you think you wouldn’t die?”

“Shut up, shut up, a guy like you-”

Leethia saw Al, always calm and collected, break down and wail. The soldier, who had seemed too tired to talk, was deliberately provoking Al and driving him into a frenzy. The two-handed sword and the halberd crossed, and the halberd won, pinning Al’s shoulder to a big tree.

“Guh, aaah!”

Skewered through the left shoulder, Al kept struggling and spat out meaningless words. Sobs and tears blurred Leethia’s vision. Her friends, who had been surrounded only minutes ago, were close to death.

“You’re not used to killing each other, are you… I envy you.”

The man drew a longsword from his waist. He means to take his head, Leethia was sure.

“Noooo, aaaah, aaaah!”

Forgetting the pain of her broken arm, Leethia cut the air with her sword. A moment late and Al’s head would fly. The slightest slip and the 《Wind Blade》 would run Al through. Leethia’s strike, at the extreme limit of her concentration, opened the bottom of her potential, and wind ran through the forest.

---

Walm struggled against the adventurer’s sword and body, which accelerated in constantly changing ways, but as his companions were wounded one after another, the man in front of him clearly slowed, and at last they reached a decisive moment. Walm’s halberd was buried deep in the shoulder of the adventurer called Al, cutting through bone, and had pinned him to a big tree.

“You’re not used to killing each other, are you… I envy you.”

“Aaaah, aaaaaah!”

He must be a good man who cared for his friends. As a person he was admirable. That was why Walm had been able to exploit him. He wasn’t suited for the battlefield. He tried to pull the halberd out, but he wasn’t going to manage it on willpower. Walm opened a step’s distance, drew his longsword, and prepared to take off the man’s head in a horizontal cut. If this one fell, the rest would follow like potatoes on a vine.

The skin Walm’s armor left exposed caught a wind. Not a natural one. Then the instinct that had kept him alive on battlefields told him of danger as never before. When he leapt aside, a storm tore past him.

It wasn’t even in the same class, in power or density, as a blade of wind made by ordinary mana. Walm spun around, but a sharp pain ran through his right arm. Fine cuts covered his armor, countless wounds were carved into his exposed skin and joints, and blood welled up.

“What is this magic!?”

Cursing inwardly at a hidden card, he looked for the caster, and it was the girl he had nearly killed. Her face, which had been so frightened, had changed as if that had been a lie, and her eyes glared at Walm, sharp.

“You.”

As Walm tried to close the distance, a second blast came at once.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Walm dove behind some trees. The blood of the trees and of the soldiers of other squads caught in it sprayed through the forest. The power was absurd. It seemed she could fire in succession, and not just at Walm. The wind ravaged the forest at random.

“Area attack! Don’t bunch up!”

At Squad Leader Duwei’s order, the soldiers each took cover. Walm was no exception. By the time the wind stopped, the adventurers and a few soldiers had begun to flee. The adventurer Walm had pinned to the big tree was gone too. Walm picked up the blood-soaked halberd and, from the amount of blood around it, knew he had failed to kill him.

“A big move like that, she couldn’t fire it many times in a row.”

Willart said, brushing off dirt and twigs.

“Damn right. We let a few get away.”

The squad leader, war axe over his shoulder, looked sheepish.

“Squad leader, what about pursuit?”

Jose, with Noor and Barito in tow, poked his head out between the trees.

“Of course not. We’ve crushed the main body of the beaten troops. What’s left is adventurers outside our orders and the dregs of the dregs of the Myard troops. The rest is the other squads’ job. No need to be hard workers.”

“Understood, I’ll collect the wounded and enemy survivors. Come on, you two. You were no use in the fight.”

“Th-that’s not fair!”

Barito protested, but Jose gave him a poke and he shut up. Noor, who made no pointless resistance, was the smarter one. Walm tied off a tourniquet himself and looked over the forest. The rest was other units’ work. With luck, those adventurers would get away.

Walm opened and closed his fingers to check his numb arm. Her sword had been sharp and every blow heavy. The saving grace was that the adventurers hadn’t been used to killing people, or to seeing their friends killed. If they had been used to life and death, it might have been Walm lying there now. The words of the woman adventurer who had fled kept going around in his head.

“I don’t enjoy killing either.”

He said it quietly, to no one. It was ridiculous. Ironic. In a forest full of corpses, no one would believe it. If he only had to fight monsters, the natural enemy of mankind, he wouldn’t have to struggle like this, but having become a soldier of the Highserk Empire, there was no point in thinking about it.

Four more years, he thought. In four years he could choose to leave the army. Some people used their pay and loot to start businesses, some went home to buy fields and settle down. Some kept fighting as soldiers, and some became adventurers.

He had been too busy surviving the present to ever think about the future. Was a head that thought only of itself right after killing people abnormal?

The adventurers, grieving their companions’ wounds and deaths and burning with rage, were certainly the more human ones. Walm was aware that the better a soldier he became, the more his humanity wore away. Would he still be Walm when he left the army? He sighed softly, wiped the blood from his longsword, and picked up the halberd. The forest was growing quiet again.

---

“Run, Leethia! Do you want to die too?”

The one carrying Al and Amy on his back was Fleck. He had lost his right eye and had countless cuts all over his body, but he was the least hurt in the party now. Even Fleck, who had run all over forests with a tower shield, found two injured adventurers a heavy burden. Even so, he couldn’t put them down. He pushed through his blurred vision on willpower alone.

“Everyone, everyone is… Lefty!”

“I know! Lefty will be fine. He always saves us.”

Fleck could tell, whether he wanted to or not, that Highserk soldiers were shouting behind him and closing in. The only mercy was that the two soldiers who had badly wounded Fleck and Al were not following. To let the party and the handful of Myard soldiers escape, Lefty, normally the scout, was desperately acting as bait. Lefty was foul-mouthed and quick to weigh gain against loss, a man easy to mistake for cold, but Fleck knew he was the kind of man who would stake his life to save anyone who could be saved.

“He’ll be fine.”

Fleck kept telling himself that as he ran on. From the two on his back, blood poured without stopping, and their lives were draining away.

---

After clearing out the beaten troops in the farmland, Walm’s Duwei Squad resumed its march toward the enemy capital, Aidenberg. The vanguard had cleared enemy resistance along the way, and no scorched-earth tactics like those of five years ago were being used. The communication line to the rear was firmly maintained, and it looked like they would be able to link up with the main force earlier than planned.

From time to time, a horse carrying a messenger galloped past Walm. Communication magic tools did exist, but they depended on finds from ruins and dungeons, and even across a whole nation there were barely enough to count on two hands. During a short break by a river, Walm sat down, loosened his bootlaces, pulled off his half-boots, and stretched the soles of his feet.

For farm work Walm had worn sandals much like plant-fiber straw sandals, but now he wore half-boots with iron plates in them. At first, long marches had given him terrible blisters, with the flesh torn and bleeding, but with continued wear his skin had grown thick and tough. On top of that, he wrapped cloth around his feet before putting on the half-boots, so now he felt no pain however many kilometers he ran.

Socks existed, but they were mostly a fashion item for nobles and royalty, and only well-paid soldiers and adventurers who wanted practicality wore them. As he washed the dirt from his body in the river, he washed his clothes and the cloth wrapped around his feet too. Other soldiers were busy with the same chores. Once he was done and resting in the shade, Willart sat down beside him.

“That’s unusual. What is it?”

In Walm’s memory, Willart joined the edge of the chatting circle but rarely started a conversation. He was quiet on the march, too.

“You said you were interested in magic. I’ll teach you.”

He half remembered answering something like that when he had thanked Willart for the fire support. He hadn’t expected to actually be taught, and couldn’t hide his surprise.

“Oh, yeah, I did say that. I would love to learn.”

Nobody could resist magic. Walm’s heart swelled at the hope that he might master it himself.

“Take my hand.”

“Huh, your hand?”

Walm asked again at the unexpected demand.

“Yes. Close your eyes, too.”

Two big, burly soldiers holding hands facing each other felt oddly surreal and stifling, but before the bait of magic, Walm obeyed.

“Whoo, how romantic.”

Jose, watching nearby, whistled with a nasty grin, clearly meaning to tease Walm.

“Just kidding.”

When Walm stared at Jose, expressionless, with his battle face, Jose shrugged, uncomfortable.

“Focus.”

Willart scolded him as he fumed. Walm wanted to give Jose a piece of his mind, but there was no point angering Willart. He took a breath, closed his eyes, and focused on his clasped hands. Besides the touch of a human hand, he could feel a chill.

“Cold.”

“Right. That’s mana, kneaded for use in elemental magic.”

Having died in a world without magic, Walm longed for it more than the people of this one. Even people of this world were thrilled or crushed by whether they had an aptitude for elemental magic.

“You’ve recognized it. Now focus on it.”

It went on for a few minutes. He began to sense what he had never sensed before. His senses were reacting sharply.

“I’m letting go. Focus on your palm. Picture water flowing, a river, or the sea.”

What Walm pictured in that moment was rain. Cold, stealing the body’s heat. And at the same time, rain soaking the earth, flowing into rivers, and reaching the sea.

“Oh…”

By the time he noticed, his palm was full of water. In return, a faint weariness had come over his body.

“This is magic, right!?”

Walm, his joy bursting out, spoke to Willart with a huge grin.

“Tch, a dud.”

The hairless man’s face twisted as if he had been let down.

“Whaaat!?”

“You can use it, but… your aptitude is borderline. It’ll only make you a water jug for everyday use.”

Walm wanted to protest that if a human could be a water jug, that was plenty impressive, but he held back. Water-attribute users, big or small, struggled. It varied by age and individual, but sixty percent or so of the human body was water.

As far as Walm knew, plenty of magic users couldn’t use magic in combat. They got priority in food distribution, but a role awaited them, squeezing out water until their mana ran dry, like a man targeted by succubi and incubi.

Willart was a powerful mage who could cover everyday water needs as well as fight. For someone who had called Walm a letdown, he looked oddly pleased, probably because it would lighten his own load.

Walm looked around to see whether the others had noticed and found the whole squad watching this ritual-like magic lesson. Seeing the squad leader grin, Walm knew it was already too late.

“Even so, compared to the explosive mana you use in your Skills, it’s just a dud. You’ll make a fine human water dispenser.”

Lamenting his blunder, Walm turned his attention back to Willart, who was still talking.

“I was using mana?”

“Of course you were. Warriors of note use mana for Skills and for strengthening the body. Didn’t you know?”

Willart frowned at Walm, appalled.

“I’m a farm kid and a conscript. Uneducated. How would I know that?”

Walm griped, but Willart wasn’t listening.

“Next. I can use water and fire. Focus.”

Fire was familiar from Walm’s previous life, and indispensable in this world too. An enemy 《Fireball》 had once burned his hair into a frizz. It was easy for Walm to picture. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He sensed Willart jumping back in front of him. When he opened his eyes, fire was rising from his right hand to the height of the trees, and it had spread to the surroundings.

“Willart! W-what do I do!?”

Panicking, Walm cried out for Willart’s help, but the fire was already scattering around.

“What, a fire attack!?”

“No. That damn Walm is burning everything down with fire magic!”

“Idiot, stop it already!”

Walm was pelted with more jeers and curses from the Three Idiots than ever before.

“My hair!”

Barito’s magnificent cockscomb had caught fire and he was about to become a roast chicken.

“Spare the cockscomb, please! Walm!”

Noor, his fellow recruit, put out Barito’s blazing cockscomb while calling to Walm. The scene around them was too awful to look at.

“I didn’t mean to! What do I do!?”

Walm begged for help, but Willart’s response was simple: “Monsters take monsters, and fire takes water!”

“Wait, hold on-”

There was no time to beg for mercy. A 《Water Ball》 that filled his entire view slammed into his body and put out the fire around him. Unable to kill the momentum, Walm rolled across the ground and finally stopped on the sixth turn.

“Are you kidding? Willart!”

When the small commotion settled, Walm shouted his protest. Willart offered him a hand. Walm took it and stood, and the magic soldier muttered quietly.

“Continue. Hurry up and picture it.”

“Eek…”

Quiet as it was, there was no arguing with the tone, and Walm cowered. He had forgotten that this silent weirdo, whose hobby was shaving every hair off his body, was an uncompromising freak when it came to magic. After that, he was found to have no aptitude for earth magic, and a high aptitude for wind magic, as for fire.

The problem was that the gale Walm produced, which he couldn’t control, hit the resting soldiers, and the wind magic ran wild until the squad leader choked him out with his signature chokehold. Walm paid heavily for it: besides bruises all over his body, three days of guard duty and orders to serve as water supply with his newly learned water magic.