Editing Rakuin no Monshou:Volume12 Chapter2 (section)

=== Part 1 ===

It was the dead of night, and Dairan, surrounded by its high ramparts, was as silent as it always was at that time.

Or so it pretended to be.

The gate was thrown open. Leaving through it was a force led by Lord Eric. This was done in consideration of the possibility that there might be enemies in the area, spies from Allion, and to make them believe that they were just conducting regular reconnaissance.

Kayness, the current head of the Plutos House, was not in his bedroom but in his office, sitting perfectly still in a formal posture. His eldest son, Darowkin, was also in full armour. He was waiting on standby at the centre of the city with seven hundred soldiers, ready for if the prince sent a call for reinforcements.

The troops which launched themselves from the gate, excluding those led by Darowkin’s younger brother, Belmor, were essentially Ende’s national army, although almost all of them were soldiers from Dairan.

''If our prince is going to battle, it probably won’t be before dawn''.

There was still time. Their hearts were not pierced by any feeling of tension. The soldiers of Dairan were use to sudden outbreaks of battle, so the rows of faces beneath the helmets were as calm as could be. Their enthusiasm, however, was strong.

Lord Eric himself was just as eager. ''In the coming war, I need to personally complete feats of glory''. Since he would be carrying Ende from now on, he needed to demonstrate his own might to those both inside and outside of the country.

It was the same for the Dairan soldiers. Even though they carried out the duty of defending the north, Safia, in the centre, criticised them as “barbarians” and “country bumpkins,” and had, up until now, kept them away from politics.

“Now we’ll show them the mettle of Dairan men!” A lot of soldiers were getting fired up.

Until today, Lord Eric of Ende in Dairan, and Prince Kaseria of Allion, who had halted in Zonga, had been confronting each other in a silent standoff. This was not like Allion, which had only just come out of a long military campaign. Some had even wondered if they were going to pull up camp without crossing spears so much as once.

Yet Eric had now left Dairan with a troop of one thousand.

They had obtained information from captured spies that Kaseria had sent out. According to that, Kaseria had already led a select few south of Zonga. There was an unoccupied fort to the northwest of Dairan, and they were apparently planning to hide themselves there. After that, a large-scale force would be deployed from Zonga, and when Eric left Dairan to confront it, their plan was to attack him from the flank.

''If I can strike at that fort first…'' Eric believed that he might be able to kill Kaseria with little effort.

This was information that two of the eight spies had revealed under torture that threatened to take their lives. It was not surprising that it was deemed trustworthy. And the information was certainly no lie: they had spoken the truth because they wanted to live.

Eric, however, did not for a moment consider the possibility that the “truth” that the spies had been taught was, itself, a lie…
 


Those spies were the ‘dogs’ that Allion’s prince had released from Zonga, in the north. Out of eight of them, not a single one had, in fact, been born in Allion. Quite the opposite: all of them had once been secret agents from enemy countries – such as Dytiann or Atall – which had once slipped into Allion.

When their identities had been discovered, each had been thrown into an underground dungeon, yet they had not been killed on the spot. Rather, they had been kept alive. For a very long time – more than ten years sometimes, depending on the person – they would be kept alive in a small and filthy prison cell.

Then one day, all of a sudden, a new person would be thrown into the cell that had turned into their living quarters. A woman. Moreover, a woman who had been born and raised in the same homeland as them. Allion had secretly kidnapped them.

A man who had endured solitude for so long that he had been on the verge of losing his mind, and a woman who had abruptly been torn away from her family and carried off to an unknown, foreign country. A man and woman from the same hometown. Almost inevitably, the two would be drawn together. They would exchange private wedding vows. Before long, a child would be born.

Thereupon, Allion would move them to different living quarters. Naturally, soldiers kept a strict watch on them, but at least the place was larger than the dungeon cell and provided them with a bare minimum of humane living conditions.

Another two or three years later, depending on the case, they would meet a high-level Allion official for the first time. “I have a job for you,” he would say.

The spies could not refuse. Their family was being held hostage. Even if this had been the aim all along, even if it was a family that they had deliberately been made to create, they could not go against the feelings that had instinctively developed.

Allion called them ‘dogs’. ‘Dogs’ picked up from another country that could easily be thrown away. They had cost them in time and money but, since these were not spies that they had originally trained themselves, the men had practically no information about Allion, and it didn’t matter if they were slain once they had served their purpose.

The eight people who had slipped into Ende were all ‘dogs’. They would obliquely be given information that Kaseria would go to a fort north of Ende, and when they were interrogated, they would keep their lips shut tight to protect the ‘truth’. Some of them, however would eventually be worn down and would spill it. Thanks to that, the information would appear more reliable.

Furthermore, there had originally been nine spies sent out from Zonga. The one which had not been caught was an agent trained by Allion. When they had been approaching the enemy headquarters dressed in Endean armour, he had hung back to the rear of the group, and had deliberately caused a disturbance to attract the attention of the Endean guards.

Once the guards shouted for them to identify themselves and started fighting warning shots, the Allion-trained spy had, of course, escaped to the north.
 


Eric had not realised.

The men of Dairan burned with quiet fighting spirit, and just as quietly, the troops moved forward. They forded the River Daivim across the shallows that they had identified long ago, and headed further north.

They joined up with the scouts that had been sent out earlier. A sharp-eyed man knelt before Eric, and a single nod from him was enough to tell Eric what he had to say.

“So they’re there?”

“Aye,” the spy nodded once more. “By the time we started investigating, there were already a number of people coming and going from the fort. At nightfall, some lights filtered through and we heard singing, as though they were having a drinking party.”

“Oh, how bold.”

Eric slowly, steadily approached the fort within the forest. The clouds overhead were dark that night, but moonlight occasionally broke through. They advanced with their helmets removed and the tips of their spears wrapped in cloth.  The horses also had wooden silencers placed in their mouths. Dragons, of course, could not be brought along for covert night actions, nor could they bring canons because of the rattling noise of the wheels. Still, they had enough guns, and fire arrows had also been prepared. There was more than enough; nothing was lacking to attack the old fort.

Even so, although Eric was a little hasty when deciding to take action, he was the sort to grow prudent once the troops had started moving. In that respect, his personality was the complete opposite of Orba’s. When he had previously marched on Garbera, Eric had sent scouts in every direction while he rode forward.

This time as well, he started investigated the surroundings once the fort was within sight. The narrow path to the northwest led to a wide valley, with a hill that gave an unbroken view of that valley. Eric had been wary of it. He had worried that Kaseria might have divided his forces in two and positioned them there, with the intention of launching a surprise attack from two directions against the Dairan troops.

He concluded that there were none of Kaseria’s soldiers on that hill.

Eric’s prudent nature however brought fortune amongst misfortune: his actions caused Kaseria to become impatient.
 


At that same time, Kaseria Jamil was concealed north of the fort. With him were a thousand soldiers lying low among the sparse trees, the reflections from their armour and spears likewise hidden. To the east, there was a further seven hundred soldiers, led by Lance Mazpotter, who had taken part in the planning along with Kaseria.

''It’s not working''.

While Eric had been chaffing impatiently in Dairan, Kaseria had discreetly sent people to the fort on Lance’s advice. They had carried out repairs to allow soldiers to conceal themselves inside it, and had also transported dismantled cannon parts and then reassembled them.

Currently, however, there were no more than a few soldiers inside the fort. When the enemy charged to take it, first Kaseria, then Lance would strike at the enemy’s flank and rear, reversing the intended surprise attack.

If they succeeded, it would be Allion who would be dealing a heavy blow to Ende with very little effort. Moreover, just as Kaseria had hoped, the one leading the troops was Eric, the future grand duke himself.

''Such fun''.

Since hearing the news, Kaseria had been licking his lips incessantly from uncontrollable excitement. His mentor, Lance, had told him over and over, “Don’t take black water lily to the battlefield.” Since Kaseria often consumed it, if he had it at hand, he might forget where he was in his excitement and give in to his bad habit.

''How should I kill him? Handing him over to that fool, Jeremie, might be fun, but it’ll be even more fun to slice through Jeremie’s neck and send the severed heads of both brothers to Safia. Yeah, but if I do that, Father would probably get angry. Hmm, what to do…''

The enemy was drawing closer, planning to attack the fortress by surprise. Kaseria waited impatiently for the moment when the tables would suddenly be turned on them, his heart thumping in excitement like a child. Be it friend or foe, he loved nothing more than to make people jump and shout in surprise.

But instead of hurrying, Eric was moving much more slowly than expected, exactly as though he wanted to keep them in suspense, and on top of that, he had started checking in every direction.

''Shit!''

The enemy’s dragnet had not reached them yet, but Kaseria was overly-anxious about those actions. That anxiety was not the fear of defeat: he couldn't stand the thought of someone taking the initiative from him. He should be the one jumping out and yelling. He did not want to miss the opportunity of reversing the surprise attack and making the enemies scream in shock.

As a result, he was too hasty.

“Prepare to charge!”

He threw himself onto his horse, put on the helmet that entirely covered his head, and roared loudly as he brandished his longsword.

“Sound the horns! We’ll overwhelm the enemy in one go!”

Ende’s side weren’t the only ones startled when the sound of horns suddenly erupted throughout the forest.

“What that… That damned brat, it’s too soon!”

Elsewhere, waiting on standby, Lance Mazpotter spat out the jerky he had only just popped into his mouth.

Now that the commander had charged earlier than expected, the cannons, which had taken so much trouble to set into place, were rendered useless. Nevertheless, Lance’s actions were swift. His foot was already in the stirrup as he yelled encouragements to his men.

He would chew Kaseria out later. At all cost, they needed to capture Eric in this battle or take his head.

“Enemies, enemies!”

“Enemy attack!”

As pitch black groups swooped in to attack Ende’s army from the side and from the rear, voices rose from each direction. And just as loudly –

“Make way for Kaseria Jamil, prince of Allion!”

Kaseria galloped in the lead in his steel helmet, and blood already clung to the tip of the sword he swung.

By nature, he disliked wearing a helmet. It was hot and stuffy, and it restricted his field of vision, but, just as with the black water lily, he had received strict orders from Lance to “Absolutely make sure to wear your helmet,” and he sometimes chose to follow them. This time, given that he had disregarded Lance’s intentions and gone bolting off, it was a way of balancing the books.
It was because he also disliked hiding his face that Kaseria was stating his own name like this.

“I, Kaseria Jamil, am here to take the head of Lord Eric of Ende. If Eric wants to prove that he’s a man, let him show himself before me!”

Ende had never dreamed that they would be the ones on the receiving end of a surprise attack and, for a moment, they lost their chain of command. The shadows of night were no longer a cloak of invisibility for them, but were instead like the mouth of some demon which was breathing life into enemies.

Of all of them there, less than a third raised their spears or pulled the trigger on their guns and fought back. Their nerves were probably shaken from not knowing what had happened, and many of them were struck with steel through their necks.

Hit with the successive attacks from Kaseria’s and Lance’s troops, the lines of ranks collapsed all at once, and one after another, soldiers threw aside their spears and guns, and fled.

“Lord Eric,” Belmor Plutos called out loudly as he pulled his horse up alongside Eric Le Doria. “It’s a trap. And it looks like the enemy is Prince Kaseria himself!”

“What?!” amidst the rough voices howling in the darkness, Eric ground his teeth. “Then we’ll align our spears in formation and fight back. If it’s certain that Kaseria himself is here, then victory is…”

“''Impossible'',” asserted Belmor.

Eric glared at him with bloodshot eyes, but Belmor returned a gaze just as sharp – or even sharper, towards him. Eric felt a sudden stab of surprise.

''It’s the same as back then.''

During the battle against Garbera, because he had believed that their side had the momentum to win, he had misjudged when to stop. Because of that, Belmor had been captured and they had been put in a position where they could neither advance nor retreat. If Gil Mephius had not taken on the role of mediator, Eric’s luck might have run out there, in foreign soil.

''I can’t make the same mistake.''

His over-excited brain cooled down all at once; however, the path of retreat to Dairan was already blocked.

Eric considered quickly. He remembered the survey of the terrain that he launched earlier.

“There’s a hill to the northwest. Let’s start with heading there.”

“Understood,” agreed Belmor, and he pulled out his spear. “Then let me serve as the rear guard.”

Eric was about to say something. However, the eyes of his childhood friend, although still as sharp and gazing directly at the him as they always did, now held a different meaning.

“I’ll leave it to you,” Eric said shortly, and with the same preparedness for death.

Belmor’s bearded face broke into a grin. He changed it back to a stern expression, then swung his spear over his shoulder with a shout that was almost a roar.

“Villar, Spirit of Flames, come dwell within me! Men, let the braves who do not fear death step forward and follow behind me!”

“AUGH, AUGH!”

“A, AUGH, AUUGH!!”

As Belmor kicked his horse’s flanks and sped off, a crowd of young men followed after him, raising the war cry that was characteristic of Dairan warriors.

Guided by some of his men, Eric left the place. As he followed the route to the northwest, the regrets and reluctance that he left behind were anything but small.