Joi split the ten-thousand-strong army into ten battalions of one thousand.

Leaving aside the one unit Kyrie would lead personally, she mixed the other nine by troop type, attached a Blue Knight from Kyrie’s personal guard to each, and sent them forward.

The Blue Knight attached to the first battalion.

“This is my chance to show His Highness my true sincerity.”

Vane roughly brushed back his white hair, fully revealing a face scattered with freckles like scars, and marched forward.

“Do not fear mere monster beasts. I will always stand in front of you!”

The route Vane chose was one that cut through large and small swamps and rivers.

The path itself was not especially difficult, but with drakes of various sizes prowling about and lizardman tribes lined up everywhere, it would not be an exaggeration to say it was the hardest route to pass through.

“Kaaah!”

“Hissss!”

“Kraaah!”

Drakes with body lengths reaching fifteen meters.

Hundreds of lizardman warriors and packs of kobolds.

Even wyverns circling the sky.

Countless monster beasts gathered around the thousand-man army as if they were boxed lunches with metal lids.

Slash!

The surface of a swamp thick with duckweed split apart.

“Kaaaaah!”

A house-sized drake charged forward, making the earth tremble.

Vane fought the way he had seen Kyrie fight.

“Come.”

At the head of the formation, he slammed his two fists together.

His combat-alloy prosthetic arm and his flesh-and-cloth fist collided with a metallic clang.

Crackle, crack!

Lightning amplified by the bodily mutilation vow rose from the crown of his head, passed around his eyes, and ran down along his spine.

Crackle!

Emission.

The lightning Vane released sizzled across the drake’s body and burned it black.

The house-sized monster curled in on itself and rolled across the ground.

Step. Step. Step.

Vane kept firing Emission as he walked closer.

Click!

From the wrist of his prosthetic arm, a sharp blade shot out to full length.

Thunk!

Even at the instant the blade pierced the monster’s eye and burrowed into its brain, the Emission did not break for even a moment.

The Blue Knight attached to the second battalion.

“We cross the river and take that fortress.”

Daniel was an old war veteran from southern Astreos.

He had been born in a small village near Spiramentaon, received excellent results in the Myriad Star Church’s aptitude examination, and gone up to the capital.

He became a Blue Knight, yet returned to his hometown.

To the boy Daniel, the capital had been far too vast and frightening a place.

For decades, he patrolled the border.

Jungles and rivers, swarming mosquitoes and lizardmen.

It was a world familiar to Daniel.

The adventure that did not fit his fate began with Kyrie.

The one-eyed boy Blue Knight fought mutated beasts, screwed over a pair of punk adopted brothers, captured a direct-line Rikenta noble across the border, went up to the capital, and drove out Traisan.

And then the one-eyed Blue Knight, now a grown man, was asked a question.

Would he return to the southern border patrol of his homeland, or remain in the capital and become part of the Mounted Patrol?

He had never done anything like that in his life.

Yet when he heard those words, Daniel’s heart beat in a strangely excited rhythm.

Perhaps the truth was that, back then, he had wanted to remain in the capital.

This time, he decided to stay.

He followed Kyrie once more.

He had even gone to the Corpse Wasteland, which had seemed like another country, and seen the Red Knights of Spiramentaon who wielded flames.

After all that, after finally deciding to remain in the capital, fate’s joke brought him back to his hometown again.

For a brief while, he even resented Kyrie at the thought that the daily life he had cast off decades ago was returning to him.

At moments like that, he thought he might as well have just returned with Hensonia a year or two earlier.

That resentment vanished in less than a week.

We will conquer Rikenta.

Kyrie crossed in one bound the border Daniel had guarded for decades.

The familiar land of his home became, overnight, a thrilling world of adventure.

Daniel thought:

It seemed that a vivid life was not decided by where one lived, but by how one lived.

Splash!

After a long time, Daniel personally dove into a river again.

Shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers, he swam to the foot of the cliff and climbed up it.

The Blue Knight attached to the third battalion.

“We’re going to build a bridge across this gorge!”

Hari was Kyrie’s contemporary and had originally been a junior officer under the Three Musketeers of the light cavalry.

Since Kyrie’s army itself had been organized only very recently, there was almost no discrimination based on one’s origins.

But vividness was a concept that implied a certain consistency.

If one could not prove it to oneself, one could not prove it to anyone.

“We’re going to make a long wooden frame in a truss structure and lay it across in one or two goes. Over there, there, and there on those cliffs, we’ll drive in large iron rings, hang ropes from them, and reinforce it so it feels like a suspension bridge. The goal is something that can pass ten thousand men in an hour.”

Hari possessed profound engineering knowledge that contrasted with his flashy looks and light tone of voice.

“While working, make rope ladders and rope bridges and use those. Rope alone is enough, but if we have bamboo too, it gets much easier. Know your knots? If not, come here. I’ll teach you.”

Even his graduation grades in theory had ranked near the top, not even falling behind Kyrie.

“What are you staring at? I minored in field construction.”

Bridges began to be laid across the gorges of Rikenta.

The knight attached to the fourth battalion.

“The time has come to earn back the price of all those elixirs I’ve been stuffing into myself.”

By now, Peijin was effectively being treated as a Blue Knight.

This time, the objective was to establish a flanking breakthrough around the salt lake that stretched on like a long river.

The flanking breakthrough itself was not difficult, but avoiding attacks from Rikenta scouts familiar with the jungle and from greenskin tribes was no easy matter.

Hum.

Peijin poured magic into the Coward Catcher gauntlet and spread out Bio-radar.

“There is a group of soldiers on the hill to the southwest. Check whether any allied unit has moved in that direction, and if not, dispatch the knights immediately.”

Along with a light sensation of drained strength, electromagnetic waves spread out and grasped the terrain and movements across the area.

“And a pack of greenskins is advancing in camouflage from the east. Roughly within three hundred meters. Their outlines are not entirely distinct, but there is a high chance they are mutated beasts, so dispose of them with field-gun fire. Also...”

Peijin continued issuing orders without pause.

Every single one of those orders was carried out faithfully, without missing a one.

“Sir Daniel has taken Fortress Number 17! All enemies eliminated! We have even secured the beacon signal. The northeastern advance route is completely under our control.”

“Sir Hari has completed the bridge. Field-gun transport is possible.”

“Sir Vane has cleared the Red Swamp region. He is requesting reinforcements in the adjoining Brown Swamp!”

The messengers came running without pause, delivering report after report.

“To link up with Sir Peijin’s Fourth Battalion, Brown Swamp is a position we absolutely must take, yes ma’am.”

Joi touched the enormous map, which was being completed moment by moment, with her fingertips.

“We will ask Sir Vane to continue the battle, and we will block Brown Swamp ourselves.”

The retainers nodded with hard expressions.

The last battalion that had remained behind in Spiramentaon set out.

The Blue Knights of the personal guard had scattered among the battalions, following the knights of the superhuman corps, but because the retainers had remained, their strength was similar to the other battalions.

The march toward Brown Swamp was filled with restrained silence.

Mud splashed underfoot like bursting water droplets, and the tense sounds of breathing leaked out from all across the formation.

A reconnaissance unit camouflaged with mud and leaves crawled up and reported.

“It’s a hydra! Six-headed class!”

The soldiers’ eyes wavered.

“A juvenile class?”

“If it has six heads, then it has to be over thirty meters long, doesn’t it?”

“Can we do this without Their Excellencies the Blue Knights?”

Joi felt her throat drying up.

But she could not stop.

Even if she still could not become the protagonist of the battlefield through the strength of a single body.

“Set up the field guns, yes ma’am!”

The giant ballistae that had crossed the bridge installed by Blue Knight Hari drove themselves into the mud along the outskirts of Brown Swamp and were emplaced.

As the soldiers turned the pulleys and locked the bowstrings into place, the air itself seemed to tighten with them.

Swoooosh.

The hydra’s shadow rose, breaking through the surface full of brown sediment.

[“Kaaah!”]

All six heads screamed at once.

It appeared to be an individual that had already begun to mutate, with dark red blood vessels protruding here and there across its body.

“Uh, uh?”

“Heh, heheheh, hehehehe!”

“I feel sick! Uuurgh!”

The battle line wavered.

Splatter! Splatter!

The hydra moved its lumpy fin-legs and climbed onto dry ground.

It was trying to charge the encirclement of field guns.

We still have to buy more time, yes ma’am.

Drawing her sword, Joi kicked off the ground.

“Adjutant!”

“It’s dangerous!”

Thrust!

Her sword traced a crescent and bit into one of the hydra’s fin-legs.

“Kaaah!”

Compared to its size, it was a wound like being pricked by a toothpick.

But even a toothpick, if driven all the way to the root, would make anyone scream and freeze.

“Fire!”

Joi shouted as she carved one large and small arc after another.

Fishy-smelling blood sprayed out.

“Fire, yes ma’am!”

Focus returned to the soldiers’ eyes.

Screeeech! Screeeech! Screeeech!

Spearlike bolts tore through the wind and pierced the hydra’s necks.

Some of them had tough ropes tied to their ends so the hydra’s necks could be hauled from a distance.

They were harpoon-type bolts Joi had commissioned after seeing the tactics of local hunters.

“Pull!”

“Help Deputy Commander Joi!”

“Move!”

The soldiers seized the ropes in groups and pulled, yanking the hydra’s necks in all directions.

“You are quite hot-blooded, Deputy Commander Joi.”

“Withdraw now. That was nerve-racking.”

At that moment, Knight Shen and Knight Augusta leaped into the battle according to plan.

“Monster that devours men! The pinnacle of humanity has arrived!”

The distant, overwhelming presence unique to knights seemed to brighten the gloomy swamp.

Shen’s sword tip stabbed into the hydra’s eye, and Augusta’s spearhead drove in between its ribs.

A relentless assault followed, one that neutralized even scales hard as steel, severed heads, and the regenerative power that restored them.

Joi watched them with eyes full of yearning.

Someday.

Retainer was not a place she could be satisfied with either.

Someday?

There was no such thing as tomorrow in this world.

The words of the Blue Knights circled in her head.

Joi moved around behind the hydra.

To the rear of its body, where relatively fewer field-gun bolts had been driven in.

Strength gathered in the tail fitted with fins and in the legs as thick as giant trees.

“Kaaah!”

The hydra drew in its whole body, preparing to launch itself forward.

It was the leap of a thirty-meter-class monster, something even a knight’s strength could not stop.

“Damn!”

“Sir!”

Even Shen and Augusta had no choice but to evade first.

At that moment, Joi slashed with all her strength at the Achilles tendon of the hydra’s left hind leg.

With a sound like a drum bursting, the tendon snapped.

[“Guaaah!”]

The hydra spun halfway like a carriage that had accelerated with one wheel broken, then crashed to the ground.

“Fire!”

Screeeech! Screeeech! Screeeech!

At Joi’s order, the field guns once more spat out steel bolts.

“Where did you cut it? Excellent work.”

“You have guts, I’ll give you that.”

Shen and Augusta circled around the hydra’s body and approached Joi.

Clear acknowledgment lingered in their eyes.

“Follow carefully!”

“If you step between the scales, you will not slip.”

“How did you even see that?! ...I will try, yes ma’am.”

Two knights and one retainer charged the hydra once more.

At last, the hydra sagged limply across the mud.

A murmur of admiration flowed through the soldiers.

“Deputy Commander Joi is amazing too.”

“That is what I’m saying. At the end there, it was Deputy Commander Joi who cut its leg, wasn’t it?”

“Can someone with a retainer’s strength really do that?”

The most yearning looks came especially from the retainers serving as noncommissioned officers and lower-ranking officers.

Joi tried to hide her beaming smile.

“Loyalty.”

“You are back?”

She simply reported to Kyrie in an even tone.

“We have secured as far as Brown Swamp, yes ma’am. As for anything unusual... there is nothing.”

“Then why is your expression so bright?”

“Heh heh, having nothing unusual is a good thing, yes ma’am.”

It was the ordinary daily life of a certain adjutant.

Kyrie did not set foot in the Governor’s Residence unless it was absolutely necessary.

With one single exception.

“It has been a while.”

“It has.”

“I heard you learned grappling from that Magnes bastard.”

“Would you call it grappling? I found it pretty useful.”

The training yard of the Governor’s Residence in Spiramentaon.

Kyrie stood facing Nereus.

Rumble.

From the sky above came thunder growling, impossible to tell whether it was natural or artificial.

Surely that is not Heavenly Thunderbolt. Do not tell me that bastard can use something only Andromeda uses? I still cannot even properly deploy Sacheol Storm.

Useful? Just how far has he mastered magnetism arts? No. Before that, are you telling me he can deploy lightning arts and magnetism arts at the same time?

Flash.

A single bolt of lightning struck in the distance.

“You overblown Deputy Governor!”

“You Comet Rank bound to burn!”

The two of them immediately grinned savagely and leaped at each other.

I will make Sacheol Storm work, no matter what!

I will show him the power of House Tonatio’s Heavenly Thunderbolt.

Each holding his own resolve.

And it took less than thirty minutes for that resolve to be fulfilled.

Chapter 170

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