Chapter 124: The Fate of the Unification War part 4
《Air Bullet!》
Elna’s spell blew aside the soldiers in Ria’s way.
The Prime Minister’s main camp was far weaker than I’d expected. Resistance was light.
Every soldier in that camp knew Lord Lucilia’s face. When his head was delivered, they’d already resigned themselves to defeat.
They hadn’t been relying on the detachment to win the battle, exactly—they’d allowed for the possibility that it might be defeated.
But the fact that the enemy could produce inarguable proof of the detachment’s destruction so quickly, that their foes had anticipated even that and already worked out how to leverage it—that was what broke them.
They looked at that head and thought, We can’t possibly compete with that level of planning.
Count Khalifa had his men firmly in hand. The Prime Minister didn’t. His tools of control were greed and fear.
Once the tide turned, he was abandoned just as quickly.
Still clutching Lord Lucilia’s head, Prime Minister Villis Burke nearly got trampled as Cleria’s horse barreled into the main tent. He dodged at the last instant and tumbled off his camp stool, landing on his rear.
Cleria’s sword was at his face before he could scramble up.
「Villis Burke—I have you.」
Cleria declared, sword leveled at him.
Elna rushed in after her and blasted the surrounding soldiers away with wind magic, while the troops following them surrounded the command tent.
《Fire Bolt!》
Cleria’s spell targeted the command banner at the Prime Minister’s side. The fireball streaked past him and set the banner ablaze.
「Don’t move, Burke. My specialty isn’t just the sword—I can use magic, too. You so much as twitch, and I’ll burn you to ashes.」
「Raise the victory cry! The battle is ours!」
At Elna’s shout, her troops answered with a deafening roar.
◇◇◇◇◇◇◇
From outside, we saw the banner in the enemy main camp go up in flames, and cheers rose from that direction.
By the time Julian and I pushed through our troops to reach the camp, Ria was standing over the Prime Minister, Lucilia’s head cradled in one arm and her sword at his throat. He sat collapsed on the ground at her feet.
「Alan! I’ve captured the enemy commander!」
Ria, in full princess mode, reported to me with a radiant grin.
Okay… what am I even looking at here?
Still, whatever the path, the end result was clear: this was definitely Prime Minister Burke.
「Julian, go get Lord Leister. Tell him Princess Cleria has captured the Prime Minister and to bring his men here at once. Take the troops I brought and stick with them. And no running around alone on a battlefield. Elna, I want you organizing the troops here in the main camp. I’ll handle security in this area.」
「Understood, Alan.」
Elna gathered the disordered troops around herself, while Lord Leister’s men formed an outer ring. That gave Ria and me a double layer of protection.
Finally, I can breathe a little.
Ader, who’d captured Count Khalifa and his attendants, finished getting his own men under control and came over to us as well.
Outside, the enemy troops were now rallying around a different banner—the crest of the Human Galactic Empire, on flags Ria had commissioned from the Silas Company.
We’d told them beforehand that we’d accept the surrender of whoever hoisted that banner. I’d repeated the same condition at the end of my exchange with Count Khalifa.
The nobles who’d ridden out on the Prime Minister’s side now raised those flags, delivered to them by wyvern before the battle, as proof of their surrender.
Count Khalifa and the Prime Minister both lowered their heads when they saw it.
The nobles they’d thought of as allies had been hedging their bets with both sides from the very beginning. The blow was heavy.
Maybe the nobles had only been weighing us both, trying to see which way to jump. But it was obvious they hadn’t truly been fighting.
We, on the other hand, had only had to deal with the forces of Count Khalifa and the Prime Minister.
Everything happening outside the center had been more like staged skirmishes than a real war.
「So they were all with you from the start. No wonder even Count Khalifa couldn’t win.」
Burke muttered.
「No. Even with twice the numbers, we couldn’t have beaten Lord Corinth. A single general isn’t enough. And even the flanking maneuver failed. There was never a path to victory.」
Count Khalifa spoke quietly.
I’m honestly impressed he could see that so clearly.
He was right. The level of civilization on our side was simply different. In that sense, they’d never had a real chance.
What they could have done, though, was hamper the development of our cities.
This war wasn’t just about who won a battle. It was a race to see who could rebuild civilization faster—or have their efforts dragged down by sabotage and wasted effort.
If they’d been even a little more cooperative, there might have been a future where we helped each other.
But trying to poison me right at the start was too much. Setting aside their personalities, Burke’s attempt at assassination had been his fatal mistake. In the end, that was the measure of the man.
「Allow me one last question, Lord Corinth. You launched those spears, didn’t you? What was that trick?」
Count Khalifa looked at me.
「It was exactly what it looked like.」
「I’m asking how you did it.」
Given that the only plausible method was a magic tool of some kind, it was a strange question in a way.
「You might not know this, but I’m rather good at making magic tools. This time, we sealed Wind magic inside long tubes. The spears are all made in Ares, so their thickness is uniform. Follow me so far?」
「So you insert the spear into the tube.」
「Right. Once the spear’s in the tube, you activate the magic tool and the wind magic blasts the spear forward. That’s all there is to it. But I figured it would be effective against cavalry.」
「That wasn’t anything as gentle as ‘throwing’ a spear. It made my blood run cold.」
「Some of your men must be wearing mithril plate, right? Mithril’s harder and lighter than regular metal armor. To punch through that with a steel spear, you need that kind of impact force.」
「You’re saying that was specifically to deal with mithril armor? You’re insane. No—sane in a way that’s even more terrifying. I’m impressed.」
I honestly can’t tell if he was praising me or calling me mad. Probably both.
The spear-launching devices were our secret weapons, made just for this day. When we brought the magic guild to Ares and restarted magic tool production, I’d wondered if we couldn’t turn some of that to weapons.
Before that, I’d considered recreating gunpowder firearms, but gave up. The biggest roadblock was securing the materials. We haven’t found good sources of saltpeter or sulfur nearby. And firearms and gunpowder, once developed, are technologies that would inevitably leak.
Once the concept got out, it would spread on its own. If we had a monopoly on the resources, that might be one thing—but if we were relying on imports, we’d be handing our enemies weapons as well.
If that was the situation, then we should wait on developing that kind of technology until we’d firmly established our lead.
If gunpowder spread, it would be easy to blow up rail lines. In this world, though, only a handful of people could cast powerful explosive spells. That alone made large-scale sabotage harder.
I want to preserve this state of affairs as long as possible.
There were other reasons to avoid guns. Firearms are optimized as anti-personnel weapons.
On Planet Ares, large monsters roamed freely. Against a dragon, bullets probably wouldn’t do much. And they’d be useless against the BUGS armored soldiers who could even shrug off pulse rifles.
Developing equipment that could defeat BUGS armored soldiers was no easy task.
All the same, if we were going to invest in new weapons, we should always be looking for ways to fight dragons and BUGS. That was our ultimate goal.
Purely optimizing tools for killing humans was a dead end.
Weapons specialized for murder didn’t help us preserve the human resources we needed for civilization to flourish. If anything, they’d work against that.
To advance civilization, we needed to find ways to keep as many people alive and useful as possible.
With that in mind, I asked myself what resources were abundant and monopolizable in the forest city.
The answer we settled on was magic stones and Wind magic. From those, we created the spear-throwers as magic tools.
Inside the tubes, we inscribed magic circles modeled after Air Bullet.
Activate them, and whatever was inside the tube was hurled forward by the power of wind. That was it. A simple magic tool.
But in testing, spears gained something like rocket-level thrust.
In firearms, bullets fly in a stable arc because of the rifling carved into the barrel. The spin it imparts acts like a gyroscope, keeping the bullet on course.
In other words, give an object enough spin and you keep it from veering wildly off target.
Whether we needed that kind of gyroscopic effect for spears was something we figured out through trial and error.
In the end, we managed to stabilize them by tweaking the structure of the magic circle that governed the airflow. Once we had one working prototype, it was just a matter of mass production.
The three of us who could use nanom all pitched in to draw the base patterns for the circles.
That still wasn’t enough. We eventually realized that three busy people drawing them by hand wouldn’t cut it, so we assigned general-purpose bots to full-time magic tool work.
They were humanoid in basic structure, with two arms and two legs. Drawing precise lines on paper was nothing to them. We also had them cut the magic stones and do the assembly.
In effect, we’d set up a magic tool factory.
Spear throwing had existed since ancient times, used as a last resort to bring down large game.
But as a ranged weapon, spears had eventually been replaced by bows, likely because of resource costs and efficiency.
Given that our infantry already used spears, though, I’d judged that these launchers would see plenty of use for now.
Once we secure resources more reliably, I’ll think about guns again.
「Then allow me one last question as well. Tell me how Lord Lucilia met his end.」
Burke raised his head and asked.
「Selena, Sharon, Gloria—we’ve taken the Prime Minister and Count Khalifa. The battle is ours. I want them to hear this. Tell me how Lord Lucilia died.」
「「Understood.」」
「Very well.」
I began to recount, in Selena’s words, Lord Lucilia’s final moments.
It had all happened in the brief span of time while Lord Leister’s unit finished tightening the encirclement—yet somehow, it brought a strange sense of peace to the battlefield.
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