The cold wind cut through the air.
Every time the chill brushed across his cheeks, Kaon felt as though his bladder reacted along with it.
‘Honestly, I feel like I’m going to piss myself.’
He had ridden out first and charged forward with great bravado, but this was the first time in his life he had ever rushed at people intending to swing a sword at them.
Even knowing it could not be helped, his modern sensibilities still filled him with fear.
If not for the constant vibration of the horse beneath him, he might already have been sitting on the ground with his legs shaking.
But once a man draws his sword, he has to cut something with it, even if it is only a rotten radish.
Rumble, rumble, rumble!
The enemy camp was right in front of them.
At that moment, the soldiers waiting behind the hill raised the scarecrows all at once.
Kaon could not remember whether he had seen the trick in Romance of the Three Kingdoms or somewhere else, but six candles had been lit on each scarecrow.
They had prepared a total of four thousand scarecrows, so at a glance, it would look like an elite force of twenty or thirty thousand was advancing.
The wind was weak, but the whole area seemed to ripple.
At the same time—
Pwooo!
Trumpeters all around sounded the advance.
It was a carefully constructed deception designed to make it seem as though allied forces were closing in from every direction—east, west, north, and south—through the darkness.
‘Will they fall for it?’
Even as he believed the plan would work, a small part of him remained uneasy.
Would his strategy really succeed?
Kaon drew his sword and pointed it straight ahead.
“Charge!”
“Waaaaaah!”
The cavalry surged forward without hesitation.
Kaon steeled himself as well.
‘Something feels different.’
After nearly dying from exhaustion the day before, a strange confidence had begun to rise somewhere inside him.
Kaon dismissed it as nothing more than adrenaline, but it felt as though something more profound was changing within him.
The confused enemy came into view.
The sentries who had been dozing off saw the approaching “army” and began fleeing in panic.
At that point, they could barely even be called guards.
There was not so much as a wooden palisade, and the entire enemy force had gone to sleep in a sloppy camp in the middle of an open plain.
At last, Kaon broke into the camp.
His sword struck an enemy soldier who had not even managed to put on proper armor.
SLASH!
With his skin already numbed by the cold, the impact and sudden heat snapped Kaon fully awake.
‘Was I always this good with a sword?’
To be honest, he had prepared himself for complete disaster the moment he actually tried to use one.
He had even imagined himself falling off his horse and rolling around with an enemy soldier.
But—
SLASH! SLASH!
Each sweep cut through the rebel ranks as easily as a sickle through grain.
“Waaaaaah!”
When Kaon unexpectedly held his own, allied morale shot upward.
His soldiers hurled prepared torches into the tents.
At last, the enemy camp began to burn.
Whether because the rebels had wanted to keep warm or for some other foolish reason, they had pitched their tents packed tightly together.
Thanks to that bizarre arrangement, the flames spread through the entire camp, and even though Kaon’s army had only swept through once, the place was already being devastated.
The survivors fled in panic.
There looked to be nearly twenty thousand of them at a glance.
Sir Jerome, flushed with excitement, shouted.
“Your Highness! Shall we pursue and expand our gains?”
“Kill enough to keep them running, then pull back! Do not go too deep under any circumstances!”
“Yes!”
Leaving the burning camp behind, the cavalry began cutting down the defenseless enemy from the rear.
They alternated between pursuit, stopping to shoot arrows, then pursuing again.
The ground became stained with blood.
Compared to all the preparation that had gone into it, the battle ended almost anticlimactically.
Allied casualties were extremely light.
It had barely even been a proper battle, so anyone who got hurt would have had to be exceptionally unlucky.
“A complete victory, Your Highness! I knew you could do it!”
Sir Mitchell came running over with a broad grin.
“Ahem. Naturally.”
“So you had been hiding your ability all this time!”
Kaon’s reputation began soaring almost immediately.
Once news of this reached the capital, there was no doubt it would cause an uproar.
“Still.”
“What is it?”
“Why are these people so weak?”
“It does seem rather obvious.”
The pursuit continued, steadily reducing the enemy’s numbers.
It was such an overwhelming victory that even if they exaggerated the military report a little, no one would care.
Military achievements were always inflated in wartime, so rumors might spread that Kaon had crushed an army of fifty thousand.
Of course, the enemy had not actually numbered fifty thousand.
“Even so, they were pathetic.”
Winning this easily made him uneasy instead.
But the rebels had circumstances of their own.
***
The Empire was currently in crisis.
The areas near the capital were still under firm control, but in the provinces, various feudal lords had been strengthening themselves and slowly preparing to carve the Empire apart.
The emperor was still holding things together for now, and the factions beneath him were striving to place their preferred princes on the throne.
That alone was keeping the system from collapsing.
Powerful lords had moved toward the center and built political blocs, which was why a fragile balance still existed among the border margraves and other feudal nobles.
But that balance would not last much longer.
The moment the emperor died, the Empire would begin its final decline.
Count Grakal had been somewhat hasty in rebelling at this point, but he had his own reasoning.
“If I rise first and swallow an entire region, the lords who are still testing the waters will rush to join in.”
Destroying the Empire with his power alone was impossible.
He intended to pull other feudal lords into the conflict.
He sent proclamations to them, calling for the overthrow of the declining Empire and the creation of a new world.
Several lords sent favorable replies.
They said that if Count Grakal successfully seized the south-central region of the Empire, they would move as well.
Encouraged by their responses, the count began planning in earnest.
[Overthrow the imperial family that cruelly exploits the people.]
He said nothing at all about what would happen to the Empire afterward.
Instead, he built his justification around the practical interests of the peasants.
The Empire’s official tax rate was forty percent, half paid to the local lord and half to the imperial family.
However, imperial administration did not reach throughout the entire realm, so tax collectors had to be hired, and the abuses were severe.
They colluded with local lords and collected as much as sixty to eighty percent in taxes, then split the profits with the nobles.
All the while, they claimed that the higher burden was caused by imperial tyranny.
Naturally, public resentment had risen to the heavens.
In the middle of all that, Count Grakal had “righteously” raised his sword.
An army that began with three thousand men quickly swelled to thirty thousand, and several feudal lords, encouraged by that success, rose in rebellion and marched with their own troops.
Everything appeared to be proceeding smoothly.
The Third Prince of the Empire was supposedly raising an army to stall for time, but it would take him a considerable while to arrive.
By then, more lords and commoners would have joined them, and the day the Empire was overturned would not be far off.
At least, that was how it was supposed to go.
“My lord! We are under surprise attack!”
“What!?”
The count sprang awake from a pleasant dream.
He did not even have time to arm himself.
By the time he rose, the sounds of enemies crashing into the camp were already echoing from every direction.
Pwooo!
Rumble, rumble, rumble!
A large cavalry force was tearing through the camp beneath the faint dawn mist.
Sounds of an advance came from every direction, and reports claimed tens of thousands of imperial troops were already close at hand.
“At least fifty thousand! It may even be more than a hundred thousand!”
A scout reported in panic.
In truth, the scout had only gotten up and begun doing his job after the attack started.
He had not been patrolling the surroundings all night.
Discipline was simply that bad.
The count, who had no way of knowing that, had no choice but to trust the scout’s report.
“A hundred thousand, you say!?”
“The imperial army is already advancing over the ridgeline! They are pressing us from north, south, east, and west!”
Their collapsed discipline and the timing of the attack just before sunrise completed the Third Prince’s deception perfectly.
“Fire!”
At that moment, flames erupted.
Because the tents had been packed so tightly together, the fire spread almost instantly, but to the panicked count, even this looked like proof that a massive army had descended on them.
“Aaaagh!”
When screams, hoofbeats, and the clash of weapons rang out close by, he decided there was no hope.
“We were tricked!”
He had let his guard down because he had heard the Third Prince was coming.
Contrary to the reality inside the imperial palace, feudal lords far from the capital had interpreted the political struggle however they pleased.
They believed the growing conflict among the factions made it difficult for the Empire to move its forces quickly.
Rumors that the Third Prince was hopelessly lazy had also contributed to their complacency.
The count concluded that all of it had been part of a deception.
“Duke Langpine! How dare you!”
He believed the commander-in-chief himself had moved.
The scheme, as he imagined it, was simple.
The Empire had made everyone believe its internal power struggles would force its army to move slowly, while Duke Langpine secretly split up a massive force and sent the pieces here to regroup.
The ultimate goal had to be encirclement and annihilation.
The terrifying thought sent chills up his arms.
“Retreat!”
“Retreat!”
And that was how the entire rebel army ended up collapsing and fleeing.
***
Crackle!
The tents continued to burn.
In the middle of the attack, Kaon had detached one hundred riders from the supply unit and ordered them to raid the enemy stores.
He had never expected the entire camp to catch fire so quickly, so in alarm, he ordered them to secure food first.
They managed to save some.
But that was all.
“Your Highness, we recovered only one day’s worth.”
“…….”
Sir Bison, who had led the supply troops, knelt and asked forgiveness.
There was no question that it had been a great victory.
More than twenty thousand enemy troops had fallen that day alone.
Only around ten thousand had escaped alive, making it a near-miraculous achievement.
The soldiers, flooded with adrenaline, were running around shouting wildly.
If Kaon announced now that they had already run out of food, morale would obviously collapse.
Kaon’s success story(?) was only just beginning, so he could not pour cold water over it.
“This was all within expectations.”
“R-Really?”
“We can obtain supplies. We have won overwhelmingly, so the feudal lords will overestimate our strength, will they not?”
“That is true.”
“In the worst case, we can simply threaten the nearby lords. There are other methods as well. The rebel stronghold is close by, is it not? Their main force did not retreat there.”
“Yes. In accordance with Your Highness’s orders, we drove the rebels south.”
“Then we seize their stronghold.”
“Ooooh!”
Kaon barely managed to stabilize the situation.
He passed over what could have become a disaster as though it were nothing.
In truth, defeating the rebels alone had already exceeded his original objective, but if he occupied the place where the rebellion had begun, no one would be able to dismiss his achievement.
The Grakal Territory was now practically undefended.
If he reused the scarecrows and merely made it look as though an attack was coming, there was a good chance they would raise the white flag immediately.
Riding the momentum, Kaon hurriedly moved his troops to seize the entire Grakal region.