"My lord, the goods are all packed. Last night's 'support supplies' — seven cattle, twenty sheep, one pack-horse, and all the rest of the odds and ends — are entered in your ledger and bundled up."
The steward, Kao, wore a well-cut cloth tunic, but his expression was thoroughly pinched and gloomy; no one rejoiced at entering the North. They stood atop the wall and gazed into the distance, where there was nothing but gray mist joining earth to sky.
It wasn't that Kao hadn't thought of fleeing, but Field gave him no opening.
Wildcat and the other slave-soldiers, corrupted by money, had become Field's diehards. Kao could swear that the moment he ran, those damned lackeys would kill him on the spot — and then Field would reward them with a silver coin.
Damned lackeys, corrupting their souls for money, not even sparing their own lives, the steward cursed inwardly.
That was slaves for you: give them a sliver of hope and a little favor, and they'd offer up their very lives.
"By the way, my lord." Kao hesitated again and again, stealing several glances at Ashina before he couldn't help asking, "That slave — sorry, I mean Lady Ashina — is she really a Chosen? You're not deceiving us, are you? Could she show a divine sign?"
To bolster morale, Field had gathered everyone the night before and announced the news of the Chosen.
"I still have to prove it to you? Then how about you do the pioneering and I'll be your steward? Though I wonder if you could survive the Empire's purge." Field stopped Ashina before she could summon the giant wolf, gave a cold snort, and fixed the steward with a frown. This disloyal steward had spent the whole journey spouting gloom; if not for his being one of only two people who could read and write, Field would gladly have made him a stablehand.
Time to put him in his place.
Kao felt the pressure; cold sweat slid down his forehead at once. He managed a faint "uh" and didn't dare speak further.
His master was like a different person from before. Maybe the family's pressure had been too much for him? That had to be it. After all, even Kao didn't want to enter the cursed land; a pampered noble surely wanted it less. Kao's thoughts churned into mush.
"No objections? Then we set out!"
Field lit a mist-dispelling lamp. At twenty-five gold a piece, every minute it burned was money tossed into the fire.
Gritting his teeth, Field stepped into the Northern Province. All around, every sound and every trace of living things vanished at once, replaced by a terrible silence. Lifting his head, Field saw the dull, leaden death-fog blanketing everything, eerily still — not even the sun was visible. Stay in it long enough and you'd feel as if sunk in the deep sea; even Field felt tension and fear, never mind the slaves.
Were it not that leaving the lamp meant corruption, and that Field had announced the Chosen to everyone, they'd likely have lost their minds by now, charging headlong into the mist to be remade into monsters.
The ground was all writhing red-black "tentacles" — corrupted plants, with no power to attack, but they tangled around the wheels.
"This is so damned Silent Hill." Field forced himself calm, walking at the front of the column so they could see him, leading them on, lending them courage.
After all, with the life-clinging noble right there, what reason did they have to flee?
"Ga-ga-ga..."
"Roooar!"
All kinds of eerie cries kept drifting out of the gray mist. The lamp lit some hundred-odd paces ahead; the roars came from farther still, and no one felt the slightest safety.
Crumbling ruins lay everywhere; on the ground, withered heads were impaled on corroded iron spears. Field even spotted a faded griffin banner — the Empire had sent no few pioneer legions, and all of them, sadly, had died and become fine "locals."
"Gulp~"
Field swallowed.
"My lord, fall back behind me." Ashina's crimson eyes turned warily to the front-right. "A monster's approaching."
Soon a rotting corpse missing half its face came staggering into Field's view.
"Whoosh!"
Ashina drew and loosed; a streak of silver light cut through the air.
The corpse's head burst like a watermelon, the body rolling twice on the ground before going still.
"Careful! More monsters are charging in!" A great patch of skull markers had appeared on Field's little map. Now that they'd been spotted, he didn't bother keeping his voice down. "Same as before — ring the wagons into a wall, crossbowmen loose!"
At Kashan Fortress, Field had acquired eighty crossbows and a hundred standard-issue Empire bows. A pity only two or three slaves could shoot a bow — but crossbows were easy to use, so he'd armed twenty crossbowmen.
The weird cries grew more rampant. Amid a dense drumming of footsteps, a black mass of corpses crowded in, bared to everyone's view. With the little map's help, Field knew where the nearby monsters were, but the density was too high; they were forced to engage.
"Damn it — loose!" Field hardly needed to give the word; the slaves had already sent their trembling bolts flying.
"Thwip-thwip~" The frontmost corpses slammed into an invisible wall, seven or eight dropping at once.
Ashina put away her bow, summoned the giant wolf, and rolled straight over them. First-rank Chosen though she was, a Chosen's combat power already stood above mortals.
The long blade in her hand fluttered up and down like a butterfly, corpse after corpse falling beneath it.
Some had their heads lopped off by the blade; others were swatted dead by the dragonkin wolf's claws. Ashina charged into the thickest cluster, and the dragonkin wolf spun and breathed fire — a hurricane of flame that burned every corpse around to ash.
"She — she really is a Chosen?" Kao rubbed his eyes, his face full of disbelief.
Ashina shouldered a great deal of the pressure, but the tense atmosphere didn't ease in the slightest. Hampered by the mist's poor visibility, the corpses kept surging out of the gray, putting enormous strain on everyone's nerves.
"Kill!" Wildcat barked, thrusting his halberd with all his strength at a charging corpse.
Three or four halberds rammed into a corpse's chest at once, then flicked up, flinging it down like a ragged sack. More corpse-fiends collided with Wildcat's slave-guard; their fists and claws fell like rain on the guards' shields and scale armor, ringing with a smith's clang-clang-clang.
"Hm? Something's flying in?"
Field noticed a skull marker streaking across the map — already directly above him. Without hesitation he flipped down off his horse; he was the only one in the whole column standing up high, far too exposed.
He'd barely steadied his footing, no time even to look up, when a fierce gust of wind bore down.
"Watch overhead!"
Field dropped low at once and stabbed his sword upward. In one hurried glance he saw a bat-woman.
No hair, no brows, a hideous face; apart from a female figure, her arms were bat wings and her legs ended in sharp hooked talons.