As of today it was already day ten since training began.
The trainees' movements were incomparably sharper than at the start.
They returned to their spots at speed, tidied them clean, and stood.
The instructor looked around the barracks and said,
"I have news to give you. There is one piece of good news and one piece of bad, so listen carefully."
"......"
"The good news is that as of today training is concluded. You are granted free time until the morning of the day after tomorrow. A scribe will write letters home for you as well, so make the request if you wish."
"What's the bad news, sir?"
"After that you move out to the front."
The instructor's words were short.
But they were enough to put everyone in the barracks on edge.
The sound of breath being swallowed came briefly from here and there.
The instructor went on explaining after that.
The situation at the front, the rewards for earning merit, advice that so long as they used what they'd been taught properly they wouldn't die, so just keep their heads.
Delam, of course, snorted while listening.
'Really, what do they take us for, idiots?'
A scribe.
A profession that wrote on someone's behalf.
Meaning the majority of the trainees were illiterate.
But they hadn't learned because making a living was hard and because it was of no particular use — it wasn't that trainees were fools.
Which was why nobody slept that night.
A six-week training period, short if you called it short and long if you called it long.
Because there was not one person who didn't know what it meant to be assigned to a battlefield without even finishing that......
***
The training camp was in an uproar.
Because it wasn't only those who had finished training, but the first-week through third-week intakes as well.
A thousand men in total were preparing to march.
The trainees, after two days' rest, were each issued their equipment.
They received their unit assignment orders along with it.
Those who were close gathered together and compared their orders.
Men assigned to the same unit were at least relieved, and men dropped alone into a different unit sighed with faces about to crumple.
Delam was the latter.
Fifteen people had come with him from his village.
And exactly one of them was assigned to the same unit.
None other than Mark, who had picked that fight with him.
"......"
Mark's face looked half dead.
He'd been like that every day since Delam wrecked seventeen men on his own.
To think he had picked a fight with a man like that.
He'd realized what he had done and had been busy avoiding him.
And now that was over as of today.
Of all things, the same unit!
"Aah......"
"Hey, it's distracting, so would you stop sighing? If you keep it up my conscience might trouble me when I shove you in my place and run."
"Aaaaah......"
Delam patted the shoulder of the despairing Mark.
And while he did, he looked over his orders again.
Delam's orders were different from the other trainees'.
They were a little longer and had an unusual emblem stamped on them.
The length was because the camp commandant's and Obern's letters of recommendation were written into them, and the emblem was a mark denoting not a common soldier but a decurion.
"A decurion! You really are something, Delam."
"Still, don't let your guard down and make sure you survive."
"You've got sheep to drive on the grassland again!"
"You too. Ah, everyone gather over here a moment."
Delam called together the older boys from home who were congratulating him.
Then he passed on a number of tips.
In your first battle, a hundred out of a hundred lose their heads.
But if you stay that way, what happens?
Your neck can get taken off too.
So keep your head straight.
If you're an assault trooper, start by praying.
And in the first clash, drop to the ground without exception.
If there's nobody around watching, act like you've been cut.
If a knight has aura, a soldier has playing dead......
"Usually they'll give you strong liquor before a battle starts, and after it ends. Don't just drink it — check your own body. If you have a wound, even a scratch, wash it clean and then wash it again with that liquor."
"Because wounds rot, right? Don't worry!"
"We heard all of that in training too."
The older boys spoke stoutly.
But Delam's face was still troubled.
Most of them.
No — perhaps all of them, he might never see again.
If he were beside them he could actively help, but with their units different as well, there was only one thing he could do.
'Fortune go with you.'
And so the last night ended.
And the trainees set out for the battlefield.
***
Empire.
To become an empire, four broad elements were needed.
[That the landmass be tremendously vast]
[That it have several peoples, or vassal states, beneath it]
[That other nations acknowledge it]
[That it possess overwhelming military force]
By that measure, how did Delam's Kingdom of [Fior] fare?
As you could tell from the names of its weapon arts — Imperial Spear, Imperial Sword — it called itself imperial, but the truth was it fell well short.
The third and fourth elements especially.
But turn that around and—
'It means it roughly satisfies one and two.'
The Kingdom of Fior's war was not its first.
It had already occupied two kingdoms some years earlier.
In the process Fior had become a multiethnic state, and had gotten its hands on a vast territory amounting to two kingdoms' worth.
The foundations of an empire, laid!
'So... about fourteen days to the battlefield, is it?'
Since the territory had widened, the road to the front had lengthened as well.
The front against the Sambala barbarians in particular was at the kingdom's far north.
Because of which Delam and the trainees had to walk for a full fourteen days.
And even that was shortened thanks to the king having re-laid every highway in the kingdom, ostensibly to promote commerce but in fact for war.
"Drill training is combined with the march!"
"Match your stride to your comrades! When the road narrows, the rightmost file waits and falls in behind!"
But it wasn't purely a bad thing.
They made up their missing training in the gaps of the march.
Of course, since the march alone wrung out all their stamina it centered on theory and drill, but even so, that was something.
A hundred times better than nothing.
"I can smell it already."
"Huh? Smell what?"
Mark asked at Delam's murmur.
Was it because Delam hadn't particularly tormented him during the march?
Mark was swaggering as if he'd never been so downcast in his life.
The sight of it was irritating, but Delam simply left him alone.
Why torment a kid who was going to see hell soon enough anyway.
Including with the answer to the question he'd just asked.
"It really does smell!"
After about another day's walking, Mark said it.
But his expression wasn't good.
An acrid smell, and something savory with it... and revolting.
The acridness came from smoke rising far in the distance.
Then what was the savory smell from?
"Bleeeuurgh!"
Confirming its identity at last, Mark emptied his stomach.
What he'd taken for a burning hill was a heap of people.
More precisely, of things that [had been] people.
It was blood and corpses — the smell of a battlefield.
Dozens of trainees were busy emptying their stomachs.
But the instructors didn't harry them.
Instead they watched with pity.
Out of the relief that they themselves didn't have to stand in the middle of that carnage.
And, presumably, the guilt that came out of it.
"If you're done vomiting, let's move."
"Y-you can look at that and feel nothing?"
Mark asked, his face gone pale.
Delam gazed for a moment at the far side of the sky.
Black smoke lay low as storm cloud and drifted along.
Feel nothing?
Hardly.
The memory was vivid even now.
The flock of crows blackening a battlefield.
Delam waking alone atop the mountains of corpses.
That last day of humanity......
"......"
Delam stopped a moment and observed a silence.
For the comrades who would have been left there with no one even to burn them.
***
"Where the hell is [1st Unit] holed up?"
"Ugh, we're all going to die......"
Delam dragged the mumbling Mark around among the tents.
There were a thousand-odd tents lined up in this place alone.
Finding the 1st Unit the two of them were assigned to wasn't easy.
Still, after asking a few times they found it soon enough.
"Ah, here it is."
The reasonably tidy tent had its entrance curtained despite the broad daylight.
Delam grinned and kicked Mark in the back.
Mark lost his balance and went toppling in through the doorway.
"Oh, a new recruit's here!"
"Yes, I'm—"
THUD!
Mark tried to introduce himself, but not a chance.
The moment he opened his mouth he took one to the gut.
He bent at the waist, hacking, and something dropped over his head.
"Wrap him!"
It was the thick blanket they slept under.
Presently the soldiers who had been waiting swarmed in all at once.
And then began beating Mark thoroughly.
"Aagh! Aaagh!"
In the middle of that, there was one thing Mark could do.
Nothing but scream diligently.
The fact that the blanket was thick was no great comfort.
Because the ones hitting him were front-rank soldiers.
Savage kicks and punches came right through the blanket intact.
"Good to meet you."
Just then Delam walked into the tent.
They'd hit him so merrily in that short span that the air was thick with dust.
But not even that dust could hide how young Delam was.
"Uh, what's with that one. Don't tell me he's a recruit too?"
"Two recruits? No, hold on. How old are you?"
The soldiers murmured among themselves.
Delam answered them kindly.
"My age? Thirteen this year."
"That's insane, why is a thirteen-year-old here!"
"I volunteered when the conscription officer came to my village."
"Haah......"
The soldiers' faces darkened as if by prior agreement.
The mood turned serious in an instant.
Mark, who had been sneaking his head out now that things had gone quiet.
Went so far as to quietly pull the blanket back over himself.
"Don't worry too much. It isn't what you're thinking."
"What? What were we worried about?"
"That they've started drafting boy soldiers because the war's going badly. Like I said, I volunteered, so it's got nothing to do with that."
"Whew. A mercy amid misfortune."
A soldier missing one eyeball let out a sigh of relief.
The other soldiers were the same.
A situation where even children had to be conscripted at random?
That would mean the Kingdom of Fior's defeat.
Or, failing that, that they were being pushed back badly.
Either way, every soldier standing here would die.
So it was a relief to hear that it wasn't so.
They'd been seriously considering desertion.
"No, but hold on... why is this little shit's tongue so short? My son waiting for me at home is fourteen, you son of a bitch!"
"Then is your son a decurion too?"
"What? What kind of nonsense is that!"
Delam waved his orders in front of the soldiers' eyes.
Most of them were illiterate, of course, so they had no idea what it was.
But that was fine.
He'd shown it carelessly on purpose so they wouldn't know.
"Don't worry."
Flap.
Delam lowered the cloth and curtained the entrance.
The tent went dim again, as it had been a moment ago.
"You'll figure it out somewhere in the middle of the beating."