'The front line, of all places.'
Delam thought it while looking at the rows of tents.
Out of a thousand trainees, to be dropped on the front line of all places?
That was proof of luck rotten beyond words.
Still, there was hope yet.
Front line or not, so long as it wasn't a line unit.
'Except it is a line unit?'
The name of the unit Delam was posted to was [1st Unit].
The number in front was the order in which the unit was committed in a battle.
So [1st] meant standing at the very front.
Colliding first with an enemy loaded with venom?
And with allies pressing in from behind so you can't even run?
You had to call it an arrow-catcher, in practical terms.
'Looks like unit assignment was drawn at random.'
The camp commandant's authority probably extended only to appointing decurions.
The units themselves would be handled directly at the front.
Otherwise there was no way they'd have posted Delam here.
Because once fighting started, at least half of this unit died.
Slide.
Delam had his spear extended straight ahead.
The posture of a man who had just thrust.
The strange part was that this was all of it.
He simply stood there in that state, as though sunbathing.
But anyone with a deep eye for observation would see it.
The fact that the shaft of Delam's spear was moving, exceedingly slowly.
"You're doing fine. Just keep thrusting."
"Uh......"
At Delam's sudden remark Mark flinched.
He raised the shaft he'd been about to set down and took his stance again.
This place was a drill yard.
Delam was training and looking after Mark at the same time.
"But you're not going to teach me to block or dodge......?"
"Everything behind you is our side anyway. If you think you're about to die, just throw yourself straight backward. Our people will take care of the rest."
"I see."
"So don't grip the spear too far forward. You have to keep your center of gravity back so you can bolt any time."
"Got it."
Mark nodded and looked around.
The only ones in this wide drill yard were the two of them.
Not just the squad Delam served in as decurion — there were over several hundred tents in the area, and not one person was training.
Mark found that strange.
Before coming here Mark had never once held a spear.
And yet from a few days of learning at the camp, and learning only the thrust at that, he had grown a great deal more familiar with the weapon.
Probably, if Mark before entering the camp fought Mark now, he could beat him down with great ease.
Never mind spearmanship.
In which case, to survive real combat, shouldn't everyone in this drill yard normally be training until they shat blood?
"You're right about that, obviously."
"Right? Right?"
"But we're a front-line unit. The chance of surviving the first battle is 50 percent. So what do you suppose the odds are that a soldier who's gone out three times running is still alive?"
"W-well. 25 percent?"
"12.5 percent. Which means nine men out of ten are dead within a month, so what kind of frozen-hell training is this? Better use of that time to give it one more pull."
"Ah......"
Mark's complexion went black.
He'd been told it was dangerous, dangerous, but that it was this bad.
He'd assumed a road to survival would show itself if he practiced hard, and to hear that the tiny gap was a mere 10 percent — well, no wonder.
"Still, wouldn't the survival rate go up if people trained together in a group? Forming a square like the one you mentioned, or something."
"Who knows."
Mark wasn't wrong.
If they all gathered and trained, the chance of living would definitely rise.
And the one teaching would be Delam, no less.
If a prodigy who had climbed to Supreme Commander on tactics and strategy set his mind to it, he could save at least half again of the men who were going to die.
But it was an impossible thing.
Setting aside whether Delam had the skill, it was because of his [age].
-I-I'll acknowledge that you're a decurion.
-You'll acknowledge?
-I acknowledge it, sir......
There hadn't been a serious confrontation in the tent.
He'd simply knocked them about a few times and shown them the difference in strength.
They were all soldiers who had gone out at least once and survived anyway.
Loaded with venom, and mentally cornered besides.
There was nothing to gain from needlessly provoking soldiers like that.
-...What do you want from us?
-Nothing. Let's just each do our own jobs and live.
-Meaning?
-So long as you don't break military law I don't care what you do. Only, when others are watching, treat me as the decurion. And if there's something I ought to do as decurion, I'll do it.
-If that's all......
The soldiers were satisfied, but Delam felt bitter.
They were unit-mates, and he'd have to stand and watch them die.
But as things stood there was nothing he could do.
Unless he recovered the strength he'd had before regressing.
'No, there's one thing.'
The fellow from his home village whose specialty was driving nails into his parents' hearts.
The punk now come to his senses and training hard beside him.
He could protect this one, at least.
Resolving on that.
Delam clouted Mark across the back of the head.
CRACK!
"Ah, what for!"
"You were just annoying me. Got a problem?"
"N-no......"
Delam snorted a laugh and raised his spear again.
This was three days before the first battle.
***
Shudder, shudder, shudder.
An earthquake had struck the whole world.
More precisely, only Mark's world.
Whoooooo—
The weather was early autumn.
The season when the wind blowing in begins to turn cool.
Mark wasn't shaking from the cold, of course.
"The glory of—"
"His most great and puissant Majesty the King—"
A voice of tremendous size rang across the battlefield.
A speech to raise morale before the fighting began.
But Mark couldn't hear it properly.
Tens of thousands against tens of thousands.
A battlefield where forces of enormous number faced off.
The plain was correspondingly vast, and the assembled people many.
In a situation like this, however much magic amplified the voice, words shouted from the rear reaching Mark was a distant prospect.
Because Mark was at the opposite end, at the very front.
'I really was out of my mind......!'
Instead Mark felt his eyes go damp.
What? Earn merit?
Have his talent recognized and become a knight?
Now he understood.
That it was all nonsense.
And his father!
Why his father had wailed like that......
'At least I'm not alone. Thank goodness.'
If there was any comfort at all, it was the comrades at his shoulders.
These past few days he'd been on genuinely awkward terms with the eight men of his squad.
Because Delam had thrashed them like rats from the outset, Mark had been treated as part of the set and never had a chance to get close.
Which was fortunate, of course.
Because looking at the new recruits in the other tents, [getting close] was a synonym for [getting diligently beaten].
At any rate, they were comrades of the same squad!
Now that things had come to this, a camaraderie that had never existed welled up.
The eight in particular had survived a number of battles.
Veterans of a hundred fights, so to speak!
So if he stuck right beside them, if he just copied what they did well.
He had a belief that at the very least he wouldn't die.
Shudder, shudder, shudder.
"Aaah......"
But Mark soon fell into despair.
The shoulders of his squadmates pressed against his.
What came through them was trembling.
And trembling that, if anything, was larger than his own, not smaller.
He stuck his head out to look, and it was as expected.
All eight were shaking like aspen leaves.
The terror of death was not something you grew used to.
"Hey, ease up."
But there was exactly one man.
One who spoke indifferently even in a situation like this.
None other than Delam, positioned in the middle of the squad.
Delam looked entirely unbothered.
Without a tremor or a trace of tension, he simply glared down the barbarians ahead.
The sight of him seemed to say he had been born for war.
"Y-y-you, how do you n-n-not get n-n-nerv......"
"How do I not get nervous, you mean?"
"Th-th-that's right."
"I do, though. Can't you see my legs?"
"Huh?"
Mark looked down at Delam's legs.
His voice had been so calm that he hadn't noticed, but they were shaking tremendously.
Even Delam, the one he'd trusted?
Mark's face went past pale to the color of dirt.
But in that instant Delam's trembling stopped dead.
"Kidding."
"Hey, you bastard!"
"There you go, don't be so tense — swear at me like that instead. And keep in mind what I said earlier: stick right beside me."
"Ah! Got it."
"That goes for you gentlemen as well."
Delam said it to the other eight squadmates too.
But their faces all said it wasn't going in.
And even if they had heard him properly, they'd trust their own experience of surviving several battles, not a thirteen-year-old brat.
'Their own fates, all of them.'
It was around then.
Had the grand speech before the battle ended?
Before he knew it the long note of a horn cut across the battlefield.
BWOOOOOOO—
"Uwaaaaaaah!"
"Chaaaarge!"
That was the order for a general charge to the front!
At the same time the soldiers lost their heads and broke into a run.
DOOM-DOOM-DOOM-DOOM!
There were no soldiers fleeing or hesitating.
Not only the front rank but the rank behind it.
And the rank behind that, surging forward in turn like a wave.
Stop here and the soldiers behind would collide with you and knock you down.
And then you'd simply be crushed flat into dried fish.
Delam and Mark were the same.
They tore across the battlefield with the stamina training had ripened in them.
He could see the barbarians running to meet them from the far side.
Blood smeared across their faces and tattooed all over, the sight of them was horrific.
Enough to weaken a man's knees just to look at.
But today alone was an exception.
Fear too required a functioning mind.
Ally and enemy alike, on a field of madness where men ran with strings of spittle trailing from their mouths, reason had nowhere to insert itself.
"Shields up!"
CRACK!
Delam shouted it while clouting Mark across the back of the head.
Only then did Mark scramble his shield up.
Almost simultaneously, a run of dull impacts came through it.
Collisions made by arrows driving down like rain.
"Aagh!"
"Gaaah!"
Screams came from left and right and behind.
From soldiers too worked up to raise their shields, or unlucky ones whose arms and legs had stuck out past the shield and taken arrows.
"Run! Don't stop!"
"Uwaaaaaaah!"
A shout stripped of reason burst out of Mark's mouth.
His vision blurred, and all he could see were the enemies up ahead.
Later even those became invisible.
Warhorses have blinders set beside their eyes so they can only run forward.
Mark and the soldiers seemed to have become warhorses like that.
CLANG-CLANG!
CRAAASH!
"Gaaaagh!"
"S-save me!"
The two front lines soon collided and tangled together.
Striking the enemy with shields, thrusting spears and blades to kill.
After the first clash came, as always, the melee.
Now it was time for each man to survive on his own.
Until the fine knights and the honorable mages went out from the rear.
"Hah, hah, hah......!"
Blades flew in from every direction, heads flew off, and arms and legs were severed from their owners, bursting blood like balloons.
Mark was in the middle of it.
With a face stripped of its wits.
He'd charged bravely, as if hypnotized, but that had lasted only a moment.
The reality of Mark was an eighteen-year-old youth.
Thanks to the training camp, at least, he had somehow kept hold of his spear.
For that alone he deserved to be praised.
"A witless one!"
The enemy, of course, gave no credit for it.
A barbarian in furs brought a scimitar down toward Mark.
"......"
Mark only stood watching it blankly.
The keenly curved scimitar closing on his neck.
Death was right in front of his nose.
And yet it didn't feel real at all......
Then an unreal scene unfolded.
A single blade thrusting out from somewhere.
SHWEK!
It licked across the barbarian's neck and passed on.
With tremendous ease.