The Imperial Army retreated.

It was not a temporary withdrawal for tomorrow's siege, but a complete retreat.

"You might have come as you pleased, but you won't leave the same way."

I had no intention whatsoever of letting the Imperial Army, who had gleefully battered the castle for over half a month, just finish their business and head back as they pleased.

"Gather the knights."

"They have already gathered in front of the gate and are merely awaiting Your Highness's arrival."

The defense captain pointed toward the gate.

I didn't know when they had rushed over, but the lancers, clad in black iron armor and holding their spears upright, were already massed in front of the gates. My horse was also positioned at the very front—the so-called prime spot, as the knights of Ballorhard called it.

If I dawdled for no reason, I would surely earn their resentment.

"Open the gate!"

In my haste, I ended up shouting that before I had even fully descended the wall. As if he had been waiting for it, the defense captain ordered the gates opened.

Leaving the noise of the rising gate behind me, I immediately joined the Black Lancers.

"You were taking so long that we were just about to head out on our own."

Before I could even settle into the saddle, the one-eyed cavalry captain voiced his complaint about my sluggishness.

"Let's go!"

Instead of answering, I kicked my horse's flanks and galloped forward.

"Move out!"

Quern led the one hundred Black Lancers and followed behind me.

Far off in the distance, I could see the retreating Imperial Army.

They were an Imperial Army retreating after a failed siege, but their numbers were still greater than our allied forces in the citadel.

Perhaps because of that, even as they fled, they did not display the characteristic urgency of defeated soldiers.

Even if their morale was abysmal from failing to achieve their objective, they maintained a certain level of formation and order as they retreated.

I didn't like the sight of it.

Defeated soldiers should act like defeated soldiers, fleeing in terror like dogs with their tails tucked between their legs.

I drew out all the mana from my heart.

The status and spirit I had kept concealed the entire time were unleashed all at once.

WOOOOSH.

The air churned. My presence expanded in all directions until it finally reached the enemy's rearguard.

The Imperial soldiers at the rear looked back in this direction.

I ostentatiously ignited a flame at the tip of my sword and shouted.

"Charge!"

RUMBLE-RUMBLE-RUMBLE.

The sound of a hundred horses pounding the earth echoed across the plains.

The pale, terrified faces of the Imperial soldiers were entirely visible. Their desperate screams and shouts were as clear as if they were right next to me.

"The enemy doesn't even amount to a handful! The rearguard will turn and engage the enemy, and the rest will move at a quick march!"

An Imperial Army commander screamed at the top of his lungs. However, none of the Imperial soldiers in the rear turned around.

Instead, they shoved the soldiers in front of them and started running.

It was a given.

The presence of a Sword Master who had attained a certain status was no less than a natural disaster. Regardless of what they knew, the Imperial soldiers were probably feeling a terror akin to having a massive tsunami or a landslide right on their heels at this moment.

No matter how much those who had not achieved that status tried to push them, the orders wouldn't even register in their ears.

I could clearly see the chaos spreading like an epidemic.

The terror spread by the rearguard soldiers infected even the soldiers who had been holding the formation until the end.

The orderly formation quickly became congested and devolved into a complete mess. Their strict military discipline was nowhere to be found. Tangled together, they looked like wild beasts fleeing in panic from a forest fire.

"Move!"

"Aaagh!"

Watching them shove and trample their own allies just to survive, I smiled in satisfaction.

Now they finally looked a bit more like defeated soldiers.

And for defeated soldiers, there was a future suited for defeated soldiers.

CRASH!

I leaped right into the middle of the defeated soldiers.

Gathering sword light fully into my blade, my mouth roared for the enemy's death.

In doing so, I showed them with my entire being that the only future given to them was despair.

"Trample the enemy!"

"Don't leave a single one alive!"

The death throes of the Imperial soldiers trampled by the incoming Black Lancers erupted from all directions.

"Guaaah!"

"Spare me!"

The terrified flock of sheep screamed,

"For Ballorhard!"

"Victory to His Highness!"

And the lancers roared fiercely like black wolves.

* * *

When the battle ended, out of the thousands of enemies, the number of those who managed to escape alive numbered merely in the hundreds.

The entire field was covered in corpses.

Of those countless corpses, not even a quarter had died from being slashed by a sword or pierced by a spear.

The rest had all been trampled to death by their own allies amidst the peak of the chaos.

This was because I had deliberately unleashed my spirit to terrify them, preventing them from making proper judgments, and also because the Black Lancers had cleverly herded them from the outside like a drive hunt.

The thousands of Imperial soldiers had been shoved around this way and that, turning on each other, until they were practically annihilated.

"Your Highness."

Shaking off his bloodied spear, Quern called out to me quietly.

Instead of answering, I yanked out the Imperial Army's standard that was ungracefully jammed in the middle of the corpses and shouted.

"We are victorious!"

"Uooohhh!"

The lancers let out a victorious roar. Shouts also erupted from the citadel far in the distance.

"Let's return."

Gripping the Imperial Army's standard in my hand, I turned my horse around.

"Long live His Highness the Crown Prince!"

"Long live the kingdom!"

The soldiers' cheers did not cease even as I fully passed through the gates.

I quietly raised my hand. Like magic, the shouting died down.

"I pay my respects to your courageous struggle, and I dare say this."

The soldiers and knights looked at me.

The joy of those who had managed to survive, the elation of those who had finally protected their home and won.

"You are the heroes who saved the nation! You are the guardian deities of the kingdom!"

"Waaaaahhhh!"

Their boiling emotions erupted with a deafening roar, sweeping through the citadel.

I watched the euphoric soldiers before quietly instructing the citadel's defense captain.

I told him to release the supplies so that the soldiers could enjoy their rights as victors for today, at least.

Fortunately, there was no small amount of supplies that the Imperial Army hadn't managed to retrieve, which was enough for them to forget the exhaustion of war and revel in victory for a day.

"Thank you, Your Highness."

"We are simply grateful for Your Highness's mercy."

Perhaps receiving abundant food and drink for the first time in a while had made them generous at heart as well, for the soldiers bowed in gratitude every time I passed by.

"Your Highness saved my life. If you hadn't arrived in time, I would be a corpse by now."

"Did I? I've saved so many bastards that I can't even remember. If you have time to blabber about a favor the person involved doesn't even recall, go eat and have fun. A day like today doesn't come every day."

Each time, I laughed, tossing jokes at them or offering words of praise.

As I wandered among the soldiers like that, I suddenly remembered something I had forgotten.

"Yorden!"

"Huh? Yes!"

A senior Ranger who had been making merry in the distance with a freshly roasted horse leg in hand hurried over to me.

"Where's Malcoy?"

"Whether his name's Pigcoy or Malcoy, I saw him on the wall just a bit ago, but..."

"Find him and bring him here."

"Right now? Of all times?"

"Then should I go myself?"

Yorden's lips jutted out a mile.

'Always making me do things at times like this. Can't stand seeing someone rest comfortably. What the hell did I even do wrong?'

The Ranger incessantly spewed complaints.

"Aren't you going?"

"Ah, I'm going. I'm going."

The Ranger vanished with a trudging gait, then returned a while later.

"I dragged him over from where he was standing blankly on the wall, sir."

I waved my hand at Yorden, who was grumbling about why the man was still doing that when the battle had ended ages ago.

"Got it, so get lost."

"Yes, sir. If you have anything else to order around, please call someone else next time. There are plenty of guys slacking off."

To my ears, those words sounded exactly like a plea to keep giving him tasks in the future, but I didn't let it show.

The frivolous Ranger Company Commander wasn't what was important right now.

"Malcoy."

At my call, Malcoy, who had been keeping his head down, flinched and looked at me.

Seeing his face covered in blood, sweat, and dirt, I let out a soft chuckle.

"Now you finally have a face suited for the battlefield."

Malcoy raised a hand and touched his own face. He seemed completely unaware of what he looked like.

"Follow me."

Saying so, I headed toward Yorden, who was lounging in the distance.

"Hand over one of those bottles of booze you stashed away."

"Are you looking for alcohol from a frontline commander in a wartime fortress?"

"So you're saying you don't have any?"

The Ranger rolled his eyes back and forth.

"If I search you and find some..."

Before I could even finish my sentence, Yorden pulled a bottle from inside his cloak and handed it to me.

"This is truly, really the only bottle. I swear."

Seeing him say something he didn't need to say, it seemed he had more booze stashed away.

"If you're going to drink, do it where the others can't see. Even if everyone else ignores it, the lancers definitely won't let it slide if they catch you."

"Of course not. I actually spotted a suitable place already, so I was planning to head there tonight..."

Yorden gasped and slapped a hand over his mouth. The senior Rangers around him shook their heads in dismay.

I wordlessly held out my hand.

"This is truly, really, genuinely the last one. This is the life-saving liquor every Ranger carries to maintain body heat in survival situations."

"Which means all the other guys have it stashed away too."

The senior Rangers sprang to their feet, hurling insults as they kicked Yorden.

"Dammit! And this idiot is supposed to be a company commander!"

"That big mouth of his won't be fixed until he's dead!"

"A snitch needs to be beaten to a pulp!"

While the Rangers spent that quality time bonding, I dragged the blankly standing Malcoy toward a quiet spot.

Finding a suitably secluded area on the outskirts, I sat down haphazardly on a protruding structure.

Then I popped the cork off one of the two bottles of alcohol I had received from Yorden.

I savored the pungent aroma of the liquor before chugging it down.

It tasted far better than I expected; it was definitely not the cheap swill that soldiers drank.

"That damn bastard. He already pilfered a bottle from the Imperial Army's supplies."

Marvelling at Yorden's resourcefulness, I handed the bottle to Malcoy, who stood blankly before me.

Malcoy didn't decline; he immediately brought the bottle to his lips and tilted his head back.

GLUG-GLUG.

Having emptied half the bottle in an instant, Malcoy's face quickly flushed red.

Seeing the color return to his face made him look much better.

"So. What do you think? Is it still the same?"

At my abrupt words that cut out the beginning and the end, Malcoy looked at me with bleary eyes.

"I mean your thought that war is ugly, and those who participate in it are all exactly the same."

Malcoy did not answer.

I didn't force an answer either. I wordlessly reached out, snatched the bottle back, and poured it down my throat.

"Kuh. This really tastes good. Do those Imperial bastards drink stuff like this even during war? I guess that's one good thing about a wealthy country."

It was an odd point to focus on, but I genuinely found myself marveling at the Empire's underlying strength.

However, since this was not a meeting set up just to drink, I returned to the original topic.

"Saying that war is ugly, that the soldiers are perpetrators too... I used to know a few people who spouted that kind of nonsense in the past."

When this nation first settled on this land, there were those who chattered like that.

"They said war is nothing but those seated in high places disguising their greed with pathetic beliefs to drive the living to their deaths."

While the kingdom's knights and soldiers shed blood fighting off the Empire's invasion, they were scholars who stayed in the safe rear, acting as if they had mastered the truths of the world.

"But out of everyone who ran their mouths like that, not a single one had ever actually stepped onto a battlefield."

Malcoy's lips parted slightly before closing again.

I already knew what he had been about to say.

"Are you going to speak of the horrors of war? You're right. War is horrific. A battlefield, and the lands swept by war, are places where humans cannot exist as humans."

War was a monster that prolonged its own existence by devouring the lives of the living, so all that remained in the monster's wake was grief, scars, and resentment.

"But there are unavoidable things in this world. And one of them is war."

Malcoy frowned as he looked at me. His unpleasant gaze made it seem like he considered me an irresponsible bastard, or perhaps he was looking at me like a hypocrite rationalizing war.

I snorted at his reproachful glare.

I asked him.

Was it the kingdom that started this current war? Did the kingdom's soldiers look like warmongers to him?

Malcoy did not answer.

Because he knew it too.

The fact that it wasn't the kingdom who started this war.

The ugly war he spoke of was the only means we had to protect this land.

"If the Royal House of Leonberk hadn't declared independence, the war wouldn't have happened."

Malcoy finally spoke as if squeezing the words out after a long pause.

Rather than truly trying to argue back, his voice sounded as though he was just being stubborn out of sheer habit.

"So are you saying we should have just lived being stripped of everything and trampled on? Are you trying to tell me that we should have just endured it since it wouldn't have led to as many people dying like now?"

I asked him.

If we merely existed to survive, how was that any different from being beasts?

"A king should live like a king, nobles like nobles. A person of Leonberk like a person of Leonberk. We simply wished to live as such."

"Wasn't that just something only the Royal House of Leonberk and a minority of nobles desired?"

I clicked my tongue at those words.

It seemed suffering on the castle walls for about half a month wasn't enough.

It looked like I would have to run him into the ground for a good while longer.