Chapter 17
Only another knight could stand against a knight.
That was the absolute law of war that had remained unchanged for a thousand years.
Joseph had thought so too.
"Imperial Guard First Squad. We will exterminate the remnants of the old era."
Until the Imperial Guard’s machine guns spat fire.
A knight who had already exhausted a good deal of aura could not withstand a point-blank hail of bullets.
When the flash from the machine gun faded, all that remained was one knight lying helplessly on the ground, his body riddled with dozens of bullet holes.
"Ugh, kuhk..."
Joseph tried to say something, but coughed up blood and collapsed on the spot, unable to rise again.
There was no such thing as an honorable death on a battlefield where one pull of a trigger could take a life.
After one of the Imperial Guardsmen shoved the knight’s corpse into the sea and signaled, the squad moved on to another target and headed for the shoreline.
The tide had already turned.
Once a knight broke through the dense anti-air barrage and reached the ground, the waiting army drove him back into the sea with overwhelming firepower.
There was some resistance from the knights in the process, but it did not amount to much.
Even when they desperately wiped out an army platoon, the Imperial Guard would appear from behind and unleash more fire.
The glow of tracer rounds lighting up the dark night sky. The trajectories of machine-gun fire slicing across the city, and the thunder of gunfire filling the air.
The knights were powerless against a kind of war they had never seen before.
"Die!!!"
One knight who had bravely charged with a lance came into the sights of a 20mm cannon gunner.
The difference in physical specs between the two was astronomical.
The human weapon the West had spent more than ten years raising, and an infantryman conscripted just a month ago.
Even that massive gap meant nothing before the absurd firepower of a quadruple 20mm cannon.
Tukakagagagak-!
The moment the trigger was pulled, the knight who had been charging in high spirits swayed in place as if dancing.
Ten seconds later. When the soldier let go of the trigger, the knight’s body was already so mangled it was impossible to make out his shape.
"Ha, haa... haa..."
Catching his breath, the soldier stared blankly at the corpse.
Then he looked once at the machine gun, calmly belching gray smoke as though nothing had happened.
"Hahaha, hahahaha..."
The soldier, born the son of a factory worker, had admired knights his entire life. The Empire’s strongest blade possessed a power that enchanted a child’s heart.
Even after becoming an adult, he could not let go of his longing for knights.
Though his status was lowly, and he was too poor to even dream of elixirs. Though he knew there was no chance for him at all.
He had always been envious of knights.
"This is supposed to be a knight?"
But... not anymore.
He had only pulled a finger. With that simple act, a knight had literally been shredded apart.
Even that glorious aura was useless before a 20mm shell.
The quadruple machine gun boasted a rate of fire of 1,000 rounds per minute.
Fifteen bullets the size of an adult fist slammed in every second at speeds far beyond the speed of sound, and no human could endure that.
Knights and ordinary humans alike were just equally dead before it.
The soldier was no longer afraid of knights, nor envious of them.
Rather...
"Has the knight who ran here already been killed?"
The Imperial Guard side looked cooler.
An elite bodyguard unit made up of special-class soldiers, martial arts experts, and aura cultivation practitioners, and so on.
To them, who ran across the battlefield carrying medium machine guns while hiding their identities, knights were nothing at all.
"Good, well done, soldier."
Seeing the Imperial Guardsman pat his shoulder and walk past with praise, the soldier gained a new dream.
From now on, this world was no longer the age of knights.
***
"Your Grace. Approximately 250 enemy knight units have been shot down and killed. There are no prisoners, and the army and Imperial Guard are currently cooperating to search for survivors."
"Good."
By the time I arrived in Sector D-5, the battle seemed to be settling down somewhat.
The flares that had lit up the sky were slowly dying out, and the repeated thunder of anti-air fire that had echoed from far away had also fallen silent.
In the city where quiet had returned, only the occasional crack of machine-gun fire could be heard.
"What about Charles Raymonz?"
"We couldn’t find any body that looked like him. He probably sensed the tide turning against him and retreated."
Well, a little disappointing, but it was fine.
I hadn’t expected to be able to kill Charles Raymonz here in the first place.
Honestly, it was even more convenient to let him live and keep holding the Western Grand Duke’s seat.
I may have built the dreadnought and succeeded in 'hit them and make them pay,' but the true textbook case of hit them and make them pay is Charles Raymonz.
That crazy bastard who says you should occupy, loot, and then repay it.
The West wouldn’t come to its senses if a man like that kept holding it down.
"Ah, and the Imperial Guard’s performance was better than expected. Most of the knights who succeeded in landing on shore were dealt with by the Imperial Guard."
"That’s a relief. We should keep researching along those lines from now on."
The South wasn’t completely devoid of mages or knights either. It was common for those pushed out of the center to flee into the South.
The unit gathered from such people was the Imperial Guard.
The idea when it was first founded was simple.
If ordinary infantry gets stronger just by holding a gun, then someone who can use magic would be even stronger, right?
Since we still didn’t really know how magic and guns would interact, for now we just gathered them around under the name of the Imperial Guard.
Still, with results like this, it might be worth putting them to full use.
Using them as agents in the Intelligence Bureau, for example. Or as an assault unit for army infantry. That’s something worth further study.
"What about the destroyer squadron’s results?"
"They reportedly shot down about 50 wyverns."
The destroyer squadron’s performance had also come out as expected.
Taken this way, it was a battle where we had gained only things.
But I couldn’t simply be happy.
This battle wasn’t a complete victory.
"...So, what were our casualties?"
Imperialism begins by erasing human individuality and brainwashing people with ideology.
A state urges its soldiers to become tools, and runs wild while treating the lives lost in war as mere numbers.
That doesn’t make it entirely wrong. If a leader were to be swayed by every single death, the country wouldn’t function properly.
But...
It’d be fine to remember them not as Leader Kyle Leopold, but as human Kyle.
"107 anti-air gunners and 58 army soldiers were killed, and 131 more are being treated for serious or minor injuries."
From the leader’s perspective, it was truly an overwhelming victory.
This was a nighttime raid by a wyvern unit that had previously been known to be impossible to stop.
Having repelled it with only this much damage was surely a feat that would go down in history.
But I couldn’t shake the discomfort I felt. Before the Empire’s mediation had even come through, we’d launched a sudden surprise attack, and people who didn’t need to die had died.
I closed my eyes for a moment, calmed my emotions, then gave the order.
"By tomorrow, organize the list of casualties and put it on my desk. Don’t forget to compensate the bereaved families sufficiently."
These were the casualties of the first war. For the sake of internal unity, I couldn’t just let it slide.
And for the sake of the pretext for starting the war.
"And in a week, clear out the hall at Albion City Hall."
It was time to sprinkle some twentieth-century-style propaganda and agitation into this romance-fantasy world.
"This time, I’ll step onto the podium myself. I’ll write the speech myself too."
The reason I wouldn’t hand it to a professional speechwriter was simple.
Because to stir up anger at their surprise attack, sympathy for the victims, and a boiling desire for revenge... I needed an appeal filled with raw emotion.
"Apologize to the families, and if necessary, bring them here even if we have to pay additional compensation."
"Yes, Your Grace!"
And for that, the bereaved families’ participation was essential.
Of course, participation from all walks of life—from workers to capitalists—would be needed too.
I’m not particularly good with words. The only thing I’d ever written in my past life was the diary I kept as a kid, so coming up with a speech out of thin air was hard.
But I had the knowledge of 21st-century humanity.
And I could confidently say I had one ability for certain: the ability to adapt that knowledge to this world.
I was the guy who’d already overturned the Southern industrialists once with labor standards law in hand.
***
By the time the Empire’s mediation proposal arrived, it was already too late.
Summed up, the proposal went like this.
1. The West compensates the South for all benefits it has obtained from Sarcen Fortress up to now.
2. The South returns the Sarcen fief.
The South and the West had already drawn blood from each other. In the middle of all that talk about devouring one another, no one was going to listen to a mediation proposal from the crown prince, whose head was full of flowers.
Southern newspapers spent the entire week focusing on how absurdly sudden the harbor air raid had been.
They ran interviews with the victims’ families and gave detailed accounts of how bravely the victims had fought.
They went on about how vile the Western upper crust was. They argued that their compatriots had to be rescued from the West’s grasp.
Then, just as Southern public sentiment boiled over to the limit.
The Southern Grand Duke, Kyle Leopold, stepped forward before the citizens himself.
Albion City Hall.
A massive hall that could accommodate up to 5,000 people was packed with people.