Chapter 33
Temerkan warriors fell like autumn leaves.
Warriors who charged without feeling pain?
Their limbs had physically evaporated, leaving them unable to charge any longer; they could only lie face-down on the ground and wait for death.
Crossfire poured across the open plain with no cover and ground people into meat, quite literally. Warriors who carelessly stepped into the kill zone could not even last a minute before collapsing.
The one most flustered by that was the Temerkan tribe’s shaman.
As the charge that had always worked so well suddenly stopped working, the shaman hurriedly tried to cast a spell.
And soon, the trace of it was picked up by the mage in the company who had been running detection magic.
"Bearing 0-4-2! Distance about 2,500 meters. I sense traces of sorcery!"
Shortly afterward, three field guns were aimed at the shaman. The field guns, boasting a rate of fire of six rounds per minute, turned the spot where the shaman had been standing into a wasteland.
Then, one by one, the spells affecting the warriors began to break.
By then, the enemy had already gone too deep into the kill zone to turn back.
"Uh...?"
One by one, the halos floating above their heads disappeared.
Only then did fear worm its way into the hearts of those who had felt nothing even as their comrades died.
"W-wait, why am I he-"
퍽-!
The head of the comrade who had frozen in place vanished.
Bullets that flew in at impossible-to-dodge speed tore limbs apart, and more than ten warriors disappeared beneath shells that slammed down directly on them.
Everyone began slowly turning around and fleeing.
Because this was the kind of fear even barbarian warriors, who lived by massacre, plunder, and arson, could not escape.
At least you could resist death by spear and sword.
If it was a fair engagement fought at a distance where both sides could hurt each other, even barbarian warriors could accept death honorably and fight.
But this was different.
Something they couldn’t even perceive, something they couldn’t properly see, was disintegrating their bodies.
A miserable end where they couldn’t even find the corpse, let alone die an honorable death. A literal dog’s death, dying without even seeing the enemy’s face.
The Temerkan warriors, known for never retreating on the battlefield, began turning their backs and fleeing one by one.
Punishment for those who retreat?
A hell for those who flee the battlefield?
What meaning did any of that have?
There was already hell right before their eyes.
"W-what is tha- aghh!"
"I don’t want to die li-"
"Kheuk..."
The 7.62mm bullets that turned people into rags and the 20mm autocannons that blew bodies apart gave them no time for final words before death.
Of course, even among the natives, there were sometimes people who handled unusual energies. They were equivalent to the West Army’s knights.
The guys wrapped head to toe in green energy bravely charged at the machine-gun positions.
"Enemy, aura users spotted!"
"I’ll handle it."
The ones who countered such aura users were the royal guard’s heavy infantry.
The South Army also did not underestimate the possibility of magic. They knew very well how powerful magic became when combined with technology.
At least one aura user per company.
Even soldiers who had only trained in basic aura circulation and rudimentary knight training possessed tremendous power.
"Dieeee!"
쩌엉-!
The axe brought down by the barbarian warrior could not pierce the aura-wrapped mana-stone steel alloy armor.
On the other hand, a point-blank spray from the dozens-of-kilograms machine gun hanging from the heavy infantryman’s right hand was more than enough to shatter the exhausted warrior’s aura defense.
With a shrill chainsaw-like sound, the barbarian warrior’s body was split in two.
The heavy infantryman, more like a tank in human form, held the line while dealing with the warriors who came at him alone.
Before long, only corpses remained on the plain.
All 1,000 warriors had become corpses.
A perfect victory no one could possibly criticize.
The ones most shocked by that achievement were the domain’s soldiers.
After all, they had never expected anything from the Southern reinforcements in the first place.
"If they could take out just two hundred, that’d be good enough."
That thought changed the moment the machine guns on the front line opened fire all at once.
드드드드득-!
Caught off guard by the machine-gun fire ringing out simultaneously, the barbarian warriors who had bravely begun charging started collapsing one after another from far away.
Their ranks turned red. Every time the South Army’s weapons spat fire, barbarian warriors were swept away in clusters.
The solemnity of battle? The tension of an ally possibly getting hurt? None of that existed. No, could this even be called a battle in the first place?
It felt like a child tormenting a swarm of ants.
When the South Army’s new weapons fired beams of light, barbarian warriors died in droves like ants underfoot.
"M-magic...?"
Barony Eirene was located at the farthest edge of the West. Because they were in the westernmost, most remote region, news reached them slowly.
So the soldiers could not figure out what on earth the machine gun was.
"You idiot, do you really think a mage would come to a tiny domain like ours in such numbers?"
"Then if that isn’t magic, what is it?"
They say sufficiently advanced technology is no different from magic.
While they still couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of weapon it was, the battle was already nearing its end.
Once the shaman disappeared, the halos above all the Temerkan warriors’ heads vanished.
Those who realized what was happening slowly backed away, then began to flee one by one.
"Those bastards are running!"
When the soldiers with good eyesight said that at first, no one believed them.
They knew all too well how insane the Temerkan warriors were.
Madmen who would keep chasing for minutes even after a spear was driven into their heads. Undead-like warriors who would not die no matter how many times you killed them. A deranged war tribe that believed death on the battlefield was salvation.
Those guys were running?
Such a thing had never once been observed in the past fifty years.
"Uh, I think those guys really are running?"
However, once the barbarian charge stopped, no one could deny it.
Of course, running away did not mean they could survive.
The red glow of the tracer rounds chased the fleeing warriors to the very end and wiped them all out.
Exchange ratio: 1000:0
Even in the conflicts with the barbarians over the past fifty years since Kaiser III, it was an overwhelming result.
***
Edwin watched the battle from inside the fortress, and as soon as it ended, he hurried down to the foot of the wall.
He wasn’t someone who understood politics well. While his fellow nobles bribed their way upward, Edwin quietly managed only his own domain.
He knew nothing about the social circles of the central nobility, and nothing about the political language used by high-ranking nobles.
But there was one thing he could understand clearly.
What it meant to annihilate the enemy with that overwhelming firepower right in front of a lord who had openly refused to join the battle.
'If I had known it would turn out like this, I should have done something from the side'
It was his own fault for thinking everything was fine just because they said it was fine. Thinking that, Edwin hurriedly led his subordinates toward the South Army’s trenches.
All he could hope for was that, because of this incident, the South Army would not come away with a bad impression of the Barony of Eirene.
"The barbarians are pretty impressive too. Just look at them charging after seeing this."
"That’s all because of those spells, really. You saw them run the moment the artillery blew away the shaman."
The soldiers cleaning up the traces of battle showed no tension at all.
To the point that the domain defense force and Edwin himself looked foolish for having been so tense.
'Has the technology gap between the South and us really grown this much over the past several decades?'
They were certainly armies living in the same era, yet the technology they used felt several generations ahead.
Among the South Army’s soldiers, there did not seem to be even three mages or aura users. And yet their weapons radiated power like magic.
When bullets of that power poured out by the hundreds every minute, there was no way barbarians could hold out.
"If our domain had possessed weapons like that, we wouldn’t have suffered losses from the barbarians."
But there was no time to feel regret. Finding Captain James came first.
"Ah, Lord Edwin."
Captain James was checking supplies in the rear. The South had given them an excessive amount of supplies for just one company.
The South’s overwhelming production capacity under its total war system.
It was made possible by the introduction of large supply ships, which were built one by one, and the convenience of moving supplies by military truck.
'Supplies can be made in twenty hours, but it takes twenty years to make one soldier.'
'An army advances only when it’s well fed.'
Following Kyle Leopold’s words, the South Army was first expanding its logistics capability instead of increasing the size of its army.
Naturally, Edwin could only be astonished.
Edwin himself was a lord who had commanded troops. He also knew very well how difficult it was to send enough supplies all the way to a remote outpost.
Feeling the difference between the stagnant West and the ever-developing South, he carefully opened his mouth.
"I’m truly sorry I didn’t help in the battle. I wasn’t confident, so I couldn’t rashly step forward."
"Haha, no need to worry. Since you trusted us and turned down the proposal, it’s only natural that we bear the responsibility as well."
Unexpectedly, Captain James brushed it off as if it were no big deal.
Instead, he pushed aside the people around them and got to the point.
"The barbarians have long been a thorn in the West’s side, haven’t they?"
"That’s right."
"That’s why His Grace Grand Duke Kyle is planning a large-scale barbarian extermination campaign."
Barbarian extermination campaign.
It had been the West’s long-cherished wish for the past thousand years.
With the eastern side of the territory completely covered by the Arbel Mountains and the southwest blocked by the sea, the West was always short on land.
That was why the vast plains in the northwest, occupied by the nomadic tribes, had always been a matter of interest to the western grand dukes.
"A barbarian extermination campaign... If it can be done, I’d like to do it, but I’m not sure it’s possible."
But the ends of the campaigns that had been attempted over generations had always been bad.
Marching north across the border was difficult, but manageable.
However, occupying land and holding it were two different matters.
Once the powerful central army finished occupying the territory and returned to the capital, the barbarian warriors, who feared death not at all, would rush in and take it back.
And it was impossible to bring troops from beyond the mountains every time a raid came.
Even after occupying it, they could not hold it.
In the end, the West’s barbarian extermination campaigns had always turned into budget-wasting exercises in taking land and losing it again.
But would this time be different?
Captain James answered without hesitation.
"Of course it will be. His Grace Grand Duke Kyle considers this barbarian extermination campaign a joint operation with the Western Army, led by the South Army."
"A joint operation? With our army?"
Whether the Western Army could be of any help before the South Army, which wielded power akin to magic, was another question.
That doubt quickly faded.
"Participation in the joint operation is voluntary. However, we will lend our weapons to the domain army working with us and teach them how to operate them."
"Weapons? You mean those machine guns?"
"Of course. Even after the South Army withdraws, we need to leave behind a force capable of defending the territory we secured."
There was no way the lord who had just witnessed barbarians being shredded by machine guns before his eyes would refuse that proposal.
"Of course, the conditions will be strict. Since the Western Army will be in the position of learning our weapon systems, you will have to follow our command unconditionally and remain under our control. Is that all right?"
"Of course. Our army will cooperate as well."
Among the western domains where the South Army had intervened, not a single one refused Kyle’s proposal for a joint operation.
Modernizing the Western Army.
Improving trust and bonds through joint operations.
Establishing a command structure in which the South would take charge of the Western Army.
The first step toward the merger of the South and the West had begun successfully.