The Great Battle of Zetta (8): Day One

Kitzar Fortress has gates only on the west side facing Golbel and the east side facing Rudek. To the north and south, only stone walls continue.

The advancing Golbel army appears to have split its forces in two and is targeting the eastern and western gates.

The Fourth Knight Order is responsible for defending each gate. Inside the fortress, Frein's unit under my command and I serve as a mobile reserve, moving to reinforce wherever the situation is worst.

After the soldiers who had gone outside returned to the fortress, we piled rubble behind the western gate to make it even harder to breach.

The eastern gate, on the other hand, was left as it was. We had not piled up rubble there, considering that the twins and Hock-san were outside and that reinforcements might still arrive.

Golbel must have realized that, but of its 15,000 troops, it sent 10,000 to the western gate, where the rubble had been piled up, and only a single unit of 5,000 to the eastern gate.

From Golbel's commanders' perspective, it was the safest choice. Since they had taken every precaution up to this point, the strategist Sakuri probably believed they had completely cut off any reinforcements. In fact, that was true. But what about General Zegabain, who had been appointed commander-in-chief?

If reinforcements did arrive—however unlikely—the eastern force would be slow to retreat. They might even find themselves surrounded.

If the 20,000 Golbel soldiers attacking here were defeated, the 10,000 troops attacking Ellen and the 10,000 attacking Schwaba would also be placed in danger.

If Golbel lost everything, the country would be destroyed.

General Zegabain was probably the one who understood that best. If Sakuri's prediction proved wrong, Zegabain had a duty to minimize the damage.

Precisely because he was a capable general who could look ahead, he could not afford to take risks here.

Naturally, then, I imagined that Golbel would concentrate its attack on the western side, where retreat would be easier, leaving the eastern gate more weakly defended.

However, there was one thing that concerned me. The commander assigned to Golbel's most dangerous target, the eastern gate, was none other than Rodelight=Est.

Despite the many conflicting assessments of him, Rodelight was generally regarded as being strong in battle. The fact that he had been sent to the eastern gate with a smaller force was unsettling in itself.

General Boldras had been wary of Rodelight, so he split the defenders in half and assigned them equally to each gate. For now, I moved our unit to the western wall, where the enemy forces were more numerous.

Not long after Wickhart's opening shot, the Golbel army began closing in on the fortress.

Their target was, of course, the gates.

A battering ram was brought out to break through the gate, and they tried to smash it against the gate. Naturally, we fired arrows down from the walls to stop them.

Golbel responded by firing arrows of its own, and several men on both sides collapsed where they stood.

Furthermore, whenever we defenders concentrated around the gate, numerous long ladders were raised against less heavily defended sections of wall.

The defenders resisted, but the difference in troop numbers was simply too great, and we could not remove every ladder. If we faltered for even a moment, Golbel soldiers came rushing up them one after another.

As a mobile reserve, we decided to focus on dealing with the enemies climbing up those ladders. If the wall defenses were breached, we had no chance of winning.

The trouble was that we simply did not have enough soldiers.

Against the 10,000 soldiers attacking the western gate, fewer than 3,000 of us defended it: 2,000 from the Fourth Knight Order and 800 from Frein's unit.

Of those 2,000 Fourth Knight Order soldiers, 1,000 were fully engaged in combat directly above the western gate, while another 500 were fighting on the ground to defend it. That left only 1,300 of us to deal with the soldiers on the ladders.

Even so, the defenders had the advantage of the terrain.

Somehow, we managed to knock the Golbel soldiers who climbed onto the wall back down, one after another.

Dick was the one who stood out most in this battle.

Dick had always stood head and shoulders above even the soldiers of the Tenth Knight Order when it came to physical strength. Frein had told him, "Rather than learning fancy techniques, make use of those muscles of yours," so Dick had switched his weapon from a sword to a club.

Whenever Dick swung his club on top of the wall, Golbel soldiers went flying. They were slammed into the ground below and stopped moving.

If he swung the club at a ladder being raised, it shattered with ease, sending all the enemy soldiers climbing it tumbling down together.

Even among the soldiers who managed to evade Dick's storm-like attacks and climb all the way up the wall, Wickhart pierced those judged to be skilled with a single shot, while Frein's unit dealt with the rest.

We were holding our own. But the situation was still grim.

Golbel's casualties were clearly heavier than ours, but it was not as though we had escaped unscathed.

The number of soldiers who could no longer fight gradually increased.

If this continued, we would eventually have been ground down.

However, we were not without a trump card.

The YuiMei twins' unit and Hock-san, who had left the fortress earlier, began moving when the time was right.

The twins and Hock-san each commanded 1,000 soldiers.

Hock-san naturally led the Ryuzel unit, but the twins also commanded cavalry. Not ordinary cavalry, either, but heavy cavalry. They were less mobile than regular cavalry, but their defenses were strong enough to turn aside enemy arrows without concern.

Hock-san's charges were renowned for their power, while the twins' cavalry could shrug off minor attacks.

The tactics chosen by the two forces were, in a word, harassment.

They would rush in, pretending to target an enemy commander, then dart away the moment the enemy tried to respond. After that, they would taunt the enemy from a position where they could be seen; if the enemy gave chase, they would throw them off, and if the enemy ignored them, they would attack again.

Even from atop the wall, we could sense the Golbel soldiers' irritation at the cavalry units darting back and forth.

At one point, Golbel sent more than 4,000 soldiers to wipe out Hock-san and the twins' cavalry, but after being dragged all over the place, they ended up being left behind by Hock-san and the others.

It was almost like watching Hock-san and the twins' chase from the other day all over again.

The YuiMei twins called Hock-san their master.

Perhaps because of that, their needling, thoroughly obnoxious attacks resembled Hock-san's methods remarkably closely.

The back-and-forth battle continued for a long time, and by the time we no longer knew what time it was, the sun finally began to set.

"The Golbel soldiers are retreating."

Even without hearing Wickhart say it, I could see that the Golbel soldiers had begun to retreat.

"It's finally over..."

With sunset, the first day's battle came to an end.