Chapter 310 - What Had Abnaire Done?

What had Abnaire done?

Abnaire had advanced slowly, but his march had been anything but leisurely. In truth, he had been exceedingly busy. Like a swan gliding gracefully across the surface while its feet paddled ceaselessly below, perhaps.

Starting with the spells, there was much to prepare and build. More work than erecting a fortress halfway up a mountain. That was the technique Abnaire had prepared.

“Nilf, go ahead and pile stones here. Build a wall.”

His subordinate nodded as he pointed at the map.

“That is a brutal schedule.”

“Stop flapping your mouth and move.”

He sent a loyal commander ahead. Nilf was meticulous; he would see to it himself.

Then he moved some of his troops out disguised as scouts, though in practice they operated more like an engineering unit. They built walls between the hills—the walls Encrid had encountered.

Afterward, he detached other units and sent them ahead as well, maintaining the main army’s pace. Piling stones into walls, digging up the ground, and laying traps could not be done in short order.

‘There’s no need to do it on a grand scale.’

It was only meant to catch a handful of elite soldiers. Three at most; two or one at the least. The work had to proceed with every variable calculated and every situation anticipated. And that was what Abnaire did.

People had called him brilliant since childhood. What lay at the root of that brilliance? Those who knew him counted boldness among his greatest strengths. Or, to put it another way, an audacity that caught people off guard.

[“I think you’re a little mad. All you ever propose are bold tactics that can’t actually be carried out.”]

He had been studying strategy and tactics under a teacher at the time. His fellow pupil was right. Abnaire’s strategies were bold, with little chance of being put into practice.

But what if they could be?

That was where his second strength shone. He was meticulous. Even to hunt a single rabbit, he would prepare a second trap and a third. He got what he wanted, even if it meant committing excessive resources. He always got it.

[“Doesn’t this leave us worse off? All we can get from a rabbit is a little hide and meat. But you’ve spent more than you’ll gain.”]

His fellow pupil chided him again. That was a shortsighted view. Abnaire saw things differently.

[“Thorough preparation has become a habit.”]

He brushed it off, but he had been looking beyond that one rabbit.

‘The traps in the hunting grounds can be used again. As long as we drive the rabbits this way.’

The next hunt would be twice as easy. So it was not a waste. It might look that way if one only considered a rabbit or two, but his preparations could catch deer as well. With regular maintenance, he could take a few more worthwhile animals before summer came.

Meticulousness, combined with a sound underlying framework: that was how Abnaire developed his strategies.

Of course, he could not explain all this. His fellow pupil was a noble, a member of the Ekkins clan that stood beside the royal family. If the Hurriers were Aspen’s body, the Ekkins were its head.

Abnaire was a commoner by birth. He was quick to read people and understood his circumstances well.

‘Things may be like this now, but they can change at any time.’

He had ambition, too. Clever since childhood, he knew how to seize what he wanted. He was a man who had obtained everything he sought. Rarely had he set out to accomplish something and failed. He had every reason to be confident.

It was for the same reason that he had entered the tutelage of a teacher whose abilities were merely average, but who was a noble with a gentle disposition. That, too, had been a marriage of meticulous calculation and boldness.

He had earned the enmity of a band of vagrants, then let his teacher see him fighting them on a road the man would take. None of it was coincidence, but his teacher had thought it fate.

[“Come with me. A better life awaits you.”]

[“Yes, sir.”]

It had been a calculated encounter. Abnaire had continued walking his own path afterward. Since childhood, he had wanted just one thing.

“Why should Aspen be content to remain a principality?”

A stronger, richer nation, with greater national power. It could become that. Though a principality, it had a knight order and knight-level forces. Even if its neighbor Naurilia posed a problem...

‘Aspen’s only enemy is Naurilia, but Aspen is not Naurilia’s only enemy.’

He wanted to prove his abilities. Mingled with that desire was the wish of the teacher who had truly cherished and loved him since childhood. Abnaire was human, too; affection had its effect on him.

[“I love this country, my son.”]

The man who had eventually taken him as a son. A man who knew nothing of politics, but loved his country. A man who had loved him even knowing he had been deceived. That was his teacher, and his father.

His drive to achieve more, and his teacher’s influence. Abnaire balanced the two and made them his weapon.

‘I will prove myself in this land.’

And in doing so, he would carry on part of the dream of his teacher and father.

‘Which means you have to die.’

There was probably no one in Aspen who had watched Encrid as closely as Abnaire had. He had devoured every scrap of information he could uncover. As a result, he had concluded that Encrid and the unit under him would become a major threat to Aspen—and to his dream.

‘A future knight.’

Or something greater.

His methods differed from Krais’s, but their predictions were not so different. Especially in how highly they valued Encrid’s future potential. Krais’s assessment also included bringing Encrid into the salon he would open, but the general shape was much the same.

Encrid becoming a knight: in terms of feasibility alone, Abnaire could offer several sounder reasons than Krais. Of course, he could not tell the royal family. They would call it absurd.

But what if, by a chance of one in a thousand, one in ten thousand, a knight emerged on Naurilia’s frontier? What if that knight happened to appear right on the border with Aspen?

A single knight meant a shift in national military strength. The emergence of a knight in an enemy nation could only be bad news.

‘Nothing good could come of it.’

So he would kill him.

Abnaire devised a formation called the Triangle Seal—a three-sided seal.

‘Three hills and man-made structures.’

To win a war, one had to make the terrain an ally. Abnaire did exactly that. By artificial means, he brought the terrain over to his side. He made powerful allies of the earth and sky.

Then he added a spell. It obscured the sky so the enemy could not get his bearings. It was easier than The Fog of Annihilation. That spared him the need for multiple shamans, though even this alone exhausted the shaman.

And it was only this manageable because the spell needed to last less than a day, at precisely the right moment. Otherwise, using a spell would have been out of the question.

In short, Abnaire had calculated how to drive his opponent inside, then temporarily blinded him with a spell. He had been certain it would trap him. And it had.

Place the prey inside a natural prison, then pour in over a thousand soldiers. Was that an efficient way to fight?

‘Of course not!’

Not even close. But it could ensure the death of that one man. Ensure the prey would never escape.

Twenty traps and five hunters to catch a single rabbit. What if that rabbit would one day become a crazed monster rampaging with a sword in its mouth? Was this a waste or not? Abnaire thought not.

Soon he was dispatching a dozen or so messengers without pause, issuing orders to the standard-bearers.

“Move the white standard!”

Every standard-bearer was an instrument for relaying his commands. He had chosen this method because a perfect prison could not allow its captive to hear even the beat of a drum.

With that, the Triangle Seal formation was complete. Man-made walls formed its first side. Spells and magic formed the second. A thousand soldiers formed the third and last.

‘Even a knight would not escape easily.’

This was the trap Abnaire had prepared.

* * *

The ferryman asked his question. A violet lamp swayed above the river in the dark. In its wavering light, shadows tilted, bent, and straightened.

“Wasn’t it enjoyable?”

The ferryman asked again. His face was now faintly visible. Yet even looking at it, Encrid did not speak.

The ferryman waited for an answer. None came. Time passed. Though the passage of time could not be felt in this world within the mind, the ferryman knew their meeting would soon end.

A moment later, Encrid’s body began to crumble like grains of sand before the ferryman’s eyes. A return from the inner world to the outer one. A repetition of today.

The ferryman watched Encrid scatter into tiny grains. As he departed, Encrid spoke.

“Ah.”

It was strange. As though he had only just noticed the ferryman. Had he failed to answer not because he had nothing to say, but because he had been ignoring him?

Something stirred inside the ferryman, but he buried it. He was no longer the same being who had called Encrid a son of a bitch.

“I will ask again next time.”

Only the ferryman’s words remained where Encrid had vanished.

* * *

Encrid had had no time to answer. Right up until he was about to die—or until death itself—he never accepted that any day was certain to end in his death.

Even so, he reflexively committed everything happening around him to memory. It was a habit. A habit for Review, a kind of preparation for tomorrow.

There had been far more than one or two things to take in. All the information entering his mind, the things he had naturally memorized, remembered, and needed. He sifted through them, then sifted again. There was still so much.

‘So much.’

As he pieced together the information about his surroundings, questions naturally intruded. Had they committed all those troops just to catch him? He did not know. Did the reason matter now? This was the time to accept what had happened and work through it, not dwell on questions.

Casting aside that distracting question, he retraced events in reverse order. While he was going over his memories, he heard a rustle. Naturally—he had sensed a presence the moment he opened his eyes. The same events were repeating.

There was too little time for Review. The moment he came to his senses, it was time to fight. But this was no crisis.

‘It’s thin.’

Encrid did not perceive this as a wall. Another day of desperate struggle would give him a rough grasp of everything happening around him. Two days at most, and his calculations would be complete. This was a today he could get through.

He had evaded danger countless times. Fighting Retsha of the Rose Vines, the wolf-men, and Aspen’s elite troops had been no different. Nor had plunging into the Knoll horde. Nor facing the stabbing pervert for the first time.

Some things changed, but others did not.

‘The broad course stays the same.’

And now, having experienced it once, he knew how the enemy moved.

‘Will I need a second today?’

So this was no wall. Compared with the repetitions he had endured before, it would be almost disappointingly easy.

Encrid took a step. What if he ran in a completely different direction from yesterday?

‘There must be a gap somewhere.’

Surely they had not really deployed a battalion-sized force just to catch him. To cut to the conclusion, they had.

A similar struggle played out again. A repeat of yesterday.

“My name is Sent.”

Encrid was a little surprised. He had run in a different direction from yesterday, yet the same man blocked his path.

‘Why?’

This was a repeating today. Unless he drastically altered events, things should stay the same.

His throbbing arm, his broken sword, the gladius he held in its place. The fight had not been long, but Sent’s interference had thrown his route off course.

Using Snake Sword, the first technique of his own sword art, he blocked, struck aside, and sliced through his opponent’s fingers.

CLACK-CLACK-CLACK!

The blade struck the sword’s hilt, sending blood and fingers flying. An opening appeared. The instant he saw it, his body moved instinctively.

It might not have been ‘Will,’ but the technique he had learned while trading blows with Lycanos had not deserted him. This was not his dodging sense, but a deliberately trained reflex.

“Ghk!”

He drove Spark’s point into the throat of the man choking back a scream. From striking the fingers with the gladius to bringing out Spark, it was almost a single movement. That was how swift and natural it was.

SHUNK!

SHIK!

He thrust the sword in and pulled it free. A thin jet of blood spurted from Sent’s throat.

“Grrk.”

With a hole through his vocal cords, the man clutched his neck. Blood streamed through the gaps left by his severed fingers. He fell headfirst to the ground.

“Let’s not meet again.”

As he spoke, Encrid lifted Sent’s corpse. He raised it with his left hand like a shield, and crossbow bolts flew into the mercenary’s body.

THUD-THUD-THUD!

‘They just won’t stop coming.’

There really were so many. He truly could not understand why.

Then came arrows, crossbow bolts, spears, heavy infantry, men from the Hurrier family, and mercenaries who knew how to fight. The same onslaught as yesterday.

Barely holding out, he endured and endured, then sprinted in one direction—only for others to block his path.

“Persistent bastard.”

“Carefully.”

There were four men. Clumsily bundled in gambesons for the cold, they looked like mediocre fighters to Encrid. His eyes had not deceived him. They were mediocre with weapons, but they wielded something else instead: spells.

They had blocked his path as he fled along the stream. Encrid regretted not bringing his whistle daggers.

‘No, even if I’d brought them all...’

He would have used them up by now. Everywhere he fled, an enemy ambush waited. Everywhere he headed, enemy soldiers blocked his way. It was as though a ghost were playing tricks on him. And after all that fleeing, this was where he had ended up.

“Surge forth and imprison.”