CH 125

“But the enemy outnumbers us by twenty to one. That fact still remains. Do we have a chance at victory?”

Even exhausted, Cardinal Georgis’ army numbered twenty thousand men. In contrast, the number of troops Count Meigis could deploy was at most a thousand.

Marquis Maiar also had an army, but he can’t make it in three days’ time because his domain is too far away. He can send around a hundred men, all of whom will be tasked with security around Count Meigis’ domain to maintain public order while the war is going on.

In the end, we’ll be fighting with only a thousand of Count Meigis’ army.

“No problem,” I said. “There’s absolutely no reason for us to lose.”

“Even when we are outnumbered twenty to one?”

“Even a hundred to one, the result will still be the same. They can gather all the people they want, but if they don’t know how to actually fight, they’re not a threat.”

We already expected Cardinal Georgis to start a war. So for the past two weeks, I’d been teaching the Count’s army how to fight. Not the common way of fighting in this world, but the basic tactics of group warfare that were used in BBO.

More than half of Count Meigis’s army had inferior job classes—or in other words, advanced classes in BBO. They had a wide variety of Skills, many of them specialized for group battles. Combining them together would allow them to exhibit power incomparable to a group of people with only basic classes.

Fortunately, the Count’s army was extremely balanced in terms of classes. Not all were of the inferior kind, nor were they all basic classes. Thanks to this, I managed to assemble all the Skills we needed for the battle.

I wished we had a hundred more Sages besides me, so we could execute a strategy so cruel that people would want to avert their gaze. The only regret I had this time was that we couldn’t do that. Then again, that strategy was used more for mass slaughter, rather than a war. I gotta consider what the people would think of us after the war was over.

“Supplies are ready, right?” I asked.

“Of course. In this short time, we have gathered enough provision to run the entire army for half a year.”

While I was training the army, Count Meigis was gathering supplies for the army to use. Normally, it would be difficult to suddenly gather long-term supplies for an army of a thousand, but the Count had the power of money on his side.

Thanks to the healing potion, Count Meigis—rather, the Meigis Trading Company, had plenty of funds. A whole lot of it, in fact. The Count used that to procure supplies. Even while he was stocking up, the firm’s finances were in the black, an indication of just how tremendous the profit from the medicine was.

“That’s more than enough,” I said. “Almost a waste for a war that’ll be over in a day.”

“We can still use what’s left. Don’t force it too much. You can play the short-term game, if you want. We want to reduce the number of casualties as much as possible, after all.”

“Of course, that’s part of the plan,” I said.

I checked the map of the battlefield. With this, we can use the strategy I devised during training.

◇

Three days later. We were in position in the Miles Plains, waiting for the battle to begin.

“Cardinal Georgis Cardinal has informed us that the war will begin in thirty minutes!” a communications officer said.

“Got it,” I replied.

There were rules to war in this country. Among them were designating the war zone and the date of the battle. But the most important one was the requisites to victory. A war that lasted until the last soldier was killed would only cause severe damage to both sides. To avoid such unfortunate situations, wars often had win conditions set in place.

This war was no exception. The win conditions set in this case were the surrender, death, or escape of the enemy commander.

Under normal circumstances, the general would be a noble. It was natural for a nobleman under heavy guard in the main camp to be the commander. Cardinal Georgis, as expected, made himself one.

But we were different.

“If you lose, our army will be defeated,” the Count said. “Don’t die.”

“Of course,” I replied.

We didn’t have a noble as the commander. The name indicated on the letter we sent to the Cardinal was: Eld the Adventurer. In other words, me.

“But are you sure it’s okay for me to be the commander?” I asked. “If needed, I can fight in the front lines too.”

“It’s fine. I don’t think you’ll ever be in danger even if you go to the front lines. I think it’s even safer by your side than the main camp I’m in.”

“Okay. I understand.”

Well, I didn’t plan on dying anyway, so being a commander was no problem to me at all. If there was even a remote possibility that I could die, then we wouldn’t stand a chance in this war in the first place.

I turned to the Count’s army standing by on the plains. “Are you all ready?!” I shouted, my magic-amplified voice echoing in all directions.

“Yeah!” a spirited reply came from the army.

They weren’t that well-trained to begin with. Count Meigis had never fought in a war, so the army’s job was only to maintain security in the domain.

But they had been training hard for the past two weeks. It wasn’t a gut-wrenching, unreasonable special training, but rather a training to drill logical fighting tactics into them.