MTLNOVEL Chapter 16
Part 1, Chapter 16
The thirty cavalrymen who completed their transfer to the unit the day after the rangers arrived were met with quite a sight.
“Uugh, my arms! My arms won't move!”
Rangers they recognized from the battlefield were screaming and rolling on the bare ground.
There seemed to be one slender guy among them whom they'd never seen before, but since they all looked equally wrecked, it was hard to tell them apart.
“Grrhk, my back!”
“Why do we have to dig the ground? Huh?”
The engineers and Blathyun's direct subordinates were leaning against the wall, rubbing their backs and shoulders.
‘Weren’t those guys supposed to be some kind of elite, walking around with their heads held high?’
The cavalrymen tilted their heads in confusion as they looked around.
These were soldiers and officers who had originally been stationed at Aide.
Even those folks didn’t look like they were in good shape.
“Uwaaaagh!”
A burly soldier in full plate was swinging an axe on his own, but his roar was soon drowned out by the others’ screams.
Blathyun was holding his head and groaning, while Tryaev stared blankly into the air with sunken eyes.
Amidst it all, a single young man in good shape appeared on the training ground.
A neat-looking youth with splendid platinum hair strolled past the half-dead crowd, creating a strange contrast.
“Sir Tryaev.”
“Uuugh, what’s with the ‘sir’ all of a sudden? Just call me brother.”
“Come on, have some conscience. There's an age gap.”
“I’m thirty-two!”
“And I’m twenty.”
Fade grinned.
"Plus, Sir Tryaev looks older, and I look younger, so based on appearances, there's almost a twenty-year difference, wouldn't you say?"
“Ha, to hear someone call themselves youthful with their own mouth. Unbelievable. Alright, let’s settle on ‘senior’ then. Now that I think about it, we hold the same position, so ‘sir’ might be too much.”
“Fine by me, Senior Tr.”
“Senior...Tr?”
Ah, this guy doesn’t get southern-style wit either.
Fade chuckled to himself and got back to what he originally intended to say.
“Titles aside, what happened to you? Your eyes are totally black and blue.”
“The... scribe went on strike. Kept bringing in unnecessary work without a raise.”
“Then just pay him more. You’re a centurion now, right? Shouldn’t your salary have gone up? Or you could just appoint someone as an administrator for our unit.”
“Ooh! That’s a solution!”
Tryaev jumped up.
“Junior, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders.”
"Well, if it's a position you're filling with your centurion connections, it'll probably be low pay. Additional wage payment will be unavoidable."
“Damn it all!”
Tryaev returned to his hollowed-out expression.
“I don’t exactly have money pouring out of my ears either...”
This guy’s character seems to be falling apart more and more.
It hasn't been that long since he was all formal with requests and orders...
Didn’t take long for the tough guy act to crumble…
Fade left his ink-stained senior behind and approached Blathyun, who was holding his head nearby.
“Uwaa, fifteen days, fifteen days, fifteen days, fifteeeeen daaaays!”
...Yeah, better not approach him.
In the end, Fade’s gaze turned back to the newly arrived cavalrymen.
“Thirty of you came exactly as expected.”
Fade chuckled as he stroked the warhorses.
“The horses look worn out from the long journey, so—”
He drew a training longsword.
“Let’s dismount and do a little skill check.”
A crooked grin formed on one side of Fade’s lips.
“Eh?”
The cavalrymen looked confused for a moment, then dismounted and swapped their swords for training ones.
“Then I’ll go first—”
“No, no.”
Fade raised his longsword.
“All thirty of you, come at me at once.”
He confidently rested his sword on his shoulder.
“Karun, watch closely. This is how you handle a one-against-many situation."
Even as he tossed out the words casually, Fade kept his eyes on the dismounted cavalrymen. Seeing they were still hesitating, he decided to move first.
Fwoosh!
With a burst off the ground, Fade lunged forward and thrust his sword.
The blade, flashing like a streak of steel-colored light, struck one cavalryman square in the gut, knocking him out cold.
“Uwaaah!”
Startled, the others frantically swung their swords to create distance, but Fade instead charged into the flurry of attacks.
Claaang!
With a spinning motion, his sweeping slash deflected all the incoming blades that were trying to block his advance.
Thwack-thwack-thwack!
His heavily swung training longsword struck three cavalrymen.
The three rolled across the ground, unable to put up any resistance.
Crack!
Without even a moment to process their confusion, Fade followed up with a kick that slammed into the lower half of a nearby cavalryman.
“Ugh!”
As the off-balance soldier fell, Fade used his face as a springboard and leapt into the air.
“Form up!”
Were they truly of an elite branch of cavalry?
The remaining cavalrymen were already gathering in small groups to form a defensive formation.
“Haaah!”
Fade dove in headfirst, swinging his sword down.
The combined force of his full-body strength and gravity was immense, easily overpowering several extended longswords.
Smack!
One cavalryman took a knee to the nose and toppled backward, and Fade landed squarely where the man had stood, burrowing into the center of the formation.
“Wait, turn back—!”
Claaang!
A devastating slash swept through the surrounding cavalrymen.
Had the blade been a real sharpened sword, they would all have been corpses.
“Eep!”
With nearly half already down, the remaining cavalrymen visibly paled.
“C-Centurion Fade!”
So young, yet so skilled—just as rumored, with golden-platinum hair and striking looks.
Only then did they fully realize the kind of opponent they were up against.
Well, they had already guessed he was strong and a superior officer—he did order them to attack, after all.
“W-We’re members of Centurion Tryaev’s unit…!”
A few cavalrymen said with trembling voices.
The cavalry force was to be split, with Tryaev and Fade each commanding about a dozen or so.
So Tryaev’s men figured they wouldn’t have to get hit anymore.
Until Fade spoke:
“Sorry, but I’ve already been given full authority.”
And with that—
“Here I come!”
Fade kicked off the ground once more and charged toward the cavalrymen.
***
“When the hell are we gonna stop digging this damn dirt?!”
One of the infantrymen gritted his teeth as he spoke.
He was one of the soldiers under Blathyun’s command.
They were currently doing groundwork for the construction of the second fortification line.
The second line was to be built atop a hill, but to take full advantage of the terrain, they had to flatten the rear side and extend the front ridge.
There were two ways to extend a ridge:
Build upward, or carve downward.
Blathyun chose both.
As a result, they were digging down the base of the hill to make it relatively taller, and piling the dug-up soil atop the hill—creating a cycle of excavation and construction.
“Ugh, my arms are gonna fall off!”
Karun bellowed with his characteristically loud voice.
“…But why are you guys out here shoveling?”
It wasn’t just Karun, every infantryman from Aide had brought tools and was being put to work building the fortifications.
“Well, our, centurion, said, it’s, physical, training, and, sent, everyone!”
Karun caught his breath, and then swapped his shovel for a pickaxe.
“This goddamn rockkk!”
On top of that, they were ordered not to completely destroy the rocks but to preserve them in usable sizes so they could be rolled or used for slinging later. So they had to regulate their strength during the work.
“Mm, you guys have it rough too, huh?”
That was all Blathyun had to offer in sympathy.
Wait—no, there was one more thing.
“You’ll also need to make traps and build structures, alright?”
Yeah, real morale-boosting stuff, that was.
“Huff! Huff! Huff!”
They dug out massive chunks of soil with shovels.
“My back! My baaaack!”
Carrying the mounds of dirt on their backs, they trudged up the ridge to dump it on top.
“Ahhh, agh, ughhh!”
Then they gathered the dumped soil and mixed it with others to shape it into a usable part of the ridge.
“Ah shit, I’m falling!”
Shhhhk.
A pile of dirt collapsed and slid down the ridge.
“Uwah!”
The soldiers who stepped on the rolling soil lost their balance and fell, causing the wave of dirt to swell even more.
“Goddammit!”
The soil that tumbled down partially filled the trench they were digging—and buried some of the soldiers working below.
“Ugh, I think it got in my eyes!”
“You dumbasses! Can’t you grip your damn tools tighter?!”
“Urrghh, I’m gonna die—”
“You morons! If you’ve got time to complain, get back to it! If we fall behind, it’s your loss!”
Blathyun alternated between sighing and yelling as he oversaw the work.
‘Why the hell did I agree to do all this in just fifteen days?’
Got roped into it by some cocky kid’s provocation and now here he was—putting up with hellish work and everyone’s resentment for something he didn’t even have to do in the first place.
“Captain Blathyun!”
A ranger under the garrison command came running with that strange, quicker-than-running gait they used.
“What now?”
Blathyun frowned.
The guy was one of the ones he’d sent off to build a watchtower. The fact he was back this soon—before they could even get close to finishing—meant there was trouble.
“We’ve run into some issues with the watchtower construction.”
The ranger seemed in a hurry but kept his report calm, as one would expect from someone trained in the rigorous ranger corps.
“Which of the three?”
They were building three watchtowers in total.
Two near the passable areas of the swamp, and one in the center of the forest.
“All three.”
“Grrghh… what happened?”
“The materials sent toward the swamp all sank. We’re trying to retrieve them, but…”
“Damn it, that lumber’s probably all ruined.”
“Most likely.”
“What about the one in the center?”
“The area’s full of trees and rocks, and the terrain is sloped to begin with. If we try to level it with the current manpower, it’ll take at least three to four days just for that…”
“Goddamn it!”
Blathyun cursed himself once again.
He really wished he could go back in time and shove his own fist into his loud mouth.
“Urghhh…”
Whether they understood his frustration or not, the soldiers’ shouting and screams echoed louder through the forest.
“Uwaaaaagh!”
“Shit! That bastard stepped on a trap!”
“Goddamn it, you idiot! You collapsed the whole pit!”
“Don’t climb up! You’ll bring the dirt down with you!”
***
Part 2
“Save me!”
“Shut up! Just bury that bastard!”
“Then you’ll be doing my share of the work too!”
“Quit yappin’ and haul that dirt instead, you dumbasses!”
“Uuugh, my arms hurt…!”
‘What do you even call a situation like this…’
Hmm, yeah.
—It was summer.