Chapter 5
“So, what are you going to do? Are you saying you’re going to negotiate?”
“Colonel. We have completed preparations to blow up the bridge.”
Lionel’s eyebrows twitched as he glared at the radio.
Explosives were already installed on the bridge where Agnes and the 5th Brigade were entangled.
This was thanks to seizing the operation command document from the captured overall commander.
According to the command document, today. The Sercadia army was scheduled to ambush on the bridge.
Although, due to the opponent not opening their mouth, they couldn’t find out the purpose of the ambush. It didn’t matter.
If they just waited idly for weapons that might arrive at any time, greater damage could occur.
That’s why, even after the previous battle, after several more engagements, the Black Iron Knights occupied the center of the 5th Brigade.
As a result, Sercadia had lost all major outer strongholds.
The remaining forces were isolated, and their only remaining infiltration route was that one. That bridge alone.
If it was for victory, it was a bridge that inevitably had to be destroyed someday.
So.
The timing was just brought forward a little.
“Shall we activate the detonator, Colonel?”
“…….”
However, an inexplicable sense of unease held back Lionel’s decision.
“Colonel?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Corel. Are you certain there are no civilians on the bridge?”
“Yes. We have already confirmed it.”
The lieutenant colonel, who had not spotted the carriage surrounded by the Sercadia army, answered with confidence.
Nevertheless, with the lingering discomfort not going away, Lionel narrowed his eyes.
Tap. Tap.
The elegant fingertips, stretched out long, began tapping on the document again.
“Colonel Valheim. Are you listening? I ask again. Do you have any intention to proceed with negotiations?”
When the minute hand of the clock had moved a few notches.
To the impatient urging flowing through the radio, Lionel stopped his movements.
“No.”
And finally.
Lionel’s head nodded up and down.
The demolition order had been given.
“There are no negotiations.”
***
“There are no negotiations.”
Rumble.
With a turbid radio sound, the bridge began to shake with a terrible noise.
“Wh-what was that just now?”
To the response different from expected, feeling that something was wrong, the Sercadia soldiers stirred.
Agnes instinctively felt an ominous sign and turned her head.
Though it was far, on the opposite side of the bridge, the Black Iron Knights in black uniforms were revealing themselves beyond the forest.
They were installing something under the bridge.
Chloe, who had unwittingly followed Agnes and looked in the same direction, let out a shrill scream.
“Wait. Is that perhaps a bomb?”
Flashing signals, ignition cables, and strange equipment shaped like iron barrels.
Agnes had seen bombs of similar shape while organizing the armory.
Clearly, those were for large-scale structure destruction.
The Black Iron Knights were trying to destroy this bridge.
“No, they would need the weapons loaded on this carriage too. There’s no reason to collapse the bridge……”
Agnes’s face turned pale white as she shook her head.
No. There is a reason.
Only then did the memory suddenly come back. The memory of the telegram her father sent to the Black Iron Knights just before departing for the north.
Agnes intuitively sensed that a misunderstanding had arisen due to the telegram.
Ruuuumble, an ominous resonance shook the bridge again.
In the terror that she might really die, Agnes shook her head vigorously.
Then, taking advantage of the
moment people were flustered, she rushed to the radio.
“No. This carriage doesn’t have real weapons-!”
However, her soft voice was soon buried in the subsequent enormous explosion.
Boom!
“……!”
Agnes realized for the first time. That if you hear too loud a noise, you end up hearing nothing at all.
She was already out of her mind.
Chloe, thoroughly frightened, began screaming. Then, she even grabbed the uniform of the nearby overall commander tightly.
“What is this? You never said something like this would happen!”
“Let go of this! How could I have known it would turn out like this!”
The overall commander shouted urgently while shaking off Chloe’s hand.
But the familiar way they spoke and their flustered expressions told that they already knew each other.
Agnes’s pupils shook greatly as she watched that scene.
“Sister, you couldn’t possibly……”
Before the words could finish, clues began connecting quickly in her mind.
The weapon inventories that hadn’t matched in quantity all this time.
The enemy’s rifle engraved with the trading company’s emblem.
The fragmentary pieces fit into one horrifying picture.
Agnes’s voice trembled.
“You…… sold weapons to the Sercadia army?”
A deep look of dismay clouded Chloe’s face.
That expression alone was enough. Being unable to deny it was the same as affirmation.
Chloe, who had been anxiously biting her nails, suddenly glared.
And she roughly grabbed Agnes, who was trying to escape the carriage, and pushed her back inside.
In that instant, an explosion rang out from another point on the bridge.
Booom!
Beyond the numbed hearing, the sensation of the carriage lifting into the air was transmitted.
Beyond the flipping vision, the image of the overall commander protectively embracing Chloe was faintly caught.
That scene felt unreal, like a dream.
Soon after, merciless gravity began pulling the carriage downward.
When hearing returned, the roar of the collapsing stone bridge shook everywhere.
“Kyaaah!”
Inside the carriage tumbling down the cliff, Agnes’s scream burst out, cutting through the air.
Inside the wildly shaking carriage, Agnes’s body bounced here and there.
Wood fragments and metal pieces flew in all directions.
The carriage door also got caught somewhere and tore off.
At the end of the shaking that felt eternal, the carriage hit the ground, and Agnes was flung out through the torn door.
“……Ugh.”
Thrown to the ground, Agnes gasped roughly.
Pain like her whole body was shattering surged in waves.
Unable even to groan properly, Agnes looked at her grotesquely bent leg.
Next to it, the shattered radio was rolling around.
Through the cracked case, with a zzzt— unstable radio wave sound, a low, rough, cracked voice flowed out.
And that voice pierced clearly into Agnes’s fading consciousness.
“I say again. There are no negotiations. We will not rescue the hostages either.”
***
Click.
Lionel slowly released the radio from his fingertips.
He stared at the smoke rising beyond the collapsed bridge in his distant view.
The space between his thick eyebrows narrowed.
It was because, at the moment the bridge exploded, he thought he heard a desperate shout from behind the radio.
Was it the scream of an enemy soldier desperate to live?
“There’s no need to care about such things.”
Lionel habitually tilted his head back to look at the sky.
He decided not to think about other possibilities from the start.
In the middle of the battlefield, dwelling on things already passed one by one was the shortcut to defeat.
Lionel fluttered his long coat hem and headed to the medical tent where Cedric was staying.
The field medical station was filled with a thick herbal medicine smell.
“How is the Major’s condition?”
“The fever isn’t coming down. It seems rust fragments were mixed in the bullet tip, and tetanus is progressing.”
As if he had stayed up several nights, dark shadows were cast under the medical officer’s eyes.
His complexion was as pale as a patient’s.
“Moreover, the location where the bullet is lodged is bad. It’s near the spine, so it needs to be removed immediately……”
The medical officer trailed off.
Surgery was needed immediately, but the situation was not favorable.
“Medicine?”
“……There is none. Not to mention antibiotics, even basic disinfectants are almost gone. Treatment is no longer possible here.”
To the despairing news, Lionel pressed his throbbing forehead.
“If we move him to the capital right now, is there hope?”
The medical officer shook his head sadly.
“In this state, the Major’s body won’t hold out.”
The only hope was if medical supplies arrived even now.
Instead of answering, Lionel placed his gloved hand beside Cedric’s bed.
The face of his younger brother, writhing in high fever, was that of a person fighting death itself.
“Brother.”
At that moment. Cedric called for Lionel with a feverish face.
“Brother, I, I want to go home. Can, can I go?”
“…….”
Lionel took a deep breath to calm his boiling insides.
Damn it.
Valheim was originally a ducal family of the empire, nobles above nobles. With a long history.
It once had such a great position that even the emperor had to bow.
It wasn’t a fate to die in a place like this, in such a state.
However, that was now just the past.
The family fell due to the false charge of treason. The previous head who led the family’s revival period died.
The only way to raise the fallen family again was to achieve military merits in war.
That’s why both Cedric and Lionel. Threw themselves into this battlefield to hold onto the single hope of reinstatement.
And now, the fruit of devoting long years to the battlefield was approaching right before their eyes.
He had received a promise from the emperor that if they won this battle, he would acknowledge their past merits and restore their status.
Just a little. They just needed to endure a very little more.
“But to end up like this not for anything else, but due to supply issues.”
A sinister voice filled with anger slipped through Lionel’s lips.
“Contact the Bardo Trading Company again. Say we’re re-requesting supplies.”
“But, will they listen? If they refuse again this time……”
“If they refuse, request again. As many times as it takes.”
The medical officer glanced at Lionel’s mood.
Lionel clenched his fist.
This wasn’t a situation to stand on pride.
But despite repeated requests, the supplies did not come.
In the end. Until Cedric took his last breath.
However, even time to grieve was not allowed to Lionel.
Lionel gritted his teeth to survive. And thus enduring one more season, he finally brought victory to the imperial army.
As a result.
Right after the victory announcement rang in the north, as promised, an imperial order came down to reinstate the Valheim family.
Adding one notification-like condition.
Namely, the condition of marriage to the daughter of Bardo.
☆▪︎▪︎▪︎☆
