Chapter 21 — The Deal Struck

Gao Yi nodded slightly. This was a young man with both courage and brains: that he could lead a mere dozen or so soldiers in escorting a great crowd of non-combatant civilians to break through spoke of his valor, and that before entering another noble's domain, knowing he could not contend with a noble, he had thought of how to preserve as much as possible of the property his lord had entrusted to him—even to the point of arranging for the soldiers to make their own way—was all the more remarkable.

So he wore a look of approval. "Well done. How many survived in total?"

Philip had in fact noticed Gao Yang in the room from the very beginning—the man's bulk was, after all, rather conspicuous. Now, hearing the question, he finally had the chance to ask: "Then you must be…"

"It seems Viscount Andrew has already told you," Hetty nodded. "This is the ancestor of House Cecil, the founding Grand Duke of Ansu, Li—"

Before she could finish, Gao Yang hurriedly cut in: "All right, all right, no need to recite that old chuunibyou's title—it gives me goosebumps just hearing it…"

Before he could finish, Philip had already dropped to one knee before Gao Yang. "Duke Gao Yang! I… I heard the news, but I never imagined it could be true! You are the model for all knights, and since I was a child I…"

"Enough, enough, will this never end!" Gao Yang hastily hauled Philip back to his feet. As an outsider who had taken over another's body, he had never felt so awkward in his life. "First tell me how many survived."

Philip barely managed to master his excitement, and his expression darkened along with the subject. "There were only a little over a thousand of us who broke out that day. After subtracting those lost to monster attacks, the gravely wounded who fell behind, and those who died of illness, fewer than nine hundred made it alive to Tansang Town…"

"Exactly how many?"

"Eight hundred and seventy-three. Of those, apart from myself, sixteen are formal soldiers, thirty are militia, and the rest are all civilians."

Rebecca swayed on her feet.

"So this is all that's left of the Cecil domain..." Heidi murmured to herself. "I never would have imagined..."

Gao Yang patted Heidi on the shoulder. "Do you know how many of us there were when we first fled out of the Gondor heartland more than seven hundred years ago?"

Heidi looked at Gao Yang. "Back then..."

"Tens of thousands," Gao Yang sighed. "So yes, the situation today is quite the headache."

Heidi said nothing.

At that same moment, in Viscount Andrew's office, the viscount himself was writing a confidential letter.

The letter was addressed directly to the king.

Because of the Gondor wasteland, Ansu had regarded the southern frontier as the kingdom's most vital buffer zone from the very founding of the realm. Even now, after long years of peace in the south, certain institutions centuries old endured in this region—for instance, every noble in the southern frontier, great or small, was a direct vassal of the Ansu royal house, and each held the right to speak with the king directly, as well as the obligation to report matters to him in person.

"To His Majesty the King, your direct vassal sends you greetings.

"You will already have learned from my previous letter of the calamity that befell the Cecil domain in the southern frontier; now new developments have arisen there. The affair is stranger than anything known before, yet I have confirmed it with my own eyes—it is true.

"Gao Yang Cecil, ancestor of the Cecil family, founding grand duke of Ansu and first of the Seven Generals, has returned to the world of the living.

"With my own eyes I saw light descend upon the wasteland of the Cecil domain, and the invading monsters were all destroyed by that light. Afterward a dragon appeared (I shall submit a separate detailed memorial concerning the dragon), and when I went in person to investigate, I stood with the Viscount Cecil and beheld the spectacle of a heroic spirit reborn..."