Chapter 432 — The Noble Virtue
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The magic-guided cannon carriages, drawn by packhorses, creaked and groaned their way along the rutted, treacherous dirt-and-gravel road. Fully armed Cecil combat troops formed a protective formation around the carriages, front and rear, left and right, keeping constant watch over every stir and sound upon the wasteland. Young Philip Cecil rode at the head of the column on horseback, and at the farthest reach of his gaze lay the unbroken mountains at the northernmost edge of the Southern Region.
Boulder Fortress stood among those mountains, locking them shut like a prison gate, and locking the Cecil family upon this land for a hundred years.
Today, he was going to open that gate.
Mounted scouts, three to a group, were dispatched continually from the column to reconnoiter in every direction—ahead, behind, to either flank—and to report back to the main body at all times. The column had now reached the buffer zone between Boulder Fortress and the Southern Region; vigilance must be raised.
Philip Cecil understood full well that this would be a battle utterly different from the bombardment at Gravel Ridge. At Gravel Ridge he had fought a defensive action: the noble coalition had been the attacker, and all he had needed to do was set up his artillery positions where he stood and wait for the enemy to walk into the trap. This time, he was the attacker, and everything would be different.
By the traditional noble code and the rites of war, both attacker and defender were bound to act according to the rules. Even if one side had scouted out the opponent's line of march, it must wait patiently upon the agreed field of battle until the foe entered the field, formed ranks, and gave the signal to commence—only then could it strike. This "operational procedure," more symbolic than practical, was held in the highest esteem by the nobles, for it guaranteed as far as possible the safety of the participating nobles throughout the war, and lent the whole affair an air of grace and decorum—but the bombardment at Gravel Ridge had shattered all of that.
A single cannon shot at Gravel Ridge, and the noble coalition, which had not yet finished dressing its ranks, was cut down in heaps by the Cecils' sudden assault. After that, the traditional rites of war were swept away without a trace. The nobles, having been burned once, could not possibly cling to those old rules with such pedantic stubbornness; Philip Cecil must be ready at every moment to meet an enemy surprise attack—for mighty as the arcane-crystal railgun was, the phase before its firing position was deployed was its most vulnerable.
As Philip Cecil mused, a small commotion suddenly arose nearby. He raised his head and saw several soldiers marching two tightly bound men forward.
Philip halted his horse. The two bound men wore traditional—or rather, old-fashioned—iron chainmail, with no insignia of any kind visible upon it. One of them had an arm wounded by a thermal ray gun, the wound charred black; the other showed no obvious external injuries.
The squad leader escorting the two men saluted and reported loudly: "Sir! We caught spies from Boulder Fortress—they were skulking about in the woods nearby and were spotted by our outer patrol."
The two bound captives wore expressions of fear and tension, as though the surrounding Cecil soldiers—strangely equipped and notorious for their ferocity—might devour them alive. Philip looked down at the two men from horseback and only after a long while asked: "Are you men from Boulder Fortress?"
In such a situation, denial would have been courting death. The two captives hesitated a moment, then nodded one after the other.
"Good. Don't worry, I won't have you executed," Philip Cecil said with a slight nod. "I'm going to send you back—our lord has a letter to deliver into the hands of the commander at Boulder Fortress."
……
The Cecils really had come.