Chapter 403 — Taking In the Surrendered

Unlike the noble coalition, which could only flee in panic across open country and hills, the Cecil Combat Corps had always been able to draw support from the homeland as well as from the Leslie and Kant regions. Though roads and transport imposed limits and such support never arrived in time, under these circumstances it was enough to give the soldiers a little breathing room and a chance to rotate.

On the afternoon of the tenth day, Knight Byron arrived in the west with a thousand troops from Cecil proper and a great quantity of supplies, and linked up smoothly with the First and Second Composite Corps under Philip's command. At the very moment of their meeting, Wald Perich was leading the men of the Second Corps in tying up the noble coalition prisoners in groups and sending them to the rear.

Byron found Philip, who was leading the troops: "I've brought more 'Persuader' light shells and replacement acceleration rail assemblies. Seems like things are going pretty well on your end."

Days of marching and fighting had left a trace of weariness on Philip's face, but his spirits were still high: "These came at just the right time. Food we can manage with dry rations and what we seize from the enemy, but shells—those we've really been burning through."

Byron raised his head and looked at the prisoners—numb-faced, stiff-footed, walking corpses with their hands bound. From the state of their spirits, he knew this chase was nearing its end.

"We need to keep as many of these people alive as possible. That's the lord's instruction," he said to Philip. "The vast majority of the noble coalition are peasants and hunters conscripted from every region, along with all sorts of serf-soldiers and slave-soldiers. These people are labor."

"I know," Philip said, nodding. "But to be honest... the more the enemy runs, the more they scatter. Especially after they reached open country, several nobles led their men off in different directions. We wiped out or intercepted some with artillery, but a few units still broke into the forests further west. I'd say at least a quarter to a third of the enemy got away."

"The lord expected this," Byron said with a nod. "We have powerful artillery and ray guns, but our numbers are limited after all. Wiping out or taking in every last enemy is unrealistic. But don't worry—before I set out, the lord said something: nobles have castles and estates they can't bear to leave behind. They can't keep wandering forever. One day we'll deal with the ones who ran."

"I hope so," Philip said, letting out a long breath. He raised his head and gazed at the long column of prisoners, its end almost beyond sight. "Once this war is over, the whole south of the kingdom will become one body..."

On the twelfth day of the pursuit, the knight and mage companies formed by the noble coalition's core transcendents, along with the nobles overseeing the battle, finally collapsed completely.

The nobles' private soldiers, lacking organization and discipline to begin with, could never have held out this long. The main reason they had been able to keep fleeing was that the coalition's transcendents were still holding things together with sheer willpower and the threat of force. But once those transcendents' wills too reached their limit, the collapse of the entire coalition came almost in an instant.

The noble coalition began surrendering in whole swaths, and surrendering with knights, mages, even noble lords personally leading them.

By the usual rules, nobles should have surrendered far more readily. According to the customary "rules" of noble warfare, a noble who surrendered and was captured on the battlefield would receive treatment befitting his station; as a bargaining chip for ransom, his life would be guaranteed, and he might even be escorted with every courtesy to the victor's castle as an honored guest. But the Cecil men's terrifying way of fighting, and Gao Yang Cecil's style of ignoring noble rules, had frightened those people out of their wits. They simply did not dare entrust their lives to the hands of Cecil soldiers.

Yet once both body and will had been worn down to their limit, no amount of misgiving or fear could make them rise from the ground and walk on.

Those noble soldiers who had lost their fighting spirit—knights and conscripts alike—sat on the plains like stunned goats. Most had eaten their last mouthful of food; even the warhorses they had once ridden and the rats they caught along the way had been used to fill their bellies. For days they had been unable to lie down to sleep or eat and drink in peace, and nothing was left in their heads but the thunder of exploding shells. Some clustered in dozens, some in groups of hundreds, scattered here and there across the land. All the Cecil soldiers had to do was run about the vast plains gathering these people up, then hand them ropes and let them tie themselves.

Wald Perich and the Second Combat Corps he led were chiefly responsible for gathering these prisoners and escorting them to the rear. The number of prisoners was so vast that those doing the escorting were outnumbered by the prisoners they escorted. Yet they had no need to worry about prisoners escaping along the way—those people had completely lost the will to resist over days of flight, and even if they did resist, unarmed conscript prisoners were no match for the ray guns and fusion-cut swords in the hands of Cecil's combat soldiers.

And as the prisoners grew more numerous and the front line stretched ever longer, an awkward and unexpected situation arose: Cecil was short-handed.

The Second Combat Corps' escort details began to run short. Even when Wald had the knight order transfer a thousand reserves from the Kant region to the front to take charge of prisoners, it was still far from enough—not enough for the escorting, and not even enough to guard the thousands upon thousands of noble conscript prisoners in place on the plains.

While the two orthodox knights, Philip and Wald, were fretting over this unforeseen awkward situation, Knight Byron volunteered to take a squad south to gather reinforcements.

Philip had always had a few words of criticism for Byron's slapdash manner and lack of knightly propriety, but he had to admit that this old comrade of mercenary origins always had startlingly novel ideas for dealing with unexpected situations. Sometimes his ideas made one's vision go black, but on the whole they solved problems very well.

After waiting some days in expectation, the two knights, Philip and Wald, welcomed Byron back from the rear. He had brought back only the same squad he had taken with him, and not a single man more.

On the plains of the ever more chaotic Hossman region, Philip stared in astonishment at Byron, who seemed to have returned empty-handed: "Didn't the lord give you any men? Even trainees would do..."

"I never went back to Cecil—otherwise how could I have returned so fast?" Byron said smugly. "I only made a trip to the Leslie domain and saw Viscount Andrew..."

"And then?" Philip asked, puzzled, unable to keep from looking behind Byron. But apart from the squad Byron had taken and brought back, and a good many wagons, he could see no reinforcements at all. "Are the men Viscount Andrew sent still on their way?"

"I borrowed five thousand axes," Byron said, pointing at the wagons he had brought. "Afterward Viscount Andrew will send a batch of grain as a stopgap. That's all. The Leslie domain isn't rich in manpower either—they're still helping watch the several thousand we fished out of the Whitewater River."

Philip didn't react for a moment: "Axes? What did you bring five thousand axes here for?"