Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion - Volume 15 - Chapter 9

9. Paradise Lost

Things had gotten bad.

Well, they had been pretty bad from the moment they’d woken up without their memories, so panicking about it now wasn’t going to help.

Still, when you’ve had a long streak like this of absolutely nothing going right, there was no getting around the fact that it was exhausting.

Haruhiro and the others had taken up their own unique position in the Expeditionary Force’s camp.

They were given a tent in the same area as Jin Mogis, the red-haired general, and his associates, as well as Anthony Justeen, who was treated like a visiting staff officer, and they needed clearance to leave that area.

When the Expeditionary Force moved, the group was, of course, obligated to move with them.

Anthony had five subordinates who had come with him to defend the messenger. Formally, these men were the same as Haruhiro and his group. Basically, they were all members of the regiment that reported directly to staff officer and regimental commander Anthony.

They were under constant surveillance, but if they stuck their heads close together, it wasn’t impossible for them to talk in secret.

Haruhiro waited until night to talk with the group.

“So, about the memories thing. What do you think?”

“I don’t think we should say anything,” said Merry.

“That makes sense,” Setora agreed. “My opinion is the same as Merry’s.”

“What do you think they’re going to make us do?” Kuzaku asked. “The Expeditionary Force is here to take back Alterna, right?”

“...So we’re supposed to... help them?” Shihoru suggested.

Setora gave an unconvinced hum. “They want us to sneak into Alterna, don’t they? I wasn’t from here to begin with, but originally you people would have been well-suited for the job.”

“Nah, but the place is full of goblins, right? No way we’re getting in there...” noted Kuzaku.

“If I went on my own, I might be able to manage it.” Haruhiro mused.

“But you don’t remember it, right, Haru? Even if you could sneak in—”

“There wouldn’t be much point, huh?”

“Even if that’s not it, I’m sure they have uses for us. They can use us as disposable pawns.”

“Setora-saaan...” Kuzaku whined.

“What?”

“Could you watch your phrasing a little more...?”

“I have no intent of changing the way I speak or act. You people will have to get used to it.”

“Nah, I’m fine with it, you know? I mean, I can take a verbal beating.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“I’m not the only one here.”

“I’m fine with it, too,” Merry interjected. “The way Setora never holds back actually feels good.”

“...I think it’s better than trying to sugarcoat things...” Shihoru agreed.

“Yeah, I agree.” Haruhiro said.

“Huh? So, what? There’s no problem, then?”

“You were making a scene about nothing. Now reflect on what you’ve done and silence yourself for a while.”

“...Right, sorry...”

Even though he was bigger than any of them, Kuzaku was like everyone’s little brother. Maybe he had the disposition of the youngest child in a family. Though, it was unclear if he actually had siblings.

Being watched felt obnoxious, but the Expeditionary Force had ample supplies, so thankfully the group was provided with enough rations and water for each of them. There was a logistics corps, and personnel capable of repairing weapons and clothing. Mogis said they were a ragtag band, but in this respect they were an organized military force.

When dawn broke, the Expeditionary Force began preparing to move.

According to their superior, Anthony, the Expeditionary Force was currently forty kilometers west of Alterna. They would approach over the next three days, then launch an operation to retake the town.

“Forty kilometers in three days...”

“We’re moving with an army, remember,” Anthony explained. “And we’ll be crossing mountains along the way.”

“Mountains? You mean the Tenryus?” Haruhiro asked.

“It’s a range of mountains that juts north from the Tenryu Mountain Range. There’s a risk of being eaten by dragons, but that’s inevitable. If we were to take a route around the mountains, we’d be passing through the Quickwind Plains. With a force of this scale, it’s highly likely we would be discovered by the enemy.”

To be honest, Haruhiro had nothing but bad feelings about all this.

The Expeditionary Force was technically an army, but even an amateur like him could see they were a ragtag group that had been hastily scraped together.

First, there was the low morale of the troops. General Mogis had given the order to prepare to move, so you would expect them to pack up their tents right away, but some of the men were still sleeping, and others were taking their time eating and drinking. There was even one soldier who got his ass kicked by a superior officer for stripping out of his equipment and being half-naked, and another who fell while climbing a tree and got injured.

The soldiers of the Expeditionary Force were so undisciplined that it left Haruhiro feeling a little shocked. These guys weren’t even in the minority. The lion’s share of the force was like this, and even the officers, who swaggered around like they were important, weren’t much better. Because of that, as long as they didn’t do anything especially egregious, like running around naked and shrieking, they wouldn’t be scolded.

General Mogis must have given up on them, because he didn’t say anything until quite some time after he gave the order. He must have gotten impatient, though. He strutted right up to one soldier, and suddenly kicked him in the butt.

“We’re moving out. Get ready.”

Now, as for whether that got the soldiers moving immediately, it did not. There were a number who started dismantling their tents without much enthusiasm, but more than half were just sitting there glumly, kicking the trees, or plucking the grass.

“Whoa...” Kuzaku started to smile, but couldn’t bring himself to. “You think this is okay?”

It clearly wasn’t.

When Haruhiro first saw the group, his impression was that there were a lot of young men. Still, they all wore armor, and had swords or spears. He had figured that, while they might not necessarily be experienced, they were all presumably professional soldiers.

That might not have been true.

He wanted to be wrong about this, but most of them might actually be less capable than Haruhiro and his group.

Based on their builds and the way they moved, most of these soldiers looked like nothing more than amateurs. The idea of them bravely facing the enemy, weapons in hand, as they fought an intense life-and-death battle was something Haruhiro couldn’t possibly imagine.

Noon had passed by the time the Expeditionary Force was more or less organized enough to be able to move. When that happened, the soldiers started to complain they were hungry, and demanded something to eat. General Mogis was a patient man. Without snapping at them, he decided that they would set out after lunch. But, ultimately, by the time the sun went down, the Expeditionary Force had only dragged itself a mere five kilometers.

On the second day they began moving early in the morning, and still just barely made it 12 kilometers. It looked like they would probably cross the mountains tomorrow, no, the day after that.

That night, Anthony gathered Haruhiro and the rest of the group.

“You’ve got to be exasperated, huh?”

“Well...” Haruhiro avoided saying anything.

“I didn’t know anything about the situation in the mainland, either. I’m frontier-born, after all.” Was Anthony being self-deprecating, or looking down on the people who were mainland-born? His smile could have been read either way. “They’d told us how great the mainland was, though. Said it was a paradise, nothing like the savage frontier.”

“You went there, right, Anthony...-san?” asked Kuzaku.

Anthony lowered his eyes and nodded with a frown.

“When we came out of the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road, we entered a fortress called Spezia... and were detained there.”

They were discriminating against him as a man of the frontier. That was what Anthony thought at first, but that apparently wasn’t it. The number of mainlanders who interacted with Anthony and his men from the frontier was kept small, and they said nothing about the mainland, not even responding to questions.

“When I joined this Expeditionary Force, on the way back through the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road General Mogis told me the truth,” Anthony said with a sigh. “We were detained at Spezia because they didn’t want people in the frontier to know about the situation in the mainland, because it was no paradise...”

It had apparently been around 130 years, give or take, since the humans of the Kingdom of Arabakia escaped south of the Tenryu Mountains.

Since then, the kingdom had colonized the south, and gradually expanded their territory. They had made their return to the frontier roughly 100 years ago, and built Alterna.

Arabakians, like Anthony, who were born in the frontier — which was to say, in Alterna — were told this:

There were not tens, but hundreds of cities with large populations in the southern lands.

The fields stretched as far as the eye could see, and more livestock than could ever be counted grazed on the hills and at the base of the mountains.

Because there were mines all around that produced iron, gold, and silver, the kingdom maintained an army that numbered in the tens of thousands, and even the commoners wore fabulous jewelry.

Even further south of the southern lands, there were barbarian tribes that had not submitted to the kingdom. But these primitives were nothing but savages. The mainlanders called them monkeys, and called the war to subjugate them a hunt. It was rare for a soldier to die when out hunting. The barbarians fought among themselves, and the kingdom even stepped in to mediate between them sometimes. The king was a merciful father.

The mainland had developed industry, and the people lived in prosperity, so music, theater, and other forms of leisure were plentiful. The God of Light, Lumiaris, was widely worshiped, and the blessings of the light filled the land.

The currency used in Alterna was minted in the mainland. However, its value was completely different in each place. An object that cost one gold coin in the frontier could be bought for ten silver coins in the mainland.

In a way, there was no poverty in the mainland. Even if you lost all your wealth gambling, there were institutions that provided aid to the poor in the cities, and if you went to one of them, they would guarantee you food, water, and a roof over your head.

“It was all a big, fat lie,” Anthony said, gesturing to the soldiers of the Expeditionary Force who were lying around in the darkness, or drinking and partying. “What would these lowlifes be doing in paradise?”

According to General Mogis, the Expeditionary Force was made up of the second and third sons of farmers, of street thugs, and deserters who had been captured.

There was only one town in the mainland that was fit to be called a city: the capital. The king, the royal family, his closest retainers, and a thousand other nobles, along with somewhere between one and ten thousand people to support these privileged classes, lived in New Rhodekia, the capital of the Kingdom of Arabakia.

There were countless farming villages, but they were taxed heavily, and the people’s lives there were difficult.

The war with the “monkeys” in the south was incredibly intense. Those savages were the reason they hadn’t been able to build larger towns. The mainlanders were under constant barbarian attack, and lived in fear of pillaging.

The Kingdom of Arabakia had warred with the savages for over a century, and not only had they failed to exterminate them, they hadn’t even set foot in their strongholds to the south. The barbarians were divided into many tribes, so the kingdom would work with one tribe, having them fight another. Shrewd negotiation was how they had managed to somehow maintain a hold on their territory.

In the farming villages, the eldest child inherited the farm, so the second and younger sons either eked out a living as tenant farmers, or had to leave their village.

The youths of the farming villages flowed into New Rhodekia with no way to feed themselves. However, only a select few could find any kind of work. Ultimately, about the only options they had available to them were to join a band of criminals or volunteer for the military.

The harshness of the battlefields in the south caused constant desertions.

There were dogs tasked with chasing down fleeing deserters.

The Black Hounds.

That was the name of a special operations unit, and they specialized in the capture and reeducation, return, or even execution of deserters.

“After ten years killing savages all over the south, General Mogis was made commander of the Black Hounds,” Anthony said with a sideward glance at the general’s tent. “...I don’t know what he did to end up leading the Expeditionary Force. But, judging by the quality of the troops he’s been given, you can’t say this was a step up for him.”

According to Anthony, the Expeditionary Force was made up of a thousand men, including the logistics corps that supported them from the rear.

However, with the exception of a few dozen men like Neal the scout, who had been one of General Mogis’s proteges since his time in the Black Hounds, there were no decent soldiers in the lot. Even those with army experience were deserters from the south. They had captured a bunch of cowards who fled for their lives, and shipped them off to the frontier.

Setora sighed.

“This is going to be a real headache.”

“Based on his military record, I think the general is capable,” Anthony said in a low voice. “He must have something in mind.”

It seemed there were a variety of people with their own intentions and situations, and Haruhiro and his group were caught up in the middle of it. He would rather not have gotten involved, but it was too late for that.

The general had made a clear threat to Haruhiro. If they didn’t cooperate, they’d be killed.

The unmotivated soldiers were large in number, but not particularly scary. However, the general’s dozens of loyal subordinates were probably all experienced men like Neal. For now, they’d have to do as he said.

“Did he mention the bit about how they’re going to destroy the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road if the Expeditionary Force can’t take Alterna?” Haruhiro asked.

Anthony nodded.

“The general did say that. He probably revealed it to us because we’re not mainlanders. It seems there are agents of the king hiding among the troops.”

Those agents were under secret orders to observe the Expeditionary Force’s actions, and return to the mainland to report to the king if the situation warranted it.

For the King of Arabakia and the nobility, it wasn’t the south that was paradise, but the frontier. If possible, they wanted to return here in triumph. Even now, 100 plus years since they were driven out by the Alliance of Kings, they hadn’t abandoned that dream.

But a dream was no more than a dream.

The kingdom had its hands full just dealing with the barbarians who were running rampant. Even when Alterna fell, all they could muster was an unruly mob like this Expeditionary Force.

“If the enemy were to discover and take the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road, our Kingdom of Arabakia would be finished,” Anthony said in a cynical tone. “I’m sure they’re getting ready to cave it in before that happens, as a last resort.”

If the Expeditionary Force was soundly defeated, the king’s men would secretly break off and return to the mainland.

If the king made the decision after hearing their report, the kingdom’s dream would end, but they would be spared an invasion by the Alliance of Kings.

Kuzaku looked around.

“So you’re saying there’re spies...?”

“Even as someone born in the frontier, I was raised to have pride as a man of the Kingdom of Arabakia,” Anthony said in a pained tone of voice. “...For now, I just want to take Alterna back. It’s my hometown, after all. My comrades who died can’t rest in peace like this.”

Haruhiro didn’t know much about the king, the nobility, or the people of the mainland, but he wasn’t completely unable to empathize with Anthony.

Still, could they really retake Alterna?

The next day they advanced five kilometers east, and the Expeditionary Force prepared to cross the mountains.

Though, there wasn’t anything specific that needed doing. They were just going to rest early now that there was a mountain range that looked like it might harbor dragons in front of them.

Did General Jin Mogis really plan on taking back Alterna?

The next day, the Expeditionary Force started climbing the mountains.

The men acted scared, or masked it by fooling around, or complained about how tough the climb was. The ones around General Mogis were quiet, so they must have been from the Black Hounds, or were other proper soldiers who had not been deserters.

Just how many of them were there that could fight properly?

He tried to count, but excluding Anthony, his five subordinates, and Haruhiro’s group, there were maybe 50 of them at best.

As he was climbing in a gloomy mood, Neal the scout came over to him.

“Ever encounter a dragon before?”

Haruhiro looked at Merry.

According to her, they had been attacked by an incredibly frightening dragon that spat fire, and fought a small dragon called a wyvern. As for Haruhiro, he had apparently even ridden a dragon in some place called the Emerald Archipelago.

Naturally, he remembered none of this.

While he was wondering how to respond, “Well, yeah, a few times,” Kuzaku answered for him.

“The dragons in the Tenryu Mountains?” Neal asked.

“Nah.” Kuzaku shrugged. “But a dragon’s a dragon, right?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve killed one.”

“Not killed one, but rode it.”

“...What?”

“But not me. Haruhiro.” Kuzaku was boasting for some reason.

Neal stared at Haruhiro.

“You?”

“He may not look like much, but our leader’s awesome.” Kuzaku sounded proud this time.

No, I’m not that awesome, and what do you mean I don’t look like much? Besides, man, you don’t even remember it happening.

There were so many things to poke fun at, Haruhiro didn’t know what to do. But since they were covering up the fact they had no memories, he kept his comedic jabs to himself.

“I thought you seemed awfully calm, but that explains it, huh?” Neal smiled wryly. “If a dragon shows up, it’s all yours. I’ve only seen them from a distance. Deep down, I’m scared silly.”

“You don’t look it,” Haruhiro pointed out.

“I’m just acting tough in front of the ladies,” Neal said casually.

Suddenly, Setora came to a stop.

She looked to the south and narrowed her eyes.

Neal’s face twitched.

“Whoa, what is it? Don’t tell me...”

Setora grinned.

“Just kidding.”