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His nails were cut short.
Also, when the man walked, he made almost no sound.
“We came from the mainland,” the man said, then grinned. “If you’re volunteer soldiers, that makes us reinforcements. I was expecting you would welcome us.”
“Welcome...” Haruhiro mumbled, then responded with a smile.
To be honest, he was trying to hide his confusion. He wanted to be able to process the information he had. That would take time.
“Why are you here?” Merry asked the man.
“...In a place like this?”
The man shrugged. He apparently either didn’t want to answer, or couldn’t.
He looked pretty tough. Could they trust him? Haruhiro couldn’t decide.
“I’m a scout. Basically, I’m at the bottom of the heap.” He smiled, with an implied, You know how that is, right? “I have no authority. If you people accept, I’m to lead you back to camp. The commander, or someone working for him, will reveal any information you should be told.”
Camp. Commander. Information. Haruhiro mulled over what the man said as he listened.
“You were the one monitoring us last night, huh?”
“So you did notice.” The man licked his bottom lip. “You’re the same as me. A scout... No, they’d call you a thief out in the frontier, huh?”
The man spoke politely enough, but there was a roughness in his gestures and expression.
Even now, this man was evaluating Haruhiro and Merry. Here’s what he had to be thinking: If I have to kill these two, how am I going to do it?
Haruhiro was thinking much the same thing, as a matter of fact.
The man looked capable. But he didn’t feel like an opponent they couldn’t beat. With Merry here, it was two against one, but that wasn’t why. The man was clearly underestimating Haruhiro. That meant there was an opening he could work with.
That said, perhaps the man had a good reason to be so relaxed.
“And if we—” Haruhiro started.
“And if you,” the man took over for him, “are the sort of unscrupulous people who wouldn’t welcome us, I’m afraid to say I’ll have no choice but to eliminate you. If you’re not a fool, I think you’ll understand this is not an idle threat, and I say it because I can deliver on it.”
“What do you mean...?” Merry whispered.
Basically, it meant the man, or rather the Expeditionary Force, or whatever they were, were a level or two above Haruhiro’s group.
Haruhiro glanced past the man. He hadn’t noticed before now, but that was because his attention had been on the person before him.
The man had made sure it was.
There were armed men here and there throughout the forest. They weren’t standing there openly, and more than a few were sticking out halfway from behind trees or bushes.
Even at a glance, he counted ten-ish.
Haruhiro put his hands up.
“Of course we welcome you.”
There were five of them, plus Kiichi. These guys were calling themselves a military force, so there were presumably more than ten or twenty of them. They were working on a different scale.
“I mean, we welcomed you to begin with. Did it not look that way?”
“Oh, I could see it.” The man gave him a mocking smile. “I came all alone last night, though. I was confident, if we came back in force, you would definitely welcome us. If you’re going to have a party, the more the merrier, right?”
Haruhiro was the type that preferred a calm evening to a raucous celebration, but he didn’t need to rock the boat now.
“You’re right.”
“The name’s Neal.” The man walked over with large strides, and extended his right hand. “You?”
Haruhiro took the man’s hand and gave his own name.
“I’m Haruhiro.”
Neal pulled Haruhiro in close, and whispered in his ear.
“That’s a fine woman you’ve got with you.” The blood rushed to his head.
Neal seemed to see right through him as he clapped Haruhiro on the shoulder with a smile.
“That was a compliment.”
Haruhiro and Merry returned to the camp in the shadow of the rocks with Neal. They explained the situation to Kuzaku, Setora, and Shihoru, and decided to pack up and head to the Expeditionary Force’s camp.
The Expeditionary Force’s camp was more than five kilometers from the rocks, in the forest to the southwest. It was pretty close to the Tenryu Mountains, but according to Neal, they had yet to be attacked by any dragons.
There were a good 50 tents pitched in the area, and armed soldiers lay about resting or maintaining their equipment. The groups of soldiers sitting in a circle didn’t look like they were just chatting. They were rolling wooden dice, or doing something with a large number of short wooden sticks. Were they gambling, maybe?
When the soldiers noticed Haruhiro and the others, they stared, whispered to their fellows, and let out mean-spirited laughs.
Many of them were young, just a little older or even a little younger than Haruhiro and his group. There were a good number of middleaged, maybe even elderly soldiers whose beards had gone half white, too.
Frankly, they gave off a bad vibe.
Haruhiro wouldn’t really know, but there were probably regulations a military force needed to follow. These guys seemed slovenly. He’d been living in the wild, so Haruhiro wasn’t one to talk, but they looked like a bunch of barbarians.
Even under the indiscreet stares of all those soldiers, Setora seemed unperturbed. But Merry and Shihoru both looked really disgusted.
“They’ve come a long way from their hometowns to serve the military, and... Well, everyone’s on edge,” Neal explained, smirking. “It may be a little bit too stimulating for the young ladies here, but put up with them, will you? It’s not malicious.”
“Stimulating, huh?” Kuzaku seemed pretty mad. “You sure it’s not malicious? I’m having a hard time believing that.”
Neal cleared his throat, then let out a low laugh, but he didn’t respond.
They walked through the camp, which wasn’t really divided up into sections, until they came to an area where some large tents were concentrated. There was a table and chairs around it, where some people were sitting and others stood. These guys didn’t seem like the rank-and-file soldiers.
Neal walked forward, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head.
“General. I’ve brought them.”
“Well done.”
The man he called General was not unkempt like Neal and the other soldiers; he had grown a proper beard that he kept well-groomed. In terms of age, he looked forty, or somewhere thereabouts, with red hair and sharp eyes. His armor was polished, and he wore a black fur cloak over the top of it. Plus, this red-haired general was tall, even if not as tall as Kuzaku.
“You’re surviving volunteer soldiers, huh?” He had a throaty, intimidating voice.
For a moment, Haruhiro hesitated. Should he kiss up to the man? Or just act normal?
“Um, yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘Um’?”
“Yes.” Haruhiro corrected himself.
He broke into a cold sweat, and grimaced a little. The guy was pretty scary.
The general looked over to another man, who was a short distance away, standing instead of sitting in a chair.
“Do you know them, Anthony?” the general asked.
The man called Anthony shook his head.
“No, General. I have no personal acquaintances among the volunteer soldiers. I know a number of them by name, though.”
The general looked at Haruhiro with rust-colored eyes.
“What is your name?”
“It’s Haruhiro.”
It was probably best not to defy this man. He seemed kinda scary. Though, he didn’t want to be too subservient. Where was this mentality coming from? Haruhiro didn’t even know that himself.
“The others are Kuzaku, Shihoru, Merry, and Setora. Also, the nyaa’s name is Kiichi.”
“I don’t know them,” Anthony said with a shrug. “I don’t think they’re like Soma, Akira, or Renji, who even the regular forces respected.”
“Soma... Renji...” Merry whispered.
Both those names had come up in the stories Merry had told them.
“Renji enlisted at the same time as us,” Haruhiro said, then paused a moment. “We’re... members of Soma’s guild, the Day Breakers.”
He wasn’t lying, as far as he knew. He just didn’t remember the details surrounding that, either.
“Day Breakers?” The general looked to Anthony.
Anthony nodded.
“The clan is something like a platoon in the military. Soma gathered capable volunteer soldiers to form the Day Breakers. Some of them, like Akira, Rock, and Io, were famous even among us in the Frontier Army.”
“You’re in the Frontier Army?” Haruhiro asked.
Anthony nodded. “That’s right. Graham Rasentra, who was commanding the Frontier Army in Alterna, sent an envoy to the mainland to request aid. My men and I were the ones ordered to guard that envoy.”
“We don’t know the frontier,” the general said, looking to those around him. “Anthony is a valuable guide. That is why, even though it meant departing as soon as he arrived, we had him accompany the Expeditionary Force.”
“I was born in the frontier, after all,” Anthony said with a servile expression on his face. “I have no intention of living in peace and safety in the mainland. I meant to come back, either way.”
Haruhiro really couldn’t have cared less about their situation, but he sort of got the picture.
The Kingdom of Arabakia had once prospered north of the Tenryu Mountains, in the land they now called the frontier. However, when they were defeated by the Alliance of Kings led by the No-Life King, they fled south of the Tenryus. What they now called the mainland would have, a long time ago, been called the frontier.
The Kingdom of Arabakia’s largest base in the frontier, Alterna, had suddenly been attacked.
General Graham Whatshisface of the Frontier Army figured he couldn’t defend it, and asked the mainland for reinforcements.
In the end, the reinforcements came.
Or they barely made it, rather.
“It looks like there’s nothing but goblins in Alterna.” Haruhiro lowered his eyes. It was best to convey this dispassionately. “There were orcs at Deadhead Watching Keep, kobolds at Riverside Iron Fortress, and there was no one at the Lonesome Field Outpost.” “We have that information,” the general said, waving his hand.
Haruhiro didn’t immediately understand what it was they wanted from him.
Anthony decided to help him out.
“The general wants to speak with you personally.”
Obviously, there was no way that they had anything personal to talk about. The general wanted to talk in secret. Anthony was telling him that in a roundabout way.
Haruhiro glanced at his comrades, then approached the general.
The general turned away from Haruhiro, and started walking. That probably meant, Follow me.
“Our Kingdom of Arabakia no longer has any foothold in this frontier,” the general said in a low voice as he walked along at a relaxed pace. “If the king and his favored retainers back in the mainland decide that the situation is too difficult to reverse, it will put you people in a somewhat difficult spot... And us, too.”
Haruhiro couldn’t understand what the general meant if he was going to beat around the bush like this. He had no memories.
Was it better to keep that a secret? Or to be forthright and reveal it? He hadn’t been able to consult his comrades about that yet. They’d have to make up their minds soon, but right now, it was probably not a good idea to bring it up.
Actually, he couldn’t decide if it was a good idea or not. The situation was too complicated and delicate. He’d have to keep quiet for now.
“Um, so, basically...”
“The king and his close retainers will, almost certainly, attempt to sever the mainland from the frontier permanently.”
“Sever.”
“To make it impossible to travel from one to the other.”
“...I got that much.”
What was it? He felt like he’d heard something about this from Merry.
Oh, right.
In the Tenryu Mountains, or maybe it was under them, there was this secret passage, the Something-or-Other Road. The people of the Kingdom of Arabakia had originally used that road to evacuate south of the Tenryu Mountains. However, they also used it to send an army into the frontier, and build Alterna.
Even now, people and trade flowed between Alterna and the mainland using that Something-or-Other Road.
Or they had, until just recently.
Whatever the case, if they knew where the Something-or-Other Road was, it would be possible to go from the frontier to the mainland, and vice versa.
The Expeditionary Force must have traveled through the Somethingor-Other Road, too.
The general stopped walking, so Haruhiro stopped, too.
There were no tents around them, and no soldiers, either.
“If we cannot secure a base on the scale of Alterna, the king will surely destroy the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road.”
Ohhh. The official name of the Something-or-Other road was the Earth Dragon’s Aorta Road.
“...Destroy it?” Haruhiro said.
The general turned, leaning in a bit to bring his face close to Haruhiro’s.
“We’re a ragtag band, as you can see. We need all the help we can get. You’ll be cooperating, volunteer soldier. Don’t say no. We have to worry about information leaking. If you won’t obey, I’ll have no choice but to kill you.”

 
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

Chapter end