It’s no good. Getting her to calm down is beyond my power. Despite that thought, Calca wasn’t worried. Remedios was like a completely different person in combat.
“Ahhh, a severed head doesn’t do much for me, but I’m very glad to have your loyalty. Chief of staff, please work according to the plan to defeat him and…buy us time?”
“Of course. I’ve already sent out a vanguard.”
Calca felt a dull pain in her heart. The order just now essentially meant Send them to die. She was telling him, Take soldiers who have no chance of winning and throw them at Jaldabaoth to slow him down.
A ruler’s job was to abandon a minority to save the majority.
She had no right to complain. Soldiers would die as a result of her order, so to honor them, she had to play her role to perfection.
She had to act the part of the supreme ruler, Holy Lady adored by all.
“All right, everyone! Let’s go!”
The moment she clapped her hands, everyone leaped into motion.
4
Clutching her holy sword, Remedios cut down a demon; one of her deputies had told her what they were called, but she couldn’t remember. Imbued with holy energy, the sword delivered terrible damage to evil beings—an effect worthy of its name.
The rampaging demon tumbled to the ground emitting something like steam from its wounds and disappeared.
After only a few seconds, there was no trace that a demon had been there at all. But the victims of its violence remained.
“What have they done?!” Remedios exclaimed upon seeing the soldiers—not the vanguard but ones who had been patrolling the city—strewn upon the ground.
One’s leather armor was split, and the hand pressed desperately against his abdomen was stained bright red; pink intestines peeked out from beneath it. His face had gone past pale to bone white.
Remedios didn’t have any medical training, but she knew from experience: There was no time to take him to a surgeon. He needed immediate magical healing.
The reason this man wasn’t dead was neither a coincidence nor due to superior skills. It had to be exactly what the demon intended to do. Not that Remedios had any idea why.
Still, that didn’t mean not saving these soldiers—abandoning them—was an option. Who could forsake those brave troops who were out there fighting for their country to buy their comrades time? Above all, she was a holy knight of justice.
“Treat him!”
She was working with a team of elite paladins, but they also had a few priests with them. The order was directed at the latter.
A deputy was in her ear whispering immediately. “I think it might be better to take him to a surgeon in the rear. If the priests use their powers now, they might run out of mana in the fight against Jaldabaoth. That might be why the demo—”
“You talk too much! My order stands! Heal him to the point that he can move on his own! And—” She looked at her deputy. “I can’t hear you mumbling through your helmet! Speak clearly!”
“Uh, er, never mind…”
“Good!”
Healing magic patched the soldiers up instantly. Of course, they weren’t completely mended. It was tier-one magic—it couldn’t bring half-dead soldiers back to full health. But it helped them enough so they could move. If they were no longer on the brink of death, there wasn’t any more magic to spare for them. Remedios remembered how insistent her little sister had been about the judicious use of resources.
“Brave soldiers, listen to me. Your wounds should have been healed the minimum amount necessary. Fall back and have a surgeon take a good look at you.”
The pain of walking would surely bring tears to their eyes. But she didn’t have time to listen to whining like that. She had to reach Jaldabaoth within the allotted time.
The troops must have grasped the meaning in her gaze, because they agreed with no objections.
“Good! Then farewell!”
Remedios sprinted off in the lead. Her metal armor was lighter and easier to move in than it looked. That plus her muscular strength meant she could run faster than anyone else, but her sister, Calca, and her deputies had told her over and over not to go charging into a fight on her own, so she slowed her pace to match the others—suppressing the feeling that they had to hurry to make up for lost time.
Before too long, they arrived at their destination, a certain corner of the city.
The streets looked utterly normal, but they had already been evacuated, so there wasn’t a single soul to be seen.
“Commander! We turn right on this avenue and head straight down it. Then it’s just one more right, and we’ll come out onto the square where Jaldabaoth should be waiting. Shall we go ahead ourselves just to confirm?”
“No, we’ll wait for Holy Lady Calca and my sister, as well as the adventurers. Once everyone is here, we’ll do the final checks. Raise the flag!”
Following her order, one of her knights attached a flag to a building a short distance away. That was the signal to the other units that Remedios’s elite squad of paladins had arrived.
There were about five hundred paladins who belonged to the order. Most of them could hold their own in a fight against monsters of difficulty level 20, but some were so tough they could take on 60s. The best twenty-five of those most elite paladins formed the core of Remedios’s unit.
Incidentally, the other three hundred or so paladins she had brought to this city were headed toward the wall to prepare to meet the advancing subhuman army.
Normally, it might have been better to have all the groups work together and avoid the risk of being picked off one by one, but Jaldabaoth had that mysterious, wall-shattering, area-of-effect attack. To avoid giving him an easy target, they were operating separately. Along the same line of thought, the flag they had raised earlier was kept slightly away from the unit in case Jaldabaoth aimed for it.
“…Do you think he can use that power he broke the
