Haze Fort, Vera's territory, on the eve of the Mist's landfall.
A few adventurers herded fifty-odd fat otaku Puchis to a stop outside the manor gates. The manor's servants were directing small Puchis as they carried out crate after crate of packed belongings and stuffed them into the fat otaku Puchis' round bellies.
Afterward, these Puchis would haul the manor lord's property all the way to Oath City.
Compared with delicate carriages that feared bumps, feared bogs, feared damage, and depended utterly on decent roads, fat otaku Puchis were easy to handle, coped with almost any terrain, and cost next to nothing to feed along the way. They had become the Kingdom's undisputed backbone of transport.
They even beat carriages hands down on capacity. Any Puchi Master could lead a dozen or more fat otaku Puchis at once, while a carriage needed one man and two horses to move a single cartload.
As for why the manor lord had hired a whole team of fat otaku Puchis to move house, it came down to a piece of news that had lately spread like wildfire: the Mist was coming.
Haze Fort sat right up against Lar Fortress, the westernmost node of the new defense line. If the United Kingdom failed to stop the Mist outside that line, this viscounty would be swallowed whole, and anyone still here would be in mortal danger.
The news had been out for half a month. People dreaded this calamity that had only ever existed in secondhand tales, and many families had simply packed up and fled east.
The wealthy, like this manor lord, hired fat otaku Puchi caravans to run east. Poor families had little to carry anyway; they gathered their people and their Puchis and took to the road as well.
In the old days, commoners leaving home on a long journey were gambling with their lives.
Starving, dying of sickness, being robbed and murdered by bandits: all of it was commonplace.
Not anymore. With mushrooms growing everywhere, starving was simply impossible.
As for bandits, ever since no one went hungry, their numbers had collapsed.
There was another important reason for the decline: commoners now had the power to fight back.
The world was no longer one where two or three Silver-rank experts could bully dozens or hundreds of commoners at will.
When a few dozen commoners traveled together, over a thousand Puchis trundled along behind them.
They might not have the courage to draw a blade and trade blows with bandits themselves, but they had more than enough courage to order their Puchis to ram, to spray poison, to self-destruct.
A thousand Puchis, even a thousand pure cannon fodder, was nothing a small bandit gang could handle.
Numbers were strength. That was the new logic the Puchis had brought to this world, and the fools who failed to grasp it had already died under Puchi tentacles.
A population that could move freely, however, was anything but good news for the nobility.
Land without subjects had no value.
Some minor nobles near the west had already turned to strong-arm tactics to keep their commoners from fleeing. It didn't work especially well, but it did hold on to some of the more timid souls.
Haze Fort's steward had raised the same idea with Vera, and been flatly refused.
"With the subjects gone, what becomes of your Haze Fort then?" the steward asked, looking ready to weep. He grieved over it even more than Vera did.
Vera clapped him on the shoulder. "As long as people are alive, there's a future. Cole, you've worked hard managing the territory this past year. Go take shelter too."
Things having come this far, the steward could only nod helplessly. Then he asked, "And you, my lord Viscount?"
Vera finished strapping his curved saber to his waist and flashed him a smile. "To Lar Fortress, naturally, to do my part defending my own land!"
In the end, Vera decided to bring no subordinates at all and go lend a hand at Lar Fortress like a true adventurer.
Fayling and Fayin followed him as a matter of course. What none of the three expected was that Sirian, this time, refused to come.
"I'm sorry. For certain reasons, I don't think I can go up against the Mist with you." Sirian hugged No. 5 to his chest, apology written all over his face.
"You think last time scared him off?" Fayling whispered her guess at Vera's ear.
"Fayling, shut it." Vera's rare stern tone silenced her at once. "Sirian owes us nothing. Whatever he chooses, it isn't wrong. Besides, I trust he has his reasons."
Vera bid Sirian a sincere farewell, then glanced at the Puchi in his arms. "It works out anyway. I wouldn't be easy handing No. 5 to anyone else."
"No no no, I want to go with Vera..." No. 5 squirmed, worked the tentacle holding its telepathy stone free of Sirian's grip, and reached for Vera's hand, only for the elf to calmly reel it back in.
Watching the three figures dwindle down the road, Sirian rubbed and petted the trembling No. 5 and finally let out a sigh.
It wasn't that he didn't want to go. It was that against the Mist, his presence would be a danger to Vera's group, not a help.
Those memories of his past held far too many uncertain perils.
And by the same logic, so did the Puchi in his arms.
"I hope the humans realize that soon."
Just like the Mushroom Fortress, the humans had assembled a large number of elite squads and scattered them across the Mist's line of approach.
That was the Archipelago's hard-won playbook against the Mist; the Mushroom Fortress was merely the imitator.
The difference was that the Fortress's elite squads fielded Knight Puchis that Lin Jun had spent oceans of mana creating, while the humans, though they brought Puchis too, had nothing remotely comparable in quality. Theirs could only play a supporting role.
Vera's arrival caught the commander of Lar Fortress somewhat off guard. He was the only noble who had received no orders and come running anyway.
Naturally, the commander wasn't about to send him to the most dangerous interception line, and assigned him a post inside the fortress instead.
Vera was hardly weak, but the commander didn't believe things had reached the point where nobles like him belonged on the front line.
Not that he took the Mist lightly. On the contrary, the United Kingdom had given this Mist its fullest attention.
The squads were manned by experts drawn from every corner of the Kingdom, many of them veterans of the fight against the Mist on the Archipelago.
By all past experience, holding the Mist until it ebbed should have been more than manageable.
What nobody had foreseen was that the Puchis brought along as support would stretch the Mist's difficulty range far beyond anything they knew.
When the Mist surged in, some of the elite squads immediately fell into scenarios no one had ever heard of, scenarios that belonged to no one's memory.
Some were trivial: deal with a few thugs not even Gold-rank in an unfamiliar town, and it was over. Others landed on super-battlefields of a scale beyond all precedent, where these elites were pebbles dropped into the sea. Whole squads vanished into the Mist's illusions without raising so much as a splash.
The unknown bred chaos, and it took people a long while to work out that the culprit was, of all things, the Puchis!
This wasn't Lin Jun setting them up, either. Before now, Lin Jun himself hadn't known Puchis could cause any such thing.
Squad after squad threw away their Puchis, but it was already a little late.
They had laid out three lines of interception, yet the surprises still tore a breach in the defense.
The Mist rolled through unopposed and engulfed Lar Fortress.
And Lar Fortress, at that moment, had no time at all to move out the mass of Puchis inside its walls. The entire fortress sank into an unknown illusion...
(End of Chapter)
Comments