My Beloved Princess ~The Boy Called Incompetent Rises with Only a Sword and the Princess's Devotion~ - Chapter 107: The Slaves' Hero

Chapter 107: The Slaves’ Hero

Having pushed back the front lines, the noble alliance broke through the border of the Kingdom of Casteria. They invaded its territory and piled up victory after victory with each passing day.

They showed no mercy even to women and children who stood against them. It was the dragonkin way to crush their enemies thoroughly, so looting ran rampant as a matter of course in every village and town they passed through.

Looting, in particular, was also a right granted to the mercenaries as part of their reward, so they rushed to raid private homes and trampled everything with all the force they had.

Watching that plunder from a distance were the two members of Black Kirin, who had no need to loot thanks to the ample reward they had already been promised. As Kirin started preparing to leave early, Kokuren voiced his doubts.

“This just feels like bullying the weak. I don’t like it.”

“Is that so? I think it’s simply a matter of them being weak. Nothing more.”

“You’re as cold as ever, Kirin.”

Kirin gave a bitter smile. It was true that she felt nothing seeing the losers ravaged. If that made her cold, then perhaps that was exactly what she was. Still, Kirin had her own point to make.

“Just think about it. If the outcome had been reversed, what do you think would have happened? Our homeland would have been ravaged in exactly the same way.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s true, but I still think it’s wrong to place that blame on ordinary people who can’t even fight.”

“Honestly. You’re the one who’s as soft as ever, Kokuren.”

The dragonkin commoners lacked education, and many of them were little more than incarnations of strife. They wielded their strength as their instincts drove them, and then they died. That was why they did not live long.

Kokuren, on the other hand, had been born a commoner, yet there was a part of him that did not view conflict as a virtue. That was something separate from the calculating self-interest typical of the nobility. It sprang less from education than from sensibility. In short, at his core, he was soft. And that was likely why she, an oddball herself, had been drawn to him, a man with values so unlike those of a dragonkin.

But that and this were two different matters. When it came to conflict, Kirin was ruthless.

“A child we spare might grow up and kill our comrades, Shunka, or Rakuyō. If that happens, regretting it afterward will be too late.”

Rough men forced their way into a house, and screams rose up from inside.

The sounds of them ransacking the place with BANG and CRASH carried even to the far side of the street. The family’s screams cut off midway, and after that, not a single cry was heard again. Looting and slaughter always came as a set. Kokuren’s face clouded at the painful sight.

“That possibility’s vanishingly small.”

He forced the words out in a voice steeped in sorrow. His fist was clenched tight.

He hated needless sacrifice. He was a kind man. But even taking his feelings into account, all Kirin could do was shake her head regretfully.

“When that moment comes, will you really be able to tell yourself they were just unlucky? Won’t you regret not finishing them off back then? If I were the one killed, could you still say the same?”

“That’s…”

“This war has already claimed no small number of lives. In a war they started, even people who were never meant to die are losing their lives.”

“But the ones who should bear that blame are the people who led the war.”

“No, Kokuren. If you, or Shunka, or the others in our pack were sacrificed, I would join that mob without a second thought. I would crush them thoroughly with my own hands so the same tragedy would never happen again. I would show no mercy even to an infant. Even if that went against your wishes.”

Kokuren looked at her with a face on the verge of tears.

It would be a lie to say her conscience felt nothing at making the man she loved wear such an expression. But Kirin, too, had a line she would not yield.

“To me, comrades are what must come before anything else. I may be at odds with Rakuyō, and I can’t say I get along well with the other consorts either. Even so, they’re precious family to me. I’m not gentle enough to smile after someone hurts my family.”

Another house, burning in the flames of war, collapsed.

What was Kokuren thinking as the fire reflected in those black eyes? Men kicked down the door of a house and emerged carrying spoils in both hands. Standing rigid, he clenched his fists and trembled as though he might charge over and strike them at any moment.

“If my comrades were sacrificed, then of course I’d… but…”

In the end, unable to find an answer, Kokuren could only stand there.

◇◇◇◇◇

The ones supporting the front lines alongside the mercenaries were the slave soldiers.

The nobles who had joined the alliance each contributed the slaves they owned, and together those slaves formed the slave unit. Its members were the slave soldiers.

The slave soldiers were all dragonkin girls, and more than half of them were young. The moment immature young dragons were assigned there, their intended role was obvious. They were meat shields.

The mercenaries served as the vanguard for the regular troops. And the slave soldiers were used as shields for the mercenaries.

Even under such inhuman treatment, the slave soldiers did not complain. They simply obeyed in silence. They had no choice if they wanted to live.

The status of a slave was always the very lowest, beneath even the mercenaries, who were treated as guests. All drudge work also fell to the slave soldiers, and even after returning from battle, they had almost no time to rest between cooking, laundry, serving, boiling water, and preparing beds.

Kirin had thoughts of her own about that brutal environment, but she had never believed there was anything she herself could do. She, too, held the typical values of the nobility, the principle that losers ought to lose everything, and likely felt a contradiction in wanting to help slaves, the very symbol of the defeated.

The only slave Kirin had ever managed to save was her maid, Shunka.

But Kokuren was different.

Perhaps because he had lived and eaten alongside the slave soldiers for so long, he had grown attached to them. Though there was a difference in standing between mercenary and slave, Kokuren had come to deal with them beyond that barrier. He often chatted with them around the campfire, and he even helped with the work that kept them endlessly busy.

Nowhere was that change more obvious than on the battlefield.

“Kokuren. Let’s do the usual.”

“No, wait a second.”

“Where are you going, Ko…”

In the midst of a chaotic melee with both armies intermingled, the ground, still muddy after the rain, gave no footing. The battlefield had quite literally fallen into a deadlock in the mud. Yet Kokuren abruptly turned on his heel and abandoned the planned forcible breakthrough into the enemy lines they had meant to use to change the course of battle.

Where he was heading, a girl had fallen to the ground, covered in mud. Above her, a great axe was about to come crashing down.

Lowering himself as if crawling along the earth, Kokuren kicked up mud and tore across the battlefield in one burst, then cut down the large man in a single stroke. Without even stopping to watch the giant sink to the ground, he rushed to the girl, who had gone weak in the knees, and moved to help her up.

“Hey, you okay?”

“U-um…”

“Just get up. You don’t want to die in a place like this, do you?”

Casually cutting down enemy soldiers in the melee around them, Kokuren held out a hand. The girl rose with his help and hurriedly thanked him.

“Th-thank you very much.”

“No need. The ground’s muddy and slippery, so be more careful next time.”

“Y-yes!”

He left those refreshing words behind, and just when it seemed he would return, he instead detoured to another girl’s side. Kirin was exasperated, but she could not bring herself to blame him.

He shielded the slaves who were supposed to be used as arrow-catchers and became their shield instead. It was absurdly backward, but if it was like him, then it was very much like him.

“Sorry. Took me a while.”

“Honestly. You’re hopeless.”

Kirin answered the Kokuren who had finally returned after finishing all the rescues within sight with a sigh, then turned her gaze over the battlefield, where sword clashes raged.

Both sides had lost all order. Even in this muddy deadlock, the enemy soldiers were still moving in coordination, covering one another. The noble alliance army, on the other hand, showed no such movement. They did nothing but hack at whatever enemy stood before them.

As he kept cutting down the enemies rushing them one after another, Kokuren looked around as well.

“It’d be nice if they could coordinate a little better. I get that the mercenaries are just a makeshift party, but if the slaves at least worked together, I think their survival rate would go up a lot.”

“It can’t be helped. Even if you call them slaves as a whole, they belong to different packs.”

A pack was a closed community. They were generous to their own comrades, but toward anyone outside that circle, they were fiercely exclusionary and cruel.

“Besides, Shunka said before that even among slaves from the same pack, the bonds between them are thin. They’re doing all they can just to stay alive themselves. They don’t have the room to worry about others.”

“So that’s why coordination’s hard, huh? But if it lowers their survival rate, what’s the point?”

“It would be nice if the commander gave orders to that effect, but with that, it’s impossible.”

As she slammed a spinning kick into an enemy soldier while turning around, Kirin pointed far to the rear. There sat the commander on horseback, and the mustached man atop it yawned as though he had no motivation at all.

Watching that from a distance, Kokuren clicked his tongue while swinging his sword.

“That guy’s still a noble, right?”

“Yes. Since he’s been entrusted with command of the front line, he should be at least a Dragon Saint.”

“We can’t just start giving orders ourselves… can we?”

“No. If we moved the slaves around on our own, it would become a major problem.”

“Tch. Useless commander. The least he could do is make an effort to keep our side’s losses down.”

“Slaves are not people. Including us mercenaries, we’re all disposable supplies to be used up.”

“So after they burn through the expendables, the regular troops make their big entrance, huh?”

“Though if we’re here, the regular troops won’t get a turn at all.”

“True enough… uh, sorry. I’m off again.”

No sooner had he spoken than his back was already racing away, leaving a gust behind.

There was still something strange about him extending a hand to slaves with whom he had neither bond nor connection. If he ended up losing his life over that, then his packmates, herself included, would be left stranded.

“That’s one of Kokuren’s good points, though. But…”

As she dropped the enemy soldier behind her with a single backfist, Kirin let out a melancholy breath.

“At that rate, it’s impossible not to fall for him.”

Day after day, he ran about helping people on the battlefield.

Before long, Kokuren had come to be seen as a hero among the slave soldiers.

Naturally, he was popular. Given their status as slaves, there was no open approach, but even they could not fully hide their admiring gazes. He was unquestionably the support in the slaves’ hearts, their hero.

Among them, there was one slave soldier in particular he had grown especially close to.

Her name was Koharu. A girl with short hair and large eyes, seventeen years old, with an easy, friendly smile that stood out. The duty assigned to her was caring for Black Kirin.

She was at an age when she should have been attending the academy. Yet because she was a slave, Koharu had been forced into military service and cast into this harsh environment. Even so, she neither lamented nor cursed her unfortunate fate, nor did she shed tears. She was always cheerful and positive.

“Please wait just a little. I’ll get the meal ready right away.”

She got up early to prepare breakfast, then was driven out to the battlefield without even a moment to catch her breath. When she returned to base camp at dusk, she was then hounded by chores like preparing dinner, boiling water, cleaning, and laundry… She likely got almost no sleep at all.

Every day was a whirlwind. She ought to have been utterly exhausted after coming back from the battlefield, and yet she always wore a smile. The sight of her devotedly taking care of them overlapped with Shunka, the former maid.

That was probably why, even though she felt jealousy toward the Koharu who had grown attached to Kokuren, Kirin never reproached her for it.

“Koharu’s cooking really is good.”

“Really? Then you can praise me a little more, you know?”

For a dragonkin girl, being patted on the head was an irreplaceable and special reward. Koharu, who received that honour, looked so very happy that even if she let herself relax into the peace she had finally obtained, who could possibly blame her?

Kokuren glanced towards her apologetically, and Kirin answered with a silent nod.

There was one unforgettable memory involving Koharu.

Late at night, wrapped in moonless darkness.

Kirin woke to a faint sound.

Beside her, Kokuren was sleeping softly. She gently pulled the blanket back over him, then rose from the simple bed.

When she pushed aside the flap of the tent and stepped outside, only the watchfires flickered in the darkness.

She turned her gaze towards the back of the tent where the sound had come from. There were watchtowers at the four corners of the camp, but the direction did not match any of them. Kirin carefully advanced into the empty space.

Once she passed through the crowded area where the tents stood in rows, there was a makeshift supply storehouse, and the sound seemed to be coming from behind it.

THUNK! THUNK!

It was the sound of something metallic digging into the earth.

Muffling her footsteps, Kirin moved stealthily along the wall of the supply storehouse. When she leaned halfway out and peered past the corner, she saw a familiar face digging a hole beside a torch planted in the ground. At her feet, something large lay sprawled there without strength. The instant Kirin recognised what it was, she called that person’s name.

“Koharu… what are you doing?”

The orange torchlight faintly illuminated a dragon robe stained with blood and part of an arm lying on the ground. It was a person. A person was lying there.

Koharu’s face, when she turned around, was smeared all over with blood.

“Kirin-sama… why?”

“I asked what you are doing.”

She gripped Koharu’s shoulders and shook them hard as the girl stared blankly in puzzlement.

In the dead of night, after everyone had gone to sleep, she had acted to avoid attention and was trying to bury one of her own people in an empty place. Imagining the worst kind of trouble, Kirin shook her shoulders so hard they rattled, but Koharu only rubbed at her half-lidded eyes and said in a sleepy voice,

“I’m making a grave.”

Looking down at her feet once more, Kirin saw that the corpse’s face had gone faintly ashen, as though several days had already passed since death. The worst possibility, an impulsive murder brought on by some trouble, vanished, and Kirin realised she was relieved.

“Even if someone dies on the battlefield, no one will mourn them. So I’m the one doing it like this. Really, I wish I could take them back home and let them rest there instead of in a foreign land, but…”

Scratching at her bloodstained cheek, Koharu said that with a troubled look.

From morning till night she was consumed by war, and after returning she rushed around the whole time doing chores. That was Koharu’s daily life. That alone was already more than enough hard labour, and yet what in the world was she doing, cutting into her precious sleep for this?

And when Kirin looked more closely, she saw small stones neatly lined up atop mounds of earth. If each and every one of those was a gravestone, then… Kirin let out a cry almost like a scream.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been doing this every single day!?”

She went back and forth between the camp and the battlefield, carried corpses back with her, then diligently dug holes and made graves. If, on top of her daily crushing workload, she had been doing such heavy labour every day, there was no way her body could hold up. And yet Koharu smiled as if it were nothing.

“I really want to mourn all of them, but that’s pretty hard.”

“Of course it is!! Do you want to die!?”

“It’s all right. I’ve managed until now, and I’m sure I can keep managing from here on too.”

Half a year had passed since the war began.

Could it be that for half a year, she had continued these burials every single day without fail?

Kirin felt awe towards that unwavering resolve. Her heart was strong. Even if her strength was weak, the power of her will to see something through was extraordinarily great. If she herself had been in Koharu’s position, could she have done the same? No, she could not.

But that was exactly why she had to ask.

“Why would you go that far?”

“Because they’re comrades who fought beside me.”

That was all the reason there was. She had fought until today believing that the members of the slave unit, who shared the same circumstances, were her comrades, going beyond the measure of a pack.

To the dragonkin, comrades were friends, colleagues, and family.

If family died, mourning them was only natural.

She was doing nothing more than that obvious thing.

While many slaves had lost the room in their hearts to care about their comrades, she alone had not cast away that sense of fellowship. That was why she kept up the burials every single day, even at the cost of sacrificing herself.

The moment Kirin understood her feelings, that earnest devotion, tears ran down her cheeks.

“You’ve been carrying this all by yourself all this time… it must have been so hard. I’ll help too, so don’t bear it all alone anymore.”

She gently drew Koharu close and embraced her.

“I really am grateful to Kokuren-sama. Thanks to him, we’ve managed to survive again today. He’s truly a wonderful person. The reason the graves number only this many is also…”

“I know, I know… leave the rest to me. For today, get some proper rest.”

Koharu’s small body shifted modestly in her arms. Then she gave a little nod and closed her eyes as if entrusting herself to Kirin. Before long, soft sleeping breaths could be heard.

She must have already been at her limit.

Gently stroking the head of Koharu, who slept like the dead, Kirin began thinking about what she could do.