A Wild Last Boss Appeared! Volume 4, page 22
The whistle sounded again. It happened twice more, and Phecda started to sweat. The whistle was a signal from those on the watchtower saying they saw something in the distance. The type of whistle differentiated the type and size of the enemy force, and the number of times the whistle was blown indicated how far away they were. The first set had indicated medium danger. The fortress was being attacked not by dragons, but by their followers or retainers. The second had indicated their size. The whistle had blown three times, so the enemy force was at least company size.
Then lastly, a different whistle blew, and Alphecca and Phecda nodded to each other. The last one informed them of how far away the enemy was, and this time they were about fifty kilometers away. The distance was hard to deal with; it was in the perfect spot where they would look far away, but they were close enough to close the distance in no time at all. High-leveled monsters could move at a speed that defied logic and common sense.
“Hey, what was that sound just now?”
“It’s saying that your inspection is over...” Alphecca replied to Alioth’s question with a lie.
This fortress would now become a battlefield, and they shouldn’t involve adventurers in it. That was why Alphecca lied.
“Huh? But we were told it’d take an entire day...”
“Apparently it went way faster than expected. I’m surprised too.” Alphecca pretended like it was no big deal by brushing off Alioth’s misgivings.
Alioth looked satisfied with that answer. “I guess it’s just like that sometimes?” Alioth muttered to himself, and he didn’t press any further.
“Okay then. Take Zeno and hurry on your way. Get outta here.”
“Hey, hey. You know how late it is? And didn’t you tell us that we could stay?”
“Yeah, until the inspection was done. It’s done now, so there’s no reason to let you stay.”
I bet this sounds so unreasonable to them... Honestly, if what Alphecca was saying were true, then it actually wouldn’t be that strange.
But Alphecca was a soldier. He couldn’t allow civilians to be involved in a battle. He was surely thinking that only the soldiers had to face death today, so playing the villain and forcing them out was necessary.
Turning his back to Lufas and the others, Phecda ran for the gates, meeting up with Dubhe, who had remained there. Either because of his extra stamina or because of his own wishes, he worked longer than everyone else. But right now, it wasn’t just Dubhe who was there. Everyone stationed at the fortress was gathering at the gates.
Eventually, Alphecca showed up after seeing off the carriage carrying the adventurers, which had left from the opposite side of the fortress. He was accompanied by the fortress’ staff officer, Meridiana. Meridiana would be turning seventy this year. With a remarkably long and crooked nose, she looked a lot like a witch from fairy tales. It was a sign of how backed into the corner this country was that they’d had to drag someone that old out onto the battlefield.
“Their size?”
“Around two hundred wyverns. They’re company sized.”
“Two hundred wyverns, huh...?”
Wyverns, unlike full dragons, were a different species of monster that only looked similar to dragons, but now they were under the umbrella of the powerful dragon king and would frequently mount attacks on the empire. While they weren’t as powerful as a full-fledged dragon, they were still a threat to humanity. Each one of them was around level 70-80, and there were very few people who could take a wyvern one-on-one. There were two hundred of them coming this way... In human terms, their force was easily larger than a battalion.
On the opposite side, the fortress had two thousand soldiers stationed in it. Including volunteers, captured monsters, and alchemist-made golems, the Crown Empire’s total forces exceeded one hundred thousand soldiers, and almost all of them were tasked with defending the country.
Once again, the role of the people in this fortress wasn’t to decimate the enemy. It was to report an enemy attack to the rest of the nation and buy time for them to form a retaliatory force. No one was expecting them to win.
“We have ten times their numbers... They’re confident, aren’t they?”
Alphecca was joking around, but Meridiana bit a retort. “Yeah. Confident they’ll kill all of us.”
“You got that right.”
In just pure numbers they’d be able to fight a single wyvern with ten people. But as stated earlier, wyverns were by no means weak. A highly skilled soldier like Alphecca could take a wyvern by themselves, but that would be impossible for common soldiers. Even ten to one, their chances of winning would be very low.
“How’s the report to the higher-ups?”
“I sent the messenger pigeon already. They should be getting it soon.”
“Good.”
Alphecca only asked Meridiana for the bare minimum of information before quickly changing tack to planning their course of action.
The enemy was a force of wyverns of about company size. With the usage of traps and other tactics, victory wouldn’t be impossible, but it still wouldn’t be very likely at all. It would be nothing for the main force to take out that number of wyverns, so the goal was to buy time until the main force could muster for an assured victory. There was no need for them to push themselves and lose their lives.
“This is an order to all soldiers: we will now be entering combat with the wyverns. Our goal is only to keep them from continuing their attack. There’s no need to force ourselves to defeat them.”
The force that came this time wasn’t enough to call a vanguard. To the dragons, something like this was just in the realm of poking and testing the empire. There’d be no end to it if every soldier of the empire sacrificed themselves trying to kill off the attacking forces every time. All that would happen was that the empire would eventually run out of soldiers, leaving them wide open for the dragons. So no matter what, the soldiers of the fortress needed to stop the wyverns here.
“The strategy will be Plan A. Don’t rush. We can just move like in practice. Make sure you don’t give up hope and act in desperation. Show me your guts. Struggle to live until the end without giving up. My order is this: live, even if you have to crawl through mud to do it!”
Alphecca’s short speech lit a fire under the soldiers as they responded with a war cry. In order to raise morale, Alphecca knew that he’d need to force himself to give a show to heighten their excitement. Otherwise, the soldiers would be swallowed by their fear.
Yeah, I’ll make sure I survive. I’ll survive, return, and shove this in their faces. This fight isn’t a fight to die. It’s a fight to survive.
Drawing upon their training, the soldiers all moved towards where they should have been according to the plan. As for Phecda and Dubhe, they were on standby. Their role was to engage the enemy in battle at the gates. It was the most dangerous role in the base.
The wyverns had gotten close enough to see from the foot of the gates when fire arrows were launched all at once from inside the fortress. Meridiana also cast her Fire magic in concert with the arrows, spawning a wall of fire as the arrows landed. There were barrels filled with oil around where the fire arrows were landing, camouflaged by grass and the like.
Suddenly engulfed in fire, the wyverns started to run, seeming confused. However, Alphecca simply stood with his arms crossed and didn’t react. The two alchemists that flanked him put their hands to the ground and transmuted a large wall of earth. Then, the ground under the wyverns crumbled beneath their collective weight, dropping several down a pit where there were iron spears waiting for them.
“Assault squad, charge!”
Responding to Alphecca’s order, the soldiers that were waiting in front of the gates all raised their spears at once. For spears, they were very long and seemed hard to wield. They were probably around three meters long, so they weren’t well suited for battle.
Phecda and Dubhe both picked up a spear, and the entire squad ran forward all at once.
The earthen wall that had just been made by the alchemists had holes in it to allow spears to poke through it, and the soldiers all stabbed their spears through the holes in unison. The seemingly useless length of the spears was actually to prevent counterattacks from the enemy and allow the soldiers to stab one-sidedly.
Both ends of the wall exploded simultaneously from the other side. The source was explosives that had been set there beforehand in order to stop any who would try to go around the wall. However, the wyverns weren’t limited to moving on land. Several of them reached the obvious conclusion and took to the skies. Right when they did, a hail of arrows was there to greet them. The arrows were tipped with something similar to a balloon, which broke when it hit the monsters. There was almost no damage, but it turned out to be filled with a very sticky liquid, which stuck to the wyverns and slowed their movements. The liquid also stopped the wyverns from being able to flap their wings well enough to stay in the air. One by one, they fell to the earth, forced to crawl miserably on the ground.
Of course, the soldiers wouldn’t let such a chance go. Phecda heaved his long lance upward so that the falling wyverns would skewer themselves on it. Anything that actually made it to the ground was quickly taken care of by Alphecca.
“Next spear forward!”
Phecda pulled back to collect his spear once again, and his spot was smoothly taken over by another soldier from the front line, who wasted no time in stabbing his spear through the port in the wall.
Hmm, we’ve been dealing with this battle pretty well so far. With ten dead, I suppose we’re doing well, Alphecca thought. For now, we’ve set the pace, but the fight is just beginning. The next wave will probably take a wider detour to get around the wall, and they’ll be careful of arrows too. Not to mention that the wall isn’t exactly indestructible.
If the enemy were bound to the ground, Alphecca could have considered taking a formation to encircle them, but since the wyverns could fly, a lot of strategies and formations were rendered useless. Geez... Flying is so unfair, isn’t it? Goddammit...
Alphecca charged into a wyvern that had gotten through the siege of arrows, slicing it apart as he passed. He quickly returned his sword to his sheath before looking towards the wall like what he’d just accomplished was no big deal.
There were other wyverns that had managed to get past the wall, but they were shot down thanks to Phecda’s remarkable skill with the bow. Alphecca fought the desire to whistle in appreciation. While Phecda was short, he was in excellent physical shape and a skilled archer. Not to be beat, Dubhe was facing a wyvern head-on, forcing it to submit through sheer power. It was obvious that Dubhe was a powerful fighter, and he was also one of the few people who could take a wyvern one-on-one from the front.
I don’t want to let them die... Not those guys... To Alphecca, the two were still young. They had a bright future filled with possibilities open to them, so much so that Alphecca was sure that if they survived, they’d become great enough to carve their names in history. If someone has to die, let it be someone like me, who’s lived a fairly long and fulfilling life. Young seedlings like them shouldn’t be picked ahead of their time. It was an exceedingly soft and naive thought for the battlefield, but that was exactly why Alphecca was loved and respected by his subordinates.
Alphecca’s eyes never strayed from the ongoing battle as he readied himself, preparing to react, give out orders, and make the best decisions possible no matter what happened. Even crossing his arms in a show of composure was a calculated move to reassure his soldiers. Just by standing firm, a commander greatly affected the morale of his soldiers, so even standing still was part of Alphecca’s job. But such fictitious bravado could be turned into gut-wrenching despair in an instant.
A shadow fell over the battlefield. Everyone reflexively looked up and saw the manifestation of fear. Its body was big enough to block out the light of the moon, and it was calmly looking down on the soldiers.
“A d-dragon...”
It wasn’t a mere wyvern. Right now, a real, honest-to-goodness dragon was looking at the soldiers. It surveyed them with a look that said that it was looking at trash.
No way... He definitely wasn’t there a second ago. And none of the lookouts spotted a dragon either. Did they just miss it? No way, surely not something that big? Look at it. That monster has to be, like, fifty meters long! Like, there’s no way that happened! Did... Did it fly over?! Did it come over from beyond where the lookouts could see at a speed faster than they could blow the whistle?!
People often held the misconception that dragons were slow because of their size. They were greatly misinformed. Given a day, it wasn’t impossible for the species said to be the strongest in Mizgarz to do a lap around the whole planet. Some scholars even claimed that their top speed was over a hundred times the speed of sound. According to a certain scholar, dragons were a monster that combined the strength ratio of a bug with the size of a whale.
A rhinoceros beetle could lift twenty times its own weight, and a grasshopper could jump dozens of times its own height. But that was possible only because they were so small in the first place. If they were human sized, then they would just be crushed under their own weight. Dragons had that strength in an even larger body. Even while being so huge, they could lift dozens of times their own weight and leap to the ends of the earth in a single jump. They even had human-level intelligence and could use magic. That was how powerful dragons were. Fighting a dragon meant fighting something as big as a whale with human intelligence, a bug’s strength, and magic.
“F-Fire! Fire, fire!”
In a panic, the archer squad loosed their arrows. But the attack wasn’t successful. The arrows fruitlessly bounced off its scales, failing to even cause a scratch. Dragon scales were strong. They had the hardness of diamond, but with high flexibility and toughness, and could even resist mana.
The dragon looked upon the fortress as if it were looking at an eyesore and simply started drawing breath.
“Crap, all of you, get out of there!” Alphecca screamed, and the soldiers quickly retreated. The speed of their retreat reflected the thoroughness of their daily training.
Then, the dragon released its breath, easily gouging a hole into the fortress, which should have been incredibly sturdy. As if it were taking a bite out of space itself, the breath damaged the fortress, greatly causing all the soldiers to turn pale.
Just a single breath held so much power. Just a simple action that seemed as light as blowing some lint off a desk caused so much destruction.
“No...way... The ground, there’s a furrow all the way out to...”
A dragon’s breath was its most iconic and powerful weapon. Seeing it once in person showed that off more than a thousand words ever could.
A furrow was shaved out of the ground, as if someone had used a giant shovel to clear snow all the way to the horizon. Of course, there wasn’t actually any snow around, but the ground itself was probably as soft as snow to a dragon. Walking would probably have them sink into the ground, and a breath would send it flying. A human’s and a dragon’s way of looking at the world were totally different.
They were monsters.
In that instant, Alphecca and all the other soldiers realized that they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Helheim.
It’s impossible now. Two thousand people is nowhere near enough to deal with this. No, “deal with” isn’t even the right phrase. We probably can’t even wound it.
Dragons were a mobile calamity, and fighting them wasn’t even an option. It was much like how no idiot that would try to fight a tornado with a sword existed, or how no fool existed who could psych themselves up to yell at an erupting volcano that they were its opponent. Such futility was so obvious anybody would figure it out instantly. As soon as the dragon had noticed them, they should have given up on fighting and ran.
We, the empire, were... We were wrong... This isn’t something we can stop with just two thousand soldiers and a fortress...!
The fortress held no meaning anymore. Alphecca was sure of that. After all, the dragon could just ignore the fortress if it really wanted to. With its overwhelming speed, the dragon could have just flown over and assaulted the center of the nation any time it pleased. Even if it didn’t, it could probably take down the fortress itself with a single tackle.
What do I do? How should I save even one more person? Alphecca didn’t care if he himself died. But he couldn’t allow himself to waste the lives that had been entrusted to him. They can’t be allowed to die wastefully here just because they were accompanying a talentless man like me.
While he was thinking, Phecda and Dubhe jumped in front of Alphecca to shield him as they took swipes at the dragon. Of course, they didn’t deal any damage. It was sad how little their attacks mattered.
Annoyed, the dragon opened its mouth, a flame that would immolate the tiny retaliators igniting inside it.
“S-STOOOOOPPPP!”
The dragon’s breath—never left its mouth.
The next moment, a black shadow came flying in from the side, blowing the dragon away.
It flipped once, twice, three times. In an unrealistic turn of events, the dragon was thrown back in a tailspin. One of its fangs had snapped in that one strike, and scales from its cheek had been ripped off and sent flying. The dragon hit the ground, causing it to shake and digging a furrow as it continued on into the distance.
“Apsaras!”
Following that, a bird made of water flew through the air, sweeping up the wyverns and avoiding the soldiers as if it were sentient before bursting.
The soldiers turned to look at the source of the unexpected help and saw the adventurers that should have left already.
That elf named Megrez must have cast the spell just now. Its scale and power is absurd.
Almost half of the original two hundred wyverns had disappeared in one strike, but it was still dwarfed by the first punch that had been thrown by Lufas. Of all things, the heaven-winged girl punched the dragon with her bare hands to send it flying.
