Chapter 39: Kingdom of Cameliard -1-

"All right, our next destination is the Kingdom of Cameliard, and it'll still take a few more days to get there, so let's keep moving."

Merlin said that from the front as she idly waved her staff.

But after walking for quite a while, she suddenly stopped, slowly shut both eyes, and furrowed her brow.

"Hm? Wait a second. I'm seeing something strange with my clairvoyance."

"What is it? Is it going to rain?"

When I asked flatly, Merlin snapped her eyes open and cried out dramatically.

"There's a huge war breaking out around the Kingdom of Cameliard right now! It looks like King Rience of the Kingdom of Norgales, the ruler of North Wales, has invaded Cameliard with his army. And... damn, it looks like Guinevere, the princess of Cameliard, is being chased by King Rience's men?"

"Guinevere?"

The moment I heard that name, my brow tightened sharply.

Guinevere.

A figure who could never be left out of Arthurian legend, and the chief culprit who became the decisive cause of King Arthur's downfall and ruin.

In the original legends, Guinevere had been a woman purely devoted and faithful to King Arthur.

But later bards, especially those French bastards, wrote up a truly horrible trainwreck of a drama to prop up Lancelot, the knight from France.

The king's closest friend and greatest knight has an affair with his lord's wife, then when he gets caught, he slaughters his fellow knights and runs back to his homeland?

And on top of that, all that insane bullshit gets glorified as romance and the ultimate chivalry.

No matter how I thought about it, the adulteress Guinevere and the traitor Lancelot were exactly the kind of people I hated most.

"Oh, really? Then just leave her to die. She has nothing to do with us."

When I answered so indifferently, even coldly, Merlin recoiled in shock.

"Wh-what are you talking about, Arthur?! This is a huge opportunity! If we rescue Princess Guinevere and return her to King Leodegrance, we can gain the Round Table, a powerful ally nation, and enormous military support!"

"I don't need any of that crap."

As Merlin stood there with her mouth hanging open at what I said, Barghest, who had been listening from behind, gave a heavy nod and backed me up.

"Master is correct, Merlin. In the King Arthur legend I know from Fairy Britain, that woman named Guinevere later commits adultery with a Knight of the Round Table and becomes the chief cause of Britain's civil war and destruction."

"Whaaaat?! It really turns out like that in the future?!"

Merlin clutched her head and screamed.

"Ah, seriously! I don't have future sight, so the only fun I get is watching what's going to happen next, and how can you just spoil it that blatantly?! You've completely ruined the mood!"

Merlin stomped her feet in irritation, but Artoria, who had been listening to my conversation with Barghest, gave a snort of disbelief.

"Just how stupid and blind is this woman named Guinevere supposed to be, if she'd cheat while having a husband as perfect, handsome, and strong as my brother? I honestly can't understand it."

Morgan also folded her arms and agreed.

"I agree, little one. Setting personal feelings aside, for a woman in the position of queen to have an affair is the most foolish and vulgar thing possible, something that shakes the foundation of a nation and destroys it."

Then Barghest hesitated for a moment before carefully dropping another bombshell.

"That... the man she has the affair with is Lancelot, the one called the Knight of the Lake."

"What did you say...?"

At once, Morgan's shoulders jolted, and her eyes shook violently.

Lancelot. Back in her days as the fairy Vivian, he had been like an adopted son to her, a baby she had taken in and raised herself in the lake.

"Th-that child grows up and has an affair with Arthur's wife...? What kind of insane, perverse sacrilege is that..."

Still unable to recover from the shock, Morgan pressed a hand to her forehead.

"Ah, enough already! Whether she cheats or not, that's in the future anyway!"

Merlin, thoroughly sulking over the spoilers, grumbled and changed the subject.

"Anyway, what matters right now is King Rience. His army numbers a full ten thousand! They're smashing the Cameliard forces and pushing their way down. If we distinguish ourselves against an army of ten thousand here, our names will spread across all Britain!"

Merlin emphasized the number ten thousand with absurdly dramatic fuss.

Artoria and Kay both swallowed hard and looked tense at that number, but the Eastern Heroic Spirits in our camp, Oda Nobunaga and Ushiwakamaru, looked at each other and tilted their heads.

"Huh? Ten thousand?"

Nobu said in a bored tone as she picked at her ear with her pinky.

"Well, sure, it's a lot of people... but is that really a number worth making such a fuss over and calling a great army? Back in my prime, when I was crushing the Takeda clan, I easily marched out with an army of a hundred thousand."

Ushiwakamaru nodded in agreement and added,

"Indeed. In our Kamakura shogunate days as well, under my brother Yoritomo, forces numbering fifty thousand to a hundred thousand would gather. If it's only ten thousand, isn't that just the scale of an ordinary local war between regional lords?"

I let out a quiet snicker to myself as well.

You really couldn't apply East Asia's scale to a backwater Western village-island like Britain. China especially was a demonic realm where every time war broke out, people got fed into it by the hundred thousand or the million.

I shrugged and explained.

"From the perspective of Eastern knowledge, it's pretty common on the continent for armies in the hundreds of thousands to clash. Ten thousand would just be treated as a scouting force or a vanguard over there."

At that overwhelming continental scale, Artoria and Morgan were both aghast.

"A-a hundred thousand?! What kind of hellish land is that, where there are so many people swarming around like ants?"

"Even if you scraped together the entire population of the island of Britain, you couldn't make an army of a hundred thousand..."

Merlin let out a deep sigh and defended herself.

"Hey now! This isn't the East, it's Britain, a remote island kingdom! In the past, even the grand allied army Queen Boudica gathered by scraping together every Briton she could against the Roman Empire was only eighty thousand! For a single king to mobilize ten thousand means he's an overwhelming superpower by Britain's standards!"

At Merlin's desperate defense of Britain, I snorted and turned to Caenis and Medea.

"Hey, Greek team. If Heracles fought ten thousand British soldiers, how long do you think it'd take him to wipe them all out?"

Caenis scratched her chin and answered.

"Hm, who knows. Maybe about thirty minutes? He'd probably yawn while smashing them all to mush with his club."

Medea nodded in agreement too.

"An elephant doesn't fall just because ten thousand ants charge it. He already proved that by destroying Troy alone."

"Wh-what?! You're saying Heracles is such an overwhelming monster that he could massacre ten thousand men by himself? W-well, if it's to that extent, then I can understand what happened to my sister."

Penthesilea, who had been listening, broke out in a cold sweat and looked flustered.

I clenched my fist and grinned boldly.

"You heard them, right? My goal is to surpass Heracles. A mere ten thousand soldiers from Britain are nothing if we step in. I'm not interested in rescuing Guinevere, so let's go poke at King Rience's main force first!"

With my warlike declaration, we quickened our pace.

After walking for several more hours like that, we entered a bleak, dark forest along the road to Cameliard.

"Grrrr...!"

Between the trees of the forest, the ominous eyes of beasts flashed.

What blocked our path were not ordinary soldiers. There were dozens of werewolves with bloodshot eyes, and black magicians draped in gloomy robes.

And escorting them were armed soldiers of the Kingdom of Norgales.

"Aaaah! Save us!"

"Protect the princess!"

At the center of a clearing in the forest, where all their gazes were fixed, a splendid carriage lay wrecked and smashed.

Around it, soldiers in armor bearing the crest of the Kingdom of Cameliard had fallen bleeding, and only a tiny handful of royal guards were still surrounding the carriage, desperately fending off the werewolves' attacks.

At a glance, it was obviously the scene of a third-rate rescue drama: King Rience's men had caught up to Princess Guinevere's fleeing carriage and were attacking it.

"......"

At that painfully obvious cliché of a situation, I let out a deep sigh and pressed a hand to my forehead.

"No, seriously, why are they attacking the carriage right on the exact road we're passing through? The timing lining up this perfectly is such a pain in the ass."

Tapping the hilt of Caliburn as if I couldn't be bothered, I looked back at the others.

"Well, maybe we'll at least take a look at Guinevere's face. For now, let's clean up those bastards and the soldiers first."

No sooner had the words left my mouth than Penthesilea and Barghest sprang forward, competing with each other like wild beasts.

"Do not stand in my way, you worthless things!!"

Roaring, Penthesilea didn't even bother taking out her massive chained iron ball and instead struck the chest of a charging werewolf with her bare hand.

With a heavy bursting impact, the werewolf's ribs caved in, and it was sent flying straight into the darkness of the forest.

"I will not forgive anything that threatens Master!"

Barghest as well, with the skill worthy of Fairy Britain's greatest knight, put on an overwhelming spectacle of one-sided slaughter against trash mobs like these.

Meanwhile, Morgan, Medea, and Merlin, standing in the rear, focused on breaking the black magicians' Magecraft.

"Oh? And who exactly do you think you can curse with such low-grade Magecraft?"

When Morgan sneered and snapped her fingers, the masses of black Magical Energy the black magicians had been trying to summon lost form and scattered into the air.

"At this level of Mana, all I need to do is disperse it."

When Medea snapped her fingers, she forcibly scattered the black magicians' Magical Energy and neutralized them.

"Ah~ you're seriously such a pain~"

Merlin cast a perception-distorting illusion between the black magicians and the soldiers, leading them to attack each other.

Amid the heat of battle, Kay also displayed excellent skill.

"Whoops! There are wolf mutts crawling all over here too! Take this!"

With graceful swordsmanship, Kay struck and shattered the weapons of the charging soldiers, then exploited their openings and subdued them.

Naturally, Kay too was stronger than most knights, having trained under Ector.

Then it happened.

The soldiers of Norgales and some of the werewolves seemed to realize instinctively that things couldn't go on like this.

"No more! Even if we have to kill the target, we'll claim the merit!!"

As one soldier shouted, several of the fallen soldiers and werewolves suddenly sprang up and began sprinting at full speed toward Guinevere's carriage, their target.

"Princess!! Aaaagh!!"

The last royal guards protecting the carriage were cut down by the werewolves' claws.

The carriage door was tightly shut, but with the werewolves' claws, ripping the whole carriage apart would have been effortless.

But before they could even lay a hand on it,

Ushiwakamaru and I moved at the same time.

Booom!

A tremendous tearing sound split the air.

By the time the soldiers who had been aiming their spears at us turned around in horror, Ushiwakamaru and I were already standing in front of the carriage.

We had passed straight through the werewolves and soldiers, and were already standing with our backs to the carriage, looking down at them.

"H-hey! Be caref...!"

The people guarding the carriage cried out in shock, but Ushiwakamaru and I had already begun slowly sheathing our swords.

In that fleeting instant, our blades had already been unleashed, cut through them, and passed on.

Shing!

The moment we fully slid our swords into their scabbards, the bodies of the werewolves and soldiers charging at the carriage split into dozens of pieces and collapsed without even managing a scream.

"Wh... what...!"

The royal guards lying there bleeding were struck speechless in shock at our skill.

"Situation handled."

As I muttered that while loosening my shoulders lightly, the others also finished the battle and gathered around us.

The werewolves and black magicians had all been subdued or struck down, and the soldiers of Norgales had lost all will to resist, fleeing or surrendering.

Once the situation was under control, in the silence where relief and tension mingled, the carriage door slowly opened.

Through the corpses of the fallen soldiers around the carriage and the thick smell of blood, someone carefully stepped out from inside.

Her identity was none other than Guinevere.

"......"

I stared at her blankly.

No, wait. That's Guinevere?

My values were shaken once again.

The Guinevere I knew was an adulteress and a wicked woman, a figure twisted however those French bards pleased.

But the Guinevere standing before my eyes now... was nothing like that. She was a woman possessed of pure, innocent beauty, like a single white lily.

She looked at her wounded, panting royal guards with pity in her eyes, then slowly walked over to us and bowed her head deeply.

"You have my heartfelt thanks for saving my life. I am Guinevere, princess of the Kingdom of Cameliard."

Her voice was clear and sweet, like silver bells rolling. There was a strange nobility to it.

I felt like I could understand, at least a little, why Lancelot had fallen in love with Guinevere.

With a bitter smile, I turned an easy smile toward Guinevere.

"Nice to meet you, Princess Guinevere. I'm Arthur, Arthur Pendragon."

So a woman like this is going to have an affair?

Honestly, part of me really hopes she's the purely devoted kind, like in the original legends. It feels like far too much of a waste to hand her over to Lancelot.

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