Chapter 46: Reinforcements and a Ruthless Move

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Honda was not insane. This was simply the result of letting one’s position dictate one’s thinking.

In Yamato, the highest rank a commoner could attain was warrant officer. Anyone who became a commissioned officer was bound to have come from the former samurai class.

Above that, those who rose to the rank of general were essentially modern variations of the old lords and provincial magnates. The ceiling of their advancement depended solely on the standing of their family.

The failure of the northern advance meant that, once Honda returned, both he and his family would be purged.

That was something he absolutely could not bear.

Having placed his wager, he had no choice but to gamble to the very end.

Either he would win everything, or drag the entire army group into hell with him.

He knew that the Kanhoku Army, already demoralized by the deaths of its comrades, had been further weakened by supply difficulties and atrocious conditions. Only the brutal medicine of a citywide massacre could bring it back from the brink.

With ruthless decisiveness, he chose the bloodiest path—the one with the gravest consequences.

Sure enough, after General Honda announced the order to massacre the city, the army’s flagging morale rapidly soared. Yamato soldiers howled with excitement, eager to take the field.

Meanwhile, something absurd happened yet again.

After General Honda issued the order permitting the massacre, the news was immediately passed through Lieutenant Colonel Sakamoto, a Yamato traitor, to Natsume Sho, and from there to Zhang Shan.

Zhang Shan could not stop sneering inwardly.

What was this? A pillow delivered just when he was sleepy?

He immediately set the Grand Duchy of Bolia’s propaganda machine in motion. The front-page headline of the Bolia Daily read:

“General Honda, Commander-in-Chief of the Yamato Kanhoku Army, Announces: After Capturing Red Tower City and All Far Eastern Cities, We Will Massacre Them All!”

The accompanying photograph showed Yamato troops carrying out a massacre in Seris. The caption read:

“The Yamato have done this in Seris more than once.”

Why were there photographs, with evidence to match?

Perhaps many readers would not believe it, but most of the pictures had actually been taken by officers of those Yamato dogs themselves, who wished to boast of their valor and their successful slaughter of an inferior people.

Seeing photographs of innocent civilians—men, women, children, and the elderly alike—mowed down by machine guns or buried alive with their hands bound, the people of Lacia were naturally driven into a fury.

If surrender meant they would not even be allowed to beg for their lives, then they might as well fight the Yamato to the bitter end.

The enraged people of Lacia began marching through the Empire’s central provinces, demanding that the emperor declare war on Yamato.

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The point of Zhang Shan’s maneuver was not to set Lacia ablaze. He intended to roast General Honda over the flames.

If Honda denied making that promise, the Kanhoku Army’s morale would plunge straight to the bottom.

But if he acknowledged it, the matter could very well escalate into an all-out war between the two nations. Yamato might dream of conquering the entire world, but did it truly possess the ability to fight Lacia—a great power of two hundred million people—and Seris, a vast but weak nation of four hundred million, at the same time?

And so an absurd scene unfolded.

Yamato’s foreign minister actually stepped forward and declared, “What is happening in Red Tower City is merely a border conflict. Our nation has no intention of going to war with Lacia, much less of massacring any cities.”

Clearly, the faction of nobles within Yamato that opposed the Kanhoku Army had ideas of its own.

The “brain” of the Yamato Empire might wish to remain calm, but its younger brother, the Kanhoku Army, had no such intention.

Whenever there were no reporters present, General Honda proclaimed at nearly every public occasion that he intended to massacre the city. Red Tower City alone would not be enough; Barovsk would be massacred as well.

Under these circumstances, the people of Seris were astonished to discover that they had somehow become spectators on the sidelines. No—better yet, they had gained a natural ally.

Zhang Shan received a peculiar piece of news. His purchasing agent in Alrica had unexpectedly acquired a shipload of small arms: eight thousand Springfield rifles, three hundred Lewis light machine guns, a chaotic assortment of other weapons, and nearly a million rounds of matching ammunition.

Most of the equipment appeared to date from the time of the last Great War in Europa. It was old enough to have been carried by Zhang Shan’s father.

The important thing was that it was cheap—and payment was due upon delivery.

This was not a case of someone taking him for every penny. On the contrary, the total price was only seventy percent of market value: two hundred thousand dollars.

According to the agent, the man who arranged the deal was a Seris citizen from New Gold City.

Zhang Shan rubbed the space between his brows. “Fine. I have no objection to a collection of foreign-made weapons. Hand them over to the First Division of the Faith Guard.”

As he always said, no matter how varied the ammunition types, it was still better than going into battle empty-handed—or carrying a manure fork.

At worst… the logistics officer would simply have to suffer a little more.

Meanwhile, Agent Smith across the sea had managed to acquire two hundred secondhand Chevrolet 4930 military trucks for him. This two-axle, seventy-two-horsepower truck was hardly impressive, but at least it could haul a fair number of artillery pieces. The black-hearted agent charged Zhang Shan two thousand dollars apiece.

Some of the trucks had already traveled a hundred thousand kilometers.

“Black” was the only word for it.

By contrast, the Orlov family, allies of the Boliaszky family, proved remarkably honorable.

Through private channels, they sold Zhang Shan eighty trucks. When the shipment arrived, however, he discovered—good heavens—that all eighty vehicles were BT-7 tanks, and the paint had not even dried.

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The most outrageous part came afterward. Patriarch Goniev announced that he would personally bless the tanks.

The tank crews, terrified of dying, had hung three logs nearly ten meters long from the outside of the armor on each side of every BT-7. They superstitiously believed the logs would increase the tanks’ protection.

Before crossing into this world, Zhang Shan had heard the claim that logs could stop shells. It was utter nonsense.

And yet, do you know what the old patriarch did?

“In the name of Polevit, god of the mountains and forests, I proclaim that you are granted the power of Resilience!”

After sprinkling holy water over the tanks, the old man caused goat-headed halos of sacred light to appear on those utterly ordinary logs.

Zhang Shan dispatched men to test them. Yamato’s thirty-seven-millimeter popguns could barely break through a single log.

Pay attention: the log, not the BT-7’s pitiful thirteen-millimeter side armor!

Zhang Shan was stunned.

The old man, having completed the holy blessing of eighty tanks in one breath, looked faintly weak.

“My child, this is all I can do for you. Before battle, simply find any priest of the Old Saints to sprinkle them with holy water, and their protection will be guaranteed for three days.”

Zhang Shan bowed respectfully.

Ahem. As a staunch materialist, I can be devout for the moment.

After all, the end of science may very well be the occult.

It was early July. When General Honda learned that the equipment supplied by the Asgardians for Bolia’s Third Division had arrived via the Bolia Great Railway, while more than a dozen divisions of the Faith Guard were waiting for transport, he finally could not sit still.

If he had a choice, General Honda absolutely did not want to throw his precious Type A divisions into the meat grinder of urban warfare.

Reality left him no choice.

On the surface, the Kanhoku Army advanced one street—or half a street—through Red Tower City every day. Anyone who knew what they were looking at understood that the defenders were deliberately abandoning buildings that had been shattered by artillery and whose capacity to provide cover had declined, then retreating in an orderly manner.

Compared with the enormous scale of Red Tower City, such a retreat amounted to little. The attackers still had to fight their way through nearly ten kilometers of urban districts before they could threaten the city’s true heart: North Station.

Along the way, they would have to pass through two high-rise residential districts with exceptionally sturdy structures, as well as three industrial zones outside the city center, where the factory buildings had been constructed from reinforced concrete.

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