Chapter Twenty: A Pyrrhic Victory

Amasca rode his warhorse straight toward Marshal Max, who had thrown his entire reserve into the battle.

Alone, Amasca unleashed his battle aura to shield himself and endured a volley from Marshal Max’s guards. Then, with effortless grace, he swept his sword through the air, sending a blade of battle aura across the field and annihilating the marshal’s entire escort. This beheading was countless times easier than the one he had carried out in his previous battle.

With a smile, Amasca said to Marshal Max, “Your Excellency, if you wish to preserve your life, you had best order your stubborn troops to surrender.”

Marshal Max burst into laughter.

“The Franconian Empire has marshals who die in battle, but no cowards who surrender! Long live the Franconian Empire!”

With that, Marshal Max drew his pistol and shot himself, ending his life once and for all.

Amasca stared at the marshal’s corpse with an ashen expression. Those lunatics of the Franconian Empire were truly troublesome.

Having no other choice, Amasca picked up Marshal Max’s head and shouted toward the Franconian Imperial Royal Guards, promising that those who surrendered would not be killed.

The royal guards glanced at their marshal’s peaceful-looking head. Their eyes filled with even greater resolve, and they hacked at the enemy with renewed fury.

Many of them shouted, “Long live the Franconian Empire!”

Even though they knew in their hearts that the battle had already been lost, the honor of a soldier would not permit them to surrender to the enemy. As Marshal Max had said, the Franconian Empire had royal guards who died in battle, but no spineless weaklings who surrendered!

Looking at these soldiers, every bit as thickheaded as their marshal, Amasca flew into a rage and personally entered the fray to reap their heads. By then, the German Republic’s reserves had also been committed in full. There was no choice but to slaughter these warriors who intended to resist to the bitter end.

The German guards whose formations had been shattered saw their leader, Amasca, join the battle himself. Led by the propagandists, they once again charged the royal guards. In an instant, more than ten thousand German guards returned to the fight. Since the battle had descended into a melee, the lack of organized formations had little effect.

In sharp contrast to the Franconian Imperial Royal Guards were the soldiers who had fled. These men had no intention of sacrificing themselves for the empire. They were merely an army formed from the common people of the Franconian Empire, fundamentally different from the noble heirs and military elites.

They had fought well on the battlefield only because they were all veterans. They knew that defeat meant death, and so they had fought desperately.

But now, the Franconian Empire was doomed to lose no matter how one looked at it. Even Marshal Max had been beheaded. What was the point of continuing to fight? While the royal guards held back the enemy, they should seize the chance to run for their lives!

The roughly twenty thousand surviving Franconian fugitives fled in the direction from which they had come. Thanks to the royal guards and the cuirassier regiment holding back the German army, hardly any German soldiers pursued them. Most of these remnants eventually escaped back into their homeland and gained a hard-won chance to live.

With Amasca, a monstrous grand-knight-level warrior, joining the battle, the German guards’ killing efficiency increased once again. More than thirty thousand against barely five thousand—however one looked at it, victory was assured, especially with such a terrifying battle-aura grand knight among them.

The battle began in the morning and continued until evening. After fighting for an entire day, the German guards finally used their numerical advantage to wipe out every exhausted member of the Royal Guards.

The cuirassiers were naturally worn down as well. Not one of these elite soldiers of the Franconian Empire shouted for surrender, right up to the very last man.

Amasca surveyed the battlefield, strewn with corpses and severed limbs. Seeing the exhausted faces of his soldiers, he felt an overwhelming surge of pride.

I have finally won!

“Long live the German Republic! The German Republic shall surely triumph!”

As Amasca’s rousing cry rang out, cheers rose from every corner of the battlefield. Bobby and Porter lay on the ground, excitedly embracing one another as they cheered with the crowd. Their fellow soldiers watched the pair clutching each other with such passionate enthusiasm, becoming even more convinced of the rumors that the two were inseparable lovers.

Exhausted to the point of collapse, the two men had no energy to care what others thought. At that moment, they were simply celebrating the fact that they had survived.

After escaping death by such a narrow margin, Leader Amasca would certainly not treat his brothers unfairly. Once they received their rewards, they would immediately find wives and have children. The battlefield was far too damn brutal!

Amasca gazed toward the direction in which the Franconian soldiers had fled.

This time, I will truly take my place upon the stage of Europa!

After the battlefield had been cleared and cleaned, the German Republic’s gains were enormous. The captured flintlock firearms, combined with their existing stockpiles, were enough to arm fifty thousand German guards. They had also seized thirty usable cannons. The rest had been destroyed in the ferocity of the fighting.

Of course, their losses had been immense as well. After the one hundred thousand German republican troops were gathered together, only around sixty thousand remained fit for service.

The German guards had suffered even worse losses. The cuirassier regiment and the Royal Guards had been the hardest bones to chew, and the German guards had been forced to fight them in close combat despite being inferior in personal strength.

Of the one hundred thousand German guards, only a little over forty thousand remained fit for continued service. The rest had either disappeared, died in battle, or been so severely wounded or disabled that they could no longer serve. Most were seriously injured, and under the backward medical conditions of the era, these wounded men were ultimately added to the list of the dead. Only a small number survived as disabled veterans and were honorably discharged.

Amasca merged the surviving sixty thousand troops of the German Republic into the German guards and abolished the title of ordinary republican army. From then on, all newly formed units would be local garrison forces, while outstanding recruits from the training camps would be transferred directly into the German guards.

Amasca had witnessed the German guards’ tremendous popular fighting spirit, and he no longer intended to establish cannon-fodder legions. If he had not been able to suppress the unrest through the authority of his great victory, the catastrophic casualties from this battle would have caused the entire country to erupt.

Even though they had achieved a tremendous victory through foreign conquest, the people’s enthusiasm for joining the army had still fallen by an entire level.

Amasca promoted the best-performing veterans of the original German guards into junior officers. These surviving soldiers filled many of the vacancies left by fallen officers. From among the newly incorporated troops, he selected the elite and formed a fifty-thousand-man flintlock division.

The remaining fifty thousand were reorganized as soldiers armed with extra-long pikes. The wretched matchlock had been one of the chief causes of the German republican army’s heavy casualties, so Amasca decisively eliminated it from the German guards and transferred all matchlocks to the newly established local garrisons.

The German guards would rather use extra-long pike formations than those damnable matchlocks.

The newly reorganized German guards once again restored their establishment to one hundred thousand men. Having endured the baptism of hard battles, these troops had undoubtedly become far stronger.

After this victory, even the German republican soldiers who had once collapsed became more firmly convinced that the German people were destined to triumph. Under the influence of the propagandists, sooner or later these men would become just as zealous—and just as fanatical—as the German guards.