Little Tyrant Doesn’t Want to Meet with a Bad End

>The current patriarch of the Seze House, Brookley Seze, was one of them.
His bloodline ability to control fluids made a terrifying combination with the Berserk Origin Attribute.
It granted him the power to draw out a person’s blood from their wounds, making him a grim reaper on the battlefield.
It was inevitable that most enemies would feel unnerved in his presence.

Of the Theocracy’s landed nobles, the only one who could stop Duke Brookley was Carter Ascart, but the latter couldn’t possibly join the fight against the Sezes when he was the highest commander of the allied army.
For that reason, Alicia had to mobilize the Emperor of Calamity, and that had proven to be a wise decision.

The Emperor of Calamity was able to gain a slight upper hand in the battle last night, but it wasn’t able to widen its advantage as Duke Brookley utilized its ability of fluid manipulation to create bogs that severely limited its movements.

Conversely, Duke Brookley wasn’t able to inflict significant damage on the Emperor of Calamity.
The sharp water blaldes he hurled were capable of slicing an armored cavalryman cleanly into two, but it barely nicked the Eight-legged Colossal Deer’s fur.
Instead, he faced great pressure from the storm summoned by the latter’s branching deer horns instead.

As the battle between Duke Brookley and the Emperor of Calamity intensified, the weather was thrown into disarray as furious squalls were mixed with pelting rain, leaving pits of varying sizes all over the battlefield.

Neither side was able to do much about the other, so the fight ended up stalling till twilight without any clear winner.
In the end, the demonic beasts retreated under Alicia’s order.

The hours of barely fending against a legendary monster had left Duke Brookley utterly exhausted.
Out of worry that the Emperor of Calamity might appear the following night, he couldn’t participate in the battlefield as actively as he wished to anymore lest he deplete his strength.

That was also what Alicia was going for.

Her plan was to harass the Sezes with demonic beasts at night and have the Ascart soldiers attack them in the day.
Through relentless aggression, she would be able to seize the initiative and stall the advancement of the Sezes to the greatest degree.

In accordance with the plan, the Ascart soldiers charged out of the jungle at dawn, taking over the demonic beasts.

What Alicia didn’t know was that, contrary to her expectations, Duke Brookley was not planning to rest up despite having returned to the Sezes’ base camp.
There was a sharp glint in his eyes as he stared intently at a single name listed in the intelligence report he had in his hand—Alicia Ascart.

…

It’s her.

Duke Brookley thought as he stared at the same intelligence report he had made light a day ago.

He had no concrete evidence to prove that Alicia Ascart was the culprit who mobilized the Emperor of Calamity, but the very fact that an underaged girl was allowed to step onto the battlefield was illogical in the first place.
The only reason that could justify such a mobilization was that the girl played an irreplaceable role in the Ascarts’ strategy.

Duke Brookley was willing to bet his many years of experience on the battlefield that the sudden participation of the demonic beasts on the battlefield had something to do with Alicia Ascart, and he was willing to take a hefty risk for that.

His battle with the Emperor of Calamity had led him to a conclusion—it was impossible for them to defeat that colossal beast.

Given that monster’s humongous physique and oozing life force, it would likely take an expedition of several months to take it down, but the Sezes’ elite troops wouldn’t even last a single week at this rate under the Ascarts’ relentless aggression.

The enemy was clearly resorting to attrition warfare.

If things continued at the current pace, by the second ambush of the demonic beasts at nightfall, they would have practically already lost the war.

I can’t let the Ascarts have their way.
The only way out of this quandary is to kill the beast tamer.

“I know that you’re all exhausted after having gone through a night of fighting; it’s the same for me too.
However, judging from the enemy’s strategy, this will likely be the best condition we’ll be in as compared to the next few days.

“The enemy won’t stop chipping away at us, so the only way out of this is to defeat them while we’re still in a good condition,” Duke Brookley said as he gazed at the Ascarts’ cavalrymen charging toward the Sezes’ base camp.

None of the soldiers voiced any objections to his call.
Similar to how they were willing to entrust their backs to their comrades, they trusted the judgment of the experienced Duke Brookley too.

The knights wiped off the bloodstains from their armor whereas the magicians grabbed their staffs once more.
As exhausted as they were, their morale remained high.
At the forefront of the army, Duke Brookley eyed the silver-haired girl surrounded by many soldiers in the distance and let out a sigh.

“A soldier has to act against their will during times of war,” he murmured.

Duke Brookley levitated a glowing blue fluid sphere into the sky and morphed it into the shape of a miniature spear.
He directed it toward the silver-haired girl standing in the distance before unleashing the immense mana harnessed within it all at once.

A loud explosion and a cloud of dust ensued.
Blood splattered all over the ground.