Chapter 3 – Story 63: The Humiliation of Sunomuta 3 – Equestrian Archery

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“…Those are…cavalry units?”

Just as General Rakius had muttered, the ones rushing out from in-between the enemy units while whirling up a cloud of dust and sand in their wake were around a hundred elves who were riding horses. The first thing coming to mind as he watched those riders were the truce bearers who would announce the beginning of a battle.

However, at this point both armies had already given the drum signals tolling the start of hostilities. So he didn’t see much of a point in sending over messengers to declare war now after all this time.

Next he pondered whether they might be approaching in order to request an early surrender, but that was even more unlikely. No matter the circumstances, he couldn’t imagine that the slaves would capitulate without firing even a single arrow. Besides, it was custom to fly blue flags to show allegiance when intent on capitulation. Those elves not holding any such flags clearly meant that they were hostile.

But, the general couldn’t understand why the enemy would send out a cavalry unit of merely a hundred riders in such a case. Horses were originally cowardly beasts. When faced with a tight formation of soldiers who were holding up a row of shields, horses would spook long before arriving.

When it came to the capabilities of cavalry, it was basically limited to overwhelming an enemy by being high up on a horse or attacking with throwing spears while using the momentum of a mounted charge.

However, for both options it’d be weird for the cavalry to not be accompanied by infantry units. Even if they managed to overwhelm the Holmean ranks with the appearance of riders and disturb the formation with throwing spears, they wouldn’t be able to capitalize on this with the cowardly horses. The general believed that it’d be absolute nonsense to do all that, if you didn’t have your allied infantrymen charge at the disordered ranks of the enemy to widen the opening.

So, what are those riders up to?

Even as he was pondering about all of this, the elven riders kept closing the distance.

“All hands, halt! An enemy light cavalry unit is incoming!”

It wasn’t as though the General Rakius could afford to not adopt any countermeasures against the approaching cavalry. He identified the elven riders as light cavalry who would be attacking with throwing spears, and started to hurl orders at his soldiers.

“Archers, nock your arrows! Light infantry, ready your shields! Make some noise!”

Light cavalry was a formidable enemy for any grounded unit because they would use their mobility to circle around the formation and attack the flanks or rear. However, things were different if a cavalry unit was charging straight from the front like this.

After all, light cavalry was wearing light armor at most to not lower its mobility and maneuverability.

First, we’re going to shower them with a hail of our arrows once they enter our range. If they still insist on charging our ranks, we’ll meet them with our light infantry’s throwing spears. That much should be more than enough to deal with just a hundred riders.

The general planned to give the order to shoot as soon as the elves got close enough and lifted his right hand in preparation.

However.

The elven cavalry suddenly changed its course to the side right before entering the fire range. The general was confused by the elves having their horses gallop in a way that showed his unit their flank. If they were going to use a throwing spear attack, they had to face the enemy. After all, you could only use the power of your upper body when throwing a spear while straddling a horse. Hence, if you didn’t add the horse’s momentum to your throw, the penetrative force of the thrown spears wouldn’t be enough to kill a human.

General Rakius also considered the possibility of their horses arbitrarily running away after getting scared in face of his soldier’s threat. However, the elves looked way too calm about this change in course for that to be the reason.

What’s the idea behind them galloping sideways like that?

The general narrowed his eyes, staring closely to grasp the intentions of the elven cavalry even while being confused by their actions. And that allowed him to clearly witness an unbelievable spectacle.

The elves twisted their upper bodies on their galloping horses, and pointed something in the direction of his unit. Yet, they didn’t seem to be preparing to throw spears.

It almost looks as if――”

All of a sudden, General Rakius realized.

“…Bows? No way…archery while mounted…?”

At the time when the correct answer escaped the general’s lips, all hundred elves shot their arrows.

Some unfortunate soldiers had peeked out from behind their shields to watch the elves move, considering it as safe since the enemy was still quite a distance away. Those were the first to get spiked with arrows, before collapsing amidst excruciating screams of pain.

Even so, the elves didn’t stop at that. They released one salve after the other at the soldiers who only now tried to panicky hide behind their shields.

Moreover, their arrows were anything but ordinary. Even though the elves remained outside the range of Holmea’s archer unit, their own arrows packed enough of a punch for the arrow’s back part to keep trembling for a bit after piercing the shields set up by the light infantry.

General Rakius shuddered upon witnessing this. As far as he could see in the far distance, the elves only held bows that could be categorized as short bows. And yet, those bows managed to fire their arrows beyond his men’s range, in addition to applying such a mighty force to the arrows themselves. The only explanation he could come up with were Elven Bows.

However, the Elven Bows, which might as well be called legendary weapons, weren’t the reason why the general was scared.

“R-Ridiculous!! Why are cavalrymen using bows!? What does this mean!?!” General Rakius yelled at no one in specific, his voice full of anxiety and bewilderment.

Very likely, many modern people wouldn’t be able to understand the general’s surprise and bafflement. However, equestrian archery was simply that crazy an idea in this world.

In order to shed some light on the discrepancy, it’d be necessary to talk a bit about the history of cavalry and chariots on the Seldeas Continent.

When it came to mountable animals in this world, one had the option of horse or kiryuu. However, neither horse nor kiryuu naturally inhabited the western regions of ancient Seldeas. Instead, those areas had plenty of cows to offer. However, although cows would run quite fast if they felt their own life in danger, they usually moved so slowly that 「Cow’s Pace」 basically meant what snail’s pace means nowadays. For this very obvious reason, cows were ill-suited as mounts.

The first mounts to be introduced into the West were kiryuu. Although kiryuu fell short against cows when it came to strength and endurance, the bipedal kiryuu could run as fast as humans or even faster. The royals and nobles of many countries in the West were greatly delighted by this new method of travel. Now that they could let their soldiers move swiftly across the battlefield on kiryuu, it widened the battlefield and its strategic layouts to such an extent that it became even hard to compare it to the past. All countries bought kiryuu like mad, competing to build the biggest army of kiryuu.

However, they didn’t get the kiryuu as simple mounts, but as draft kiryuu for chariots. This had a simple reason. Kiryuu had a huge flaw when it came to them serving as mounts. Kiryuu could run on their two thick and muscular hindlegs, but because of their body’s structure, a rider had to sit right above those legs. Logically, this meant any shock or swaying during the kiryuu’s movement would be directly passed on to its rider. Those shocks and jolts were drastic, and when it came to running, a rider had to cling to the kiryuu for dear life, rather than normally straddling it.

A great help to imagine the sight of rider and kiryuu racing across the lands would be the ostrich races carried out in the modern world. The Internet is full of sites where you can watch pictures and videos of such races. And just as you’ll be able to understand from watching those, most of the riders will be thrown off the ostrich during full gallop, resulting in only the bird reaching the goal. It’s no exaggeration to describe the real challenge of an ostrich race to be the rider’s ability to remain on the bird throughout the entire race.

Kiryuu, on the other hand, were bigger than ostriches, and it should be easy to imagine how very difficult it would be to ride them, even if this world had already developed special saddles for the endeavor.

Moreover, for a kiryuu it was anything but simple to keep running while having a human on its back. Since it was required to carry an armored person and its own weight with just two legs, the burden was tremendous.

Compared to that, pulling a box with wheels was far easier.

The same also applied for humans. Rather than frantically using both legs and arms to cling to the kiryuu, standing firm on top of a chariot opened up many options during battle, not to mention the lessened burden.

Because of this, chariots were developed first in the West. But, that didn’t mean the armies of the west had no cavalry.

Chariots couldn’t be used on very uneven grounds or places with many obstacles. Furthermore, they had many flaws such as their inability to make tight turns. Cavalrymen riding kiryuu were used in areas where chariots were not an option, and as messengers whose priority lay with agility.

A while later, horses, which were much easier to ride than kiryuu, were also introduced into the West, but that didn’t cause much of a change on the battlefield. Even though a horse rider’s position was located on the beast’s back between forelegs and hindlegs, resulting in the impacts and jolts being far weaker and less, riders still had to use one hand to hold onto the saddle knob while using their thighs to hold onto the horse’s torso alongside the saddle.

For this reason, the horse cavalry’s weaponry was limited to one-handed weapons. There was no way a horse rider could brandish a long-handled spear like it’s depicted in manga or movies. And using both hands for a bow was out of the question.

However, Souma, as a modern Japanese person, was different. Horseback archery, an art which was still practiced in modern Japan, had weathered through the eras in the forms of Shinto rituals and competitive tournaments. Moreover, it was a famous story that mounted archers were the founding stone of the Mongol Empire, the nation said to have possessed the largest territory on the globe in the past.

Establishing mounted archers as a unit was indispensable for Souma since he assumed they’d become a mighty force to reckon with in his upcoming battles. Because of that, Souma bought huge amounts of horses through Yoash for the five years since he became the ruler of Bolnis, and poured a huge amount of funds into the rearing and feeding of those horses.

But, preparing such a huge number of horses didn’t make the creation of mounted archers any easier. After all, archery and horse-riding took a surprising amount of time to master. Not to mention that it’d likely take dozens of years when it came to mastering the use of both at the same time.

Yet, Souma didn’t give up on his dream and chose the elven women as his starting point. He believed that it’d be much better to just have them learn horse-riding, seeing how they already possessed more than enough archery skill. It followed the simple idea that it’d likely take half the time of rearing mounted archers from scratch.

With that idea, the elven women started their training after accepting his suggestion, but this allowed them to discover an unforeseen ability. Equestrian archery was supposed to be different in many parameters when compared to shooting an arrow from the ground, but the elves could easily shoot their arrows in all directions while sitting on horses and twisting their bodies.

This ability stemmed from them having originally lived up in the trees of deep forests. The elves wouldn’t go down to the ground when hunting either. As such, they would bend and twist their bodies in order to aim through the small gaps in the foliage while using shaky branches as a foothold. On other occasions, they’d stabilize their body by twining their legs around the trunks of trees.

Hence, the elves were equipped with the special skill of being able to accurately hit their targets with their arrows even while in unsteady postures.

In the eyes of the elven women, shooting arrows from a horse that used Souma’s revolutionary discovery of stirrup was nothing worthy of mention.

The elves and the stirrup brought into this world by Souma; combining these two factors gave birth to the very first mounted archers of ancient Seldeas.

However, even if you left the elves out of the equation, Souma never tried to hide the stirrup, so it was possible for mounted archers to crop up in Holmea, too. And as a matter of fact, stirrups spread to Holmea through Jeboa’s merchants because of their usefulness.

But, Holmea deliberately avoided adopting stirrups for its cavalry. This was a measure of the army to protect its vested interests.

As mentioned many times over, horse-riding required riches to keep horses and training from an early age to become good at riding horses. Because of that, horse-riding was restricted to the young sons of nobles and wealthy people or those receiving assistance from the Kingdom. In other words, being able to ride a horse was a status symbol in and of itself.

Yet, the stirrup made it very easy to ride a horse, basically infringing on those vested interests by the upper class of the Kingdom. Hence, the nobles had to shun stirrups as 「savage tools」 or 「Novice’s Walking Sticks」. And this hubris led to Holmea now paying a hefty price.

“What’s wrong, you lazy bums!? Why can’t you hit them with your arrows!?”

It was only understandable for General Rakius to shower his archers with abuse. After he scolded his men, who got swallowed up by their own unrest, they had finally started to fire back from their side, but most of the arrows didn’t even reach the elven archers. And even the arrows that flew far enough only stabbed the soil where the mounted archer’s horses passed a while ago. In short, there was absolutely no sign of them hitting anything anytime soon.

Compared to them, the elves’ arrows hit Holmea’s side to such a degree that it was actually hilarious. Something that would throw anyone into rage, not just General Rakius.

But, this outcome was natural. Hitting an immobile target from a vehicle, which was moving at high speed, and hitting a very quickly moving target while immobile were two different cups of tea. Of course, the former was much simpler a task.

Much less to say that the 2,000 men strong archer unit of Holmea had crowded up in order to shower the enemy with masses of arrows. So the elves simply needed to aim in the general direction of the group if they wanted to simply hit something with their arrows.

Under these circumstances, this battle wouldn’t resemble anything close to a fight.

Furthermore, the mounted elven archers had been gradually closing the distance while having their horses gallop along meandering courses, apparently having realized that their enemy’s arrows wouldn’t hit them either way. Currently the losses were small thanks to the light infantry’s big shields, but if the power and precision of the elves’ arrows kept going up as they closed the distance, the casualties among General Rakius’s men would rise.

Even so, the general couldn’t think of an effective means to fend off the elven archers.

And, General Rakius wasn’t the only one to be dumbstruck by this display of skill. Even Prince Alexius, the lords, and the veteran officers of the 「Black Wall」 suffered a heavy shock as they watched from the rear.

They all had ridden horses and kiryuu, and thus they knew very well just how outlandish this feat of the mounted elven archers was.

In the past of Earth, the Parthians would fake retreat during battles against the ancient Roman Empire and then shoot their arrows at the Roman soldiers chasing after them while fleeing on their horses. This maneuver, which the Parthians perfected as a battle strategy, would be later called Parthian shot. Nowadays it was a proverb for a 「Parting Threat」.

Also, theories claim that the centaurs, the half-man-half-horse people accompanying Sagittarius, were born out of the fear towards the Scythae, a nomadic tribe who would use archery on horseback in ancient Greece.

In other words, equestrian archery gave birth to proverbs that were still used in the modern era and could be regarded as something so shocking that it created legendary, fantastical creatures that combined horse and rider.

Thus, it was only understandable for the humans of Holmea to be so shaken by this.

However, one man alone among the agitated Holmean officers watched the mounted elven archer unit calmly.

“…His Excellency would probably say the following…,” he said while watching the elves parting to the sides in front of the First Division, “…you’re overdoing it with the silly bluffs.”

That man ways Hiakis, Deputy Corps Commander of Holmea’s strongest army corps, the 「Black Wall」.

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