Yoshimoto found the armored giant shortly after Britannia finished withdrawing.
The western courtyard had become a mess of wounded Martial Apprentices, physicians, damaged equipment, and fighters trying to get whatever rest they could before the next attack. Merun stood near one of the inner walls with his enormous greatsword resting against his shoulder, apparently untouched despite having just stopped an entire section of Britannia's advance by himself. Several Kinzoku Martial Apprentices lingered nearby, though none seemed willing to approach him.
"Lord Guts."
Merun turned slightly toward him. "Hm?"
Yoshimoto approached with one hand resting near his injured ribs. The fight with Kay had reopened some of the pain Rui left behind, and every deep breath reminded him that his body was still far from recovered. Even so, he forced himself to straighten before stopping a few steps away.
"That was impressive," Yoshimoto said. "With your help, I think we can actually turn this around. Britannia has the numbers, but if you hold one section while Lady Mikan supports the others, then we could begin pushing them back instead of just enduring."
Kabuto's helmet slowly turned toward him.
"Do not disturb Lady Mikan, Lord Yoshimoto."
Yoshimoto froze.
There was no visible technique, nor was there any sudden movement from the armored man in front of him. Yet something heavy crashed down across Yoshimoto's instincts so violently that his breathing stopped for half a second.
Danger.
The courtyard suddenly felt too small. His injured ribs tightened beneath the pressure while cold sweat gathered across his back, and every instinct screamed at him to lower his head, retreat, kneel, do anything except remain standing before the giant.
Yoshimoto looked toward the darkness beneath the kabuto.
For one terrible instant, another pair of black eyes flashed through his memory.
Rui.
That endless stare.
The abyss.
His knees nearly buckled before he forced them straight again. "O-of course."
Merun placed one enormous armored hand on his shoulder and gave him two light pats.
The pressure vanished completely.
Yoshimoto sucked in a breath before he could stop himself, while Merun returned to the same casual tone he'd been using moments earlier. "Good. See you next fight. Take a potion, will ya?"
Then he walked away between the fortress buildings with the massive greatsword resting against one shoulder. Martial Artists quietly moved aside to let him pass.
Yoshimoto remained where he was for several seconds before wiping the sweat from his forehead. His ribs were throbbing harder than before, and he could still feel the remnants of that instinctive terror crawling along his spine.
He stared after the armored giant until Merun disappeared between two buildings.
"Who the hell is that man exactly...?"
.
.
.
Britannia attacked again that afternoon.
Merun noticed their adjustment almost immediately.
The moment the western gate opened and Sekigahara began spreading across the field, his eyes moved over the Britannian formations approaching from the jungle. Their overall structure looked similar to the previous assault, but six additional squads had been concentrated around the section directly opposite him.
Merun stared across the battlefield.
Sir Kay stood farther back with his sword resting against one shoulder.
Paranoid much?
The Britannians advanced, and Sekigahara met them far more cautiously than before. Without Mikan darting through the battlefield to break formations and rescue overextended fighters, the Martial Apprentices had learned their lesson quickly. They stayed closer together, protected one another more carefully, and abandoned the aggressive pushes that had gotten so many of them surrounded earlier.
That kept them alive, but it also gave Britannia exactly what it wanted.
The Sekigaharan line began giving ground.
Merun did not.
He planted himself near the western center and allowed the first squad to reach him. One Britannian rushed directly in with a reinforced punch, clearly expecting to force the armored giant backward.
CLANG!
The fist landed cleanly against Merun's chest.
Merun did not move.
The Knight recoiled instead, his arm jerking backward as pain shot through his knuckles and wrist. Before the others could adjust, Merun's greatsword swept through the formation in one simple Blossoming Blade arc.
WHAM!
The flat side caught three Apprentices at once and sent them crashing into the dirt. Merun settled the blade back against his shoulder while the remaining fighters hesitated, and another short sweep dropped two more before they could properly reorganize.
The next squad approached more carefully, spreading around him and testing different angles. It changed little. Merun remained rooted, his frame locked beneath Sanchin as direct strikes slammed into him without shifting his stance. The attackers came away with bruised fists, numbed arms, and aching joints while Merun waited for them to overcommit.
Whenever someone did, the greatsword moved.
A short Blossoming Blade sweep knocked two unconscious. Another Britannian tried a piercing strike through a gap in the armor and hit something that felt closer to forged iron than flesh. His fingers buckled on impact, and Merun answered by slamming the flat of the blade across his ribs.
BAM!
The man hit the ground unconscious.
Another Britannian rushed from behind and wrapped both arms around Merun's waist while two others closed from the front. The Knight grunted loudly, legs trembling as he tried to lift the armored giant, but Merun did not move so much as an inch.
Merun looked down at him. "...Really?"
The Knight strained harder.
Merun raised one armored elbow and brought it lightly down against the back of his helmet.
The man collapsed.
Another squad rushed in before his body had even finished falling, and Merun sighed beneath the helmet. "Persistent."
That became the pattern.
Squad after squad converged on him while the rest of the Sekigaharan line slowly compressed toward the fortress. Britannia tried force, numbers, grappling, and coordinated attacks from multiple directions, yet Merun remained rooted in the same patch of ground.
The problem became obvious very quickly.
They couldn't move him.
They also couldn't ignore him.
Any squad that attempted to push beyond his position would expose its back to a Martial Artist capable of incapacitating several Apprentices with a single swing. Britannia had no choice but to keep feeding more fighters into him, and Merun kept putting them down.
Elsewhere, the battle was far less comfortable.
Sir Kay and Yoshimoto had found each other almost immediately, and their fight still looked competitive from a distance. Yoshimoto's compressed wind could force Kay backward, while his close-range strikes remained dangerous enough that the Britannian Knight couldn't afford to become careless.
But Merun could see the difference.
Yoshimoto's breathing became heavier as the battle dragged on, his movements slowing between bursts while blood gradually seeped through the bandages beneath his dougi again. He was still fighting like a Grade Ten Martial Apprentice, but his body was protesting harder with every exchange.
Merun watched him for several seconds.
How did Sekigahara stall Britannia for an entire month?
The question had been bothering him since the first night, but seeing Yoshimoto now made it worse. The man was already exhausted, his injuries were reopening, and the defenders around him were being worn down faster with every assault.
The novel had described the siege as brutal, but from Rui's perspective, Sekigahara had somehow endured for weeks.
Looking at it now, Merun couldn't see how.
Britannia had already cut the nearby supply routes, surrounded the fortress, and established a rhythm that allowed them to keep rotating fresh fighters into battle while Sekigahara slowly deteriorated. Without Mikan helping during the earlier clashes, the defenders would have suffered even worse.
Without Merun standing here now, the western line would already have been pushed much closer to the walls.
Something didn't add up.
Maybe the novel had skipped important details. Reinforcements might have arrived later, or Britannia could have encountered problems Rui never learned about. There was also the possibility Merun liked least: perhaps he'd already changed enough that the future was beginning to drift.
That bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
Future knowledge was one of his strongest advantages.
If he couldn't trust it...
A fresh Britannian squad rushed him from three directions and cut the thought short.
Merun exhaled beneath the kabuto and adjusted his grip on the greatsword.
Whatever.
He could figure it out later.
The blade swept once.
WHAM!
Four bodies dropped.
The whistle sounded not long afterward.
FWIIIIIIIIII!
Britannia disengaged.
Merun lowered his sword while defensive squads moved forward to cover the withdrawal. Support personnel rushed in to recover the nearest wounded, dragging unconscious Knights toward their lines before Sekigahara could reach them.
One injured Knight lay only a few meters from Merun while two comrades grabbed him beneath the shoulders and pulled him backward. Merun watched them go without interfering.
Farther away, another wounded Britannian wasn't as fortunate.
He had fallen too deep inside Sekigahara's position, and one of the Martial Apprentices reached him before his comrades could. The Britannian tried to raise one arm, but the Sekigaharan's fist came down without mercy.
CRACK!
Merun sighed.
He wasn't there to protect Britannia.
These people had been watching their own comrades carried back into the fortress for days. Some had lost friends, while others had spent hours being ground down by a larger army capable of rotating fresh fighters into their places.
Merun had no intention of becoming their conscience.
His attention returned to Yoshimoto.
Sir Kay was already retreating beneath the protection of his men, flaming sword still held ready as he backed toward the Britannian lines. Yoshimoto remained where their fight had ended, shoulders rising and falling heavily while one hand pressed against his ribs.
Merun's expression tightened beneath the helmet.
Seriously.
How the fuck did they last a month?
.
.
.
Britannia attacked again before sunset, then after midnight, and returned the next morning before some Sekigaharans had even finished eating. By the third day, nobody inside the fortress bothered asking whether Britannia would attack. The only question was when.
Two or three battles a day became normal, sometimes four, and Britannia changed its approach constantly. More squads were assigned to the armored man with every assault. Heavy offensive Apprentices tried overwhelming him with brute force, piercing specialists targeted the gaps in his armor, grapplers attempted to drag him from his stance, and even niche mentalist Knights were brought forward to slow his thoughts or disrupt his concentration.
None of it worked.
Every battle began with the armored man choosing a patch of ground and planting himself there. By the time Britannia withdrew, he was usually standing within a few steps of where he started, surrounded by unconscious Knights.
The Apprentice Knights began calling him the Wall.
Their strongest fighters could not make him budge. Striking him only left bruised knuckles, damaged wrists, and screaming joints, while the mentalists looked increasingly ridiculous as their techniques failed to produce any visible reaction whatsoever.
By the fourth day, Britannian analysts had begun recording the exact area he occupied during every engagement. One pattern stood out immediately: he rarely pursued retreating Knights and almost never moved beyond the section he had chosen to defend.
That gave them their first useful theory.
Perhaps the armored giant was using some form of prepared territorial Martial Art. Maybe esoteric material had been buried beneath the battlefield, or some hidden formation anchored his body and amplified his defenses within a limited radius.
The longer Britannia failed to find another explanation, the more reasonable it sounded.
On the fifth day, engineers examined the ground after the fighting ended.
They found nothing.
Sir Kay did not take the news well.
By the sixth day, Britannia's problem had become embarrassingly simple. They could not move the Wall, but the Wall would not move toward them either. He never hunted retreating Knights, never charged their artillery positions, and never attempted to break their siege lines.
He simply stood where Sekigahara needed him.
And Britannia could not pass the Wall.
.
.
.
"Enough conjecture. Tell me what we have actually learned."
Sir Kay Pendragon stood over the field table inside the command pavilion, both hands pressed against its edge. His voice remained calm enough that the officers surrounding him immediately became nervous.
One analyst stepped forward and unfolded a map of the western battlefield. There was no need to recite casualty numbers or list every failed technique again. Everyone in the pavilion knew those reports by heart at this point.
"He appears unwilling to leave that position, my lord," the analyst explained. "Whatever grants him such defensive strength, he either cannot or will not employ it beyond that ground."
Kay's eyes dropped toward the marked section of the map. "So this invisible fortress remains our best explanation."
"For now, yes, my lord."
"And our engineers found nothing beneath the ground?"
"Nothing we could identify. No esoteric material, no formation, nothing beneath the surface that explains his defensive capability."
Kay stared at the map for several seconds before giving a quiet laugh.
"Wonderful."
Nobody joined him.
His finger tapped once against the section the Wall usually defended. Irritating as the armored man had become, the wider campaign was still proceeding in Britannia's favor. Sekigahara's supply routes remained severed, their wounded continued to accumulate, and no meaningful reinforcements had broken through the encirclement.
Time remained on Britannia's side.
That was what mattered.
Kay had never intended to win through some glorious charge that left half his Knights buried outside the fortress. He wanted Sekigahara strangled slowly and cleanly, with as few Britannian losses as possible.
When the fortress finally fell, the reports would speak of Britannian discipline, superior organization, and a victory achieved without throwing lives away for spectacle.
His victory.
His campaign.
If some stubborn armored bastard delayed that achievement by several days, then so be it.
Besides, Kay still had one card he had yet to play.
His gaze briefly shifted toward the rear of the camp, where one particular "Apprentice Knight" had remained conspicuously absent from every battle. The man had received very specific orders before the campaign began and would continue following them unless circumstances became truly desperate.
Kay had no intention of reaching that point.
Not yet.
He looked back toward the marked section of the battlefield.
"Then perhaps we have wasted quite enough time trying to solve his little mystery."
The analyst hesitated. "My lord?"
Kay straightened. "If he will not leave that ground, I shall go to him."
The command pavilion became noticeably quieter.
One of his aides stepped forward. "Sir... what of Yoshimoto?"
Kay's mouth curled into a small smile. "Leave him to the others."
The aide hesitated before answering. "My lord, he remains a Grade Ten Martial Apprentice. Wounded or otherwise, containing him will require considerable attention."
"Aye. And a dying Grade Ten at that." Kay reached toward the longsword resting beside the table and lifted it onto his shoulder. "Broken ribs, reopened wounds, and scarcely enough breath left to curse me properly."
Several officers exchanged uncertain glances.
Kay noticed.
"Two squads should suffice. Hold him. Do not be heroic."
The aide stiffened before bowing his head. "Understood, my lord. We shall maintain pressure and keep him separated from the western center."
"Good."
Kay walked toward the opening of the command pavilion and looked out toward the distant Sekigaharan fortress.
Kay's smile slowly returned.
"Prepare the next assault."
He tightened his grip around the sword.
"This time, I shall break the Wall myself."