As Jeanne traded blows with the rushing waves of Sarkaz, a highly peculiar thought crossed her mind. Are these guys... actually supposed to be this weak?
Cut after cut, parry after parry, she found herself tearing through their formations with an almost frightening level of ease. They certainly didn't feel like the terrifying, insurmountable nightmares Mudrock and the others used to describe during their late-night chats around the campfire. Aside from the sheer, overwhelming advantage they had in numbers, Jeanne honestly felt like she could take on the entire valley alone without breaking a sweat.
Of course, she was looking at things through a bit of a skewed lens. When a person spends their time trading blows with elite Ursus regular forces, going toe-to-toe with their horrifying Emperor's Blades, and holding their own against entities as cataclysmic as the Sanguinarch, a standard gathering of regional highway mercenaries just isn't going to look like much.
It was simple math, really. If you spend your life fighting final bosses, the local grunts are going to feel like child's play. The fact that these mercenaries weren't getting instantly vaporized by her opening moves was practically a miracle on their part.
Still, these men weren't completely brainless. Realizing they couldn't overpower Jeanne head-on, they used their numbers to play dirty. They split their focus, deliberately ignoring her whenever possible to ruthlessly hunt down the vulnerable Infected drivers and smash up the transport trucks parked throughout the camp.
That single tactical choice kept Jeanne pinned in place. She knew exactly what she was capable of, but she also knew the civilian convoy drivers didn't stand a ghost of a chance against these hardened mercenaries. If she abandoned her post to charge deep into the enemy's backlines, the people behind her would be slaughtered in minutes.
The only people truly suffering from this arrangement were the low-ranking Sarkaz cannon fodder tasked with holding her attention. They were being thrown into a meat grinder against an opponent they had zero hope of defeating. Retreat wasn't an option either—their own commanders would put a bullet in their heads the moment they turned tail and ran. They were just green recruits, disposable bodies the mercenary syndicate wouldn't waste a single tear over, no matter how many of them died tonight.
"I am truly sorry. I never intended for you to be dragged into a localized conflict that belongs strictly to our internal factions."
With a sickening crunch, a dark, chitinous creature lunged out of the shadows, its razor-sharp claws instantly taking down a Sarkaz mercenary who had tried to creep up on Jeanne's blind spot. Kal'tsit stepped up beside her companion, her voice carrying a genuine weight of apology.
Before they had ever left the northern wilderness, the ancient doctor had given Jeanne her personal word that Babel would do everything in its power to guarantee her safety throughout the journey to Kazdel. Yet, looking at the burning chaos of the camp, things had deteriorated to the point where Jeanne was forced to carry the defense on her own shoulders. To Kal'tsit, this was a direct failure to uphold her promise—a severe miscalculation that she took full responsibility for.
Jeanne didn't seem to mind the extra work, but Kal'tsit wasn't the type to skip an apology just because the other person was easygoing. It wasn't about whether Jeanne cared; it was a matter of whether her own word possessed any real integrity.
"Don't worry about it, Doctor," Jeanne replied, her tone perfectly casual as she deflected the blame. "This isn't entirely your fault. Besides, we both knew an unexpected, unavoidable fight like this was always on the cards, right?"
Jeanne had reconciled herself to the reality of swinging her sword in Kazdel long before she ever climbed aboard these transport trucks. Whether some hidden faction had deliberately orchestrated this ambush to drag her into the region's bloody sandbox, or the enemy had simply caught wind of the supply convoy and set a trap they couldn't have predicted—neither scenario was impossible.
As she spoke, Jeanne turned her dark golden eyes toward Kal'tsit. Those reptilian, slitted pupils held an intense, piercing clarity, completely devoid of ordinary emotion, as if she were trying to look straight through the doctor's ancient soul.
Meeting that unwavering gaze, Kal'tsit felt an immediate, heavy wave of pressure settle over her shoulders. For a split second, even her hyper-analytical mind couldn't tell if this was just the passive aura of Jeanne's heightened battle spirit, or if the girl was genuinely looking at her with deep suspicion.
It was probably a bit of both, though mostly the former. If Jeanne truly doubted Kal'tsit's core integrity, she would have already summoned a Wyvern and flown straight out of the valley, leaving Babel and its assets to burn. She wouldn't be standing here, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with them.
"This is indeed an uncalculated engagement, but I have already established contact with Babel to secure reinforcements," Kal'tsit said, sharing her intelligence to keep Jeanne grounded while subtly urging a defensive strategy. "Our elite operators are moving at maximum speed. If their transit goes smoothly, they will integrate with our line right before dawn. We don't need to push a risky counter-offensive. We just need to hold this ground until first light."
Jeanne could have easily ended this entire battle before midnight by going on a total rampage, but Kal'tsit was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of her charging out alone. Prying into unmapped, hostile terrain in the dead of night would only invite disaster.
Besides, the civilian guards didn't have the training to back her up on an assault, and as capable as Kal'tsit was, fighting off a whole brigade of mercenaries by herself was a massive headache.
For Jeanne, the news of incoming reinforcements was a bit of a mixed bag. Holding the line until dawn actually sounded a hell of a lot harder than just wiping these guys out right now. If she were allowed to go all out, she could just flood the entire valley with her purifying flames and black iron thorns, or use her Noble Phantasm to clear the field in one clean sweep.
But there was a catch to that strategy: if she completely drained her internal reserves of magical energy, where was she supposed to find a top-up? Draining her core to zero without a master to anchor her would cause her to pass out cold—and that would turn this battlefield into a disaster real quick.
There was no guarantee she could harvest high-grade Originium out here to replenish her strength, and the emergency supply she had brought along was running dangerously low. Saving her energy was a matter of survival.
Unless she found a perfect bottleneck like the previous ridge line, Jeanne decided that playing defense and conserving her magic was the smarter move. That way, she'd still have plenty of fight left in her if things took a sudden turn for the worse.
"Fine," Jeanne agreed, turning back to the fray. "I'll make sure none of them break through this sector. But you should go help the other flanks, Kal'tsit. I promise you, nothing is getting past me."
With a sudden, violent crack, Jeanne swung her sacred banner, sending an advancing mercenary flying through the air like a baseball. The man crashed heavily against a distant boulder and slumped to the ground, entirely motionless.
Jeanne easily had the strength to explode his skull into a bloody mess with that single strike, but a sudden mental image of how grotesque that would look made her hold back at the very last microsecond.
It wasn't out of mercy or some sudden aversion to killing; it was purely about keeping her stomach settled. The thought of brains and blood pooling all over the dirt was just plain nasty. She really didn't want a disgusting memory like that popping into her head the next time she sat down to eat a decent meal.
Watching the surrounding Sarkaz skirmishers begin to hesitate, completely terrified to step into Jeanne's territory while Mon3tr impaled another three charging soldiers, Kal'tsit turned back to her.
"Then I will move to reinforce the other defensive lines. Please, watch your safety out here. And whatever you do, try your best not to summon those massive flying creatures—they draw far too much political attention."
Seeing that this sector had completely stopped being a mercenary raid and had turned entirely into Jeanne's personal playground, the ancient doctor felt comfortable leaving her to look after the rest of the camp. Jeanne was clearly holding all the cards, and for some reason, the enemy's main command elements were still holding back their heaviest hitters.
"If things get truly catastrophic, don't try to save the cargo," Kal'tsit warned, giving her one last piece of advice before running off into the rain. "Just climb onto one of your Wyverns and take to the sky. These men have no anti-air capabilities. You can safely wait out the storm from above until Babel arrives!"
With those words, her silhouette dissolved into the dark, pouring rain. Even if the chances of Jeanne needing to flee were incredibly slim, Kal'tsit's centuries of experience told her it was always mandatory to leave a loophole, just to stop a stubborn, idealistic youth from throwing her life away for a convoy she had no real stakes in.
By now, the digital clocks on the dashboard of the remaining trucks showed less than three hours until dawn. A hard-won victory was finally within arm's reach, even if the outer perimeter of the camp was already littered with ruined vehicles and fallen drivers.
Yet, through the howling wind and the steady drumming of the rain, Kal'tsit could already hear it—the deep, thunderous roar of a high-yield Originium engine echoing through the distant mountain passes. Babel's elite extraction teams were closing in at a terrifying speed.
It felt as though, from the very moment the first shot was fired, victory had never truly left their side.