Payback: Isekai

Strength of A Thousand Man

There was almost nothing eerier than a winter forest. Everything was painted in monochrome color. The white snow and white fog swirling around almost make them unable to differentiate the ground and the sky. The black, cracked bark of the tall and thick trees felt like imposing pillars. And everything was eerily quiet, that a simple step would resound loudly in the vicinity.

It was in this kind of situation that Yoohan slid across the snow, with seven other people—two other mercenaries, three mages, a tracker from the intelligent squad, and a short man as their captain. They ran on the hard ground and soft snow without leaving any traces or sound. The only communication they had was through hand signal and their memory of the area's map. Soon, the trees thinned slightly and the area opened into a frozen creek, where the eight people stopped their track. The tracker jumped over the creek and continued into higher ground, while the others were waiting. Soon, the tracker gave a signal to the captain, which nodded to the other. The six people separated into three, a mage and a mercenary each, and went in three different directions.

Yoohan followed a mage that seemed to be the youngest. During the briefing, the mage looked really eager and excited, despite this being a mission that needed to be threaded carefully and in absolute calmness. So Yoohan felt a little worried. But the mage seemed to be competent this far—at the very least, his noise-canceling spell still worked well during the journey.

They came to the point marked on the map, and they stopped. Yoohan looked around and afar while the mage made marks on the frozen river. The whole thing suddenly reminded Yoohan about military conscription back home. Even though he had yet to enlist, he had heard stories about it, and remembered that one guy's stories about digging up the hard ground in the winter for trenches. Well, it was probably like this.

They were here on a mission to put a magic time bomb on the frozen river—one of the preparations for the final battle tomorrow. It was a secret mission that demanded people with stealth-related skills and the ability to dig up ice. Yoohan—or mercenary Lee—was chosen as one of them. He had a rune of [weightless step] and [elemental ice] to work on the river. So now he was crouching on top of the frozen water making holes in the places the mage told him to. The mage then took out a sphere from his dimensional pocket and put one each on the holes, which Yoohan immediately filled with the dug-up ice. The sphere was a sensitive thing that could go haywire with a slight change of temperature, that it needed to be stored in dimensional storage where time was suspended, and taken out without touching, using levitation magic. It couldn't be exposed to the air for more than three seconds, lest it exploded. Thankfully, their coordination went well.

"Is that all?" Yoohan asked, after filling up the last hole. The mage nodded, looking proud of himself. He reminded Yoohan of those elites from prestigious schools during his days on Earth, proud and haughty. They'd look at thugs like Yoohan with contempt and disgust, and it used to rile them up, and Yoohan would derive satisfaction from making them wept and tremble from threat and taking their money. It was a past that Yoohan had wanted to be written over. Looking at the mage kid—probably just hit twenty—Yoohan supposed they seemed cute now for him, as he remembered his dead brother.

Then they get back towards the creek, where the Captain was waiting. The short man gave a signal to the tracker, who'd been watching for any ambusher, or spies from the other side. Yoohan actually had no idea what this war was about. He heard the gist of it, but the detail was too complicated for him. Then again, in his understanding, where there were people, there was conflict. And the conflict between people who had the authority of an army would lead to war. After all, even people that were supposed to be of the same ancestry still wage war on Earth. Much more those that had less similarity between them.

Yoohan recalled it had something to do with religion at first, this war. Something about claiming a piece of land as a holy site to build their temple. Two kingdoms with different god patrons claiming the same land as their God's holy dwelling. Which was actually quite a ridiculous thing, since the empire's patron goddess, [Divine Crow Ishtarhea], and the kingdom's patron god, [Sacred Hawk Atgherno] were supposed to be twins. What they did though, was only make the supposed 'holy land' destroyed through years of conflict. And now, the land was barren in the summer and desolate in the winter. It was the land where the battle would occur tomorrow.