Isekai Student Historian: Chapter 07

Chapter 7: The Art of War and the Ghost Camp

The newly paved cobblestone square of Orlon was dead silent, save for the frantic panting of Captain Rael’s scout. To the south, an elite army of two hundred professional soldiers was marching to hang them all. To the north, a horde of corrupted, unnatural beasts was massing in the dead, black treeline.

Alice drew her red-gold sword, her aristocratic face pale but fiercely set. “We are caught in a trap, John. If we fight the Duke’s men, the beasts will hit our backs. If we try to hold the woods against the monsters, the heavy cavalry will run us down. We have to clear the villagers out and scatter into the hills.”

“No,” John said, his voice completely calm. He adjusted the single strap of his heavy canvas messenger bag across his chest. Veronica, the three-tailed sapphire fox, chirped from her perch inside his jacket collar, entirely unbothered by the impending doom. “Nobody is running. Gather the leadership team in the command tent. Jake, Rael, get in here. Class is in session.”

A moment later, the core members of the Vanguard Company — Alice, Kalinda, Marund, Ilka, Tobias, Judith, Jake, and Captain Rael — were crowded around the heavy oak desk inside the canvas tent.

John unrolled a blank piece of parchment and picked up a piece of charcoal.

“Listen closely,” John began, looking around at the nervous faces of his team. “There is a very important difference between a tactic and a strategy. Do any of you know what it is?”

Captain Rael scratched his scarred chin, his new steel armor clinking. “A tactic is how you swing an axe. A strategy is… swinging it really hard?”

John smiled faintly. “Close, Rael. A tactic is what happens when you are already in a fight. It’s how you hold your shield. It’s how Alice steps to the side to disarm a man. A strategy, however, is the big picture. Strategy is moving the pieces on the grand board before the fight even begins, so that by the time swords are drawn, you’ve already won.”

John quickly sketched a crude map of the village, drawing a thick, jagged line for the northern woods and an arrow for the southern road.

“In a great war in my distant homeland, a massive alliance of kingdoms was preparing to cross the water to invade a terrible, dark empire,” John explained, keeping his words simple so the locals could easily follow the historical lesson. “The dark empire had heavily fortified all the beaches. If the alliance attacked directly, their men would be slaughtered.”

Jake leaned over the table, his brass goggles pushed up onto his forehead. “So what did they do, Mr. John?”

“The alliance had a brilliant, deeply feared general named Patton,” John said, tapping the parchment. “The dark empire respected him, and they fully expected him to lead the invasion. But the allied kings didn’t give Patton their real army. They gave him a ghost camp.”

Kalinda tilted her head, her amber eyes narrowing. “Ghosts?”

“Wood, cloth, and air,” John explained. “They built a massive, fake military camp miles away from the real target. They set up empty canvas tents and hollow wooden wagons. They had a handful of men march around, light huge fires, and make a tremendous amount of noise. The enemy empire saw the fake camp from afar, assumed Patton was massing his forces there, and sent all their best troops to guard the wrong beach.”

John looked around the table. “Patton didn’t lead the invasion. He was the distraction. The real army crossed the sea entirely miles away, because the enemy was focused on fighting a shadow.”

Kalinda rested her massive hands on the hilt of her iron broadsword, a slow, terrifying grin spreading across her scarred face. “You want to trick the Duke’s army. You want to make them beast food!”

“Exactly,” John confirmed. “We aren’t going to fight anyone today. We are going to let our two biggest problems solve each other. Jake, Tobias, I need you to gather up all the spare canvas, empty crates, and scrap wood we have. We are going to build a ghost camp.”

“Where?” Alice asked, leaning over the map.

John pointed the charcoal precisely at the northern edge of the map, right where the dead grass met the corrupted treeline. “Right on the border of the cursed woods. We make it look like we saw the Duke’s army coming and retreated to the edge of the forest to hide. We light giant bonfires. We leave a wide, muddy trail leading straight from the southern road to the fake tents.”

“And the real town?” Marund rasped, his sunken eyes gleaming with dark approval.

“We fall back to the keep on the hill,” John said. “Marund, you and Evie stay in the village. Use your shadow arts to dim the light around the new cobblestones and the fresh buildings. Make Orlon look like a miserable, abandoned ruin. The Duke’s men will likely march right past it, following the mud and the smoke straight to our ghost camp. If they attack the empty town, we will become the anvil and the beasts will be our hammer.”

“And if they attack the tents, they will wake up the corrupted beasts,” Rael realized, letting out a loud, barking laugh.

“Let’s get to work,” John said. “We have an hour.”

Fifty minutes later, the rhythmic, terrifying sound of heavy steel boots marching on dirt echoed through the southern valley.

Commander Kaelen rode at the head of the Black Boar Regiment, sitting tall atop his massive, armored warhorse. To his left rode the disgraced Guildmaster Thorne, sweating profusely despite the cool afternoon air. Behind them marched two hundred elite infantrymen in gleaming steel plate, fifty cavalry lancers, and a dozen Imperial battle-mages in pristine white robes.

As they crested the final hill and looked down at Orlon, Kaelen pulled harshly on his reins, bringing his horse to a dead stop.

The village below looked completely dead. Heavy, unnatural shadows seemed to cling to the empty buildings. There was no smoke from the chimneys, no sound of merchants, no barking dogs. It looked dead.

“They ran!” Thorne cackled, pointing a fat, trembling finger at the abandoned square. “The coward knew the Duke’s wrath was coming! He took his peasants and fled!”

Kaelen narrowed his eyes. He didn’t like empty towns; they felt like traps. But then, his gaze drifted past the village, toward the edge of the dense, looming northern forest.

Plumes of thick black smoke were rising into the sky just at the treeline. Through the distant haze, Kaelen could see the shapes of dozens of canvas tents, stacked supply crates, and the silhouettes of men standing guard near roaring campfires. A wide, deeply churned trail of fresh mud bypassed the quiet village entirely, leading straight to the encampment.

“They didn’t run far,” Kaelen sneered, drawing his polished longsword. “The fools tried to set up a fortified camp at our backs. They think the woods will protect their flank.”

Kaelen turned in his saddle, his voice booming over the ranks. “Form up! Bypass the village! We march on the rebel camp. Cavalry, take the flanks. Mages, prepare your fire incantations. We will burn them out of the trees!”

The heavily armored column bypassed Orlon, their boots crunching on the dirt path Jake had deliberately laid down. They marched aggressively toward the smoking campfires.

Up in the highest stone tower of the Vanguard Keep, John stood perfectly still, looking through the stacked glass lenses of his brass spyglass. Alice and Kalinda stood beside him, holding their breath.

“They’re taking the bait,” John whispered, watching the Duke’s army march right past the real village.

Down in the valley, Commander Kaelen halted his men fifty yards from the canvas tents. Something felt wrong. The figures standing guard near the fires weren’t moving. They looked like… wooden boards draped in old cloaks.

“Mages, fire the tents!” Kaelen ordered, uneasy.

The dozen battle-mages stepped to the front of the line, raising their wooden staffs. They began to chant, their voices rising in a loud, echoing chorus that vibrated through the quiet valley. They drew heavily on the ambient aether, the air around them crackling with heat.

ROOOOAAAR.

It wasn’t a battle cry from the tents. It was a cacophony of unnatural, gurgling shrieks that erupted from the deep woods directly behind the fake camp. The loud chanting and the sudden, massive draw of magic had acted like a ringing dinner bell.

Bursting from the black, dying trees was a nightmare.

Dozens of massive Razor-Bristle Boars, their hides weeping a toxic, bubbling black sludge, charged into the sunlight. They trampled right through the fake canvas tents, shattering the wooden cutout guards Jake had built. Flanking the boars were massive, emaciated wolves with too many limbs, their eyes glowing a sickly, diseased purple.

The corrupted horde had arrived, completely starved and driven mad by the blight. And standing directly in their path, heavily armored and totally exposed, was Duke Gronen’s elite army.

“BEASTS!” Kaelen screamed, his horse rearing up in terror as a tent was flattened by a monster the size of a wagon. “FRONT RANK, SHIELD WALL! PIKES OUT!”

The Imperial army’s discipline was incredible, but it was designed to fight other men, not a tide of mutated, hyper-aggressive monsters. The massive, sludge-covered boars slammed into the steel shield wall like runaway boulders. Steel crumpled. Men screamed as the toxic black sap burned through their armor like hot acid.

“Mages, keep firing!” Kaelen yelled, desperately hacking at a mutated wolf that leaped at his saddle.

“We need two more minutes to finish the spell, Commander!” the lead mage shrieked in absolute panic, backing away as the frontline collapsed.

In combat against a starving beast, two minutes was a lifetime. The monsters tore into the human lines. The cavalry horses, panicked by the unnatural scent of the corruption, bucked their riders and fled blindly into the hills.

Thorne, the cowardly Guildmaster, didn’t even draw a weapon. He turned his horse and tried to gallop away, but a massive, multi-eyed boar crashed through the remnants of the fake camp, catching the horse in the flank. Thorne was thrown into the mud with a sickening thud, and the beast descended on him in a blur of black sludge and jagged tusks.

Up in the tower, Alice slowly lowered the spyglass she had borrowed from Evie. Her hands were shaking. “By the Gods… you didn’t swing a sword. You didn’t cast a single spell. You just completely erased a Ducal army.”

John didn’t smile. He watched the slaughter below with cold, analytical precision. The strategy had worked flawlessly. The Duke’s army had taken the absolute brunt of the demonic assault. The beasts were tearing through the armored knights, but the knights were fighting back desperately, their sharp steel taking a heavy toll on the monsters.

The two forces were utterly destroying each other.

Within ten minutes, the screaming stopped.

The edge of the forest was a ruined, bloody mess. The fake camp was gone. The corrupted beasts were all dead, having thrown themselves onto the pikes and swords of the soldiers until the last monster fell.

But the Black Boar Regiment was broken. Out of the original force, perhaps twenty were still standing. They were covered in mud and the black, foul-smelling sludge of the monsters. Their beautiful armor was torn, their shields splintered.

Commander Kaelen slowly climbed to his feet, his ornate helmet missing, his face pale with shock. He looked at the mangled bodies of the beasts, then at the smoking ruins of the fake tents. He realized, with a sickening drop in his stomach, that he had been fooled. There was no rebel army here. He had been tricked into clearing out a monster nest for a merchant.

Kaelen didn’t order a rally. He didn’t look toward the village. He just turned to his surviving, terrified men.

“Fall back,” Kaelen whispered, his voice completely hollow. “We leave this cursed valley. Now.”

The remnants of the elite Imperial army limped away, abandoning their wagons, their dead, and their pride. They dragged themselves south, leaving Orlon far behind.

“They won’t come back,” Kalinda grunted, watching them retreat. “The Commander will tell his Duke that the northern woods belong to the demons. They will write this town off as a lost cause.”

“Which gives us time,” John said, turning away from the window. “But we have a much bigger problem now.”

The Great Hall of the Vanguard Keep was warm, lit by a roaring fire in the hearth. The long oak table was covered in parchment maps, Judith’s massive accounting ledgers, and a mountain of roasted meats and heavy breads John had pulled from his bag to feed the team.

Sitting around the table were Alice, Kalinda, Marund, Evie, Ilka, Jake, Tobias, and Judith. The atmosphere was a heavy mix of triumphant adrenaline and lingering dread.

“The Duke’s army is gone,” Alice reported, taking a sip from her wooden cup. “They are force-marching back to the capital. Gronen will be furious, but after losing his best men to monsters, he won’t risk sending another army here.”

“Gronen is a political problem, and we just solved it,” John said, resting his forearms on the table. He looked directly at Marund. “The real problem is biological. Marund, those beasts today. I’ve read a few books since I got here. Razor-boars don’t bleed black mud, and they don’t hunt alongside wolves.”

The old shadow mage nodded grimly, his dark robes shifting in the firelight. “It is a sickness of the deep earth, John. Something very old and highly poisonous has woken up in the heart of the Wildlands. It is rotting the soil, driving the animals mad, and pushing them south. Today was just the first wave. If we do not find the source of the rot and cut it out, the next wave will not be fifty beasts. It will be five hundred.”

Tobias rubbed his face, looking exhausted. “Can our new steel weapons stop hundreds of those things?”

“No,” John answered honestly, leaning back in his chair. “A shield wall is great against human soldiers. But if a spreading sickness is pushing monsters out of the woods, hiding behind a wall won’t save us. We need to go on the offensive.”

John looked around the table at his eclectic team. A tribal warrior, an undercover princess, a disgraced shadow mage, a young inventor, a child-spy, a beast-girl, and a corporate accountant.

“We need a strategy council,” John declared, his blue eyes sharp. “Evie, Ilka, tomorrow at first light, you two are sneaking into the deep woods. Map the edge of the dead trees. Do not fight anything. Just look and report back. Jake, I want you to start drawing plans for heavy, wooden ballistae — giant crossbows we can mount on the keep’s walls.”

“And us?” Kalinda asked, grinning eagerly, her hand resting on her iron sword.

“You, Alice, and I are going to start training,” John said, standing up from the table. “Because if we have to march into a cursed forest to kill whatever is rotting the land… we’re going to need a much better plan than hiding behind a ghost.”

Chapter 8: The Hammer’s Provisions and the Heart of the Rot