Richard immediately grabbed the plate beside him and dug in. Gunther opened his mouth, but in the end, he could only helplessly choose to get another serving.
"Interesting stuff?" Annie simply couldn't understand how the warriors of High Mountain Keep could still have such a good appetite. Didn't they know what tension was?
Richard tilted his head back and laboriously swallowed the mouthful crammed into his mouth before picking up the javelin beside him.
"I pulled this off that cavalryman's back." He flicked the metal piece with his fork. It made a dull sound, more like striking stone. Its material was clearly impure.
"Look at the spearhead. Such crude workmanship, such poor-quality iron, and you can even see slag that wasn't properly removed. Even a rural blacksmith who specialized in making farming tools would be ashamed to produce something like this."
"And the shaft is oil pine." Richard displayed it to everyone as he spoke. "As far as I know, this tree's excessive oil content makes it highly prone to spontaneous combustion. It usually only grows in frigid, snowbound regions. There's practically none of it in Pompeii."
"You can often see oil pines back on the frozen plains in our homeland. We use them to make torches." Gunther chimed in indistinctly through his chewing.
Richard tightened his grip and snapped the wooden shaft in two. He pulled a splinter from the break and held it over the candle. A moment later, it suddenly burst into a mass of blue-green flames.
The wood's oil content was astonishing. As it burned, it occasionally crackled explosively and gave off a strong pine-resin fragrance.
"See? I'd guess this was made by the natives of the wilderness themselves, nine times out of ten." Richard let out a cold laugh. "Damn, can you imagine it? Wilderness natives capable of mining and smelting iron!"
There were a thousand things he didn't understand, ten thousand things he couldn't figure out. First, where had the wilderness, famed for its barrenness, gotten its ore deposits? Second, how had the natives who found the deposits acquired the necessary skills?
A native tribe was lucky if it had two hundred people at most. Their size made complex specialization impossible. The inheritance and exchange of knowledge were entirely a matter of luck, and its accuracy was often questionable at best.
Even if a group of gnolls got incredibly lucky and found an ore deposit, how could they just happen to know what it was, just happen to understand how to smelt it, and just happen to possess the necessary material conditions?
"Maybe it's meteoric iron." Hert took the spearhead and examined it carefully, then shook his head and rejected his own guess. "The impurities clearly weren't fully removed because the smelting temperature was too low. It isn't meteoric iron."
"An expert." Richard gave him a thumbs-up.
"My lord, there may be some information you haven't heard."
The Voya Merchant Guild had been engaged in wilderness trade for many years. With this local power backing her, Annie understood the wilderness far more deeply than Richard, an outsider.
"The wilderness is vast, far vaster than you imagine. It's even larger than the entire Pompey Empire. The tribes near the border are all the weakest small tribes because they face the threat of Pompeii and have the harshest living conditions."
"But few people know that, in the vast lands farther north in the wilderness, there are many tribes that are larger and more powerful. Some of these great tribes even possess several thousand adult warriors. In scale, they're no different from independent minor kingdoms."
Richard nodded. He had never heard this information before, but it made perfect sense.
Pompeii might tolerate a few impoverished nobodies brawling around on the border, but it absolutely could not tolerate a true power standing too close.
"As the saying goes, one cannot allow another to snore beside one's bed. That's the idea."
"Beside one's bed..." Annie savored Richard's phrasing, then nodded in agreement. "That's a wonderfully concise yet profound expression."
"So you think those large tribes attacked the mercenaries?"
"It isn't suspicion. It's confirmation." Annie was not the elegant, gentle type traditionally admired by Pompeii. On the contrary, she was brimming with heroic spirit, and her tone was utterly firm as she spoke.
"The Voya Merchant Guild trades with the local tribes, so we're never attacked under normal circumstances. Only these outsiders would act so recklessly!"
"It isn't strange that large tribes have the ability to smelt iron, but why would they appear here?" Hert interjected.
"In past years, when food grew scarce in autumn and winter, they would head south to raid small tribes and even Pompeian civilians. But it's only summer..." Annie spread her hands, indicating that she didn't know either.
"Why bother worrying about all that?" Gunther waved his spoon in dissatisfaction. "If they dare come to High Mountain Keep, we'll smash every last one of them until they get concussions!"
His voice carried magnificently, and everyone in the great dining hall heard him clearly. The barbarians and centaurs howled their approval, while the mercenaries in the corner turned even paler.
"Hert previously said that a shaman had organized an allied army to deal with me. At the time, I found it strange. If sheer prestige could persuade a bunch of profit-before-all natives to help fight a war, that would really be seeing ghosts." Richard spread his hands.
"Now it seems they were bullied by the gnolls heading south and, with nowhere else to turn, decided to bully me instead. Heh, do I look that much like a soft persimmon?"
"Richard, take your followers back to Koren and abandon High Mountain Keep for now. The wilderness is already in chaos. No one can accuse you of cowardice for retreating at a time like this." Annie sighed.
"My dear Miss Annie, why should I return to Koren? Just because of these few chickenshit weaklings?" Richard slapped the table and laughed heartily. "I'm only annoyed that they didn't come fast enough. I've wanted to capture slaves to build my castle for ages."
Although it was still only a newly developing territory, Richard possessed unquestionable authority in High Mountain Keep. Once he made a decision, all the others could do was cooperate as much as possible.
The barbarians and centaurs were enthusiastically drilling their coordinated infantry-and-bow tactics on the training grounds, striving to sharpen their weapons at the last moment, even if they couldn't make them faster.
Several of the most fleet-footed centaurs were temporarily and honorably assigned as scouts, sent out to investigate every movement around High Mountain Keep.
Richard took all the caravan's gold coins. Annie didn't know what use the money could possibly be at a time like this, but she still handed it over without hesitation. Trade caravans didn't carry many coins. After lending him five hundred last time, they had only a little over two hundred left.
The money remained in Richard's hands for less than fifteen minutes before it became several sets of iron armor.
Their battle with the gnolls had yielded a huge pile of battered weapons and armor, most of which had been left in the warehouse as junk and ignored. Annie was a meticulous person. She had the caravan servants remove the more intact armor plates and string them together with ox sinew, managing to piece together more than a dozen usable sets.
Richard distributed these precious suits of armor among the highest-level barbarians.
When charging, they would serve as the sharpest arrowhead breaking through the enemy formation, bear the brunt of the enemy's counterattack, and deliver the decisive blow! In any army that hadn't completely rotted from the inside out, such elite troops would always wear the finest armor, receive the highest pay, and drink the strongest liquor!
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