Chapter 9: To My Little Kittens

“—And that’s about the sum of it.”

Bri-chan had a cleft chin. Not just a slight cleft, either: it was a deep, clear cleft. His lips were dark black. He probably wore black lipstick. If they were that color without lipstick, he would be a monster. He had a lot of eyelashes and they were fluttery. Were those natural? His cheeks were red. It looked like he wore rouge. Actually, he wore way too much make-up.

Today’s Bri-chan was fully clad in armor and had a sword at his hip. He still wriggled when he moved, though. Scary.

His armor had the hexagram carved into it, so was he a paladin like Brigadier General Wren Water?

Bri-chan had a strange sparkle in his light blue eyes, and his hips were swaying. “The area outside of Deadhead Watching Keep is as I was just saying. To quickly review, camps centered around towers are dotted around the area near the fortress. In each of these camps there are two to five orcs. Well, I think most of you here would know, but since a handful of you look like you don’t, I’ll say this just to be sure. These camps and the keep itself are collectively called Deadhead Watching Keep. Everyone follow me so far? Any questions? No? None, right? It would be a problem for me if there were. Anyway, next I’ll talk about the keep itself.”

Bri-chan spread out a map on the ground, illuminating it with a lamp. It looked like a map of the main keep at Deadhead Watching Keep. He now pointed at it.

“The walls surrounding the keep are around six meters high on the south side, where the main gate is. They’re lower on the east and west sides, about four meters high. On the north side with the rear gate, they’re around five meters. If we’re going to go over the walls and get into the keep, we have to use the exterior stairs to go up to the roof. There’s no entrance on the first floor, you see. So, the entrance is here,” Bri-chan said, using the tip of his sheathed sword to point at a spot on the roof.

“—I’m sure you can tell just by looking,” he continued, “but it’s built so that the southeast corner of the wall is connected to the keep. The exterior stairs are on the east side, way towards at the south, see? In short, even if we go in through the main gate at the south, we’ll have to go almost the entire way around clockwise to reach the stairs. So, if we race up the stairs and go inside through the roof entrance, now we’ll have to go all the way back down to the first floor. You all realize why it’s been designed in such a cumbersome way, right? For defense, of course. Once we go all the way down to the first floor, there are more stairs going up to the watch towers in the northwest, southwest, and northeast.

“—Ah, right, right, I should say this for our rookies’ benefit, this keep has three watch towers sticking up out of it. That’s where the ‘Watching Keep’ part of the name comes from. We anticipate that the enemy boss, the keeper, will be in one of these three towers. Do you have the image down in your head, for the most part?”

Haruhiro nodded a little, still staring intently at the map. They were going to attack this place soon? Somehow, it just didn’t feel real.