Alderamin on the Sky

Ikta is a brilliant, but lazy and unmotivated boy. His childhood friend, a high-ranking daughter of a noble, offers him an easy position at a library if he can help her get the top score on a military exam. But their lives take a sudden turn when the boat carrying them to the exam runs aground, and Ikta rescues a mysterious girl on board. When she turns out to be a princess, and they all find themselves behind enemy lines, Ikta is going to start having to work hard for real.

Ikta succeeds in a daring plan to cross the Kioka border and return the princess home. But this means he gets a reward, and his reward is the title of Imperial Knight. Now he finds himself dragged into a war he hates, serving a government that doesn't want to win, and despising the princess he rescued.

Ikta has been appointed an Imperial Knight, and his new life at the High-Level Officer's School begins. The easily-bored Ikta has difficulty fitting in, and its not long before he's picking fights and making enemies among the upper ranks. He's set up in a trap to be humiliated during a mock exercise, and to make matters worse, his platoon commander won't listen to a word he says. The reason: because he slept with her mother!

Ikta leads his troops to grand victory over the forces led by the higher ranking officers. But what was supposed to be a simple training exercise turns deadly serious when a force of men loyal to a betrayed commander kidnaps the princess. Can Ikta lead his exhausted troops to track down and defeat a squad of experienced soldiers? And can he do it without letting them hurt the princess?

"Welcome to the world of science!" When Yatori was 9 years old, she was sent to study with the general Bada Sankrein, and met a young boy her age, Ikta. The world he shows her is new and exciting, like nothing she's ever seen.

Ikta and crew are assigned to a garrison in the far northern region of the empire: a lonely, desolate place at the foot of a massive mountain range. The garrison staff are petty and corrupt, and don't like it when Ikta slacks off and defies orders. But when they try to throw him in the garrison prison, he stumbles across a secret that they want desperately to keep hidden.

War breaks out in the far north, as the Empire's oppression of the mountain people results in a terrifying backlash. With the one competent leader in the Northern Garrison assassinated, the ignorant garrison commander flings the troops headlong into a highly defended, mountainous position, with disastrous results. Ikta and his friends are kept as part of the reserves for now, but it won't be long until they're thrust into the war as well.

Ikta and his soldiers are sent to deliver supplies to the struggling imperial armies as the war continues. Unused to fighting in the high mountains, and led by incompetent leaders the imperial soldiers suffer heavy casualties. Ikta devises a brilliant stratagem to retake an enemy fortress, but when a messenger begs him for help in saving his allies, he's forced to choose between risking his own soldiers life, and bringing another imperial force to certain doom.

The war against the mountain people continues, and the imperial forces are about to make one last march to their final staging ground. The incompetent imperial commanders pick a route that leaves their flanks exposed to an attack, but fortunately Ikta persuades them to dismount and use their shields. In the midst of the Sinack attack, a group of unknown assassins appears out of nowhere and heads straight for the Lieutenant General! They're heavily armed and highly trained, but can Yatori stop them in time?

The Sinack have been subdued, but the Imperial Army finds that it's been caught in a trap! A huge army from the Aldera nation has crossed the supposedly-impassable northern mountains, and threatens to overwhelm the exhausted Imperial forces. Ikta's only way out is to force a peace treaty with the Sinack and ask for their help, which means going to their defeated leader and abasing himself. Will she respond to his pleas, after the Imperials burned her village and killed her people? How far is he willing to go earn her forgiveness?

The Imperial Army is pushed back, and Ikta is forced to use every trick at his disposal to keep his numerically inferior force from being overwhelmed. The Alderamin army has 12,000 troops, and his unit has only a little over 600. When he's forced to make a tough call to sacrifice his own men and save the Sinack, Suya confronts him angrily. She wants to know why he was willing to sacrifice his own men for the people he was fighting yesterday, and she says he owes her an answer.

The Imperial army is continuing its retreat from the numerically superior Aldera forces at the base of the Alafatra mountain range. They've set fire to the forest to buy themselves more time, but after a few days the fire is beginning to burn out. To buy the time they need to finish the retreat, Ikta is forced to maintain a proactive mobile defense and keep the flames burning. But the enemy general is breaking all the rules, and Ikta can't figure out his game. By the time Ikta realizes what's happened, it's too late, and the enemy is battering down his walls with a new weapon and sending their cavalry straight through the flames!

Ikta suffers a serious setback at the hands of the unsleeping, shining officer from the Kioka republic. His lines have been broken and the retreat is in disarray. To salvage an increasingly desperate situation, he leads a small, handpicked force to lure Jean into a trap. But Jean's proven himself for than a match for Ikta already, and the Alderan military outnumbers his own forces by over a dozen times. How can he handle such overwhelming numbers when his opponent has shown to be his equal?