Become a Rebel
Count Montpellier was no fool.
He was a capable noble skilled enough to throw Asty off balance, an excellent politician tempered by decades as a lord. Had he been dull-witted enough to swallow Asty’s proposal whole and raise a rebellion, House Montpellier would have been wiped from the map long ago.
What moved him, then, was neither Asty’s true identity nor her reckless ambition. What moved him were the fragments of the future that slipped from Asty’s lips.
“I cannot tolerate the tyranny of the incompetent Claude V. How many more must suffer to protect the throne of a man who has no right to it?”
“Indeed, Your Holiness, your heart is truly kind.”
“How could I call myself a good person when I have merely watched these tragedies unfold until now? I simply believe that even at this late hour, we must set right what has gone wrong.”
Asty had preached people-first ideology to the Count. More precisely, she hadn’t meant to preach it—she had accidentally let it slip while trying to give the rebellion legitimacy—but the claim that they should smash the king’s skull because he was doing a shitty job was genuinely shocking.
In this world, where the divine right of kings was common sense, calling for rebellion in the name of the people’s will was practically forbidden knowledge from the future. …Though Mencius, who had treated the king’s neck as little more than a crown stand, had been a man of the ancient past rather than the future. Still, the shock Count Montpellier received was that intense.
“These are the blueprints for the spinning machine and the loom. So long as Your Lordship does not gouge the people with excessive profits, I will support whatever use you put them to.”
Asty had taught the Count a money-printing bug. In truth, she had handed over the designs simply to accelerate technological progress now that they were in the same boat, but to Count Montpellier—who had suddenly been nominated ringleader of a rebellion—it sounded like the most sincere declaration of support imaginable. After all, the very reason he had sent his eldest son was to secure the blueprints for the Water Frame.
Of course, the Count was no man from the future, so he had no idea exactly how much productivity the combination of the Water Frame and the semi-automatic loom would yield. But he at least knew it would make money.
“If this enterprise drives up the price of cotton, it should become possible to draw soldiers from Iberia or Italy as well.”
“?”
“…I mean we can hire a great many mercenaries with the money earned from selling cloth.”
Asty had taught the Count a winning strategy. It was too far ahead of its time to be accepted, however. The idea of cornering the cotton market in advance because demand would rise with the introduction of the Water Frame and semi-automatic loom, then using the profits to hire troops, was a concept that leaped far beyond the era. It seemed that sweeping up cotton across southern Europe would fall to Asty after all.
“May the Goddess’s grace be with you, my lord, as you walk this difficult path.”
Finally, Asty had instilled confidence in the Count. This, too, was closer to a misunderstanding. Believing the Count had long dreamed of treason, Asty had merely offered a well-wishing remark as a way of saying they should remain on good terms. But to the Count, who had suddenly been handed a whole armful of gift packages, it meant something entirely different.
Has the Goddess truly chosen me to be King of France…!
It wasn’t entirely baseless delusion, either. In a world where the Goddess had abandoned humanity, the girl he had summoned for the prosperity of his house turned out to be the Saintess. And that Saintess had told him he was qualified to be king, provided him with both justification and means for seizing power, then coolly taken her leave. Wasn’t all of this clearly the Goddess’s will?
The notion that an eleven-year-old girl could invent revolutionary machines on her own and urge a lord to rebel was absurd. But if Goddess Vesta had chosen him as the new King of France and sent her proxy to support him, everything made perfect sense.
Why had Asty possessed such dignity and composure beyond her years? Because she was the Goddess’s proxy—of course her mind would be mature. Why had every single word she spoke contained meanings so complex they were hard to grasp? The words and deeds of one who carried out the Goddess’s will could hardly be light. How had she been able to invent such astonishing machines in a rural village? Obviously the Goddess had taught her.
Count Montpellier was truly a capable noble. Rather than waste time doubting every one of Asty’s words and actions, he settled on the reasonable conclusion that Goddess Vesta had chosen him as the new King of France, and chose the path of becoming a rebel ringleader.
And so, to the very end, he never knew. That all of this had begun from a simple misunderstanding. That what he had realized was nothing but a baseless illusion. He accepted a sacred mission he could never have imagined.
Around the time Count Montpellier, having fallen for Asty’s coaxing and blossomed into a budding traitor, quietly burned with ambition in his room,
“Whew… I thought I was going to die of fright.”
The wicked Saintess who had turned an ordinary feudal lord into a man with emperor delusions lay on the bed the Count had provided and let out a sigh of relief. Her expression suggested she had not the faintest idea what she had just done.
Well… she had believed from the start that the Count was a traitor. In a situation where royal authority was greatly weakened, if a local lord swallowed the largest city in the kingdom, what would follow if not a large-scale rebellion and a bloody war of succession?
In truth, Count Montpellier had simply intended to reclaim the city’s autonomy and suck its wealth dry. But Asty, who had developed unfortunate prejudices from various dramas, games, and alternate-history novels in her previous life, was convinced the Count was a traitor and had attempted to negotiate her own worth.
“Did I seem off just now? Not awkward or suspicious, right?”
Only, her mental state was nowhere near as composed and calm as it had appeared on the surface. What person in the world could maintain their composure while plotting the overthrow of a nation? Especially when it wasn’t even something she wanted to do, but a situation where she had been dragged into someone else’s treason.
One might think she could simply run away, but over the past few weeks Asty had clearly recognized the harshness of the Middle Ages. A world with no sophisticated laws or systems anywhere, where everything was resolved solely through authority and violence. In an age where there was no proper way to stop high-ranking people who suddenly went off the rails and committed every kind of madness, showing a negative reaction to the lord who stood at the apex of local society was an excessively dangerous act.
All the more so if that lord harbored ambitions of toppling the puppet king and becoming king himself, and intended to drag her into the rebellion. Even if she told a traitor who meant to swallow the country that she could not take part in such a heinous act, what would she get but a silenced mouth? To the country girl Asty, a lord commanding thousands of soldiers was a walking disaster itself. For the safety of the family remaining in the village, she had no choice but to cooperate with the Count’s conspiracy.
…Even though the Count had no intention of raising a rebellion at all.
In the end, it was Asty who had planted the seeds of treason in the Count. Having mistaken a man who was not a traitor for one, and thrashing about to survive, she had ended up raising a rebellion together with a Count who had truly become a traitor.
“Pardon?”
“When I was talking with Count Montpellier earlier. I’m terrible at acting, so I was shaking like a leaf inside, but how did it look to you, Sister?”
Of course, Asty had not the slightest inkling of that fact, so she could smile brightly and savor the hard-won victory. A victory she had claimed by deceiving even her only ally.
“Just now… was that not a revelation from Her?”
“Come on, no way. If it had been, I wouldn’t have borrowed the lantern. The Goddess is still giving me the silent treatment.”
Rebecca simply could not understand the situation. Had that just now been mere acting? A lie to get through the moment? That performance that had toyed with a seasoned noble, tempered by decades of lordship, like a plaything?
No, more than that. If she had not received a revelation from the Goddess, then where on earth had all those countless stories she had spun for the Count come from?
“Where from? From right here.”
Asty shrugged and tapped her temple with a finger. Then, with a troubled smile, she picked up the dagger lying on the table.
“Sister Rebecca, you called me the Saintess, but I can’t use Divine Power and I can’t communicate with the Goddess either.”
The reincarnator drew the blade across her palm. Just as he had always done in his previous life. But because her body had changed, or because she failed to control her strength, the crude medieval blade sank deeper than she intended and tore into the flesh beneath the skin.
“Ah.”
“Saintess!”
Horrified, Rebecca immediately snatched the knife from Asty’s hand. Then she promptly healed Asty’s wound with the lantern she wore at her waist.
“So I’m just… a pathetic human who can’t even heal a little cut on her own.”
“This is hardly the time for such—”
But blood once spilled cannot be erased. The sacred blood of this unholy Saintess who had drifted into this world flowed down her arm like a brand, drawing a red line.
“So please help me.”
The girl whispered softly, her eyes flashing. So that she would never again be swept up in malice. So that she would never again be crushed by loss. She had to discover the reason she had been reborn into this world, and a way to receive the Goddess’s answer.