The Age of the Sword
For the past six weeks, I had been so busy my eyes were practically spinning in my head.
The journey to Avignon had ended successfully with the recruitment of the Paleheart siblings, but the city of Montpellier we returned to was no cozy refuge.
To me, this city was closer to a battlefield.
There were treasures I had to claim by any means necessary, gatekeepers standing guard over them, enemies waiting only for a chance to stab me in the back — a battlefield where a single moment of carelessness could cost me my life.
In a way, it was no different from a dungeon. The city's shadows would swallow the defeated without mercy.
And the Asty Faction was still a feeble organization that had only just grown to two active field agents.
If an unbalanced party of two combat members carrying three elderly dependents was going to survive a demon-haunted labyrinth this dangerous, we had to prepare for every crisis more diligently than anyone else.
So that was exactly what I did.
I secured lodging and clothing so the Paleheart siblings could adapt to city life, and I dragged Grandfather Pates out of the library where he had been wasting his days, assigning him as their private tutor to inject them with all manner of knowledge.
I reviewed the basic common sense of this other world — a mandatory subject for any reincarnator — and honed my qualifications as a cleric in preparation for acting as the Saintess.
With Rebecca's help, I studied the Order's history and etiquette, and memorized a scripture that felt strangely familiar in more places than one.
In the middle of it all, I made a brief trip home to confirm that the large-scale expansion of the weaving machines had succeeded, and left a modest gift with each of the family members who welcomed me back.
After that, I paid a courtesy call to Count Montpellier at Vermont Castle, lied to Loan King Billy that the plan was proceeding smoothly, tracked down the printers I had funded and pressed them on the development of the printing press, and recruited a few of the poor as informants from the shantytown on the city's outskirts...
I explained Arturo's role to him, tried and failed to teach Arisa echolocation, learned basic self-defense from Rebecca, and asked Pates whether any books in braille existed.
Then it was back to the library to pursue new knowledge, carefully organize and record everything I had learned, agonize over ways to turn future knowledge into money, and despair when I slammed into the limits of the era.
I handled a truly countless number of tasks at a breathless pace, preparing for the wars that would one day come.
But the wars arrived far sooner than I had expected.
And from a completely unexpected direction.
"...Excuse me? The peasants founded a what?"
"The peasants of Avignon have declared the founding of a Peasant Republic. A man named George, who led the rebel army, has reportedly been elected as their president."
On an otherwise peaceful morning, Rebecca came to me with a strangely proud expression and this bizarre piece of news.
The Avignon peasant rebels I had assumed were being thoroughly trampled by knights had, against all odds, cut off their lord's head and swallowed the entire region.
And the name of the nation they had declared was... hmm.
Had I heard that correctly?
Why on earth were words like "republic" and "president" showing up in the year 1298?
Even if this was a fantasy-flavored other world, a democratic republic popping up in the thirteenth century should have been sociologically impossible.
"I'm certain of it. I overheard the city soldiers talking about it."
I looked at Rebecca with every ounce of that doubt packed into my gaze, but she simply squared her shoulders and nodded with complete confidence.
The words that had left her mouth were, without a single falsehood, the truth.
Even if the story had been distorted or embellished somewhere along the way, it was without question a conversation that people of this era had shared.
She stood there looking thoroughly pleased with herself, spouting absolute nonsense.
"No, that's just... I'm going to lose my mind."
I was dizzy.
How was I even supposed to explain this to Rebecca?
There was no way this sister of mine knew about the Soviets that would appear six hundred years from now, and the idea that a late-thirteenth-century peasant uprising would lead to the establishment of a republic was simply...
...not entirely impossible, was it? Our own village was essentially a quasi-autonomous district beyond the reach of noble control.
Of course, the people of our village hadn't gone so far as to chop off their lord's head, but regional communities that operated without direct aristocratic interference weren't all that rare.
The difference was that these people hadn't simply been too far from their lord for his authority to reach them — they had killed the lord they already had. And that lord had been a count, no less, which was what made the whole thing look so strange.
Looked at that way, even the name "Peasant Republic" wasn't particularly odd.
As a reincarnator from the twenty-first century, the name Peasant Republic conjured images of a blood-red hammer and sickle for me, but to the people of this era it would simply mean a self-governing community of peasants.
Their actual system and professed ideology would be far closer to the latter than the former.
This place was not the Cold War era, when ideological conflict had been racing toward its peak.
This was still the heart of the Middle Ages, where even handicrafts hadn't properly developed, let alone an Industrial Revolution — an age of poverty so deep that Bibles weren't widely distributed because books were too expensive, never mind some communist demon king named Marx writing and circulating a grimoire of dark arts.
A noble's head had suddenly rolled and a Peasant Republic had been declared, but that absolutely did not mean it was the work of revolutionaries with a suspicious love of the color red.
At the same time, it seemed equally unlikely that a powerful military force capable of defeating mana-wielding knights and beheading a lord would declare a nation with the modest goal of simply farming in peace.
They had probably slapped the "republic" label on the door while running something little different from a bandit gang — a warlord-style regime.
...Wait. Isn't that dangerous in its own right?
The moment that thought landed, my head went cold.
Right. I understood how the name Peasant Republic had managed to surface.
I understood that it wasn't such a strange name for this era, and that they were almost certainly running on the slapdash, rebel-typical system that was a million light-years removed from any republic I would recognize.
And when I stripped away all my twenty-first-century social science knowledge and every prejudice attached to the name Peasant Republic and looked at the situation bare...
This was the worst possible outcome for me.
"That goddamn megalomaniac bastard...!"
The Avignon peasant rebels had cut off the Count of Avignon's head and declared the founding of a Peasant Republic.
That was a declaration of war against the old order — the worst possible judgment, one that sealed off the option of compromise entirely.
This was bad.
If the rebels had failed to take the lord's head, the whole affair could have been tidied up with the execution of a few ringleaders.
The Count of Avignon, who had fallen into heresy and ruined his own fields, was an obvious self-destructive idiot by anyone's measure, and the peasants who had risen up were simply good people pushed past their limit.
The Avignon count's house had neither the military force nor the wisdom to calm the situation anyway, so neighboring lords would have stepped in, crushed the rebellion, and carved off chunks of land for themselves as the final settlement.
From the neighboring lords' perspective — knowing full well the Count of Avignon had brought this on himself — there was no reason to accept personnel losses just to massacre serfs. They would have wrapped things up by hanging a few dozen people at most.
Even if the rebels had stopped at simply cutting off the count's head, something could still have been worked out.
Left alone, of course, our valiant knightly lords would have gone around indiscriminately swinging their swords to teach those insolent serfs a lesson... but the biggest reason a large-scale rebellion had erupted in Avignon was heresy, nothing else.
If I had used the lantern to prove myself as the Saintess, pulled Count Montpellier into the mix, and crushed the rebels, I could have shown mercy in the aftermath by citing the Count of Avignon's corrupt faith as the excuse.
But that was off the table now.
The moment that idiot mob's leader declared a nation under the half-witted name of Peasant Republic, the neighboring lords would never leave that insolent rabble alive.
The reason was simple.
They had proposed a system that could exist without nobles.
It didn't matter how a country with the peculiar name of Peasant Republic actually functioned.
The instant a mere peasant rebel army killed a count and invoked a national name that defied the feudal order, they became an enemy that had to be annihilated.
Not a mob that could simply be scattered, not lambs to be soothed and sent home — but a rival that threatened feudalism itself.
Just like the French Republic during the Great Revolution.
"A miniature revolutionary war, five hundred years early."
But the outcome of this war was all but decided.
Avignon was not Paris. It didn't have the population for total war. And above all, the age of knights was not yet over.
The traitors who had dared declare they would replace the feudal system would eventually be slaughtered to the last man.
Unless I stepped in.
"...Rebecca. What do you think I should do?"
I knew the future.
I had come back from eight centuries ahead, carrying in my head — however incompletely — the history of everything that would follow.
I knew, however dimly, the direction this world would take and the ideal it ought to strive toward.
Therefore, I could turn that rebellion into a revolution.
I could take a trivial disturbance on the southern fringes of France and transform it into a great flood that would overturn the entire world.
I could predict the thinking of those ignorant feudal lords with my eyes closed. If I rode this wave now, couldn't I seize all of Occitania in an instant?
"Absolutely not. If you intend to go to that bandit den, you will have to take my life first."
Right. Of course not.
I still had no proper foundation and barely anyone I could freely command. A revolution? Please.
This was a fantasy world where magic and miracles genuinely existed. There was no reason the knowledge I had built up on Earth would apply as-is.
So rationally speaking, pretending I knew nothing was the correct choice... but if I washed my hands of this too, those idiots really would be massacred without being able to lift a finger.
"Then I suppose there's no choice. I'll just have to help them — only as much as won't put us in danger."
Knowing the future and still standing by left a bitter taste in my mouth.
At the very least, I should try to keep the body count as low as possible.