The Age of the Sword
Ha. These vulgar misers dare...!
Count Montpellier reacted exactly as Asty had intended.
He immediately grasped what the pouch of gold coins she had handed him meant, and began to regard the city's influential figures—who had dared try to sabotage his plans—with open suspicion.
"I shall deal with these lawless men as justice demands. So please, Saintess, do not trouble yourself overmuch."
"Uh... yes?"
Yet the intensity of Count Montpellier's response completely overshot Asty's intentions.
And for good reason: the count had never been some monstrous traitor plotting to seize the throne from the start.
Had he been a true ambitious schemer eyeing the crown all along, he would hardly have been so shaken by the mere news that the city's power brokers had approached Asty. His grand design would already have been advancing steadily for years, and Asty would have been nothing more than a useful recent collaborator. He might have taken some measures to keep his secret ambitions from leaking, but he would never have felt genuine crisis or lost his reason to rage.
In reality, however, Count Montpellier was no natural-born traitor who had nursed rebellion since the cradle. He was more like a fresh-faced novice who had been sweet-talked by the Saintess of Earth into joining a shady enterprise.
And that was precisely the problem.
Asty had assumed Count Montpellier was a professional rebel who had spent long years preparing his uprising. In truth, he was a complete beginner who had stumbled into treason almost by accident. It was not that a virtuous Asty had been swept up in the count's monstrous conspiracy—rather, a virtuous count had been swept up in Asty's monstrous conspiracy.
Thus the sense of crisis Count Montpellier felt upon seeing that pouch of gold far exceeded anything Asty had anticipated.
"Thomas! Bring me my sword! I will personally pass judgment on those greedy demons who dare defy the Goddess's will!"
The moment Asty left the office, still tilting her head and wondering if something had gone wrong, Count Montpellier twisted his usually refined features into a demonic snarl and began to vent his fury.
"Y-yes? Wait, Father, what on earth are you—"
"Can you not see this filthy gold before your eyes?! That money pouch is both the unchanging token of divine faith and the proof that those filthy slaves of gold have stretched their black claws toward the Saintess! I swear upon the Goddess by the name of our house—I will cut off the limbs of those greedy swine and tear off their heads to throw to the wild dogs!"
Naturally, to his son it looked as if his father had simply gone mad and started spouting nonsense.
There were limits even to blind obedience. When a man suddenly started bellowing at the top of his lungs, summoned you, and then casually proposed marching on the city, what exactly were you supposed to say in response?
This could not stand.
No matter how firm his father's resolve, this particular order could never be followed.
This was Montpellier they were talking about. The largest city in France, the very prize they had worked so hard to claim. If they simply charged in with swords drawn, who knew what the public reaction would be? All their efforts would go up in smoke, and they would draw the hostility of every neighboring lord. What was he even thinking, saying something like—
"They have caught the scent. What do you think it means that they approached the Saintess first?"
"...Ah. You don't mean—"
"Exactly. Those bastards could never have discovered her true identity, so they must have guessed what we are plotting."
Right. That was it.
Thomas stopped panicking and swiftly recovered his reason. Using the sharp mind he had inherited from his father, he analyzed the present situation—and his face turned ashen as he realized how close they had come to total ruin.
"These insolent curs dare...!"
Thomas, son of Count Montpellier, poured out his rage with exactly the same expression his father had worn moments before.
Once again: originally, Count Montpellier had not harbored even the slightest intention of claiming the French throne. The sole reason a diligent provincial lord had begun dreaming of overturning the heavens was Asty's clumsy meddling. Naturally, he had made no mental preparations whatsoever for becoming a traitor.
Of course his heir Thomas was equally unprepared, and so he flew into a rage for precisely the same reasons as his father and began demanding extreme solutions.
"Father, summon the army at once! We must teach those utterly insolent commoners a lesson!"
"Now hold on, my son. Even so, mobilizing the army is—"
"If we swallow a provocation like this as if nothing happened, they will only scorn our house even more! How can you hesitate when this is a fight to uphold the Goddess's will?!"
"...You are right. Send messengers to the vassals immediately! We will restore order in Avignon according to the Saintess's plan, and on the way back we will behead those rotten maggots of the city and leave them for the eagles to peck!"
In a medieval feudal society where personal martial prowess still carried real weight, most lords who swaggered about with their shoulders squared also tended to know a thing or two about swinging a sword. And like most heroic types who placed their confidence solely in combat, the local lords had mastered the forbidden art of converting precious brain cells into muscle.
In short, there were a lot of idiots around.
Count Montpellier and his son were frequently praised as competent and well-educated, with minds that turned quite well... yet as long as their baseline remained medieval, the limits were clear.
Having learned that the Saintess coin into which they had poured their entire fortune had nearly been delisted, the two traitors had not the slightest intention of exercising patience.
And so House Montpellier began to apply force against the city of Montpellier itself.
It was the moment the power structure of the Oxyca region twisted once more.
The nobility of the Oxyca region in southern France, where Asty was active, could be roughly divided into five houses.
House Montpellier, which held France's largest city under its arm.
House Marseille, which controlled a sizable city of its own, even if it could not match Montpellier.
House Valence, bound by blood to the eastern powerhouse House Lyon.
House Aquitaine, which had fallen into a brain-dead state from its struggle for supremacy with Bordeaux.
And finally House Avignon, which had recently been thoroughly thrashed by its own serfs and become a laughingstock.
There were of course far more nobles who had formally received titles, but only these five houses commanded multiple vassal lords under them and were recognized as independent powers in their own right.
Or rather, it was now four houses rather than five.
In any case, as was typical of provincial lords, the nobles of Oxyca felt little genuine loyalty toward the royal house.
After all, the king was nothing more than a puppet, was he not? And a particularly stupid one who had failed to protect even his own palace and had been freeloading off the Duke of Orléans for decades.
Had he at least retained some nominal authority as head of state, things might have been different. But for a penniless king who possessed neither Paris nor the protection of the Church, any loyalty that might once have been offered had long since evaporated of its own accord.
Of course it was no great secret that Claude V's coffers still held the legacy left behind by the City of Light... but if he spent that money, how exactly was he supposed to feed the Royal Knights?
The royal house no longer possessed the capacity to attempt anything beyond mere maintenance of the status quo. Between the royal family's extravagant lifestyle and the upkeep of the Royal Knights alone, the household accounts were already stretched thin; there was simply no room left to try anything new.
Had the notoriously sharp-tongued royal treasurer overheard this conversation, he would have exploded in fury, demanding to know how they dared claim knowledge of the royal finances. But the problem was so obvious that one hardly needed to steal a look at the royal ledgers.
Paris had fallen.
The once-flourishing city that the Goddess herself had honored with the glorious epithet "City of Light" had been left to rot for nearly a century after the orc invasion.
The holy capital that had once served as the heart of the French kingdom and the center of royal authority—Paris itself.
Under those circumstances, the state of the royal purse was obvious without looking. Had the French royal house truly been reduced to penniless paupers, the crown itself would have been stripped from them long ago. Had they still possessed the means to do something, they would have begun the reconstruction of Paris first.
The very fact that the man called king of this country was freeloading off a relative while stubbornly clinging only to his crown was itself proof that the royal house was poor.
Thus most lords paid little attention to the king's wishes, and the lords of Oxyca were no exception.
What could a king without authority or military power possibly do? Since that crowned scarecrow showed no intention of escaping the Duke of Orléans's influence, they simply decided that as long as they did not openly defy him, they could do as they pleased—and then forgot about him entirely.
But no longer.
"Blasphemer!"
"Spare me! I don't know what I did, but I'm sorry!"
Count Montpellier, whose reputation as an excellent lord of both sense and ability had been widely known, had suddenly—as if he had eaten something rotten—marched into the city and begun raising hell.
Considering that the legal guarantor of Montpellier's autonomy was the king himself, this was an outrage that could reasonably be interpreted as a declaration of war.
Everyone waited in shock for the royal response.
"..."
And, astonishingly, nothing happened at all.
Indeed.
Claude V was a rare breed of disastrous monarch who could plant treasonous ambitions even in perfectly loyal subjects.