The Blunder
The daily routines of medieval lords were simple to the point of absurdity.
They rose in the morning, squeezed their serfs for everything they were worth, then spent the rest of the day either drowning in luxury and pleasure or training their bodies. When night fell, they went to bed at a reasonable hour.
It was less the schedule of a ruling class and more the instincts of beasts, but given that most "lords" of the era were little better than village headmen, there was nothing especially strange about it. Even the most populous fiefs barely scraped past a thousand souls. What grand duties or packed calendars could they possibly have?
High-ranking nobles of real stature might have been different, but the overwhelming majority of the aristocracy—the petty lords—spent most of their lives lounging around their own houses. These shut-in freeloaders only stirred for one of two reasons: either some enormous profit had been dangled in front of them, or some enormous crisis was bearing down.
Right now, it was unmistakably the latter.
The royal authority that had been teetering on a knife's edge had been shattered by the king's own hands. War was no longer avoidable. Arrow prices were skyrocketing everywhere, and mercenaries were racing around hunting for contracts. Any lord who failed to feel the danger at this point had no business holding a title.
The proud shut-in freeloaders of the Kingdom of France sensed the threat faster than anyone.
"Buying arrows! I'll take every last one you've got!"
"Too late, friend. Brittany already scooped up every fletcher worth the name."
"Then what the hell am I supposed to—"
"How should I know? If you're that desperate, buy the crude ones the carpenters are knocking out. You can always fit the heads later."
They threw every ounce of survival instinct into stockpiling supplies like squirrels racing to fill their dens before winter. Arrows and every other piece of war gear that had been floating on the open market vanished as if by magic. The craftsmen who made them were hired away by lords and disappeared just as thoroughly.
Meanwhile, the lords who had made their living selling weapons either shut down their businesses entirely or began dealing only with trusted allies. The age had arrived when a single sword could accomplish more than a glittering pile of gold coins.
"My lord, if you take even that, what are we supposed to live on?!"
"Hey, I need to eat too if I'm going to swing a blade!"
"A serf's life? Why would that matter?"
"Heh heh… if I hoard every last sack of flour right now, the profit multiplies several times over!"
Naturally, the common folk were not exactly celebrating the approach of war. Lords who smelled danger began buying up every scrap of food they could find under the pretext of stockpiling military provisions, and bread prices exploded. The moment bread prices soared, merchants with a nose for profit piled on and began cornering the flour market as well.
Bread prices climbed even higher. Yet because war was already breathing down everyone's necks, demand showed no sign of easing. Lords who still lacked enough grain resorted to "taxation" and sucked their serfs dry to the marrow. The grain they extracted was frequently siphoned off and sold again further down the line.
Someone had to keep food flowing into the markets, after all. The method of transport might have been grotesquely immoral, but at least a few people stayed alive thanks to those crimes. At the very least, no one with money found themselves unable to buy grain at all.
The countryside, of course, became hell.
Grain gone. Livestock gone. What were people supposed to eat? The mad nobles had swept the wheat fields clean down to the last ear. Digging for a living was no longer an option.
Serfs who finally understood what the people of Avignon must have felt bolted for the fields and forests, only to learn the hard way that a hunter-gatherer's life was anything but easy. If living off game and wild berries had been simple, their ancestors would never have bothered inventing agriculture in the first place.
A few budding druids had already slipped into famine-season mode and started chewing roots and tree bark. Everyone else quietly went home. There were still turnips left, after all. Once winter passed, things would somehow work out… or so they told themselves, clinging to lies they didn't even believe, choosing the path that looked least dangerous for now.
"Peasants of France, rise up! You have nothing to lose but your taxes—and a world to win!"
"I will stand in the heavens! In the Goddess's name I will beat every last noble into the dirt and build a paradise where those who sweat enjoy everything!"
"Fire Punch! Fire Punch!"
"You bastards! You could at least leave us rye bread! I can't take it anymore. Let's tear this rotten world down with our own hands!"
"Tear it down!"
Just as the peasants of Avignon had done, some prepared or launched uprisings of their own. The Peasant Republic—still standing after cutting the throat of a full-fledged count—had become an inspiring precedent for every peasant in France. When a lord's merciless extraction left you with no way to live, what choice remained but to open that lord's belly?
"Fire Punch? Try a Knight Punch instead!"
"How dare lowly serfs raise their heads!"
"Family Annihilation Punch—hyaaat!"
They were not linked by any psychic neural network, so most of the revolts erupted in scattered bursts and were crushed with almost pathetic ease. Still—
…Ah, I could really go for a cigarette.
—it was more than enough to shake the heart of one endlessly kind Saintess.
Asty watched the drifting clouds and playfully smacked her lips. Inside, she was already blackened and rotting—contempt for herself, who could do nothing even as the situation reached this point, and resentment toward the goddess who had dragged her into this world.
"If this was how it was going to be, why the hell did you call me?"
The mood in the city of Montpellier was better than expected. Count Montpellier had personally killed far fewer people than feared, and instead of greedily grabbing everything, he had redistributed the rights of the dismantled guilds among the citizens. The terror had more or less settled. The king's blunders had also thrown France into a war footing, leaving craftsmen so busy they barely had time to breathe.
Moreover, other lords who had watched the count's sudden violence began reclaiming urban autonomy left and right. Public opinion quietly shifted: compared to the rest, Count Montpellier almost looked like a gentleman. In other regions, lords blinded by greed routinely threatened the very survival of their cities, creating the insane situation where a serial killer started to look like a fairy. With war liable to sweep everyone up at any moment, picking a fight with a lord who actually commanded an army was simply not smart.
As a result, relations between the city of Montpellier and the count's house were better than before. The entire city was feeling the wartime boom and the soaring price of bread. Other lords kept making reckless moves, the count's image rebounded, and a populace that finally understood war was coming began craving a protector who could supply both soldiers and grain.
Of course, behind the scenes lay a carefully orchestrated campaign highlighting the wickedness of the spinner's guild that had tried to harm a genius inventor girl, the evils of the guild monopoly system, and more. The most effective weapon of all had been the propaganda leaflets Asty herself had cranked out on her prototype printing press.
A reincarnator from the twenty-first century, fully aware of medieval illiteracy rates, had produced state-of-the-art trash pamphlets complete with illustrations. Their impact was so enormous that no one could believe they were mere scraps of paper. Printing even a few hundred copies in this era cost a fortune, but luckily a mountain of gold coins extorted from the loan shark still sat piled in her room.
Having already watched the count butcher hundreds in broad daylight because of her own mistake, Asty no longer had anything left to hold back. She threw every card she possessed into cleaning up the mess in front of her. The uneasy peace of the present was the fruit of that effort.
"If you're going to watch, at least say something. Otherwise I really am going to lose my mind."
Therefore her self-reproach that she had been able to do nothing was flawed from the premise… but guilt had always belonged to the realm of emotion rather than reason. Even though she had managed to paper over the count's unexpected rampage in a reasonably plausible fashion, she was already being eaten alive by guilt. Every person the Count of Montpellier had cut down after listening to her words had turned into lead and settled in her heart.
Asty was more sensitive than most. Sensitive enough that she had once followed a mad philanthropist she met on campus and ruined her life for a while. Now that same sensitivity was trying to claim every civilian death the coming war would produce as her personal responsibility. Someone had to receive the grudges of those who suffered simply for having been born.
It was an utterly stifling way of thinking—and precisely why the goddess had chosen her.
"…Huh."
The Saintess of Compassion suddenly looked at the candle she had set on the desk. A tiny flame she had lit earlier so she could read a book borrowed from the old librarian, before she had turned to the window and sunk into thought. From that trivial little fire she somehow felt a gaze.
"Come on. No way."
Impossible. Asty gave a bitter smile and shook her head.
Yet the flame was still watching her.