The Blunder
It’s a memory I’d rather not dwell on now, but my senior was the sort who caused trouble at every possible turn.
She’d pick the absolute worst neighborhoods under the pretense of doing good deeds, and of course accidents followed wherever she went.
Ju Se-hwa, proud graduate of one of Korea’s most prestigious universities, possessed drive that left everyone else in the dust—and she dragged disasters of equally monstrous scale along with her.
No wonder even I, who merely trailed after her, ended up on the Foreign Ministry’s blacklist.
She always let her heart race ahead of her, yet she was needlessly competent and diligent, so every plan she cooked up tangled itself into a hopeless mess.
That was how I developed the habit of preparing a Plan B.
I simply couldn’t trust anything that senior brought to the table, so I made a point of devising backup plans that were both realistic and flexible in advance.
And this matter was no exception.
Around the time Count Montpellier was swinging blades through the city and rising as a public enemy—
No. From the very moment I was summoned to the count’s castle and drawn into the rebellion, I had already prepared a Plan B for the worst case.
It was a method so vicious I could barely stomach it myself, so I had been pretending it didn’t exist. But now that Vesta Coin, my last remaining hope, had been exposed as worthless junk stock, I had no other choice.
I had no option but to adopt Plan B—the one that required no Divine Power at all.
“Everyone, a great war has come right to our doorstep.”
The one silver lining was that I had managed to secure two useful cards in the meantime.
Elder Pates, once a priest of the old order, and Arturo Paleheart, scion of a fallen southern noble house.
If I hadn’t brought those two aboard, Rebecca and I would have been grinding ourselves to dust alone. For the moment, at least, I could call myself lucky.
Not that we had anything close to enough hands.
“The incompetent Claude V failed to control the nobles, and with his appalling governance he has plunged the lives of the people into misery.”
But it wasn’t as if I could simply go out and recruit trustworthy comrades on the spot. What else was I supposed to do?
I would just have to work the people I already had as hard as possible and somehow make it succeed.
“I tried to borrow the Goddess’s power to prevent the outbreak of civil war, but my aptitude proved insufficient. In truth, I failed.”
I conjured a small flame to prove that I had obtained Divine Power.
And I laid bare the fact that my talent for it was abysmal—and that Plan A had collapsed because of it.
Only then could I make them accept the necessity of Plan B.
“Therefore we will side with Count Montpellier and elevate him as the new King of France.”
I pointed to the County of Montpellier on the map spread across the desk.
At first glance, Plan B’s objective was almost insultingly simple.
Depose the incompetent King Claude V, who clung to the Duke of Orléans and did nothing.
And support the usurpation by my patron, Count Montpellier.
End the coming war as swiftly as possible and minimize meaningless sacrifice.
“Crowning a cunning snake is still better than the near-anarchy we have now.”
I made sure to stress, however, that this was only the lesser evil—chosen solely to avoid the absolute worst.
Count Montpellier himself was hardly a man one could trust, and his infamous reputation threatened to stain me as well.
For a Saintess, a fall in public standing was fatal.
If I boarded the same ship as a cruel megalomaniac like the count, my evaluation would plummet into the abyss long before I could even declare the order’s reconstruction. I needed to keep a careful distance.
“Then would it not be better to seek another? Rather than one so cunning, would it not be wiser to place a devout and honest man upon the throne…?”
“Unfortunately, we have no such luxury. Elevating the count as king is the only path left to us.”
Elder Pates, true to his roots as a priest of the corrupt old order, suggested installing some fool as king and turning him into a puppet. If that had been possible, I would have done it long ago.
I knew my own cards perfectly well.
What I possessed now was Divine Power with less output than a disposable convenience-store lighter, and future knowledge riddled with holes—half-baked knowledge I could barely even use properly because of how frantically the situation was shifting.
Meanwhile my sole backer, Vesta, was bound by the complex regulations that governed transcendents and would likely be unable to intervene directly on the earth for some time. The legacy of the old order had already been carved up and devoured by the high and mighty long ago.
There was simply no way I could cut Count Montpellier loose now and try to set someone else on the throne.
“And did the count not care for his own people rather diligently? He is merely wandering for a time because of the chaos of the age. Once he ascends the throne, he might well become a sage king the likes of which we have never seen.”
But it looked wretched for the Goddess’s proxy to admit she had no choice but to join the rebel ringleader’s line, so I clasped my hands in a pious gesture and spouted nonsense I myself could not believe.
It was, quite literally, bullshit.
That he might become a decent human being once the chaos ended and he wore a crown? The very man who had brought this chaos upon us was Count Montpellier himself.
A bastard whose head had been stuffed full of rebellious ambition for decades, a sage king? He would be lucky if he didn’t simply invade the neighboring houses out of pure lust for power.
Throughout history it is common enough for a previously decent man to go mad once he seizes power. It is rare indeed for a thug to become normal after grasping the throne.
Count Montpellier, who was already carving up a city with his sword before he had even worn a crown, was not worth a moment’s consideration.
I could state it flatly. That man was an idiot.
He possessed the excellent brain and cunning needed to realize his bloated greed, yet he lacked the single most important quality: patience. A complete moron.
Therefore elevating him as King of France was an unforgivable sin—an act that would indirectly invite tyranny and plunge the people’s lives into misery—but—
“So let us leave worldly matters to the world.”
What else could I do? The current king was an idiot as well.
It was a war someone would have started eventually, a throne someone would have usurped.
Rather than leave an inactive dark king sitting on that seat forever, sowing the seeds of further discord, it might be better to hand everything over to a clever bastard.
“We will rebuild the order in a new land, and found a thousand-year kingdom that will bloom with peace and prosperity according to Her will.”
In the end, if Claude V remained on the throne, I would never be able to angle for secession.
The reason was simple.
The current dynasty, which had lost Paris a hundred years earlier, was freeloading off their relative and true power-holder, the Duke of Orléans.
And the Duchy of Orléans lay south of Paris—essentially near the very center of France.
So regardless of the king’s idiocy, France’s de facto capital sat in the middle of the country, making it extremely easy to project influence from the center out to the provinces.
But if Count Montpellier deposed Claude V and opened the door to a new dynasty?
France’s capital would shift from Orléans to Montpellier.
The city of Montpellier had been France’s largest ever since Paris was reduced to rubble. The founding ancestor of the Montpellier dynasty, who would seize power with the help of neighboring lords, would have no justification for centralization. And above all, once civil war began, the Duchy of Orléans would be swept by the flames of war and turned into a wasteland.
Orléans was not even the official capital to begin with. The Kingdom of France still claimed Paris as its capital; the Duchy of Orléans was nothing more than a temporary refuge.
Therefore Count Montpellier would not relocate the capital.
The de facto capital of the new Kingdom of France would be the city of Montpellier.
Naturally, control over the north would weaken—and anything farther north still would not even register in his attention.
“Further north than even the abandoned City of Light lies fertile land that the Goddess has designated for us.”
We take it.
With a resolute expression I drew a line across the map.
The Low Countries.
In the world I had once lived in, the region that held the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
On the land that had also been called Benelux when the three countries were spoken of as one, I would establish a theocratic state where I could implement my future knowledge without restraint.
“A nation in which the order dedicates itself to the happiness of the common people, and, following the Goddess’s will, leads humanity onto a more righteous path.”
Rebecca’s eyes sparkled. Elder Pates’s face began to glow with rapture.
The only person in the room left unmoved by my grand design seemed to be the faithless unbeliever Arturo Paleheart.
But that was fine.
This plan had nothing to do with the Goddess’s will in the first place.
There was no way our merciful Goddess would have told us to wreck France with civil war and then flee to the next neighborhood over.
She certainly would not have told us to grow our strength in the place we fled to and then devour our neighbors’ lands.
But that was exactly what I intended to do.
For the sake of a religious state that would suck up the wealth of all Europe and stand at the summit—and for the prosperity of humanity that state would accelerate.
I decided to bury the pangs of conscience for now.
This would be the fastest path.