Flashpoint
"The incompetent and greedy Claude V is unfit to rule France. Unrest simmers across the entire realm, and the lives of the people have fallen into ruin—yet this man drowns himself only in wine and women! How can such a creature be called a king? Now I, Thomas, Count of Montpellier, shall cast down this tyrant and become the new King of France! O Goddess, protect the people of this land!"
February 1, 1299. The bone-chilling cold of winter had yet to fully release its grip.
Thomas Montpellier, Count of Montpellier, recited his splendid declaration of war and raised an army of eight thousand men.
The timing was nothing short of insane.
Winter was no season for war. Temperatures sat below freezing, the cold was brutal, and snow fell at the slightest provocation, throwing the roads into chaos. Constant measures against the freezing weather had to be taken simply to keep the army from dying of cold.
That was only the beginning. When the ground turned into a blanket of snow, forage for the horses became scarce. The soldiers’ lodging and provisions suffered. February was nearly planting season, making it awkward to pull manpower from the villages.
In short, it was a goddamn awful time to wage war.
Even sitting still, non-combat losses would pile up relentlessly. Launch an offensive, and the army would melt away like shaved ice under a summer sun.
Yet the Count of Montpellier had no choice but to risk it all and raise the banner of rebellion.
Claude V had proven even more of an idiot than he had anticipated.
"I have no further need of you, woman. Get the hell out of my palace!"
"...Yes, yes. As Your Majesty wishes. I shall pray that Your Majesty does not go bankrupt."
Around the time Asty relieved the fortress of Portugrua and rose as the benefactor of the Kingdom of Venice, Claude V—that living embodiment of incompetence—finally carried out the radical personnel measure he had so long threatened.
He dismissed the chancellor who had managed the royal finances, on the grounds that the man did nothing but nag and failed to deliver sufficient tribute.
It was the mindset of a gang boss rather than a king, but then again, his throne itself had been held by violence rather than authority. The fat pig who had never once performed a single kingly duty in his life, clinging to the crown solely through the loyalty of the Royal Knights, was utterly ignorant of administration or the art of employing talent.
"What? You can’t pay our wages? Then I’m just going home."
"They get to hole up in a cozy palace slicing meat while we freeze and starve out here?"
"Ptooey! It was filthy working with you. Let’s never meet again!"
So of course the Royal Knights could not remain intact.
The moment the capable chancellor who had somehow kept the royal household’s beggarly finances on life support was driven from office, the royal treasury—already teetering on the edge of life and death—hurtled straight toward the abyss.
The royal demesne and the gold and silver locked in the secret vaults were still there, but the man who knew how to make them productive had vanished, and revenue collapsed overnight.
And the single largest item of expenditure in the royal household accounts was none other than the army.
The rank-and-file soldiers whose pay was suddenly halved or evaporated entirely were the first to desert. Veteran troops who sensed the royal coin was about to be delisted followed close behind. Knights who had lost all faith in their incompetent king drifted home one by one or went seeking new masters, until only the half-wits with a few screws loose remained at his side.
Interpreted as charitably as possible, he had traded away unnecessary support staff for a band of fearless, death-defying knights.
Their numbers had simply shrunk... a little more than slightly.
"Sir Baldwin, what on earth are you saying, barging in like this? A knight who swore loyalty to His Majesty the King—how can you—"
"His Majesty informed this old man that he has no gold to bestow upon me. So I decided to look for a new position."
"...Good heavens. The kingdom’s future is so dark I cannot see a step ahead!"
The real problem was that the newly unemployed sought patronage from neighboring lords—or swore fresh oaths of fealty and transferred their allegiance outright. In the process, the true cause of the royal family’s catastrophic financial crisis leaked out. Nobles who had merely thought their king was an idiot now discovered, through His Majesty’s gracious instruction, that even the bottom had a bottom.
"Haa. How did I ever end up in this... No help for it. Escort His Majesty to the palace with all due courtesy."
In the end the Duke of Orléans, unable to watch any longer, confined Claude V and calmed the nobles’ agitation. He declared that whether he seized the throne himself or forced an abdication upon the king’s children, Claude V would be dragged from the crown no matter what.
The confrontation between the legitimate king and a would-be usurper thus mutated into a confrontation between a regent hungry for the throne and a would-be usurper. Even so, the northern and central nobles continued to offer their loyalty to the royal house and the regent.
After all... the Count of Montpellier was, by any measure, not in his right mind.
The Duke of Orléans was Claude V’s uncle, the younger brother of the previous king, Claude IV. He therefore possessed blood legitimacy to claim the throne, and his qualities as a ruler were beyond reproach. While the king had idled away his days trusting solely in the taxes of the royal demesne, it was the duke who had actually run the government. Even if he usurped the crown, little would change.
The Count of Montpellier, by contrast, was a mere provincial lord with not a drop of royal blood in his veins. The casual way he had stormed a free city and started a bloodbath made his brutality plain. Moreover, his lands lay far to the south; the moment he seized the throne, the north would be relegated to second-class status. That much was obvious.
"Just depose that bastard and take the throne yourself, my lord."
"Claude V is finished! The Duke of Orléans must rule France now!"
"We stand with the Duke of Orléans to the death!"
The northern nobles, who could not tolerate the Count of Montpellier’s accession under any circumstances, far from criticizing the duke for revealing his ambition, actively cheered the usurpation.
"Damn it. That old man is throwing obstacles in my path like this...!"
With matters turning out this way, the Count of Montpellier had no choice but to hurry. If the Duke of Orléans deposed Claude V first, the count would lose the justification of casting down a corrupt and incompetent king.
He had to raise his army now.
Before the Duke of Orléans could depose the king and place the crown on his own head, the count had to declare war and draw the southern lords to his side. Fail, and he would pay for the crime of dreaming of rebellion with his life.
Claude V’s astonishing incompetence had thrust the Duke of Orléans onto the front stage; the Count of Montpellier could no longer afford the luxury of buying time.
"Father, this is madness! Even if we raise a rebellion now, the lords will never answer the call!"
"Silence! The game has already begun. If the duke seizes the throne, everything is finished!"
The earlier-than-planned uprising sparked a heated argument between father and son, but since both would be executed together if the rebellion failed, the quarrel never deepened into a true rift.
"...I apologize. I will do everything I can to secure the lords’ cooperation."
"Good. I will look for places to hire mercenaries somehow."
Thus the two traitors hastily mustered troops and employed every means at their disposal to win the favor of neighboring lords.
"Are you all insane? You really want us to grab swords and go cut off the king’s head?"
"No, the Duke of Orléans is handling it—why bother...?"
"I’ll sell you all the supplies you want. But soldiers? Absolutely not."
The results, however, were pitifully meager.
They had missed the timing.
The royalist faction had already coalesced tightly around the Duke of Orléans among the northern and central nobles, while the Count of Montpellier’s rebel army stood empty and forlorn. The privileges and the title of founding meritorious subject the count offered were certainly attractive, yet no one was willing to gamble everything on a fight with no chance of victory.
In short, it was a staring contest.
Had the entire south united as one under the count’s plan, they might have fielded a force capable of challenging the royalists. But because the Duke of Orléans had seized the initiative, the southern lords who ought to have joined the rebellion began merely watching one another.
Therefore the count had to raise his banner alone if necessary.
He had to declare war at once, halt the Duke of Orléans’s usurpation, and prove to the southern lords that this was a fight worth fighting.
It was an absurd gamble, but there was no other way.
The so-called king had offered up his own crown as a sacrifice and summoned the colossal monster known as the Duke of Orléans’s royalist faction onto the earth. What else was one supposed to do?
If he was doomed to be executed for treason no matter what he did, then one final gamble was not such a bad choice.
"Long live France! Death to the tyrant! Peace for the people!"
And so the Count of Montpellier proudly declared his rebellion—
"The Saintess has ordered war! May the Goddess’s grace rest upon His Majesty Thomas Montpellier, the rightful King of the new Kingdom of France!"
Heaven took his side.
On a winter’s day when heavy snow fell in thick white flakes, the tiny spark cast by the reincarnator finally blossomed into the vast conflagration of the French civil war.