Cold War
Even after Asty led the troops she had borrowed from the Italian Peninsula to join the rebel forces, the southern lords largely clung to their lukewarm stance.
The reason was simple.
They could not trust Count Montpellier in the slightest.
The support army that had supposedly come from Italy did nothing to improve the Count’s image. This was no small mercenary band—ten thousand troops crossing into another country’s civil war purely out of faith? The claim was absurd on its face. Far more plausible was the notion that, while preparing the rebellion, he had struck some secret pact with the Italian rulers.
The rebel ranks had more than doubled, and the Count’s odds of victory had grown by a hair’s breadth, yet his justification remained far too thin for anyone to throw in with him blindly.
Claude V’s incompetence had, of course, long since crossed every line. It was true that the king’s failures had plunged France into chaos, and true that something drastic was needed to restore order. But why did the man taking that drastic step have to be Count Montpellier? Would it not be far more reliable—and far less bloody—if the Duke of Orléans simply succeeded to the throne by lawful right?
No—by what authority was that man even calling for the king’s replacement? The very one who had suddenly drawn steel in the streets and dragged the kingdom into the abyss of civil war?
Claude V’s astonishing incompetence had driven the realm to this state, yes, but none of it would have happened if Count Montpellier had not stirred the pot in the first place. Whether dethronement or usurpation, that was a matter for the royal house and the high nobility to settle among themselves. Serving as king the man who was practically the root of every disaster was out of the question from the start.
And a Saintess? How were they supposed to swallow such wild nonsense?
Decades had passed since the Vesta Order lost the Goddess’s favor and collapsed. It was hardly the first time former Order hangers-on or well-dressed frauds had claimed to wield Divine Power in order to fleece the innocent. Now the Order’s Saintess had supposedly nominated Count Montpellier as King of France? The claim was not even worth hearing.
The lords of medieval France, steeped in intrigue and double-dealing, were not so naïve as to take a traitor’s propaganda at face value.
“Brave and just warrior of France, Count of Marseille! The Goddess desires your devotion!”
That was before the Saintess they had dismissed as a fake arrived at the head of several thousand heavily armed soldiers and began putting on a fire show.
The surest proof that a miracle is real is to demonstrate it in person. With nothing left to hold her back, Asty began touring the southern domains with her bodyguards, authenticating her own divinity.
“Authentication” was merely the polite word for it. In practice it was a naked show of force. Watching her work, one could scarcely tell whether she was a Saintess or a street thug—but public opinion no longer mattered. Every scrap of bad reputation could simply be dumped on the Count.
After all, every good and grateful thing that happened on earth was thanks to the merciful, benevolent Saintess, and everything opposite was the fault of that heinous rebel ringleader, the Montpellier bastard.
Faced with the traitor’s army at their very gates and the summons of an infinitely merciful Saintess, the southern lords opened their gates one by one and accepted their fate.
“I happen to have an excellent business proposition—”
And then, enchanted by the merciful Saintess’s dazzling tongue, they donated vast fortunes.
Even the nobles of a medieval society thick with schemes proved helpless before the polished skill of a specialist tempered in the twenty-first century. After all, what chance did provincial lords—whose entire political experience consisted of squabbles among vassals—have against someone who had walked the tightrope with her life on the line in civil-war zones?
Thus Asty, transformed into a vicious saleswoman, overachieved both goals—persuading the lords and securing resources—by a full 140 percent. Then, defying every expectation, she announced a massive redevelopment of the city of Montpellier and poured cold water over the rising heat of the moment.
It seemed the war was going to last quite a while.
“Saintess. I would never dare question your judgment, yet… is it truly all right for us simply to sit still like this?”
The morning after they returned from shaking down the neighboring lords with the devout soldier-uncles, Elder Pates—the “book-eating old man,” former corrupt official of the old Order—rarely voiced concern over her decision and demanded immediate correction.
He insisted he was absolutely not raising an objection, but what clearer expression of denial existed in the world? Elder Pates clearly believed her judgment was wrong—wrong enough to set a momentary doubt above the faith he had carried his entire life.
“For a cleric who ought to fulfill the will of heaven with the firmest faith not only to harbor doubts but to speak them aloud… As expected, people from the era that helped bring the Order to ruin think differently, don’t they?”
And Rebecca, slipping in like a ghost, launched a full assault on the elderly. True to her fanatic nature, she turned a light objection into a generational-conflict hellscape with terrifying speed.
No—if she makes it so no one can even ask a question, what happens when I make a mistake?
And why is she looking this way with those sparkling eyes? Looking like that won’t earn you any praise.
I understand she’s built up a lot of anger listening to the high-and-mighty in Italy spout nonsense, but this grandfather wasn’t even there. If she had poured curses on the nobles back then I would have clapped for the catharsis, but bottling it up and taking it out on the wrong person doesn’t look good at all.
What exactly did Elder Pates do wrong?
On the contrary—when the old Order fell he protected the treasures of the library with unwavering faith and a sense of duty, and even now, as a close aide to the Saintess, he never brings up wealth first. A man of integrity. No matter how rotten the old Order was, not every affiliate was a corrupt official.
Looks like I need to rein in Sister Rebecca’s aggression a little this time…
…But wait a minute.
Elder Pates claims he safeguarded the precious books so they would not be lost in the chaos right after the collapse—but from another angle, he simply grabbed the books and fled to start a new life once the Order went under, didn’t he?
It’s true the old man never brought up wealth first, but we almost never talked about anything that would make money either. With rebellion and war, there were only places money was flowing out. The fact that he never so much as opened his mouth about wealth—
“…Wouldn’t it be better for the books Elder has preserved to be professionally managed at the Order level from now on?”
“Heh heh. No need to trouble others with that. This old man will handle it himself.”
Yeah. Sister Rebecca wasn’t wary for nothing. Greed is practically dripping from his eyes.
From now on the money pouch goes to Sister Rebecca, no exceptions. It’s not as if the old man will stab me in the back at this stage, but I also don’t believe he’ll move heaven and earth to save even a single coin. If anything, he might actively encourage budget waste and skim whatever’s left.
“Well then, we’ll leave that to Elder.”
But this was a different matter entirely.
Separate from the sharp drop in trust toward Elder Pates, completely shutting down every channel of dissent was not a good method. Self-righteousness that denied everything existing had always been a shortcut to ruin. Moreover, for this particular decision the absence of opposition was stranger still.
What she had put up as the stake this time was nothing less than all their lives.
“You’re worried that I emptied the front lines on my own authority, aren’t you? Because if the royalist army comes south in the meantime, it will be a disaster.”
She had emptied the front lines.
More precisely, she had not sent the troops sponsored by Italy and the southern lords to the front. She had even stopped the private soldiers Count Montpellier had personally mustered from marching out. On the lines that should have been holding back the royalist army, only sentries stood alone; the main forces she left idle in the rear.
In effect she was handing land to the enemy for no reason and making even a response to an offensive difficult. On top of that, under the pretext of launching large-scale civil engineering, she was disarming the soldiers they already had. At a glance it looked like pure madness.
“…Yes. In this situation, if we were somehow ambushed—”
“It would all be over?”
But he was wrong.
She was not mad, and she had not been bought by those friends in the north. She was simply doing everything in her power for their victory.
“Well. Do you think the other side would see it that way too?”
Elder Pates’s point seemed reasonable at first glance, yet it was also an overly pessimistic forecast. This was no longer a contest between Count Montpellier and the Duke of Orléans. It was a head-on collision between the south that rode the Saintess’s name and the north that had long been the heart of the Kingdom of France. Half-hearted compromise was therefore impossible—and the one who had made it so was none other than herself.
The moment she had gathered the allied forces in Italy by invoking a holy war, the moment she had authenticated her Divine Power before the southern lords and drawn them into the rebellion, the war had ceased to be a game among feudal nobles and become a guillotine match between two powers.
“Assume you are the Duke of Orléans and think it through. If you lead an army south right now, could you end the war?”
Of course not.
The focal point of the rebel forces was no longer the Count—it was her. The ten thousand elite soldiers she commanded had been mustered not from southern France but from Italy; the other side would therefore misjudge that the true main body of their power lay among the city-states of the Italian Peninsula. They would almost certainly suspect the Kingdom of Venice, large enough and close enough to fit the bill.
In that case they could not launch a rash offensive. If the rebels’ true center was not Count Montpellier’s domain but the Kingdom of Venice, then the objective that had to be taken for victory was no longer southern France but northern Italy. And a royalist faction mustered as hastily as their own would never possess the capacity to achieve operational goals through the winter winds.
Therefore the actions the Duke of Orléans would take fell into three broad categories.
One: immediately dispatch diplomatic envoys to the Italian Peninsula to gather information and browbeat them into staying out of the war.
Two: scrape together every still-uncommitted royalist force and prepare for a frontal showdown. If they looked down on the rebels they would try to settle it with the central nobles alone; if not, they would risk mobilizing even the border margraves or outright request support from the Kaiser.
The countermeasures were simple.
One: mobilize every available hand to rebuild the city of Montpellier, and when winter ended, arm only the existing forces and push them forward.
Two: once the sowing season was over, conscript every surplus laborer from the countryside and open the offensive.
If the war situation turned unfavorable or the Kaiser sided with the Duke of Orléans, sell off the Alsace-Lorraine region to buy the Kaiser’s goodwill.
In modern times such a move would have sent all of France foaming at the mouth in a traitorous fit, but by the standards of medieval feudal society it was merely the land documents of that region changing hands. She intended to put Count Montpellier’s name—not her own—on any secret pact with the Kaiser, so even if the matter later became a problem, the chance of sparks flying as far as her was low.
In the first place, this damned fantasy Kingdom of France was not even her homeland. Having been dragged here by an unwanted reincarnation, drawing up plans for rural improvement and urban industry was already more than enough. She felt no obligation to safeguard another country’s borders.
“Until then, we simply build houses here. Diligently.”
So stop complaining and go measure the shantytown acreage. There’s a mountain of work if we want even the framework of the residential district finished before winter ends.