The Hot War
Winter had ended.
The cold that had held the flames of war in check melted away beneath a warm spring breeze, and the armies once shackled by General Winter were at last fit to fight.
All that remained was to take the tyrant's head, snatch the crown, and offer it up to the traitor.
The minions of the rebels who had sworn to turn their blades against this nation's rightful king advanced to the front with a splendid departure ceremony.
And quite naturally, they settled into the fortresses along the line and began preparing for a siege.
It was baffling—but this was precisely the surefire strategy Asty had prepared.
The barony of Clermont-Ferrand, a strategic stronghold in central France.
The Count of Lyon's aging fortress, which had not seen combat in decades, was finally fulfilling its purpose after a very long time.
War.
It offered its body as lodging and shield to the utterly valiant murderers who had flocked as if enchanted by those two blood-reeking words.
A truly pitiful and regrettable tale.
Outside, throngs of people still suffered without so much as a place to lay their bodies—yet they had raised such a large and beautiful fortress for mere fratricide.
The Count of Lyon's interests had been fixed on the south, so the fortress had rarely been put to military use; that fact alone was infuriating in its own right.
No—if you weren't going to use it properly, why pile up such a magnificent heap of stones in the first place?
A fortress of this size would have consumed enough manpower and materials to build a small city, and after all that hardship they had left it rotting as a villa for decades on end.
It was no different from erecting lavish officers' quarters under the pretense of military expansion.
…Thinking about it that way, I'm suddenly pissed off.
Nobles really were the root of all evil.
I should have just joined hands with Avignon and started a peasant uprising. What riches was I hoping for, cleaning up after these pigs?
Of course she didn't mean it seriously.
She had simply been dragged here before finishing the residential district because of the war, and now she wanted to curse everything under the sun.
"Saintess, your expression doesn't look well."
"Ah, I'm fine. It's nothing."
But she couldn't take it out on Sister Rebecca, so she suppressed the rising irritation and dispelled the girl's concern with a gentle smile.
"Your mouth is twitching, though."
Failed.
Acting really isn't my forte. How did she catch that?
"It's really nothing. Just something a little on my mind…"
"It is certainly a situation that would weigh on anyone's mind. Raising an army with usurpation as the goal and then taking a defensive stance—whose idea was that…"
She had tried to brush it off with a vague excuse, too embarrassed to spill her twisted inner thoughts, only for a thoroughly off-target response to come back.
Strange. I was clearly thinking about wanting to go back soon—why did the conversation suddenly jump to the war?
"…Were you not displeased by the Count's bizarre strategy?"
"No."
Ah. So that's the misunderstanding she had.
From an uninformed perspective, the misunderstanding was natural enough.
Right now their army was diligently reinforcing the walls in preparation for the enemy's offensive.
One might ask what was wrong with preparing defenses before a war—but they were rebels, not the royalist army.
Rebels who had indiscriminately slaughtered the patriots gathered to defend His Majesty the King to the death, violated the royal palace, and sought to remake the realm for the rebel ringleader.
Naturally, rebels were not supposed to sit still like this.
They had to race somehow to the capital, smash the gates, and take His Majesty the King's head.
If you stop, you die.
If you hesitate, you die.
In most situations, the only option rebels could choose was a mindless offensive toward the capital.
"Your premise is wrong. This strategy didn't come from the Count's head."
But the story was different now.
What would originally have been nothing more than a greedy rebel ringleader—Count Montpellier—had the enormous justification of the Saintess added to him, making the rebels' cohesion abnormally strong.
The southern lords who had sworn they would never do anything for anyone else's benefit even if dirt got in their eyes were now united, cheering "Long live Count Montpellier!"—that said it all.
Faith really is a broken OP justification in this era.
And once the rebels united around the Count as their focal point, it was the royalists' turn to grow anxious.
It was not a question of whether they could suppress the rebellion or not.
This era had neither machine guns nor universal conscription, and neither side possessed overwhelming force, so the royalists had never had reason to be confident of victory from the start.
They would long since have resigned themselves to the possibility of simply losing on the battlefield, having their capital taken, and being destroyed.
"This strategy came from my head. I was able to conceive it thanks to our senior who used to crawl into civil war zones whenever she got bored."
So she had decided to present them with a new possibility.
A highly original and lethal worst-case scenario that they would want to avoid by any means necessary.
"Now, Sister Rebecca. Imagine you're the Duke of Orléans somewhere over there. How would you need to win this war?"
"…First win the battles, then eliminate Count Montpellier, and imprison or persuade the Saintess to accept their surrender, wouldn't I?"
"Hmm. Why do you necessarily have to accept their surrender? Can't you just kill them all?"
"Because then even winning wouldn't really be winning. And I don't think massacring this many troops would even be possible…"
"Yes. This is ultimately a war within France over ownership of the Kingdom of France. Since both sides aim for the throne, the less damage to the kingdom, the better."
The new scenario she would present was this.
Count Montpellier, who had raised an army under the banner of rebellion, had borrowed the Saintess's halo to rise as the unshakable leader of the south.
Yet the rebels who had vowed to take Claude V's head never left their territory, and far from attempting an offensive, they consistently took an extremely defensive posture—reinforcing fortresses and erecting palisades.
A rebel force with the Italian peninsula as its hinterland, possessing sufficient military might and authority, yet instead of advancing on the capital for usurpation, seeming intent on solidifying the current arrangement?
"But what if we abandon the usurpation? What if we don't stake our lives as chips to claim the French throne?"
We call that secession.
This was the worst possibility she had prepared.
The scenario where Count Montpellier, thought to dream of becoming King of France, took only southern France and set up his own household.
In that case the Kingdom of France would lose nearly half its population and military strength, and be forced to face the Germans to the north and the Holy Kingdom to the south at the same time.
If the south became independent, the land routes to Italy and Iberia would also be cut off, effectively isolating the country.
"Then are you abandoning the establishment of the Holy Kingdom…?"
"No. But they don't know that we're after the Low Countries."
Of course they could not actually aim for the partition of France—but the other side did not know that.
"They said the Duke of Orléans is a wise man, so he'll definitely take the bait."
Now the enemy would have no choice but to throw strategy out the window and attack.
If southern France seceded like this, no matter what they did, only the path to ruin would remain.
There was no chance the Kaiser would side with them.
If Germany had joined their side, this place could not still be this peaceful.
The margraves' armies had the highest proportion of standing troops in France, the most combat experience, and were accustomed to fighting while enduring the cold.
If those margraves could mobilize every force without worrying about the northern threat, they would long since have marched south to wipe out the rebels before they could even gather.
"The perfect board for a short decisive battle has been completed."
But now their side held the advantage.
They had already mobilized every available troop and finished preparing to meet the enemy, while the royalists had to leave some forces in the north and enter an unfavorable fight to stop a secession that would never happen.
They had essentially seized the maximum strategic advantage possible.
All that remained was to trust the knights and wait.
It went without saying that large-scale combat with cold weapons was not her field of expertise.
Those gentlemen who did nothing but eat and swing swords could not possibly be worse than her, so she could only pray that fortune would favor them.
"S-Saintess. A guest has come to see you outside…"
"Who is it?"
"Uh, he says he's a former royal finance minister…?"
No. Not something like that.