The Hot War
The northern royalists moved exactly as Asty had intended.
They hastily mustered every soldier within reach of their authority and immediately flung them toward the front.
Even so, the North’s population and economic strength were so formidable that a host of seventy thousand was raised—yet only fifty thousand could actually be committed to the field.
"We cannot go to war while leaving the North empty!"
"Still, we have the Royal Knights. We’ll manage somehow."
"…What? A rebel envoy was captured in Alsace?"
Fully twelve thousand men were swallowed at once by the mere necessity of holding the German border.
As long as the royalist faction remained, at its core, a coalition of nobles, this was inevitable. The northern marcher lords had joined the royalists in the first place because they feared that a victory for Count Montpellier would shift the center of power southward and leave the North neglected. Their foremost concern was therefore the stability of the North and the safety of their own domains; the option of stripping the frontier bare and marching every man south had never existed.
Had some incident diverted the Kaiser’s gaze, or had a firm pledge of non-intervention been secured, the calculus might have changed. For the moment there was nothing of the sort, and Asty—who held the rebels’ command—was relentlessly churning out propaganda. In the end even the Duke of Orléans judged full mobilization of the marcher lords’ armies too dangerous, and most of the forces that had guarded the North remained exactly where they were.
At least some troops and knights did join the suppression army; without them the royalists would have faced the rebels with nothing but the central forces. In the final reckoning the difference was not so great.
"What do you mean? The Goddess has returned?"
"That’s right. I heard it with my own ears from an elder served by my in-law’s cousin’s nephew! Now we can live like proper human beings!"
"Good heavens, good heavens. No wonder my sleep has been so restless of late…!"
"Make Paris great again! Heed the Goddess’s will, overthrow the tyrant, and found the Millennium Kingdom!"
Paris had suddenly begun to boil.
Any objection that the city had already been destroyed and no longer existed was meaningless. Paris was Paris—a sacred land that, long ago, had received a glorious epithet from a goddess who descended to earth. The City of Light that had once drawn in all the wealth of France, serving as the headquarters of the Order and the very heart of the kingdom. Even if foreign invasion had reduced it to ruin and desolation, it was impossible for every soul who had lived there simply to depart.
…Of course, a hundred years after the city’s fall any rational person would have packed up and left the capital for good—but since when had humans been such rational creatures?
As already said, Paris had been the undisputed heart of France and, before its collapse, the central seat of the Vesta Order. Leaving such a city reduced to scorched rubble was a blow to national prestige and a drain on national power; successive governments had therefore made endless attempts to rebuild the capital. Political strife of every kind, the fall of the Order that had once held vast wealth, and the incompetence of the royal house that should have led the reconstruction meant that an entire century had passed with no visible result—only stagnation.
The outcome was the Paris of today: a vast garbage dump in which the homeless poor, fanatics bound by faith, speculators who flooded in whenever a reconstruction project began, and criminals fleeing the world all lived parasitically upon partially functioning infrastructure. A lawless zone of madness with no clear ruler, where even a census was impossible and the true scale of the place could not be known, where taxes could not be collected and even relief was beyond reach.
Many had reached out over the years, trying somehow to purify this demonic realm; none had succeeded. The city’s internal interests were so hopelessly tangled that when trouble arose, identifying its cause was virtually impossible.
And this time was no different.
The Duke of Orléans hastily dispatched soldiers to quell the unrest that had erupted in Paris, yet before his army even arrived, militias sprang up from nowhere and the entire city split into two factions that began slaughtering one another. When the commander, seeing this, tried to leave only a minimal garrison and withdraw, robe-clad experts appeared and fell upon the soldiers.
It was chaos absolute.
In truth the first outbreak had been a spontaneous rising of the destitute poor; the clashes between militias were the work of redevelopment-hungry speculators and redevelopment-hating criminals turning their weapons on each other; and the robe-clad experts who attacked the soldiers were Rebecca’s brothers and sisters, who had come to pin down the royalists after hearing news of the holy war.
The wisest course for the royalists would therefore have been to ignore the Parisian turmoil and simply crush the rebels. Unfortunately the Duke of Orléans did not know this. He therefore stationed four thousand troops near Paris against every contingency and even detached dozens of knights to guard against the robed attackers. Leave Paris alone, and the countless poor might suddenly turn rebel—a knife in the royalists’ back.
Of course the Parisian unrest would, as always, burn itself out once the factions finished fighting one another. But the ignorant Duke of Orléans had to split his army with a heart full of blood.
It was an unexpected achievement wrought by the shadow of the old Order in a place even Asty herself did not know.
"…"
Finally the elves siphoned off another two thousand men.
An elven scouting party had suddenly appeared and begun loitering near the border. No one knew why a people who had until now pursued extreme isolation had chosen this moment to show themselves—but whatever the reason, they were unmistakably a military threat. Elves might be milder than orcs or demonkin, yet they remained an other race. Other races were dangerous. Other races that were numerous and finely organized were more dangerous still. And there was no human who could remain calm while a scouting party of such beings prowled the frontier.
Thus the suppression army shrank once more, and the forces the Duke of Orléans could bring to the front numbered a mere fifty thousand.
Even so, that much was acceptable. Dispersing troops here and there had reduced the army more than first expected, yet fifty thousand was still more than the rebels, was it not?
The Duke of Orléans was by no means an incompetent man. He calculated the rebels’ strength from the southern population and economic power he had previously assessed, and concluded that forty thousand was the absolute maximum they could field. Even if the report of ten thousand reinforcements from the Italian Peninsula proved true, the total would reach only fifty thousand—and if numbers were equal, the royalists, reinforced by the Royal Knights and the marcher lords, would hold a clear superiority in knightly power and therefore the advantage.
The very reason he had dispersed his forces before the decisive battle was confidence that he could win. Even a minor numerical disadvantage, he judged, could be overcome by proper use of his superior knights.
And his judgment was not greatly mistaken. Victory or defeat in battle ultimately belonged to those who wielded mana, and in that field the royalists clearly held the edge. Moreover the rebels, like the royalists, were an organization cobbled together overnight; he expected that a single overwhelming blow to the solar plexus would scatter them.
Here the Duke of Orléans missed three crucial points.
First, the numerical disadvantage was by no means minor. The reincarnated girl—born in a culture where hundred-thousand-strong armies casually appeared and who had lived through an age when Earth’s population reached eight billion—had scraped together troops with ruthless tenacity. As a result the rebel host now numbered a full sixty-five thousand. Moreover she had not dispersed those forces but concentrated them at the heart of the front; the actual disparity on the battlefield would be far from trivial.
Second, the army Asty had forged was no sandcastle that would collapse at a touch. She had drilled her soldiers with advanced grind techniques brought from the future, instilling a cohesion that the clumsy training methods of the thirteenth century could never approach. Moreover the ten thousand reinforcements from the Italian Peninsula were Elite Soldiers mustered by the royal house of the Kingdom of Venice, staking its very prestige. With the cohesion problem solved by twenty-first-century cutting-edge technology (grinding), the rebels’ average combat power now lightly surpassed that of the suppression army.
And finally, the third.
It was true that the royalists’ knightly power overwhelmingly outclassed the rebels’—yet Asty had prepared a countermeasure of her own.
The very thing she herself called a gamble.
"Your Grace, there’s someone up ahead…"
"…The Saintess?"
Leading the suppression army toward Clermont-Ferrand, the Duke of Orléans came face to face with Asty, who had appeared in the middle of the plain with only a single attendant at her side.
The mad Saintess, as always, had staked her own life as the wager.