The Converts
The men peeling away from the marching column to chase after me shared a few things in common.
First, every last one of them was dressed in armor. Second, every last one of them wore a sword at his hip. Third, every last one of them was on horseback.
In other words, several dozen fully armed knights were coming after me.
And they were coming hard.
"You've got to be kidding me..."
Had the Duke of Orléans decided to have me killed?
I hadn't exactly expected a warm welcome, but I never thought he'd send knights after me right out of the gate.
"Can we shake them?"
"We've already entered the forest, so throwing off the pursuit shouldn't be difficult. However..."
Rebecca's reaction, though, was utterly flat. Unlike a moment ago, there wasn't even a faint tremor in her voice — she seemed to regard the entire situation as nothing worth fretting over.
And before I could even ask why, her legs stopped dead in their tracks.
"Wh-why are you stopping?"
What? Why are you stopping all of a sudden?
Don't tell me this sister of mine is about to sell me out to the royalists.
So there's really no one left in this world you can trust.
I'd thought at least Rebecca would never betray me — and now she's going to stab me in the back in the most ridiculous way possible.
"The enemy's overall skill level is pitiful. It's possible they didn't come after you intending to do you harm at all, Saintess."
Of course I was joking.
A human weapon capable of dismissing several dozen fully armed heavy cavalry as "pitiful" was hardly going to renounce the object of her faith over a crisis this minor. Still, when a throng of knights in plate armor with spears and swords came thundering after you, "do harm" seemed like the most obvious item on the menu — but Rebecca wouldn't have said something like that without reason.
So instead of roaring at her to stop talking nonsense, I simply fixed her with a polite, expectant look and waited for an explanation.
"The current Duke of Orléans is old enough to remember the days when the Order still stood strong. If a man like that truly meant to harm the Saintess, he would never have assembled a pursuit party of mere Plain Knights."
Uh... even if you put it that way, I have no idea what you're talking about.
What does the Duke of Orléans being an old fossil have to do with those guys being weak?
It's not like I brought hundreds or thousands of bodyguards with me, and they still don't know that Rebecca is a human weapon wearing a sacred relic.
No matter how threatening the Order's Divine Power is supposed to be, isn't sending several dozen knights just to catch two people overkill?
"No. It would be nowhere near enough. To face a bishop of the Order, you need at least three Senior Knights — or thirty Plain Knights. And you, Saintess, are in an entirely different league from some ordinary bishop. If I were the Duke, I would never entrust a mission of that weight to such half-baked knights."
Oh. So that's how it is.
Several dozen fully armed knights charging at you isn't overkill — it's inadequate. I really can't make heads or tails of how this place works.
At any rate, I understood what Rebecca was getting at.
The Saintess of the Vesta Order was essentially a final-boss-tier position, and the lot trailing after me clearly didn't have the stats for a boss raid. Of course, I was a defective Saintess who could barely produce a flame the size of a convenience-store lighter — but only a handful of people knew that, and just moments ago I'd been strutting around with a halo courtesy of Rebecca's help.
So the Duke of Orléans would have perceived me as something like the rebels' ultimate weapon. And he was going to pick a fight he was certain to lose with a few dozen Plain Knights?
It made no sense.
Rebecca had flatly declared the pursuers' skill overall pitiful, but they were still genuine knights. And knights, in this reeking feudal society, were typically the local nobility themselves — or their kin, or their heirs.
Bodies far too precious to force into a mission that amounted to suicide.
Which left two possibilities.
Either the royalist leadership had misjudged our combat strength — or they hadn't come to fight at all.
"...Let's hear them out first."
Either way, the odds of things going sideways were low. Time wasn't that tight, so listening to what they had to say couldn't hurt.
And Rebecca's prediction proved correct.
"It is the honor of my house to stand before the Saintess who has descended upon the earth by Heaven's command! This grace I shall never forget until the day I die, and for generations to come my descendants shall..."
These friends spraying saliva with such fervor had never been particularly interested in my neck to begin with.
Their purpose was the exact opposite: to switch sides to the one that looked like it might win, and thereby keep their own necks intact.
All under the convenient pretext that they were merely being faithful to their beliefs.
"Mm. Just as I thought — once the Saintess herself proclaims the righteous path, men of discernment return to the Goddess's embrace. This proves that true faith is directly linked to victory."
Rebecca, for her part, tried to interpret the situation through a thoroughly sentimental lens. Fortunately, I was nowhere near as devout as she was.
"Right? If we weren't a religious faction, those guys would have cracked their skulls trying to invent an excuse. Turns out the title of Saintess comes in handy this way too."
"...Pardon?"
I wasn't naive enough to take these converts' excuses at face value.
Faith or no faith — when friends who'd been playing for the royalists suddenly wanted to switch sides, the natural first response was suspicion, wasn't it?
Again: the knights of this era were a class composed of regional lords, their relatives, or their heirs. In an age where "father's a swordsman, so son's a swordsman" was practically common sense, royalist knights had been so thoroughly seduced by the noble cause of faith that they were prepared to betray their own families and change sides?
Nonsense.
If they'd brought their entire households and converted as whole clans, I might have found it plausible. But the knights who'd just switched sides were all excessively young — and none of them shared a family name.
Which meant... these weren't real converts.
There might be one or two who'd genuinely come to change sides, but the composition of the group was far too uniform for that to be the main objective. Roughly half were probably spies posing as converts to reconnoiter our situation, and the other half were insurance — just in case we actually won.
And of course there'd be a few who'd infiltrated with the intent to kill, persuade, or kidnap me.
The kind of lunatic Rebecca was hoping for — someone joining the rebellion out of pure faith alone — either didn't exist, or numbered so few as to be negligible.
"...Then wouldn't it be better to dispose of them all here? If they're not only useless but dangerous as well, there's no reason to bring them back to the castle..."
Jumping straight to killing them isn't exactly normal either, you know.
I made my refusal clear with a light shake of the head.
Killing every last one of them was never the answer.
Hadn't I just said it? Half of them were spies sent to dig up information on our camp, and the other half were insurance for if we won. The ones who'd come with impure intentions from the start could be reduced to ash right here without much consequence — but killing the ones sent to say "let's get along" would be tantamount to declaring a blood feud with the lords on the other side.
And of course, I couldn't read minds. Picking every spy out from among the converts and eliminating them was close to impossible.
"You said they're so weak you could subdue them all by yourself. Keep them where we can see them and manage them — that should be fine."
So how, then, to manage this collection of hazards?
Sending them to the battlefield was out of the question. The royalist plants would inevitably try to plant a knife in our backs and return to base, and the converts who'd only come to play comfortable hostages wouldn't fight with their full strength. Deploying them in combat was clearly a bad move that cost more than it gained.
If their combat ability had at least been exceptional, I might have fretted over ways to offset the drawbacks or sidestep the side effects. But Rebecca had already certified them as Plain Knight-level mediocrities. Stuffing them onto the battlefield would only multiply variables working against us.
Their management needed to be as peaceful as possible.
The method that first came to mind was locking every last convert and plant in solitary confinement until the war ended — but that would contribute nothing to the war effort and only drive up costs. Just because Rebecca found them pitiful didn't mean they stopped being knights. Preparing the facilities and manpower to keep several dozen monsters who could shatter ordinary manacles and shackles with their bare hands locked up long-term would cost more than simply anesthetizing them with alcohol and opium.
I needed something more productive.
Something that left no room to scheme, that could contribute to our victory, and that put a knight's sturdy physique to use... something like hard labor.
"Still, if we leave them idle they'll get bored. Let's hand them over to Sir Arturo and put them to some modest work."
So get to work, you slaves.
If you're going to freeload under someone else's roof, you'd better earn your keep.