Bloody Battle
Asty's scheme had been nearly perfect.
Who could have possibly anticipated that the Saintess of the Order would use herself as bait to execute a decapitation strike?
It was an idea that flatly rejected every scrap of common sense, and that was precisely what made it so lethal. In attacks of this kind, surprise was everything.
She was still a young Saintess, barely old enough to be called an adult. A girl so devout and morally upright that she would march out to block a suppression army's path and deliver a sermon — surely she would never lure the Duke of Orléans out under the pretext of peace talks only to eliminate him. Moreover, Rebecca, the rebels' ultimate weapon, had yet to reveal her overwhelming martial prowess to the world.
By deploying their most powerful asset in the most lethal manner at the moment of the enemy's greatest complacency, Asty's decapitation operation had been as good as successful before it even began.
"I have nothing to say to Your Holiness, yet you have come all this way to meet this old man yourself?"
"Well. If Your Grace truly had nothing to say, you would never have accepted the request for talks in the first place. Why waste time with tedious stalling? Why not speak frankly?"
That was only true if the Duke of Orléans had been acting rationally.
And the Duke of Orléans was already far from sane.
"I am truly grateful that Your Holiness has come all this way in person, yet this man truly has nothing to say to you. We have already come too far for words to resolve anything."
The first to sense something wrong was Asty.
Memories of the days she had wandered the civil war zones, chasing after her beloved and hated senior, dancing along the edge of death. The intuition forged by a past stained with gunpowder and the stench of blood detected the threat faster than anyone else.
"This crazy old bastard — don't tell me—"
But it was already too late to change the situation.
The Duke of Orléans raised his shield and scraped his sword across the ground. A sword strike that defied the laws of physics kicked up dust and sparks, and a fuse that had been buried only shallowly revealed itself to the world, already cradling a flame.
"Saintess!"
Rebecca's reaction was swift. The Order's Lantern Bearer, trained to protect the sacred relic under any circumstances, had been on high alert from the start for the possibility that things might go wrong. Thus she was able to draw Divine Power from the lantern almost the instant the Duke of Orléans drew his shield, and the moment his sword strike touched the fuse, she could pull Asty into her arms and raise a protective barrier.
And immediately after — the explosion.
With a thunderous roar the ground heaved over, and shards of stone and clouds of dust flew up from every direction, blotting out the view. It was a trap cobbled together in half a day, so it lacked the power to produce fatalities, but neither was it a soft explosion one could simply laugh off. Especially when one had to absorb the shock at point-blank range, unarmed and without a single scrap of cover.
Arturo, who had not yet earned the right to be called a Senior Knight, lost consciousness from the blast and was completely incapacitated. Count Montpellier, who had managed a partial response, had exhausted most of his mana and was effectively combat-ineffective. Rebecca alone, true to her status as the Order's ultimate weapon, had taken the explosion head-on and remained unharmed — yet with Asty, who possessed no combat ability of her own, to consider, she too was effectively immobilized.
There was no way the cards the Duke of Orléans had prepared ended with this alone. If, while she charged through the dust to snap the Duke's neck, the royalist knights seized Asty, everything would be over.
This goddamn bastard dares to trap the Saintess...!
Yet staying still would mean being dragged along by the enemy's scheme just the same. Overwhelmed by extreme crisis, Rebecca forcibly suppressed the rage boiling up inside her and rolled her eyes this way and that, searching for a way to break the current situation.
In the end, it was a meaningless worry. In a situation where she could not see ahead, finding the path was not her role — it was the role of the reincarnator who had flown in from the twenty-first century.
"Ha. It's been a while since shell shock made my vision shake like this..."
The young man recalled a past stained with gunpowder and the stench of blood, and smiled bitterly. The girl brushed the dust from her nun's habit and stamped footprints into the ruined ground.
"Still, thanks to that, my mind is crystal clear. My sincere thanks, Your Grace."
Muttering a word of gratitude the man himself would never hear, the Saintess of the Order — grinning like a madwoman — suddenly drew a dagger from her bosom and began to slash her own palm to ribbons. Then she poured the flowing blood over her head to feign a serious injury, and the moment the dust settled, she fixed the Duke of Orléans with a frigid expression and opened her mouth.
"You accepted talks claiming you wanted peace, only to trap people in an ambush! Does Kaiser's puppet know neither honor nor faith?!"
It was insane talk.
It was true that the Duke of Orléans had accepted the talks in order to trap the rebel leadership, but a surprise attack had been the goal from the start on this side as well, had it not? And "Kaiser's puppet," of all things. Coming from the mouth of someone who had been about to sell Alsace-Lorraine to that very Kaiser, the statement was utterly unbelievable.
But it did not matter.
That Asty had intended to use the talks as a pretext for a decapitation strike, that she had planned to sell national territory to Kaiser and borrow an army if the war situation worsened — these were facts known to no one except herself and her closest confidants.
"Even beasts at least observe the bare minimum of decency, yet here we have a creature worse than a brute beast."
Thus Asty's agitation was richly persuasive. So much so that even the knights lying in ambush behind the tents stopped in their tracks and began casting suspicious glances at the Duke.
When the Duke's sword strike lit the fuse, she had entrusted all response to Rebecca and devoted herself entirely to grasping the situation. And through rapid self-questioning and answering, she had identified the core of the problem.
Why had the negotiation site suddenly exploded?
Because the Duke of Orléans had planted bombs.
Why?
Because he needed to wipe out the rebel leadership in one stroke.
But why now, of all times? Before the advantages and disadvantages between the two camps had even become clear, before a single proper battle had been fought?
The royalist faction, already losing the war of justification, was going to smear the Duke's name as well just to blow up the rebel leadership? And take the Saintess, who carried the Goddess's authority on her back, along with them?
No matter how one looked at it, the action could not be called rational — yet if one added a single assumption, the story flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
If the discord within the royalist faction was more severe than she had anticipated. If, justification be damned, cutting off the rebels' heads would still be profitable. If her agitation had struck so lethally that the royalists' cohesion was shaking to its roots, then sacrificing prestige to eliminate the rebel leadership was a perfectly rational choice.
"Enough! If you truly desire divine punishment, I shall gladly deliver it!"
Then Asty's response was as good as decided. She simply needed to push them even harder. The merciful Duke had personally taught her that the cracks within the royalist faction were already severe — so she would fan those cracks until they became irreversible.
Yes. Until they collapsed upon themselves and could no longer function as a force—
"Saintess, you were just caught in that explosion — if you push yourself like this...!"
"Ah."
"...Haa. Count Montpellier, please support Sir Arturo. We have nothing more to discuss, so let us return."
Asty, who had been enthusiastically denouncing the Duke of Orléans and the royalists, overexerted herself drawing Divine Power for the performance and promptly fainted. Seeing that, Rebecca wiped her face with a sigh and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, declared a retreat — yet no one dared stop her. Not even the Duke of Orléans, who had planned this very trap.
"..."
Silence fell. Stillness settled. The place where the collapsed Saintess had been carried away on the Lantern Bearer's back, leaving only the traces of the explosion, froze solid along with the people remaining there, as if time itself had stopped.
The Duke of Orléans's gamble had failed in the worst possible form.
Every card he had prepared to kill the Saintess had been neutralized before he could even play them; the prestige of a Duke who had dug a despicable trap and still failed to eliminate the Saintess had been driven into the dirt; and above all, the attitude of the border marquises had turned sharply uncooperative.
The false charge of being Kaiser's puppet that Asty had pinned on the Duke. That lethal poison spat out by her cunning silver tongue had set the northern lords trembling as one.
In that moment, the life expectancy of the royalist faction was cut to a quarter.
The ruined authority of their leader. The enemy's justification strengthened still further. And the stigma of treason they had somehow ended up wearing. Every single element that had held the faction's cohesion together had been butchered without exception — if they could still wage a long war after that, that would be the stranger thing.
Now only one choice remained to the Duke of Orléans.
Before the already crumbling royalist faction completely disintegrated, he had to take that damned fortress and crush the rebellion utterly. In other words... from this moment on, he would have to throw precious soldiers recklessly against those walls. Soldiers who had already lost their will to fight after the Saintess's surprise sermon.
"This war is a complete fucking mess..."
The Duke of Orléans spat out the highest praise with thoroughly dead eyes.
If he attacked, he would probably lose. Yet if he did not attack, the royalist faction's schism would collapse the suppression army itself.
How had he ended up in this godforsaken situation? He had not lived a life he could proudly boast about, but he had never neglected his duties as a noble.
Yet the Saintess who might have heard his prayer had just been carried off, covered in blood, after delivering a sermon while caught in the trap he himself had laid. Then the day an answer would return to an unbeliever who had committed the sin of apostasy would never come.
The Duke of the kingdom bowed his head, sunk in bitter grief.
Whatever the reason, the war would not last much longer.