The Abandoned Hunting Dog
The Kyle Leopold that Aria—the abandoned hunting dog—had first laid eyes on was truly an incompetent man. A royal bastard and blood of the Southern Grand Ducal house, he possessed nothing worth mentioning beyond the luck he had been born with.
He was an ugly creature who knew how to do nothing yet clung to a disgustingly inflated pride. An unsightly fool who never bothered to groom himself but still tried to approach beautiful women. In short, the most convenient kind of man to use.
And just as expected, Kyle Leopold moved exactly as Aria wished. She gave him just enough leeway and adjusted the distance with precision. Before long, he confessed to her in the middle of a banquet hall where everyone could see. Aria rejected him with surgical coldness, and—
Slap—!
Humiliated before the entire crowd, Kyle behaved exactly as she had predicted.
“How dare a wretch like you…!”
The third-rate villain dialogue was merely the bonus. Aria, who had fallen with a dramatic crash in front of everyone, squeezed out tears with a perfectly pitiful expression.
Even looking back, the composition had been flawless. It had been enough to captivate Charles Raymonds, the eldest son of the Western Grand Duke, in a single moment.
Kyle Leopold, who already carried plenty of prior offenses, was driven from the capital. She thought she would never see him again.
Yet…
“They say the atmosphere between the West and South has grown ominous, haven’t they?”
“Words like war… frightening rumors are flying around.”
“Hoho, it’s perfectly fine. After all, it’s only a story beyond the Arbel Mountains.”
Not long ago, strange rumors had begun circulating in the empire’s social circles. It was a situation Aria’s common sense could not comprehend.
“How could the South possibly move against the West…?”
At first she assumed the position of Southern Grand Duke had changed hands. The South she knew had not even possessed a proper army. For such a South to wage war on the West? Something had gone terribly wrong.
And then even more astonishing reports kept arriving. A western fortress had been destroyed. The wyvern unit had been defeated by the South’s new weapons. The South had formally declared war on the West.
“What on earth is happening?”
In her urgency, Aria had rushed to the Crown Prince to demand an explanation. But the indecisive Crown Prince failed to grasp the true severity of the situation.
“Ah, you mean that business between the West and South? There’s no need to worry. It’s only happening beyond the Arbel Mountains.”
“Does it still trouble you? As expected, Aria, you have such a gentle heart.”
“Still, the way you seem more interested in the Grand Dukes of the West and South than in me… I might grow a little jealous.”
After he had spoken that much, there was nothing more she could do. The Western Grand Duke had suddenly gone silent, and the only news that arrived was that the South had won the war.
Then, in the midst of it all, contact came from the South.
“His Excellency the Western Grand Duke Charles Raymonds is said to be heading to the capital.”
When she first heard those words, Aria had breathed a sigh of relief. As long as the Western Grand Duke was alive, it didn’t matter. Her plan to fracture the empire and ignite a civil war could proceed without a hitch.
“No, it might actually be even better than before.”
Contrary to all expectations, the South had begun expanding its military. The Crown Prince’s so-called ‘Peace of Our Era’ was nothing but a hollow slogan, and both the East and South were slowly distancing themselves from the center. The empire’s internal situation was more precarious than ever.
If a full-scale civil war erupted and she sent the Western Grand Duke back to the West—if he stirred chaos in the South’s rear—both the empire and the South could annihilate each other completely.
In that sense, Charles Raymonds still held value as a tool. She would skillfully manipulate him from the sidelines to make the civil war even more chaotic.
Harboring such expectations, Aria had gone out to the pier—and—
“…Hello, Aria.”
There she met Charles Raymonds, sitting in a wheelchair with a haggard face.
The authority of the Western Grand Duke, his power as a 9th Tier Aura user, his handsome features—nothing remained intact. He was a half-corpse. The message the Southern Grand Duke was sending was simple.
I will turn everyone who defies me into this.
Aria’s expression froze at the sight of Charles Raymonds, reduced to a state where he could not even stand or walk on his own.
Even in the most extreme situations, humans refuse to let go of hope until the very end. Hope is the driving force that allows people to keep living no matter the circumstances.
Charles Raymonds, who loved war yet feared death more than anyone, desperately clung to his final hope. Aria. Because he believed the only sanctuary in his life stained by battle and bloodshed would not abandon him.
The man who once rode wyverns now sat in a wheelchair. The body once hailed as the empire’s greatest knight had become a cripple that could not even move properly. Yet Charles still believed.
Because he remembered the words she had spoken to him one day in the imperial palace’s secret garden.
“Aria. If I were not the successor to the Western Grand Duke but an ordinary commoner… could we still have met?”
She answered without the slightest hesitation.
“Puhuhu, of course.”
Beautiful platinum hair reflecting moonlight. Silver eyes shimmering like transparent glass. In the secret garden glowing with countless fireflies, Aria had definitely said those words.
“I believe in fate, you know.”
“Fate?”
“Yes! Isn’t it such a romantic idea—that people bound by fate will meet no matter what happens?”
Charles still remembered the small hand that had boldly grabbed his that night.
“Even if we had met as commoners, I think we would have become good friends.”
“Because that’s what fate is.”
Although Aria had called him a “friend,” he had never doubted that the word would soon change into something far closer. After all, she had called him her fated partner.
Therefore…
“…Hello, Aria.”
Charles greeted her, firmly believing that Aria would accept even this broken version of himself.
But the response that returned was completely unexpected.
“Uh… um, yes. Hello.”
A reluctant smile. A reluctant greeting. Eyes trembling with unease and a gaze that refused to settle on him, drifting elsewhere instead.
Aria was not looking at Charles at all.
It was only natural. To Aria, Charles had been a hunting dog. And a hunting dog that could no longer hunt was no longer needed.
Charles’s heart plummeted. He spoke again, clinging to desperate hope.
“Haha, it’s quite an unsightly sight, isn’t it? So many things happened… that bastard Kyle Leopold…”
“Ah… I see…?”
Yet the more they spoke, the clearer it became that the conversation was being forced. Aria kept cutting him off with half-hearted replies, clearly eager to end the exchange.
What finally shattered Charles’s heart was her next sentence.
“Um, I’m sorry, but I have urgent business to attend to. Let’s meet again later and talk properly…!”
Charles could not stop Aria as she quickly walked away.
“Aria… ack!”
Crash.
He desperately tried to rise, but that was all he could manage. Collapsed on the ground, Charles could not even stand without someone’s help.
Only then did he finally understand why Kyle had left him alive.
“…Ah.”
All that remained on the pier was a man who had lost everything.
“A report has arrived that the ‘gift’ has reached its destination. Would you like to see the results?”
“No. I can imagine it well enough without looking.”
In the original Mona-joh, Charles had lost everything and been discarded. He saw no reason this time would be any different. Aria had approached Charles purely for her own purposes from the very beginning.
“This should be warning enough.”
Western Grand Duke? Do not even dream of using him. The West now belongs to our South.
He had already dealt with every single person who possessed even the slightest possibility of intervening in the West.
“Lucilla, what happened to the high-ranking Western nobles who fled?”
“The Imperial Guard is tracking them. Roughly sixty percent of the escaped nobles have been captured or eliminated. The remaining forty percent are believed to have fled abroad or taken refuge in the imperial capital.”
“That’s sufficient. Withdraw the Imperial Guard.”
Extending operations into foreign lands or the capital would draw too much attention. Besides, those corrupt nobles who had abandoned their entire foundation in the West had no way of returning.
“Now we must focus on developing the West.”
The ‘Peace of Our Era’ had bought the South precious time—time to produce new weapons, expand the army, and train the troops. Even now, Eastern Grand Duke Edward had yet to make any significant moves.
Therefore, now was the time to stabilize the West.
“There is one report that has come up from the West. It was submitted by one of our accounting officers dispatched to the western border.”
“An accounting officer?”
“It concerns the western natives.”
Ah, right. There were the natives. The chief troublemakers who had constantly stirred up chaos along the western border. They had been strangely quiet for some time, but now they were raising their heads again.
“It’s a border matter… A proposal the natives sent to the lord of one of the West’s strategic strongholds was enclosed with the report.”
“A proposal?”
The word ‘proposal’ itself felt suspicious. These plunderers daring to make a proposal to a western lord.
With the recent complete overhaul of the West’s leadership and the removal of all corrupt nobles, many vacancies had been created. Were they seeing this and thinking the West had grown weak?
Officially the West was still the West and the South was still the South, after all. The natives, who understood little of politics, might simply be thinking, ‘Ah, the West lost the war,’ ‘The West has become weak.’
It seemed they intended to stab at the empty space left after the South’s elite forces had swept through once.
“Give it here.”
We are aware that the Western army has been greatly weakened by the recent series of conflicts between the West and the South.
We could carry out a large-scale plunder taking advantage of this opportunity, but we will specially refrain from doing so.
Instead, surrender wealth equivalent to the amount we demand.
“…Have the lords of other border territories received proposals with similar content?”
“Yes, that is what I understand.”
“Those barbarian bastards have lost their minds.”
Crunch—!
He rose from his seat, crumpling the paper violently in both hands.
He had deliberately left the natives untouched. He had seen no reason to stir up unnecessary trouble. Yet they had begun scheming in the places his gaze did not reach?
“Leaving them alone, it seems they now think they’re the ones in charge….”
Before expanding into the East, the center, and the North, the rear had to be cleaned thoroughly. And this time, there was no need to spare the enemy for the sake of public sentiment.
Killing the raiders who wrecked the border whenever they had the chance would not cause the people’s hearts to turn against him.
It was time to let those plunderers taste the flavor of machine guns.