Chapter 273: The Tin Knight and the End of the Banquet (3)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 273: The Tin Knight and the End of the Banquet (3)
Giselle von Lennart, the acting lord of the Friedel domain, was an early riser.
She was keenly aware that her position was fundamentally that of an outsider who had rolled in. To earn the respect and loyalty of her vassals and subjects, she believed she could never show a hint of laziness or incompetence.
She washed her body, tidied her hair, and straightened her clothes.
Since she had morning training to attend to anyway, she kept her preparations simple, forgoing any excessive grooming or adornment.
Unlike typical nobles, she completed her preparations without the help of servants. This was something of a small trend among the younger members of the main family.
The members of the Lion Duke’s bloodline were born with overwhelmingly superior physical conditions and required little sleep to recover from fatigue.
In other words, they could go to bed later and wake up earlier than everyone else, day after day, without any health problems.
Their servants, however, were a different story.
It was standard for the servants of a noble house to rise before their masters and sleep after them. But trying to keep pace with the lifestyle of the Lion Duke’s bloodline would, without fail, take a toll on their bodies.
Their ancestors had solved this by dividing the servants into morning and night shifts. But the trend began when a few of the younger generation thought, ‘Rather than making such a fuss, isn’t it more efficient to just do what we can ourselves?’
Of course, not everyone followed suit.
Many insisted there was no need to change established traditions, while others detested the practice, viewing it as a commoner-like behavior to tend to one’s own affairs.
Giselle’s reason for joining the trend was simple.
It gave her a few more minutes of usable time.
If she could secure an extra ten minutes a day, that would amount to a hundred minutes over ten days.
For Giselle, who was constantly building her specs and career to surpass her rivals and climb higher, that was reason enough.
After training with her sword in the courtyard, she would have her second round of grooming, this time with the help of servants who, though initially flustered by their new acting lord’s habits, now moved with practiced ease.
After a prepared meal, she would have a light tea time to improve her efficiency before diving into her real work: the paperwork.
It was truly the model life of a perfect planner.
And yet, the eyes of Giselle, the one carrying out this perfect routine, were strangely dull.
They brought to mind a dead fish.
She stared out the window at the endlessly clear and sunny sky, muttering a single word in her mind that she could never speak aloud.
My life…
When she was first offered the position concerning the Friedel domain, she had thought her chance had finally come.
Although Giselle was a skilled warrior, she considered her true specialty to be administration.
While it would have been nice to follow in the footsteps of her senior and role model, René von Lennart, by becoming an instructor at one of the dojos and proving her worth through reform, she was just as confident in her ability to manage an entire domain like this one.
Only later would she learn that it was the Elder faction, not the family head, who had chosen her. They had picked someone who knew little about the conspiracy behind the incident, someone who could remain under their influence while deflecting the Duke’s suspicion. But at the time, the younger Giselle was simply thrilled by the path to success that had opened before her.
And the Friedel she saw with her own eyes… was in far worse shape than she had ever imagined.
The former lord of Friedel had been an honest and diligent knight, but he could not be called a skilled administrator even with the kindest of words.
To be more precise, he had pushed the morality and skill of his knights and soldiers to their absolute limit, using that military might and trustworthiness to cover for all other shortcomings.
Public security? The presence of his skilled and incorruptible soldiers was more than enough.
Money? He earned it by crushing nearby bandit groups or lending his military power to other domains for a price.
Mediating disputes among the subjects? There were no special systems or legal standards; the lord simply resolved matters arbitrarily as they arose.
Farming and other primary industries, diplomacy with neighboring domains, logistics using visiting merchants.
He handled everything else with a single tool: ‘a competent and moral military force.’
It was as if he had taken the saying, “If the body is strong, the mind doesn't have to suffer,” and applied it directly to governing a domain.
Of course, considering the countless domains in history that had fallen because they couldn’t even manage that one military trick, one could argue that his approach was decent enough. It was better to run a domain with the one thing he was good at than to meddle in areas he knew nothing about and ruin everything.
But if he was going to be a one-trick pony with his military, he should have at least kept a certain portion of his forces in the domain as a contingency. Instead, the lord of Friedel had thrown the very core of his domain’s strength into a single mission.
All that remained was a hollowed-out domain, full of weaknesses and devoid of any strengths.
After analyzing the Friedel domain, Giselle felt a sense of disbelief, but at the same time, she thought it wasn’t so bad.
It meant there was more for her to work on, more areas where she could demonstrate her abilities and prove her worth.
She had been a little flustered when the youngest lady of the family had run off, and quite a bit more flustered when that same girl, who she expected to die an unsung death or return with her tail between her legs, began steadily building a reputation. But still, Giselle had been confident.
The vassals and subjects, who at first saw her as just ‘someone from the Lennart main family,’ slowly began to direct their respect and loyalty toward Giselle as an individual, cheering for the domain she was reviving.
The heir, that young girl.
Even if Adelaide von Lennart’s military prowess and fame were somewhat superior, Giselle believed she herself was far ahead in terms of performance and ability as a lord.
Yes.
She thought she could cover for a somewhat superior opponent.
Within a certain, common-sense range, that is.
But the reality?
What? The Tragedy of Friedel? A fabrication by the main family? She destroyed the Tower of Control and beat its head to death?
That alone was enough to make her mind go blank, but the news that followed was even more spectacular.
The ducal family’s treason. The hero who suppressed it.
A girl who had been certified as the ‘representative of the Lion Duke’s bloodline’ by the Guardian Lord of the State—a figure who was, to Giselle, practically in the clouds—and had even received pledges of loyalty from bloodline members of Giselle’s own rank.
Ha, ha, ha.
On the surface, Giselle’s face was perfectly calm and intellectual, as if lost in thought. But inwardly, her world had crumbled so completely that she had reached a state where she could only laugh.
A fight, a duel, a competition—it’s only possible when you’re in the same weight class. What was she supposed to do when she was waiting in the ring with her gloves on, only for her opponent to charge in with an elephant stampede, trampling not just the ring but the entire stadium?
…Adelaide. When she returns, it will all be over.
Not only would the competition for the next lordship end, but there was a high probability that Giselle’s own life would end as well.
After all, Giselle was a member of the Elder faction, and it was beyond doubt that the Elder faction and Adelaide were practically mortal enemies.
Even if Giselle herself was unaware of the conspiracies related to the Friedel domain, it was questionable whether Adelaide would believe her.
No, even without that, Adelaide had plenty of reasons to hold a grudge against her.
Giselle herself vividly remembered spewing all sorts of harsh words at Adelaide, like ‘I told you to wait quietly, but you had to go and do something useless,’ and calling her ‘incompetent for getting kidnapped by a mere bandit group.’
Even if she was just stating the facts as they happened, it was obvious that it would have been unpleasant to hear.
The fact that Adelaide had deliberately used Marquis William Hemming, a key figure of power in the kingdom, to spirit away her mother and aides was clear proof that Adelaide viewed Giselle in a negative light.
With such a bleak future awaiting her, she should have been planning her escape, but Giselle had nowhere to run.
Her home base had been blown to bits, and her distinctive appearance as a member of the Lion Duke’s bloodline was far too conspicuous to live as a commoner.
If Adelaide, who would soon gain new power as the next head of the family, decided to find her, it wouldn’t be a difficult task.
More importantly, Giselle herself had no will to run.
Her lifelong goal of rising through the ranks of the family and the Empire had been completely shattered. She wasn't resourceful enough to simply set a new goal and devote herself to it.
She even had a self-deprecating hope that if she were to die as the adversary of the next Lennart head, rather than as a miserable fugitive, her name might at least be recorded in a line of the history books.
As tea time ended, Giselle processed her work out of habit, her mind blank.
Why am I still doing this?
With her execution or exile all but guaranteed, there was no reason for Giselle to continue her work as acting lord.
And yet, Giselle trained, did paperwork, inspected the domain, and mediated the residents’ conflicts, just as she always had.
Her mind was in a state of despair, asking what the point of it all was, but her body, which had run full-tilt its entire life like a workaholic, simply couldn't stand still.
Like oiling a sword after use, Giselle put her body through the maintenance work of sleep after finishing her daily routine.
The next morning.
She came face to face with the heir of Friedel, who was waiting for her in the office.