Chapter 26
Honestly, when we began marching on Porvin, I had expected at least some resistance.
Porvin is the western capital and the West’s largest city. Including the satellite cities around Porvin, it boasts a population of 150,000.
As a metropolis of that scale, it was only natural that it would be defended to some degree.
The very reason I hauled the dreadnought all the way here was to neutralize those defenses.
"So I was expecting at least a battle..."
I muttered quietly and looked around the western capital of Porvin.
I could see traces of the magic towers that defended the capital. But it didn’t seem like anyone was inside them.
The towers, some of them crumbled and overgrown with ivy, looked closer to ruins than anything else.
"They’ve grown far too spoiled by peace."
The capital of Porvin had been too peaceful for too long.
There had been no barbarian raids all the way to the capital, it had been thoroughly protected by the Arbel Mountains, and the South just below it had practically no army to speak of.
It seemed the importance of capital defense had naturally declined as a result.
And the money left over would have gone to corrupt nobles.
Besides, our army’s advance had simply been too fast.
We’d kept the number of soldiers and supply units to the bare minimum and charged straight ahead for a week.
There simply hadn’t been enough time to rebuild the broken defenses in a week.
The land of those corrupt, incompetent nobles. The West.
The suffering of the people here would end today as well.
The Western Grand Duke, Charles Raymonz.
It was time to settle the score with that bastard once and for all.
Creak-
The sound of a gate opening echoed before the quiet Porvin castle.
What emerged from there was a tiny army of only a few hundred men.
For the western brute’s reputation, it was a pathetically small number.
It was also proof that Western Grand Duke Charles Raymonz had completely lost the support of the people.
"Long time no see, Charles Raymonz."
One of the main culprits who drove the ending of Monajot to ruin.
The Empire’s fiercest hound, and the rabid dog who, following Aria’s orders, wiped out everyone who tried to stop the war.
I planned to deal with him personally so that something like that would never happen in this world.
***
There are two kinds of people who suffer a major defeat.
They either rise again by overcoming it, or they sink under its weight and collapse into despair.
Western Grand Duke Charles Raymonz was closer to the latter.
That was because he had never truly been defeated before.
The overwhelming aerial force known as the Western Wyvern Knights. Enemies who had no air force.
The fights Charles Raymonz had fought were the kind anyone could win if they showed up. The only one who didn’t know that was Charles Raymonz himself.
Always succeeding, always winning wars, always being the stronger side—he was a brute who didn’t know what defeat was.
'If I do things my way, I always win. So why should I listen to anyone else?'
That was his basic way of thinking.
Until he met Aria.
Aria was the only woman Charles Raymonz ever took a liking to. He was quickly smitten with her.
Having always been a winner, he assumed Aria would eventually be his as well.
...Of course, that was a foolish dream.
In the original Monajot, Charles was never chosen by Aria in the end.
The hunting dog tamed by Aria became nothing more than a useless beast once the civil war that brought down the Empire was over.
And when the hunt is over, the hunting dog gets eaten.
He was abandoned by Aria amid the ruins of the fallen Empire.
After tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of people had already died and suffered.
That was his first defeat.
Fortunately, in this world, Charles didn’t have to ruin the Empire just to be defeated.
Because there was someone who defeated him before the men who entered Aria’s 'harem'.
"Kyle Leopold...!!!"
KWAJANG-!
The porcelain bowl he threw smashed against the office wall. Even so, apparently still not satisfied, he hurled a chair and paced back and forth for a while, huffing with rage.
After raging for a while, Charles slumped down in place.
And he muttered.
"...This, this was all because that fucking idiot pulled some shitty trick."
In the end, Charles Raymonz never realized his own mistakes.
His pride would not allow it.
The fat vermin who had once forced him to his knees so magnificently in front of the woman he loved.
Now it was his turn to kneel before that bastard.
The pride of the Western Grand Duke could not accept that he, once the superior one, had to crawl before someone he considered inferior.
For Charles, everything had to be Kyle Leopold’s fault.
It had to be.
"If that stupid bastard hadn’t made a move on my Aria. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had to cross swords with the South in the first place!"
He screamed in fury and grabbed the door. It looked as if he was about to rush out and drag the bastard back right then and there.
However, he still couldn’t bring himself to open it all the way.
A man like an animal. Charles Raymonz.
Animals are endlessly fierce toward the weak, but endlessly craven before the strong.
Charles Raymonz’s mind flashed back to that hellish night at Albion Harbor.
The knights melting away without being able to do anything. The murderous bombardment flying everywhere, and the flares that blocked their vision.
"Fuck!"
Crash-
Once again, the Western Grand Duke’s residence rang only with beastly screams and the sound of things breaking.
Charles Raymonz was never strong enough to rise above defeat in the end.
Nor was he a great man capable of admitting his mistake and bowing his head to those he had once looked down on.
He simply escaped reality in his room and let his savage temper run wild.
Under normal circumstances, that would have been fine.
Because of his usual irresponsibility, born from how much he liked war, the grand ducal estate’s work was already being handled by underlings who were sacrificing themselves for it.
But... this was clearly a conflict between the South and the West.
Since Charles Raymonz, the very cause of it, was holed up in a corner of the room, it was only natural that ugly talk would start flying.
At least, that was what Charles Raymonz thought.
That line of thinking turned into hallucinations.
- The grand duke himself is stuck in his room while war is breaking out... tsk.
- Didn’t he start this war himself? It’s pathetic how he’s acting so irresponsibly after causing all this...
- Hah, after this he’ll probably go right back to that woman and wag his tail again.
In a strictly hierarchical society, it made no sense for a servant to insult the grand duke?
Such common sense no longer worked on Charles Raymonz, whose mind was already half gone.
His paranoia grew worse and worse.
And the target of that paranoia was, in the end, the weak.
"You bastard of a butler! How dare you insult me, Charles Raymonz, rightful blood of the Raymonz family and ruler of the great West!"
"A-Ah, no! I didn’t say anything!"
"Cut the crap! Are you saying that my words, the words of Charles Raymonz, were lies!"
Over the course of a month, more and more people were injured by his paranoia, and some were even killed.
As that happened, the butler and maids of the grand ducal estate became increasingly reluctant to enter Charles Raymonz’s room.
And so, Charles Raymonz gradually began to grow strange.
The news reaching him was always hopeless.
"The South has given a total war speech and sent out its army!"
"Count Eric Smith of the frontier marched out with forty thousand troops, but they were utterly annihilated by the Southern Army..."
"Aquiten Fortress has fallen to those Southern bastards! Their army is already right in front of the grand duke’s castle!"
Driven to the limit, unable to escape reality any longer, he finally had no choice but to step forward.
The situation had reached the point where he could no longer stay cooped up in his room.
"Fine, fuck it. I just have to prove myself by winning. I just have to catch that half-baked, rude bastard Kyle and beat him to death!"
He only had to win and settle it.
In the end, Charles Raymonz followed his instincts.
But when he finally came outside, everything was already over.
No one wanted to follow Charles Raymonz.
It was his karma.
A conflict was underway, yet the grand duke had spent weeks locked in his room, lost in delusions.
It wasn’t as if he had any loyalty to the ducal house; there was no way the corrupt nobles who had gathered around him for money would follow him.
The major nobles had already fled.
The common people did not follow him either.
Public sentiment had clearly tilted toward the gentlemanly Southern Army rather than the western corrupt nobles who had only ever exploited them.
And so, when Charles finally came out with a lance in hand, leading what few troops he had before the grand duke’s castle.
What he faced were five thousand soldiers filling the plain-
"Long time no see, Charles Raymonz."
Kyle Leopold, looking down at him from atop a horse.
Ironically enough, that formation was similar to the one from ten years ago.
The day he subdued Kyle, who had been tormenting Aria, and publicly humiliated him.
The crowd surrounding the kneeling Kyle.
Standing at the very front of it all was Charles Raymonz.
"How’s that? Looks familiar, doesn’t it, Charles Raymonz."
That sneering voice severed the last thread of Charles Raymonz’s reason.