I Became the First Prince

A Group That Follows the Dawn (5)

As usual, I was wielding my sword in the hall, and Jordan came to me.

“Your Highness! Your Highness!” the ranger called to me several times.
Usually, I would have hated the fuss, but this time I couldn’t because the experienced ranger’s face was full of urgency, rare for a hard man such as he.
My heart was thumping; it was obvious that something big had happened.

I lowered my sword and waited thusly for Jordan to speak.

“Your Highness, it is said there is a revolt in the Empire!”

My beating heart grew cold.
I lifted my sword and took up my stance.

“Your Highness! This is not the time for you to be doing this.”

I replied by swinging my sword.

“If you talk of the fifth princeps’ rebellion, I already know of it.”

“No, I mean another uprising!”

I stiffened, rolling my eyes to look at Jordan, who shook his head in frustration and told me, “The lords of the northeastern region of the Empire have rebelled against the imperial family! Right now, Count Balahard is discussing the matter with the marshal!”

I sheathed my sword and left my palace straight away.

“I will escort you,” said Carls as he and other palace knights led me, with him reminding me of the king’s order barring me from the marshal’s offices.
The Bielefeld family knights were blocking off the office and looked at me with nervous apprehension.
I knew they wondered if they could stop me if I decided to break the king’s edict and intrude into the marshal’s office.

Their worries were of no use; I had no intention of going in.

“Marquis!”

I stood in front of the entrance and called out to Bielefeld.
I shouted with all my might, even adding mana.
Before long, the marquis appeared, along with Vincent and Malcoy.
Malcoy saw me and halted in his tracks.
Perhaps he thought I had come to grab him, and his face was hard as a stone.
I ignored him and immediately asked the marquis, “Is this the sword of the kingdom you spoke of, marquis?”

Bielefeld looked at me, saw the ranger, and then turned to Vincent.
I could see the subtle rapprochement in his eyes.
It seemed that the behavior of Count Balahard, who had broken the king’s edict to deliver the news to me, was unpleasant to the marshal.
As a result, Vincent kept his facial expression consistent.
He blatantly acted as if he hadn’t known there was such a royal order at all.

“Let’s talk inside,” the marquis told me, his voice pained as he almost spat out the words.
I left Carls and the knights behind and immediately followed the marquis.

“That’s right, your Highness.
Our kingdom orchestrated the rebellion in the Empire.”

“How on earth did you do it?”

On my last trip to the Empire, I had seen with my own eyes how much the nobility of the Empire feared the emperor.
The imperial nobles dared not even breathe loudly in the emperor’s presence and were afraid to make eye contact.
That the nobles of such an Empire had rebelled?

No matter how confused the Empire was due to civil war, it was difficult to understand.

“Do you know a man named Degaulle de Devisch?”

Degaulle was a senior imperial knight whom I had embarrassed when he tried to humiliate me on my diplomatic trip to the Empire.

“When I was taken prisoner,” Malcoy, who stood behind the marquis, explained, “he was also taken prisoner.
He’s so useless that your Highness didn’t seem to bother with him.”

“Right.
But why use him?”

“At the time of the war, he had reassured the first legion commanders who attacked the Gifted Lion Citadel to do so recklessly, giving a guarantee of victory.
He was afraid that imperial intelligence might know about it, and worried what they would do once he was released.”

As I heard that, I felt foolish for not immediately understanding why the marquis was mentioning Degaulle’s name.
Apart from that, however, I remained skeptical about the possibility that the nobles who served under a tyrannical emperor would listen to the words of a high-ranking knight and so initiate a revolt.

“There would only be his word.
If Degaulle is alone, no one would have listened to him.
Rather, he would have been hung from the gallows because of his treasonous thoughts.”

The marquis laughed when he heard me.

“Actually, his role was just as a guide, and, to a high degree, he was only a windbreaker.
In fact, it’s okay to assume that someone else did everything important.”

“Someone else?”

Bielefeld smiled as he replied to me.

“Count Montpellier himself persuaded the nobles of the Empire.”

My eyes widened when Montpellier’s name suddenly popped up, and the marquis explained the ploy to me.
I burst into laughter.

“Somehow, I let him slip from under my nose.”

After he negotiated with Teuton, I did wonder briefly why I couldn’t hear the whining of Montpellier.
But then I had guessed that he was doing some petty thing somewhere.

“The task proved easier because most of the officials of the regular army who enforced the emperor’s order were either killed in the war or left with the third princeps to the central region.”

“Even so — how the hell were the nobles baked and boiled?”

Just because the emperor’s ears were absent, his shadow would not disappear completely.

I knew it was not easy for those nobles to overcome the fear of the emperor engraved on their souls and rebel against him.
I was curious about what the hell Montpellier had used to convince the imperial nobles.

“He told them that if the civil war ended with the victory of the third princeps, the princeps would search for scapegoats to take responsibility for his disgraceful defeat on the border.”

I laughed again.
What Montpellier had done was so Montpellier-like that I laughed out loud.

He was the one who had made nearly half of the nobles in the kingdom turn traitor.
He was the one who had threatened the royal courtier and made him betray the royal family after his family had served the Leonbergers for generations.
If there was a master of sowing fear and dissension, it would certainly be Montpellier.

“When he was our enemy, he was a cool customer.
It’s pretty reassuring to have him under our command now.”

The marquis nodded at my words.
“This plan itself actually came from the mind of Count Montpellier.”

“The guy has committed so many crimes that he became convinced that we might stab a knife into his back at any time.
But he did something big this time to aid our cause.”

“It might not come to be, but I told him if this goes well, his Majesty might pardon him for all the mistakes he had made thus far.”

It was truly the correct carrot to swing in front of Montpellier’s nose.

“So, did his Majesty accept the offer?”

“He said it depended on the scale of the rebellion Montpellier incites.”

The king’s response was also a masterpiece.

Weighing the number of nobles Montpellier convinces to rebel against his past sins was a ploy closer to that of a bargaining businessman than of a man idly trying to alter the situation on the continent.
I was happy to see that Montpellier and the king’s behavior were consistently different than before.

“Anyway, with this incident, Dotrin’s army will be able to focus solely on the enemy in front of them.”

The marquis corrected his expression and explained how the rebellion would change the situation.
The northeastern lords’ rebellion meant that the emperor has now virtually lost control of the eastern region.
Bielefeld said the rebellion would enable the Dotrin Kingdom’s concerns about disruptions to their supply lines to be alleviated.

“The Royal Dotrin Army, which is now relieved from the burden of possible attacks from the flanks, will ravage the empire’s strongholds more heatedly.”

The marquis pointed his finger at a section of the map.

“Dotrin’s army will stop advancing after taking full control of the eastern territory.”

He now pointed to the border between the eastern and central imperial territories.

“And that’s when our kingdom enters the war.”

At that, I laughed cheerfully.
I didn’t doubt the marquis now when he had said that the day I awaited would soon dawn.

“But can you tell me all these things?”

“Your Highness already knows what we are doing.
And even if I didn’t tell you, Count Balahard would tell you everything.”

Vincent, who had remained silent up till now, coughed.

“And soon, we will hear more good news,” Bielefeld told me, pretending not to see Vincent.
“Because Leonberg hasn’t prepared only one sword.”

I crumpled my face.
“As I said, don’t hint at things unless you tell it all to me right away.
My curiosity will burst my heart,” I said in a dissatisfied tone, and the marquis chuckled, then laughed.

“What else can I hide from your Highness after I’ve already told you everything?”

Then, with a smiling face, Bielefeld quickly told me about the other scheme prepared by the kingdom.
“Soon, all the wizards of the imperial army will be disengaged from the front at once.”

That was also something I didn’t expect.

“I don’t like to admit it,” said Bielefeld with twinkling eyes, “but during the reign of Burgundy, the Empire shines brightly.
However, the brighter the light, the darker the shadow.”

Now was the time for the ambitious nobles who were repressed by a mighty power they could not hope to face; the time for those who were crouching and unable to satisfy their greed in fear of the emperor to rise and carve out their own future.

“The great Empire will be shattered.
The greed and hunger that had been suppressed for many years will erupt at once, and the high lords will not hesitate to stick their daggers into each other’s backs in order to grab even the slightest chunk of meat.”

Bielefeld made it clear that the era of revolution has arrived.
I laughed.
The soon-to-be world the marquis spoke of was one I was very familiar with.

At the time when the Great War just ended, when the humans had gained continental hegemony, people all over the world constantly fought for supremacy.

To me, it sounded like saying that the world was going back to that time.
The only difference was that the Burgundy family, who had formed an empire and ruled over half the world, has become the largest and most delicious chunk of meat on the dinner table.

“I will go back.”

I woke up straight away.
I was going to sharpen my sword and train again until that day came.
If you wanted to cut the most delicious slice from a large chunk of meat, you would need to have a sharper knife than anyone else.

I left the marshal and went back to my palace, noticing that the wind blew in an unusual manner.
The flags of the Dawn Alliance and Leonberg that were hoisted high above the palace fluttered exceptionally violently.
It felt as if a great wind that had been stagnant in front of a massive wall had finally started to flow.
It felt as if the same wind blew on all roads leading to my enemies and back.
My impression of reality was completely different than before.

The change felt too clear for me to think it was just because I heard the marquis’ statement.
I quickly identified where my conflicting feelings originated.
If I wasn’t originally a sword in the past, I had existed as a being for which sight and hearing were everything.

The feelings I would have felt at that time would have also been like this.

“I am truly a warrior.”

The only thing that remained for me to do in the face of a monster called the Great War, which has finally begun to materialize, was to cultivate my power to the point that that monster would not eat me.

I hurried my steps.
It seemed that I couldn’t learn the truth right away without wielding a sword.

* * *

Adrian Leonberger wasn’t the only one who sensed the change in the material world.

As the whispers of fate flowed under the snow-capped trees, the pointy-eared tribes stopped what they were doing and looked at the sky.

On dark rocky mountains where none dared to tread, beings with eyes that looked farther than anyone’s stomped down heavily upon the earth.

In the deep darkness of the forest that kept its primal appearance, sensitive beasts cried out gloomily.

Everything that had become lost in the Great War and hid in the dark now awakened.

After the long night that had come upon them, many different species were waiting for the rising of the dawn.
And they started to shout.

“At last! It has finally begun!” The man sitting on the highest throne was delighted.

“Dawn has come,” the White Night Mage crouching in the deepest depths of the dungeon sighed.