Mirkena didn’t look meticulous enough to be entrusted with an aide’s duties, no matter how she looked at it.
Nor could she say the person was particularly well-versed in subjugation or damage recovery either.
If anything, it felt more like they were unfocused and sloppy…
Liselotte stared at the letters as if glaring them down, then thunk, tossed them across the desk in a careless scatter.
Leaning back against her chair, she closed her eyes.
‘Agh, this is suffocating. I really need to fix this temperament of mine.’
Being forced to watch something so blatantly sloppy was torture in itself.
It felt like watching someone who clearly knew the answer deliberately mark only the wrong choices.
With a dry laugh, Liselotte straightened up.
Pen in hand, she wrote a letter meant for Ferento.
[Do not advance northward into the Eastern region.]
Even though this was not something the East had directly requested, Liselotte didn’t concern herself with that.
As she was folding the letter, knock knock. Marsha opened the door and stepped inside.
“Your Highness, are you busy?”
“No. What is it?”
“Well, we collected them today, but there turned out to be more than expected.”
When Liselotte lifted her head, Marsha was holding an armful of letters.
Strictly speaking, they were closer to crumpled notes, roughly folded rather than proper letters.
Liselotte’s eyes lit up at the sight of the long-awaited denunciations.
“These are all from the mailboxes?”
“Yes. These are the ones left after I filtered out the ones with especially weak content.”
Whoosh. Like snow, the notes scattered across Liselotte’s desk.
When she unfolded the papers, every single one of them was shouting the same thing.
[Sir Masid’s mistreatment is too hard to endure.]
[I wish Sir Masid would not come to our workplace.]
[There is someone who makes us uncomfortable, but is it right to write a note like this?]
All of them were pointing to the same person.
‘As expected, what happened at the training ground must have been a big factor.’
The atmosphere had changed.
There were surely still those who could not fully trust Eren.
But more than that, Masid’s conduct made it difficult to continue supporting the old generation.
When the core was shaken, it became hard to maintain cohesion.
On top of that, the newly hired staff were not the type to know Masid or the North inside and out.
There was no way they would endure such mistreatment simply because he was a collateral branch member.
Once someone started raising their voice, things spread in an instant.
Looking over the grim contents of the notes, Liselotte smiled brightly.
“Then we should put this issue on the agenda soon!”
The preparations were done. Now it was time to meet him.
She asked a confirming question.
“Where is Sir Masid right now?”
Marsha, who was calmly sorting through the notes that detailed specific cases of damage, answered.
“Oh, he was assigned to the damage recovery team, so he should be in the border region right now.”
***
“Her Highness the Grand Duchess says not to go north into the eastern region since House Gloria is handling it!”
Near the border region, where nothing but stone markers carved like stakes and set at wide intervals stood.
Despite Ferento’s shout, Masid, standing near the hill, pretended not to hear.
The subjugation force members, who had already heard the news, began relocating in orderly unison.
Seeing Masid still acting on his own, Ferento let out a long sigh.
Striding down to the base of the hill, Ferento looked up and cupped his hands around his mouth as he called out to him.
“Sir Masid. You are told not to go up.”
“I heard.”
“Right. I clearly told you, didn’t I?”
Still uneasy, he reaffirmed it once more before turning and walking back down.
Masid’s expression, meanwhile, was nothing but rigid.
‘That damned “Grand Duchess”, Grand Duchess! Since when did they start calling the Princess “Grand Duchess”!’
From the subjugation team members to the knights, everyone was gradually avoiding him, leaving Masid isolated on the fringes of the group.
And yet, if he gave an order, they were all still in a position where they had to obey him!
Because of that, he had thought the recovery work he had vaguely told them to handle on their own would be proceeding without issue.
Before he knew it, however, his subordinates had vanished in a flash, following Ferento’s movement orders.
“What could possibly be down there anyway?”
Even if he went down, all he would receive were the subjugation force members’ cold stares.
The knights were no different.
What was so special about those wretched subjugation troops that everyone was making such a fuss over them?
As he dawdled about, aimlessly pacing back and forth near the boundary line—
BOOM.
A massive explosive sound rang out from behind him.
Masid quickly turned around, and in the distance, smoke was rising near a cave halfway up the mountain.
From the look of it, it seemed to be a mana stone mine.
It was not a man-made explosion.
Most likely, stones that could not withstand the mana had burst.
It was an accident that occurred intermittently in places where mana stones were mined.
The problem was that the upper area was precisely the spot the East had said attracted the largest concentration of monsters.
With a sound this loud, there were surely monsters that would be drawn in by the scent of mana.
Sensing the seriousness of the situation, the northern knights raced up the hill the moment the sound rang out.
After grasping the situation, they urgently called for Ferento.
“Sir Ferento! A mana stone mine has exploded!”
“So this is what Her Highness was talking about. This is bad.”
He whistled sharply up into the air.
From somewhere, a large hawk let out a “pii-” cry as it circled the sky before landing on Ferento’s arm.
He quickly scribbled the situation onto a roughly torn sheet of paper, tied it to the hawk’s ankle, and sent it flying off again as he shouted.
“Go to Princess Liselotte right now!”
***
The moment Ferento’s letter arrived, Liselotte tied the reply she had already prepared to the hawk’s leg without even reading it.
She gently patted the hawk’s head and smiled kindly.
“Now then, deliver this safely to the Gloria ducal estate!”
“Pii-,” with a strong cry, the hawk took flight.
Only then did Liselotte belatedly open the note Ferento had sent.
Most of it reported that they had withdrawn from the northern border of the East and pulled back, along with a brief notice that a mana stone mine had exploded.
Explosions in the Eastern region were not uncommon.
In the original story, this was the period when Eren, having failed to secure cooperation, continued the subjugation unilaterally.
Unable to cross into the East, they lay in wait near the border, lying low and watching for monsters that might cross over at any moment.
Then, suddenly, a mana stone mine exploded, and some of the Northern knights suffered heavy damage.
At the time, Masid blamed this entire sequence of events on Eren’s incompetence.
“This time, I cut off the chance to pin it on His Highness altogether.”
Liselotte smiled quietly.
It was a cave located close to the North.
Of course, it was clearly territory belonging to House Gloria.
Since the current aide in charge of damage recovery did not inspire much confidence, Liselotte had personally sent a letter informing them that the mine had exploded.
That was the message she had just tied to the hawk’s leg.
[Greetings,
This is Liselotte of House Keilos.
It appears there has been a mana stone explosion at an Eastern mine near the border.
The North is currently carrying out temporary measures, so please confirm and dispatch personnel.]
Recalling the contents of the letter she had prepared in advance, Liselotte nodded to herself.
“At this point, I’ve practically spoon-fed them.”
Where else would you find someone who would even notify others about matters in someone else’s territory?
In truth, it was their responsibility, but judging from Aide Mirkena’s conduct so far, it seemed easier on her peace of mind to just inform them herself.
Well, it was also, in a way, doing her a favor.
Even if monsters gathered after sensing the surge of mana from the mine, there was no cause for concern.
A subjugation force had already been dispatched ahead of time, and Ferento would handle the command well.
Thanks to the advance guidance she had given to prevent injuries, unlike in the original story, there were no wounded.
Liselotte stretched her stiff body and muttered to herself.
“Alright, then. Shall we do the math?”
She had spent money, so it was time to recover it.
“If it were up to me, I’d like to really go after them for botching things so badly in the East, but…”
Unfortunately, there was no way to calculate the damage they had caused in purely monetary terms.
What could she use to prove how much loss was incurred because the work was delayed?
Could she say with certainty that the amount was accurate? The answer could only be no.
Sadly, the law required direct damage in order to recover anything.
For example, cases like this one, where Northern knights ended up handling incidents that broke out in the East.
Calculating it using the very, very high labor costs of a high-class subjugation force, for instance.
