The mansion’s gate was shut tight, but the walls weren’t very high. Naturally, the attackers had prepared ladders to climb straight over, and the defenders tried to keep them from setting the ladders in place.
But the defenders were hopelessly outnumbered.
Adolf and the Steinhof knights climbed the walls themselves. The private soldiers desperately tried to stop them from coming over, but blocking every attacker scaling the walls at once was nearly impossible.
Still, Neunil’s guard captain displayed his martial prowess and fought the Steinhof knights to a standstill, refusing to be pushed back easily. Our members climbed the walls as well, and blades clashed everywhere.
"Aaargh!"
"Spare me!"
The resistance was fierce, but it wasn’t enough.
While the members who had entered without trouble sought out their opponents and pounced on them like beasts, I surveyed the whole scene, watching in case anyone climbed over the wrong wall.
The former Hungarian mercenaries in particular required close attention. They came from nomad stock that had made plundering its livelihood, and though they had since settled down and their culture had changed, that temperament did not simply disappear.
Fortunately, no one had slipped out of Barosi and Herto’s control so far. It was almost comical that I had to worry more about my own side than about the enemy.
Meanwhile, Adelbert didn’t look well. The sight of flying blood and torn flesh had sickened him to his core. Hmm, he was showing the reaction of a sheltered young lord in the most unexpected place.
He had come to observe so he could watch with his own eyes as Neunil and Mort, the men who had done this to him, fell. But Adelbert had never once set foot on a battlefield. As time passed, his condition worsened.
"Are you all right? There’s no need to push yourself just to watch this."
"I appreciate your concern, Baron, but I have no intention of returning until Mort is caught."
Despite his words, he kept swallowing dryly and had gone pale, as though he’d fallen ill. The gruesome scene before him seemed likely to become the most terrifying experience of his life.
Not all nobles are accustomed to the battlefield. Most court nobles were greenhorns who had never even set foot on one, and only the likes of Beort, Drek, and Ferke had seen real combat.
That lack of experience was precisely why they’d been annihilated by the Bavarian vanguard. They ran wild in complete disorder, refusing to follow commands, and so they were trampled by an enemy that pushed forward as one.
Adelbert was merely a high noble, a bookish sort with no battlefield experience. Simply observing was quite an adventure for him, and it seemed I had taken that far too lightly.
That was a separate matter from the killing intent he’d shown when he vowed to kill Mort.
Adelbert struggled to pull himself together.
"The resistance is fierce, but suppressing it is only a matter of time. Bear with it a little longer."
"I see. But no arrows will reach us here, will they?"
No sooner had he spoken than a stray arrow came flying our way. I quickly grabbed Adelbert by the scruff of the neck and yanked him toward me. The fletching of the arrow lodged in the wooden post behind us quivered.
The new Count of Reinfeldt had very nearly taken an arrow to the forehead.
At the sight of it, Adelbert collapsed to the ground.
I grinned and soothed the startled man as if it were nothing. No matter how brilliant your strategy or how valiant your tactics, a stray arrow can come flying from anywhere at any time and take your life.
"Sometimes an arrow flies off in an odd direction, but don’t worry. At the very least, you won’t die as long as I’m beside you. Now get up."
"Th-thank you, Baron. Whew, I suppose your years on the battlefield have left you unfazed by all this."
"A battlefield with cannons belching fire is far more terrifying than this, and there is far more to see. One can hardly be startled by a single arrow. I recommend you come observe one sometime, Count Reinfeldt."
"I-I will consider it."
Adelbert’s pale, drained expression looked like a silent vow that he would never set foot on a battlefield. Everyone has their own battlefield, and for him, it would be court politics.
"What sort of battlefield did you see, Baron of Rosenheim?"
"A battlefield where cannonballs fell like lightning and arrows poured down like rain is a place more horrific than purgatory. To win, we all had to become devils. There is no justice or conviction to be found there."
To be, or not to be, that is the question. It’s Hamlet’s famous line, but the battlefield follows the same logic. The countless knights who staked their honor to challenge me all met the same end. I’ve truly stained these hands with a great deal of blood.
But for a knight and a prince living in this era, that is practically destiny. I’ve walked too long a road to feel guilt now. Adelbert watched the small siege battle with wide eyes.
He must have been realizing something in his own way.
Personally, though, I find the court, rife with scheming, more frightening. The battlefield is brutal, but victory and defeat settle things cleanly. With schemes, you can no longer tell what is truth and what is lie.
It’s like wading into a swamp filled with poison.
Crash!
"The gate is broken! Move in!"
"Don’t fall behind the Steinhofs!"
"Raaaaah!"
Even the mansion’s inner doors were smashed open. The Neunil family’s private soldiers, who had resisted desperately, finally collapsed. In an instant, Adolf’s sword pierced the body of his old rival.
The Steinhof family’s swordsmanship specialized in thrusts, and as befit its founder, Adolf’s skill was truly remarkable even seen from a distance. If only he were younger, he would have made an excellent sparring partner.
When I measured his threat level through the Manager Scouter, the Storm Knight came up green, an opponent I could beat without difficulty. Obvious as that was, even making the comparison felt embarrassing and disrespectful.
I was a teenager in my prime, and he was an old man of nearly seventy.
But his reputation was legendary, so not only the Steinhof knights but even the Gale Knights considered it an honor to fight alongside him.
The battle was effectively over.
In truth, Frendel, who had agreed to cooperate with us, had been covertly sabotaging the defenders, and that seemed to make them crumble even faster. At times like this, the enemy within is more frightening than the enemy without.
The soldiers’ boots stormed through the mansion, trampling the history of a venerable family. Private soldiers threw down their weapons and surrendered one after another. The servants scattered, screaming, but we captured them all.
"Baron of Rosenheim! Viscount Neunil is nowhere to be seen!"
The moment it became clear that his lifelong nemesis was missing, Adolf reported it to me at once. We had arrested most of the Neunil bloodline, but the problem was that the viscount, the ringleader, was nowhere to be found. Don’t tell me he slipped away while we were breaking in?
It was Frendel who answered the question.
If the family head wasn’t caught, it was the collaborators who would suffer for it.
"It seems the family head and Mort snuck out!"
If they had escaped even though we had the mansion surrounded, that meant there was an escape passage. Breisburg was built atop an old Roman city, and there were any number of ways to slip out through the sewers.
The problem was that only Viscount Neunil knew about it.
The collateral relatives didn’t even know the passage existed.
Rosengarden also connected to the underground waterways, so this was nothing new. That was why I had asked Viscount Loewenbert to encircle the harbor along with the northwest district.
The gatekeepers at every city gate were strictly controlling all traffic as well. Even if the two of them had escaped the mansion, getting out of Breisburg would be difficult. Unable even to hide in the slums, what choice would they make?
Still, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of traitors within the duchy army itself.
The duchy army was an enormous organization where all sorts of opinions and characters coexisted, which made perfect control impossible. Only the exceptional charisma of the War Minister’s family had kept major problems from erupting.
"My lord! We found a letter sent by the Count of Basel!"
"The Count of Basel helped them escape? Hand it over."
The letter Beort secured revealed that the Count of Basel was willing to help Viscount Neunil defect. Several other letters suggested there had been a secret pact as well.
"Shouldn’t we cut off the southern routes out of Breisburg first?"
"True, but isn’t it a bit strange to handle such an important document this way?"
"...That is certainly true. Documents this important are usually hidden, but this one was left on the desk almost as if for show."
Leaving out in the open a letter that documented collusion with a southern prince might be a ploy to draw our attention with that very information. Or perhaps they really were just careless.
But a viscount who threatened a minister’s family in court politics would never be so sloppy. Frendel had already told me as much, yet the fact that the link to the Count of Basel had surfaced so easily still warranted suspicion.
"The viscount’s mansion is fully secured!"
Drek and Anton reported energetically.