On the fifth day after Baschurten was occupied, the three days of plunder came to an end and things settled down to some degree. The citizens, who had endured immense losses, were relieved that this hell was finally over.

"Return to your livelihoods! There will be no more looting!"

"Your right to make a living is guaranteed in the name of Altringen!"

The crown prince released the large stores of food our forces had secured, taking measures to keep the citizens, who had been stripped of everything, from starving. The carrot after the stick? Still, it was a necessary measure.

In a sense, the crime of treason had been paid for by the three days of plunder. With no further price for the citizens to pay, the crown prince officially issued a pardon to Baschurten.

Now the mercenaries could no longer lay a hand on the citizens of Baschurten. Maintaining public order fell to the Offenburg Knights and the Gale Knights, who had never once taken part in the plunder.

There were minor clashes here and there, but for the most part the mercenaries backed down. The Swiss mercenaries took charge of defending Baschurten’s lord’s castle, with Leto and Gedel in command.

Even right after the plunder, the Swiss mercenaries carried out their duties without a single lapse, and their sense of responsibility left a deep impression on the crown prince. It was a virtue an imperial guard ought to have, and it seemed to win the crown prince over completely.

I was absorbed in securing stone shot.

The cannons whose touch holes had taken on water could be used again, but for the most important task, producing cannonballs, I hired most of Baschurten’s stonemasons. As a result, a workshop of about a hundred men was formed.

The truth was, I only had two days of working time.

After three days of that chaos, there was no way anyone had been working properly.

Thankfully, the thirty Breisburg stonemasons stationed at the encampment had managed to produce fifty stone shot. My minimum target was two hundred cannonballs.

Sixty rounds had barely been enough to break the gates, and luck seemed to have played a part. So I planned to prepare a generous supply so I’d never be caught short again, and could pound the enemy’s walls to my heart’s content.

I’d been worried we might run short on gunpowder, but fortunately there was still plenty left. Stone shot could be produced by carving rock, but in the current circumstances it was impossible to obtain gunpowder.

So it was a resource to be conserved even more carefully than stone shot, and I was practically reduced to praying—to heaven and earth, no, to the Lord—that it wouldn’t rain. Luckily, no rain had fallen so far.

We were now into December, and the cold had grown even fiercer.

The south was said to be colder than here, and I was starting to worry whether I’d adapt well to a medieval winter with its dismal heating. The truth was, I’d always been rather sensitive to the cold.

Medieval heating meant fireplaces or braziers, but they didn’t warm a whole room. So people slept clutching thick blankets and animal furs, and on farms they spent the winter huddled together with their livestock.

No wonder they were crawling with lice.

It’s said that in Roman times heating was fairly well developed, but with the transition to the Middle Ages most of it was lost. A shame that such excellent technology vanished.

I really ought to make something like a Roman hypocaust.

Hilda was pregnant and might have a hard time in the winter, so I wanted to build her a villa with heated floors as a gift. Of course, living on the floor would be utterly foreign to her, but once she got a taste of it, she’d never be able to give it up.

Anyway, I was steadily preparing for the next battle, and whenever I had time to spare, I swung my halberd. I don’t mean to belittle the skill of the knights who guard princes, but the truth is, the fights had gone far more smoothly than expected.

Thanks to that, I’ve been discovering a whole new world. The halberd isn’t all-powerful, but it was clearly the melee weapon best suited to my hands. Of course, that doesn’t mean I intend to abandon the longsword.

"Hngh! This is quite hard to handle! Hah!"

"Be careful not to let the center of gravity pitch forward."

"Haaah! A hundred times! That’s all of them!"

From among the belongings of a fallen Swiss mercenary, I bought a halberd at a high price and bestowed it on Anton. I focused on teaching him halberd techniques he could put to good use in real combat.

The old prejudice that only infantry used halberds had long since disappeared.

Anton seemed deeply moved when I started teaching him halberd technique in earnest. Hm, had I been neglectful of my retainers all this time?

The truth was, I’d considered passing my swordsmanship down to my retainers, but the main reason I hadn’t was that most of them simply couldn’t keep up with the instruction.

The concept of Fühlen was simply too difficult for them. The moment swords crossed, predicting an opponent’s movement a step ahead was, frankly, too much to ask of them.

But with a halberd, you could gain the upper hand against a sword just by managing distance well, so halberd technique was well suited for retainers to learn. That’s why I taught Anton, but the problem lay elsewhere.

Unlike a sword, the halberd was a melee weapon that was hard to handle. Its center of gravity was concentrated in the head, and it was quite heavy. So first I focused on conditioning drills to build the strength needed to handle the halberd well.

Anton followed my instruction with real enthusiasm.

After a hundred swings, I had him train his lower body.

"By the way, you, still no thoughts of marriage?"

"Hngh! Not yet! Hngh! None!"

Unlike Ted, who kept singing the same tune about wanting to marry, Anton had no interest in it whatsoever. Pushing it on someone when the man himself didn’t want it wasn’t my style, so I didn’t meddle any further.

Winter doesn’t seem to have much interest in marriage either.

They’re my retainers, but they really are odd fellows.

"Commander! A summons from His Highness the Crown Prince!"

A summons, hm.

So the course of action has finally been decided?

For the first time in a while, all the nobles and commanders gathered. Most of them must have grabbed a considerable haul, because their faces were practically gleaming. Meanwhile here I was, scraping and struggling over stone shot production.

"I have summoned you to share two pieces of news and to decide on our course going forward."

The crown prince looked over each of their faces as he spoke, and he carried a certain gravity about him now. The civil war had likely given the crown prince a measure of authority. This much could be called positive growth, I suppose.

One of the commanders asked lightly.

"Might both pieces of news be good news?"

"Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, both are bad news."

Bad news, hm. For me, bad news would be the Grand Duke’s army being routed by the Duke’s army. If that were the case, we might end up fighting in Breisburg’s front yard. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to be the worst-case scenario.

"On the southern front, our forces broke through Rheinkalsen’s defensive line. Whether the rebels will keep resisting from here, we can’t yet say, but there is no longer any army capable of stopping us."

From the moment the Count of Basel was captured, the southern rebels had, in effect, lost their rallying point. They’d tried to halt the Western Lords’ Army’s advance at Rheinkalsen, but in the end they collapsed and were essentially shattered.

"Your Highness, if I heard correctly, isn’t that good news?"

"It’s bad news, all right. The military merit and spoils in the south are gone now."

It was Fried who answered the commander’s question. Only then did the nobles air their grievances, complaining that the Western Lords’ Army in the south had swept up all the targets we’d meant to claim.

You grabbed plenty at Baschurten, isn’t that enough? You want to gorge yourselves again?

In any case, since our side had won, the mood was good.

"The Grand Duke’s army has pulled back from Dellingen."

"..."

That is, until he delivered the second piece of news. The Grand Duke’s army, which had clashed with the Duke’s army on the plain of Dellingen, had held the advantage and overwhelmed the enemy, but after losing the third battle, their momentum had faltered.

Yet the Grand Duke’s army pulling back from Dellingen meant they had shifted from offense to defense. For what reason on earth? Even after losing the third battle, the gap in strength was still wide.