In a moment like this, wasn't a normal person supposed to shed a few tears, or deliver some rousing speech about vengeance and justice?
That was how you made your soldiers feel you were merciful. Every other ruler would have done it — as though Sophia alone couldn't be bothered with such theater.
Sophia swallowed the last bite of her simple ration, her tone as flat and featureless as still water.
"Daphne, stop the pointless drain on your magic. Just maintain her vital signs — we can't afford to waste more time than necessary."
Daphne's face had gone quite pale. She could replenish her magic through contact with Sophia, but the repeated overextension still left her exhausted.
She knew Sophia was looking out for her. And in truth, the little girl in front of them had no more life-threatening injuries — she just looked utterly, terrifyingly numb.
The moment the two-hour deadline was nearly upon them, dust billowed on the distant horizon.
Several heavy cavalry troopers assigned to deep reconnaissance hauled back on their reins. The lead knight practically tumbled from the saddle, his armor packed into every gap with black ash, his voice ground raw as though scraped by sandpaper.
"Reporting to Your Majesty — the Royal City of the Kingdom of Jasu ahead… there is no longer any need to send the full army to investigate."
The knight knelt on one knee, his voice shaking violently.
"Same as the border villages. The walls were destroyed by catapults from both inside and out. The entire city was drenched in oil and set alight. We searched three li into the inner city and heard not a single dog bark, saw not a single living soul.
"All the mine shafts were blown shut with rockfalls. Inside them… inside them were packed… the bodies of civilians."
"All dead. Burned clean."
A suffocating silence fell over everything.
Four thousand soldiers gripped their muskets tight, but faced with destruction on this scale, a visceral, physical revulsion was spreading through them all the same.
Willow stopped mid-motion, the ladle still in her hand. She looked toward Sophia, and a razor-sharp flash of cold fury crossed her eyes.
This was not war. This was Olan's greed and malice made manifest.
They had tried to bring Jasu into their alliance. Jasu had refused. Fearing Mason — or some other kingdom — might gain Jasu's backing, Olan had chosen to destroy what they could not possess.
They knew what Her Majesty valued most: population and resources. So they had reduced this once-vast resource node to nothing, carving a gaping black hole into Her Majesty's path forward.
Their message was unmistakable: everything you want, we will turn to ash before your hand can ever touch it.
But they had miscalculated one thing.
In Her Majesty's logic, ruins were never an obstacle. They were raw material for reshaping Order.
Embers spun in the cold wind, dusting the kneeling knight until he looked like a gray shadow.
Silence. The entire army of four thousand — apart from the occasional uneasy snort of a warhorse — made not a single sound.
Mason's soldiers had seen blood. They had killed. But this — the burying of an entire city together with its mine shafts, a slaughter indiscriminate of day or night, of man or woman — this had gone beyond the scope of anything recognizable as war.
Bardess's knuckles cracked audibly where they gripped the curved blade at her hip, her eyes — reddened from gunpowder smoke — locked rigidly ahead.
She looked down at the little girl still sitting in the open ground, not a flicker of movement in those empty eyes, and a suppressed fury kindled in her gaze.
"Your Majesty, I took people and swept the area twice more. Not even a living animal to be found."
Bardess's voice carried a particular weight at the edge of that empty ruin — low, flat, and deadly.
"All of Jasu… I'm afraid this really is the only seedling left. But the child…" She paused. "Her mind has most likely shattered completely.
"These past two hours, I tried every method I could think of. She won't say a single word — her eyes are completely unfocused. Any hope of extracting the enemy's movements from her is, logically speaking, gone."
In Bardess's assessment, a survivor who could provide no intelligence and had no combat capability was, under the current march's demand for absolute efficiency, an extremely heavy and redundant burden.
Sophia slowly withdrew the hand she had rested on Daphne's arm.
With the replenishment of magic, a trace of color had returned to Daphne's pale face. She lingered for just a moment, savoring the deep-sea-ice-spring chill of the magic flowing from Her Majesty's fingertips.
"It doesn't matter that we can't get anything out of her," Sophia said.
Her tone was as level as someone reading a financial report with no surprises left in it.
"Logic's chain never lies. The only variable in the Northern border who would choose this kind of scorched-earth destruction — burning everything at any cost just to slow Mason's advance — is that Olan king who fancies himself playing a grand game of strategy. Truth has never required an eyewitness."
She turned. Her black riding coat stood out against the ashen ruins with a cold severity, a few strands of silver hair whipped loose by the wind — which only sharpened the impression of solitary arrogance.
"Open the map."
Victoria, who had been watching from the shadows this whole time, stepped forward at precisely the right moment.
Her flame-red gown blazed outrageously against the scorched black landscape — like a wayward wisp of foxfire that refused to be extinguished.
What a terrifying little stone-face.
Standing before a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, she hadn't spared those dead so much as a single unnecessary microexpression.
Your so-called merciful rulers would squeeze out at least two tears and deliver a rousing blood-debt-demands-blood speech just to buy some goodwill. But not her — she'd gone ahead and treated the whole thing as a resource-loss spreadsheet.
Still… this absolute abandonment of sentiment in favor of pure reason was, without question, the most unshakeable trump card available right now.
Which means I'd better produce something substantive as well, or Bardess the lioness over there is going to classify me as dead weight and have me dealt with accordingly.
Victoria stepped forward, her long and pale fingertips tracing across the map covered in mineral vein markings, a faint smile at the corner of her lips.
"Sophia, if Olan silenced Jasu to this degree, the reason is almost insultingly simple.
"The Olanese wanted to seize the iron mines here and use the geography as a staging ground, but the Jasu people were used to independence. Those six mine lords were greedy but stubborn — they refused to submit to Mason, and they refused to be swallowed by Olan.
"Since they couldn't have it, Olan chose to destroy it."
Victoria lifted her head, pale gold eyes meeting Sophia's directly.
"If I were Olan's supreme commander, after leveling Jasu, I would not wait here for a monster like you to come and retaliate.
"The next node will definitely be Yurilland, to the south of Jasu. The land is riddled with waterways — the most notorious marshland in the Northern border, and the best concealment point for a retreat or an encirclement.
"If Olan's goal is to gather more forces and strike at the Imperial Capital, they won't let Yurilland slip through their fingers."
"Yurilland?"
Irene edged closer, a flicker of puzzlement in those sapphire-blue eyes.
"That place that calls itself the Kingdom of Ten Thousand Lakes — all wetlands and reed beds? There's no ore there."
"No iron. But there's an escape route."
Victoria tapped lightly at the dense blue waterways on the map.
"Yurilland's ruler is completely spineless — their greatest skill is lending their territory to whichever strong power needs a staging ground at the time.
"If Jasu was the bait Olan threw to you, then Yurilland's wetlands are the swamp they've prepared for you to drown in."
Willow, standing nearby, tightened her grip on Hailey's hand.
So that was it. This was the real hunt.
Princess Victoria was scheming to the bone, but her nose for power truly was sharp.
The Earl of Olan destroyed Jasu to cut off our supply lines. And luring us into Yurilland was meant to bury our black musket formations under a numerical advantage in complex wetland terrain.
The reason Her Majesty shed no tears for Jasu's annihilation was because she had already seen through every one of these cheap traps.
Those who had died were a fixed fact, already woven into history. Every battle from here forward was Her Majesty's logical reshaping of a broken world.
You Olanese — did you really think turning the world to rubble would stop the sun from rising? No. When the sun rises, rubble turns to ash along with everything else.
Sophia leaned over the map, her eyes fixed on that blue region labeled Yurilland, her fingertip drumming the table in a steady pendulum rhythm.
"Yurilland…"
She straightened up. She looked at the little girl — still blank and motionless as a stone idol — and swept her gaze across the four thousand soldiers surrounding her, every one of them radiating killing intent.
Sophia's cloak cut through the air, raising a sharp gust of cold wind. Her icy voice resonated across the dying light of the landscape.
"Whole army, change heading. Target: Yurilland.
"Irene, get every unfinished fire bottle prepared and ready to deploy.
"If they enjoy playing with fire so much, then we'll turn every wetland in Yurilland into boiling water."
"As for this child…"
Sophia cast a cold, offhand glance at the little girl.
"Bring her."
"Got it!"
Irene was delighted. Her explosive charges had proven effective in testing, but the fire bottles were still untried.
Glass was precious, but with Qubi City's multiple mines now supplying Mason, there was plenty to work with.
When Irene had first proposed making fire bottles, she'd run into a small objection from Willow.
"We haven't run any tests — what if the throw goes wrong and we hit our own forces?"
Irene had shared that concern, which was why she hadn't pushed the idea further at the time.
"Since Her Majesty has given the go-ahead, then I'll make them while doing my best to mitigate the risks."
Irene was currently crouched in the storage compartment of her carriage, surrounded by a heap of expensive, crystal-clear glass bottles — supplied exclusively from Qubi City.
Her eyes were gleaming. She was carefully filling each bottle with an alchemical liquid that glowed a lurid, enticing shade of orange-red.
The splash-and-friendly-fire risk Willow had worried about was, at its core, a question of mismatched ratios — throw distance versus blast radius.
Irene ran rapid calculations in her head, her fingertips deftly adjusting the fuse length at each bottle's neck.
As long as she added a layer of heat-insulating, fire-retardant coating to the outside of the glass bottles, combined with the trained throwing strength of Bardess's squad...
Before those Yurilland water-rats could even figure out what was happening, they'd discover that the water beneath their feet was no longer a refuge — it was magma ready to boil them alive, armor and all.
She let out a quiet, gleeful laugh and slotted a sealed fire bottle into its shock-absorbing case.
To her, this wasn't weapons manufacturing. This was a large-scale outdoor experiment on land that Olan had already defiled.
Outside the glass window, the sky had sunk to the color of lead freshly poured from a furnace — thick, murky, pressing down from above.
The smell on the wind had changed. The stale, charred scent of ash was forcibly erased by a damp, ice-cold, rust-tinged mist rolling in from somewhere ahead.
In the distance, from deep within the cloud layers, came a muffled rumbling — heavy and deliberate, like some enormous war machine calibrating its gears in the dark.
Irene watched the weather through the window, turning over the problem: if it rained later, how would she make her fire bottles usable in wet conditions?
Well. Make some first, figure the rest out after.
That way she could send a few people ahead for testing before they actually arrived at Yurilland.
In contrast to the heated activity in Irene's carriage, the second carriage at the rear was a picture of stillness.
Victoria sat with immaculate posture, her lake-blue skirts spread out across the leather cushions.
She was toying with a silver coin embossed with an intricate floral pattern.
That little stone-face Sophia was getting better and better at wringing the last drop of use out of people.
Being stuck next to this Bardess woman — who had a slightly unhinged energy — was one thing. But then dumping a half-dead little mute on me too? Does she think I run some kind of professional orphanage?
And that Bardess across from me — the way she keeps looking at me with those eyes, it's like she's tallying up my work-point value.
Maintaining elegance in an environment like this was, without question, the most grueling diplomatic mission of her entire life.
Victoria's inner monologue was a nonstop riot, but her face wore a warm, jade-smooth smile of perfect approachability.
She extended one slender, scallion-stalk finger and flicked.
"Ting——"
The silver coin traced a graceful arc through the air, its metallic gleam catching the light and scattering dazzling sparks as it spun dozens of times before landing perfectly on the back of Victoria's pale hand.
Nearby, Bardess — who had been busy trying to tighten the screws on her black musket — found herself drawn, without quite meaning to, by the crisp, clear sound.
"Princess Victoria, that trick of yours… is steadier than our grenadiers, I'll give you that."
Bardess raised an eyebrow, the compliment slipping out involuntarily.
"It requires a certain understanding of technique, and… an ability to anticipate the target," Victoria replied, tilting her head slightly, her voice as soft as a spring drizzle.
She flicked again. This time the coin's rhythm in the air was far more unpredictable.
Bardess, unable to resist, dug a rough iron coin out of her pocket and, mimicking Victoria's grip, sent it flying upward.
"Thwack."
The coin smacked straight into the carriage beam and fell, with all the dignity of a defeated general, directly into Bardess's lap.
"These hands of mine are built for blades and guns — delicate work like this was never going to happen," Bardess said, scratching her head with a good-natured laugh.
Victoria chuckled softly, shifting her position with graceful deliberateness, and patiently began coaching Bardess on exactly where the force should come from in the fingertip.
The two of them chatted away on one side of the carriage, but Victoria's pale gold eyes never entirely relinquished the thread of attention fixed on the little girl huddled in the corner.
In the instant the silver coin flashed its silver light in the air, the girl's eyes — dead as a dried-up well — contracted and expanded, ever so slightly.
It was the instinctive capture response of a living creature encountering something novel.
Good.
As long as eyes still tracked a moving light, the soul hadn't been entirely burned to cinders.
She hadn't been frightened completely senseless, then. There was still some spark of her own in there.
But Victoria had no intention of prying the girl's mouth open by brute force.
Marching straight up and asking "who killed your whole family" was the single stupidest possible communication strategy. That would only send her retreating back into that pile of corpses inside her head.
I need to use something she can't understand yet can't resist — a sense of novelty — to fish her mind up out of the abyss, one careful inch at a time.
Sophia had been right. She really could handle this child.
The moment this girl spoke her first word, her worth in that little stone-face's eyes would double.
Victoria made no move to call the girl over. She simply maintained that aura of graceful, intellectual beauty, chatting idly with Bardess about the wetland climate of Yurilland.
And the silver coin continued to dance at her fingertips — up and down, over and over — like a silver butterfly that would never stop flying, even in this gloomy carriage.
The carriage raced down the rutted dirt road toward Yurilland, wheels grinding over snapping dry branches, the sound weaving together with the low, distant rumble of thunder.
Inside the cabin, the silver coin at Victoria's fingertips moved as though it had a life of its own, leaping and flipping between her knuckles, trailing shimmering silver afterimages.
Bardess beside her was nearly goggling her eyes out watching it. Her thick fingers clawed at the air in clumsy imitation, but the best she could manage was barely catching her falling iron coin — getting it to dance at the tips of her fingers was nowhere in sight.
"Honestly, this thing just isn't meant for human hands."
Bardess deflated slightly, stuffing the iron coin back into her coat. Her face — well-accustomed to gunpowder and battlefield grime — was written over with the frustration of someone genuinely, comprehensively beaten.
"These hands of mine — pull the trigger on a black musket and they don't miss by a hair. But this silver coin is like a greased-up eel. Positively cursed."
Victoria covered her lips with a small laugh, the corner of her eye catching Bardess's deflated expression, while her inner commentary dissolved into howling laughter:
If you could learn this, Mason's grenadiers could all go become seamstresses. The fine control this requires comes from the near-pathological muscle discipline drilled into you by aristocratic etiquette training. A logic-brained person who only knows how to swing a sledgehammer should save her energy for the water-rats of Yurilland.
On the surface, Victoria maintained her water-smooth gentleness.
"Commander Bardess, there's no need to be modest — strength on the battlefield and artistry at the fingertip are simply variables from two entirely different dimensions. I only picked this up because I've been away from home so long, and needed something to fill the hours between tedious diplomatic exchanges…"
Before she'd finished speaking, the carriage hit a violent lurch.
"Ah——"
A soft, startled cry. Victoria's slender fingers seemed to lose their control, and the silver coin in mid-air let out a "ting" as it glanced off the carriage ceiling, veered from its intended path, and with a gleam of silver light cut through the dim interior — flying straight toward the little girl sitting in the corner shadows.
In that instant, the little girl — who had been utterly expressionless, as though her soul had vacated her body — suddenly snapped those dead eyes into sharp focus.
It was a defensive reflex written into the very bedrock of biological instinct.
"Snap."
A tiny, crystalline sound.
Victoria and Bardess held their breath simultaneously.
That small hand — dried-out, gaunt, crusted with dirt — had shot up in the space of a lightning flash and caught the silver coin clean, just before it would have struck the girl's forehead.
The girl was still sitting exactly as before, her expression still carrying that heartbreaking blankness. But resting in her palm, undeniably real, lay the silver coin, still faintly glowing.
"She caught it… she actually caught it?"
Bardess straightened up instinctively, astonishment written across her face.
Victoria pressed down the flash of calculated satisfaction behind her eyes and replaced it with an expression of mild surprise and delight. She shifted her body gently, closing the distance to the girl just a little.
"Thank you for catching it for me."
Victoria extended her hand with a soft, unhurried movement — but rather than reaching out to take it back, she turned her palm upward and let it hover in mid-air.
"That coin is fairly important to me. If you don't mind… would you like to learn how to do magic tricks with it in your hand?"
The little girl said nothing. She only looked down at the cold silver coin lying in her palm, its royal insignia pressed into the metal.
Seeing this, Victoria didn't wait for a response. She simply reached over and took the coin back from the girl's palm on her own — moving with exaggerated slowness.
"Watch here… all you have to do is… let your thumb give it a little push from underneath…"
Victoria demonstrated patiently, all while tracking the girl from the corner of her eye.
She caught it — the girl's previously rigid spine had relaxed, ever so marginally. And in those dry, hollow eyes, beyond the numbness, something had finally surfaced: a faint, hesitant flicker of uncertainty.
It was the signal of a mind that had gone completely dark beginning, at last, to stir.
Bardess, watching from the side, felt her impatient streak surge up all at once.
In her view, now that the child was showing a reaction, the right move was to get straight to the point: what had happened in the Royal City of Jasu, where exactly had Olan's army retreated to.
"Hey, kid — since you're moving now, just tell me…"
Bardess leaned forward half a step, and hadn't even gotten the word "Olan" out yet.
"Swish——"
A gaze — cold, razor-sharp, carrying the absolute weight of a warning — locked onto Bardess in an instant.
Victoria's face of composed, intellectual warmth hadn't shifted by a fraction, but something had entered those pale gold eyes: a suffocating force of intimidation.
The expression said, without words:
"If you make one more sound right now, I will personally kick you off this thirty-li-per-hour carriage directly into the mud of Yurilland."
Bardess was brave, but in this rarefied domain of psychological maneuvering, facing a veteran diplomat of Victoria's caliber, she felt a sudden, inexplicable chill run down her spine.
"Uh… I, I just remembered I haven't finished cleaning my black musket. On it, on it right now."
Bardess retreated sheepishly, sliding to the far end of the carriage with movements so careful and light she might have been trying not to startle a sparrow that had just landed.
Victoria withdrew her gaze and looked back at the little girl, her voice once again becoming soft as clouds drifting at altitude.
"Don't be afraid. That big fierce one isn't a bad person.
"Let's continue. You see — if you want it to jump up to your index finger, you need to use these small muscles here…"
Outside the carriage, a fine rain had begun to fall, tapping against the glass window in soft, scattered sounds.
And inside this narrow cabin, with each successive leap of the silver coin, the frozen shell of despair seemed to be developing — under the tap of this small, improbable variable — a hairline crack. Thin enough that, just barely, hope might find its way through.
In the deepest corner of her heart, Victoria awarded herself a perfect score.
Victoria means victory.
Truly. What can I say. That's just me.
____
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