Chapter Ninety-Five: Should I take the blame? Or not?

The Principality of Marino is very small, surrounded by mountains, and its terrain is roughly oval. It is more than 40 kilometers from east to west, and less than 20 kilometers from north to south at its widest point. According to official statistics, the country’s area is just over 6,000 square kilometers.
Just looking at the area of ​​the fiefdom, it is not qualified to be an independent principality, let alone a duchy. The standard duchy on the Chaos continent starts at at least 10,000 square kilometers, and some grand duchies have 30,000 to 50,000 square kilometers.

Fortunately, there are silver mines in the nearby mountains, which supplemented the income of a duchy.

With the completion of the silver mines thirty years ago and the exhaustion of the ore veins, the economy of the Principality of Marino began to decline.

Due to the deterioration of finances, the two previous grand dukes of the principality intended to return to the direct jurisdiction of the empire.

Looking at the map, the Principality of Marino is sandwiched between the Kingdom of Cervantes and the Barbarossa Empire, surrounded by mountains, and the mountain roads are extremely inconvenient. It takes at least a week for a fast horse to travel from the principality to the neighboring country, whether to the kingdom or to the heartland of the empire. It has been an enclave of the empire for more than two hundred years.

It is precisely such a useless thing that made the emperor of that year readily give up the jurisdiction.

Now that the silver mines are used up, they want to stick to it again. Isn’t this a fuss?

The dukes who are loyal to the emperor, their duchies and highly autonomous duchies are essentially different:

Although such dukes usually don’t give the emperor a copper coin, if the emperor wants to fight, the dukes are obliged to send troops to help the emperor according to the area of ​​the fiefdom. Similarly, if such a duchie is attacked by the enemy, it is equivalent to invading the empire’s homeland, and the emperor must help the duke to fight back.

As for the duchies… Although the contract states that if the duchies are attacked, the empire has the obligation to rescue them, it does not say how to rescue them and to what extent.

A hundred years ago, the Barbarossa royal family began to be slack about the requests of the Principality of Marino. Even if something happened to the principality, they would just send some knights with titles but no fiefs with some knights’ followers.

There was no way, the core of the feudal system was the division of territory.

In the early years of the founding of the country, any knight could be granted thousands of acres of uninhabited wasteland.

As the territory solidified and time passed, the emperor found that he had no land to grant.

[Devil’s Mouth] is a black hole that swallows money and lives.

For knights who died for the country, as long as they have descendants, even if the knighthood is not hereditary, those descendants do not have the title of knight, the lord is embarrassed to confiscate the territory, at most temporarily manage it and take away the territory’s harvest.

The result is that the fiefdom given to new knights by the Barbarossa Empire has now been reduced to a bridge (collecting tolls for knights) or even a mill.

If the Principality of Marino is directly governed again, even if the Principality sends troops to help fight, by the time the Principality’s army leaves the mountain, the opportunity will be gone.

The Empire has no benefit at all, and it has to bear such a heavy burden. The then Emperor Barbarossa was not happy and ordered to keep it as it is.

So the Principality of Marino has become the half-dead and declining state it is today, with economic recession and the land unable to support so many people. Civilians have gone out to work or become mercenaries.

No one expected that something would happen to the Principality in late autumn.

…

Time goes back to the late night two days ago.

A messenger covered in blood, with two wounds on his body and green spiritual flames lingering, rushed into the castle of the capital of the Principality, Marino City, with his last breath.

“The Grand Duke’s expeditionary army was ambushed and annihilated! The Grand Duke, the Grand Duke passed away and was transformed into a death knight by the hateful lich!”

“What!?”

“The Grand Duke brought the Grand Highness, the Second Highness, a team of master adventurers and all the elites!”

For a moment, the nobles and officials who stayed behind were in chaos.

Originally, this should have been a relatively simple expedition. The former Grand Duke Albert Marino received news that a village was slaughtered by a corpse wizard. More than 500 people in the village were turned into zombies and scattered, causing trouble to the surrounding villages.

Because there happened to be a team of adventurers around level 5 nearby, they fought a battle and retreated, so the Grand Duke got clearer intelligence, which was also confirmed by the adventurer reconnaissance team sent later.

In the Chaos continent, corpse wizards and liches were originally the same word, because they were all spellcasters who were tempted by the dark power, fell into darkness, and became undead.

Gradually, in order to better distinguish the two, the Adventurer’s Guild discussed and defined the corpse wizard as [a low-level undead spellcaster of level 10 or below], and only those above level 11 were called liches.

In the past hundred years, there have been few reports of liches appearing in the world, and most of the known corpse wizards were transformed by poor low-level warlocks.

Low-level corpse wizards are useless, but the damage they cause is not small at all. If left alone, zombies can turn people who bite to death into zombies, and a corpse wizard can easily turn the entire principality into a kingdom of the dead.

Archduke Albert’s approach was not problematic in the eyes of others.

He mobilized almost all mobile forces – more than 150 official knights, more than 300 knight squires, and six battalions with a total of 1,200 spearmen and sword and shield soldiers. In addition, there were three adventurer teams, one of which was a master-level elite team with an average of level 12 per person, and 10 priests who believed in the God of Light.

A corpse wizard can directly control at most a hundred zombies or skeletons, and the rest can only be left alone to follow their instincts and attack the living.

In order to let his son experience the atmosphere of the battlefield, the Grand Duke brought his only two sons to the battlefield.

Everything seemed to be going well, and this would be a battle of sledgehammers smashing eggs.
What was the result?
As the enemy changed from corpse wizards to liches, the situation immediately reversed 180 degrees.

The Grand Duke’s troops were annihilated.

The latest news is: the liches have led tens of thousands of undead troops and began to crush towards the capital of the principality.

In the Grand Duke’s mansion, there was chaos everywhere, and even a high official like the Prime Minister was panicked.

At this time, no one even noticed that a beautiful young woman in the center of the hall lowered her head in grief.

In his ears, there were only meaningless insults and excuses.

The air was filled with cowardice and despair.

The ministers discussed how to escape.

The remaining knights were at a loss.

Her mother had already burst into tears.

Only she slowly spread out her palms and looked at the sword cocoon on her palms that had faded to the point where it was almost unrecognizable.

If it hadn’t happened today, she would have become a real lady as her father expected, and would have been sent to the Cervantes capital, 300 kilometers away on the mountain road, to attend endless dinners and dances.

But what happened today changed her life again.

After the voices and smiles of her father and brother echoed in her mind countless times, she had the courage.

She stood up resolutely, grabbed her beautiful red hair, swung her dagger and cut it, and with a “swish”, only a neat short hair was left.

With the next strike, she cut off the hateful waist strap on the right waistline, allowing her waistline to stretch again.

“What are you panicking about!” The woman shouted loudly, with supreme majesty in her magnetic voice: “The bloodline of the Marino family has not been cut off! Since my father and brothers have all died, and the people need me, then I, Sofia Marino, will take over as the Grand Duchess! In charge of all affairs of the Principality!”

Her fiery red eyes first swept across the whole place like a battle axe, and then turned into a sharp sword, piercing the heart of every coward.

In the blink of an eye, the whole hall fell silent.

The Prime Minister came out and saluted: “If you, the noble one, take the office of the Grand Duchess, I have no objection. But I have to remind you that it is a lich, not a terrifying existence that our country’s remaining combat power can contend with.”

“Then ask the Barbarossa Empire for help and ask them to send a Pegasus brigade.”

“The war in the Devil’s Mouth is tight recently, and the Empire may not have any extra Pegasus troops to send. Regular troops can’t make it in time.”

“The Kingdom of Cervantes?”

“It will definitely be too late!”

Just as the atmosphere was deadlocked, the Prime Minister hesitantly said the last suggestion: “Legend has it that as long as a princess or queen of a country sends a pink envelope to the Grand Master Tesla, the Grand Master will consider helping…”

Instantly, all eyes were fixed on the face of Grand Duchess Sofia.

Her face flushed, veins even bulged on her neck, and her full chest kept rising and falling, but in the end: “If this is the only option to save the people, I will send out the pink envelope in my name. But…”

Speaking of this, Sophia changed the subject, drew the long sword from the waist of her guard captain, raised it high, and her voice suddenly became high-pitched: “Before any reinforcements arrive, I will pick up my sword. For my people, I will roar at the goddess of fate for the last time in my life! You, if you have the guts, follow me!”

All of a sudden, the entire Grand Duke’s mansion was boiling.

“Oh oh oh oh!”

“Women are on the battlefield! Men, follow me!”

Countless people waved their fists and raised their swords. They followed the footsteps of the new Grand Duchess, made deafening shouts, and began to surge to the top of the city.

On the streets, citizens who knew the news also picked up everything that could be used as weapons at hand, and merged into the crowd like a hundred rivers into the sea.

…

And so, the pressure came to Ryan.

Should he take the blame? Or not?

(End)