The Imperial forces advanced without hesitation.
Having won a decisive victory through a surprise attack, Raura immediately drove her army toward Pavia.
Pavia was surrounded by quite respectable walls. The problem was that the defending force was thin. A rough estimate put them at perhaps four hundred.
Their own forces, by contrast, numbered six thousand, and eleven mages marched among them. To put it bluntly: the enemy had no chance of victory.
Moreover, Commander Raura was a self-proven master of siege warfare. Heidelberg, a fortress city built for nothing else, and Parisiorum, the largest city in Frankreich — both had buckled beneath Raura's boots. Pavia would be nothing more than a snack.
Raura issued her command.
"Mount the Count's head where they can see it."
The mercenaries planted the heads of enemies killed in the recent battle onto their spears.
As dawn broke, the defenders hunkered down behind the walls witnessed a gruesome and horrifying sight.
Thousands upon thousands of severed heads dangled from spear tips. Among them was the head of the Count of Pavia. Upon learning that their lord had been killed so cruelly, the defenders' morale plummeted.
Raura seized that opening without hesitation. Eleven mages fired their spells at the gate simultaneously. The gate was obliterated in an instant, and the cavalry charged forward with a great blare of horns.
With their morale shattered and the gate breached, the defenders lost all will to fight. They abandoned any semblance of organized resistance and fled, each scrambling to save their own skin.
Thanks to that, six thousand cavalry swept through the city as though galloping across an open plain. Raura issued a cruel order to them.
"Do not lay a hand on the children or the elderly."
In other words, every male and female resident fair game. To make matters worse, Raura also permitted unrestricted looting — no officer would intervene if a soldier seized anything for himself.
Hell was unleashed upon Pavia.
The mercenaries savored every privilege rightfully belonging to the victors. They smashed through the front gates of mansions and aristocratic estates and stormed inside. Any servant or man who stood in their way was split open by an axe and killed on the spot.
"Aaaaagh!"
"P-please spare me! Just spare my life!"
Both men and women were killed and raped without distinction. There were no shortage of those who murdered humans for sport or set fire to civilian homes. The citizens of Pavia had everything they had accumulated over a lifetime — or rather, over generations — stripped entirely from them.
If it were only their wealth being taken, that would have been the merciful outcome.
"All surviving residents are to be treated as slaves."
Laura scoffed coldly.
"There is no need for mercy toward those who once treated us as slaves. The Kingdom of Sardinia and Pavia will answer for what they have done."
That single sentence sealed the fate of fifteen thousand citizens of Pavia.
The Imperial forces garrisoned in Pavia, using it as a military base. Civilian homes were seized by force and converted into quarters for our troops, and the residents were reduced to slaves who waited on the mercenaries hand and foot. There was no shortage of valuables or provisions. We rested in comfort.
Pavia had fallen.
The news struck the Kingdom of Sardinia like a thunderbolt.
The Count of Pavia had been killed in battle. Five thousand cavalrymen had been wiped out in a single engagement. The kingdom's forces were shaken to the core. The Duke of Milan, whose cavalry had been completely annihilated, gave up on open-field warfare and barricaded himself even more tightly within his fortress.
Laura received the report and muttered to herself.
"Hm. If he turtles up completely, that's going to be a problem. The Duke of Milan does seem to be rather more shrewd in matters of war than the Count of Pavia."
"With all his cavalry gone, he has no choice but to stay put — even if he wanted to come out, he couldn't."
"Mm…"
Laura twirled a strand of her hair around her finger absent-mindedly.
"My lord. Surely you must have a good idea?"
"It's difficult to drag out someone who refuses to come out. But there is a way to make the duke's strategy increasingly untenable."
"What would that be?"
I smiled.
"Proclaim to the Duke of Milan: if he wishes to have the slaves of Pavia returned, he must pay their ransom."
"…Ah, I see. You plan to set the ransom so high that the Duke won't be able to afford it."
Laura let out an admiring sound, as if she'd caught on right away.
"So the Duke would be turning a blind eye to citizens he could have released. He'd be vilified for it."
"No, it's the exact opposite. We'll set the price very low."
"Hm?"
Laura tilted her head. She was practically my direct disciple, but she always fell just one step short. Her grasp of scheming was a little too transparent, if you will. That was the feeling.
"Set the price at roughly thirty libra per head. Doesn't matter whether they're commoners or nobles. Everyone goes for thirty libra."
"What? What do you mean?"
Laura furrowed her brow.
"That's an absurdly low price. At that rate, the Duke of Milan would surely purchase the slaves…"
"There is one small condition, however. Only bulk purchases will be accepted. It won't be possible to cunningly single out just the nobles for a separate deal."
"Mmm…?"
"To buy them, he'll need to take all fifteen thousand citizens at once. No other arrangement will be permitted."
Laura still looked puzzled.
I smiled.
"Think about it. Common sense says that offering to release even the nobles for a mere thirty libra each is completely absurd. And yet, we're trying to sell them off at thirty libra…"
"…"
"The Duke of Milan won't be able to avoid being suspicious. He'll fixate on the bulk-purchase requirement. And he'll think to himself, 'Ah, the expeditionary force must be desperately short of funds right now.'"
Laura slammed her fist down on the table.
"So that's it! He'll be led to believe we're strapped for cash!"
"The Duke of Milan doesn't know the state of our finances. He'll assume we raided Pavia in a rush because we were feeling the financial squeeze."
The Duke of Milan would be thinking something like this:
The longer he drags out the war, the more it works in his favor. Perhaps the expeditionary force hasn't paid its mercenaries and they'll just dissolve on their own……
Besides, hadn't the Habsburg Empire just fought the Puppet War not long ago? They must have burned through enormous war funds. The Empire simply didn't have the resources to launch one large-scale war after another. No—they didn't. That was precisely why they were so eager to collect ransom money for the prisoners!…….
I allowed myself a smile.
"Humanity has this nasty habit: once they settle on a conclusion, they reinterpret everything to fit it. The Duke of Milan will want to give his own theory a little test. That's when we drop the price to around four-fifths and put it back on the table."
"Ahahahaha!"
Laura grabbed her own forearm and laughed.
"As expected, my lord is the greatest! The most vicious and thoroughly rotten man on the continent—in the whole world!"
With that, Laura rose from her chair and threw her arms around me. And before I could so much as protest, she kissed me.
It was truly baffling. Why was every woman who got involved with me attracted to the fact that I was vicious? Was it really as simple as "women love bad boys"……? I genuinely had no idea. I probably never would, even in death.
We promptly laid our trap for the Duke of Milan.
"If you want the citizens of Pavia back as slaves, pay the ransom."
The price was thirty gold per head. For a freeman's ransom, that was steep enough—and for a noble's ransom, it was practically free. You could have called it a clearance sale.
We did attach one condition: they had to buy the entire lot in one go. Since the number of citizens captured as slaves reached fifteen thousand, the total came to four hundred and fifty thousand gold. A considerable sum, sure—but when you considered it amounted to binding a debt to fifteen thousand laborers, it was practically a steal.
The Duke of Milan sent an envoy and politely declined.
We dispatched our negotiator once more, proposing, "How about we knock it down to three hundred and fifty thousand livres? This is basically a fire sale—fire sale!"
The Duke of Milan refused flatly this time. He was now fully convinced the Imperial forces were strapped for cash.
He didn't merely refuse, either—he issued a lengthy denunciation of our pillaging. Something about how enslaving freemen was an abomination before all mankind and whatnot……. I didn't bother memorizing the specifics. It was the sort of boilerplate you'd find in any ethics textbook.
The two of us read through the letter—one long exercise in "polite vitriolic cursing"—side by side. Then we snickered.
"My lord. Is it done now?"
"Yes. That's enough."
The Imperial army left only three thousand garrison troops in Pavia and marched north.
Along the way, they recalled the twenty thousand men dispatched toward Milan and brought them to join up.
With a combined force of roughly twenty-five thousand, they attacked the military base of Novara.
Novara was a well-fortified military stronghold, far from easy to take. Five thousand mercenaries, hastily hired by the Kingdom of Sardinia, were guarding it without a gap. But "far from easy" was all it was—they couldn't hold out forever against a force that outnumbered them five to one.
As for the position of our forces.
Novara — our army — Milan: we had wedged ourselves between the enemy's strongholds.
If Milan had boldly sortied at that moment and attacked our rear, things could have gotten dangerous.
At the very least, the fall of Novara would have taken considerably longer. And armies recruited from the south of the Kingdom of Sardinia would have swept in to meet us.
But the Duke of Milan didn't move.
Even as desperate magic-communication messages pleading for relief poured out from Novara without pause, even as a section of the wall crumbled and the defenders clung on in a desperate last stand, the Duke didn't stir a single step from Milan—as though he had already discarded those mercenaries.
The mercenaries of Novara must have despaired. They hadn't been asked to do anything extraordinary. Just keep the Imperial army's rear in check. That was all. And the Duke of Milan couldn't even be bothered with that simple request.
Thanks to that, we could focus entirely on assaulting Novara without a care for our rear.
"The Duke of Milan thinks we're trying to lure him out."
I said that while watching Novara from a distance. The enemy mercenaries were resisting desperately. The wall had already been breached in two places, but they had managed to concentrate their forces and stave off the incursion—for now.
"He thinks we're short on funds and trying to drag him out of the city for a quick decisive battle. Well, it's not an unreasonable assessment, in its own way."
"But it's a miscalculation."
Laura smiled.
"The Duke of Milan succeeded in protecting his city. At least, that's what he'll think. But in the end, all he's done is lose five thousand cavalry and five thousand mercenaries. All that's left in Milan now is the citizen militia."
That was correct.
We had turned the Kingdom of Sardinia's grand strategy against them.
If they wanted to defend their great cities, we would let them defend to their heart's content. But in exchange, we would melt away every elite unit in their possession. By sacking Pavia, we also stockpiled ample goods and provisions.
The Duke of Milan had lost everything except his cities. Cavalry, elite troops, military strongholds — even his reputation and prestige.
He could have released the citizens but chose to leave them be, and worse, he watched helplessly as his military strongholds fell right before his eyes. A tremendous wave of criticism would surely come crashing down on the Duke of Milan, and on Sardinia's strategy.
The military stronghold of Novara fell into our hands in just nine days.
The enemy's mercenaries fought bravely until the city walls were breached, but once it became clear that no reinforcements were coming, they lost all will to fight. They requested to surrender to us.
Laura graciously accepted their surrender and even praised their valor, then rehired them. Those regiment commanders who refused to be rehired were executed, and our army gained two thousand fresh soldiers in the process. After all, the Kingdom of Sardinia had ruthlessly betrayed the trust of its own mercenaries.
At this point, the Kingdom had already lost ten thousand elite soldiers.
And now they would console themselves by claiming they had achieved a so-called strategic victory.
Fine. Let them console themselves all they wanted. After all, there was not much time left before they realized it was no victory at all…….