Rebirth in a Ruined Nation! The Life of a New Strategist Starting From Now - Chapter 138

The Royal Ceremony (7) – The Ceremony

The Lapilia Brigade returned earlier than my expectation, but the cleanup still ended up lasting until late at night.

I mean, the numbers of thugs we captured were just a lot. We also needed to think about where we could imprison them. Even if we wanted to take them with us to the capital later, we couldn’t just let them stay in the town until the ceremony ended.

There was a Prince and also many people in the town so if one of the thugs managed to escape and took someone as a hostage it would be really troublesome.

But leaving them here was also problematic. Leaving them here meant I needed to assign people to watch over them, but even though currently it was near the end of the winter, the night was still pretty cold. I couldn’t let the soldiers endure the cold in a place like this.

“My colleague is currently stationed at a nearby fort, so how about leaving them there? I’ll make the arrangement,” Nelfia proposed.

Heh, the ‘King’s secretary’ has influence even in a small local fort? Impressive.

Thus, after interrogating them and sending them to the fort, we returned to the town only to find out that the celebration to welcome Prince Zeland had long ended. The only stuff left that we could eat was bread and soup.

I was grateful that the worker here prepared bread and soup for over 1000 people in the middle of the night.

Still, I couldn’t help but resent Dentacruz Belosa for making me miss eating the famous Halodel beef!

Unfortunately by the time we returned to the town, Dentacruz Belosa had already disappeared.

Apparently, he used ‘needing to report back to the 9th Division barrack’ and ‘feeling a little unwell’ as excuses and run away, leaving the command of the rest of 9th Division soldiers that were here to Captain Griez.

Griez-san was also speechless at Dentacruz’s antics.

“But is it really alright to just let him go? It seems he was going to try to cover up his tracks.”

As I muttered to myself while sipping the warm soup, Nelfia replied, “It’s fine.”

“Roa-dono, if you cut only the visible part of a weed, they will grow back, so there’s no point in cutting them unless you can also cut their roots.”

So they were aiming for the ‘root’, Senburia.

“Plus, Dentacruz is already dead in the water.”

Lying about the Imperial soldiers’ infiltration would be considered an act of treachery against the country and Dentacruz said he got the information about the infiltration from the 9th Division.

The 9th Division wouldn’t be able to cover up the truth since we had already obtained reliable information from the thugs we captured. Thus, if the 9th Division wasn’t careful, they could face a severe punishment.

That meant, the 9th Division wouldn’t try to protect Dentacruz.

Dentacruz has no way out.

In the first place, if Dentacruz had enough control over the 9th Division that he could even make the entire division cover for him, the most effective thing to do was backstabbing us, the 10th Division in this town.

If the entire town along with the Prince were all burnt to ashes, taking care of the rest would be easy.

The reason he didn’t do that was probably because, even if I ignore the fact Dentacruz was incompetent, Dentacruz didn’t have enough control over the 9th Division. At least I think Griez-san and the members of his unit weren’t under Dentacruz’s control.

“Still, it’s surprising to see how many of those thugs came from Gedland,” Luzel commented, changing the topic.

More than half of the thugs we captured were people who escaped from Gedland’s underworld. It was all because a certain someone I knew pretty well cleaned the underworld.

From the information we had gathered, through the unique information network of the thugs, words that there was a big profit to be made in this town were spread.

I thought that 3000 people was a bit too large for just thugs, but it turned out it was all Zackhart-sama’s fault.

We already got the information we wanted from the thugs who didn’t come to Gedland anyway, so should I just send the rest back to Zackhart-sama after everything was sorted out? Yeah, that’s a good idea.

With such thoughts in my mind, the sloppy evil scheme involving the Prince came to an end.

***

The day of the royal family.

As I was following Prince Zeland diagonally behind, I was quite impressed.

Even with all eyes on him, Prince Zeland was calm. He even exuded an aura of dignity.

“I heard that shortly after he arrived in the town, he personally led the soldiers to defeat bandits.”

“Although he’s still young, I’m looking forward to his future.”

“With him as a heir, Rudek’s future is bright.”

The spectators have nothing but praises for the Prince.

It was hard to imagine that a little while ago, he was just a timid boy. I didn’t know what made him change, but he sure was a Prince

…Wait a minute.

I took Prince Zeland to the battlefield to liven up the ceremony, but now I thought about it carefully, wasn’t it his first campaign?

A Prince’s first campaign would normally be more…proper, wasn’t it? Not some lame bandit extermination.

Damn it. The King and Rays-sama might scold me for this.

As I was trying to think of an excuse for dragging Prince Zeland to his first campaign, the ceremony continued.

In the end, I barely paid attention to the ceremony, and instead spent the time feeling anxious as I escorted Prince Zeland who was receiving thunderous cheers from the spectators.