Chapter 99: Regiment de Lulu
Lu-lu Fargone squirmed as she laid on her cot, whispering her delusions aloud. It was an exciting time to be alive, to finally fight for what was right, and she only had Manager to thank for all of it. Oh, she couldn’t wait to see him again—she really couldn’t!
Amelia couldn’t wait, either. It only took two seconds of overhearing Lu-lu’s deluded monologuing before she decided that it had to stop right there.
The tent flaps flew apart as she welcomed herself in. Lu-lu, a good soldier at heart, rolled off the cot and drew her sword. When she saw just who had intruded on her flight of fancy and fantasy, however…well, she didn’t expect her.
Lu-lu’s sword shook in her hand. Her legs were shaking, her breathing was shallow, and her eyes’ pupils contracted.
Her sword fell apart in neatly-sliced rectangular slices, which all hit the floor in dull thunks. She looked down as her sword had mysteriously become lighter, and it was only then that she realized all she had left was the hilt. When she looked back at Amelia, she was dusting her hands.
Amelia took a step forward, and Lu-lu took a step back.
“Funny,” Amelia said. She grinned. She had to, because this was a play. There was a certain performance to commit to when you were supposed to be a ruthless killer.
Lu-lu gulped. There might have been no path of escape, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have a chance. She broke a biscuit hidden under her sleeve with a squeeze of the hand, hiding it behind her back when she did.
“What do you want?” she said. Her voice wavered between afraid and defiant.
“Your cooperation,” Amelia replied. “Your lieutenant mentioned quite a few interesting things.”
Lu-lu gritted her teeth. Did she know? She had to know. She couldn’t believe that Gale had sold her out—no, she shouldn’t lose faith in her long-time friend. Gale could have fessed up incorrect intel knowing that this would happen. There was still hope.
“Like?” Lu-lu said in challenge.
“I know about the man.”
“I know plenty of men.”
“The one behind the hill.”
“I know plenty of hills.”
“The one back there.” Amelia pointed over her shoulder with a thumb.
“That’s a lot of hills.”
Unfortunately for Lu-lu, Amelia got tired over this pointless exchange pretty quickly. {Spin the fiber beneath my feet to capture my enemy before me.}
It was a decently long spell, but the fact was that Amelia wasn’t someone you could interrupt anyway.
The flooring of the tent was a kind of crude carpet, but it was fibrous enough to count. Its loose fibers spun into threads that shot forwards and wrapped around Lu-lu’s legs.
Panic overtook her, and she tried to step back, but the threads took hold around her ankles and arms faster than she could move, and she almost fell backwards from that.
Lu-lu managed to regain her balance by a close margin. When she looked forwards again, however, she found Amelia just inches away from her face.
“I already have a decent grasp of what’s transpired,” Amelia said.
“Then what do you need me for?!” Lu-lu was more panicked now—much more desperate. The bindings around her feet and arms made her feel so much more constricted, a constriction which she could feel reaching inside her chest.
“The fate of Regiment Quaternius rests on your shoulders,” Amelia continued in a business-like tone, like she didn’t really care. “If you don’t tell me the exact names of all those who’ve been charmed, the entire regiment will be put to the sword.”
“Wha—are you crazy?”
Amelia flicked her in the forehead. No, it didn’t kill her.
“What you are guilty of is treason,” Amelia explained to this blinded child, “and treason by a knight is punished with death. Especially now, we cannot afford to have a regiment full of traitors guarding the rear, and we cannot spare the time for a proper inquisition to take place.”
“You can’t possibly put down a thousand knights—”
“But I can.”
It was at this moment that Lu-lu’s quarterlife crisis peaked. Although she might have been thoroughly charmed, it’s not as if she had lost all care for her subordinates and the friendly ones from the other companies. Sure, the rest of them could die in a ditch, but she truly didn’t despise all of them.
The fact that Amelia could deliver on her threat was the other thing. She was, in the first place, the Sentinel—someone whose primary job was to kill the King—her own husband—if he stopped acting like one, and there was no doubt that she’d totally do it if it became necessary.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Well…the reality was different. Amelia didn’t actually want to massacre a whole regiment just because a few of them were bad apples. It was certainly an option, no mistake about that, but there were threats other than the cult that they had to worry about, such as an overwhelming presence of nervous Republican soldiers and their various war machines on the other side of the border.
That was why Amelia manufactured Lu-lu’s choices.
In the end, was Lu-lu more loyal to Manager, or to her troops?
That was a trick question. They were all loyal to Manager.
Lu-lu’s emergency signal biscuit should have called most of them all here by now. They only had one chance to strike.
She cried at the top of her lungs— “NOW!”
Clay bullets pierced the tent from all directions, whistling past Amelia’s ears. It was…annoying, like mosquitoes constantly hovering an inch away from her ears, and no matter how much she swatted them away, they wouldn’t go away. If it weren’t for the fact that she needed to hear what was going on around her, she’d have cupped her ears by now.
At the same time, flames started to gather within Lu-lu’s mouth—and Amelia didn’t know what to do about it. In Amelia’s eyes, the spell had a painfully long wind-up, cursing her with plenty of time to think about her response.
Should she take Lu-lu prisoner? Should she just kill her? Agh, I really don’t know!
Incensed, irritated, and wanting to go home, she knocked Lu-lu’s chin upwards with a pinky flick. The force knocked out the good captain on the spot, but not before directing the trajectory of her spell upwards.
The top of the tent blew out in a great Hollywood fireball. For the traitorous knights surrounding the tent, the searing intensity of the mushroom flame blinded them, making them feel the same pain as looking into the sun.
Amelia jumped out of the tent the next second. While the traitors were still blinded, she cast an information spell to get a better idea of who was where. A ring of 99 knights surrounded her at the moment, hidden between and inside tents.
The real problem, however, was that there were streams of more knights coming at her from other parts of the camp, and there was no way to tell which ones were enemies.
She did, however, have friends.
After the mushroom of fire dimmed, and the night returned to its natural lightlessness, Amelia sent up a signal flare, alerting the Maids to show their true battle dress—and blinding the traitor knights once again. Poor gals.
Traitorous reinforcements arrived, and the 99 blind knights found reprieve and guides in 99 more of their … slightly-less-blind … comrades.
Amelia had never regarded them as a threat to begin with. That they had been reduced to the blind leading the blind—was just way too sad, innit? She didn’t feel like fighting anymore, so she walked right back into the captain’s flaming tent to get Lu-lu before she asphyxiated.
Gross dereliction of duty? Of course not! One by one, the Maids saw the flare hanging in the sky. They rushed into the nearest tents, knocked out the occupants, and inverted their skirts.
From the clean white of a Maid to the black and striped grassland camo of warriors, the Maids donned shade dresses and ghillie overcoats to obscure their silhouettes and identities. They unrolled bundles of laundry to arm themselves with the compact air guns hidden beneath, each similar in form and function to modern submachine guns.
In units of two or three members each, they each found their own way through the hot new mess their boss had stirred up. Some snuck in as inconspicuous boxes—one with the wind—while others knifed their way through tents to make their own paths, and all the tents’ occupants ever saw of them were shadowy blurs.
They took up positions around the ring of traitorous knights who surrounded Amelia. Although the knights were beginning to regain their bearings and were apt to resume shooting at Amelia, the Maids didn’t yet attack.
They were using Amelia—their own commanding officer—as bait, waiting for more traitorous knights to stream in like sardines who didn’t know they were already caught in a net.
“For Lord Manager!” Some of the knights’ war cries could be heard from the various crates and tents the Maids were hiding in, eliciting plenty of raised eyebrows. It didn’t stop there.
“Ah! I can’t wait to breathe the same air as him again!”
“I’ll sell you this Bottle of Lord Manager Air for 10,000 Notes when this is all over!”
“How dare you monetize our Lord and savior without his permission!”
The traitorous knights’ determination was perfectly balanced by the Maids’ newfound disgust. It was a good thing that they were here to kill or capture, because wow, this just had to stop.
Y’know what else didn’t stop? The flow of traitorous reinforcements. Even Amelia was surprised. She’d expected at least some of the regiment to remain uncharmed, but thanks to her superhuman hearing and therefore grasp of the situation, she also perfectly grasped just how depraved and down bad all these women were.
—The regiment is lost.
She sent up a purple and a green flare, both so much brighter than the one that had come before them.
From the top of Castle Westbreak’s observation tower, a runner rushed down the spiral staircase, only to be met halfway by a trio of armed Maids. Thinking fast on her feet, she ran all the way back up, screaming “Infiltrators!”
Chaos twinkled in spots all around the castle’s halls and kitchens as backstabbings and betrayals evolved into small-scale battles between confused loyalists and hopeless Maids.
Shal-yen and Arpeggio had expected this. The fact that these betrayals only resulted in a few people getting shanked here and there was already the best case scenario, but it still forced their involvement in cleaning up a few hallways.
As they cleaned up one such hallway among the upper floors, they caught a glimpse of her mother’s signal flares through a window.
Arpeggio didn’t know what they meant, and she did not appreciate being left out of the loop. She pointed out the window. “Shal-yen! What’s the meaning of this!”
It took a moment before a shocked and agape Shal-yen straightened his face. “It’s a—it’s the whole regiment.”
“What?” Arpeggio gritted her teeth. The scale of the enemy’s plans instantly grew by a magnitude in her considerations. There wasn’t any time to waste!
She jumped and perched on the window sill. “I’m heading for the southern gate!”
“Wait!” —
Shal-yen stretched out his hand, yet he was only able to grasp air. He looked out and down from the window, cursing the Princess Knight for being so hot-blooded to disappear into the night like that!
***
Harmony had moved a step ahead of them, and their plans were sure to fall apart at this point. Maybe they should’ve expected that, but there was no use sulking over it. It would be better to retreat; they had all the time in the world to build even bigger armies.
That was what they thought—what everyone on every side thought—but a meteor streak in the sky, its myriad lights spilling away from the body like sparkling tears, drew the attention of anyone who could see the night sky.
It was brighter than Amelia’s flares, yet somehow so gentle and soothing to see. It was the epitome of transient beauty, growing brighter and brighter, larger and larger, until its small body streaked past Harmony, followed seconds later by a thunderous sonic clap, then moments later by a bright flash in the forest—then seconds later by the boom, and moments later, by the rumbling of the ground, then the soothing wash of a warm wind over the hills.
—Then the ###### God said in his anger, [Kill her.]