“The only language they understand is terror. The goal of this organization is to ensure that women understand it well for the first time, after centuries of their domination.”

- General Richstoff, during the creation of the “Protection Corps”.

+++

West Lieplatz

Road to Nordia

General Holl could not fathom the reports that he was receiving. Each town and village they captured, each small city that was forced to surrender after a brief fight, left a bloody remain of the Lieplatzan retreat.

He and a group of officers, guarded by multiple soldiers, walked through the remains of another site of the massacres conducted by the now infamous “Protection Corps”. He couldn’t help but vomit at the sight. It was a full-on massacre of what must have been the local aristocracy. Female nobles and their entire families.

All lined up on the wall to be shot by the Protection Corps.

General Holl looked away from the corpse of a blonde woman that he was eyeing, down into the shamed look of a Lieplatzan officer. He was in charge of manning the defenses of the city, or more accurately, the forces outside of the city, on its defensive trench lines.

By the time he retreated, the Protection Corps was gone, and left these grizzly massacres, alongside the traumatized local authorities. By the time General Holl’s tanks arrived, a white flag was already being flown by one of his command APCs, which bravely drove on the flat terrain, vulnerable to an Orlish attack.

As far as General Holl could say, this Colonel wanted to surrender rather quickly.

“Colonel, would you mind explaining further?” General Holl asked, not keeping himself from letting off his subtly furious tone. The Colonel looked at the site himself, and he shook his head.

“Reprisals. Reprisals to your Queen’s invasion. We should have…we should have seen this earlier when they started marking any noblewoman with those…” He almost fell silent.

“Speak.”

“Royal armbands. Any woman who held a significant noble ranking, or was accused of being a Royalist had to wear one. They….they started doing it during the media blackout. For national security, they said…”

The General looked back at the women on the pile. Indeed, all of them had that same armband. It was a white armband with a yellowish flower on it. Almost similar to the emblem of the Lieplatzan Royal Family.

“I…I thought it was all rumors,” the Colonel muttered. “He…they all must be insane.”

“What is that man’s goal?” General Holl asked. “Why would Richstoff do this?”

“As I’ve said, revenge,” the Lieplatzan officer answered. “He knows he’s losing. The Armed Forces are disintegrating. His loyalists are on the run. Now, the only way he’ll get back to the Queen of Orland and those Federalists is scorched earth. Especially to the Queen of Orland.”

“Explain.”

“You plan…to restore Her Highness, don’t you?” the Colonel asked. “The General said that the Junta would take every measure to ensure that Royalist rule would never return. Perhaps, this is his sick measures.”

“Murder all of the nobility…” the General said, finally realizing it. Of course, without the high nobility and those above the low nobility, it would be hard to restore the monarchy. All Kingdoms relied on its aristocracy. Wipe them out and Princess Celeste would only be able to return to a throne without them.

“A large portion of women are above the lower nobility, Colonel.”

“Approximately twelve percent are landless noble families, sir,” the Colonel said. “Then there’s the one percent, which, I believe, was long wiped out.”

“Wiped out?”

The Colonel fell silent. “We had to shut up…maybe some managed to hide, but the General already hunted them. If you were a part of a noble family above the Baroness rank, you’re…well, you’re a dead woman walking.”

“How did it happen so fast?”

“The General is a fast, efficient, and ruthless man. Didn’t help that there was a national registry of every noblewoman of significance. He just had to raid them and…”

“Herd them.”

The Colonel fell silent, as General Holl looked at the crimes in front of him. This was nothing less than deliberate femicide. He could tell, because some towns seemed to have suffered massacres that involved women of the lower nobility. The Arcana, which was the legal noble classification of anyone born with magic but held no titles were afforded greater privileges and rights, which basically meant it was every woman of the lower nobility.

“Do you support any of this, Colonel?”

“I joined the revolution to overthrow the farce that women of Lieplatz enforced on us, but no, sir. Not I, nor my men, support this. I do not expect any of you to believe us, however.”

“Many in your Army are surrendering already. They all say the same tune.”

“Well, sir, do you honestly believe that every man of the Lieplatzan Armed Forces would follow the mad General?” the Colonel asked. “Our counter-coup failed. This is our chance to redo it. By surrendering to advancing Orlish forces.”

“You had a coup?”

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The Colonel laughed. “Was lucky the Secret Police didn’t have enough time to search for all of the plotters afterward. The media blackout must have masked it well. We failed, unfortunately.”

“Well, Colonel, it would be most prudent that you and your men begin searching for proof that none of you did this,” General Holl closed the distance. “Because I swear to the Goddess’s name, our Queen will be screening all of you one by one once this is all over.”

The two stared at each other, unflinching.

“And I swear, justice won’t be kind to the perpetrators.”

The General found distaste about it, but he already ordered most of his units to apprehend the surrendering Lieplatzans “gently”. He already heard that many of their units had begun summarily executing surrenderees due to the bloodbath they were witnessing at some of the liberated settlement.

Emotion however shouldn’t cloud them. There were rules of war in regard to POWs. He wouldn’t need his men turning into war criminals when seeking reprisals for the crimes right in front of them.

Still, General Holl wouldn’t be kind to what he now knew as the perpetrators. The Protection Corps didn’t seem to be a part of the Lieplatzan Armed Forces. They were more of a paramilitary hand of the Junta. Perhaps, not even the Junta, as most of its original members had long died suspiciously.

Nay, they were the dark hand of General Holl.

And his forces wouldn’t be giving them the niceties afforded by the rules of war.

+++

West Orland

November Palace

“I should say, I’m not quite surprised,” was the first thing that the NID Director said. The AFI Director was silent, merely nodding grimly, while Marie herself sighed.

“Well, we noted the disappearances of prominent Lieplatzan nobles, particularly those in the former Royal Court of Lieplatz,” Marie said. “But we thought it was just normal crackdowns. We didn’t really infiltrate far outside of the border cities.”

Amelie on the other hand, was utterly enraged. Partly for herself for not knowing it sooner. Partly to her three intelligence agencies for not knowing it too. But mostly because that man, General Richstoff, had the gall to do something like this. It was repulsive. Vile. Utterly maniacal.

She couldn’t even fathom what kind of brain rotten insanity must be going on inside the minds of General Richstoff and his high-ranking officials. Why they would do something as vile as this? She had many doubts about launching this entire operation earlier, but now…

She felt as if her true crime was not launching it sooner. She was way too slow.

“Can…” Amelie tried to speak again. “Can we try to…do something? Find these camps? Get those women out of there? Can we?”

“We’re already interrogating the captured members of the ‘Protection Corps’, and some officials of the Lieplatzan military,” Marie said. “What we found out was that the camps are somewhere in the northern tundras of Lieplatz.”

Amelie fell silent. That…she didn’t even have to ask General Albrecht in the room to know that it would take at least a few weeks, or even a month, or even more than that to reach the northern frozen tundras of Lieplatz. Nordia was their main target, which was close to the border. Because that was where the majority of Lieplatzan population centers were.

But up north, they wouldn’t be able to just send convoys of tanks there. While many of the Lieplatzans were folding down south, what was being left of their army was the most fanatic ones. The ones who would bravely hold out in the frozen hellscape of North Lieplatz. Where the roughest terrain of North Opellia was.

Her tanks, infantry, mechs, all of them, they would have to slowly grind down any resistance up north. Through endless ambushes. Bad terrain. This wasn’t a part of the plan. They should surrender at Nordia.

But Amelie knew with these reports that the madman wouldn’t surrender. He’d keep fighting until the last pocket of his resistance was mopped up.

“How many are we talking about?” Amelie asked. “How much have they taken up north?”

“Last census data showed that at least a hundred thousand Lieplatzan women had blood ties to the high nobility,” Marie said. “That doesn’t include the dissidents, resistance groups, protesters, business owners, and on and on that aren’t a part of Lieplatz’s landed female nobility arrested and disappeared to these camps.”

“And of the massacres?”

“Seems more like a terror tactic than anything,” General Albrecht said. “Many settlements didn’t suffer from it. While it’s organized to kill a few tens of thousands, it’s too disorganized to murder anything above that. They’re doing as much terroristic damage as they flee, but it's more of a raging bloodbath of a fleeing rat than a fully organized mass killing. They’ll fail.”

“General, they’re still killing women and girls,” Amelie said. “They’re still taking lives they shouldn’t.”

“And they’ll keep doing it,” the General said. “These men and the Lieplatzan Junta have lost ties with the people of Lieplatz. They’re more like rejects from now on. And they’re lashing out, hard. Many of our forces are entering settlements full of cheering crowds and surrendering troops. General Richstoff and his fanatic loyalists know that they lost. So they’re going to take as many people with them.”

“Thus my point, we have to stop them.”

“We’re trying,” General Albrecht said. “But I can’t make my boys charge forward faster to Nordia. Or to other cities. The Lieplatzan Army is still mounting a modicum amount of resistance, that if we drive toward that city too fast without regard for safety, we would suffer casualties that we don’t need.”

“But they’re surrendering,” Amelie said. “As you reported.”

“Not the fanatic ones,” General Albrecht said. “The ones who will stubbornly wait in front of a town with old main battle tanks, ambush our columns and kill at least five of ours, and refuse to surrender until they run out of ammo, or die to our forces.”

“Last stand?”

The General laughed. “I remember the days when soldiers, men, would retreat. Seems like in this day and age, fanaticism on our boys is so high, death is the only option.”

Both the NID and AFI directors seemed silent about that. Even Amelie did. Even amongst her troops, those suicidal tendencies were present in her men. The Grand Duchy Campaign after all would have been lost had it not been for those suicidal units that stubbornly held out till they were gone until reinforcements arrived.

She could imagine the same was true for fanatic Lieplatzans.

“In any case, we’ll try our best to push quicker,” the General said. “Expect more tragedies along the way. Your Majesty, you should certainly harden your heart for a while—”

“I already did, General,” Amelie said, slightly offended.

General Albrecht didn’t react. “Good. Because once we start entering those major cities…well, not great. And as for the noblewomen up north. Well, I imagine a cold winter, harsh environment, lack of food and supplies, and abusive captors would result in things I shouldn’t elaborate further about. All I can say, General Richstoff may fall, but, he may have succeeded at wiping out the high nobility of Lieplatz.”

Amelie felt empty at that. Could that have been her and many Orlish noblewomen’s fate had she failed in her defense? Moreover, the unthinkable. She felt her hands were tied. Rescuing them…

Her eyes glanced at the map, and their gains last night.

It’s too far…

She tried to hold off her tears. That was…she really wanted that General shot dead.

Amelie couldn’t do much for now though. And so, with a heavy breath…

“That will be all then,” she said. “Continue on your work.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” was their grim, collective reply.