WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Abood

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◈ Friedrich's Battlefield

Chapter 71: A Certain Girl’s Vengeance (2)

“...I can only imagine your frustration, Your Grace.”

Inside the carriage leaving the royal castle, heading toward the Fargiere family’s royal villa in the capital. Cecilia Fargiere responded to Knight Celestan’s words with a faint, bitter smile.

“Thank you, Celestan... But, well, it’s ultimately my fault for failing. There’s nothing to be done.”

Like her current lord, King Childebert Arelia, Cecilia had a goal of her own. It was much smaller compared to the king’s ambitions.

To defeat Count Matthias Hosenfeld. As a commander, as a person, this was her most burning desire.

“The point is to face the battlefield given to me, and win. Then I’ll have another chance to face Count Hosenfeld... He is the living hero of Edelstein. Until I kill him, he will wait without dying.”

Feigning to gaze out the window at the capital’s cityscape, Cecilia’s eyes instead reflected memories from the past. Her hands resting on her lap were clenched unnecessarily tight.

She did not notice Knight Celestan sitting across from her glancing at her with a faint hint of pity.

Soon, the carriage arrived at the Fargiere family’s royal villa, and Cecilia entered the mansion accompanied by Celestan.

Feeling somewhat weary, she dismissed Celestan and the servants, and locked herself alone in her room.

As usual, she wore a calm expression as she walked to the dressing table, and then slammed both fists against it.

The luxurious, heavy dressing table absorbed Cecilia’s light blows, making barely any sound. Only a dull pain lingered at her fingertips.

“…Once again, you’ve skillfully slipped through my grasp, Count Hosenfeld.”

Staring intently into the well-polished mirror, Cecilia muttered to herself. Her crimson eyes burned with hatred like blood and a murderous intent like flames.

The Duke of Bachstein had come close. If the Ostburg Fortress, which his forces had captured, had not been retaken, the plan would have succeeded.

In other words, their defeat was caused by the Ferdinand Regiment of the Edelstein Kingdom’s army reclaiming the fortress.

Once again, Count Matthias Hosenfeld had interfered. Cecilia’s fervent desire to defeat him had been thwarted by the man himself.

“Why can’t you just let yourself be killed? You certainly owe me that much.”

Though she spoke these words, a calm smile still lingered on Cecilia’s face.

She had learned that neither tears nor anger would change the outcome. This lesson was from more than twenty years ago, when she was still a child.

When Cecilia was six years old, the then-head of House Fargiere, her father Gerald, and her mother Felicity, the Countess, welcomed their second child.

For Cecilia, it was a younger brother. For Gerald and Felicity, it was their first son.

Though noble titles generally followed primogeniture, in martial families it was common for sons to inherit. At that time, Cecilia neither coveted the title nor desired to become a soldier, so she had no sense of threat at her brother’s birth and was genuinely happy.

However, Gerald and Felicity could not rejoice purely. Their son’s hair bore a deep crimson hue.

Whether ancestral reversion or divine whim, it was widely known across the Ludna Continent that people sometimes were born with hair colors such as red, blue, green, or purple. It was a one-generation phenomenon and did not suggest any infidelity. Like Cecilia, the boy had inherited their father’s red eye color.

Yet, having red hair was particularly ill-favored.

In the former Kingdom of Loire, children born with red hair to noble families were considered bad omens.

They were said to bring misfortune. Specifically, defeat for the family or the death of loved ones.

Nobles who lost factional struggles and took their own lives; generals renowned for their valor who died in battle; some stories even told of red-haired royalty attempting to usurp the throne, murdering the king and queen.

For these reasons, the parents initially braced themselves.

But in the end, Gerald accepted his red-haired son.

He named him Maximilian and resolved to cherish and protect him just as he did their firstborn, Cecilia.

It was after all an old superstition. Not every red-haired noble born into royal or aristocratic families had brought misfortune upon their house. If the honorable Fargiere family were to be swayed by such superstition and treat their own son badly because of it, they would become the laughingstock of the entire kingdom.

Gerald’s words, half-spoken as if to convince himself, were accepted by everyone with varying degrees of unease. The one who felt the deepest anxiety was the infant’s mother, Felicity.

She had already experienced a miscarriage once. Three years earlier, she had lost the baby who was supposed to be Cecilia’s younger brother or sister. That was why she held an obsessive conviction that she must absolutely protect this second child who had finally been born safely.

And not long after, the superstition became reality.

In the battle against the Kingdom of Edelstein that took place on the Beiral Plains, the fierce warrior Count Gerald Fargiere fell. He was slain by one of the enemy generals, Count Matthias Hosenfeld. The army of the Kingdom of Loire was routed, and the Arnsberg fortress was captured.

This defeat, which greatly tilted the battle in favor of Edelstein, shocked the entire Fargiere household.

Shortly after the birth of the crimson-haired infant, the head of the family died. Many came to believe, some more openly than others, that this child was indeed a harbinger of misfortune for the count’s family. Some even whispered that the child had caused Gerald’s death.

Those rumors ended up reaching Felicity’s ears.

Even from young Cecilia’s perspective, her mother was not a particularly strong-willed woman. Losing her spouse, the head of the family, and hearing such bad rumors about her precious newborn son caused Felicity to feel fear and confusion. She became trapped in the thought that her child, believed to bring misfortune, might be killed by those within the household.

A few days after the grim news of the head’s death arrived, at late night, Felicity placed Maximilian in a basket, carried him, and slipped out of the mansion using a hidden passage originally meant as an emergency escape route.

To avoid causing a large uproar, the retainers and servants searched for the two of them, and when Felicity was found in an alley the following afternoon, she was no longer with Maximilian.

‘That child has gone somewhere safe. I won’t let anyone kill him.’

Felicity kept saying this with a broken laugh, and no matter who spoke to her, she refused to reveal Maximilian’s whereabouts.

A search for the red-haired infant took place around the capital Toulouse, but he was never found.

Felicity’s mind remained broken after that. Doctors were called in, but she did not recover, and eventually took her own life. To protect the family name, the retainers and servants spread a false story for the public that the infant had unfortunately died young, and that the lady had fallen ill from grief over losing her husband and son, and subsequently passed away.

Cecilia lost her family. Her father, her mother, and her newborn younger brother, all gone. Seeking someone to blame for the tragedy, she concluded it was all Count Matthias Hosenfeld’s fault, the one who had slain her father.

Her father was a soldier, fighting a war. It was only natural that he might be killed by the enemy.

However, Count Matthias Hosenfeld, the enemy who took her family, was also a soldier. Therefore, it should be permitted for her to defeat him in turn. In fact, it should be praised. After all, he was a hero of the enemy nation.

“...Next time, next time for sure, I will bring you down with my own hand. I will take you away from your new son, you who took my family from me.”

Gazing steadily at her own smile reflected in the mirror, Cecilia spoke.

Cecilia had inherited the headship of the Fargiere Count’s house at a young age. She stopped allowing herself the indulgence of childishness. The day of her mother’s funeral marked the last time she openly showed her emotions; from then on, she hid her feelings.

She survived on her father’s legacy, was supported by her father’s retainers as she grew up, and, like her father, became a soldier.

Through intense effort and thanks to the prestige of the Fargiere house, she quickly rose to command a battalion-scale force, and in one of her many battles, she defeated Count Hosenfeld’s son. She took a step closer to revenge.

But it was not yet enough. The key target, Count Hosenfeld himself, had yet to be taken down. Even now twenty years later, he still lived. Recently, rumors said he had taken in an orphaned adopted son. After full-scale hostilities began, information from the Kingdom of Edelstein became harder to come by, but Cecilia managed to grasp at least that fact.

According to rumor, it was that adopted knight of Count Hosenfeld who last year, in the battle on the Northern Plains, employed a similar strategy to Cecilia’s and drove one of her detachments into retreat.

The recent strategy to retake Ostburg Fortress wasn’t like something Count Hosenfeld himself would devise. Rather, Cecilia thought it was a sneaky trick she herself might come up with. She instinctively believed it was probably the work of that adopted son.

Count Hosenfeld seemed to have picked up a remarkably clever orphan. To have taken everything from her family himself, then form a new family, and father and son both stand in the way of her revenge. It was utterly infuriating.

That only made her thirst for revenge burn all the more fiercely.

To defeat Count Matthias Hosenfeld and avenge her family. To make him suffer the same pain her father Gerald had endured, and to give his adopted son the same sense of loss Cecilia knew—losing a father.

She would accomplish it no matter what. Carving deeper wounds into her already scarred heart, Cecilia’s resolve hardened.

“...Now then, first comes the Kingdom of Novakia. How shall I go about conquering it?”

Stepping away from the vanity mirror, Cecilia murmured to herself as she walked toward Celestan, who was waiting outside her room. Her voice was light and lively, as if she were planning something for a day off.

Footnotes:

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