It was generally acknowledged that the Battle of Chelán Hill ended in a complete victory for the emperor’s forces. We had slain the false Duke Raul, and I had announced my claim to his duchy.
On the other side of the fence, the nobility of the self-proclaimed “Grand Duchy of Raul” spiraled into a rapid collapse, having lost their “Archduke” and any kind of valid justification to refute my claim. Some had already offered me their allegiance, while others had abandoned their lands entirely and fled into secrecy.
Meanwhile, we regrouped and prepared our forces to march into the Raul territories.
We had suffered horrific casualties during the battle, losing forty percent of the lords’ armies who’d made up our right flank—a number that jumped up to fifty for Marquess Mardrusa’s troops in particular. In other words, we could only mobilize half of what we’d started with. Thankfully, the losses to Marquess Mardrusa’s force weren’t as bad as they initially seemed: The one thousand men we’d left in Keighamer were fresh and unbloodied, meaning the army was still two thousand strong.
My understanding of Earth’s battles was that a thirty percent casualty rate was considered as good as complete annihilation, but I believed that number took noncombatants into account as well. In this world, however, classifying noncombatants was a little more tricky. Even a noble’s mount attendant, for example, would sometimes take up arms and participate once the battle started.
In addition, while it was soldiers who escorted the supply chains that kept armies fed, the actual convoy workers were merchants or day laborers, who weren’t counted in the army numbers to begin with. All up, when I accounted for the fact that our fifty percent losses were only pure combatants, I could convince myself that we’d barely fallen short of qualifying for “complete annihilation.”
Still, it seemed it was quite rare for such losses to be suffered by the winning side of a single battle—and civil conflict, at that.
Regarding the newly recruited emperor’s host, we had lost five hundred from their original count of two thousand. Incidentally, only about half of the missing five hundred had been confirmed injured or killed; the other half’s whereabouts were unknown. Surprise, surprise; we’d pinned them as the same individuals who had been looting the enemy’s corpses after the battle. No doubt they had run off somewhere to pawn their spoils. Honestly, it was enough to give me a headache.
One thing was for sure: I wouldn’t be giving the order to have them dragged back. After all, the emperor’s host’s salaries—as well as the bonus for the battle—were to be paid afterward. In that sense, they’d saved me a bit of money by running off.
They were idiots, to be frank. The armor and weapons they’d looted would be damaged secondhand goods worth little, especially compared to the bonus I would’ve given them. Then again, even that sort of simple math was beyond the capabilities of a lot of people in this world. Education was definitely an issue I’d have to sort out down the line.
Once our allied forces had regrouped and everything was in order, we finally set out to pacify the Raul territories.
To get into the weeds a bit, there was technically no official holding in the Empire by the name “Duchy of Raul,” only the “Duchy of Lower Raul.” To learn the reason for this, we’d have to dig into the Empire’s lengthy history.
During the era of the Rotahl Empire, the country’s territories had been divided into nine duchies: Aphoroa, Trodau, Headoix, Agincarl, the Duchies of Upper, Central, and Lower Meschen, and the Duchies of Upper and Lower Raul. Later on, the Empire’s prosperity had led to the establishment of further territories under the governance of the Teyanave margraves and Bundarte landgraves, but we’ll leave those aside.
The collapse, revival, and subsequent second collapse of the Rotahl Empire brought us to the era of the Bundarte Empire, and as you can imagine, a whole heap of redistribution and reclassification happened in regard to the nine duchies. The Duchy of Lower Raul, however, had remained basically untouched, which was why it still bore its original name. In contrast, the Duchy of Upper Raul had lost its name during the reshuffling, and no such noble title existed today. This had resulted in everyone coming to refer to the Duchy of Lower Raul as simply the Duchy of Raul—the former was still its official name on paper, but no one called it that in practice.
This, in fact, was connected to why members of the Chancellor’s faction had referred to the Chancellor as Twice-Duke Raul, because he had controlled pretty much all of the territories formerly or currently of the upper and lower duchies. Incidentally, the terms “upper” and “lower” referred to the distance of the duchy from the imperial capital, with the former being closer and the latter being farther. It was a similar deal to the provinces of Echizen and Echigo of ancient Japan.
Getting back on topic, though, there were three noble titles once held by the Chancellor and self-assumed by his now deceased son: the Dukedom of Lower Raul, the Marquessate of Etruscharl, and the Marquessate of Lufini. However, since addressing him by all those titles would be tedious and long-winded, people had stuck to “Duke Raul” for convenience.
One unique characteristic of the Raul territories was that each domain had its own major city, and there was no one location that could be called a capital, like Cardinal was for the Empire. Instead, the successive generations of Duke Raul had possessed their own residences where it pleased them and rotated between them at periodic intervals. Naturally, our aim was to occupy all of them.
In the last third of the eighth month of the year, we divided up our forces and began invading the territories of what was once known as the Duchy of Raul, one after the other.
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The pacification effort went so smoothly that it scared the hell out of me. Having lost their main fighting force and any legitimate inheritance claim, the Raul territories put up little resistance to our occupation. Part of the reason had to be that, unlike the Agincarl region, much of the nobility was ethnically Bundartian. I had expected things to be easy if we eliminated Duke Raul, but not this easy. There were some nobles who put up a fight, of course, but only on a per-city basis—nothing on the scale of a coordinated rebellion.
It was worth mentioning though that they still fiercely resisted the Gotiroir incursions from the east, even when the Gotiroir informed them that they were acting under the emperor’s banner. The fact that said resistance capitulated immediately once our main forces arrived was telling of the Raul region’s deep-rooted views on the ethnically foreign tribe.
Either way, we finally succeeded in linking up with the Gotiroir, and the complete pacification of the Raul region followed soon after. I stayed a short while with the Gotiroir, enjoying the traditional hospitality of their culture, renewing our alliance, and reaffirming my recognition of their autonomy.
With my gratitude expressed, I returned to the imperial capital before the coming of winter.