Chapter 48

An awkward silence suddenly filled the room.

It was all because of the bombshell statement made by none other than Lady Arshah—no, Kamilla.

“Well, I expected something like that to come up at some point.”

The content itself wasn’t particularly special.

If she had suggested gas chamber showers or being sliced alive, I might have been shocked, but the idea of wiping them all out was bound to come up sooner or later.

There are plenty of people who, like me, have suffered for years, teetering on the edge of death countless times. Even if they survived, many lost fingers or an eye.

After going through all that, wouldn’t it be strange if they didn’t hold a deep-seated grudge?

If not a single person was shouting to tear them apart and burn them, I would have been the one shocked.

But Kamilla? She’s not like that.

She’s just a woman barely over twenty. The only fights she’s ever been in were probably social power struggles.

A noblewoman who’s never gotten her hands dirty—why is she so bloodthirsty?

“Uh… Lady Arshah?”

“Why do you ask, Sir?”

Since it was a formal setting, I addressed her as I used to, and she hesitated for a moment before answering.

“Do you perhaps have a grudge against your parents? You shouldn’t speak so casually about killing your family.”

“Ah, Sir, you must not know. I’m a bastard child.”

“Uh…”

The bombshells kept dropping without giving me time to prepare.

She suddenly revealed a family secret, leaving me speechless and unable to argue.

…Wait a minute. If she’s a bastard, how is she being treated as a legitimate daughter and using the family name?

According to the kingdom’s inheritance laws, illegitimate children cannot inherit the family name unless adopted by the legal wife. Doesn’t that contradict what she just said?

I was about to ask how that was possible, but she added an explanation just in time.

“To be precise, I was about to become a bastard. Thanks to my father, who couldn’t keep his pants on, just like the Crown Prince.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“My biological mother was the legal wife of Count Arshah, but she passed away five years ago. Before we even finished mourning, my father brought in a new woman. Along with my half-sibling.”

“Half-sibling, you mean…”

“Yes. That damn Count was having affairs while my mother was still alive. As soon as she passed, he tried to bring his mistress into the house.”

Oh, uh.

What a tumultuous family history.

With such a bitter tone, I couldn’t even bring myself to say we should spare him.

Kais had mentioned that Count Arshah was an important informant, so we should provide protection and support.

He was the first to leak classified information about the truth of the war that the nobles had tightly sealed.

So, we were planning to push him hard as a symbol of our support if he sided with us… but it seems we’ll have to give up on that.

If we had to choose between the Count and Kamilla, the latter is far more important. Both politically and emotionally.

“Sir and everyone else probably know this, but the order of succession for titles is based on who was born first, regardless of gender.”

“Right?”

“Since I’m the eldest daughter, my younger sibling can’t inherit the title, so my parents went to great lengths to invalidate my mother’s marriage. They tried to demote me to a bastard.”

While the royal family strictly follows the principle of male primogeniture, the kingdom’s nobles are different.

Women can hold titles, so the firstborn child, regardless of gender, is supposed to inherit. But usually, it’s the males.

The system is surprisingly flexible, with plenty of loopholes and workarounds.

If they negotiated with the royal family and the church, they could have easily raised the second child’s position in the line of succession.

Why go through the trouble of trying to invalidate the marriage? There must be something more to it.

Poor Kamilla. Her birthright is being denied because of her scumbag father and greedy stepmother.

“Thanks to that, I’ve endured all sorts of humiliation over the past five years. Being ignored by servants, getting slapped by my sibling, having my mother’s keepsakes taken away, being engaged to a 70-year-old man… If he hadn’t died of old age, I would have actually married him!”

“…You’ve been through a lot.”

“It was hell. I almost ended up in the real hell several times due to assassination attempts. Part of the reason I got into politics was because my family was such a mess. Arguing with strangers is much more enjoyable than eating scraps at home.”

Kamilla shrugged nonchalantly.

“So, I plan to kill both my parents and my sibling and take the title for myself. I’m tired of being pushed around.”

“Understood. Let’s stop there.”

Any more, and the atmosphere would have been ruined. Let’s keep it appropriate, young lady.

After hearing her harrowing story, I calmly rejected her proposal.

“However, it seems difficult to execute the nobles as you suggested. Unfortunately, that method won’t work.”

“Why not? Didn’t you round them up to deal with them?”

“Well, that’s true, but…”

I pointed out the flaw in her logic that she seemed to have forgotten in her excitement.

“The kingdom is a nation with established laws and a judicial system. If we execute them without due process, what would happen to the system’s credibility?”

Even if high-status individuals can get away with illegal acts and run rampant with their power, we can’t just ignore the laws we’ve created. Systems only have meaning when they’re used.

Especially for a group like us, who rose to power by overthrowing the existing ruling class due to their incompetence and tyranny.

There’s something called the line we must uphold.

“…So, you’re saying we should just let them live?”

“Of course not.”

I immediately denied Kamilla’s statement.

Having a line to uphold also means we can pull all sorts of tricks within that line.

“We need to follow the proper procedures. First, we need to create a justification for arresting the nobles.”

We need to turn the current situation of detaining all the nobles without warrants into a legal arrest.

We had our reasons for capturing them, but those reasons aren’t officially recognized yet.

“To make it official, we’ll need to pass a new law in parliament soon. The content will be… something like allowing immediate arrest for treason without conditions.”

“You plan to treat the nobles as traitors?”

“Doesn’t it fit? They hid the cause of the decade-long war and exploited the people. Some even contributed to that cause.”

The most straightforward approach is to frame them all as traitors.

Unlike ordinary criminals, there’s less room for backlash no matter how harshly we treat them.

We’ll also add a retroactive clause to the law, which should cover up what we did during this coup.

Deploying troops everywhere can be framed as blocking escape routes, and transporting the nobles as arresting traitors and their accomplices.

We can portray our actions as “somewhat extreme but necessary for maintaining social order.”

“The condition for parliament to convene is a 60% attendance rate, so there shouldn’t be any issues with legislation.”

“We’ll pass it in the next session.”

“I’ll leave the detailed drafting to you. I don’t have time to handle that myself.”

Once we’ve created the charges, the next step is the trial. Determining the appropriate punishment for each person’s crimes.

By having a public judicial body define the punishments, we can execute or imprison them without worry.

However, there’s one problem.

“We need to bring them to trial in some form…”

“Will that work? Most judges are nobles too.”

“Exactly. They’re all in cahoots, so there’s no way we’ll get a fair verdict.”

There’s a term called “robe nobles.”

They don’t have territories or independent power, but they’ve built their families by inheriting judicial and administrative positions for generations.

The administrative side at least recruits new members annually and undergoes some turnover, but the judiciary is the opposite.

It’s a small, elitist, and exclusive organization that heavily emphasizes bloodlines.

I’ve heard that over 95% of them inherit their positions from their ancestors.

And like all blue bloods, robe nobles intermarry and network extensively.

Each person is connected to at least 10-20 families.

In such a situation, a fair trial is impossible, so my subordinates’ concerns are valid.

“You’re right.”

“Then—”

“But I don’t plan to hold an ordinary trial.”

Therefore, my choice is not to use the judges.

“Huh? How does that make sense?”

“Of course it does. We can use a jury.”

The jury system is one of the recognized trial methods in the kingdom.

It hasn’t been used in the last 100 years, but since it’s still on the books, using it won’t be a problem.

“Bring all the captured nobles to a public trial. Designate the attending citizens as jurors and let them decide the verdict by majority vote.”

A decision based on public opinion without expertise.

An environment where we can provide one-sided information.

You get the idea, right?

We’re going with the people’s court meta.