Count Lance?
Lance thought he had misread it. He silently reread it word by word several times and confirmed that he hadn't seen it wrong. Somehow, without doing anything, he had inexplicably become a count of a human kingdom.
Oh, and he might have also ended up with the infamy of being a traitorous rebel. Truly, he had been sitting at home while disaster fell from the sky. He had never dreamed that someone as pure-hearted and honest as him would one day bear the infamy of a traitorous rebel.
The key was that he had never given the Viscount's Mansion any orders.
He had left the Red Maple Kingdom five or six years ago. Normally, after being gone for so long, his title could have been revoked by some other powerful noble in the kingdom.
He had been prepared for that. Yet after all this time, not only had his title not been revoked by some minor noble of the human world, it had even been upgraded to count. It was more than a little absurd.
His fief wasn't large: six villages and a poor little town, with a total population barely approaching three thousand.
Six knights and more than two hundred soldiers. Their weapons and equipment weren't very good. The shields had gaps, there was no armor, and the leather armor was tattered. How had this armed force managed to join Grand Duke McDonald's army?
He remembered now. That had been the state of his fief when he had just become a viscount. Later, after his administration, things in the fief had indeed improved somewhat.
At the very least, the humans in the six villages were no longer sallow and emaciated, going hungry after every full meal. They had gradually begun to eat their fill, and after he