In Port Vias, Zeppelin and a group of consuls were being driven to distraction as they dealt with the siege of a huge crowd of nobles.
Old and young, male and female, the nobles surrounded Zeppelin and the others. They shouted and cursed like mad, doing everything they could to tear at the clothes of the dozen or so consuls, furiously demanding that their families' titles be inherited without delay.
Early yesterday morning, nearly a hundred nobles of varying ranks had gone to the harbor to watch the spectacle—the Green Forest Count's direct troops coming ashore. Instead, they had run into assassins from the Dragon Wing Legion. Two thousand elite longbowmen unleashed a volley, slaughtering nearly a hundred nobles to the last.
Well, dead nobles were dead nobles. The dead were worthless anyway—even at the Hyena Merchant Association, noble corpses could not fetch much of a price. These nobles from non-military lineages were generally frail and bloated, nothing more than lumps of human-shaped fat. Would even the undead of the Undead Continent be willing to spend shining gold coins on a pile of fat?
So no one cared about the nobles' deaths. The nobles still crowding the Consulate in the dead of night, refusing to leave, were anxiously concerned with where their family titles would go, agonizing over exactly how much they could gain from them.
When the head of a family holding a hereditary title died, someone had to inherit that title. And what did a title represent? It represented money, power, handsome men and beautiful women, and endless enjoyment. A title also meant one could enter high society openly and honorably, dancing gracefully with exalted figures or dining alongside them!
Though they had been born into noble families, there were far too many members in those families, while