"Sympathy? More like gloating. If the Pilai Family doesn't fall, they'll have the rights to mine that copper deposit for at least another thirty years."
Baron Gregorich mocked them without mercy, leaving the richly dressed middle-aged men shocked once again. There was no doubt that he knew all about their schemes. The feeling of having their trump cards seen through was agonizing.
Count Stadion had already investigated the cities along the Galician Legion's route. With his keen mind, it hadn't been difficult to figure out what had happened.
Franz, meanwhile, knew full well that you had to know yourself and your enemy to win every battle. So he had never stopped gathering intelligence on the Hungarian-occupied territories.
And the Austrian Empire's state apparatus was clearly far more powerful than anything Count Stadion could command on his own. The former didn't need to guess; they could be certain that the betrayal by Košice's local families had led to the slaughter of the Pilai Family and the city's Hungarian resistance fighters.
Without those traitors, the resistance forces wouldn't have been wiped out, and the Pilai Family wouldn't have suffered the Magyars' vengeance and nearly been exterminated.
Baron Gregorich wasn't some monster who could see through people's hearts, but once he had learned the facts, it wasn't hard to make the right choice.
"You traitors don't get to choose to surrender."
"What? You can't do that!"
The richly dressed middle-aged men finally began to panic. They hadn't expected things to turn out this way. After all, they had merely followed tradition and seized an opportunity to secure their own interests.
It had always been like this.
Wasn't the House of Habsburg supposed to show mercy at a time like this?
Weren't those stupid, greedy soldiers supposed to bargain with them?
It was always