Chapter 629: Mutual Respect

Lowering the telescope, Christina turned to her current commanding officer and saluted.

While she and Charlotte still had a bit of a prickly relationship and often quarreled with each other when they were off-duty, the two of them were also extremely professional when they were out in the field.

Christina didn’t particularly like Charlotte, thinking she was far too stuck up and immature in her private life, but after carefully observing her when she was commanding her soldiers, the princess was at least confident that Charlotte would not allow her personal feelings to interfere with her responsibilities.

Likewise, Charlotte wasn’t a fan of Christina’s, thinking she was a cheeky brat who didn’t know how to respect her elders, but she also begrudgingly admit that the young girl was both capable and competent when it came to combat and command.

The simple result was that Christina had no issue taking orders from Charlotte, and Charlotte had no problem trusting Christina with important assignments.

Both young women were willing to acknowledge each other’s abilities, and for simple missions like this one, that was enough.

Having received her orders, Christina slid down the mast to the deck below where she promptly ordered the ship’s distress flag be raised. She then moved below deck to prepare her strike force.

Plan A, as Commander Charlotte put it, was actually fairly simple.

After raising their flag, signaling they were in need of assistance, they would sail slowly towards the smuggler’s ship, trying to get as close as possible without raising any suspicions.

The hope was that they could pull up directly alongside the target, then board them by force and seize control before the enemy had any idea what was happening.

This was hardly an ’honourable’ act, as the distress flag was only supposed to be used in real emergencies, but having confirmed that the ship they were raiding this time was smuggling weapons into the kingdom to be used against its citizens, both Charlotte and Christina saw no reason to ’play fair’ with these criminals.

As for actually subduing the enemy ship, with 50 soldiers from the Raging River Legion, and 150 from the Piercing Sword Legion aboard, along with a Complete High-Rank Initiate overseeing the operation, that likely wouldn’t be any trouble at all.

That said, neither Christina nor Charlotte was going to let their guard down just yet.

Back when the sporadic raids on the mysterious organization’s bases and trade routes had just gotten started, the enemy had been mostly unable to respond; however, about a month ago, they seemed to have become much more vigilant and the level of resistance had gradually been rising since then.

It still wasn’t enough to be much of a threat to the professional soldiers of the Rockwell Kingdom, but one could never be too careful when dealing with fanatics who were willing to kill themselves to take you down with them.

For instance, the last raid Christina had taken part in about half-a-month ago was targeting a small tavern in a small town north of Amherst.

The initial battle had gone smoothly, with the Rockwell Kingdom forces smashing through the inn’s doors in the middle of the night and swiftly arresting everyone inside.

There were also several guests at the inn who seemed to be uninvolved bystanders, such as an all-female adventurer team who were on their way to the Great Western Forest, a farmer in from a local village trying to enjoy his night in town with a local prostitute, and a merchant father traveling together with his little daughter.

After separating those they found suspicious from those who seemed innocent, the soldiers swept the inn looking for contraband and any information they could find.

Half-an-hour later, Christina’s unit had obtained a couple crates of crude weapons, a few Silver and Gold coins, and a smattering of documents related to the enemy organization’s local operations.

It wasn’t much, but they weren’t expecting to find anything of significance in such a small place, so the mission was still deemed a success.

Up to that point, everything seemed to be going according to plan and everyone from the Raging River and Piercing Sword Legions was already looking forward to heading back to Amherst to get some rest when all of a sudden, something completely unexpected happened.

The ’merchant’ actually drew a hidden dagger from somewhere and stabbed one of the raid’s Captains from behind, drawing everyone’s attention.

While the soldiers were distracted, the man’s ’daughter’, who could not have been older than 12, actually knocked over a burning lamp into a pile of laundry.

From the intensity of the blaze that erupted after that, it was obvious that these ’dirty clothes’ were actually coated in some kind of oil, and it wasn’t long before the entire inn was up in flames.

In all the chaos, more than a dozen soldiers from the raid team were injured, 2 of them seriously.

As for the perpetrators of the attack, perhaps because he engaged the soldiers directly, the man was swiftly captured, but the little girl actually managed to slip out a window and disappear into the night, probably using an aura concealing cloak of some sort to erase her presence, making it impossible to track her through the dark, narrow back-alleys.

Needless to say, it was quite an embarrassing incident, but it had also taught Christina a very important lesson, never assume anything is certain when you’re on the battlefield.

The raid on the inn was still considered a success, but not a total one, which irked Christina as the target that night had been rated as one of the least dangerous or important.

In fact, the whole reason the upper echelon had chosen that target was specifically to throw off the enemy by making them think they were running out of good intelligence and had now resorted to just hitting whatever locations they could come up with.

Regardless, Christina was determined not to make the same mistake again and thus double and triple checked her troops before the boarding action was set to begin.

The soldiers from the Piercing Sword Legion had been a bit reluctant to follow the lead of a Captain from the Raging River Legion at first, especially one who was so young who they all heavily suspected got her position through nepotism; however, after months of working together with Christina, she had gradually earned all of their respect.

As such, they all now stood at full attention while the young princess performed her final inspections, not daring to utter any complaints.