Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 113: An Unsettling Witcher
Count Stessa sat inside his study, turning through a stack of documents.
A dossier on the witcher, Lannor.
A pince-nez rested upon his face. Unlike the spectacles from Lannor’s home world, these did not hook behind the ears. Instead, the lenses clamped onto the bridge of the nose like a delicate drafting compass.
The handsome, powerful middle-aged noble removed the glasses with a frown and muttered to himself.
“Not normal ... this mutant is not normal.”
Men like him always learned what they wished to know.
Every detail within the kingdom eventually reached their desks.
And beyond the kingdom, with Nilfgaardian intelligence channels supporting him, Stessa could usually grasp the rough outline of matters abroad as well.
So although the order to gather intelligence had only been issued that morning, by evening a small “book” already sat in his hands.
Lannor’s complete dossier.
This level of efficiency and operational quality would have ranked among the finest even within Temeria’s official intelligence apparatus.
And Stessa was, in fact, using Temeria’s official intelligence apparatus.
Reality was often far more complicated and absurd than people distant from politics imagined.
The political conflict between Count Stessa and King Foltest was not the sort of mutual annihilation most commoners pictured.
The truth was much messier.
Both king and count relied upon the kingdom’s bureaucratic machinery to carry out their will.
Their ideological conflict did not mean the count established an entirely separate governing structure to oppose the crown. That would have bordered on outright secession.
Instead, their struggle for power took the form of competing for influence inside every branch of administration.
Naturally, bureaucracies were supposed to obey the king.
But the count’s inheritance rights, bloodline, and wealth all existed plainly before the realm. A feudal kingdom could not simply pretend otherwise.
So throughout Temeria’s administrative system, departments constantly ignored one another, undermined one another, or quietly sabotaged one another.
Because the balance of influence between king and count differed everywhere.
Sometimes even within the same department.
The department head might belong to the king’s faction while the deputy served the count. When Nilfgaard-related matters arose, whose orders should the subordinates obey?
Did people truly believe the superior could simply dismiss the deputy with a single sentence?
Since ancient times, how many first-in-command officials had been hollowed out by their seconds?
In the end, everyone still dragged out their own resources, allies, and intelligence networks to fight for dominance.
Foltest was formidable. Even Stessa admitted that much.
But the count also knew the king could not simply eliminate him overnight.
Because Stessa no longer represented merely a faction.
He represented an ideology.
An ideology pushing Temeria toward what its followers called a “more civilized, more advanced” social order.
As long as Stessa himself remained, the forces gathered around those ideas remained tangible, centralized, manageable.
Whenever Foltest released news that he had “suppressed Count Stessa,” the public interpreted it as the suppression of the ideology itself.
Create a target. Let that target embody a philosophy. Then every victory over the target became a victory over the invisible idea behind it.
Foltest wielded that strategy masterfully.
But if Stessa disappeared, those same ideas would scatter leaderless across Temeria. Without a physical figure to strike, they would become far harder to suppress.
The people and interests gathered around him by ideology would disperse like stars across the kingdom.
Tiny. Difficult to identify.
Yet poisonous all the same.
It was precisely this bizarre but internally logical political ecosystem that gave Count Stessa his current influence.
And within this magical medieval world, relationships between rulers and subordinates still possessed something rare.
Trust.
This world had corporations and shares, yes.
But it also had hereditary succession and sworn fealty.
Stessa bound himself to his followers through those social contracts, tying their interests together until trust became practical rather than sentimental.
Most important of all was his willingness to invest real gold into the people beneath him.
Stessa understood the importance of children to human beings.
During major festivals each year, he gathered his subordinates and their families together in lavish celebration.
There, he rewarded diligent children with almost extravagant generosity.