Chapter 126: A Bit of Debate

Belis stared at the goddess, his wrinkled mouth agape. The initial spark of relief that had flickered in his chest died instantly, smothered by an icy wave of pure terror.

"Kill him...?" Belis whispered, his voice trembling so violently the syllables almost blurred together. He reached out with both hands, clasping his chest as if his old heart might give out on the spot. "Your Divinity... forgive my insolence, but that... that is a double-edged sword forged over an abyss! It is madness!"

Viona’s eyes narrowed into dangerous golden slits. The faint, bruised smile on her lips vanished. "Madness? You dare call my divine strategy madness, old man?"

"I speak out of devotion to the Empire, Lady Viona!" Belis pleaded, falling flat onto his knees and scraping his velvet robes against the rough stone floor. "I have served the throne for forty years! I saw our grandfathers lay the stone for the coastal forts! I balanced the ledgers that fed our legions! Everything I am, everything I have ever done, was to keep the Holy Solarian Empire whole and enduring! But this... this gambit does not merely risk our lives. It risks the utter, absolute annihilation of every soul on this continent!"

He raised his head, tears wetting the deep creases of his cheeks, looking desperately into her radiant, unforgiving eyes.

"Think of what we have witnessed over the last four days," Belis urged, his voice cracking with emotion. "When we merely resisted their blockade, they severed our bridges. When our outposts fired, they wiped the Cape of Spears and Fort Oakhaven from the map. When you cast your holy flames into the bay, their ships pulverized the entire breakwater in two minutes! They possess weapons of thunder and iron that strike from beyond the curve of the world! They hold back against our cities only because their commander—this boy, John Smith—has chosen to withhold his hand!"

"And that restraint makes him soft!" Viona spat, stepping forward and towering over the Prime Minister. Her voice was shrill with indignation. "He sits upon his foreign throne believing in contracts, laws, and treaties! He is a mortal from a peaceful world where kings bow to pieces of paper! If we sever the head of the snake, the body will thrash and die!"

"No, Your Divinity, you misunderstand them!" Belis cried out, desperation granting him the courage to raise his voice against an immortal deity. "You hear Ayanokoji speak in numbers and charts, but you do not hear the horror beneath his words! Ayanokoji told us of their doctrine! Modern armies are not like our feudal hosts! When an imperial lord dies, his knights disperse and swear fealty to the next claimant. But these Americans... they do not serve a king! They serve an apparatus! A system of unyielding protocols and iron command!"

Belis reached into his tunic with shaking hands, pulling out a charred scrap of parchment bearing notes taken from Ayanokoji’s interrogation weeks earlier.

"Their ships have captains, their wings have commanders, and above Donovan sits a council of war thousands of leagues across the ocean! If John Smith is murdered under a white flag—if we slaughter their supreme commander during a sacred parley—they will not fall into despair! They will not bend the knee to us!"

Belis gripped the bottom hem of Viona’s gown, his knuckles white.

"They will call it an atrocity, Lady Viona! Their cold, disciplined restraint will shatter into vengeful wrath! The flying machines that currently spare our commoners’ cottages will no longer carry guided needles—they will carry fire! They will turn the capital into glass! They will salt our rivers, poison our wells, and unleash weapons capable of burning whole cities to ash in a single flash of light! If we fail to kill him, or if killing him only enrages his fleet, there will be no empire left to rule! Our people will be wiped from the history scrolls!"

Viona stared down at the trembling minister. For a brief second, the sheer weight of his desperate plea pressed against the silence of the room. The memory of the carrier’s massive gray bulk, the lightning grounding harmlessly into the water, and the deafening roar of the jet that had nearly buried her on the bluff flashed through her mind.

A knot of cold dread tightened in her stomach. She knew the power of those gray machines. She had felt the concussive pressure waves that had torn her sacred robes to rags.

Then her divine pride surged back, hotter and uglier than before.

"Silence!" Viona roared.

A sudden burst of celestial force exploded from her body. The shockwave tore Belis’s hands away from her hem, throwing the old man backward across the floor until he crashed against the heavy cedar council table.

"You sniveling coward!" Viona shrieked, her golden eyes blazing with hysterical fury. She followed him with furious strides, her silk slippers clicking sharply against the stone. "You speak as if I have a dozen choices! You speak as if we have time to negotiate a comfortable retirement for your bureaucrats and lords!"

She grabbed Belis by the collar of his robe, hauling him halfway up from the floor. Her face was inches from his, her teeth bared like a wild predator’s.

"Look through that slit window, Belis! Look at the harbor! The army is gone! Sixty thousand men vanished into the trees in a single night! The granaries are black cinders! The salt is mud! Even if we sign their treaty—even if I bow my head, hand over the summoned heroes, and accept John Smith’s terms—what happens to the Holy Solarian Empire?!"

Her grip tightened, choking the old man’s breath.

"They will dismantle our temples. They will place their iron garrisons on our soil. They will demand reparations of silver and food that we do not possess. And worse, Belis... the people will see that their goddess is powerless! The moment my worshippers realize that foreign iron is stronger than divine light, my faith will wither! And without faith, my immortality will bleed away until I am nothing more than dust on the wind!"

Viona shoved him back against the table. She began to pace frantically, her arms crossed over her chest, her breathing ragged.

"A surrender is a slow, agonizing death for both me and this realm. An execution on the neutral ground is our only path to total victory. It is the only move that flips the board in a single stroke!"

"Lady Viona..." Belis wheezed, rubbing his bruised throat, coughing as tears stung his eyes. "The risk... the risk is total extinction..."

"There is no risk if the execution is absolute," Viona said, her voice dropping into a cold, terrifying whisper. "You worry that Ayanokoji and Kenji will fail? They are S-rank champions! Kenji’s blade moves faster than the human eye can track! Ayanokoji’s spear can pierce dragon scale at thirty paces! And Miyuki will cast an absolute anti-kinetic barrier around them the instant the strike begins!"

She stopped, leaning down over Belis with a venomous sneer.

"John Smith was summoned as an E-rank discard. He is frail. He is soft. He relies on his metal guards and his flying birds. On the neutral ground, inside the agreed parley perimeter, he will not be inside an armored carriage. He will stand on two legs, holding a pen, flanked by at most four or five riflemen. From five paces away, Ayanokoji’s spear will punch through his chest before his guards can even twitch their fingers."

She tapped her temple with a manicured finger, her eyes gleaming with manic conviction.

"Once John Smith’s brain is dead, the chain of command in this theater will freeze. You say their apparatus has a council across the ocean? How long will it take for a message to cross the void between worlds? Weeks? Months? By the time their distant masters issue a new order, this fleet will be leaderless, confused, and paralyzed by grief and shock! And in that moment of hesitation, I will unleash the full fury of the temple relics and finish off their crippled ships!"

Belis slumped against the wood. His shoulders shook as he wept silently. He looked up at the ceiling, where the painted history of the Solarian dynasty smiled down from the plaster. He saw no light in it anymore. He saw only blood, ruin, and the unstoppable march of steel.

He knew she was blinded by her divine ego. He knew she was gambling the lives of four million imperial subjects on a single desperate strike from an assassin’s spear.

Yet, as he looked into her burning golden eyes, he also knew the grim truth: a goddess could not be reasoned with. To refuse her now would only mean his immediate execution on the council floor, replaced by some mindless puppet or fanatic inquisitor who would carry out the order with even less care.

"You have no choice, Prime Minister," Viona whispered softly, her tone turning sweetly venomous. "You love the Empire? Then help me save it. Or die here as the first traitor to the Empire."

The room fell dead silent, save for the faint whistling of the ocean wind through the narrow arrow slit.

Belis slowly pressed his palms against the cold flagstones. He lowered his forehead until it touched the dusty carpet, bowing in total, broken submission.

"The... the will of Her Divinity," Belis whispered, his voice trembling with bitter, hopeless sorrow. "I will climb the harbor keep. I will hoist the white silk. I will signal the flying machine and deliver your terms for the face-to-face parley."

Viona’s smile returned, radiant, cruel, and triumphant.

"Good," she purred, patting his gray head with two fingers. "Make sure your tears are dry before you face the light-mirrors, Belis. When the rat arrives to claim his prize... we will make sure he never leaves the shore."