Chapter 2480: THE Laundry!

Inside Headquarters’ Public Laundry—

Here, inside a relatively large room specifically used for this purpose, servants brought the clothes of the most important personnel in Headquarters to be washed, those people who were required to work day and night without even having the opportunity to return to their homes and deal with such ordinary matters themselves.

The washing machines here were cubes in which clothes continuously rotated through energy-supported movement, and despite how constantly they were used, a single pearl was enough to keep dozens of the machines here running for entire months.

And atop one of those machines, which was vibrating beneath him at a steady, uninterrupted rhythm, sat someone... leaning his back against the wall behind him and staring blankly at the ceiling while keeping a pen resting inside his mouth.

"Mr. Prime Minister..."

Kristan Burton, Robin’s nephew and the person responsible for all the Empire’s internal affairs, was currently sitting atop a washing machine of all places, his messy black-and-white hair shaking constantly along with the machine’s rhythmic movement, making his already crazy appearance look even crazier than usual.

"Mr. Prime Minister..."

"Tsk..." Kristan made a clear sound of annoyance at the repeated interruption, then ignored the person beside him and continued talking quietly to himself, "...What should I write? I’ve done so much for this Empire... My efforts are countless, there are too many things to even count..."

"Mr. Prime Minister!!!"

"What?!" Kristan suddenly shouted at the person standing beside him, finally turning his attention toward him with obvious irritation. "Can’t you see I’m busy, you blind idiot?!"

"Sir, there are important matters that require your attention, and sitting here like this is strange and completely inexplicable!" Kristan’s assistant, who had held his position for a full three months now, spoke loudly and insistently, clearly unwilling to let the matter go regardless of Kristan’s annoyance. "Ever since the war began, the pressure has only continued to increase, and the situation keeps requiring immediate interventions and decisions!"

The beginning of the war in Mid Sector 90 had naturally attracted the attention of the entire universe, and with that enormous attention came countless reactions from every direction as everyone watched what was happening and responded in their own way.

Not everyone understood the matter of the temporary truce or the reason behind it, the truce that had caused the Tyrant, the Council of Thrones, and the Destroyer to halt their advance instead of continuing with the same ferocity displayed by the Syndicate Forces, but regardless of how much or how little they understood about the circumstances behind that decision, as far as they were concerned, what was actually happening in the war was deeply disappointing.

Everyone had expected an immediate victory and the forces of the evil Robin Burton to be completely wiped out within only a few hours of the beginning of the war everyone had been waiting for over the past three years, yet what actually happened was something entirely different: parity between the two sides. In fact, there were even several fronts where the followers of the devil Robin currently held the advantage, and to a great many people watching the war, this was something that simply should not be happening.

Therefore, even those who had chosen not to intervene in the war from its very beginning had gradually started looking for a role they could play now that the expected quick conclusion had failed to arrive.

There had previously been people who ignored the ban on buying and selling and continued using the safe trade network in order to obtain good prices, but they had now stopped completely. At the same time, some powers had begun sending support in the form of pearls and food toward the Major Space Gates, because they could clearly see that the Horde Forces were repeatedly failing to occupy even a single planet.

A growing number of Dominators, Guardians, Monarchs, and even Soul Masters above seven stars had begun flocking toward Mid Sector 90 from different places. Some of them made no attempt whatsoever to conceal themselves, proudly declaring that they were the emperor of this place or a follower of that galaxy, while others arrived masked and gathered into groups without openly revealing themselves... and with the number of enemies arriving and increasing every single day, this steady growth was tightening the pressure surrounding the ongoing battles between the Dominators and Behemoths.

And that wasn’t all...

The rebellions within the borders of the regions under His Majesty’s control had also increased, adding another source of pressure at the same time the war outside continued consuming enormous attention and manpower.

Now, nearly every minute brought another piece of news from somewhere in the Young Belt reporting that the powers on some planet had begun an uprising, while there was already a severe shortage of soldiers available to respond, since the soldiers of the First and Second Armies were occupied with the war, while the soldiers of the Third Army had been transferred to Donara.

Only the Beast Army under the Prime Minister and the police forces remained available.

Depending on the brutality of the resistance and the severity of what those resisting forces were actually doing on the ground, it was decided who would take charge of that planet’s file... If the uprising had already gone completely out of control and its people were burning everything around them, then the file would be assigned directly to Kristan, while if what was happening amounted only to demonstrations or large gatherings, meaning that the planet still had not reached the point where it needed to bleed yet, its file would instead be sent to Billy.

But there were so many planets requiring attention that the two of them could no longer afford to look into the situation of every planet individually as they once might have done... Instead, each of them had established his own system for handling the enormous number of files reaching him.

Billy had hundreds of officers working under him, and every one of those officers had thousands of soldiers under his command. Whenever any complaint or report arrived from a planet assigned to Billy’s side, one of those officers would immediately head to the scene with his forces to either subjugate the resistance or kill those responsible, with the condition that he had only three hours to finish everything that needed to be done, and the forces of the Light Swords never disappointed when carrying out those assignments.

As for Kristan, he had only one assistant, the very same person currently standing beside him and repeatedly disturbing his thoughts. His task was simply to activate the gate using the coordinates of the planet in question and send one of the Beast Kings along with his followers directly there, then, after three hours had passed, activate the gate once again so that they could return.

Even with those systems operating continuously, however, they were still losing more and more planets with every passing day...

And more importantly than the planets themselves, they were losing more and more of the Empire’s people on every planet they managed to seize again by force, while simultaneously earning the resentment of those people for hundreds or perhaps even thousands of years afterward.

And of course, all of this was only referring to Sectors 99 and 100, where their forces could still be reinforced whenever necessary by the Shadow Swords and the Beast Army, giving them the means to respond to at least some of the situations occurring there.

As for the planets throughout all the other Sectors of the Young Belt, most of them had already been wrested from their hands after the armies stationed there withdrew from those planets in order to participate in the war.

But even this, everything currently happening throughout the Young Belt and all the planets they were steadily losing there, could not compare to the scale of the internal disturbances currently taking place throughout the Mid Belt.

Aro and Peon had left powerful deputies behind before departing, specifically to keep the situation under control in their absence, but even their capital Sectors themselves were now burning with unrest, let alone all the other neighboring Sectors surrounding them.

The forces backed and driven by the Council of Thrones, the Syndicate, or even the Tyrant Antares were no longer as afraid as they had been before, especially after most of the armies had been withdrawn from those regions and sent toward Mid Sector 90, and now those forces had finally emerged in full force.

Currently... there was a very real fear that the war raging throughout Mid Sector 90 might ultimately not be what decided the fate of the Empire at all, and that instead, the thing that would determine its fate would be everything currently happening inside its own borders.

"Can’t I just sit down and think in peace for a while without having to listen to all this nonsense?!" Kristan shouted angrily at the person beside him. "Can’t you see that I’m right in the middle of something important?!"

"What’s so important?!" Kristan’s assistant raised his voice as well, apparently no longer caring about the Prime Minister’s irritation. "Didn’t you say before that the most important thing is the galaxy, then the planets surrounding that galaxy, and then the planets that come after those? Well, the planets that come after those are in revolt right now! You need to intervene!"

"....." Kristan finally opened his eyes slightly after hearing those words, as though something had suddenly occurred to him. "Hmm, this will be suitable."

Then, without offering any explanation, he reached out toward his assistant, Krssh, and tore a piece directly from his clothes.

"Gwaa!!" The assistant immediately hugged himself in panic at the sudden action.

Kristan, meanwhile, paid no attention to his reaction. He gripped the pen in his hand in a strange manner and wrote a short phrase directly onto the reinforced piece of cloth he had just torn away, then carefully folded the cloth several times before handing it over to his assistant. "Pass this to Billy."