Semi-Coercive Imperialist

Arthur Winston returned safely to his homeland, Hailand.

He had two or three more bags than when he had left. All of them were gifts from the Empire.

"......"

He sat quietly at his study desk, gazing at the framed photograph on top of it.

Arthur, his wife, and his daughter Sara, posed together with the Empire's great actor Leonard.

The deep academic conversations with Professor Arnolt. The dazzling, startling aesthetic of the completely renovated Arte Museum. A dining experience at Lilac Vita he would never forget for the rest of his life.

By virtue of carrying Maximilian's personal signature, the Winston family had been lavished with hospitality by everyone in the Empire.

Yet Arthur's own one-line verdict on Maximilian the man was this: he is dangerous.

He is a dangerous man. The way a celebrated leader is more dangerous than a tyrant no one can reason with. The way a general respected by his enemies is more dangerous than a commander respected by his own.

His longtime colleague Gary wandered over and asked.

Today, a small party was being held at Arthur's home to celebrate his daughter Sara's birthday.

"It'll be out soon."

"Hmm. I heard you went to the Empire. Sara seems absolutely enchanted by the place, she keeps going on about the knight this, the knight that. Apparently Maximilian is devastatingly handsome."

"......"

Arthur said nothing. Gary shrugged.

"Does that war theory of yours still hold? The Empire-as-root-of-all-evil hypothesis too?"

"I've told you any number of times that I was detained in the Empire on suspicion of espionage."

"You went strolling through the middle of someone else's country with a soldier, poking your nose into everything. Of course you got detained."

A wry smile spread across Gary's lips.

"If anything, Maximilian letting you go is the impressive part. You should write him a thank-you letter."

Gary and the rest of Hailand's leadership still refused to believe in the threat of the coming war.

"Arthur. The Empire's economy is in spectacular shape right now. Another mana stone vein just hit in southern Hermes."

No matter how many veins came in, a mana stone economy was not enough to sustain a body as large as the Empire. The reason the Empire looked so prosperous was the military-industrial sector and public works projects it had artificially inflated through bills of exchange.

He had said it countless times, and these people still would not listen.

"And yet you go on faithfully believing the Empire will start a war. Honestly, Arthur, I feel for you."

Gary swirled his wine glass and added.

"If anything, the Empire doesn't want war. Can't you tell just from how fully they've backed Mekerel this time?"

Mekerel. A small, powerless nation caught under Balkania's invasion.

"The Empire wants to maintain its standing and legitimacy as a hegemonic power. By stepping forward to defend a weak nation, it's entrenching its continuity and influence on the world stage."

Arthur no longer felt it was even worth pushing back. Instead, he pulled out a thick hardcover and pressed it against Gary's chest.

"Read it. It's one of the countless bestsellers in the Empire right now."

The book was dressed-up hatred, logic for the extermination of a people called Izenheim.

"The Empire's bookstores are packed wall to wall with this kind of deranged hate literature."

"Your wife and Sara seemed to have a perfectly wonderful time being pampered over there, from what I hear."

"......"

Arthur's face twisted into something ugly.

Gary snickered.

"All right, all right. Out of respect for your dignity, I'll give it a read. But."

He slipped the book into his inner pocket and his expression turned genuinely serious.

"Try to show a little decorum from now on. I am your prime minister."

Gary Beaufort. Hailand's current prime minister. A man of soft temperament who refused to believe in war, and who had the nerve to market that very softness as open-mindedness.

"And ease up on the endless war-mongering in parliament, too. People in the party are already whispering that you're a paranoid warmonger."

Arthur glared at his old colleague, drowned in complacency, and murmured.

"I simply do my own business."

On a continent where madness was not far off. In a Hailand that wished only for a fragile peace. The only work a man like Arthur Winston could do.

For now, it was nothing more than crying out about the danger of war.

* * *

Skreeeee, skreeeee.

Cicadas shrieking as if they would tear the eardrums apart. Midsummer's high noon, heat haze shimmering up from the scorched earth.

Hanna Usar felt the stifling summer heat with every inch of her body.

"Ugh......"

Hot. Suffocating.

She wiped the sweat from her face and gave a nod to the operative beside her.

"......What do you have?"

"Numbers one, three, seven, and nine from the lineup."

The Yaken informant at her side, "Karak," answered. Behind his sunglasses, a row of suspects stood lined up before him.

"Four in total giving off that smell."

The location was a run-down boarding house in Imperial Central District 33. It passed itself off as a facility teaching reading and writing to poor commoners, but in truth it was a hideout for Izenheim spreading seditious ideas.

Safe to call it one of the Revolutionary Faction's cell units.

"Knight-nim! The evidence has been secured!"

The field officers came out carrying several banned books. Hanna picked up a few. Their contents covered anti-war sentiment, peace, equality, and the like.

"Clear enough."

Hanna gestured toward the boarding house with flat eyes.

"Round them all up."

......

Back at Sentinel Order headquarters after the mission. Unlike outside, cool and pleasant air wrapped around the skin.

Thanks to the window-unit air conditioner developed by Lorenzo Academy, the knights could now enjoy a summer this comfortable.

"Hey, Hanna. Hot out there?"

Royce, passing in the corridor, asked. He had an iced coffee in one hand.

One of the Order's recent perks. An unlimited supply of premium coffee beans. That too was probably Maximilian's doing, given his taste for fine things.

"It's hot, yeah. But you have to go out in the field to catch the cockroaches."

"True enough. Ideological crimes have been on the rise lately. What have they all got to complain about, I wonder."

Dare Tan appeared beside them as well.

Those two were always a pair.

"There's living proof right in front of us that a commoner can make it all the way to Sentinel knight on ability alone, and still they're not satisfied."

The two of them jerked their chins toward Hanna and laughed. Hanna wrinkled her brow, but she largely agreed.

"Any Aran who puts in the effort can succeed. It's the impure ones who aren't Aran that are the problem."

Not that being non-Aran was necessarily a bar, even those outside the bloodline could receive quasi-applicable bloodline treatment if they showed loyalty to the Empire.

And yet those wretched people, far from putting in any effort, were busy spreading seditious ideas.

"They always confuse cause and effect."

They made excuses that they had turned to crime because the Empire persecuted them, but that was wrong.

They had brought that persecution on themselves from the start. Loan-sharking that bled the citizens dry, endless fraud, spreading seditious ideas, acts aimed at overthrowing the Empire, committed over and over again, driving themselves to the edge of the cliff.

"And it's not just the Empire. Every nation on the continent is the same. The degree may differ, but treating that subspecies with suspicion and contempt has become common sense across the world. So......"

Hanna looked out the window. She had now fully absorbed Maximilian's thinking.

As though she had always held these thoughts from the very beginning..."......They're subhumans."

The word that spilled from her lips. Royce and Dare Tan smiled and nodded. Their faces said they agreed completely.

"Right, take care. We're heading out now too."

The two knights moved off together.

Probably a mission much like Hanna's own. The Order's top priority these days was internal enforcement: rooting out seditious ideology and crushing the Revolutionary Faction.

* * *

Before long it was autumn, leaves falling in drifts.

Aran Shepherds had been distributed on a large scale to the Empire's military police. The precisely trained dogs proved their worth at crime scenes, and the Imperial Guard took notice and wanted in. I willingly shared the training methods and handlers with them as well.

Of course, the Imperial Guard could become a political adversary, but our actual purpose was ultimately the same.

My guard dog Leo had made remarkable strides in that time. Having become Yukia's partner, he had reached a level of skill matching an actual new recruit knight, and above all, his accuracy at identifying Izenheim had jumped by leaps and bounds.

According to Yukia, a thousand out of a thousand.

One hundred percent.

Next, Aternum.

My munitions factory had finally recovered nearly all of the production output lost when Gigantes was destroyed. At this rate, it would become the Empire's largest military-industrial complex, surpassing Gigantes at the earliest next year and at the latest the year after that. With far less cost and far more advanced technology.

To mark that milestone, I set out to inspect Aternum.

"This is the logistics of a pure Aran."

The factory supervisor puffed out his chest with pride as he led me through the production line.

The Izenheim who had once infiltrated this place had steadily dwindled and now nearly vanished entirely.

Every condition that had allowed seditious ideas to spread, covertly or openly, had been completely cut off.

"Yes. I've heard. The result of the workers achieving self-purification from within."

It was something I found rather satisfying.

A cleansing carried out not by outside force, but from the inside.

The workers watched one another. Even in casual conversation, they felt out each other's roots and beliefs. If they detected anything even slightly different from themselves, any trace of the foreign, they reported it without delay.

Because that entire process was conducted in secrecy, the burden on any individual was light and the rewards were certain.

"Exactly right! The workers themselves are voluntarily working to protect this place! To insult Aternum is the same as insulting our very souls!"

Thanks to that, the entire southern Hermes region had become a district reserved solely for the Empire's Aran.

"Now then, let's head to the tank assembly line!"

The supervisor led me forward, his voice brimming with excitement.

"Right this way."

Every piece of knowledge I had brought back from the ruined future before my regression had been transplanted into Aternum.

First, standardization of models.

There was no need for needlessly diverse tank types. The lineup was compressed down to a single primary model.

Second, parts compatibility and modular design.

The same engine. The same transmission. The same treads. Even bolts to the same specification. Several vehicle types shared identical components.

Before the regression, the Empire had different parts for every vehicle type, making field repairs a nightmare. That waste was now gone.

Third, concentration and dispersal of production.

To prepare against large-scale strategic bombing by coalition forces, the power sources and critical installations had been fortified underground in advance. The parts production lines, by contrast, were broken up and spread across multiple districts. Even if one site was bombed out of existence, the overall production line would never stop.

Every innovation I had proposed was concretely realized here in Aternum.

In a way, this was the blood-soaked inheritance left to me by all of humanity.

By those who had been defeated by Izenheim and perished, who had left their answers atop their own bodies.

Through every book and press outlet, they had pointed out each and every failing and incompetence of the Empire in exhaustive detail, and in doing so had handed me a perfect manual.

If that too could be called succession, then they had contributed to humanity's survival without ever knowing it.

"Good. Excellent."

I caught the supervisor's eye.

"Ah, yes sir!"

Sharp as he was, he immediately grabbed the megaphone.

"Attention! Attention! Knight-nim will say a few words of encouragement to you all!"

The end of the shift.

I stood on the balcony overlooking the entire factory floor. Workers finishing their day gathered in a crowd below me all at once. There were quite a few of them, so I waited about five minutes.

"You may speak."

The supervisor offered me the megaphone, but I didn't bother taking it.

A knight's voice carried far enough on its own.

"Good to meet you all. I am Maximilian, a knight of the Empire and the proxy of this factory's owner."

A script Johann Georg had stayed up all night polishing. The reason I presented myself as the owner's proxy was simple: ultimately, all of this belonged to the Emperor.

Even if I didn't see it that way myself, for now that was what had to be said.

"As of today, Aternum has fully restored Gigantes's annual production capacity."

There was no need to raise my voice, no need to exaggerate my emotions or put on a performance. Simply showing myself as I was, the person called Maximilian von Ebenholtz, was enough.

"I am grateful to each of you standing here."

The reason was simple.

I was the perfect embodiment of pure Aran.

I carried the face that had absorbed every quality these people idealized and worshipped.

"I am genuinely proud of you, who carry the most pure Aran blood."

In the eyes looking up at me, the emotions Johann had intended were alive.

"I trust that you all know the true purpose I hold for Aternum, and the path we must walk together."

Respect, admiration, belief that bordered on faith.

"The noble value called a pure people. The struggle we wage to protect it."

Meeting those burning gazes, I told them a lie.

A deception made necessary solely for the survival of humanity, to prevent the extinction of civilization.

"We are, right now, doing the greatest thing there is."

But the phrase "greatest thing there is," at least, was not a lie.

"The sweat we shed will become the Empire's steel, and the treads we assemble will become the punishment that grinds down our enemies' hearts."

We will kill every last monster wearing a human face, for the sake of our own lives.

"So that primitive and inferior foreign bloodlines will never dare to defile our purity, the force forged by your hands will become the Empire's iron wall."

Johann's words worked perfectly.

"We will never retreat. The glory of Aran will shine eternally upon your blood and sweat."

Something shone in the eyes of those looking up at me.

"You will stand with the Empire forever."

Those workers' faces, bright as starlight, moved something in me too.

It was a resonance that made me realize, all at once, who I had come here to protect, and what I had come back for.

"Thank you all for your hard work today. Now go home to your warm houses and rest easy with your families."

At that moment, thousands of workers erupted in a cheer all at once.

I turned quietly away from their fervor.

Afterward, the supervisor stepped back to the balcony railing and raised his voice.

"Today, to honor your efforts, Knight-nim Maximilian is presenting a special bonus for everyone. Please make sure to collect it without fail at the settlement office!"

In the supervisor's own breast pocket, naturally, there was also a thick envelope of money.

I did not skimp on my people. Only by doing so could I prevent larger sums from leaking out, and only then could their loyalty be fully mine.

Uwaaaaaa!

The reason corruption had been so rampant in the Empire. The reason rot had been the ordinary order of things.

It was because they had never given those who devoted and worked themselves to the bone the rewards they deserved.

Maximilian! Maximilian! Maximilian!

Listening to the chants echoing through the factory, I walked toward the quiet, empty corridor behind it all.

Maximilian! Maximilian! Maximilian!

All of you, countless and devoted to the Empire: I believe in you.

And so we move forward together.

For your sake. For the sake of all of us. I will willingly drench myself in the world's blood.

Everything I intend to do.

The duty that belongs to me alone, that I must carry through.

The greatest ambition I am determined to see realized.

Maximilian! Maximilian! Maximilian!

All of it, only for the lives of us, humanity......