Chapter 221 |
Edmund Bwindol returned to the command tent.
Clatter.
He threw down his gun and sword and sank into the field chair.
"......"
The tent stood empty. Just him.
He let out a hollow sigh.
He stared up at the ceiling, unfocused.
Thoughts clung to his whole body like something out of a swamp.
He had lived his whole life inside a contradiction.
His adjutants were the same kind of people he was.
Effort that never wasted a single day. A mindset that would put even a knight to shame.
And still, some of the Imperial Guard's people looked down on them, held them in contempt.
And still, they stood at this border.
So what was left to them, in the end?
Had they lived this hard, worked this hard, only to end up with their lives snuffed out over a scrap of paper......
"......"
Edmund closed his eyes.
An exhaustion he hadn't even noticed pulled him under, and when dawn broke again,
"Edmund!"
Morning at the camp.
A Sentinel knight had arrived. He called Edmund's name and strode toward him, raising a hand in greeting.
The soldiers fell into formation and saluted in step with his approach, and Edmund answered with a smile of his own.
"It's been a while, Max."
"Yeah. Been a while."
Shaking his hand, Maximilian leaned in and whispered near his ear.
"Want to take a walk? I've got something to say, just between us."
His golden eyes settled quietly. Edmund pretended not to understand what that look meant.
"Sure. Follow me."
Walking side by side up the mountain path, Edmund spoke first.
"What's going on?"
"Nothing much, really."
Maximilian clicked his tongue, faintly annoyed.
"You know Georgen, that new political police outfit?"
The Empire was currently oversaturated with power. The direct agency, the Palace Imperial Guard, the newly formed political police Georgen, the ordinary police bureau, the knight orders, the regular army, the parliament, the royal family, the nobility. Jurisdictions overlapped endlessly, each faction with its blade aimed at the others' throats.
The Emperor had deliberately let them multiply this way, consolidating his own power by keeping them locked in mutual restraint.
"They've got their eyes on your two adjutants. Something about suspicious bloodlines and ideology."
Captain Kane and Captain Heintz. Edmund's longtime adjutants.
"......"
Edmund said nothing, looking back over his own shoulder. Not far off, at a respectful distance, two figures followed.
"Kane. Heintz."
At his call, the two adjutants came forward, faces set.
"It's the knight. Greet him."
"Loyalty. Captain Kane, reporting."
"Loyalty. Captain Heintz, reporting."
Instead of turning their backs on the cliff and running, the two of them had chosen to stay and prove their innocence.
Edmund had chosen to believe in that innocence too.
"Your family registers?"
"Here, sir."
They handed over the original registers. Maximilian took them. His eyes swept down the page.
"......Well. Detailed review can wait for later."
Maximilian folded the registers and tucked them into his coat.
"Since I've come all the way out east, show me around the field. Let these two rest."
"Sure."
Maximilian toured the outpost with Edmund as his guide, moving through the rugged mountain terrain, past neatly ordered tents, tightly arranged magic cannon positions, soldiers standing armed and disciplined without a single thing out of place. The whole scene carried the tension of a true front line.
Eventually, the two of them crossed a ridge and reached the edge of an open cliff.
"......Nice view."
The wind stirred Max's hair. The deep blue sea stretched endlessly. Beyond it, the snow-white territory of Finnomia spread wide in a single sweeping vista.
"Edmund."
In that scene like something out of a watercolor painting, Maximilian called his name.
Edmund turned quietly.
"If we set up artillery emplacements along Finnomia's coast, would they reach all the way to the Lobrus capital?"
"......Who knows. Never bothered to calculate that. More importantly, how are the family registers?"
Edmund's attention stayed fixed on the registers alone. Maximilian smiled faintly. He held out the two documents he'd just been given.
"Already finished the analysis?"
"Yeah. They're genuine."
Maximilian nodded.
"Captain Heintz is three-quarters Imperial Aran, one-quarter Hailand. Captain Kane is seven-eighths Aran, one-eighth Mer. Kane's cutting it close. Mer only gets overlooked up to one-eighth."
Kane and Heintz were mixed blood, but they weren't Izenheim.
Edmund clenched his fist without meaning to. He let out a sigh of relief and asked again.
"Is that much mixed blood acceptable, from the Empire's point of view?"
It was meant as something of a joke.
"Serve the Empire faithfully as a soldier and you can qualify as quasi-applicable bloodline. Better than plenty of rotten Aran, honestly. But aren't you curious? Why they became Georgen's targets in the first place."
"......Who knows."
Maximilian was thinking it through.
This was a deliberate move, striking at the people around Edmund to try and pull him in. Somewhere inside Georgen, Izenheim was lurking. Or at the very least, someone equivalent to a Revolutionary Faction operative.
"I don't think the family registers themselves are the real issue. The problem is ideology. If your adjutants ever so much as glance at a banned book, tell me first."
"No need to worry about that. They're soldiers through and through."
Maximilian looked at Edmund as he said it.
Edmund. Perhaps, before the regression, he had been the very first person to grasp the true, monstrous shape of Izenheim.
"......Well. Good thing, at least."
He folded the adjutants' registers carefully and tucked them away.
"Edmund."
Maximilian lifted his gaze without warning. He murmured, staring at the horizon, or somewhere far beyond it.
"I'm behind you."
A friend met again, after turning through so many long years.
The words he wanted to give to the man who had turned back the clock on a world already spiraling toward ruin, the man who had brought him to this miraculous present.
"You can reach wherever you want to go now."
All he could do was hope for it.
If, in this world he had essentially restored with his own hands, he himself never got to live and breathe in it, there would be no greater tragedy than that.
"......So."
He hoped that the man who would one day turn toward the revolution would come back to them again.
"Whatever happens, trust me."
He hoped that Edmund would choose Maximilian, not the revolution.
* * *
"The problem is history! Search through every ancient text from the Empire's thousand years, and you will not find a single record of a race called 'Izenheim' anywhere!"
A lecture hall at Imperial Central University. A student standing at the podium pressed on, his voice rising with fervor.
"Edellem, Dromon, Yaken......"
He traced through a thick history book, retracing the long-standing lineage of the subspecies living on the continent today.
"They have history. The Yaken especially have long been of service to the Empire......"
Nearly every subspecies had existed alongside the continent's history since the Empire's founding, or even before it. Traces of them remained clearly recorded even in the era of the "Centric" civilization, the origin point of the Aran themselves.
"But Izenheim is the exception. Their history is deeply vague. They appear suddenly in a given era, and even their origin remains unclear."
In the back row of the lecture hall.
A knight sat listening with interest to the fervent student's voice.
"The same goes for their religion, 'Izent.'"
Point by point. Piece by piece. Corner by corner.
The more you picked it apart, the more suspicious things there were about Izenheim. Too many uneasy details to simply write off as discrimination and hatred toward a subspecies.
No proper history. A religion that formed out of nowhere.
Ethnicity and religion were both supposed to form through a long accumulation of shared community consciousness, but Izenheim had no such continuity.
They tried to dress up that contradiction with the flimsy claim that they were a "forgotten branch of an ancient race," but the argument itself was hopelessly weak.
"Izenheim gathers its forces and parasitizes financial capital. They suck the pure Aran's lifeblood dry through usury, latching onto compradors and eroding the Empire's interests. On this basis alone, they qualify as anti-race......"
"What do you think?"
At that moment, the dean seated beside the knight asked cautiously.
The knight, Hanna Usar, nodded.
"Not bad."
Now in her second year at the Sentinel, she had her junior knight Mia and her fellow year-mate Royce beside her. Not just them, either. The lecture hall was packed with new knights whose Sentinel induction had just been confirmed.
As a proper senior knight now, she'd dragged them all here for the sake of properly grounding her juniors' ideology and giving them a chance to sit in on the lecture.
"The structure of the speech is quite solid. Good rhetoric, too."
Maximilian's autobiography, "Moonlight Below."
Dr. Johann's thesis compiling his arguments, "A Thousand Years of Empire."
Since "A Thousand Years of Empire" had gone through Maximilian's own review and carried his endorsement, it was essentially an extension of "Moonlight Below."
"I should reference that student's phrasing in my next paper too."
Hanna murmured, scribbling in her notebook, and Royce beside her tossed out a jab, half joking.
"Please. Your writing's never been great. Just hire a ghostwriter."
Hanna's brows drew tight.
"What matters is the content and insight inside it, not the writing style."
"Sure, sure. I'll introduce you to a good ghostwriter who can dress up your brilliant content nicely, so give it a shot. Oh, right."
Royce dropped his voice suddenly.
"Hey. Did you hear the Izenheim have set up some kind of rights organization among themselves lately?"
"......A rights organization?"
"Yeah. Something about ending discrimination, guaranteeing their right to survive, that sort of thing. Trying to quietly band together again, it looks like."
Hanna let out a short, scornful laugh. A dark contempt slipped out naturally, but at some point her mouth went cold and hard.
"Ridiculous."
"Tell me about it."
Mia gave a hollow laugh of her own.
"...... We must not treat this as annexation or violence. Every act of the Empire has its grounds."
The Aran race was superior to all others in both soul and body, and so it was only right that they held the authority and responsibility to rule and lead civilization. If anything, the Aran were the ones bearing sacrifice, working to purify the continent of 'inferiority.'
Words that swelled the heart just to hear them.
"Selecting between races and applying a hierarchy to restore order. That is precisely the devotion the Empire offers to the continent."
An order fixed since the very beginning of the continent. The duty of the strong to embrace and guide the weak, restoring humanity's rightful hierarchy.
Which made it, in the end, an entirely natural calling, and an entirely noble one......
......
"Hanna, Knight Hanna!"
After the lecture ended, in the hallway of Central University, a voice called urgently after Hanna.
"......?"
She turned back briefly. A young girl stood there, baby-faced. Sharp eyes, a sharp jawline. A face that stood out at a glance.
"Knight, I......"
"Yaken?"
"Yes, yes! That's right! My name is Erka!"
Erka. At the girl's answer, her voice flushed with excitement as she introduced herself, Hanna's expression softened into a gentle smile.
"One of my administrative officers is Yaken too. What can I help you with?"
"Ah, it's nothing much, just......"
Erka clutched something tightly in both trembling hands, clearly nervous.
Hanna soothed her gently.
"Relax, relax. I'm not going anywhere."
The Yaken tribe had recently received official recognition as one of the Empire's "quasi-applicable bloodlines," and their treatment had improved considerably compared to before.
The simple fact that a Yaken freshman had been admitted to Imperial Central University said something about how much better regarded they'd become within imperial society.
"Could, could I get an autograph, please!"
Erka thrust something forward. An exam prep book related to knight administrative appointments. In other words, the required qualification exam textbook for anyone hoping to become a knight's clerk or administrative officer.
"......An autograph?"
Caught off guard by the request, Hanna blinked blankly for a moment before bursting into a delighted laugh.
"Wow, look at you, a real celebrity."
Royce gave Hanna's shoulder a playful nudge. The other new knights broke into warm smiles.
Erka's face, meanwhile, went red as a tomato about to burst.
"My, my dream is to work in a knight order too, so......"
Her voice trailed off, small with embarrassment, but the longing behind it was genuine, and it was well within reach for a Yaken now.
"Yes. Keep working hard. You'll get there."
Hanna scrawled her signature across the cover of the exam prep book.
Having come up from the very bottom as a commoner herself, all the way to where she stood now, the Yaken girl's earnestness didn't feel like someone else's story to her at all.
"I'll look forward to meeting you in the knight order someday."
* * *
Eastern front garrison, the colonel's office.
Edmund glared at the two Georgen officers seated across from him.
Chomp, chomp.
They chewed their gum, meeting Edmund's stare without so much as flinching.
"Captain Kane and Captain Heintz. We sent people to make inquiries in the two adjutants' hometowns, and we've secured testimony suggesting their identities are in question."
An odd claim. Edmund asked back, calm.
"I don't follow. My adjutants' family registers were confirmed as genuine originals. And you're telling me a handful of uncertain testimonies from villagers is enough to call them fake?"
"Yes. That's correct."
One of the Georgen officers replied with a small smirk. Edmund swallowed down his bitterness at the sight of that repulsive face.
Somewhere along the line, a colonel of the regular army had become someone even Imperial Guard lackeys like these felt free to disrespect.
The Emperor shielded the Imperial Guard, and Sebastian followed only the Emperor's will. So the fact that Edmund had been raised by Sebastian meant nothing to men like these.
"Family register forgery's been running rampant lately, and there are plenty of people out there stealing genuine registers to launder their identities. Even if the register itself is authentic, there have been a few recent rulings that treat it as a forged identity if the villagers' cross-testimonies don't line up. Didn't you know?"
But the Maximilian Edmund had come to know clearly had something Sebastian never did.
He understood when to wield his power and when to hold it back, and above all, in the cracks of this Empire, he wasn't endlessly loyal to the Emperor. If anything, his words carried the shape of someone trying to build an order all his own.
"Who gave you this testimony?"
"Already told you. Can't say, witness protection."
"......"
Edmund clenched his fist.
Chomp. Chomp. Chomp. Chomp.
The sound of the two of them chewing their gum in unison scraped at his nerves, and a string of curses nearly slipped out of his mouth right then.
Knock, knock.
Right on cue, a knock at the office door broke the silence.
"Colonel, sir. An urgent delivery from Central."
Edmund nodded. His adjutant stepped in carefully, handed over a thick document envelope, and withdrew.
The Georgen officers' brows furrowed in irritation at the sight.
"Colonel, sir. I really don't know how you're training your subordinates. Barging in like that in the middle of official proceedings......"
Edmund ignored their grumbling and checked the contents.
Thankfully, it was the very thing he'd been waiting for.
"......I'll ask again. Who gave you this testimony?"
"Ah, come on. Why are you being like this. Keep pressing us like this and we'll have no choice but to report it as overreach to our superiors-"
Snap.
Edmund held up a single document in front of their faces, stamped with a red seal.
"Certificate of Family Register Authenticity."
The moment they saw the fluid signature scrawled at the bottom of the page, the color drained from the Georgen officers' faces.
"This requires verification from the knight order."
He understood the precedent. Even a genuine family register could be treated as forged if the villagers' testimony didn't match up. It was all guesswork anyway.
But the logic would shift again, depending on the authority of whoever had reviewed that register and guaranteed its authenticity.
"......If you're going to keep your mouths shut to the end about who gave that testimony."
Edmund glared at their bloodless faces and murmured, low.
"I'll have no choice but to hand this whole corrupt investigation."
To these vermin who played soldier without being soldiers, played nobility without being noble, and dared to wield power they had no right to.
"Directly to Knight Maximilian himself."
Edmund had decided, gladly, to borrow the name Maximilian.
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