Chapter 223

Semi-Coercive Imperialist

"Thank you, Colonel."

Inside a tent at the eastern imperial front line, Captain Kane and Captain Heintz bowed deeply to Edmund.

"Thank you!"

They said it again, voices trembling. Their eyes had already gone red, on the edge of tears.

Their gaze dropped for a moment, fixed on the single sheet of paper clutched tight in their hands.

[ Certificate of Authenticity for Family Register ]

The name of the appraiser who had issued and signed this certificate was Sentinel Maximilian.

"......Apparently this is a certificate most people never get to see once in their whole lives."

A relieved smile touched the corner of Heintz's mouth.

Envy didn't even begin to cover it, honestly.

The two of them had recently faced open distrust from soldiers and fellow officers. Even before Georgen's internal investigation spread through the military, word had quietly leaked that they were of mixed blood.

But this one thin certificate, the signature engraved at the bottom, Maximilian Ebenholtz, had dissolved every trace of suspicion and friction.

Word that Maximilian himself had verified their family registers turned the distrust inside the military into something closer to awe.

"Keep it safe. That paper's worth your life."

"Yes, sir! We'll bear that in mind!"

How could the world change so easily?

How could the name of a single person carry so much weight?

"Loyalty!"

Watching the two adjutants salute, Edmund asked, his voice gone quiet.

"......Do you two serve the Empire out of genuine loyalty?"

"Of course!"

Heintz answered without hesitation. Kane nodded the same way.

"That family register may have opened your airway just now, but in the end, that same blood might keep you from ever climbing any higher."

The reason Edmund himself could never become a knight.

The reason he could never reach the place he wanted.

"Even so...... a new path has opened now. 'Quasi-applicable bloodline.'"

Captain Kane answered carefully, his voice carrying a note of hope.

"Captain Heintz has it a little easier than I do. Hailand mixed blood gets classified as Aran lineage, so-"

"Kane, you're Aran too. If seven-eighths Aran doesn't count as Aran, who does?"

"......Thank you, sir."

Told that he too was Aran, he answered with thanks.

The Empire's system, its ideology, had bound even the souls of its soldiers.

"......"

Edmund turned his gaze away in silence. He looked out at the darkness beyond the tent.

Who had decided this concept of bloodline in the first place, and by what right had they carved it up this way? Could blood really determine every ounce of a person's worth?

He couldn't make sense of it at all, but thoughts like these weren't the kind he could speak aloud.

"Go rest. Tomorrow's march is a long one too."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, Colonel! Loyalty!"

"Loyalty!"

The two adjutants withdrew, and quiet settled back over the tent.

Edmund closed his eyes. Caught in his own private darkness, he turned over a word he had buried deep in his chest.

Revolution.

It either boiled up from the lowest bottom and burned the world, or descended from the very top and dyed the world in its color.

But there was only one method for revolution. At least, that was how it worked in this Empire.

...... To Edmund, who had always thought exactly that until now, a thought surfaced.

Maximilian's words came back to him.

"I'm behind you."

What had Maximilian meant by saying that?

"You can reach wherever you want to go now."

The man who had spent his adolescence alongside him, had he already sensed the depths of Edmund's heart? Had he glimpsed, however faintly, the intent Edmund carried inside him?

Edmund sank slowly into endless brooding.

* * *

Lien, a city in the western Empire.

Inside this small town, coiled into its daily life, was a nest of serpents.

"They are traitors plotting insurrection against the Empire, scheming to overthrow the system."

Maximilian's voice lingered in their ears.

In the early hours before dawn, the operation unfolded in secret.

Cliff took the lead, with Mia, Jeffrey, and Lucas, four knights, along with a handful of elite agents, infiltrating in plain clothes.

"Their base is an ordinary house, along with a small hospital nearby."

The Revolutionary Faction always worked this way. They hid among the people, in the ordinary spaces between them, using the lives of innocent civilians as a shield.

"We strike that location and capture or eliminate only the key personnel. Civilian damage must be kept to a minimum."

The knights split into teams with the agents and struck the target points simultaneously.

A standalone house, a small hospital, a hardware store, a fish market.

They concentrated their forces on the sites Schatz had already pinpointed.

"Bear this in mind."

But an operation rarely unfolds exactly as planned.

BOOM!

A sudden blast shook the street. The moment the knights infiltrated the hospital, an explosion touched off chaos across the block.

"The moment they sense they're cornered, they'll try to draw civilian casualties to scatter our attention."

The Revolutionary Faction operatives, the instant they realized they were surrounded, set fire to the hospital along with their key documents, and their most important people burst out from inside.

"Don't let them get away! After them!"

Cliff shouted. The knights gave chase at once.

Subjects jolted from sleep screamed, and a mana-laced gale tore through the alley.

Just as knight Mia had nearly closed the distance,

"Gwaaah!"

A massive figure blocked the middle of the alley with a roar.

Something easily over two meters tall swung a mace and knocked Mia back.

"Out of my way!"

Mia rushed in sharply and loosed a strike with her sword, but the mace's mana caught and repelled her sword aura.

Whoosh! Whoosh!

The thing swept its mace in a long arc. Everything within that radius was swept away.

Mia faltered for a moment,

"Stand back!"

Cliff leapt in, drawing his sword. It wasn't a standard-issue blade.

A misshapen thing, like two greatswords forced together into one.

A unique weapon built to fully contain Cliff's particular brand of destructive power.

Hmmmm!

Deep blue mana coiled and burst across the heavy blade. Before the giant could even get into a defensive stance, Cliff's massive frame plunged down vertically out of the air.

CRRACK!

The sound of a body tearing apart. Cliff's greatsword split the enemy open from collarbone to abdomen. The thing crumpled to the ground in two pieces.

"Keep chasing. Don't let a single one get away."

Cliff shook the blood off his greatsword and gave a glance. Mia nodded briefly, stepped over the giant's corpse, and was about to sprint on again when she stopped short.

There was no need.

Her gaze lifted to the sky. Cliff's did the same.

Shhhhhhh......

White moonlight tore down through the open sky. The moment "it," looking for all the world like a meteor shower, touched the ground......

BOOOOOOM!

A mass of wind tore through the entire city like it was being ripped open.

......

The operation succeeded cleanly. Several caches of the Revolutionary Faction's hidden assets were discovered, and most of the key officers were either captured alive or killed on the spot. Aside from the initial explosion, civilian damage was almost nonexistent.

A few days later, at the top floor of Sentinel Order headquarters.

Kairon's office as Commander.

"Congratulations, Cliff."

Cliff stood before Kairon. The gold nameplate reading "Commander Kairon" still felt a little unfamiliar, even now.

"The operation report. Have you seen it?"

"No. Not yet."

Kairon smiled with satisfaction and held out the paperwork.

"Then have a look. Maximilian wrote it himself, and apparently your contribution was enormous."

Cliff took the document, but his expression stayed stiff as he answered briefly.

"......I just did my job."

"Ha. Still the same as ever."

Kairon laughed heartily and leaned back in his chair. Even his manner of speech had shifted to fit his rank.

"Word came from the palace. You're to expect a medal for this."

A medal. A clear honor for any knight, but Cliff's expression barely changed.

"Also, the way this operation unfolded, the tactics used, has become a fine example in its own right. It'll probably be formally recorded in the next knight's manual."

Keep the strike team on the ground, and post a knight skilled at aerial descent in the sky in case of emergency.

"The operation's being named 'Revolutionary Strike.' What do you think?"

"It's fine, Commander, but..."

Cliff bowed his head and added, respectfully.

"The junior knights who took the same risks alongside me deserve more credit than I do."

"Ah, that goes without saying. Mia, Lucas, Jeffrey...... you led the junior knights well."

"Thank you, sir."

After receiving that unfamiliar shower of praise, awkward and stiff, Cliff stepped out to find,

"You worked hard!"

"You worked hard, sir!"

Mia, Jeffrey, Lucas. The three junior recruits called out together, voices full of energy.

"......It was nothing."

Cliff cleared his throat, looking embarrassed, and glanced away.

"Go get some rest."

"Yes, sir!"

"Rest well, sir!"

Cliff himself went back to his own office meaning to rest, only to find a guest already waiting.

Maximilian.

He approached slowly, a faint smile on his neat features.

"You worked hard, Knight Cliff."

He said it gently, holding out a hand.

Cliff hesitated for a moment. Shame over his past self.

The day he'd misread Maximilian entirely over Anton's downfall and turned hostile toward him for no good reason.

"......"

But Cliff knew better now.

He knew what lengths Maximilian had gone to, in Anton's closed hearing, in the District 14 explosion, to protect both Anton and himself.

"......You too."

Cliff looked down at Maximilian's hand for a moment, then gripped it firmly.

"Well done."

......

The knights of the Empire move forward.

Sometimes in worn plain clothes, sometimes in dignified uniform, down into the lowest places among the people, or up into the highest places in society.

Their authority is no longer doubted by anyone.

The imperial military, the Imperial Guard, the Royal Guard who protect the Emperor, even the nobles of the palace itself, all acknowledge the Sentinel's strict authority.

So a knight has no reason to take a bribe, no need to bow his head to some unjust request.

Knights forge their blades on nothing but their own strength and conviction.

Thud. Thud.

Hanna walked down the marble corridor and felt, in her own bones, the change that had soaked into the Order.

Dare Tan and Royce had cut ties with noble social circles entirely, and Lucas had received a medal in front of his own father, who happened to be a judge.

Commoner knights no longer had any reason to feel inferior over their status, and noble knights no longer bothered flaunting their birth in front of them.

Circumstance, and rank alike, had made the people they'd become.

Knights now operated under the umbrella of Maximilian, under the protection of Ebenholtz.

No matter how high someone's birth, it couldn't outrank Ebenholtz. No matter how much money someone had, it couldn't touch Maximilian's fortune.

So no power, no corruption, could do the Sentinel any harm.

The only power deeper than Ebenholtz was the Empire itself.

A Sentinel knight. A place any subject of the Empire could reach, if only they tried hard enough.

The door always open, so any pure Aran of the Empire could seize that chance through effort and talent alone.

No one dared encroach on the Sentinel's authority, and the Sentinel in turn kept its flexibility and self-purification......

And yet, every so often, an unexpected gap turned up in the smallest, most trivial place.

"......That actually happened?"

"Yes."

Maximilian's office. Hanna Usar stood beside junior knight Mia and reported how Mia's infiltration of the Revolutionary Faction had failed.

"'A Sentinel knight doesn't wear a wristwatch'......"

Maximilian murmured, setting the document down with a light thud.

Just as he said, knights these days didn't wear wristwatches. At the very least, the ticking-second-hand kind had all but vanished from inside the Sentinel.

Even an ordinary desk clock was hard to find anymore.

Which meant that when knights went undercover in plain clothes for an operation, they often didn't wear a watch at all.

A custom born entirely from Maximilian's own habits, in effect.

And every now and then, it seems, that becomes a blind spot the enemy can use to spot them.

"I'll bring it up with the Commander. Even I didn't see this one coming."

"Yes. Thank you."

"Knight Mia?"

"......Yes."

Mia, head bowed low like someone guilty of a crime, lifted her gaze.

"Lift your head. It's not your fault."

"......Yes. Thank you for understanding."

Mia straightened her shoulders, which had gone stiff a moment too late.

"Go on, then."

"Yes."

The two of them left Maximilian's office. Mia let out a breath first, and Hanna looked out through the corridor window.

The color of the world had grown vivid without her noticing.

Summer already, then.

"I swear...... my heart feels like it's about to burst. Are you okay, Hanna?"

Mia asked, still smoothing down a chest that hadn't quite settled.

"Okay, my foot."

Maximilian. A hill every knight in the Sentinel could lean on, and at the same time, a man more terrifying than anyone else alive.

"Same here. Even now......"

Hanna gave a small, hollow laugh and patted Mia lightly on the back.

"Enough of that. Get to work. Weren't you saying you had a mountain of paperwork?"

"Yeah. The Hermann Fund, there've been so many donations this time I have to process them all......"

Hermann. A former comrade who had died in battle against the Revolutionary Faction. He still remained, somehow, in the hearts of Sentinel knights like Mia.

Because the Sentinel does not abandon its comrades.

* * *

Screeeeech......

A sweltering day. A heavy mass of steel slid along the rails, closing in with a grinding screech.

"Spray some water inside. That stench is unbearable."

This was the border region between the Empire and Lobrus.

Guards sprayed cold water into the train's cargo car. Beyond the bars, the groans of huddled imperial prisoners mixed in with the hiss.

"There he is."

At someone's voice, the ranks of Lobrus troops lined up along the platform snapped to attention at once.

Maximilian Ebenholtz. The most famous imperial knight in the east.

"Good to see you, Knight."

Zerof, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs for the Eastern Alliance, faced Maximilian in a crisply pressed uniform.

"Another year's gone by, and summer's here again, Knight."

Zerof offered a deliberately warm greeting. Maximilian answered with a faint smile of his own.

"The seasons change, but you never lose your dignity, Committee Member Zerof."

At the brief compliment, the corner of Zerof's mouth twitched upward, just barely.

If Maximilian had thrown out some obviously false flattery about his looks or his stature, Zerof would have been irritated all the same, but Maximilian was different, as always.

He'd put his finger exactly on the value Zerof himself held most dear, a rigorously controlled bearing and a neatness bordering on obsession!

"What do you plan to do with the prisoners you're taking custody of this time?"

Zerof asked, tilting his chin toward the cargo car. Imperial defectors and reactionaries, expelled from Lobrus, were packed inside like freight.

"You know the answer. Why ask?"

His dry reply drew a silent laugh from Zerof.

"Our prisoners will be arriving soon too."

Maximilian gestured toward the opposite side. Zerof tensed slightly.

"Yes. This time, Knight, why don't you call them forward first."

That day, the ruthlessness Maximilian had shown during their first prisoner exchange.

Zerof, deeply impressed by it, had something of his own he wanted, very much, to show him in return.

"Let's do that."

Maximilian opened the train door, and Zerof drew the pistol at his hip and started forward toward them, when-

"Gwack!"

He tripped over the rail and went sprawling.

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