Chapter 114
The square was filled in every direction with people cheering.
The drums played by the military band at the front of the procession pounded against my heart, while the engine noise of the armored vehicles surrounding us made my skin tremble.
Everyone's eyes were fixed on me.
The man who would become the Empire's new emperor. The superhuman who had breathed new strength into the crumbling Empire. The eyes of those expecting me to restore the Empire's glory once more were... To be honest, they were a little overwhelming.
But I was a leader who had been ruling for eighteen years now. Maintaining a poker face without letting it show was not particularly difficult.
Once I hid the ordinary, small-citizen mindset I had carried over from my previous life, I finally found a little room to breathe.
"The citizens are quite enthusiastic."
"That means the expectations they place on you, Lord Kyle, are just as great."
As always, it was Lucilla who answered from beside me.
There was no one else in the car I was riding in besides Lucilla, the driver, and me.
That was slightly different from the usual sight of high-ranking officials seated beside a nation's leader during a procession.
After all, the seat closest to a person in power inevitably came with a comparable degree of power.
Even if I had no intention of granting anyone power, if people believed they had it, then it was practically the same as if they did.
Having a man remain beside me at the very moment I proclaimed myself emperor? People might interpret that as the birth of a new second-in-command.
And I still had no intention of creating anyone who could rival me as my second-in-command.
Until now, the strength of our Southern regime had been that my orders reached every corner without fail, but the emergence of a second-in-command would make things considerably more complicated.
At least until I unified the Empire, no one could be allowed to rival my power.
Thinking that, I answered Lucilla.
"Still, I can't say I dislike it."
"I... find it a little overwhelming. To be honest, I never imagined that the daughter of a fallen house could stand in a place like this."
"No, you have every right to be here. You were my first revolutionary comrade and the one person I trust most."
People who possess everything cannot feel the sincerity of others, because they cannot tell whether someone approaches them because of their power or because of who they are.
Perhaps that was why I felt more affection for Lucilla than for anyone else.
Eighteen years ago, she was the only person who followed a Southern Grand Duke who had nothing but a name. She was the revolutionary comrade who helped me transform the South with the Labor Standards Act that everyone else had thought was nothing more than a delusion.
In terms of stocks, it was nothing short of buying in at the absolute bottom.
There was no one left in the Empire who could say anything to me. Lucilla, who had also been the only person at my side during the victory parade, would be treated much the same way.
"The status system doesn't mean much anymore. Just enjoy this moment."
With those words, the procession entered the center of the plaza.
Everyone's eyes were fixed on my face. Since I couldn't just open my mouth carelessly in a situation like this, our conversation ended there, but... when I glanced at Lucilla, her expression looked considerably more at ease than before.
I, too, smiled faintly inside and waved ceremonially.
Before I knew it, the procession was heading toward its end.
After showing the might of our Southern Army, what we would show next was the downfall of the old Imperial dynasty.
Once again, a unit carrying flags appeared. They were carrying the Imperial Army corps banners captured in battle.
Strangely, they held the flagpoles upside down, with the flags pointing toward the ground. Marching while carrying all sorts of Imperial Army banners upside down, the soldiers stopped before the walls of the ruined Imperial Palace.
The soldiers threw the banners onto the damp ground before the Imperial Palace and trampled them mercilessly with their military boots.
A flag was a symbol of an army and a nation, and trampling such a flag was a tremendous insult. It was therefore an act no one could have dreamed of while the Empire still stood.
Yet among the countless citizens lining the route from the plaza to the Imperial Palace, there was no one to stop them.
There could be no better image of the Imperial Army's destruction. It showed that no one cared about the old Empire anymore.
The reporters following behind eagerly took pictures of the scene.
They wanted to show the entire world the downfall of the old, incompetent, and corrupt Empire.
Just as the Imperial Army's military band had opened the march, the military bands filling the plaza around two o'clock played a majestic military song to bring the parade to a close.
Above the heads of those military bands, thirty wyvern knights flew in perfect formation.
With the sight of the wyvern knights flying past above the procession, smoke grenades of every color trailing from their tails, the Southern Army's victory parade that had brought down the Empire came to an end.
However, that did not mean the event itself was over.
The nobles were dragged up one after another onto the platform where the great emperor's statue had once stood. In their line of sight stood a guillotine with an eerily honed blade.
They had brought too few administrative personnel to investigate every crime and wrongdoing committed by the nobles they had captured. Thus, only a few were dragged out as examples.
Those whose guilt was obvious and who needed no complicated trial were forced to appear before everyone in shabby clothing.
Commoners looking up at the nobles, and nobles looking down at the commoners.
It was a scene no different from the usual one, but the expressions on the two sides were completely opposite. This time, it was the nobles who trembled with fear.
They had thought nobles being executed by guillotine was something that belonged only in the history of a republic hundreds of years ago, but now they were about to become the ones facing it.
Meanwhile, not a trace of sympathy could be found on the crowd's faces.
These were already nobles infamous among the people. They were the ones who had committed crimes using their power and yet could not be touched.
"Duke Albert, you are charged with dozens of counts of soliciting murder and..."
As the charges were recited one by one before the guillotine, the citizens' expressions grew increasingly grim. From time to time, some of them even threw stones at the criminals on the guillotine platform.
"Shut up! I cannot accept the result of this summary trial! After going through a proper trial procedure..."
"He wants to go quickly. Send him off."
One of the nobles who had been struggling was the first to have his neck placed beneath the guillotine.
Duke Albert, who had wielded enough power to bring down even a bird flying overhead, vanished like dew from the guillotine's blade.
Some of them fell to their knees and begged.
"S-Sorry! I really did wrong! If you give me just one more chance, I'll live a good life..."
"Why didn't you give the people you killed for fun just one more chance?"
Of course, his plea fell on deaf ears.
Once the shields of power and money had disappeared, all that remained were useless old men incapable of doing anything.
Still, dying on the guillotine could be considered a fairly good death.
For nobles whose crimes were truly heinous, even the guillotine was too lenient.
They were executed on a temporary wooden scaffold built directly opposite the guillotine.
The method of execution on that side was not nearly as merciful as the guillotine. Unlike the guillotine, which at least guaranteed a clean death, hanging was one of the most horrific ways to die.
And it was also the most miserable way to die.
Hanging had long been used as the most dishonorable method of execution, reserved for heinous criminals, the lower classes, and the lowborn.
For those who had lived their entire lives proud of being nobles, no end could have been more horrifying than this.
"Duke Aslan. You..."
"Shut up! I am a duke of this Empire! I am a member of the family that aided the great Founding Emperor when he established the Empire!"
"Damn, he's loud. Did selling drugs make him lose his mind too?"
The nobles who could not accept that they were going to die by hanging threw fits, but that could not possibly change the reality before their eyes.
The fate awaiting him was not a merciful one. He had secretly distributed drugs throughout the Empire and argued that the Imperial Army should be drugged so that it could fight to the bitter end.
They were hanged without even being given time to leave their final words.
"Huh, looking at them like this, those noble bastards really were human after all."
"No kidding. They were such scary bastards when they were alive..."
"Hah, so what? Now they're just corpses, unable to do anything anyway."
The nobles' corpses were left lying on the ground without even being properly cleared away.
There could be no better sight for conveying that the class system had collapsed. The citizens defaced the corpses to their hearts' content, feeling that the nobles' era had come to an end.
***
Meanwhile, even amid all this, there was one person who still failed to grasp what was happening.
The former Crown Prince of the Empire, Theodore.
Having fled earlier than anyone else, he had quickly reached the rendezvous point where he was to meet Aria.
But because he had been moving secretly for the sake of safety, he had no clear idea what was happening in the Empire.
He simply assumed complacently that everything was going well because the nobles had said they would hold things off.
"Yes, I'll spend some happy time with Aria until everything is over. That's what everyone must want, too."
Muttering that, he opened the door of the cabin with an expectant heart.
"Aria, I..."
It was around then that he noticed something was strange.
The cabin where Aria should have arrived ahead of him and been waiting was utterly silent, without a single sign of human presence.