Preparation

And so, after the Crown Prince was dragged away by the Imperial Guards.

The search party's attention turned to the other nobles who had jumped into the sea as the ship exploded. The Crown Prince was not their only target.

Surprisingly, many nobles had survived just like the Crown Prince.

That was because nobles always went around wrapped head to toe in magical artifacts.

Perhaps they had valued their own lives even while committing corruption, and so wrapped some of their accumulated wealth around their bodies.

Defensive artifacts worth as much as an average mansion did an excellent job protecting their owners as they were flung from the exploding ship.

Of course, was that really luck? It would be difficult to answer yes.

Since they were going to die anyway, a clean death right there would have been the best possible end... but because they had survived, they could no longer escape responsibility.

The only people who died there were the smugglers and their accomplices, who had continued their operations while evading the government's watch.

"Wow, if I'd known it would turn out like this, maybe I should have blasted them away with naval guns from the start."

The destroyers that had joined the operation behind the battleship Albion also focused on hauling the nobles out of the water.

The nobles tried to resist in their own way, but resisting while floundering in the water was impossible to begin with.

They could neither cast proper magic nor perform proper swordsmanship while in the water.

All the soldiers had to do was haul up those nobles and fit them with magical restraints.

"Let go! I said let go! How dare lowly creatures like you...!"

The nobles who resisted like that?

Most of them crumbled easily before the Imperial Guards' rudimentary torture. Having lived lives so far removed from pain, they were incredibly weak in the face of even a little suffering.

Nearly forty nobles had been hauled out that way.

That figure was almost exactly the number reported by the Intelligence Agency.

It could not be exactly the same number to begin with, since some nobles had died as armor-piercing shells tore through the ship.

"This is a satisfactory result."

Arthur, captain of the Albion, said so and ordered a withdrawal.

***

"You succeeded in capturing Theodore?"

The operation's success was reported to me immediately. I had made it clear how closely I was following it.

In truth, this was probably an obsession experienced by anyone who had seized power through force, whether in a civil war or a coup.

No matter how disastrously someone had run the country, the symbolism of having been the head of state was enormous regardless.

I had been rather worried that he might later be put forward to interfere in domestic affairs, but fortunately, it seemed the Navy had done its job well, which put my mind at ease.

"How long do you think it will take to bring him to the capital?"

"If we use the roads, we estimate it will take about one to two weeks."

Come to think of it, that might be right, given the poor transportation infrastructure.

Of course, we could bring him back sooner on a wyvern, but who knew what variables that might create.

All things considered, I felt safer with overland transport, since we could attach plenty of escort troops.

"Add a few tanks stationed in the East to the escort as well."

"Understood."

In any case, there was no enemy left capable of creating another variable within the Empire. There was no need to risk rushing Theodore and the nobles here.

"Tell them not to rush. Time is on our side for now."

Saying that, I turned my gaze north.

The North, home to no fewer than forty million of the Empire's one hundred and fifty million people.

Those forty million people were one reason I could not easily give up on the North.

The first reason was that allowing the North to be completely destroyed would severely damage my image as the emperor of the Empire, and the second was that I could not afford to abandon forty million people who had been modernized to some extent.

That was why we had to destroy the North with our own hands.

The weapon intended for the North, our first target, was already ready. The Gustav railway gun was that weapon.

Of all the methods currently available to us, the railway gun was the only one capable of penetrating the North's formidable defensive line.

By World War II standards, there were three ways to destroy a fortress. The first was naval gunfire from a battleship, the second was dropping aerial bombs, and the third was bringing in a gigantic gun.

However, each method had drawbacks.

First, the battleship's drawback was very simple.

Battleships could not move where there was no water. A battleship was still a ship, after all, and ships could never cross land.

Could we float the fifty-thousand-ton battleship Albion up a river, then? That was impossible. No river wide enough for a battleship that size led to the North.

Therefore, the first method was out.

The second method, aerial bombs, was at least a realistic alternative. After all, we had an aerial force in the form of the Wyvern Knights.

But the Northern defensive line was not so feeble that ordinary aerial bombs could blow it apart. The fortress carved out of a massive mountain range over centuries would not even be scratched by bombs weighing a few hundred kilograms.

Then how many tons would a bomb need to weigh to destroy a fortress?

The anti-fortification aerial bomb 'Grand Slam,' developed by the British military during World War II, weighed a staggering ten tons. A bomb that size was necessary to inflict meaningful damage on the defensive line.

The problem was that even Britain had no bomber capable of carrying a bomb that large at the time.

The Avro Lancaster heavy bomber operated by the British military at the time was about twenty meters long and had a wingspan of thirty meters, roughly the same size as our wyverns.

Even the Avro Lancaster, which could reach 480 kilometers per hour while carrying its maximum bomb load, could not properly make use of this bomb, so it would be impossible for a wyvern, whose normal speed was 100 kilometers per hour, to carry it.

A wyvern's basic power output was lower than a bomber's, so it could barely manage to carry even the earthquake bomb 'Tallboy,' which was half the size of Grand Slam.

They could carry it if made to fly at low altitude... but then mages would shoot them down without fail.

So, for the time being, the aerial-bomb option was out as well.

We still lacked proper aircraft technology.

Until now, what the Southern Army had needed most were the Army and Navy, while wyverns could fill in for an air force.

Research into aircraft concepts was still underway at the Design Bureau, but it would take several more years at minimum to build a proper heavy bomber.

So the only means left was the railway gun, with battleship-level firepower and penetration.

Considering that railway guns had originally been developed to destroy fortresses beyond the reach of battleships at a time when aircraft technology was lacking, perhaps this was only natural.

'That takes care of the Northern defensive line...'

For the monsters that would soon invade Imperial territory, I had a gift waiting that I had prepared in advance.

Having seen the twenty-first century, I knew all too well that wars did not end with clashes of firepower.

Humans were the creatures most naturally gifted at killing living things. That talent even extended into the invisible realm of poison gas.

And for our South, with its world-class universities and research institutions, producing such chemical weapons was not particularly difficult.

Phosgene, one of the notorious toxic substances, was extremely, extremely, extremely easy to make.

All it took was passing pure carbon monoxide and chlorine through activated carbon. On Earth, it had been developed as far back as 1810.

Naturally, companies in the South were already producing and using phosgene.

That was because phosgene was an essential material in organic chemistry.

And loading it into shells and firing them turned it into poison gas.

Besides, just because it was easy to make, did that mean it was any less potent? Not at all.

Phosgene inhaled into the lungs reacted with the moisture inside them to produce hydrogen chloride, or hydrochloric acid. Lung tissue exposed to hydrochloric acid melted away, causing excruciating pain.

Phosgene also destroyed the protein structures in the alveoli, causing asphyxiation.

It was a horrific weapon that inflicted fatal damage on any breathing creature and had no antidote to speak of.

Its only drawback was the delay before its effects appeared, but that was irrelevant.

When used in combination with chlorine gas, which caused immediate poisoning, its effectiveness multiplied several times over.

During World War I, the German and Allied forces gave this chlorine-phosgene mixture the codename WHITE STAR and sprayed it indiscriminately at one another.

"You mean... you want us to mix chlorine gas and phosgene?"

"Yes. I will provide as much funding as you need."

"Ah, understood! Leave it to us!"

At present, research institutes run by Southern companies, along with the universities there, were focusing on producing these chemical warfare weapons.

Spraying poison gas at other humans would earn one plenty of condemnation from the international community, but it was a different matter when the targets were monsters charging in to kill people.

There was no need to apply human rules to things that were not human.

"Lucilla, how is the production of gas masks coming along?"

"It is proceeding well according to plan. At this rate, we should have more than enough to equip 300,000 people by this time next year."

And once we had decided to use poison gas, gas masks came as part of the package. Unlike infantry weapons, poison gas had no eyes—it could not distinguish between targets.

We would control its deployment by having wind-element mages alter the wind's direction, but preparing for unforeseen circumstances was always the right thing to do.

"Then preparations are mostly complete."

With that, the preparations for the final war to conquer the Empire completely were nearly finished.

Now all that remained was the execution of former Crown Prince Theodore.