Chapter 31
Our army had only just begun arming in earnest.
Naturally, there was a mountain of work to do.
Just the navy alone already had all kinds of tasks waiting for us.
Develop anti-submarine measures. Expand the fleet. Develop new types of warships...
On top of that, the manpower needed to modernize the West was enormous.
An industrial revolution doesn't happen just by throwing up a few factories. Skilled workers and experienced managers are needed. More manpower.
Of course, that manpower would be drawn from our South.
Railroads?
We're trying to make as much use of local labor as possible, but we need our own manpower here too.
And the high-level personnel filling the administrative vacuum in the West were also ours.
The countless vacancies left by the disappearance of the corrupt nobles. The incompetent West couldn't fill them, so our people were covering that void.
In effect, it meant the South was what kept the near-vegetative West moving.
The advantage was that the West had now become our own front yard.
With life becoming more comfortable, the people were satisfied, and the upper levels couldn't function without our personnel. If things kept going like this, annexing the West would proceed smoothly.
The problem was that it left us short on manpower.
"In that situation, we're supposed to consider the relationships between the western native tribes too?"
Yet now they were saying we also had to consider the natives' relationships.
There were tribes that raided heavily, and tribes that raided hardly at all. Tribes with blood ties to the West, and tribes that had some sort of mutual defense pact with it, so they had been responding differently depending on the situation.
It wasn't an unreasonable way to act.
The corrupt nobles and the undisciplined army couldn't block every native wave, so they must have been barely fending off only the lethal blows.
The problem was that most of the nobles who had been the standard for those responses had been swept away.
And now they wanted us to pour manpower and administrative capacity into investigating everything from scratch and reorganizing everything from scratch?
We were already on the verge of a manpower crisis.
"Do we really need to show that kind of care toward the bastards who keep raiding our borders?"
The incompetent former West had no choice but to block attacks that way.
But we didn't need to.
"Treat all barbarians who approach the vicinity of our territory as enemies and open fire."
Then won't that just enrage the natives?
I didn't care. In fact, that was exactly what I wanted.
Hit them, and they'll come in greater numbers?
Let's see for ourselves whether there are more natives or more of our bullets.
"How do you plan to deploy the troops?"
"Hmm. For now, send only about a hundred men to each area. The first reinforcements' goal isn't to strike bases, but to defend the territory."
Right now, there were far more guns than soldiers in the army.
Since we were running a wartime economy and keeping the arms factories going, weapons were pouring out nonstop, but the soldiers to use them were limited.
Even so, why keep producing weapons?
In the end, once the West was fully annexed, we'd have to put our weapons into the hands of the Western Army too.
For now, we'd send in a force of around a hundred and have them carry out joint operations with the Western Army.
Once they built trust through a few such operations, we'd hand them our weapons.
So a hundred would be enough. We could make up the shortfall by arming the local military.
"Let's use this chance to train the Western Army little by little too."
A weapon that could efficiently slaughter barbarians?
The soldiers on the Western border would probably love it.
Then we'd get the Western soldiers used to our weapons and carry out joint operations under the pretext of suppressing the barbarians.
What could the center possibly say if we were suppressing barbarians who were harming the Empire?
Through lawful joint operations, we'd integrate the command structure, train them in modern tactics, and foster the awareness that we were on the same side.
For a future that would one day head toward the imperial center.
***
The long-standing enmity between the West and the natives beyond the border goes back a very long way.
At the beginning, there were many tribes in the West, but one of them was the strongest. That strongest tribe united the others under it and became a single nation.
The tribes that agreed to the union and entered under its banner were the ancestors of the nobles who make up the West today.
The tribes that opposed the union and went their own way lived beyond the western border.
And before long, the Empire entered its golden age.
The Empire offered the West broad autonomy, economic support, technology transfer, cultural exchange, and more. In that way, the West finally became one with the Empire.
The Raymonz royal family, which had originally ruled the Western region, became the Western Grand Ducal House, and naturally Imperial culture flowed into the West.
And that had already been going on for hundreds of years.
While the West mixed with the Empire and became 'civilized,' the natives who lived among themselves in the forests and plains retained almost all their old ways.
Naturally, differences between the two groups were inevitable.
Hunter-gatherers and nomads versus a centralized agricultural state.
Which side had the higher output was obvious without even looking.
And when hunter-gatherers and agricultural states met, it was only natural that they would fight.
The natives repeatedly crossed the border and kept stabbing at the West. They raided farmland and kidnapped the people, causing enormous damage.
At least before Kaiser III's iron-fisted rule, things were manageable.
The Empire before Kaiser III did not tolerate such actions by the nomads.
Even if it was the West beyond the Arbel Mountains, the central army would intervene directly and suppress the nomads.
But after the iron-fisted rule ended and the Empire entered its dark age, things changed.
After the thirteen-year-old prince ascended the throne, the Empire set off down the road to rapid decline.
The nobles became corrupt, the Empire's swords and spears rusted, and the officer corps was filled with political officers who had no combat experience.
Over the past forty years, the central government had been unable to spare any attention for the West.
Taking advantage of that gap, the nomads began running wild again.
Even if Western Grand Duke Charles Raymonz had recently resumed fighting the natives, that didn't make the West's situation any better.
Charles Raymonz wasn't waging war to stop the natives, after all.
He simply loved war, and he went around waging it recklessly with conscripted commoner troops.
For Edwin, lord of the small frontier town of Eirene in the western borderlands, it was nothing but a headache.
"Charles Raymonz, that stupid bastard."
The West had lost nearly 50,000 troops in total during the conflict with the South. With the central reserve forces having vanished entirely, the natives' offensive only grew fiercer.
A few days ago, that's when the 'proposal' had come his way.
If he offered up a certain amount of wealth, they would not attack his domain.
Being treated as if he were a Western noble who meant nothing at all made Edwin furious.
But soon, he realized reality.
That the West, having suffered a crushing defeat in a territorial war against the South, could not refuse this proposal.
The day he gritted his teeth and was about to sign the proposal.
"My lord, there is contact from the South!"
"From the South?"
Suddenly, a message arrived from the Southern Grand Duke's residence.
It said they had received the West's request for help and would send support.
In the past it might have been different, but now was not the time to be picky. He knew all too well how barbarians treated you once they marked you as weak.
On top of that, he'd heard a fair bit about the South's new weapons as well.
Edwin, brimming with expectation, asked his aide.
What's the size of the reinforcements?
"Uh, well..."
After hesitating for a moment, the aide answered carefully.
"They say it's... a force of about 100 men."
"What?"
Edwin couldn't help asking back.
For good reason: it was obvious that just 100 men would never be enough to stop the western barbarians' offensive.
This wasn't a matter of technology or new weapons.
No matter how good the weapons were, they didn't work against the barbarians.
It was because of the spells their shamans cast.
'A spell that numbs pain'
'A spell that removes fear'
Barbarians who charged without fear were the terror of the western infantry. There was no way to stop bastards who kept rushing in laughing their heads off even after being stabbed with spears.
The only asymmetric force that could stop them, the wyvern knight order, had mostly left the West after the defeat.
"How are they supposed to stop a horde of fearless barbarians with only a hundred men..."
Edwin wasn't the only one thinking that.
The chief of the Temelican tribe, one of the larger western tribes, burst out laughing after hearing the scout's report.
"Kwahaha, only a hundred? A hundred?"
"Yes. They are encamped on the plain in front of the territory and digging in."
"I've misunderstood something about the South, it seems."
The Temelican warriors fought best on the plains.
There was no way to stop the charge of Temelican warriors, who knew no pain, on an open plain with no cover at all.
They planned to block that with only a hundred men?
"I thought they were pretty impressive since they said they won against the West, but to be this foolish..."
Not knowing much about the South's 'new technology,' the Temelican chief took it lightly and gave the order.
"Gather the warriors! It's time to make the bastards who dared reject our merciful proposal pay the price!"
"Gather the warriors! It's time to make those bastards pay for rejecting our merciful proposal!"