The Wavering Center and North

June 23. The workers rose up all at once.

The Northern Grand Ducal Household had buried workers beneath the mine and shot all the protesters to death—an act that could not be justified in any way.

The discontent that had been building for the past year over the Northern Grand Duke's violent suppression of the workers finally erupted all at once.

"Bread for the workers!"

"Let us work only ten hours a day!"

"Stop the tyranny of the factory owners! We are citizens of the North too, just like the factory owners!"

"Recognize the right to strike and expand the rights of labor unions!"

"Ban child labor!"

At first, the workers made demands related only to the Labor Standards Act. They had seen how well workers were treated and how prosperous the South was.

Besides, no one dared think of undermining the legitimacy of the Northern Grand Duke, which had endured for a thousand years.

The Northern Grand Duke was the symbol of the North's protection, and to the Northerners who had lived under monster invasions until just ten years ago, the Northern Grand Duke's existence had seemed only natural.

The fact that magic existed in this world also played a part.

This was a world where golden bloodlines truly existed, and where people with special abilities wielded extraordinary powers. That was why, at first, they protested only for basic rights.

Even so, Siegfried felt as though he were suffocating.

"If we stay away from work for three months, the capitalists will exhaust all their power, and if we don't work for half a year, we can welcome a new North!"

No matter how reckless the Northern Grand Duke was, he could not deny those words.

"All the employees of the North's First Arsenal have declared a strike! At this rate, we will be unable to deliver the firearms scheduled for delivery to the Imperial Family next month!"

"The Orlov Arms Manufacturing Company is the same! If this continues, production of the 110-pounder rifled cannons will also come to a halt!"

"The miners of Petrov Mining have declared a strike! They are demanding the harsh punishment of Petrov Mining's upper management, asking whether we intend to bury them too if an accident occurs!"

It had already been a year and a half since the East fell. By now, it should have been time to maximize factory efficiency and turn out weapons at full capacity.

Yet the factories had ground to a halt at precisely that time. Before the great war to turn the enfeebled Empire back into an empire of steel could even begin, the factories looked ready to collapse first.

"Those fools! The Empire must become great again! Only by purging the corrupt and incompetent nobles of the Center and driving away the great powers targeting us can our one hundred million Imperial subjects survive!"

To be honest, Siegfried was frustrated.

The sight of people launching protests because they did not want to work at a time when they ought to be charging ahead did not fit the Empire of steel he envisioned.

"While our army was risking its life to defend the front lines, you were safely working in factories behind the lines..."

Even so, he could not recklessly order them to open fire.

He understood that much, at least.

If they shot all the factory workers to death, there would truly be no one left to work from that point onward.

In a situation where he could neither act nor stand still, it was soldiers from the defensive line who set off a bomb in the North's already knife-edge situation.

For the army guarding the northern defensive line, disobeying orders was an act punishable by summary execution on the spot.

This was less a matter of the Northern Defense Forces being strange than of the North's circumstances. If they failed to obey orders in the face of the monsters surging in to wipe out the North, the front line would collapse.

Having been mentally reshaped on the defensive line, they viewed citizens who went on strike and protested as enemies.

And before they had received any orders at all, the soldiers from the defensive line made their own decision and acted.

Because when facing monsters on the defensive line, failing to do so meant death.

"Open fire."

Before the Northern Grand Ducal Household could issue an order, their guns began spitting fire.

The workers who had been protesting peacefully began collapsing one after another, helpless before the firepower of the soldiers from the defensive line.

"What are you doing?! The Grand Ducal Household hasn't issued an order yet!"

Despite the city defense forces' protests, the soldiers from the defensive line silently began massacring the citizens.

Matters even reached the point where the city defense forces, unable to endure it any longer, aimed their guns at the soldiers from the defensive line.

Thus, an unexpected firefight broke out around the First Arsenal.

And the smell of blood and gunpowder filling every direction was enough to drive the workers who had been protesting peacefully into a frenzy.

Instead of fleeing, the workers opened the First Arsenal's armory. As luck would have it, it contained a shipment of rifles that was supposed to have been sent to the Imperial Center.

Although the workers had received no proper training, that hardly mattered.

A gun was a weapon that enabled even an eight-year-old child to shoot an adult man to death.

The situation turned upside down once again. Once the workers also took up guns and resisted, even the units from the defensive line began suffering casualties.

Regular defensive-line forces, including mages, eventually entered and suppressed the situation, but by then public sentiment had turned too far to be recovered.

The government had completely ignored the workers' voices and deployed the units that had hunted monsters against human beings. That much could not be denied.

Moreover, it had been an uprising near the First Arsenal, which could be called the heart of the North. It was far too large to conceal, even if they wanted to.

"Run the secret printing presses at full capacity! Pour the Intelligence Bureau's budget into our agents in the North above all else!"

The Southern Intelligence Bureau also began to move in earnest.

Against the Northern Grand Ducal Household, which was trying to hide and cover up the truth by any means necessary, it began spreading the truth while setting up secret printing presses and the like.

Once the Southern Intelligence Bureau, capable of mobilizing a national budget and armed force, began acting directly, the Northern Grand Ducal Household was beside itself.

"No, we smash and burn down the secret printing presses as soon as we find them, so how do they keep producing more of them?"

"And their concealment magic is top-notch! It's not a scale that penniless workers could create!"

"Our military and police were killed recently when they raided a secret printing press. It looks like they have mages on their side too!"

By then, Siegfried could also sense what lay behind the protests.

There was only one hostile group in the Empire capable of mobilizing that much capital and manpower.

The South.

It was the evidence that gave Siegfried certainty as he hesitated to crack down. If this was a Southern plot, granting their demands would only work to the South's advantage.

And so, the Northern Grand Ducal Household attempted to suppress the communist protests without properly understanding them.

The result was disastrous.

"The Northern Grand Duke who kills workers must step down!"

"We are not monsters! We are human beings just like you!"

"The only thing we workers have to lose is our chains, while the whole world is ours to gain! Everyone, take up your sickles and hammers!"

The protesters' slogans grew increasingly violent. People began questioning the power structure of the Empire, which had endured for a thousand years.

And that ideology began spreading like wildfire toward the Center.

"The land belongs to those who till it."

The serfs suffering under the exploitation of the Central nobles also began to awaken.

Naturally, the Central government also began to panic.

Weapons that had not arrived? The South aiming straight at their throats? They had no room to worry about such things.

A dangerous ideology that denied the existence of the nobility and shook the Imperial Family had spread to them. To preserve the dynasty that had lasted a thousand years, the Center had no choice but to lend a hand in suppressing the protests in the North.

Thus, the year 1028 by Imperial reckoning became a record-breaking year in which production across both the Empire and the North was utterly destroyed.

Just when they should have been devoting all their strength to preparing for war with the South, the two regions were scrambling to put out the fires that had spread through their own backyards.

Bolt-action rifles? Rifled cannons? Such things no longer mattered. The Center had to spend its precious forces suppressing the unrest in the North and stabilizing its own citizens.

But did using up those forces to stabilize the region resolve the situation? Not at all.

Even if they somehow forced the workers back into the factories, there was no way workers who had already lost their motivation would produce anything properly.

In the end, the Center and the North began suffering from terrible inefficiency and the ideology of communism.

The only regions left unaffected by the wave of communism sweeping through the Empire were the South and the territories under its rule.

"Communism? Do we really need something like that around here?"

"Overthrow the capitalists? They already listen to us just fine."

"Welfare is increasing too. Is there any need to change society?"

"Change the ruling class? We can just live our lives. Lord Kyle Leopold seems to be taking good care of everything already..."

"I don't know, so let's just work. There's a reason that ideology was already discarded more than ten years ago."

Southern citizens did not feel any great need for the ideology of communism.

It was an ideology that had already died down once, more than ten years ago. The South of today was a place where a system of modified capitalism was being implemented step by step.

Moreover, approval of Kyle Leopold had continued rising after his victory over the East.

The West and the East were not in a significantly different situation either.

At a time when the economy was beginning rapid growth and people's lives were visibly improving, no one was about to launch a communist revolution.

Just as the Center and the North began losing their senses,

the Southern Design Bureau completed the engine that would go into the tank.