Most Wyvern Knights were sponsored by noble houses. Raising a single Wyvern Knight required enormous sums of money.
And those who had received such noble patronage all left the West.
Even so, roughly two hundred Wyvern Knights remained.
With new weapons rendering the western border obsolete, they had nowhere to go—their political foundations were too shallow to transplant elsewhere.
Most of them had spent their careers doing nothing but quietly holding the line.
"If we left for the Central Empire, what would actually change?"
They had taken up their lances to protect people, and they were deeply skeptical of the Empire's current state.
The Empire was crumbling. The Crown Prince was incompetent, the nobles corrupt. Anyone worth knowing already knew it.
What was the point of heading to the Central Empire—peaceful to the point of complacency—while everything slowly fell apart? Would there even be anything to do?
Their rank as Wyvern Knights would guarantee them decent treatment, of course. But they hadn't become knights for the treatment.
If wealth and comfort were what they'd wanted, they would have signed up for the Western Reserve Forces.
"Then again, staying here doesn't leave us much to do either, does it?"
"That's fair..."
The times had changed. No one felt that more acutely than the Wyvern Knights.
The new era's battlefield had no welcome for knights.
Wyvern Knights were helpless before the weapons of modern warfare. The conquest of the western steppes—their long-cherished ambition—had unfolded without a place for them in it.
"What about heading north instead?"
"The North won't be any different. Word is the monster wars are winding down up there too. Things are getting cozy."
Even the North, which had at least seen some fighting, was drifting toward an era of peace.
Going abroad had never been an option to begin with. They were knights of the Empire's people.
They knew better than anyone that chivalric honor was a fiction, that no institution was more entangled with power than the knighthood itself.
And yet they still wanted to uphold the spirit of what a knight was supposed to be.
"Hah... I can't see where this Empire is headed. It's bleak."
The conference room of the West's 23rd Knight Corps.
Twenty knights sat gathered, and the atmosphere was less dark than it was simply hollow.
They were educated men, and they understood exactly how rotten the Empire had become—which made it all the worse that they could do nothing but watch it decay.
"At least the West we tried to protect seems to be holding together. Small mercies, I suppose."
In truth, the West could hardly be called intact.
Over the past fifty years it had been slowly sinking, and under Sharl Reimonds it had finally broken.
The conflict between the South and the West—decided in a single week—had been a tremendous shock even to the Wyvern Knights.
At first they had pushed back hard, debating whether to intervene...
"But in the end, the people are living better lives."
It had already been a full year since the South-West conflict ended.
A great deal had happened in that time, and the West had been transformed entirely.
The lives of western people had improved markedly.
With the crushing taxes of corrupt nobles gone and the barbarian threat that had preyed on outlying territories eliminated, vitality had returned to the countryside.
As if the West alone were exempt from the Empire's collapse.
And everyone knew exactly who was responsible.
"Kayl Leopold. He really is something, isn't he."
The South before and after Kayl Leopold's rise to power looked like two entirely different places. From an outside perspective, the contrast was even starker.
As recently as ten years ago, the South had barely concealed its internal fractures.
Corporate magnates, the South Duke's residence, and the parliament all issued contradictory directives, while workers cried out that they were being worked to death.
The South of that era was notorious for poor public sentiment.
When people said they were heading south to make money, those who saw them off would always add a worried word: come back in one piece.
Its political voice had been negligible.
The South had simply never had power.
"So much has changed in just ten years."
The South that had been flailing had found its footing.
The suffering of workers had been addressed, and growth now had a clear direction.
Military strength had grown steadily stronger. Once the South's inefficient systems were reorganized, its factories began operating at full capacity simultaneously, churning out goods and weapons at a pace that defied belief.
"Completely unlike the Empire falling apart around it."
"You're not wrong."
Old states collapse. Old dynasties lose the capacity for renewal, and old nobles cling to their privileges.
Cracks form slowly in what once seemed an unshakeable foundation.
Leaders who do nothing but plaster over the surface pass the detonator to the next generation, and when that detonator finally goes off, everything ends at once.
In the knights' estimation, the Empire was one step away from detonation.
The South, by contrast—
It had the energy of a new dynasty, brimming with vitality.
That was why the knights couldn't shake a certain wistful thought.
"If only someone like that were leading the Empire..."
Enough to think it.
And it was before those very knights that Kayl himself appeared.
"A pleasure. I'm Kayl Leopold—South Duke and currently serving as policy advisor for the West."
***
Until an air force could be established, I needed a unit capable of eliminating strategic targets from the sky.
So I carved time out of a packed schedule and went myself.
These were far too valuable to lose over a half-hearted summons delivered through a subordinate.
"Ah—good day, sir. I'm Roen, Knight Commander of the West's 23rd Knight Corps!"
"A pleasure. I'm Kayl Leopold—South Duke and currently serving as policy advisor for the West."
That was why I had come to the western knight corps in person.
Political rhetoric wouldn't land with knights who had abandoned politics and stayed on the frontier to protect people.
Neither would the roundabout speech patterns typical of the nobility.
These men were the only thing left standing in a West where the entire upper echelon had rotted through, so I went straight to the point without hesitation.
"What brings you all the way to this humble place?"
"To give you the chance to fight for the people again."
"A chance, you say?"
These were knights who had quietly protected civilians even as everyone around them chased power and the knighthood began to take on the character of political officers.
Naturally, wealth and honor were not their goals.
"Yes. We'll likely be entering into conflict with the East before long."
It was something the knights—educated men that they were—had already sensed to some degree.
Every face in the room tightened slightly.
"Are you saying you intend to start a civil war within the Empire?"
"If necessary."
"Then we cannot help you. We are knights who protect civilians—not power-mad men who plunge them into suffering."
A reaction I had more or less anticipated.
I showed no sign of being rattled and asked in return.
"Plunge them into suffering?"
The ones plunging the Empire's citizens into the greatest suffering right now—and who would plunge them into far worse—were not me.
The incompetent upper class that would bring this Empire to ruin.
They were the true enemy of the Empire.
"Yes. There are plenty who would plunge the people into suffering. Especially on the other side of those Arbel Mountains."
"..."
"You already feel it, I think. That this Empire has no hope left. That the thousand-year dynasty has reached its end."
Words that could not be tolerated in a nation where an Emperor still sat on the throne.
But the knights, who felt that truth in their bones, could not bring themselves to speak against it.
"I have always stood on the side of those who suffer."
Even if, at the very beginning, it was only to keep myself off the gallows.
Regardless—I had always stood with the people.
"This time is no different. I will fight for the citizens suffering under a crumbling Empire. And you have seen with your own eyes what became of the West when it was falling apart, haven't you?"
"...We have."
The knights hesitated briefly before conceding the point.
They were the ones who had felt the West's transformation more viscerally than anyone.
"Then let me ask you something."
To make certain their minds were turned, I drove the decisive blow home.
"Who do you fight for?"
"..."
"An incompetent, corrupt state? Or the people suffering beneath it?"
"We..."
There was only one answer available to them.
"...We fought to protect the people."
That was the moment the western knights made up their minds.
***
New weapons for knights suited to a new era.
As it happened, those weapons were already more or less ready.
"The Design Bureau reports that all weapons testing ordered by Your Grace has been prepared."
"Good."
He who commands the sea commands the world. A law of the world that had not changed since the Age of Sail began.
Which was why I had a keen personal interest in weapons that dominated the sea.
Keen enough to keep developing and testing new weapons even after the battleships were already built.
Submarines, for covert strikes.
Torpedoes, the submarine's weapon.
Depth Charges, to sweep the abyssal monsters from the deep.
Naval Mines, for maritime blockades.
There was only one place where every one of these weapons could be tested together without issue.
The South's long-festering tumor: the pirates.
"Testing is approved."
On that order, the submarines waiting in dock filed out of port in a single column.
The following dawn.
Before the reef-strewn waters the pirates used as their base.
*Thoom—*
The hiss of compressed air launching a Torpedo, and a trail of white foam split the predawn sea.