Semi-Coercive Imperialist - Chapter 164: Probing
Dawn, when the sky seemed to break apart.
In the Sentinel’s office, Chiron was still gathering all manner of documents.
The fruits of his relentless tracking and pursuit, mobilizing the full breadth of an intelligence network he had operated like a cell organization for years. The culmination of all the obsession he had built with blood and sweat would finally, today.
Shine at the public hearing to judge Deputy Commander Anton.
Anton’s former lover, Seria Martel, who had become part of the Revolutionary forces. The miscarriage between them, the doctor’s testimony. The love letters they had exchanged.
Chiron bound the thick stack of files together and stuffed them into a fine leather bag.
Rising from his seat and walking out into the empty corridor of the Knight Order, an irrepressible smile spread across his lips.
Once he leaked all of this to the press, Anton would be utterly destroyed. He would plummet into the abyss without even the slightest chance of recovery.
With that conviction, he descended into the underground parking garage.
“…?”
Beneath the dim lighting, someone was standing there.
His golden hair gleamed coldly in the darkness. He seemed to have noticed Chiron as well, turning his body to face him.
“Sir Chiron.”
Maximilian.
“Might I have a moment of your time?”
He asked politely with a faint smile. Chiron nodded in good spirits.
“Of course. What is it?”
“……”
Instead of answering, Maximilian fixed his gaze steadily on the briefcase in Chiron’s hand.
“Ah, you mean this?”
Chiron lifted the bag.
“You can look forward to it. It’s the final nail in the coffin that’ll cut off old man Anton’s breath for good.”
Maximilian quietly watched Chiron.
This, too, was the product of Chiron’s efforts.
A man who had run ceaselessly to seize what he wanted. A man who had climbed endlessly toward the heights he desired.
Chiron was a man who did not change.
And a person who does not change is, in and of itself, extraordinary.
Even amid the waves of war that would soon come crashing in, Chiron would stand tall as Chiron.
However…
“I don’t believe a finishing blow is necessary.”
Maximilian slowly shook his head.
“…What?”
Chiron’s smile froze in an instant. He stared at Maximilian with a strangely contorted expression.
“We are Arans of the Empire, and at the same time, Knights of Sentinel.”
Maximilian said this and extended his hand toward Chiron. The meaning was clear: hand over the documents inside.
“And in the end, Sentinel is still Sentinel.”
Chiron’s eyes trembled violently. For a moment, he could not comprehend.
This was the perfect opportunity to crush Anton and sever his entire faction…
Amid his sudden confusion, a voice reached his ear.
“Sir Chiron.”
Maximilian called to him softly.
“Was it a knight’s dream that brought you this far, or…”
The parking garage at dawn. The scent of settled dust and the sound of wind were unusually vivid.
Beyond the walls, snowflakes shimmered, cold or perhaps warm.
“Is it the emotion you can’t let go of right now?”
Emotion.
“…It’s already over, Sir Knight.”
Chiron looked at Maximilian.
He stood there motionless, reaching into the depths of his own heart.
He picked up the bitter sediment that had been lodged in his heart since some point he could no longer remember.
The sense of defeat that had seeped into his very bones from being dismissed as nouveau riche and scorned by the orthodox aristocrats.
The ugly truth that, to compensate for such vicious inferiority, he had been determined to drag Anton down into the gutter and trample him, a man who, despite being from a fallen noble house himself, had shone from a place higher than his own…
Maximilian’s words were true.
Anton had already been broken enough.
And yet, the malice of scraping together facts entirely unrelated to the hearing in order to bury him was not for the sake of achieving his dream, but merely for the sake of destroying him.
“…There’s nothing more for me to gain from this.”
As Maximilian said, Anton was, in the end, also Aran and also Sentinel.
For the sake of the Sentinel, for the sake of the Empire, and above all, for the sake of his own future beyond him.
There was no need to go too far with insults or to hurl filth.
“……”
A deep sigh rose from within Chiron’s chest.
Pressing down his brows, he handed the briefcase to Maximilian.
“…Take it.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
Maximilian received it with a respectful bow.
“Shall we go? There is someone waiting for you.”
He gestured toward a vehicle behind him. An attendant sat in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel.
Chiron climbed into the back seat, and Maximilian gave a brief nod before disappearing beyond the parking garage.
Vroooom…
Inside the car, moving through the empty dawn streets. Amid the cold winter night of the snow-covered Empire, taking in the strangely fresh atmosphere, Chiron was lost in thought. Quite a number of thoughts tangled together of their own accord.
In the meantime, they arrived before a restaurant with its lights dimmed.
“We’re here.”
In the establishment, where only a few remained after business hours had ended, Chiron was escorted politely inside.
He arrived at a private room deep within.
“……”
In the spacious room behind the heavy oak door, there was only one person.
Anton Zefren sat alone.
……
Meanwhile, in a secret chamber of the Imperial Palace.
Kentz Bertem sat facing Chief of Staff Grossman, tilting a glass of the finest wine. Trickle. The crystal glass, stained crimson, gleamed under the lavish lighting.
“It appears Anton Zefren will be giving up the Knight Commander position.”
Kentz spoke in a voice intoxicated with victory.
Anton had been eliminated, and the Sentinel had been split between commoners and nobles. The benefits the Imperial Palace faction stood to reap from this were boundless.
For one thing, Chiron would be far easier to control than the resolute Anton. The greatest reason the Imperial Palace’s politics and capital had failed to penetrate the Sentinel all this time had been Anton’s stubbornness.
“In that case, Kentz, it seems the time for you to make your real move is approaching.”
Grossman took a sip of wine and casually broached the subject.
“By move, you mean…”
“There will be a newly established Minister position before long.”
At that, Kentz’s eyes flickered with excitement.
“It’s about time we properly managed the regular army and the Sentinel, wouldn’t you say?”
A key post overseeing the regular army and the Sentinel. The long-held ambition Grossman had been preparing.
If he could only reach that seat, he could climb far higher and far faster than his elder brother, the heir of his house.
“Ha, haha, hahahaha! That is wonderful news indeed.”
Kentz burst into laughter. Grossman maintained his gentle smile while swirling his wine glass.
“By the way, about that closed hearing. I hear you went out of your way to bring up the matter of the child?”
However, just as Anton had experienced, a hearing was also required to ascend to a Minister position in the Empire.
“Yes. It was to make certain of things.”
“Will the aftermath be manageable?”
Kentz nodded as if it were obvious.
“It was a closed hearing, after all.”
The contents discussed at the Imperial Palace’s closed hearings were kept in strict confidence. Fragments might pass from mouth to mouth, but no one could definitively confirm anything.
It was classified under Imperial law, a secret whose disclosure was punishable by law.
“Even so, people can still more or less guess.”
“All the better. We simply mix in some falsehoods and leak them from our side first.”
Kentz answered leisurely, swirling his wine glass.
“The rumors will sort themselves out. I’ve already made the preparations. The talk about the child will probably be pinned not on me, but…”
Grossman raised one eyebrow slightly, as if he already knew the answer.
“On Maximilian Ebenholtz, I imagine.”
It was a closed hearing. One could neither deny involvement nor would denying it make any sense.
Above all, the faction within the Sentinel that had lost Anton would want to believe whatever suited them. They would want to hate a clear target standing on the opposite side.
“Is this not precisely what politics is?”
Topple Anton, fracture the Knight Order, and tarnish Maximilian’s reputation.
Even in Kentz’s own estimation, it was a truly beautiful piece of politics.
* * *
Sentinel’s great hall.
The public confirmation hearing for Anton Zefren’s appointment as Knight Commander drew a massive crowd. Hundreds of current and former Knights, Imperial Palace officials, and reporters from the Empire’s major press outlets packed the hall, holding their breath as they watched the stage. The tension hanging over the chamber was oppressively heavy.
Then.
“Breaking news!”
Someone suddenly burst through the entrance of the great hall, shouting urgently.
“Deputy Commander Anton Zefren has just announced that he is fully withdrawing from the Knight Commander confirmation, and…”
At that first sentence. At the words that Anton was giving up his candidacy for Knight Commander, everyone leapt to their feet.
“He is stepping down from active Sentinel duty!”
At that second sentence, the hearing hall erupted. Reporters scrambled for their cameras and notebooks, desperate not to miss the scoop, shouting at the top of their lungs as they poured out of the hall.
The Imperial Palace nobles looked blank for a moment, but soon wore satisfied smiles. The commoner Knights murmured in furious expressions.
“……”
In the very center of that chaos, I simply sat in silence and watched with indifference.
“…Hey, Max.”
Just then, Tiana pushed through the crowd of furious commoner Knights and approached me.
“What in the world did you say at the closed hearing?”
Unhidden disappointment lingered in her eyes.
“…Me?”
I pointed a finger at myself. Tiana nodded as though it were obvious.
“Yes.”
“Hmm… That’s classified.”
And it truly was something I could not disclose. Especially not in a setting as public as this.
I answered dryly and rose from my seat, but Tiana grabbed my sleeve and whispered.
“Say something, anything. Do you even know what kind of vile rumors are going around about what you said at the closed hearing?”
Perhaps this, too, was unavoidable. Ever since the「Imperial Citizenship Law」, my image had solidified in precisely that way.
…No.
Perhaps someone in the Imperial Palace had deliberately spread it.
What I had said to Anton at the closed hearing may have rubbed some people in the Imperial Palace the wrong way.
Kentz Bertem, in particular.
To them it was familiar politics, but there was no need to go around correcting or denying things one by one.
The ‘transcript’ would be leaked soon enough.
“Rumors are just rumors. Don’t believe what you want to believe. Believe only what you can see.”
Leaving Tiana behind, I walked out of the great hall under the icy stares of the commoner Knights, their gazes dripping with something close to killing intent.
I still had much left to do.
* * *
Anton Zefren had withdrawn from the Knight Commander position and left the Sentinel. As a result, Knight Commander Alberich’s tenure was forcibly extended by six months.
Alberich, who had been desperate to retire—the man was well over seventy—wore a sour expression, but there was nothing to be done about it.
In his place, Chiron emerged as the sole candidate for the now-vacant Deputy Commander position.
He had at last drawn close to the place he had yearned for his entire life, and I boarded a Canilan’s state-of-the-art military transport aircraft.
It was for my next assignment abroad.
“…I want to jump.”
Inside the transport cutting through the distant sky, my head ached.
There was no time to rest. I wanted to eat good food.
My body was harder and stronger than ever, but I needed to manage my mental stress. Maybe I should just parachute out right now…
─Thud.
Before I knew it, we had landed at the Robrus military airfield, our destination. The aircraft settled and the hatch opened.
Whoosh! The blast of cold air made me want to flinch.
It went beyond mere cold; the air itself seemed frozen solid, but I did not let it show. That is what it means to be a noble. My mana would adapt to the environment soon enough. Ebenholtz resembled nature, and cold, in the end, was only another part of nature.
Hweeeeee──!
Amid the howling, biting wind, a familiar figure greeted me.
“Welcome, Knight Maximilian.”
Yelena Yumanov. A power player of the Eastern Alliance and its People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. By now quite a familiar face, she stood there in military uniform.
“You’ve come alone without an escort, Sir Knight. Is that what being a knight means?”
She peered behind me and asked with a curious look.
“Yes. I wished to keep this visit quiet.”
I answered with feigned ease.
In truth, Schatz, my greatest asset, had already entered Robrus territory overland under a false identity. There was no need to show my hand to these Easterners.
“I see. Let us go.”
I boarded the waiting vehicle with Yelena. It set off toward the capital of Robrus with a heavy rumble of the engine.
Even the cars in Robrus were heavy. It felt like riding a bear.
Which is to say, the ride was not exactly comfortable.
“……”
I watched the scenery passing by outside the window. The rugged, imposing architecture unique to the Eastern Alliance, people bundled head to toe as they moved through the streets, and also Ezenheim.
For now, I intended to establish several footholds here in Robrus.
No matter how capable I was, there was no way to safely extract her from the maelstrom of the coming Great Purge without at least a minimum of safeguards in place.
…No, first I needed to confirm whether Yelena even possessed the will and the ability to preserve her own life in that political struggle.
If she were swept away helplessly and dropped dead just like that, then I had no particular reason to save her either.
I had not come seeking a feeble asylum seeker, but a powerful and reliable strategic partner to forge the Empire’s future alongside.
“We’re here.”
We arrived at the restaurant in no time. I stepped out of the car. Honestly, I was looking forward to it. I had never once experienced Eastern cuisine in my life.
“It may not compare to Lilac Vita, but it can be called the finest in the East.”
If the food was good, my stress would ease…
By the time I came back to my senses, there was a dish piled high with sturgeon roe before me.
I cut into it with my knife and took a bite. It was certainly a novel flavor. A true delicacy.
“…Your manners and etiquette are truly remarkable.”
Yelena seemed fascinated by the way I handled my knife, by every gesture.
“More importantly, might I ask what this dish is made of? I recognize the caviar, but…”
“Yes. Sturgeon roe, caviar, and bear paw.”
“…Ah. Bear paw.”
It did not look like it. Yelena let out a small laugh.
“Catching those bears is extremely difficult. How does it taste?”
“There doesn’t seem to be any elaborate recipe, yet it is very delicious. This caviar is good enough that I would like to import it to the Empire.”
Yelena nodded.
“The caviar is managed by the Yumanov Family. Would you care to draw up an export contract right now?”
Yelena asked in a half-joking tone laced with amusement, but I was serious.
“Very well. Let’s write one up immediately. I’ll take it with me when I return to the Empire.”
Fine dining is my passion. Savoring the delicacies that come from land, sea, and sky, I feel the very reason for this world’s existence. I take in, with my whole being, the reason why this world must never be allowed to perish.
“Oh… Yes. I will have the contract sent to you later.”
“Ah, so this is where you were.”
Just then, the restaurant door opened and another figure appeared.
A small-framed man with a rather unpleasant look about him.
I recognized his face.
Zerov. Regarded as the Premier’s right-hand man. The pillar of power driving the current Great Purge.
“A knight of the Empire… You’re as blindingly handsome as I’ve heard. Enough to inspire jealousy.”
Zerov smiled and took a seat beside us. Yelena did not seem particularly pleased by his presence, and neither was I, but this meeting was necessary.
“Knight.”
Zerov peered intently at my face. His gaze was like a tongue licking over me, thoroughly repulsive.
“Let me cut straight to the change here.” (TL Note: Zerov misspoke, saying “change” instead of “chase”.)
I set down my knife for a moment. I picked up a napkin and dabbed my lips.
“What is the reason you have come seeking us, come to the East for, Knight?”
For the sake of this man, whose impatient nature left him tripping even over Imperial speech,
“Well, it’s simple. I have come to establish cooperation with all of you.”
I got to the point.
Cooperation. Zerov seemed to grasp the general idea and masked his expression to some extent.
“Mm… Cooperation…”
He murmured as though taken aback, but I already knew the true intentions of a man preparing for the Great Purge.
They, too, must surely be desperate for cooperation.
And therefore, my diplomacy to negotiate non-aggression would not be difficult.
