Chapter 241: Expo (2)

A cold, dark night in Robrus.

Former People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Yelena Yumanov, current Warden of the 17th Labor Reeducation Camp, Maxim Voronin.

She was reading a newspaper in the warden’s office, where a fire burned in the hearth.

「The Tragedy of the Titan, an Omen of the Arrogant Empire’s Downfall?」

A page celebrating the sinking of the Titan.

They mocked and condemned the Empire, yet deep in the heart of Robrus, purges more brutal than any of that continued unabated.

Even Prison Warden ‘Petrin’, who appointed himself Yelena’s patron, had been visibly withering away of late.

─Crackle, crackle.

Yelena stared blankly at the flames in the hearth, then picked up another sheet of paper.

It was the camp’s prisoner roster.

The Ezenheim held here numbered a hundred or so. Yet even inside this camp, their strange religious rites were still being observed.

Under the Party’s tacit sanction to ‘accommodate their religion’, they alone alone maintained an eerie tranquility.

No matter how she thought it over, Yelena could not make sense of it.

The Great Purge had happened because of their religion, of all things? Her father, the entire Yumanov Family, had been wiped out to fulfill the doctrines of that faith, and countless comrades who had devoted their lives to the state had been dragged to the guillotine for it?

She did not want to believe that every value of Robrus, the nation that held labor sacred and proclaimed itself the hegemon of the East, had been defiled for a reason as paltry as that.

But no matter how she tried to deny it, no other answer presented itself.

Then, reason it through once more, from the very beginning.

The blade of the purge had fallen from above. The directive to accommodate religious practice had also come down from above.

Approval from the very top.

And only one name sat at that summit.

The Premier.

Yelena’s grip tightened on the roster. Scrunch. The paper crumpled.

“How revolting.”

Hatred had already settled into the low voice that leaked out of her.

It was laughable.

There had been days when she cursed the Empire’s racists as barbarians and preened over her own morality. The baseness of dividing human beings by blood, she had said, was the very proof that the Empire would fall.

But it seemed a person’s true colors only showed once the fire reached their own doorstep.

「The Thousand-Year Empire」, the work of Johann Goetze, one of the Empire’s most eminent scholars, described the Ezenheim this way.

‘A pestilence adept at betrayal, one that devours the lives of others through scheming and gnaws away at the foundations of civilization.’

Yes.

A pestilence.

The disease had lodged itself in the head of the body called Robrus, and it had festered through the nation’s limbs one by one. The name Yumanov had been severed the same way.

──Crack!

A log collapsed in the hearth, scattering sparks.

The pride of the Yumanovs, which she could not bring herself to release even after losing everything.

If hatred required qualification— then she, who had been robbed of everything, possessed it in overflowing measure.

The dying embers, meeting the fuel called ‘revenge’, were beginning to blaze up again, upending her from the very bottom…….

* * *

Language and history, culture and art, science and technology, and the humanities.

……all of these, I studied without end.

I filled my time with my own development.

The foundations of civilization that humanity had built over thousands of years, the things I must never forget, the values we absolutely had to preserve. I crammed them all into my head, or perhaps into the ‘Virus’.

Using the Expo as a pretext, I toured every corner of Prozen. I read books that had been banned in the Empire, admired buildings weathered by the years, and took in a kind of freedom that did not exist back home.

Yet all the while, Pablo’s painting kept flickering at the edge of my mind.

Pablo Suarez Diego Jose Francisco de Zeula Nepomuceno Maria de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santisima Trinidad y Sobakin.

This man, whose name strung together his baptismal name and those of all his ancestors, a name so long one doubted whether even he could recite it in full, would be known to posterity simply as ‘Pablo’.

The greatest and most controversial painter of the postwar era.

He overturned the very framework of painting and opened the horizon called modern art.

The shockwave of his deconstruction and reassembly of the subject spread beyond the canvas into sculpture and architecture, design and daily life itself, throwing open the door to a new era called ‘abstraction’.

Before my Regression, one of his greatest themes had been anti-war.

Of course, he was not a man who preached only against war. It was merely one of his many styles.

Pablo’s ideology leaned toward the East, yet the East loathed his audacity as decadence, and the Empire sneered at his abstraction as a madman’s scribbles.

Even so, nearly every intellect on the continent raved over the tip of his brush.

That, of course, was still some ten years away.

He was a man far, far ahead of his time.

And now, on that master’s canvas, the things I had done were being painted.

Pablo’s work had changed.

Before my Regression, his masterpiece had depicted the Empire’s bombing of a civilian city during the Zerphian civil war.

But that future had been erased because of me.

As history shifted, the place of the civilian bombing was left vacant, and into that void stepped the Jeronika Mine.

The same painter. The same fury. The same masterpiece.

Only the agent of history nailed to his canvas had changed.

Perhaps it would go on this way.

The countless deeds I would commit as I pressed forward would become the inspiration, the subject matter, of countless artists.

Because the name Maximilian was now, in itself, history.

The problem was my own heart.

When I stood before Pablo’s canvas── a strange impulse stirred within me.

The impulse to erase it.

It was the temptation of ‘censorship’, the one harbored by every dictator, emperor, and conqueror in history.

I looked that impulse squarely in the face. The fact that the same nature lived in me as well. I chose not to deny it.

Then, could I leave them be?

Could I leave Pablo alone, or the other painters and writers who would soon make their debuts?

……The answer had been decided from the start.

Once I achieved what I desired, I would be hung up, whole and entire, before the judgment of the survivors.

If we won, then after my death, they would exhibit the man I was, each in their own way.

So I should never have entertained the hope of being understood, not from the beginning.

Whatever I harbored within. Whatever cause I swallowed. However deep a solitude I endured.

What remained for posterity would be only the face I had ‘shown’, so no matter how monstrously that portrait was painted, I had to choose to accept it.

There would be no excuses, not even after victory.

Because the record belonged to humanity.

Within the Empire, of course, it was a different story. There, I would break pens when they needed breaking. Until my great ambition was complete, brushes inside the Empire were dangerous.

But outside the Empire’s fence……

perhaps, for a while, they could be left free.

Someday, once we had won, humanity would have to walk out of this age of loathing and hatred and set off once more in search of the right values.

The signposts we would need then would not be the victors’ records, but the brushes that had borne witness to this era.

Paintings like Zernica.

The painting that indicted me would one day become the painting that healed humanity.

Then I had to keep my indictments alive.

If only to leave behind a foundation, a groundwork, for peace.

──Crunch.

I thought all this as I bit into Prozen’s immaculate cuisine.

It was delicious.

Prozen’s gastronomy was decidedly a cut above the Empire’s.

This capital alone held five or six restaurants on par with my own「Lilac Vita」, into which I had poured the finest ingredients and the most gifted chefs without stinting.

“Thank you for the meal.”

I asked the chef who came out to see me off whether he might consider working in the Empire, but he answered only with a smile.

Afterward I stepped outside, and as I walked, breathing in the chilly autumn air.

“E-excuse me…….”

Someone blocked my path. In truth, I had sensed them tailing me for a while.

“A-a pleasure to meet you! We’re students, university students, from Prozen National University, um…….”

It was halting, clumsy Imperial Language.

“You may speak in the Prozen Language.”

There were five or six of them, young men. Neatly dressed, with something hungry in their eyes.

“Ah, yes! Well, the thing is, we heard word that you had come, Sir Knight…….”

One of them carefully drew a book from inside his coat.

It was my own book,「Under the Moonlight」, translated into the Prozen Language.

“We’ve read this book hundreds of times over. You are our hero, Sir Knight!”

Freedom was Prozen’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

Literature and art without censorship. The freedom to read and write anything at all.

But riding on that very freedom, the poison that would collapse the nation from within also spread without the slightest check.

It was a contradiction born of the age.

“I see. I’m honored.”

I took the book they held out. The cover, worn soft with handling, felt strange in my hands.

“N-no, the honor is all ours! Which is why…… it’s this passage, you see.”

The young man opened the book with trembling hands. The page was ragged with creases and underlining.

“‘Order is not erected by force. Order is born from the thirst of those who crave it.’ After reading this passage, we couldn’t sleep.”

A tremor crept into the young man’s voice.

“Sir Knight. Look at our homeland. Parliament spends the whole year at each other’s throats, the factories stand idle with strikes, and the streets are soaked in debauchery. And all the while, the Ezenheim suck the lifeblood from ordinary people with their moneylending.”

The other young men nodded fervently.

“The East’s filthy ideology is seeping into the workers, and the government just sits on its hands. Everyone knows this country is rotting, and yet no one even feels the thirst!”

The young man at the front finally spat it out.

“Sir Knight. We…… frankly, we envy the Empire. If our Prozen is to be saved, shouldn’t it become like the Empire? If only a legion of iron men like the Sentinel would come pouring in and take those damn parliamentarians’ heads…….”

It was a dangerous sentence. To voice it in the middle of a public square was to stand half a step into treason.

“…….”

I let the silence sit for a moment.

“Thirst only has meaning if you endure it. Until the proper season comes.”

As I spoke, I drew a fountain pen from my coat.

“Winter clears away rotten trees on its own. If the axe grows impatient and thrashes about, it only gets caught by the forester. Your task is not to glare at the trees, but to whet the axe’s edge.”

The ideology these young men harbored would serve the Empire.

I, too, hoped the war would not drag on.

I wanted to fold up the grueling war, the horrific history, as swiftly as possible, and then focus solely on the ‘creatures’ we had to cut away.

“Build your bodies, learn, find your comrades, and take up positions. In the government offices, in the military, in the newspapers, in the schools.”

Scritch.

I wrote a short inscription on the inner title page of「Under the Moonlight」.

“And then, you wait.”

“……For the right moment, you mean?”

I smiled faintly.

“Yes. Because your existence, thirsting as it does, is what will bring that moment to completion.”

I handed the book back to them.

[ Hold fast to your thirst, until the proper season. ]

[ Awaiting the day we meet again. ]

[ Maximilian Ebenholtz ]

An inscription written in the Imperial Language.

Henri’s hands, as he received the book back, shook like a leaf.

“Well then, I’ll take my leave. It was a pleasure. It gladdens me to meet comrades here in Prozen.”

I clapped each young man once on the shoulder, and each time, they bowed nearly in half.

Tonight, they would likely not sleep.

And in a few years’ time, some of them might well be standing somewhere in Prozen’s government offices and army barracks, ready hands resting on the door handles.

* * *

Winter came. Even as cold snowflakes blanketed the continent, construction of the National Pavilions was in full swing in Prozen’s capital.

My daily life, meanwhile, swung between extremes.

Just last night I had stood nearly every Ezenheim recovered from the Titan before a Knight’s Trial and hanged them; the next day I would call on the artists under my patronage to check their progress; and the day after that, supervise the construction site in Prozen. It was a fairly breathless stretch of days.

“It’s nearly complete.”

Ebenholtz Mansion.

Imperial Guardsman Jurian Spehl presented his finished invention to me─the Mana Stone Searchlight.

The ‘light’ that would be the heart of this Expo and the crowning glory of the Imperial Pavilion.

For security, the plan was to finish every component in the Empire first, then handle only the assembly on-site in Prozen.

“Let’s have a look.”

I was certain of the ‘greatest height’ this light would reach. I was equally confident of the visual shock and awe this art of light would deliver to the masses.

It would come to pass without fail, and for a moment, Prozen’s capital would be dyed in the Empire’s colors.

After all, in the future before my Regression, it had already been a wild success.

“Yes, sir. Activating it now.”

Clack!

Spehl pulled the lever. The mana stone lens resonated with a low hum and released its light.

Firing it into the night sky would draw the eyes of the entire city, so for this test run the output had been lowered and the beam angled to land obliquely against the mansion’s wall.

───.

Even so, a pure-white flash that seemed to swallow sound itself split the darkness. A beam without a single tremor, straight as a ruled line. Where the ray passed, the night looked cleaved in two.

“At full output, the vertical beam climbs to a maximum altitude of ten kilometers. Depending on weather conditions, it will be observable from dozens of kilometers away.”

I already knew this invention.

A memory from before the Regression.

[ The pillars of light shot skyward by a hundred-odd Mana Stone Searchlights touched the clouds and joined into a ceiling. A temple with neither walls nor roof. Even in villages dozens of kilometers away, people saw that colonnade of light rising above the horizon…….

We do not hesitate to classify this light, which raised not a single wall, as ‘architecture’. For humanity’s architecture had always been built of stone only because nothing better than stone had yet been found. ]

── Excerpted from 「The 50 Structures That Most Influenced Human History」.

The Mana Stone Searchlight itself had been invented by Imperial Guardsman Jurian Spehl, but the architect who turned it into art after the war was another man entirely.

This time, however, I would use his invention as I saw fit.

“Excellent. You’ve done fine work.”

As I clapped softly and smiled, Spehl’s face, which had been nothing but tension, was quickly flooded with joy.

“Th-thank you!”

…….

Prozen, once again.

An Imperial minister visited the Expo construction site.

“Word has been sent that His Majesty himself may attend the opening ceremony in person.”

“I very much look forward to it.”

Contrary to such talk, His Majesty would most likely never manage it.

The Emperor was a man with a vicious complex about his own appearance. Rather than put his ugliness on display in the middle of Prozen, he would sooner send Princess Justine in his stead.

“I hear Lord Reutern is coming as well. He’s already making an unholy fuss over his wardrobe, this outfit or that.”

“Ah, is that so.”

Damn it.

That bastard is 100% coming.

I really wish he wouldn’t.

At my conflicted reply, the minister studied my expression and cleared his throat.

“By the way, Sir Knight. There are some nuisances you’ll want to deal with before then. Have you seen them, by any chance?”

“Nuisances?”

“Yes. Please, follow me!”

The minister strode off toward a corner of the city center.

A street I had never once set foot on.

Thump──.

The Virus beneath my collarbone pulsed with unusual force.

“Look!”

The spot the minister pointed to. Where my gaze landed stood a building so shabby it was embarrassing to even call it a National Pavilion.

“The Ezenheim Pavilion. Mongrels without so much as a country of their own, daring to style themselves a nation and squatting on this ground.”

“…….”

Thump──

A race that was not human, daring to speak of nationhood and mount a National Pavilion.

Thump──

Looking down at the Ezenheim swarming and murmuring around the pavilion like a colony of ants, I wore a quiet smile.

~~~

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