Chapter 245: Flowers (3)

Zestfall was a city that had taken a direct hit from the 「Imperial Citizenship Law」.

The proportion of non-Aran residents. In other words, mixed-bloods, foreigners, Ezenheim, Edlem, and the like lived there in greater numbers than anywhere else, and many of them belonged to the upper class and professional circles.

Their knowledge and talent had been a great pillar holding Zestfall up, but now, after all this time, the Empire sought to drive them out.

Faced with losing neighbors, colleagues, friends, and lovers from their workplaces in an instant, the citizens of Zestfall had pushed back fiercely, and though those embers still had not died down, Joshua’s family belonged to the relatively moderate camp.

Even if Joshua himself did not, his family, at least, did.

“…….”

In the silence of the interrogation room, Julian read the written statement with his eyes and listened to Joshua’s breathing with his ears.

It was a curious thing.

People revealed more openings when someone read through the lies they had written than when they spoke those lies aloud.

Why that was, Julian himself probably could not say for certain. No mechanism was harder to understand than the way human beings worked.

But one thing was certain, and it was that the act people found hardest to bear was ‘waiting’.

“The work of one man alone.”

Joshua’s breathing wavered faintly.

“That’s correct.”

The moment he answered, his composure returned. He had put the mask back on, the one meant to deceive others.

“Meaning you are the head of the Blue Rose Society.”

That Joshua was one of the founding pillars of the Blue Rose Society was beyond question.

“No. The Blue Rose. Singular.”

Joshua’s face, mottled with livid bruises, was certainly blue enough.

“You alone carried and distributed these leaflets?”

Julian pointed to the leaflets lying on the table.

Joshua stayed silent for a long while before offering only a faint smile.

“……It’s a funny thing.”

Julian listened to him.

“Compared to speaking of the suffering of people who are dying.”

Listening was an important virtue for the people of this world to possess. Perhaps the most important of all. All the more so because too many had forgotten it…….

“Compared to crying out the truth of children who are discriminated against, of people groaning under oppression.”

They called it principle.

Words pleasing to many ears. It was also the ideology of the Republic.

“Is mocking one man, Maximilian, the greater and heavier crime?”

If so, then Julian would simply answer with principle of his own.

“In the Empire, it is.”

“…….”

What rose in Joshua’s eyes was closer to confirmation than disappointment.

The certainty that said, so you’re one of them after all.

“Do you believe that is right, Sir Knight?”

“Laws and systems are set by those who hold power. Right and wrong come after.”

Which meant they were not the sort of thing one individual’s sense of justice could overturn in a single stroke. To believe otherwise was folly.

“Sir Knight. While we wait for that ‘after’, people are dying. The city of Zestfall is being destroyed.”

Julian’s eyebrows twitched. With a soft rustle, he turned a page of the statement and asked,

“So, you cried out?”

“……Yes. I cried out. Because someone has to make a sound.”

“And once you made that sound, did the world change?”

Joshua’s mouth closed.

Nothing had changed.

No. Something had.

Joshua alone had ended up sitting here. With his entire family dangling over a cliff.

“Then what should we have done? What did we need? In the middle of all this injustice and inequity?”

To Joshua’s question, laced with genuine feeling, Julian answered.

“Time.”

That single word, nothing more.

“If what you believe to be right is truly right, then a time will surely come when it is made right. If you genuinely believe in your own rightness, you must wait for that time.”

“……That’s the language of a bystander.”

“Perhaps it is.”

Julian did not deny it. Nor did he try to lecture him with the Empire’s logic.

A man who did not rush to judge others.

Tap.

He closed the file. He rose from his seat, leaving Joshua behind. And with that, he left the interrogation room.

“…….”

The stillness of being left alone.

In Julian’s place, an Administrative Officer came in and set a meal tray down before him.

“Eat. Before it gets cold.”

Joshua picked up his utensils. The Administrative Officer watched him for a moment, then added in a low voice,

“Do yourself a favor and cooperate with Knight Julian.”

Joshua’s hand froze.

“Did you know? Knight Maximilian formally requested that this case be handed over to him, and Knight Julian refused. He’s also barely holding off the investigative pressure from the other agencies, all under his own name. Which means that we, too, are shouldering considerable risk here.”

“……Then let me ask you something.”

Joshua raised his head and fixed his eyes on the officer.

“The moment I’m handed over to that man, do I die?”

The Administrative Officer met Joshua’s gaze steadily. What surfaced there was closer to pity than contempt.

“Is this man Maximilian greater than the Emperor?”

Joshua asked again.

The Administrative Officer shook his head.

“Don’t act so cynical. You aren’t actually capable of it.”

“……What?”

Joshua’s brow furrowed.

“If anything, it’s the opposite. You’re far too idealistic. You’re angry because you believe the world should be different from what it is, and because you’re angry, you imitate cynicism.”

“……What are you-“

“If you’re going to be cynical, be cynical about everything. The Empire, the Blue Rose, and yourself too. You’d live longer that way. The most dangerous kind of person is ice on one side and fire on the other. Like you.”

Gripping the door handle, the officer spoke, a sigh threaded through the words.

“Do you think you’re smart? If you really were, you’d know. The world is wide, and there are countless people out there smarter than you who also hold power. So why don’t all those smart people act the way you do?”

Creeeak.

The interrogation room door opened.

“……If this goes wrong, you won’t be the only one who dies.”

Thud.

The door closed again.

“…….”

Joshua stared for a long time at the cooling food set before him.

* * *

The finished works were arriving one after another. The sculptor Max Riefenstahl, the composer Richard, the cinematographer Lenny, and various painters, all of whom I had personally recruited.

They had crossed over to Prozen along with their works.

Every piece of art had been placed inside the Imperial Pavilion, though for now they remained hidden beneath canvas.

Things that stood silent, waiting only for the moment of the opening.

“Finished it perfectly, right on schedule.”

Outside the Imperial Pavilion, along the boulevard of the Prozen capital. The sculptor Max Riefenstahl came to stand beside me with a wry chuckle.

“You finished faster than expected?”

“That’s what happens when no one interferes. I’ve always had a contrary streak, you see; the more someone nags, the less I want to make anything. This time, I actually found myself wanting to hurry.”

He fiddled with his beard, looking pleased. I smiled faintly.

“There’s still plenty of time until the opening, so please rest easy. I’ve arranged a separate itinerary for you.”

“Oh? Have you now?”

“Yes. All you need to do is enjoy yourself.”

Afterward, I entrusted all the artists to the Operations Officers.

So they could tour the heart of Prozen freely.

“─Max!”

A familiar voice rang out.

Ezell Runsellot. She was accompanied by Jun Kandel and other Wizards of the Sentio Magic Tower.

“Oh. You made it?”

I’d already had word by letter that she was coming.

Ezell asked with a bright smile.

“So this is the Imperial Pavilion. When does it open?”

“Probably next week. At night.”

Before I knew it, only a week remained.

I was fairly tense. Of success I was certain, but variables like sabotage lay beyond prediction. I had people mobilized and was keeping my nerves on edge.

“At night?”

“Yeah.”

“Wasn’t the opening at noon?”

“That’s about when it’ll be finished. Besides, we can do things whenever we feel like it. We’re the Empire, aren’t we?”

Ezell nodded at my words, but her gaze drifted toward the Eastern Alliance’s grounds in the distance.

“What about them? Robrus, I mean. I’ve spotted red uniforms around sometimes.”

“Who knows.”

The Eastern Alliance’s grounds, like the Imperial Pavilion, were still wrapped in canvas.

“……Are you confident?”

Ezell looked up at me as she asked. She seemed worried.

Because at the very least, I had to make something better than those bastards.

“I am worried. If you lose…….”

How many would come tearing at my throat? Half of Maximilian’s career might go up in smoke. The World Expo was a stage that big.

“I’m confident. I always am.”

“Certain?”

“Yeah.”

I expressed my confidence with a smile, but after gazing at her for a moment, I added quietly,

“If anything, I’m the one worried about you, Ezell.”

“…….”

Ezell’s eyes wavered faintly.

“……Why?”

Because I feared you’d go plotting revolution and get caught by someone who isn’t me.

“……No reason. It’s just, the work Wizards are given these days keeps getting rougher. I worry you won’t get to pursue the scholarship you want.”

An age in which magic was treated not as scholarship but solely as a weapon.

The shadow of war had already swallowed even the Magic Tower, that very symbol of intellect.

“Please. Don’t you know? The Tower’s higher-ups are the ones walking on eggshells around me. I’m the Maximilian of Sentio, is what I’m saying.”

Just as I was smiling at that,

“—Sir Knight.”

An Operations Officer approached and delivered a report at my ear. An uninvited guest had entered the Imperial Pavilion.

I gave a light nod.

“Keep watch on him, but if he’s not here for terrorism, leave him be.”

“Yes, sir.”

At that order, the Operations Officer vanished at once into the shadows.

* * *

Into the Imperial Pavilion construction site, wrapped in layer upon layer of canvas, a man stepped.

He wore the uniform of a safety inspector. The Imperial Pavilion’s overseer ran a metal detector over him, but there was nothing for it to catch. His methods were entirely peaceful, and his purpose was far removed from any attack.

He went inside and surveyed the state and progress of the Imperial Pavilion’s construction.

He was a spy.

An eye belonging to the Prozen Intelligence Bureau, to those who sought to preserve an order all their own.

To record the structure of this space in his head, he first craned his neck and looked upward. Because of the ‘greatest height’ Maximilian Ebenholtz had been boasting of, naturally.

“……?”

The ceiling was unexpectedly low.

The canvas itself looked to stand over a hundred meters tall, yet the structure inside seemed less than half that.

Doubt flickered for a moment, but a spy’s role was to acquire information. There was no room for personal judgment. He simply had to report what he saw, nothing more.

…….

Dignitaries from across the entire continent, the Empire among them, arrived in Prozen one after another.

As a result, all of the nation’s security personnel and intelligence agents were concentrated around the Expo grounds.

Professor Jean Pierre gathered with Prozen’s Intelligence Bureau Director Akenzi and Highland’s Arthur Winston in a hotel conference room overlooking the Expo grounds.

“According to the spy’s report…… the Imperial Pavilion’s ceiling height remains unimpressive.”

At Akenzi’s words, Arthur Winston set down his teacup and muttered,

“Are they planning to use the same method as the East?”

The Eastern Alliance. Robrus had chosen a modular method, finishing the components in the homeland and then assembling them on site.

“But stacking prefabricated modules higher than Prozen Tower would carry considerable structural risk. And Maximilian is no fool who can’t manage that much arithmetic.”

“It’s questionable whether he ever said ‘taller than Prozen Tower’ himself in the first place. Perhaps it was something he let slip as exaggeration or metaphor, and the political sphere inflated it somewhat…….”

Akenzi said.

The episode had in fact run in the Prozen newspapers. Their headline was the very sentence Maximilian─though the papers, of course, styled him ‘the head of the Imperial Pavilion’─had spoken, “It will stand taller than Prozen Tower”.

It was public-opinion engineering intended by the political class, and the citizens’ response, naturally, was a snort.

So the Imperial pigs are strutting about again. Fine, we’ll come watch how they fall apart…….

Thanks to that, the Expo’s turnout itself was projected to reach an all-time high.

“……Maximilian is not a man who exaggerates. There will be some meaning in it, at the very least.”

Arthur Winston clamped his pipe between his teeth, and just as the three of them were puzzling over Maximilian’s intentions,

“──The Eastern Alliance delegation has arrived, we’re told.”

At an agent’s report. They rose hurriedly from their seats. There was no need to go far. They threw the hotel balcony doors wide open.

Whooosh──

Beyond, with the Expo grounds laid out in full view, the Robrus in their red uniforms cut an imposing figure. They unloaded steel crates from a line of trucks into the very middle of their site.

“Prefabricated, just as we heard.”

“Yes. No doubt about it.”

From the lead truck stepped the director of this Eastern Pavilion.

Tatyana Volkov. One of Robrus’s foremost sculptors and painters. Perhaps the only artist ever to earn the approval of that rigid, exacting Premier.

“So that’s the woman. The one who painted「Steel Dawn」.”

The Eastern masterpiece,「Steel Dawn」.

A celebrated painting capturing a procession of workers heading out for the dawn shift, the red glow of a blast furnace at their backs.

Praised as the very embodiment of Eastern ideology on canvas, it had been exhibited in Prozen as well, dealing quite a shock to the critics who had been loudly proclaiming that ‘Robrus art is dead’.

“Yes. I’m curious what masterpiece she’s brought this time.”

The Imperial Pavilion drew attention with bluster; the Eastern Pavilion drew it with its director’s renown.

What would unfold, of course, remained to be seen—

but thinking rationally, for the moment, one could only give the East the edge.

…….

Tatyana Volkov.

She had spent the past several months in a fever of obsessive immersion, carving out a certain symbol. Even her memories of the process were a blur.

Months in which she had burned that much of her soul.

The finished work had been shown first to Premier Varmil, and the appraisal she heard from his own lips was a single sentence.

──It is worthy of becoming the symbol of Robrus.

“Are you nervous? Comrade Tatyana.”

The Adversary at her side asked.

“What is there to be nervous about!”

She bellowed heartily, adjusting her gloves.

“If anything, it’s almost a letdown.”

She was the East’s self-assurance itself, in the shape of a woman.

“I hear our opponent is Maximilian. What would a man who’s done nothing but swing guns and blades know about art?”

A Knight of the Empire. Her opponent was a man with nothing but a tin can where his brains should be. If anything, it was a dull matchup.

“Even so, be careful. Maximilian is…… ‘a man capable of influencing the East’.”

In Robrus, where anything Imperial was condemned wholesale down to the newborns— it was effectively the highest praise that could be handed to a figure of the Empire.

“Well, enough of that. Let’s start with the assembly!”

Tatyana raised a clenched fist into the air.

“Hey─! Get ready!”

A thunderous shout erupted from her slender frame. In fact, she had once been an Adversary hopeful herself.

“Take up your hammers and anvils……?”

That was when it happened.

Across the road. The crowd parted to either side, and a procession in black uniforms appeared.

Thud─ Thud─ Thud─ Thud─

The metronome beat of boot heels rang out like a drum.

It was the Imperial bastards.

“…….”

To a painter’s eye, the scene looked like a painting walking toward her.

First, Prozen’s wide boulevard was the canvas.

The crowds lined up on either side of the Imperials became the frame, and the Imperials themselves the black vertical line splitting the center.

And at its head, a single golden point catching the slanting afternoon light head-on.

Tatyana and the Adversaries turned as if by instinct. It was formality and formation that said they could not be outdone by those bastards.

Before them, arrayed like a red tide─ stood the knight bearing the Empire’s gold, face to face.

Maximilian Albrecht von Ebenholtz.

He came forward trailing the scent of blood, smiled elegantly and put out his hand.

“A pleasure to meet you.”

Tatyana stared at him.

There was no denying it.

The man before her had the looks of a sculpture.

But she must not be fooled by that handsome skin. She knew all too well the madness lodged beneath it, and the inhuman massacres to his name.

“It is an honor to meet a master of Robrus at such close quarters.”

Maximilian, said to be gifted with languages, nonetheless refused to let go of the Imperial Language this once. Most likely because this in itself was an act of diplomacy.

“A pleasure! Knight of the Empire!”

Tatyana clasped his hand in a crushing grip and answered in the rough Robrus Language.

“I hear you’re a man of deep insight into art! Then you must know it well. That the height of art is never something to be measured with a ladder!”

She jerked her chin toward the Imperial Pavilion’s canvas.

“But of course, some heights are another matter entirely. I will be waiting, with all sincerity, for the day I can confirm with these two eyes that magnificent claim, ‘taller than Prozen Tower’!”

It was, in essence, a courteous insult, wrapped and delivered in a hearty laugh.

The moment they traded that sort of psychological warfare.

Click. Click. Click.

From somewhere came the sound of camera shutters.

An Imperial reporter? A Prozen reporter? Or one from Robrus?

Whichever it was, it was a camera lens.

Suddenly, as if by occupational hazard, Tatyana found herself framing the scene from a bird’s-eye view.

Against the backdrop of Prozen’s boulevard, a wave of red uniforms on one side, and opposite them, the vertical lines of black.

Red and black.

A composition of two camps facing each other across an empty space.

And at its dead center, at the one point where the two colors touched, two hands clasped together.

Fortunately, Tatyana was tall for a woman. Tall even for a man. So she did not concede much in height.

Composition, contrast, tension. All three in perfect measure.

If she were to give such a photograph a title…… well.

It would make quite a photo for the history books.

Pfft.

Just as a laugh threatened to slip out at her own idle thought, Tatyana suddenly realized.

“…….”

That their clasped hands had gone unreleased for quite a long time.

When Tatyana lifted her gaze, Maximilian only smiled.

Click. Click. Click…….

Until the shutter sounds died down.

He waited precisely that long before letting go of her hand, half a beat late.

He did not avoid being photographed. If anything, he held still, all the better to be photographed.

……This bastard knows the camera.

A man who knows a thing or two about art.

“This won’t do you any good, you know?”

Tatyana murmured under her breath.

The photographs would only amplify the attention, and before long, lay bare the disgrace of an Empire defeated by the East.

Maximilian answered, meeting her gaze.

“We’ll see soon enough.”

~~~

TL Note: I’ve picked up a new novel! Do check it out:

https://kjnovels.com/novel/the-russian-emperor-is-too-good-at-dictatorship

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