Semi-Coercive Imperialist

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Tatiana looked down at her wristwatch inside the Eastern Pavilion's tent.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Ever since rumors spread that Maximilian hated wristwatches, nearly every Eastern soldier, senior official, and Party cadre had been issued one.

If the Empire disliked something, it became a favorite in Lobrus.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Yet her attention was fixed less on the passing time than on the setting sun.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

Prrr.

She fluttered her lips, then lowered her wrist as if making up her mind.

"Let's take it down."

Our art is sculpture.

A sculpture that reflects light needs the warmth of the sun.

"First, the Lobrus national anthem."

"Yes. Ready!"

At a signal from the Adversaries, the anthem began.

Its first note rose from beneath the ground.

The visiting orchestra lined up before the Eastern Pavilion, and the low voices of the men's chorus spread over the plaza pavement like an echo.

The Eastern Union's anthem was neither cheerful nor ornate.

It was a marching song closer to a hymn, singing of sacred labor, the motherly land, and the people as its children.

That unfamiliar sound drew people in.

"What, are they opening now?"

"The East is going first? Not the Empire?"

At first, it was simple curiosity. Some had even come to mock them.

But only five minutes passed.

In those five minutes, as the anthem moved from its first verse into the second and the chorus grew fuller, the noise in the plaza gradually died down.

There was a weight to the song that silenced even those who had come to laugh.

"......"

Tatiana quietly closed her eyes before the tent ropes.

Her heart was racing.

Was it nerves?

No.

It was the tremor of a creator finally showing the world the child she had spent months pouring herself into.

She checked the sinking sun's angle one last time.

Now, when the steel burned hot.

"Open it!"

At the anthem's climax, when the chorus rose to its highest note, the red tent fell.

Beyond the crimson curtain flowing down like a waterfall, something was revealed.

Two figures.

On the left stood a worker raising a great forge hammer. On the right stood a female miner gripping a pickaxe.

The man and woman, forged from steel, charged forward side by side, crossing hammer and pickaxe over their heads.

Together, the two steel giants raised them toward the sky.

It was Eastern ideology itself, shaped from steel. The power of the earth could only be raised through the labor of the people.

Sunlight fell over the statue.

The leading edges flared scarlet, like molten metal freshly drawn from a furnace. As if the sweat of thousands of people had gathered and caught fire.

"......"

The Adversaries' gazes went still. So did the Lobrus officials'.

Without realizing it, they placed their hands over their hearts.

The anthem continued, growing louder.

Lobrus citizens in the plaza, the visiting workers, and the agents began singing along one by one.

They stood in the heart of another nation's capital, thousands of kilometers from home, looking up at their homeland's steel burning red.

Magnificent did not begin to cover it.

"If I have pride! If I have hope!"

Tatiana Volkov shouted at the Lobrus statue with all her strength.

Her cry rose over the waves of the chorus.

"It is the Eastern Union itself!"

Waaaaa!

The Easterners erupted in cheers. Citizens of other nations applauded as if entranced.

Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

The Adversaries focused on Tatiana.

Until moments ago, she had been a fastidious person measuring the angle of the sun. Still, there was a reason the Supreme Leader recognized her.

"We've won."

They were certain.

Lobrus owned this plaza today.

The shouts and cheers filling the place were proof enough.

Waaaaa!

Amid the Lobrus language ringing through the plaza, Tatiana glanced somewhere.

Across the square.

At the Empire's black tent, still silent.

The sun would soon be setting.

What was the knight called a monster thinking?

* * *

The Lobrus statue had been unveiled.

Many watched it. Admiring looks and praise poured in, while reporters pointed their camera lenses toward it.

"......As expected."

Maximilian slowly nodded as well.

This was the first time he had seen it in person in this life.

Even in the history before his regression, it was considered the pinnacle of Lobrus art, a masterpiece included in all their textbooks.

The steel man and woman burning red were certainly magnificent.

Which made them even better supporting players.

"Let's prepare as well."

He addressed everyone in the Imperial Pavilion.

All the actors were on stage now. It was time for the lead to appear.

......

"Wow!"

Leutern let out a gasp of admiration without realizing it.

A skewer was in one hand, a drink in the other.

"Look at that! It looks like it's on fire! Wow!"

"......Please don't applaud them, Your Grace. The Imperial citizens will see."

Bern hurriedly stopped him. Leutern belatedly came to his senses and growled.

"Right. Those stupid bastards hid a treasure like that. But I trust Max!"

"......Is that so?"

"I'm telling you! Want to bet?!"

Leutern was not the only observer.

Every important Imperial guest, including Ezel and Sonnet Kandel, looked at the statue and gave credit where it was due.

"It seems to gather all of Eastern ideology into one."

"......It is well made."

Sonnet's gaze was indifferent, while Ezel pursed her lips. Neither thought their opponents would be easy to deal with.

"......"

Kairon and the Sentinel Knights were briefly speechless. It was the sort of symbol soldiers and knights would especially appreciate.

"Cliff. Go get us a can of beer."

"Yes."

Tense, they found themselves looking for drinks and food for no reason.

And somewhere in Prozen.

Somewhere neither the crowd, the reporters, nor even the agents could know.

That most exalted person in the Empire also watched the sunlike burning statue in silence.

......

The sun set.

As darkness seeped into Prozen, lights came on one by one around the plaza and pond. The festival city had not lost its energy.

Only the Imperial Pavilion, still unopened, felt out of place.

"Yaaawn...... Still nothing?"

Halbert Goring had come out after sleeping at his hotel. He yawned deeply and looked toward the Imperial Pavilion with bored eyes.

"......Is the Prozen edition different somehow?"

Ezel sat on a bench, flipping through a Prozen language edition of the Outcast manga.

"I have no idea what Maximilian is thinking. Do you?"

"No. Me neither, brother."

Jun Kandel and Sonnet Kandel ate a late meal at a nearby restaurant.

Outside, reporters from every nation huddled together, their enthusiasm completely drained.

"......Hey. What do you think?"

"Looks like the Imperial bastards got scared. They're probably inside that tent right now, panicking over what to do."

"Hahaha. Then tomorrow's front page will be, 'The Silent Empire.'"

Really, as far as they were concerned, it had already been decided.

"They'd be better off lying and saying they got attacked by terrorists."

"Then 'The Terrorized Empire' will be on the front page."

Everyone killed time thinking up headlines for tomorrow's papers.

Citizens cursed at the Empire's dragging pace, wondering how long they had to wait for some insignificant building.

"Ah, damn...... What the hell are they waiting for?"

"Forget it, let's go. They can't show it because there's nothing to show."

"Those Imperial pigs can't do anything but boast."

One by one, they started turning away from the plaza.

Then it happened.

A clear melody bloomed somewhere.

The opening measures were Prozen's national anthem, a respectful musical gesture toward the host nation.

"Huh?"

"Mm?"

People stopped in their tracks.

The melody quietly faded away, and after half a beat of silence, an entirely different anthem began.

"......?"

It was a sound familiar to every Imperial citizen down to their bones, yet strangely unfamiliar the moment it reached their ears.

The Imperial anthem, rearranged for an orchestra.

"The Imperial Pavilion!"

Someone shouted.

Was it a reporter, or a sharp-eyed young man?

Either way, people rushed in at the cry.

"The Imperial Pavilion is opening!"

They put down their forks at restaurants and ran from bars with beer mugs still in hand.

"They're finally crawling out......"

Nobles who had returned to their hotels in exhaustion threw open their windows.

"Hey, hey. Let's go!"

"Come on!"

"Fuck, the Imperial bastards could've done this sooner......"

Reporters pulled out notebooks they had folded away. Fathers carried children on their shoulders. Market vendors and even patrolling officers joined in.

Nearly everyone who had scattered during the day was drawn back into the plaza.

Some came out of simple curiosity. Some came ready to laugh. Some only wanted something to criticize.

Whatever their reasons, they all headed in the same direction.

"......What is this?"

Yet the musicians were nowhere to be seen.

The orchestra and conductor had seemingly vanished, but the performance continued.

The sound came from no single point. Music spread through the entire space of the plaza.

The anthem began with a solo cello.

With each measure, it grew fuller.

Violins and violas joined in, and the strings seeped through the air.

It was the same melody that even a three-year-old Imperial citizen could hum, but under master musician Richard's direction, the orchestra made it sound like an entirely different song.

The crowd held its breath. Their eyes fixed ahead, their ears on the music.

As the performance gradually softened, the tent peeled away as if darkness were flowing down.

The structure behind it was......

Not tall.

"Huh?"

"What is that?"

"What?"

It was a black stone hall.

A smooth block of stone, with what looked like an eagle carved atop it, though the night made it hard to see.

It was neat enough and somewhat tall, but it did not even come close to Prozen Tower.

"......That's it?"

"Seriously?"

"They made us wait this long for that?"

"Pfft! Didn't they say it would be taller than Prozen Tower?"

"They wrapped it up for months, and it's just a stone warehouse?"

"As expected, the Empire's boasting......"

Laughter spread everywhere.

The reporters quietly lowered their cameras. The Adversaries by the Eastern Pavilion shook their shoulders, snickering.

In the middle of that tide of ridicule, only Tatiana did not laugh.

The jeers kept piling up.

Then, all at once, the performance burst back to life.

The audience's hearts jolted.

In time with the surging music, light appeared at the base of the Imperial Pavilion.

Flash!

From the very top of the hall, directly behind the eagle, a pure white pillar of light shot straight upward.

It rose and rose and rose, until it reached the sky.

People craned their necks as far back as possible.

Then a second light rose after the first.

Then four, eight, sixteen......

One pillar after another stood up.

More than a hundred mana stone projectors planted around the hall's perimeter ignited in sequence to the anthem's melody.

It was as though the music summoned the light, or the light answered the music.

The pillars of the Imperial Pavilion reached the clouds.

The clouds burned silver-white, becoming a ceiling that linked the pillars together.

Walls without walls.

A roof without a roof.

The Empire's pavilion rose into the night sky.

The columns of light swayed with the wind, their movement spreading across the edge of the sky like an aurora.

The plaza's streetlights, the lights around the pond, every light in the city lost its brightness before the Imperial Pavilion.

Even in villages dozens of kilometers away, far from the city, people who had no interest in the World Expo and scraped by day to day opened their windows.

They looked at the pillars of light rising above the horizon.

Beside them, Prozen Tower had become a quiet black silhouette.

In its place, the Imperial anthem swelled without end.

It swallowed the space.

......In such a vast plaza, every human voice disappeared.

The tourists and citizens of other nations could only stare blankly.

They had even forgotten to applaud. Mouths that had been jeering moments ago remained half-open.

Some removed their hats as though paying respect. Fathers and children wore the same expression.

People cast into an illusion.

Eyes in which the boundary between dream and reality had melted away.

But to Imperial citizens, this sight felt different in kind.

"Ah......"

"......"

They had found their homeland in the sky of a distant foreign country.

The Imperial anthem resonated through the space.

They felt something strange. A shiver, an exaltation, a resonance.

Yet instead of cheering or shouting, they grew calmer, sinking deeper into themselves.

"Haah......"

They wept.

Nobles, attendants, laborers, cooks, each with reddened eyes and wet cheeks.

"......"

A long drop of water hung from Leutern's wide eyes. Goring had straightened his posture at some point, sniffling as he did. Imperial soldiers closed their eyes with caps pressed to their chests.

The Sentinel Knights were no different.

Even the coldness forged through training could do nothing before emotions boiling up from the depths.

"......Where the light points is the Empire."

Kairon and the knights held back their tears, but the act of holding them back was already a surrender.

What happened next was stranger.

Imperial citizens scattered throughout Prozen Plaza. Complete strangers who did not even know each other's names.

As if they had agreed beforehand, the Aran turned toward one another.

When their eyes met quietly, they smiled as though they might cry.

No words were needed.

At this moment, standing beneath the Empire's light as Aran was enough for them to understand one another completely.

The divide between nobles and commoners, the distance of hometowns and dialects, the gap between middle-aged and young, the long-running friction between the regular army and the Imperial Guard all melted away beneath the radiant light.

Only one bloodline remained.

Aran.

Aran pride. Aran glory. Aran honor. Aran splendor.

The sensation of the narrow vessel called "I" breaking apart and flowing into the vastness called "we."

A rapture an individual could never reach. The certainty that they belonged to the greatest place of all, the Empire.

This beautiful cathedral in the sky was proof.

A light the inferior could never raise. A height only great blood could reach.

This was why the Aran were the masters of the continent.

That was what the Imperial citizens in the plaza believed.

Then all of it came together: the temple of light, the foreigners lowering their heads as if kneeling, and the faces of Aran laughing through tears.

"......"

It was reflected in Sebastian's eyes as well.

As every eye in the plaza grew wet that night, only a sliver of moonlight crossed his pupils coldly.

Footnotes:

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