However, while there was no talk of Ludwin making ostentatious displays of spending money, there was no sign of him saving it, either. So where was Ludwin’s salary going?
The answer to that question was something we would eventually find out.
— Early in the 11th month, 1546th year, Continental Calendar — Royal Capital Parnam
With autumn growing deeper, the days grew gradually colder.
With the post-war arrangements with the Principality of Amidonia concluded and the corrupt nobles that had been working behind the scenes to hinder me domestically swept aside, Elfrieden was enjoying a fleeting peace.
Because the internal threat of the corrupt nobles and the external threat of Amidonia had both been taken care of at the same time, the people’s opinion of myself as king and Hakuya as the prime minister had improved. With the nobles who had chosen not to take a side in the conflict with the three dukes now swearing loyalty to me, I was able to quickly centralize power.
It was that sort of autumn afternoon where I could imagine my political reforms would be moving forward in leaps and bounds.
Currently, I was in the governmental affairs office in Parnam, showing Liscia a certain something. “Take a look at this. What do you think?”
“It’s very… long, thin, and curved.” With a curious look on her face, Liscia stared intently at the thing I was showing her.
“Do you want to try it?” I asked.
“Can I? Well, then…”
Liscia’s thin, white fingers reached for the rapier at her waist. Then, narrowing her eyes, she drew her blade and swung it at the thing. In the next instant, there was the screech of metal on metal and the tip of her rapier was cut off and fell to the ground.
Liscia looked back and forth from the severed tip to her rapier, then cried out in surprise, “M-My sword?!”
As Liscia lost her mind over what had happened, I let out a big sigh. “What’re you suddenly taking a swing at it for…?”
“Well, you asked if I wanted to test it!” she exclaimed.
“I meant for you to hold it, maybe take a few practice swings,” I said. “I have no idea why you suddenly tried slashing it…”
Liscia could be a bit of a meat head sometimes. Was it her teacher Georg’s influence?
“Besides, you must know what would happen when you swing two blades at each other, right?” I asked.
Liscia’s eyes wandered around the room awkwardly. “W-Well, you know… That’s a Nine-Headed Dragon katana, right? I was interested in its cutting edge, you could say…”
“Honestly…”
The blade that had chopped Liscia’s sword in two was a type of katana, specifically a Nine-Headed Dragon katana, forged in the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago Union, a maritime state that ruled the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago to the east of Elfrieden.
It was single-edged, with a thin, narrow, curved blade. There was a blood groove running between the blade ridge and back. That’s enough detail to make it clear that, for those in the know, it should have been apparent that the Nine-Headed Dragon katana closely resembled a Japanese katana.
Unlike this country’s swords, which were meant to chop through things (the Western style), it was specially designed to cut by pushing or pulling. Exactly the same as a Japanese katana. Maybe the manufacturing process was the same, too.
That Nine-Headed Dragon katana was out of its sheath and its blade was exposed, sitting on top of a sword rack with its blade facing upwards. That was how it had been when Liscia had taken a swing at it and lost.
Liscia was now staring intently at the Nine-Headed Dragon katana’s blade. “It’s got an incredible cutting edge, huh.”
“We had swords like these in the country I came from, and when it came to cutting power, they were top class,” I said.
In one program I’d watched, I had even seen a katana cut through the stream of a water cutter (a machine that used high pressure water to cut through things), after all. They had to have some pretty impressive cutting power.
Liscia let out an impressed grunt. “That’s really something. But what’s a Nine-Headed Dragon katana doing here?”
“It was a gift from Excel,” I said. “It apparently came from a fishing ship from the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago that they seized.”
“A fishing ship?”
“There’ve been a lot of them lately, I hear. Ships from the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago that come into our waters to fish illegally.”
In this world, there were large creatures called sea dragons (they looked like monstrous plesiosauruses with goat horns) used to tug iron ships. Sea dragons were relatively docile, but among the large sea creatures of this world, there were also vicious and dangerous ones like the super-massive sharks called megalodons. Because those sorts of dangerous sea creatures mainly lived in the deep sea, fishing was, by necessity, restricted to the coastal waters of the continent and islands.
There were still enough fish to catch, so it wasn’t much of a problem, but in recent years, the number of ships from the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago coming to fish in our waters had increased.
In this world, it was commonly accepted that fishing should be done in one’s own country’s coastal waters or on the open sea (though that was, of course, dangerous), and fishing in another country’s coastal waters was considered illegal. Illegal fishing ships could be seized or sunk without recourse. And yet, the number of illegal fishing vessels entering our waters was on the rise.
Correlating with that, there had been an increase in the number of clashes between fishermen.
“We’ve submitted a formal complaint to the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago Union, but… there’s been no reply,” I said. “I have Excel’s fleet out patrolling our waters, but it doesn’t seem to be having much of an effect.”
“It’s a maritime state you’re dealing with, after all,” said Liscia. “They have the best shipbuilders and helmsmen in the world.”
She was right. In the Nine-Headed Dragon Archipelago, they trained other creatures that could draw their ships in addition to the usual sea dragons. I had heard they were incredibly fast. That, and because fishing ships were made of wood and not loaded with cannons, they could move quickly. If they focused on trying to escape, a military ship couldn’t catch up to them.
“Even this ship they seized recently was only caught when they had the bad luck to run aground,” I added.
“Then why don’t we chase after them with fast wooden ships of our own?” Liscia asked.
“If we did that and they were armed, we’d take heavy losses, you know?”
“…You’re right.”
It hurt that, as the ones guarding, there was a bare minimum of equipment we would need to get ready.
Liscia crossed her arms and thought deeply about it. “Still, it’s a bit strange. It’s true that, if they make it to our coastal waters, they can fish here easily, but to get here, they have to travel over the open sea where there are large sea creatures, right? Why would they go through that risk to fish here illegally when there’s the chance they’ll be caught?”
“Who knows…” I said. “There might be something going on in the archipelago, and there’s no way for us to find out what it is. We get barely any information on the island countries.”
Even if I had my clandestine operations unit, the Black Cats, infiltrate the country to collect intelligence, the country was surrounded by the sea, making it hard to get information out. Messenger kuis couldn’t travel over large stretches of sea when there was no place to rest, and a jewel for the Jewel Voice Broadcast would be large enough that it would be difficult to sneak in. That, and there was the risk we’d lose it.