Chapter 100: The Blueprint of Tomorrow

The morning air over Suebic City carried none of the heavy, sulphurous smog that so often settled over Dian City's industrial quarters. Instead it hummed with something else entirely — the frantic, organised rhythm of a city being rebuilt from the ground up, brick by brick, wire by wire.

A sleek, reinforced carriage bearing the crest of the Prime Minister rolled smoothly along a newly widened avenue of pressed asphalt. Inside sat Takuya Kazuha and Princess Seraphina, who had insisted, the moment she heard he was leaving for Suebic the night before, that she would be coming with him whether he liked it or not. Opposite them sat Takuya's newest administrative assistant, a sharp-eyed young elf named Mornea, who had traded his people's traditional robes for a tailored Cynthia civil service suit two months earlier and had taken to the role with the fervour of a man who had finally found his calling.

"If you look to your right, Your Highness," Mornea said, gesturing out through the glass, his voice crisp with professional pride, "you'll see the construction grounds for the new Suebic Market Mall."

Seraphina leaned towards the window. Even half-built, the steel-and-glass skeleton rising from the site was staggering in scale.

"It's enormous," she breathed. "It makes the commercial hub in Dian City look like a village market."

"It is, in fact, precisely three times the size, Princess," Mornea said, checking his ledger with evident satisfaction. "Designed by Chief Architect Caelion himself. The whole philosophy behind the blueprint is maximum consumer flow and absolute modernisation. And because Suebic sits at the very heart of the First Phase National Power Grid Project, the mall — and every street around it — has already been wired for electricity."

Seraphina looked down the avenue properly for the first time and noticed what she had somehow missed before: tall, sleek iron poles running the length of the road, each one topped not with an oil lantern but with a globe of glass. It is a new design of street lamp.

"A centralised electric grid," Takuya murmured, his dark eyes tracking the passing infrastructure with something close to satisfaction. "To run it, we've established the empire's first government-linked company. We're calling it the Cynthia National Power Company, Limited, operating under the Ministry of Utilities."

"A state-owned corporation." Seraphina's sharp political mind seized on the detail at once. "And who holds the reins of it?"

"It's jointly owned by the Ministry of Utilities and the Ministry of Finance," Takuya said. "Utilities is responsible for the engineering side — the actual distribution of water, gas, communications, and very soon petrol and diesel, right across the continent. Finance keeps the budgeting and the expansion planning honest, so that none of it drifts outside the empire's long-term economic sense."

Seraphina considered the arrangement, turning it over. "Why not simply split them, Takuya? A Ministry of Utilities and a separate Ministry of Energy?"

He gave her a faint, razor-edged smile. "Because bureaucracy is a parasite on capital, Seraphina. Keep the two functions under one roof and you save enormous amounts on operating costs, on maintenance, on the sheer administrative redundancy of running two ministries where one will do. Every credit we save that way goes straight back into research and development — into the two industries we're about to build from nothing: automotive industry, food and beverages, and hospitality."

Seraphina looked at the man beside her with something close to wonder. Other kings and lords in this world worried, at best, about next month's grain harvest. Takuya was already sketching entire industries that did not yet exist, and totting up the tax revenue they would generate decades from now.

"And that," Takuya went on, straightening his cuffs, "is exactly why we're here today. I need to talk to the head of the vocational school about the groundwork for both of them."

Seraphina blinked. "Wait — you mean my sister?"

His smile widened by a fraction. "Precisely."

The carriage slowed and rolled through the iron gates of the central vocational institute. The moment Takuya and Seraphina stepped down, a squad of Homeland Security Department operatives closed around them, forming a tight, practised perimeter as they were escorted through the school's busy corridors.

When they pushed open the heavy oak doors of the headmaster's office, they found Princess Lysandra all but buried behind a desk vanishing beneath schematics, ledgers, and half-finished curriculum drafts. She looked dreadful — her hair scraped back into a hasty knot, dark shadows bruising the skin under her eyes, the general appearance of a woman who had not slept properly in a week. When she looked up and saw who had just walked in, her expression curdled instantly into pure annoyance.

"Lysandra!" Seraphina rushed forward. "By the gods, what happened to you? You look exhausted."

Lysandra dropped her pen and pointed an ink-stained, trembling finger straight at Takuya. "Ask your fiancé. He's the reason I'm living in a state of purgatory."

Takuya only cleared his throat, entirely unbothered, and stepped up to the desk. "Is the baseline curriculum I asked for finished?"

Lysandra stared at him, her jaw dropping in disbelief. "Wow. Not even a single 'good morning,' Takuya? Straight to business, is it? My kingdom for a bit of courtesy."

"You appear to be in perfectly functional condition," he replied smoothly, the ghost of a smile touching his mouth. "So we may as well get straight to business."

She rubbed her temples and groaned. "Of the three brothers, you genuinely have the empathy of a brick — has anyone told you that? Fine. Yes. The baseline automotive course is finished. With Inori's team feeding us the mechanical documentation and schematics, my staff have managed to put together a proper one-year track. We can launch the programme next month, once the printing presses have finished the textbooks."

Takuya nodded, pleased. "And the secondary industries?"

Her scowl deepened. "There's the bottleneck. Food and beverages, hospitality — we're completely stalled on both. We haven't got a single person with real expertise or experience in modern hospitality work, and there's no documentation to build a curriculum around. Every course needs a textbook, Takuya. You can't run a school for a trade nobody in this world has ever practised."

"Understood," he said, absorbing the block without flinching. "I'll see to the documentation myself."

"And the automotive course," Lysandra pressed, arms folded, "who's meant to be teaching it? Every one of Inori's researchers is far too busy building actual machines to leave their posts and stand in front of a classroom of teenagers, and Inori will murder me personally if I try to poach his lead engineers."

"Already solved," Takuya said at once. "Every senior researcher in Dian City was assigned a junior assistant. Those assistants already understand the baseline mechanics — they'll be transferred here to teach. We're also putting a strict age limit on the intake. Seventeen-year-olds only, to begin with. It's meant as a foundation year before the students move up."

"The next level?" Seraphina asked.

Takuya crossed to the large city map pinned to Lysandra's wall. "The vocational school is being formalised as a one-year programme. Graduates go straight into the national workforce as technicians. If their results are exceptional, they're offered a further year at the Cynthia Technical University — the CTU — to qualify as certified engineers. And if they want to push further still, a third year turns them into lead researchers working on next-generation engineering."

"That's a genuinely brilliant pipeline," Lysandra admitted, grudgingly.

"It applies right across the disciplines," Takuya continued. "Civil engineering, mechanical, electrical, chemical, telecommunications. Medicine and architecture I'm leaving entirely to Kaguya and Caelion to structure — those two industries are still concentrated in Dian City, not here."

"And where exactly is this Cynthia Technical University?" Seraphina asked, fascinated despite herself by the sheer scope of the vision.

"On the outskirts of Suebic," Takuya said, tapping a broad zoned section of the map. "Nearly finished. Caelion's team designed it, of course. It has a graduation hall that converts into a full event space, six academic blocks of four storeys each, seven blocks given over entirely to modern laboratories, a full athletics field, and ten blocks of two-storey dormitories, sited well clear of the heavy industrial zones.'

He turned back to the two women, and something rare crossed his face — genuine respect. "Suebic used to be a sprawling, half-empty city, burdened with vast tracts of unused land. I have to admit, the new ruling lord — Duke Balmarrat's son — has done a remarkable job of it. He's kept the city's character while aggressively zoning for commerce, road expansion, utilities, housing — he even set aside land for future government buildings before I'd said a word to him about it. Managing finance and governance at once, and doing it well — the boy is unusually competent for a young lord."

Seraphina blinked, genuinely startled. Takuya almost never praised the nobility of this world. For him to speak so warmly of the young Balmarrat heir meant the boy really was something rare.

"The city does feel different," Seraphina said, glancing out of the window. "There are no walls left at all — just wide paved roads running straight out into the countryside. Why hasn't Dian City done the same? The walls there are still standing."

"Because Suebic is a city of trade and ideas," Takuya said, his voice dropping a shade darker. "Dian houses our most advanced research and our most dangerous weapons manufacturing. Until our borders are secure, those walls stay up. They're protecting our secrets."

He turned back to Lysandra and straightened his coat. "I'll find someone to write the foundational material for food and beverages, and for hospitality. Don't let it hold up the other programmes."

At the door he paused, glancing back with an entirely deadpan expression. "Once those are running, I'm thinking of a course in advanced synthetic farming, and one in naval construction. Warn your staff."

Lysandra's eyes went so sharp they might have cut glass. She looked, for a moment, as though she were seriously considering whether the Prime Minister could simply be swallowed whole.

Chuckling, Takuya stepped out into the corridor. "I have to get back to Dian City. Inori and Kaguya are waiting."

Seraphina said a quick, sympathetic goodbye to her sister and followed him out into the grand, vaulted hallway of the institute.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

They were halfway down the wide marble staircase towards the entrance when their path was briefly blocked by a group of students coming up, arms full of heavy textbooks and slate boards. Among them was Princess Vanessa of Frisia, walking shoulder to shoulder with a young woman named Adeeka and three commoner-born Cynthia students from her study group.

When the Cynthia students realised who they had very nearly walked into, they froze on the spot in pure terror, then scrambled to the edges of the staircase, bowing so low they almost dropped their books and whispering frantically amongst themselves.

Vanessa alone kept her composure, stepping forward with a graceful curtsy. "Prime Minister Takuya. It's an honour."

"Princess Vanessa," he said. "Allow me to introduce my fiancée, Princess Seraphina."

Vanessa offered Seraphina a polite greeting, then straightened to find the Cynthia princess studying her rather too closely — taking in the ink stains on her fingers, the tired but fiercely set jaw, the easy way she stood among the commoner students rather than apart from them. Slowly, a warm, knowing smile spread across Seraphina's face.

Vanessa shifted, uncomfortable under the scrutiny. "Your Highness — is there something on my face?"

Seraphina only laughed and shook her head, her eyes bright with the particular mischief of an older sister already three moves into a matchmaking scheme. "No, Princess Vanessa. I was simply thinking — you really are lovely. And very suitable."

Vanessa blinked, thoroughly bewildered. Suitable for what? "I — thank you, Your Highness," she managed, somewhat stiffly.

Takuya smoothly stepped in and rescued the Frisian princess from his fiancée's scheming before it went any further. "How are your studies progressing here, Princess Vanessa? Is the crucible proving useful?"

Vanessa's spine straightened with pride. "I'm still working to catch up on the advanced calculus and thermodynamics, Prime Minister, but I've found excellent study partners, and it's going well. I won't fail."

"See that you don't," he said, with something almost approving in his tone. "Now — forgive us, but I have business waiting in Dian City."

Before Vanessa could step back into a proper bow, Seraphina closed the distance between them and pulled her into a sudden, warm hug.

"Keep at it, Vanessa,' she whispered with a bright laugh, then let go and swept on down the stairs after Takuya.

Vanessa stood frozen on the landing, clutching her books to her chest, watching the two of them go in a state of complete bewilderment, while behind her the study group murmured on in open awe.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

By late afternoon the Prime Minister's carriage rolled up to the heavy concrete walls of Dian City, and the mood of the journey changed the instant they passed beneath the gate.

There was none of Suebic's bustling, open-air energy here. The walls had not been torn down; if anything, they had been reinforced. High above, silhouetted against the setting sun, Homeland Security Department snipers walked their patrols along the battlements in slow, deliberate lines. At the gate itself, armed guards were working methodically through the cargo of an incoming merchant caravan, cross-checking every paper before allowing it through.

As the carriage rolled on into the city, Seraphina pressed close to the window, her brow furrowing. The Dian City she remembered had been loud and crowded, overflowing with new money. What she saw now felt hollowed out. Shop after shop along the main streets had its shutters drawn. Whole rows of residential houses stood dark and empty behind their windows. The only place that still showed any real civilian life was the central Dian City Market Mall.

"Takuya," she said, turning from the window. "Why is it so quiet? Where has everyone gone? It looks as though a plague swept through the commercial district. Is the ruling lord not looking after the city?"

He gave her an oddly awkward, thin smile. "I am the ruling lord."

She blinked. "You? But — why? You're the Prime Minister. Why would you be the one emptying out your own city?"

The awkwardness fell away from his face, replaced by the cold, calculating mask he wore when discussing intelligence work. "After the recent espionage incidents, it became clear Dian's security needed rebuilding from the inside out. A dense civilian population makes it far too easy for a spy to blend into a crowd and loiter near a restricted area without drawing attention. So for the last few months, I've been offering generous relocation incentives — merchants, shopkeepers, anyone whose presence here isn't strictly necessary — to move to Suebic instead."

"You bought them out of their own homes," Seraphina said, astonished.

"It was a very good deal for them," he said evenly. "I've moved every factory that isn't directly tied to critical defence technology out to the north and west. The only farms still operating inside these walls are used for agricultural research — not for feeding the city."

Seraphina was still struggling to take in the scale of it. "But why go this far, Takuya? What's the actual plan here? You're choking the life out of this city."

"The plan," Takuya said, his voice dropping, "is to turn Dian into a pure, concentrated research hub — the centre of everything we do in military technology, combat medicine, advanced automotive research, and synthetic fertiliser production, which happens to require handling explosive chemical compounds in bulk. For work at that scale, the security has to be absolute. The only people permanently living inside these walls now are HSD operatives and their families, the core research staff, and the military architectural firms."

"It seems cruel," he admitted, a hint of steel entering his gaze, "but it's necessary. None of this technology can be allowed to leak. That's exactly why Suebic is bursting at the seams right now — I sent everyone there on purpose. They're safe, they're better off financially than they've ever been, and Dian is secure."

"Did my father agree to all this?" Seraphina asked, knowing the Emperor generally hated the idea of displacing his own people.

"Not at first," Takuya said, nodding. "Chief Director Vane, Duke Balmarrat, and I sat with Emperor Regis for a very long time. It was only once I laid out the consequences of our explosive chemistry or our engine schematics falling into the wrong hands that he agreed the risk of exposure simply couldn't be tolerated."

"And the hospital?" Seraphina asked, thinking of the flood of patients Kaguya normally handled.

'Dian General Hospital is still running,' Takuya said. "But the new facility in Suebic is already twice its size, and built to operate entirely independently. Most of the civilian medical staff here will be transferred there before long. Kaguya will stay on in Dian mainly for deep medical research." He paused. "Though he'll be splitting his time with Poremania as well. He's built himself a second residence there for his elven research work."

Seraphina's face softened into a smile. "Speaking of elves — where's Caelion's office? Isn't he still running the architectural firms here?"

"He's moved away from drafting and taken up teaching the next generation of architecture instructors, part-time," Takuya said, and then, unexpectedly, gave a genuine smile. "He's also taken some personal leave. He got married recently."

Seraphina's jaw dropped. "Caelion — married?"

Takuya laughed. "Small ceremony, very fast — typical of the man's efficiency. His wife's one of the elven nurses at Dian General. From what I hear, the marriage is going rather well."

Before Seraphina could press for details, Mornea leaned forward from his seat. "Prime Minister, Princess — we've arrived at Lord Inori's main laboratory."

The carriage drew to a halt outside a vast, heavily reinforced warehouse. Takuya and Seraphina climbed down, their HSD escort closing around them, and stepped inside to air thick with the smell of ozone, hot metal, and grease.

Near the entrance they found Gina — Inori's sharp, endlessly capable commoner assistant — lecturing a group of wide-eyed new staff on the sanitisation protocols required before entering the clean rooms. She spotted the royal pair, straightened at once, and offered a crisp bow. "Prime Minister. Princess Seraphina. Lord Inori's expecting you — he's out in the rear testing bay."

She led them through a maze of whirring dynamos and cluttered drafting tables until they reached the back of the warehouse, where Lord Inori stood bent over a heavy workbench, sleeves rolled to the elbow and hands black with soot, checking the voltage on a heavy rubber-cased box with a pair of brass testing prongs.

"Inori," Takuya called over the hum of the machinery. "Is the accumulator ready?"

Inori looked up, pushing his goggles onto his forehead, and broke into a triumphant grin. "Final discharge test finished ten minutes ago. It's stable. We're ready to move into mass production."

Seraphina stepped closer, curious, and studied the heavy black box with its two lead posts jutting from the top. "What is it, exactly?"

"This, Princess," Inori said, patting the casing with obvious pride, "is the heartbeat of the future. A chemical battery."

"A battery? Like an artillery battery?"

"No — an electrical one." Inori slipped easily into his lecturing voice, chalk already in hand, and sketched a rough square on a nearby slate. "Think of this box as a stomach. Inside, we've packed plates of lead metal, and we've filled the whole thing with a bath of strong acid. When the acid and the lead touch, they react violently against one another, and that chemical reaction throws off a surge of invisible energy — electricity."

He drew an arrow leading away from the box. "We catch that surge with a wire and send it wherever we need power — to a motor, to start a heavy engine in a lorry or a ship, without needing a hundred men to crank it by hand."

Seraphina's eyes widened as the shape of it came together. "So the acid simply eats away at the metal until the energy's spent?"

"Exactly!" Inori was delighted she was following. "But here's the clever part. Once the engine's running, it spins a small wheel called an alternator, and that wheel forces electricity back into the battery. That returning current pushes the acid back away from the lead, resetting the whole reaction. The battery heals itself while you drive. As long as the chemicals stay sealed inside, it can charge and discharge like that for years."

Seraphina looked at the black box with something close to awe. "That's — terrifyingly clever."

Takuya, long since inured to his brother's genius, cut straight to business. "Show me the lorries."

Inori's grin faltered into a slightly defensive grimace. He grabbed the edge of a heavy canvas tarpaulin covering a shape in the centre of the room and pulled it back.

Underneath sat a small, boxy, four-wheeled vehicle — a flat cargo bed at the back, a tiny enclosed cabin up front. It was, unmistakably, built to the exact proportions of a Japanese mini-truck.

Takuya stared at it. The silence stretched.

Slowly he turned to look at his brother, his face a masterpiece of deadpan disappointment. "Inori. This is a kei-truck. A farm vehicle. I asked for heavy logistical transport."

"Oh, don't look at me like that!" Inori snapped, throwing his hands up. "It's a working prototype! Getting the combustion timing right even at this scale nearly killed me!"

Takuya sighed and rubbed his temples. "I need semi-trailer lorries, Inori. We're moving thousands of tonnes of grain across the continent, not a few sacks to market."

"I know that!" Inori shot back, pacing now, his frustration spilling out in a rush. "My team's already finished drafting the block for a turbocharged inline-six diesel engine — the engine isn't the problem. Everything else is." He grabbed a wrench and gestured at the little truck's chassis. "To build something that can haul fifty tonnes of cargo, I need an entirely new heavy-ratio gearbox, designed from nothing. Standard iron gears simply won't survive it — the moment the driver shifts into first gear, that much torque from a diesel engine will shatter the teeth to powder."

"And the chassis is worse," he went on. "Ordinary steel buckles the second you put a full trailer load on it. We have to go back into metallurgy and develop proper high-tensile alloys before we can even think about it. Then there's heavy-duty shock absorbers to design, pneumatic air brakes for the trailers, fifth-wheel couplings that won't shear off on a rutted road. The engine's the easy part, Takuya. Building a skeleton strong enough not to tear itself apart under that weight — that's the nightmare."

Takuya raised a hand in surrender, nodding slowly. "Fine. I take the point — metallurgy takes time. How long before a viable semi-trailer?"

"If I don't sleep? A year," Inori muttered. Then, after a beat: "But there's something else I want to show you."

He led them past the mini-truck to another canvas-draped shape against the back wall and pulled the cover free.

Seraphina gasped.

Beneath it stood a sleek, precisely machined civilian motorcar — four doors, a smoothly curved bonnet, gleaming glass windows, a plush five-seat interior, built with the steering on the right-hand side. It shone under the warehouse lights.

A rare, unguarded smile broke across Takuya's face. It felt, for a moment, like a piece of home.

"By the gods," Seraphina whispered, stepping forward to run a gloved hand over the smooth painted metal. She looked back at the two brothers. "What exactly is this?"

"A passenger automobile," Takuya said quietly, coming to stand beside her. "Something like your royal carriage, Seraphina — except instead of horses that tire, starve, and panic, it's driven entirely by the diesel and petrol engines Inori's built beneath that bonnet."

"You sit inside," Inori added, opening the driver's door to show her the wheel and pedals. "Press one pedal with your foot, and the engine turns the wheels. It'll outrun the fastest thoroughbred in your father's stables, and it never needs to rest."

Seraphina's political instincts were already racing ahead. "If this works — the royal couriers. The fast riders who carry every letter across the empire. They'd be finished entirely. We could send word from one end of the continent to the other in a single day."

Takuya's smile sharpened. "Oh, Seraphina. We've already got something ready that makes even sending a physical letter obsolete."

He glanced at Inori. "Show her the other prototype."

Inori wiped the grease from his hands and led them out of the machining bay, down a corridor, and into a small, pristine, soundproofed room. In the middle stood a long wooden table, with a strange, heavy wooden box sitting at each end — a rotating dial, a small metal bell, and a curved handle attached by a coiled wire — and a thick black cable running between the two boxes.

Takuya rested a hand on one of the boxes. "Does it actually work, Inori?"

"Of course it works," Inori said, with the air of a man mildly offended by the question. "The telegraph was only ever a stepping stone. Direct current supplies the loop between the two sets. When you speak into the receiver, the sound of your voice — the acoustic vibration — strikes a thin metal diaphragm sitting next to a magnet wrapped in coiled wire. As the diaphragm vibrates, it disturbs the magnetic field, and that disturbance converts the sound of your voice into an electrical signal."

He tapped the black cable connecting the two boxes. "That signal races down the wire almost instantly. When it reaches the receiver on the other end, the whole process runs in reverse — the current drives an electromagnet, which vibrates a second diaphragm, and that diaphragm reconstructs the sound. Your voice, more or less exactly as you spoke it."

Seraphina scratched her head, thoroughly lost. "Magnets — diaphragms — you've entirely lost me."

Takuya only laughed, picked up the receiver on his side, and held it to his ear. "Mimic what I do, Seraphina. Pick up the handle on that box, top to your ear, bottom to your mouth."

Hesitant, she crossed to the far side of the table and lifted the heavy receiver as instructed. Takuya turned to face the wall and spoke into his own set in an ordinary, conversational tone. "Can you hear me, Seraphina?"

She nearly dropped the receiver. The voice had not come from across the room — it had spoken directly into her ear, clear and close, out of the strange metal earpiece in her hand.

"By the gods!" she gasped, staring at the handle, then across the room at Takuya. She lifted it back to her mouth. "Takuya — I can hear you. You're inside the wood."

He turned round, laughing properly now. "And I can hear you just as clearly."

Seraphina set the receiver back onto its cradle slowly, her mind working through the sheer impossibility of it — technology that owed nothing at all to magic. "The fast riders," she said, half to herself, looking at the black cable. "They're not just obsolete for carrying letters. They're not needed at all. You could simply speak to someone in another city."

"Exactly," Takuya said. "Instant communication. Military orders, economic shifts, word of a disaster — all of it relayed across the continent without an hour lost."

He turned back to his brother, his business manner settling back into place. "Inori, I've already secured funding from the Ministry of Finance for a telephone manufacturing plant, along with the first automotive factory."

Inori rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. "It's not as simple as throwing money at it, Takuya. Pushing lorries and motorcars into mass production needs infrastructure that doesn't exist yet — proper roads, fuel depots, the right metallurgy. None of it's ready." He tapped the wooden telephone box. "My advice is to put everything into the telephone first and shelve the long-range telegraph project for good. The beauty of it is that we can reuse the telegraph cable my teams have already laid — we only need to build exchange centres to route the calls."

His eyes lit up with the particular fervour he reserved for a genuine engineering problem. "Give me the budget, and I'll push my team to finish the automatic mechanical switchboards. Once those are ready, we can mass-produce the handsets and have every major city wired within a matter of months."

"Agreed," Takuya said firmly. "Make the telephone the priority."

While Seraphina lifted the receiver again, fascinated by the faint electrical hum on the line, Takuya stepped closer to Inori.

"I need a private meeting," he said, low enough that only his brother could hear. "You and Kaguya. Tonight, at your house."

Inori frowned and checked his pocket watch. "Kaguya only got back from his honeymoon today. He's in the middle of a debriefing with his medical staff — should be free within the hour.'

"Send word the moment he's finished," Takuya said, and all the usual humour had gone out of his voice.

Inori caught the sudden rigidity in his brother's jaw and leaned in. "What's this about, Takuya? We just finished the communications network. You should be celebrating."

Takuya looked him in the eye, and the weight of what was coming settled visibly onto his shoulders.

"It concerns all of us, Inori," he said quietly. "I had Vane look into the man who approached me at the wedding. The one with the foreign accent."

He let the silence stretch a moment, making sure the words would land properly.

"We are not the only ones who've fallen into this world."

Inori's breath caught in his throat. All the colour drained from his face.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

The night over Dian City was never truly quiet. Even at this hour, a low, steady hum rose through the cobblestones — the sound of Inori's factories, running their tireless mechanical heartbeat somewhere beyond the walls.

Inside Inori's private residence, the atmosphere was heavier than any factory floor. The study door swung open, and Kaguya stepped in, shrugging off his coat as he crossed to take the seat opposite Takuya, who was already pouring three glasses of amber liquid by the fire.

"I didn't expect you to send Seraphina to my estate," Kaguya said, settling into the chair. "When I got home from the hospital, she and Aurelia already had a full pot of tea going and were deep into royal politics."

"I wanted the two of them to have some time together," Takuya said, handing him a glass and passing another to Inori, who leaned against the mantelpiece. "More than that, I needed them well away from this room. Nothing we say tonight leaves it."

Inori took a sip and winced as the spirit burned its way down. "You looked like you'd seen a ghost in my laboratory, Takuya. Tell us."

Takuya stared into his glass for a long moment. "At the wedding banquet, a man came up and spoke to me — our language, but with a heavy German accent. I had Vane trace his credentials. His name is Gestapo Müller. A senior official from the Kingdom of Archaea, across the eastern ocean.'

Inori tilted his head. "Gestapo Müller. That sounds more like a rank than a name."

"It isn't his real one," Takuya said, his voice dropping into a flat, chilling register. "His real name is Heinrich Müller. 'Gestapo Müller' was a nickname, used to tell him apart from another general of the same surname in the German army. I remember him from research I did for my second master's, in political science."

He set his glass down with a heavy thud. "He was the chief of the Gestapo — the secret state police of Nazi Germany, during the Second World War. A man who vanished without a trace in 1945."

The temperature in the room seemed to drop. Kaguya's composure cracked, his eyes going wide with horror; Inori's grip on his glass tightened until his knuckles whitened.

"Müller wasn't just a soldier," Takuya continued, the venom creeping into his tone. "He was a fanatic — an absolute believer who treated Hitler as something close to a living god. What made him dangerous wasn't only the hatred, though. It was the mind behind it. He was a brilliant, cold-blooded administrator, one of the men who organised the persecution and mass murder of Europe's Jews with the efficiency of a factory line. His loathing of communism made him equally skilled at rooting out dissent and controlling a civilian population through fear and economic pressure."

He looked at Inori directly. "And it's worse for you than for either of us. Before he rose through the police, during the Weimar years, he served in the aviation corps. He understands early twentieth-century aircraft mechanics, logistics, and state finance better than most men of his generation. If he's in Archaea, he isn't only bringing fascism into this world. He's bringing the entire blueprint for building an industrialised, totalitarian war machine."

"Good god's" Kaguya said, dragging a hand through his hair. "If a new power's rising in Archaea, and Müller's the one shaping it — Archaea's going to become a proxy for the Third Reich itself."

"Wait. Stop." Inori pressed his fingers to his temples, his face draining of colour as he tried to work the timeline out. "I understand recognising a German accent, Takuya, but — 1945? That's eighty years ago on Earth. We only left in the 2020s. How does a man who vanished nearly a century back arrive in this world only a few years ahead of us? The maths doesn't hold together at all."

"Think of spacetime as a sheet of paper folded over on itself," Kaguya said, leaning forward, his eyes intent. "If transmigration happens through some kind of singularity — a microscopic black hole, an Einstein-Rosen bridge, call it what you like — the entry and exit points aren't bound by ordinary chronological time. Müller's disappearance in 1945 opened one point of entry. Ours, in Tokyo, opened another. If time inside such a passage experiences enough dilation, an eighty-year gap on Earth might collapse into a difference of only two or three years on this side."

Inori shook his head, holding up a hand. "Enough— let's stop there. I build engines, Kaguya, not time machines. I don't need to understand how the universe folds itself. I only care about what's standing in front of us right now." He turned back to Takuya. "What's his next move?"

"Exactly what we did," Takuya said grimly. "According to Vane's people, Müller worked his way into Archaea's government two years ago. He's introducing new agricultural methods, streamlining their economy, and winning the loyalty of their nobility one estate at a time. He's laying his foundations."

"Which means," Kaguya said slowly, "we're up against a master strategist, a veteran of a world war, and a committed fascist — and he's had a several-year head start on us in this world."

"Exactly," Takuya said. "We're already behind."

He turned his full attention on Inori. "The ocean is the only thing standing between his vision and ours. I need to know where the naval research stands. We can't fight a war of that scale with wood-and-iron galleons."

Inori drew a slow breath, pulling his mind away from the politics and back onto steadier, more familiar ground — steel.

"The structural work is essentially finished," he said, his confidence returning. "I've already built initial prototypes of a battleship and a littoral combat ship — an LCS, for coastal defence. They're sitting in the restricted naval testing pools right now."

"Prototypes," Takuya said. "How large?"

"When I say model, I don't mean toys," Inori said, a fierce pride creeping back into his voice. "These are fifteen-foot steel hulls, bigger than a grown man, fitted with scaled-down but fully working diesel-marine engines and propellers. The hydrodynamics and weight distribution testing came back flawless."

Takuya's jaw eased, if only slightly. "And the container ships? To match his logistics?"

"The concept's sound," Inori confirmed. "The bottleneck's the same one I told you about earlier today — scaling it up. The open ocean is brutal. Build a five-hundred-foot cargo hull out of ordinary iron, and the force of a single deep-sea wave will snap it clean in half. My team needs to finish the marine-grade high-tensile steel before we can even think about laying a real keel."

Takuya turned his glass slowly, watching the last of the liquor catch the firelight.

"It's been almost a year since we arrived here," he said at last, his voice softer than either of his brothers had heard it in some time. He looked into the fire. "We brought our technology with us. We stopped the plagues. We modernised the cities. For the first time, ordinary people living under our banner are actually seeing their lives improve." He raised his eyes to meet theirs. "I will not let a butcher from a dead era cross that ocean and burn it all to ash."

He lifted his glass. "We protect this empire from Gestapo Müller. Whatever it costs us."

Kaguya and Inori raised their glasses in answer, their faces set with the same unbroken resolve.

"Whatever it costs," they echoed.