Chapter 101: The Engines of Expansion

The fire in Inori's study had burned low, casting long, restless shadows across the heavy oak shelves. The revelation of Gestapo Müller's existence still hung in the air like smoke that refused to clear, but none of the three brothers could afford to let fear settle in and take root. There was too much left to build.

Kaguya leaned back into his leather armchair, turning his glass slowly so the liquor caught the last of the firelight, and steered the conversation back onto steadier, more domestic ground.

"While you're busy preparing for Archaea, Takuya, I need to get our own house in order first," he said, his clinical focus sliding back into place. "Where do my medical policies actually stand? I submitted the draft on medication as a basic right, along with the mandate for subsidised clinics in every rural agrarian district."

Takuya nodded, settling back into the ease of a man discussing business he already knew the answer to. "Both have been cleared. Finance has already set aside the budget for the rural clinics." He paused. "Your second proposal, though — legalising civilian organ and cadaver donation for anatomical research — has run straight into a wall."

Kaguya's frown was more resigned than surprised. "The Emperor."

"He refused to sign it. And for what it's worth, I agreed with him," Takuya said evenly. "Kaguya, the idea of cutting open a dead relative to harvest their organs is not merely unfamiliar here — it's close to blasphemy. Push that policy through the ministry today, and we'll have religious riots in the southern provinces by tomorrow morning."

"We can't teach modern surgery without cadavers," Kaguya said quietly, the firelight catching in his eyes. "My residents understand the theory. They need hands. Without real anatomy in front of them, we've hit a wall of our own."

"I know," Takuya said. "Seraphina's already drafting a nationwide campaign to introduce the idea gradually — framing donation as the highest form of imperial sacrifice, something to be honoured rather than feared. But until that takes root in the public mind, you'll need another source for your research subjects."

He took a slow sip from his glass. "For now, the only method that can supply cadavers in any real quantity runs through the Imamah Empire."

Inori, who had been staring quietly into the hearth, turned his head sharply. "Imamah? That territory way up in the north?"

"That's the one," Takuya said. "Imamah and its former vassal states are tearing themselves apart in a multi-faction civil war — border disputes, succession quarrels, the usual mess. Thousands are dying in the sand every week. The climate up there does half the work for us: scorching by day, near freezing by night, and thousands of refugees left exposed with nowhere to shelter. Given how destabilised the whole region already is, we have access to a substantial pool of the deceased that no one is coming back to claim. We can quietly purchase and extract bodies from the war zones for your laboratories, entirely outside the reach of our own domestic law."

Inori's brow creased in confusion. "Hold on — how do you even know their troop movements, or the death tolls? Everything I've ever read says Imamah runs one of the strictest closed borders on the continent. They execute foreign diplomats on sight."

The warmth drained from Takuya's expression, replaced by the cold, unreadable stillness of a man who had spent years learning to give nothing away. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped almost to nothing, barely rising above the crackle of the fire.

"Because the Homeland Security Department runs a classified division that works directly alongside the CID," he said. "Their sole purpose is infiltrating closed borders. They wear no uniform. They travel in through neutral merchant caravans, through black markets, through the slave trade — wherever a door happens to be open a crack."

He looked from one brother to the other, the full weight of his office pressing down on his shoulders as he said it. "The CID has used every dirty method available to secure a foothold inside Imamah's various factions. Bribery. Extortion. Smuggling of Cynthia crossbows into rebel hands. And, when nothing else has worked — targeted assassinations."

Inori stared at his eldest brother, the shock plain on his face. He opened his mouth to object — to say something about sovereignty, about the sheer scale of what he'd just admitted to — but Kaguya spoke first.

"It's necessary," Kaguya said, and there was nothing soft in his voice at all.

Inori turned to him, disbelieving. "He just told us he's funding civil wars and assassinations in another country, Kaguya."

"And if he doesn't, eventually they come for us instead," Kaguya said, his clinical detachment overriding whatever discomfort he might otherwise have felt. "Sometimes securing a nation against a threat from outside means you can't afford to wait for it to knock on your door. You go in and you deal with the disease from the inside — plant the cure, or the poison, whichever the moment calls for."

Inori let out a long breath and dragged a grease-stained hand down his face. He didn't approve of any of it — the bloodshed sat badly with him, and it always would — but he found he had nothing left to argue with. He remembered Lyros. He remembered how close that massacre had come to costing them everything they'd built. He understood, in that moment, exactly why his brother had let himself become this ruthless. Takuya was burning quietly in the dark so that the rest of them could go on living in the light.

"My methods may be cruel," Takuya murmured, looking into his glass rather than at either of them. "But it's the only way this empire survives what's coming. This level of CID activity is known to precisely to few people — Emperor Regis, Duke Balmarrat, and now the two of you."

The silence that followed stretched on rather longer than any of them were comfortable with. Inori and Kaguya looked at their brother and understood, all at once, just how much blood-soaked weight he was quietly carrying beneath that composed political smile — and both privately agreed, without ever saying so aloud, that there were probably a hundred other secrets like this one that they had no wish to learn. It was too much for one man. It would have been too much for three.

Inori was the one who finally broke the tension, clearing his throat and steering them, gratefully, back towards steel and copper. "On a happier note," he said, nodding towards the distant hum of the laboratory, "the thermodynamic work on the electric refrigerator's finished. The compressor units are stable and holding. I need you to secure land for an assembly factory to start mass-producing the parts — and the funding to build it."

Takuya nodded, visibly grateful for the change of subject. "Consider it done. I'll have the ministry zone land in the north tomorrow morning. We've been planning a new city up there for some time — this gives us exactly the excuse we needed to start building it properly.'

"And," Kaguya cut in, pointing a finger at Inori, "the first production run goes entirely to medicine. We need those units in the rural clinics and in every general hospital across Cynthia, without exception. Half our volatile liquid medicines and biological samples are still being stored the old way, and we lose more of them to spoilage than I'd like to admit."

"Agreed," Takuya said. "Medical infrastructure takes absolute priority over everything else. Poremania and Bregran are already connected to the Phase One grid, and the next expansion is aimed at Lyros. Once Inori's telephone switchboards go into mass production, I intend to shift our entire economic strategy."

Seraphina's question from earlier that morning — about who truly held the reins of a government-linked company — surfaced again in his mind. "I'm going to build out an entire fleet of them," he said, his eyes lit with the particular fire he reserved for the things he cared most about. "State-backed corporations for electrical appliances, automotive manufacturing, telecommunications, maritime logistics, and central banking. It's the only way to sustain the sheer volume of capital we're about to start generating."

Kaguya looked doubtful. "Can you really launch all of those at once? Especially with our timeline shrinking because of Müller?"

"It's a considerable undertaking," Takuya admitted, a confident smirk creeping onto his face. "But I'm not carrying it alone any longer. I've spent the last year cultivating capable people right across the ministries. Crown Prince Julian, in fact, will personally lead the establishment of the central banking corporation, working closely with the current Governor of the Central Bank."

He rose, straightening his coat. "Each of these corporations will be built to blend directly into the domestic economy — to become its lifeblood, not merely sit alongside it. Once they're standing on their own two feet and turning a genuine profit—" his smile sharpened "—the next step is foreign direct investment. We start quietly buying into the infrastructure of friendly nations. Starting with the Frisian Empire."

Before either brother could fully absorb the scale of what he'd just described, three sharp knocks sounded against the study door.

It opened to reveal Mornea, offering a deep, polished bow. "My apologies for the intrusion, Prime Minister. I've been sent by Princess Seraphina and Princess Aurelia. They wished me to remind you all that it is past midnight, and that if the three of you do not stop plotting and come to bed, they will lock the estate doors."

A genuine laugh broke out of Takuya, rare enough that it caught even Kaguya off guard. "I believe that's our cue, Kaguya."

Kaguya smiled, drained the last of his glass, and rose to his feet. They bid Inori goodnight, leaving the exhausted engineer alone with the quiet hum of his machines, and stepped out together into the cool, electrically lit dark of Dian City.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

The morning air over Dian City was crisp, and a welcome change from the heavier, smoke-choked skies further into the industrial districts. At the grand entrance of Dian General Hospital, Kaguya and Inori stood together, watching the Prime Minister's armoured carriage roll away towards the Royal Capital.

Takuya had given Kaguya a single, silent nod just before the doors closed — the kind of acknowledgement that needed no further words between brothers. Takuya would go on fighting his war in the shadows. Kaguya would keep their people breathing.

Once the carriage had vanished past the reinforced gates, the small group broke apart. Inori offered a quick wave and headed off towards his machinery labs, his mind already turning over metallurgical formulas. Aurelia, crisp in her white Chief Nurse's uniform, leaned in and kissed her husband's cheek.

"I've got three wards of new admissions to sort through and a rotation schedule that looks like a battle plan," she said, with the particular fondness of someone who complained about her work because she loved it. "I'll see you at dinner."

"Try and take a proper lunch today, for once," Kaguya said, and turned to make his way up to his office on the third floor.

With the hospital now lit throughout by the steady hum of electric bulbs, his mind was already racing ahead. He sat down at his desk, unrolled a fresh sheet of drafting parchment, and began sketching out new medical instruments built around Inori's electric motors — an electric blood centrifuge to spin red cells away from plasma far faster than any hand-cranked device could manage, and the intricate pneumatic bellows of an early mechanical ventilator. He meant to have the rough concepts sent to Inori's engineers before noon.

The day dissolved into the usual blur of administrative work and surgical consultations. By evening, the corridors had settled into the hush that came with the night shift.

Down in the lower-class public wards, Prince Adrian of Frisia was running on fumes. His resident's coat, once crisp white, had gone wrinkled and stained with iodine, but he had refused to go back to his quarters. He'd sent Olivia home hours earlier, insisting he could manage the rest of the shift alone.

He sat on a wooden stool beside the bed of a Cynthia commoner boy, no older than six, whose small chest rose and fell too fast, fighting a severe bacterial fever. Adrian pressed a cool, damp cloth to the child's forehead and checked his pulse against his pocket watch, his jaw tightening with every irregular beat.

Thousands of children die of exactly this fever every spring back home in Frisia, he thought, the bitterness rising in his chest. Because we still rely on prayer and boiled tree bark while the science that could save them sits locked behind these walls. I won't let another child die while the cure exists somewhere in this building.

Later that night, instead of heading for the exit, he slipped quietly down the restricted west corridor.

Inside the central medical archive, a single electric desk lamp cast a small, bright pool of light across a mahogany table. Adrian sat hunched over it, his hands shaking slightly as he copied line after line onto his own parchment from Chief Director Kaguya's restricted laboratory journal — pages detailing the cultivation of Penicillium moulds and the extraction of the antibiotic compounds they produced.

He knew precisely what he was doing. His father, Emperor Magnus, had sent him to Cynthia to learn, not to steal — but copying the Chief Director's private research without so much as asking permission edged uncomfortably close to espionage. Had he been caught doing anything like this in the Theltan Empire, he would have been executed on the spot. And still, his desire to spare Frisia its annual plagues outweighed his fear for his own neck.

"Your incubation temperature is too high, Adrian."

Adrian flinched so hard his pen skittered off the desk and clattered onto the floor. He spun round, his heart hammering, to find Kaguya standing casually in the doorway, hands in the pockets of his white coat.

He didn't look angry. He made no move to call for the HSD guards stationed at the end of the hall. He simply walked in and came to stand behind the terrified prince, tapping a finger against the copied notes.

"Culture the mould at twenty-eight degrees and it will multiply aggressively, yes — but it will burn through its own resources and die before it ever secretes the compound you're after," Kaguya said, his voice carrying easily through the quiet archive. "You have to stress the mould to force the secretion. Bring the temperature down to twenty-four."

Adrian stared at him, the blood roaring in his ears. "I — Director Kaguya, I—" He swallowed hard, looking down at the stolen notes in front of him. "Why aren't you calling the guards? I'm copying Cynthia's most closely guarded medical research."

Kaguya's smile, when it came, was warm and entirely without malice. "Secrets? Adrian — isn't that rather the point of you being here at all? To learn modern medicine, and to take it home with you?"

He reached past the young man and closed the ledger, then pressed the heavy, leather-bound book directly into Adrian's hands. "A plague doesn't stop at a border, Adrian. A child dying in your capital suffers exactly the way a child dying in mine does. If people are dying of something curable, that's a failure of medicine as a whole — not a state secret worth hoarding."

Adrian looked down at the invaluable book now resting in his hands, and something in his royal upbringing quietly gave way. His father had sent him here as a spy, carrying the weight of that assignment like a stone in his chest. Kaguya, in return, had simply handed him the cure, no strings attached, as one colleague to another.

"Your grasp of Frisian botanical alkaloids is genuinely impressive, from what I've seen," Kaguya went on, his tone shifting into something closer to professional respect. "I'd like you in my inner research circle properly. Help me get these antibiotics synthesised faster."

"I—" Adrian's voice cracked. He held the ledger tight against his chest, and whatever loyalty he still owed to his royal title quietly rearranged itself around a new and steadier calling. "I won't let you down, Director. I swear it."

"Good," Kaguya said, with a small nod. "Bring the ledger. Walk with me to the primary lab — I want to show you the actual fungal cultures under the microscope."

Adrian gathered his notes eagerly and fell into step behind him. They were halfway down the brightly lit main corridor when the sharp, frantic squeak of rubber-soled shoes broke the quiet.

An elven nurse came sprinting round the corner, her face bone white with panic. "Director Kaguya!" she called, barely able to get the words out. "Emergency in Ward Four — a patient, twenty-four years old, six months pregnant. She's collapsed. Massive sudden bleeding, and her abdomen's gone completely rigid."

Kaguya's warmth vanished in an instant, replaced by the razor focus of a trauma surgeon. "Get Theatre One ready now. Find Aurelia."

He broke into a run, and Adrian didn't hesitate for a second, sprinting after him.

They burst into the ward to find the sheets already soaked through with a frightening amount of dark blood. The young woman lay pale and gasping, shock visibly closing in, her hands weakly pressed against her swollen belly.

Kaguya was at her side immediately, pressing his palms flat against her abdomen. "Board-rigid. No give at all," he said rapidly, two fingers already searching for her pulse. "Blood pressure's dropping fast." He raised her legs to keep what blood remained circulating to her brain. "Adrian — look at the volume she's lost. Tell me what's happening."

Adrian's mind raced through every Frisian medical text he'd ever studied, and none of them had prepared him for something moving this quickly. "A — a miscarriage? Something's ruptured?"

"It's a severe placental abruption," Kaguya said grimly, already drawing up a syringe of coagulant. "The placenta — the organ feeding the child — has torn away from the wall of the womb, completely and without warning. What you're seeing is retroplacental haemorrhage on a massive scale. She's bleeding internally, into her own womb, faster than her body can compensate for it."

Adrian's eyes went wide with horror. "The baby — we have to save the baby!"

Kaguya looked at him, and for a moment something heavy and sorrowful passed behind his eyes. "We can't."

Adrian froze. "What? But if we operate—"

"She's only twenty-four weeks along, Adrian," Kaguya said, his voice tight but perfectly steady as he worked. "At six months the lungs simply aren't ready. There's no surfactant yet — the substance that keeps the tiny air sacs from collapsing in on themselves the moment the child tries to breathe. Even if I pull the infant out alive this instant, without a positive-pressure ventilator and a proper incubator waiting, it will suffocate in open air within minutes. We don't have either.'

He looked down at the mother, whose eyes were already beginning to flutter shut. "The child's oxygen supply is already cut off — entirely — by the detachment itself. If we try to save them both, we lose them both. Our only path now is an emergency laparotomy: open her, clamp the uterine arteries, deliver the foetus to stop the bleeding at its source, and put every effort we have into keeping the mother alive."

The words landed on Adrian like a physical blow. He had spent months in this hospital watching Kaguya undo the impossible — curing infections that should have killed, setting bones that should never have healed straight, pulling people back from the very edge of death. Somewhere along the way, without quite noticing, he had started to think of Cynthia's medicine as something closer to magic than science.

Standing over those blood-soaked sheets, that illusion came apart completely. Science had limits. And when those limits were reached, even the best doctor alive was left to make choices no one should ever have to make.

"Director!" Aurelia arrived at a run, two orderlies close behind her with a wheeled gurney.

"Theatre One, now," Kaguya ordered, stepping back to let them move the unconscious woman across. He turned to Adrian, who stood frozen. "Scrub in. You're assisting."

Adrian swallowed hard, looked down at the blood already soaking into his sleeve, and nodded, pale but steady. "Yes, Director."

Hours later, the first grey light of dawn had begun creeping in through the hospital windows.

Adrian sat on a bench in the locker room, his surgical mask hanging loose around his neck, his hands scrubbed raw and stinging from the disinfectant.

The mother had survived. Kaguya had worked with a precision that still didn't feel entirely real, closing off the haemorrhage just before she slipped past the point of no return. She was resting now, stable, in recovery, under Aurelia's watchful eye.

The child had not survived.

The heavy door swung open and Kaguya came in, looking every one of the hours he'd been awake, the lines around his eyes cut deeper than usual in the harsh electric light. He crossed to the sink without a word and began washing his hands.

Adrian stared at the tiled floor. "I thought — with everything you know, Director, I thought we could fix anything. I thought we could save everyone."

Kaguya shut off the tap and reached for a towel, drying his hands slowly, unhurried despite the exhaustion.

"That's the heaviest part of wearing this coat, Adrian," he said quietly, leaning back against the sink. "We're not gods. We're only men fighting a war against death with whatever knowledge and tools we happen to have to hand. And sometimes the tool we needed simply hasn't been invented yet."

He glanced towards his office, thinking of the unfinished ventilator sketches still sitting on his desk. If he'd had it built a months earlier, perhaps tonight would have ended differently.

"Medicine will fail us," he went on, meeting Adrian's eyes. "Patients will die under our hands, no matter how much we know or how hard we try. But that failure is exactly why we can never stop researching. Every life we lose tonight has to become the reason we save the next one."

Adrian looked up, and whatever remained of the sheltered, naive prince who had first arrived in Cynthia was gone. In his place sat a young man who had finally understood, in full, the weight that came with the coat.

He stood, retying his mask into place. "I understand, Director. Let's get back to the lab."