Chapter 78: The Tale of Lyros (Part 3)

The royal carriage thundered across the newly paved Grand Continental Highway, washed in the pale silver of the midnight moon. Inside the cabin, the silence had weight to it — the kind that settles after a truth too large to speak aloud. Ennalone's plan hung in the air like something poisonous.

Then Takuya moved.

He grabbed the wooden stick lying on the floor of the carriage and struck it hard against the roof.

"Halt!" he shouted, his voice cutting clean through the rattle of the wheels. "Halt the convoy!"

The carriage lurched as the driver hauled back on the reins, the draft horses snorting in protest. The HSD outriders flanking the cabin drew their weapons on instinct, forming a perimeter in the dark before anyone had explained why.

"Turn us around," Takuya ordered into the speaking tube, sharp and final. "Back to the Capital. Full speed."

The Crown Prince gripped his seat, eyes wide. "Count Kazuha — what are you doing? We're hours from the Lyros border. Turning back from King Alaric's funeral, the night before the ceremony — the newly annexed state will call it an insult. They'll call it abandonment."

"There is no funeral, Your Highness." Takuya's breathing was shallow. "There's an execution waiting. And I won't walk the Crown Prince of Cynthia onto it."

He sank back against the leather cushions. For the first time since Seraphina and the Prince had known him, the composed, unreadable mastermind cracked open.

He dragged a trembling hand through his hair, undoing its usual order. His eyes closed. His jaw clenched hard enough that his teeth ached.

"I failed," he said. The word tasted like ash.

"Takuya..." Seraphina's voice was quiet, caught off guard by the sight of him like this.

"I was arrogant." His eyes opened, burning now with something closer to fury at himself. "I thought I had this whole continent figured out. I treated the kingdoms around us like backward children — too ignorant for chemistry, too slow for economics. We built the factories in plain sight. We fired the cannons in daylight. I never imagined anyone out there was smart enough to steal from us."

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on the floorboards.

"I accounted for their armies. Their gold. Their politics," he said, bitter. "I never accounted for their patience. Do you understand what that means, Your Highness? When my brothers and I first reached Dian Village, I assumed it was nothing — an isolated farming town. I never once considered Ennalone might already have someone planted there."

The Crown Prince swallowed. "Before you even arrived?"

"Yes." Takuya's nod was grim. "Spies don't only watch enemies. They watch borders. Ennalone had eyes on Dian's local lords long before we showed up. And when we did — when Inori started working his 'miracles' on a tabletop — that spy didn't strike. They watched. They noted the sulfur ratios, the nitrate measurements, and sent it all home."

He laughed, short and hollow. "My ledger was perfect. Iron, gold, grain — all of it balanced. And I missed the one deficit that mattered most. My own arrogance."

The carriage held nothing but wind for a moment.

Then Seraphina moved. She slid across the seat and laid her hand over his — firm, certain.

"Regret doesn't fix anything, Prime Minister." No pity in her voice — only trust, unwavering. "The ledger's bleeding. How do we stop it?"

Takuya looked at her. At the steadiness in her eyes, the strength in her grip. He closed his hand over hers and held on. Whatever spiral he'd been falling into simply stopped.

When he looked up at the Crown Prince again, the shaken man was gone. What remained was colder, sharper, already three moves ahead.

"Driver — turn us around! Back to the Capital!"

As the carriage swung hard onto its new heading, Takuya pulled an iron-clasped dispatch case from beneath his seat. He unrolled two sheets of red-bordered priority parchment and uncapped his pen.

"Protocol Alpha," he said, already writing. "This first letter goes to Mathew — HSD Chief, Lyros."

"What does it say?" the Prince asked.

"Everything I've worked out," Takuya said, not slowing. "Mathew needs to know Ennalone has our explosive formula. Tomorrow's funeral isn't a funeral — it's a single coordinated strike meant to end the Lyros bloodline and Cynthia's leadership at once. I'm ordering him to lock down the Grand Duchess and Princess Jeanna immediately. No open streets. If there's already explosive material in that city, they evacuate — Mathew takes them out under heavy guard to the nearest secure outpost."

He sealed the letter in red wax and threw open the carriage window. Wind tore into the cabin.

"Outrider!"

A cavalryman spurred his horse alongside the moving carriage.

"Take this." Takuya thrust the sealed tube into his hands. "Ride east. No stopping for water, no stopping to rest. Run that horse into the ground if you have to — but reach Lyros Castle before sunrise. Go!"

The rider snatched the tube, saluted, and drove his spurs in, vanishing into the dark ahead of them.

Takuya was already writing the second letter.

"This one's for Chief Vane, in the Capital," he said. "Full lockdown on the Dian City R&D lab and every chemical factory. Nothing goes in or out."

"Count Kazuha." The Prince's voice wavered. "If the spy's been there for months, how do we find them among thousands of workers? Do we question everyone?"

"No." Takuya's eyes were cold. "You don't find a trained spy by hurting people — they're built to take pain. You find them by checking the books."

He glanced up from the letter. "I'm telling Vane to run a Forensic Hunt. A spy trying to disappear into a crowd always leaves a mark in the records — they try too hard to look ordinary. Vane needs the worker who never drinks at the tavern, who carries no debts, no vices, no ties to anyone. The laborer who's asked one too many casual questions about the sulfur supply chain. Cross-reference every worker's start date against the exact week of Inori's first black powder test."

He sealed the second letter. "Whoever doesn't fit the pattern, Vane brings in for interrogation. We'll find him."

The carriage rattled at full speed, racing the dark back toward the Capital walls.

The Crown Prince's knuckles had gone white on his knees. The shape of what they were facing kept getting larger.

"Count Kazuha." His voice shook with the weight of the question. "If Ennalone has the recipe to our weapons — how do we defend an empire against its own firepower?"

Takuya finished latching the dispatch case and looked at the young prince directly.

"This is the most important thing you'll learn about industrial warfare, Your Highness," he said, steady now. "Knowing how to build a bomb means nothing without the means to build a thousand of them. Ennalone has a formula on paper. Cynthia has the factories, the steam engines, the assembly lines, the iron supply running deep into the earth."

He leaned in. "This is an arms race, and the clock is already running. Whoever moves first, whoever controls the raw materials, wins. Ennalone can't outproduce us. But—"

He stopped. Something darker crossed his face.

"There's one thing that genuinely frightens me."

"What?" Seraphina asked, feeling the shift in him.

"If Ennalone realizes they can't outproduce us," he said quietly, "they won't keep fighting alone. They'll sell it. The Kazuha formula, sold off to the other major powers — the Frisian Empire, for one — just to strip Cynthia of its monopoly."

The Prince went pale.

"If that happens," Takuya warned, "it sets off the worst war this world has ever seen. Those empires have the gold, the manpower, and the land to dig up their own minerals. If they start building weapons to match ours, the dying won't stop for a generation."

"Then what do we do?" the Prince asked, desperation creeping into his voice.

"The Blockade Strategy." Takuya's eyes had gone tactical, almost hungry. "We strike Ennalone first — fast, and without warning. But the real goal is to cut off their raw materials."

He pointed east. "They're attacking Lyros for one reason — the bat guano. The saltpeter. No saltpeter, no powder. Duke Balmarrat's attrition line on the border has to hold, no matter the cost. We lock the mountains down. And I need Inori building the next generation of weapons faster than he's ever worked. If we keep Ennalone away from that saltpeter, their stolen formula is just ink on a page."

✽✽✽✽✽✽

While the Prime Minister charted the Empire's survival, the outrider tore across the eastern plains.

He rode low against his horse's neck, the cold wind raking his face, pushing the animal past anything it should have been asked to give. Foam streaked from its mouth. The sealed tube stayed tucked against his chest. He kept his eyes on the horizon, willing the sun to wait.

✽✽✽✽✽✽

Inside Lyros Castle, the sun was the least of anyone's problems.

Hughes was lost in the dark.

He'd wandered deep into the servants' wing, cut off from the HSD guards entirely. The acetone-and-nitric smell wasn't a trick of memory anymore — it was real, thick, and stinging in his nose with every breath.

He followed it down a narrow stairwell into the castle's sub-basement.

At the bottom stood an arched wooden door. He tried the iron ring. Locked.

He pressed his ear to the cold, damp wood and held his breath.

Voices moved on the other side — quick, low, urgent. Metal clinked and scraped against stone. The chemical smell leaking through the gaps was almost too much to breathe through.

"...pack the powder tighter..." one voice hissed.

"...needs enough yield to drop the whole archway..." another answered, nervous. "The HSD's already sweeping the grounds. We move the timing up. It has to go off earlier than planned."

Hughes's blood went cold. His heart slammed against his ribs.

Explosion. Earlier than planned.

The words landed all at once. He understood, completely and instantly, what he was standing outside of. Not a kitchen. Not a storeroom. A bomb, being built directly beneath the Grand Duchess's feet.

Panic took hold. He had to find Mathew. He had to warn Jeanna.

He stepped back, slow, careful not to make a sound.

His boot brushed the wall behind him.

A hand — broad, rough-skinned — clamped over his mouth before the gasp could even leave him.

An iron pipe swung out of the dark and caught him across the back of the skull.

The crack of it echoed down the stairwell.

His eyes rolled back. White flooded his vision, then collapsed into black as he dropped to the stone floor.