Irritation
If there was anything fortunate about it, well… maybe this counted.
Contrary to my anxious expectations, the journey to Lixy had been surprisingly comfortable and even enjoyable. On the return trip as well, we managed to finish the schedule without any major incidents even inside the Holy Sevelian Empire itself.
“Thanks to you, I had a truly excellent experience.”
“Ah, not at all!”
I was the one who, when we were being chased by a space beast at the end, had driven the VIP shuttle into an asteroid field and then pulled off aerobatic maneuvers to escape. I clapped the shuttle pilot on the shoulder and once again welcomed the beautiful sunlight of our mother planet, Ka’zan.
And as I returned to the office of the Foreign Executive Ministry under that same sunlight, one thought had completely seized me.
…I really want to go smash the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security.
Space beasts were one thing, but pirates running wild near the capital planet? What the hell was that about?
“Uuuuugh… sniff.”
If I had been kidnapped by those pirates, just how catastrophic would the fallout have been? At the very least, I would have been wailing just like Riel, who was currently sniffling with a huge lump on her head from the etiquette injection rod. The fact that I had nearly become a sacrificial lamb to tax-wasting scum made me determined to somehow convey this seething rage.
But…
“Minister, if you go there in person, you’ll have to reveal the secret pact. Can you handle that, yeah?”
“…”
Riel’s words, spoken through a still-sniffling face with that enormous lump still attached, snapped me back to reason.
“You’re right. Now that I hear it, Riel, you’re correct.”
“Right?”
Of course, that didn’t mean the stunt Riel had pulled during the shuttle trip had vanished from my mind.
“Then why did you go and say something you couldn’t handle out loud?”
“…”
At that, Riel pouted as if she regretted giving advice in the first place…
—Crack!
“Ow!”
…and ended up earning herself yet another lump on the head for shooting her mouth off without reflecting on her own mistakes.
After sorting out one thing and another, a week passed. Then another week. A month went by. Then another month. All the while I simply threw myself into work.
But one day, a thought suddenly rose in my mind.
At this point, shouldn’t I start deciding what to do for the victory condition?
The idea that I needed to draw up some kind of future plan began to fill my head. It wasn’t as if I had never thought about this before… but back then the very survival of the empire had been in question, so forming concrete plans had been nearly impossible.
Now, though, the situation was completely different. Previously the hegemony built by the Kerzin Federation had been so solid that the Holy Sevelian Empire alone could never hope to challenge it…
Thanks to the mess Prosnark stirred up, Kerzin’s authority has completely collapsed.
On top of that, through the secret pact with Lixy, if things went well the vast territories linking the western and southern reaches of the galaxy could all become ours. And at that moment, staring at one of the quests on my status window, I realized something.
[PAUSED]
Currently Active Quests
Main Quest: Achieve victory with the Holy Sevelian Empire!
Galactic Ranking: 4th
Warning! If a faction opposing the empire’s ethics rises to power, or if another nation changes the empire’s name, the quest will fail!
Victory.
Only those two words were written. Nothing about how to achieve it.
…Should I aim for a diplomatic victory?
Considering all the realistic problems, that still looked like the best option. Of course I wasn’t thinking of something as simple as dispatching envoys and ambassadors, winning goodwill, and then turning the rest of the galaxy into international outcasts.
Prosnark is already basically an international pariah and it’s still doing just fine.
After mulling over and over what to choose in order to resolve this situation, I…
[PAUSE LIFTED]
…lifted the time-saving pause and manipulated the terminal screen to bring up the positions of the nearby nations. Looking at that 3D map, I quietly steeled my resolve.
…Yeah. A federation is the answer.
The true foundation of a diplomatic victory. The very method used even in the original game to maximize victory points: the founding of a so-called Galactic Federation.
Ah…! The dream of a federation!
No matter how I looked at it, under the current circumstances there seemed to be no other answer. Prosnark might have beaten the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd ranked superpowers at the same time, but if we could found a federation and draw federal fleets from the member states…
Lost in that happy dream, I eventually explained my plan to Riel, whose lumps had finally gone down…
“Hmm, but is that actually realistic, yeah?”
“What.”
Our robot tin-can head had the audacity to reject this human’s brilliant idea to his face. I was about to unleash a barrage of thoroughly non-PC discriminatory remarks at Riel…
“I mean, think about it. Honestly, how many nations around here are even in a position to form a federation with us right now?”
“Quite a few, aren’t there? Even excluding Lixy there’s Ztrakpor, and a bit farther out there’s Loyrakan.”
Since she was being relatively logical, I stopped the crude behavior and decided to have a proper conversation. And the words that came out of Riel’s mouth right after stabbed straight into my weak point.
“Minister, what you want is for our Holy Sevelian Empire to take the chairmanship of a huge federation, right?”
“Of course that’s what I want.”
“But, you know… have you actually read this report that just came in?”
After stabbing me, she sent a file through the internal messenger. With a puzzled feeling I opened it and checked the contents. What I found inside made my head go numb.
“No way. Those Ztrakpor Council bastards… after Kar-Du they even took the Uko’praknar Interstellar Union as a protectorate?”
“Yes. Fresh intel that arrived this morning.”
The fact that my dream-and-hope plan had been wrecked before it even started left me able only to groan.
“…Hard to believe.”
“It’s reality. Denying it here will only make you look pathetic, yeah.”
When I saw that the sender wasn’t some frontline agent but the diplomatic ambassador dispatched to Ztrakpor, it became even harder to reject reality.
“If we form a federation the way you want, Ztrakpor will end up as the number-one chair nation under the current conditions.”
“…”
“Common sense says Kar-Du and Uko’praknar are far more likely to cast their votes for Ztrakpor than for us.”
“This is tough.”
“Right?”
To achieve a diplomatic victory through a federation, we absolutely had to become the chair nation. Under the present circumstances, even if we managed to create a federation it would just be cooking the porridge only to feed it to a dog—exactly like the proverb from my previous life.
“Then what should we do?”
“Well… if Lixy became our open vassal state it might be different, but…”
“Yeah, you know that idea is completely absurd, right?”
“Yep.”
Even so, I couldn’t just give up here.
“What about Loyrakan? They’re relatively friendly with us, aren’t they?”
If the best option doesn’t work and you keep clinging to it, that’s just stupid. When something fails you have to move straight to the next-best plan if you want flexible operation of the Foreign Executive Ministry.
But even against my flexible thinking, Riel’s head shook slowly from side to side.
“Loyrakan’s the same. This is only our intel, but…”
She paused for a moment, then nodded and continued.
“There’s evidence they exchanged secret pacts with at least one of the Sir Citizen Alliance or the Mekt-Pux Free Trade Association.”
“…Them too?”
“Yep. It’s the outcome you yourself once predicted to Her Majesty, isn’t it?”
At Riel’s words I dragged a hand down my face and let out a long sigh.
“It was only a prediction. Now that it’s reality, it’s just frustrating as hell.”
With that thought I stood up and switched on the large screen mounted on one wall.
—Whirr
As the screen activated, a map of the galaxy appeared. On that galactic map every nation I had identified lit up… and looking at the position of the nation I belonged to—the Holy Sevelian Empire—I couldn’t help but sigh heavily again and again.
“As expected, our location is just too disadvantageous.”
Stuck in a corner of the northwestern galaxy, the kind of place that would typically be treated as a rural backwater. Aside from the space Nazis, the only nation we were physically connected to was Kar-Du—an isolated country.
Staring at it, I felt the confidence I had once held in what I thought was a sure-win strategy of diplomatic victory slowly draining away.
Ah, fuck. How the hell am I supposed to do this?