The Path to Diplomatic Victory Is Far Too Treacherous
Realistic constraints were so crushing that irritation had begun to flood every corner of my brain.
“Haaaah… this fucking shiiit…”
“Minister, take a deep breath and calm down, yeah.”
Riel had reached the point of trying to soothe me just from watching, which said everything about how bad it looked.
But maybe stress had been piling up without me noticing…
“Urgh…”
“Minister?!”
A sudden headache crashed over me, and my vision blacked out completely.
Ah, shit. I still have work left.
How much time passed after that, I couldn’t say.
When I finally came to and opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a ceiling that felt vaguely familiar yet not quite right.
But in moments like this, the line I was supposed to deliver was already set in stone.
“…Never seen this ceiling before.”
“Never seen my ass. It’s the hospital ceiling you used to stare at whenever you got bored, yeah.”
Heat flared across my face. I hadn’t expected anyone to answer my muttered line, so I buried my burning cheeks in the pillow.
“…I made a pathetic showing.”
“You used to do it all the time, so no need to feel bad about it, yeah.”
Despite her blunt tone, Riel was nursing me with surprising care. Under her hands I took a quiet look around the room.
Pure white walls, a calm interior designed so a patient could rest easy. A few simple pieces of furniture—wooden stand, desk, drawers. A bed covered in spotless white sheets and blankets. And, standing in stark contrast to all that serenity, some extremely complicated machine of unknown purpose.
After sweeping my gaze over the whole scene, I spoke in a low voice.
“What happened?”
“The doctor said it was overwork, yeah.”
“….”
Hearing that, I suddenly found myself missing the quests that used to pop up at the drop of a hat until about a year ago.
All that ‘recover fatigue’ nonsense never felt like much, but it was keeping this kind of thing from happening!
And once Riel said it, my whole body started tingling with a dull ache.
“Nngh…”
“Don’t try to move. Overwork plus muscle pain—doctor says you need to rest for the day, yeah.”
“Tsk. We’re in the middle of the busiest stretch.”
Even as I grumbled, I obediently let myself be pushed back down by Riel’s strength—which wasn’t even greater than a human’s.
“Riel, you’ve gotten a lot stronger.”
“Minister, I’m not using any force at all, yeah.”
“Shut up. Right now your power is the only thing keeping me from getting up.”
“….”
…Anyway, having been ‘forcibly’ laid flat, I started wondering how I was supposed to kill time.
“Riel, when the doctor says rest… exactly how much rest are we talking?”
“Basically ‘don’t even look at work,’ yeah.”
“Hmm.”
“So I won’t drag this out. Rest is the best medicine, yeah.”
She said that, then—robot or not—took a breath and opened her mouth.
“Comebackasfastasyoucanifyoudon’tcomeeveryone’sgonnadieyeahthesecretariat’sjustdyingrightnowandwithoutthehigher-upsmanagingitthey’reatdeath’sdoorplusthePurgeSquadmemberssayingthey’llvisittheMinistersometriedtoplananassaultandgotstoppedandHerMajestytriedtovisittheMinisterbutbarelymanagedtoregainhersensessoit’schaosyeah.”
“…Oh.”
What followed was Riel’s intense rap—no, ultra-high-speed word barrage. I lowered my head and managed only one reply.
“Couldn’t understand a word.”
“You understood just fine, so quit joking and get discharged already, yeah.”
“That’s pretty harsh treatment for a Minister.”
But once Riel actually left…
…Hmm.
I tried my hardest to enjoy this sudden vacation (?), yet…
“Ah, shit. What am I supposed to do with this.”
I realized only now that by this world’s standards I was a complete infant who had no idea what to watch for fun.
What good was an all-purpose terminal that solved everything if I didn’t know how to use it for entertainment?
…No, I can’t even tell what the games are supposed to be.
I didn’t know how to play any of the games available on the terminal. I did manage to get into a streaming site that reminded me of YouTube, but…
—“Breaking news regarding the recent exclave-related clash between the Holy Sevelian Empire and the Rixi Republic…”
“Ha. The embargo’s only lifting now?”
Unfortunately all that came up was news. And even that news was just stuff I’d handled weeks—or at longest half a year—ago, only now being reported.
“Stories I already know.”
Thanks to that, I once again got a vivid lesson in why sometimes giving a person absolutely nothing to do is used as a form of torture.
And the next day.
I was half-forced into experiencing just how far future medicine could advance… and before lunchtime arrived—
“I’m back, everyone.”
“Yay. Then here’s today’s report, yeah.”
“….”
After properly re-educating the wicked Riel who dumped work on me during mealtime, I dove straight back into the job.
A short while later.
“Mmm. Nothing major happened while I was gone, right?”
“Of course not. A galactic-scale superpower’s government agency isn’t going to wobble just because one person is missing, yeah.”
Riel said it with that cocky attitude of hers, but—
“Is that so. Then why did you dump that whole speech on me yesterday?”
“…Nngh.”
Unfortunately for her, no amount of smug smiling could save her. Yesterday’s freestyle rap had burned itself so deeply into my brain that for a while I felt I could counter any cocky line she threw.
“Well, jokes aside… so there really were no problems?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Then… good.”
With that I picked up the train of thought I’d been working on the day before yesterday.
“Let’s see… come to think of it, the refugees are starting to head home soon, right?”
“That’s right, yeah. Especially the Ztrakians—they’re going crazy trying to enlist in their own military, yeah.”
I nodded at Riel’s words and opened the status window to check the national overview.
Holy Sevelian Empire
Current Overall Rank:5th
Population:67.4 billion(down 100 million from previous month)
Political System:Empire, Theocracy
Racial Composition:Sevelian (60%), Other Races (40%)
Current Ruler:Emperor Artraia Beliard Penash Khan Seveli
Yeah, no need to stare at the racial composition right here.
I felt a quiet satisfaction looking at the cleaned-up racial composition window, then a slightly odd feeling when my eyes landed on the population number.
“Population dropped hard.”
“What did, yeah?”
Sadly Riel couldn’t see the status window, so I had to explain it to her. After hearing me out she said:
“Ah, that. We weeded out the groups pretending to be war refugees so they could freeload on our Gaia Worlds, yeah.”
“Ahh, the ones faking refugee status to come looking for jobs.”
I nodded at her words while privately marveling once again at just how enormous a galactic-scale operation really was.
Just flushing out the trash that slipped in among the war refugees, and those numbers still hit the hundred-million mark.
On top of that, the matter of the Empire’s bid for the federal chairmanship that we’d talked about yesterday… still had plenty left to think about.
Territorial expansion… the Empire’s already pushing that as hard as it can within its limits, so nothing more for me to worry about there.
Even now, how many resources and how much capital were being poured into exploring and colonizing star systems in the galactic west—no, more precisely the outer rim?
Even during the massive organizational overhaul that merged or gutted the budgets of countless departments, the Colonial Ministry’s budget had actually increased.
Of course, if colonization proved too hard there was always the option of invading weaker neighbors…
War?! That’s far too dreadful!!!
No war! War, war never changes!
We also had to factor in the frothing fits of our beloved pacifist faction the moment the word “war” was mentioned.
Oh, war? I like that too.
Ah.
And most of all, sitting right above our Empire was the galaxy’s strongest warmonger state, the Prosnark Coalition…
That alone made the odds of success effectively zero.
No wonder Artraia’s eyes flip the second anyone brings up expanding influence or territory.
To avoid that nightmare, the Colonial Ministry was still out there every day shouting frontier spirit and exploring every corner they could…
The vast majority of star systems can’t even support a hyperlane, and even if you install one there’s usually nothing of value.
Still, the attempts to find usable systems and stake claims to expand the Empire’s borders would keep going.
…Damn exclaves.
Thanks to them, the closer you got to the galactic core the more the map started looking like a nightmare version of the medieval Holy Roman Empire. I shut off both the terminal map and the status window in disgust.