This Country Simply Makes No Sense (3)
Five days had passed since His Majesty the King's latest spree of madness.
That was the day I found myself face to face with Chancellor Blaine, who had sauntered back into the royal council as if he owned the place.
Barely five days had gone by, and yet there he was, standing proud and dignified at court once more.
"Lord Blaine. I imagine conscripting sixty thousand men must be keeping you rather busy."
I addressed the Chancellor as he stood there, utterly self-assured. Conscription on the scale of sixty thousand soldiers should have been burying him in work.
No, forget busy. It should have been impossible. The population was forty thousand. How on earth was anyone supposed to raise an army larger than the entire nation?
Let's just say that if he bows his head quickly enough, I'll let it slide.
Even if Lord Blaine was the greatest chancellor in history—the GOAT—there were things that could be done and things that couldn't. So I resolved that the moment Blaine lowered his head, I would grant him my pardon.
Even if he was the lunatic minister who had conscripted a bedridden king, I was not so cold a ruler that I would cast out a man who had served the kingdom loyally for decades.
"Your Highness the Crown Prince. I have something to report."
Just as I finished steeling myself for this great act of clemency, Blaine bowed his head toward me.
Was he finally about to apologize?
Even as that thought crossed my mind, the Chancellor spoke with the utmost courtesy.
"As of today, we have successfully conscripted all sixty thousand soldiers."
"……?"
"Ah, pardon—sixty thousand and two in total……"
Before Lord Blaine could even finish his report, I cut him off with a voice full of disbelief.
"Wait. You gathered sixty thousand men?"
"Sixty thousand and two, Your Highness."
"The population is forty thousand. How did you conscript sixty thousand?"
The Chancellor's reaction to this perfectly reasonable question was deadpan calm.
"I am a brilliant chancellor, and I worked very hard."
"No, I'm asking how that's even possible."
"That would be because I am a brilliant chancellor."
A brilliant chancellor who had conjured sixty thousand soldiers out of a nation of forty thousand. This was not something you could explain away with words like "competent." If someone actually pulled that off, he wouldn't be a brilliant chancellor. He'd simply be an aberration.
"Good heavens……"
"Yes, truly the greatest chancellor in history, Lord Blaine……"
Then again, the ministers reacting with awe over there couldn't be explained away as merely incompetent, either. No—honestly, this wasn't even a question of caliber. This was simply proof that this country—
Is this actually a place where human beings live?
The entire nation was clearly not operating on normal rails. Could this truly be a country of people? Unless the kingdom itself was some sort of ghost story given flesh, none of it made sense.
I found myself feeling that I could sympathize, just a tiny bit—twenty percent, to be precise—with the justification the Holy See gave for its crusades.
In other words, I was beginning to suspect that these people really were, in the truest sense of the phrase, descendants of demons.
Because honestly—it made sense, didn't it? Something was clearly wrong here. No proper nation could produce events like this.
"Lord Blaine……"
"Yes, Your Highness."
"Let me see this army you've gathered. Show me."
Hoo—
In the end, I rose from my seat with a sigh. It seemed the only way to settle this was to verify the sixty-thousand-strong host with my own eyes.
* * * * * *
Before a plain blanketed in green, I witnessed the true form of the great army Blaine so proudly proclaimed. A vast host stood arrayed across the field, packed so densely it seemed to swallow the entire plain.
And what was truly astonishing was the strange things wedged in among the ranks. To put it precisely—things that were not human.
"What on earth are those?"
"Goblins."
"No, how did you conscript them?"
I stared at the goblins mixed into the sixty-thousand-strong army. Perhaps they'd taken a few blows during the conscription process—every goblin who had joined the muster had a face swollen fat and puffy.
"They joined our proud royal army of their own free will."
The Chancellor's explanation of the goblin forces was, unsurprisingly, extremely simple.
"Voluntarily?"
"Yes. They volunteered."
He claimed the goblins had volunteered to join the royal army. Were these creatures even capable of conversation in the first place—? I didn't bother voicing that question out loud. Because the moment goblins started volunteering, the army had effectively become a legion of demons.
"We're supposed to be the ones getting exterminated as descendants of demons, and if these things fight alongside us, we're literally the Demon King's army."
"Indeed. Then I shall remove them."
And with that, Chancellor Blaine struck the goblin forces from the ranks arrayed across the plain. He had, in the most literal sense, purged the true descendants of demons from the royal army.
Once the goblin horde had vanished, what remained in the spot where they'd stood were yet another breed of oddity—the ones who had been sitting behind the goblins all along.
"And what are those?"
In the middle of the vast plain, a flock of sparrows wearing tiny hats was hopping about. Worse, the sparrows were chirping furiously at one another.
- Cham-cham-cham……
- Cham-cham……?
- Cham……
Was that how sparrows normally sang?
For a moment, my mind simply stopped. Though come to think of it, I couldn't actually remember what a sparrow's cry was supposed to sound like.
As I stood there mired in confusion, the greatest chancellor in history introduced them with perfect confidence.
"That would be our kingdom's air force."
"……"
"In this day and age, even the sky is part of the battlefield… and so I, Blaine, founded an air force in my pursuit of a truly modern military."
The Kingdom Air Force. The ministers marveled at Blaine's introduction of technology far too advanced for the era.
"Good heavens……"
"An air force. Remarkable……"
The ministers swooned over what seemed to be advanced civilization a thousand years ahead of its time. I wanted to smack each and every one of them across the head.
Watching the spectacle, all that escaped my own lips was a groan of pure anguish.
"An… air force…?"
Where in the world was there an air force like that? I couldn't even fathom what one could possibly use it for. The question crossed my mind, but I didn't voice it. I'd known for a long time now that Chancellor Blaine was not a creature one could reason with.
"Who are the people over there?"
This time I looked at the humans standing beside them. No matter how I looked at them, they didn't appear to be Mertians. If anything, they looked closer to Imperials.
When I asked about the men standing there blankly, Chancellor Blaine answered with a face of boundless loyalty.
"Imperial citizens."
"Then why are they here?"
"I conscripted them."
So, to stop the crusade organized by the Empire's own Holy See, he had conscripted Imperial citizens into the royal army. It bordered on miraculous. What possible means had he used to bring them here?
"How did you get them here?"
"I persuaded them."
That was the truly astonishing part. Since when did being persuaded by a foreign chancellor count as voluntary enlistment? Unless Chancellor Blaine was wielding hypnosis, it should have been impossible.
He's not a brilliant chancellor—he's just not human.
At this point, I was drifting dangerously close to the conclusion that Lord Blaine was not a person at all. Nothing like that could be human. It fell outside the boundaries of mankind entirely. Wasn't that thing already something closer to a monster? And weren't the Mertians really and truly something like descendants of demons after all?
Just as I was beginning to suspect the Holy See's claims might hold water, I came upon a sight that turned that suspicion into certainty.
"What are those ones?"
"Loyal subjects of the kingdom."
"No, why do they all look identical?"
At the front of the proudly arrayed soldiers stood a line of peasants with the exact same face. They were so alike it looked like they'd come off a factory assembly line.
"Those aren't doppelgängers, are they?"
I gaped at the doppelgängers standing before me. But our brilliant chancellor, Lord Blaine, showed not the slightest concern over the fact that every soldier in sight was identical. Naturally. Blaine was himself a monstrosity no less doppelgänger-like than they were.
"They are all different people, Your Highness."
"Is that so."
"Yes. So please, place your trust in me—Blaine, your brilliant chancellor."
I couldn't believe a word of it, but Blaine's manner was so magnificently confident that I decided to verify things for myself.
Step, step.
I walked up to the man standing nearest and asked his name.
"You there. What's your name?"
"I am Hans."
The man before me was named Hans. Hearing the answer, I shuffled one place to the right, where an identically faced man greeted me.
"Your name."
I asked him the same question.
"I am Hans."
The same familiar name. Identical name, identical face—these were doppelgängers, no doubt about it. I had a feeling the next one would be no different.
Slide.
I moved down the line again and put the question to the man standing there.
"Name."
"I am Hans."
Once again, the familiar reply. Having confirmed the name, I shuffled down the line one more time and asked the man standing there as well.
"Your name."
"I'm your father."
I lifted my head and looked up at the man in question. There stood His Majesty the King, resplendent in a suit of armor, chest puffed out among the ranks.
"Father…!"
"Insolent brat."
Clutching His Majesty's hand with a face washed over by shock, I spoke.
"Why… why on earth are you here, Father…?"
His Majesty's answer was simple.
"The duchess."
"…Pardon?"
"I have to go fetch the duchess, don't I."
At that impeccably lucid reason, I could only stare at His Majesty, dumbfounded. And there, perched atop the royal head, a sparrow of a very familiar face gazed down at me.
Flutter—
A member of the newly founded Royal Air Force—Blaine's sparrow—sat atop the King's crown.
- ………
The moment our eyes met didn't last long. Before much time had passed, the sparrow looked at me and let out its cry.
- Cham……
"……"
Only then, at last, did I fully understand this country.
This country was not sane. And the Mertians were, without question, the kin of Satan himself.