Chương 1151: 1181 - Kesken

A chill filled the air as the room filled with people. Dozens of the highest officers in Leon's military, plus his high ministers were attending this strategy meeting in the Flash Fortress, the headquarters of the Kingdom's military. The fortress was located along the eastern edge of Artorion, purpose-built on the slopes of the eastern mountains to serve in its current role. The Southern Talon had worked well for a time, but as Leon's Kingdom built up over the years, it became clear that it wasn't enough.

Flash Fortress had been built in a shape familiar to anyone who'd lived in Occulara for any amount of time—which wasn't that many people in Artorion. Three large triangular towers rose from the mountainside like spears stuck in the earth, flat sides pointed at each other forming a fourth, corner-less, triangle. On these sides of the towers, robust enchantments had been laid, allowing a triangular brick of a structure to hover between them at a height that could be dictated by those in the structure.

The tower and hovering structure were both made of dark, smoky gray metal, and whenever the structure changed height, lightning would arc between it and the towers. In all, ten thousand people or so worked in each of the towers, while another five thousand worked within the hovering structure, known formally as Flash Fortress Sky Wing, and more colloquially as the Jaguar's Den.

Each of Flash Fortress' four structures was as invincible as Leon and his enchanters could make them and possessed several large hangars in which arks as large as destroyers could park. The meeting that had been called was located in the most secure room in the Jaguar's Den, and the Den itself had risen high into the air where it was then surrounded by protective clouds and a fleet of arks.

With so many high-ranking people in the same room, precautions were warranted even if Leon had no active and open enemies at the moment. The room was dark and triangular, with the walls slanted slightly, making the floor slightly wider than the ceiling. Dim white fire burned in the corners of the floor, while translucent black projections descended at ninety degrees from the ceiling's corners.

These projections remained simple for the time being, leaving them looking like black glass, behind which the glow of the white fire could just barely be seen. Leon sat in the highest seat about ten feet from the center of a long table that ran perpendicular to the wall he was facing, his back to one of the room's corners. Everyone else in the room either sat on the opposite side of the table or stood by the projected walls.

The only exceptions to that rule were the Jaguar and Iron-Striker, his Marshall and Chancellor respectively. They sat at either end of the table, as befit their rank. The two men were dressed as befitted their station. The Jaguar wore the black uniform of Leon's armed services, a silver raptor with its wings spread emblazoned on one shoulder and a blood-red jaguar on the other—all members of the Tribes had similar markings showing which Tribe they had come from.

His rank, denoted by four silver lightning bolts, was embroidered into his lapel. Iron-Striker, meanwhile, was dressed more extravagantly; a red tunic to match his Bear coloring, trimmed in gold, and embroidered with gold representations of his Honored Ancestor. He wore trousers to match, and boots made of the dark leather of a horned stag-like creature whose hide had become something of a status symbol in Artorion given the difficulty most had in hunting them.

Leon himself had four such pairs of boots, having hunted a particularly large stoia with Numa some years ago. In short, the Jaguar had dressed to show the seriousness and professionalism of Leon's military, while Iron-Striker had dressed to showcase the magnificence and prosperity of Leon's court. Leon himself, however, to hammer home his intentions, had donned his armor for this meeting.

The suit was immaculate, the Adamant it was made of allowing Leon to layer countless more enchantments upon it than he might've otherwise been able to, allowing him to add self-cleaning and polishing enchantments to it. The Adamant had come out quite a bit darker than Iron Pride had in its forging, though it was no less effective in Leon's expert hands.

His cuirass was embossed with half a dozen images of the Thunderbird—the first of her conjuring lightning, the second of her claiming the Iron Needle, the third of her doing the same with the Storm diamond, the fourth of ten beasts and as many men bowed to her, the fifth of her standing with her children, and the last of her final battle with Khosrow, though she had told him his depiction was quite a bit more glorious than the knock-down no-holds-barred dirty, hate-filled fight that it had been.

His pauldrons were flared slightly, like tucked wings. His gauntlets and greaves were embossed with feathers and scales, respectively, and the cuisses over his thighs were lightly etched with runes telling the story of Leon's rise to power. Layered plates covered almost everything else, which followed his gauntlets' design, allowing him to move easily and freely. Beneath all of this were layers of enchanted silkgrass and stoia leather.

The only part of his armor that he refrained from wearing was his helmet, which had been made slightly angled, like a raptor's beak, yet given no identifiable features. No visor, no breathing holes, nothing to even suggest a face. He could still see thanks to his magic senses and projection enchantments on the inside surface, and in fact, could actually see more easily with his physical eyes out of this helmet than he could out of his old one.

In total, his armor weighed less than half of what his old set had, but given his greater skill in enchanting and his use of Adamant as the material for the main protective layer, it was many times more protective. If he fought Terris again, the Diluvian Despot would find this new set much, much harder to get through than his previous suit of armor. He cut quite the imposing figure if he did say so himself.

Cassandra had insisted that he also add an eye-catching silver and blue cloak to his ensemble, though he decided to only do so in the most formal of settings when he needed to cut the most imposing figure he possibly could. In this meeting, the cloak wasn't necessary, so he kept it in his soul realm. To Leon's right and left stood Alcander and Alix, each dressed in the now traditional armor of the Tempest Knights.

Tinn, Rakos' child, and Siddi, Leon's giant partner, were just past them, along with a handful of other giants. To the Jaguar's left sat Anshu, Solomon, and the tenth-tier Bison elder Tillan—the commanders of the ark fleets, ocean fleets, and army, respectively. A dozen more high officers followed. To Iron-Striker's right were Gaius, Marcus, Clear Day, and Ipatameni, along with ten more high-ranking bureaucrats.

Most of those standing around the walls were generally more there to listen than to contribute to the meeting, Leon's eyes lingered on the woman standing behind Marcus—Linda, formerly the High Inquisitor, but now serving as Inspector General. She was second-in-command of the Inspectors, having been given the post after the Inquisitors had been folded into Marcus' new department, and answered directly to Marcus.

Leon's wives were notable only for their absence in this meeting, as their official duties had pulled them away, but Anzu was present, though given he was the star of the meeting, that was to be expected. He stood just off-center of the table on Leon's side as everyone waited for the doors to seal and the spectacularly powerful privacy enchantments to activate. The moment they did, runes crawled across the dark glass-like projections that formed the walls of the room.

Lightning fractal patterns flashed in between the runes, providing a little extra light as the projection background darkened and the white fire in the lower corner of the walls faded. The disembodied voice of Nite, the highest-ranking giant who ran the Den's enchantments, then announced that the room was fully secure, allowing the meeting to proceed. Anzu waited until Leon gave him the go-ahead to begin.

He started by tapping a few runes on a control console on the table, and another light projection formed in the air above the table, allowing everyone to see what Anzu wanted them to see—a cluster of nine planes, all fairly close to one another and relatively close to the Nexus. The cluster was still farther from it than the Divine Graveyard, but Leon's arks could still bridge that gap with a single jump with their upgraded Nestorian Drives. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road.

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"This is the Kesken Cluster, as the locals now call it—or 'Sylphia' as they knew it before we killed those pirates who ran the cluster," Anzu began without preamble.

"Nine planes, with a combined population of just under ten billion souls." Leon frowned slightly. Ten billion was an enormous number, but he guessed that as many people lived on Aeterna alone, let alone the entire Divine Graveyard. None of the planes of Kesken were as large as Aeterna, though combined they were between five and six times larger than Aeterna as a whole and had perhaps eight or nine times as much land.

"Most of that population lives in this core area," Anzu continued, pointing to a sub-cluster of five planes that were each less than ten million miles from each other. The remaining four planes were more distant, though none were more than a hundred million miles from the geographic center of the cluster.

"They possess Void-capable arks, though they are few in number. Most of their resources are devoted, as far as I could tell during my time spent observing them, to warring with each other—there are hundreds of small Kingdoms and other independent polities on these planes, none of which are strong enough to dominate more than a single continent on any plane. The possibility that we'll be challenged above any plane's terminus line is slim."

The terminus line, as the people in the Nexus called it, was the edge of a plane's atmosphere. Unlike the planes of the Divine Graveyard, most planes didn't have magically defined barriers, and so their terminus lines were generally hazy and could mean different things to different people—the edge of breathable space, the edge of a plane's ambient magic power, or the point at which the gravity surrounding a plane let go and released something into the Void.

Leon's Kingdom defined a terminus line as the farthest point at which the ambient magic power could be measured at more than one aetos per cubic inch—aetoi being the unit of measurement for magic power in his ancient Clan. Even with that concrete definition, however, the terminus line could still vary depending on the terrain and level of ambient magic of a plane, but this variance wasn't enough for Leon's people to bother with in a higher-level strategy meeting.

"Once we get into the planar atmosphere, however, we might face stiff resistance," Anzu continued.

"These are people who lived under the thumb of a ruthless piratical warlord, who abandoned them without warning to come and die amidst our mountains here in the Nexus. Without their warlord keeping some kind of peace between them, the planes fell into anarchy. They've now been fighting amongst themselves for a century and a half at least. Large Kingdoms and powerful cities have been growing recently, though, and these people are unlikely to willingly hand over their sovereignty if we ask them nicely.

These are not pirates; these are men and women born with iron in hand and songs of battle already on their lips." With a few more rune strokes, Anzu showed several particularly emblematic battles he'd witnessed during his scouting showing large armies supported by arks and relatively strong mages—though none stronger than the ninth-tier. Disciplined ranks, standardized equipment, and large corps of war beasts spoke volumes about the level of societal organization that Leon would be dealing with.

In short, something that might've given him pause if he were still only a King on Aeterna, ruling over Kataigida and its holdings. However, the military he commanded now was a whole other beast. Thousands of Void-capable arks were at his command, and millions of fighting men and women would storm their personal hells if he were only to ask.

"The outlying planes are generally more peaceful," Anzu continued.

"With smaller populations, they were more easily able to organize themselves. That being said… I wouldn't take their capitulation for granted, they're not exactly 'peaceful', either."

"Such soldiers would be a great boon to the Kingdom," the Jaguar mused with a toothy grin.

"Chaos will have bred them into warriors of great skill."

"What else might these planes have to offer?" Iron-Striker asked with a more measured expression.

"We can take these planes without much trouble as far as I can tell, but if we gain nothing from that conquest aside from problems with the locals, it might be more beneficial to leave these planes alone." Leon tapped a rune on the armrest of his elevated chair, taking control of Anzu's projection. A projected console gleamed into life in front of him, and after a few seconds of his fingers flying across the console, the images of the Kesken Cluster zoomed out many times to show their place in the universe.

This was the chart taken from the navigation wisp that Nestor had salvaged from the crashed Thunderbird supercarrier back in the Evergolden Empire; many of the stars marking the locations of planes jittered and blinked in and out thanks to the damage and degradation of that navigation wisp, but about eighty percent of the chart was still complete and clear.

About a tenth of the human-dominated Void was shown, which still amounted to millions and millions of planes, especially since the density of planar clusters decreased dramatically the closer to the universe's edge and the Elemental Planes they got.

"They lie on the way to more lucrative targets," Leon stated as he showed other clusters on the chart. The cluster containing Tiryns and Minos was notably large, as was Kypros' cluster, both consisting of more than a hundred planes, but there were hundreds of other clusters that the chart noted as being strategically important to the old Thunderbird Clan. For the most part, they were concentrated in the universal north, as categorized by Khosrow.

Thankfully, that put them in the same hemisphere that the exit of Leon's portal was on, though only just. The Kesken Cluster wasn't on the straightest route to the edge of ancient Thunderbird territories, but it still got them closer if they were only to take it. From there, it put the extreme edge of ancient Thunderbird territories within the range of ten jumps from Nestorian Drives.

There were additional planar clusters on the way, though those were generally larger and closer to bigger portals in and out of the Nexus. Leon couldn't imagine that all were without post-Apotheosis rulers. But that was a problem for another day. For the moment, it was Kesken that concerned him. Unfortunately, aside from their population and location, Kesken had little in the way of strategic resources of note. Enough Titanstone to build arks, but the mines in Leon's Kingdom were already producing what they needed.

More was always better, but Titanstone was the only material resource that truly caught Leon's attention.

"We could always negotiate for basing rights," Clear Day suggested, and not for the first time. This time, however, someone in the room finally had a verified and concrete response for the tau rather than something more philosophical. Anzu said matter-of-factly, "These people have been ruled by a brutal warlord for many years, and have experienced generations of war before and since that warlord's reign.

Negotiations are held not to bring about peace, but to allow the various sides in a war to rest and prepare for the next campaigns. The chances that they'll allow us basing rights are slim to none."

"You're trying to tell me that none of these local powers would be willing to negotiate with us?" Clear asked skeptically.

"I'm saying that the chances are slim to none," Anzu repeated.

"They do not know peace. Mutual collaboration is an alien concept to their culture given how long they've been fighting. They need a strong hand to give them peace. Our King's hand, to be precise."

"I am not convinced that they cannot be reasoned with," Clear stated.

"They are still thinking, feeling men, are they not? Do they not bleed as we do, and wish for better lives for their children? If they see the benefit of having us as friends would bring them, then would they not agree?"

"That depends on whether or not we agree on what a 'benefit' is," Leon mused, interrupting Anzu and Clear's short debate.

"But that's a philosophical debate that we don't have to get into right now. As it is, I'm more inclined to agree with Anzu, here. Given he's seen these people and he says that peace isn't likely, then we'll prepare with the assumption that we'll have to resort to war to bring these planes into our sphere of influence."

"We should be doing that anyway," the Jaguar growled.

"True," Leon agreed. His eyes turned to Clear.

"However, that doesn't mean we can't try this the easy way. We can try and get in contact with the people of Kesken and see how willing they are to surrender peacefully. I'll offer them generous terms, as I did with the cities of the Finger Lakes. That strategy won us not only Hosragan, Elegan, and Lancefoot but also Culain and now Queenfall. It works, if we have the time to work them over. We can try it, but if our terms are refused, then we will take other actions."

"I'll be glad to at least try," Clear responded with a grateful nod.

"Even if they do not take you up on your generosity."

"Either way," Leon continued as he made quick eye contact with most of the people in the room, "we'll need plans for how to organize and govern these planes once they've been brought into the fold. Plans for Exarchates, Praetor courts, and garrisons." His officers and ministers nodded, his word ending any debate on how they'd take these planes and delving into specifics about what would come after, which they could now get into thanks to Anzu's in-depth scouting.

When the meeting ended several hours later, Leon was confident that they had a good plan in place. They'd take the central five planes first, then move on to the four outlying planes. From there, they'd spend time consolidating control over Kesken before plotting their next move. Given the time he'd already spent preparing to expand his Kingdom into the Void, Leon's military had already been prepared to move on his word.

They'd be ready to launch their first great expedition out into the wider universe within three months. Their diplomats, however, would be departing within a matter of weeks.