BXBX NOVEL Chapter 483 Smokes Of War (3)
"Three of you are finally here…" Emperor Valentin looked at his sons with a solemn expression.
Kazimir, Antoine, and Leon greeted their father calmly and waited for him to tell the reason why they were summoned so hastily.
Seeing that everyone settled down, Emperor Valentin finally looked at Leon and started the discussion.
"As you all know the Pope suddenly gave a drastic request to hasten the timeline for the transport… I am sure that you already have a guess of the effect of this matter for our side." Emperor Valentin looked at his three sons and scanned their expressions.
The three princes gave a serious nod. Since they have been called here, then there must be a significant change that needs to be done as a result of the Pope and their Father Emperor's negotiations.
"Then just to let you know, the Pope originally wanted for us to start the transport by seven days instead of the initial fourteen…
However, after our discussion, I was able to force them to relent until ten days!
After all, if they force us to do that on the seventh day I would never open the doors for the court of sinners but force them to come to the Empire to get the prisoners instead."
As Emperor Valentin said these words, he wore an annoyed and menacing expression when he remembered how conceited the Pope sounded at that time.
Emperor Valentin could not take it anymore and told them that if he still insists on being unreasonable, he would have to disregard the jurisdiction of the Temple over the prisoners and refuse them to have a hand in the discussion.
After all, the prisoners were still citizens of the Seirende Empire and although they had no full jurisdiction on handling them, they could exercise doing so when the Main Temple was being uncooperative.
He emphasized that the Seirende Empire had already relented to the Main Temple's request three times:
First, is to force them to not carry out any nonfatal punishment for the prisoners until the time arrived which was by right, a power granted duly to the Emperor of Seirende. This punishment involves incapacitating the prisoners in order to ensure the safety of the citizens against the criminals until the trial begins.
But because of the Main Temple's insistent request to keep them intact, the Empire was forced to use a lot of resources in order to reinforce the detention facility, fuel the magic and security arrays, and ensure that the Court of Sinners have two times the number of prison guards.
The second absurd request they made was when the Main Temple suddenly canceled their scheduled visit to the Empire and forced them to receive a member of the Vanderford Imperial family as a proxy. Although this one was triggered by the attack of Eli and Leon, the matter was used against the Pope.
After all, Seirende is 'innocent' about the matter of the attack.
The third request which came hand in hand with the second request is of course the tedious transportation of the prisoners from the Seirende Empire all the way to the Holy Island.
All of this was thrown by Emperor Valentin as a slap to the Pope's face. To make the verbal matters more compelling, he made sure that he involved the leaders from the Green Wave and the rest of the Independent Kingdoms.
As for the Vanderford, they were not invited in the matter mainly because their very own people represented the Temple. That meant that the Pope's presence represented both powers, which became their disadvantage.
In the end, the Pope is forced to relent from having it seven days to ten days as this is the most reasonable time for the Seirende Empire to prepare everything at full speed,
"In reality, I know that you guys can pull it off in seven days as I heard that the construction progress remained on target and the necessary goods had been received earlier…
But I want to give you the additional three days to prepare as much as possible because of the things that I will say to you next…" Emperor Valentin looked at them and explained.
Kazimir and Antoine were curious, what would their father say next? Looking at this dead serious face, it must be something of great importance.
They looked intently at their father and braced themselves for what he is about to share.
"The Vanderford and the Holy Island are preparing to go to war…" Emperor Valentin looked at his sons and clenched his fist which was resting over the discussion table.
"W-what… this Father?!"
"To whom will they wage war?"
"Why did we not hear of any information and warnings from the other allied territories?"
Kazimir and Antoine asked several questions in one breath. The recent war had made a deep impression in their hearts, and hearing it again has made them deeply anxious.
"Elder Brothers… let me explain in detail."
This time, Leon saw the exhaustion on Emperor Valentin's face, most probably he had already expended a lot of energy haggling for extra time against the Pope and could no longer explain the matter properly without getting emotional.
While they were taken aback that Leon seemed to have known this matter, the two older brothers still closed their mouths and sat on their respective chairs. They looked at Leon trying to calm their emotions.
Leon stood up and took out a projection stone. Quickly activating it, the projection stone flashed an image that resembled an informative timeline gap.
"What you see here is a representation of the time from the moment we declared victory over the internal war to the present timeline…" Leon pointed at the image and started with his lengthy explanations.
"During the time that we declared our Empire's victory and started the rebuilding of the Empire, the Vanderford Empire started to move.
They were clever in using our situation in order to conceal their procurement of large amounts of raw materials for prospective warfare. Logs, oil, metals, grains, and even large machinery for metal processing... all were strategically bought on distributed parts of Prasinos.
What's more, in order to mislead the suppliers and not associate their procurement to the Vanderford, they bought this stuff by use of ghost merchants.
These ghost merchants appeared to be taking advantage of the great business opportunity of the Seirende Empire's rebuilding, but in reality, they will not travel to our side, but instead, deliver the materials to select locations where their future forts and bases were located.
This aggressive purchasing continued to rise until the season when the foreign delegates of the Grand Tournament started…"
This time Leon gritted his teeth and continued,
"In this particular timeline, not only did they take advantage of everyone's focus on the grand tournament but also used the massive traveling fluctuation to secretly disperse their troops to their predetermined camps.
There, they used the entire timeline of the Grand Tournament to fortify their camps and recruit more troops while also processing their metals to forge more weapons!"
"T-this!!"
When Kazimir and Antoine heard this, they felt suffocated and anxious, they never knew that while they were working so hard to rebuild the Empire and prepare for the Grand Tournament, the enemy was preparing to stab a knife in their busy backs!
Leon knew that this was already enough for Kazimir and Antoine to be convinced about the war but since Emperor Valentin already decided to tell his two brothers about the war, he had the responsibility to let them know the whole situation.
"When the Grand Tournament ended and the people started to travel back, they also used this situation to get more people around…
After that, everything seemed to have come to a stop until the Pope and our Father Emperor announced the preparation for the transfer of prisoners.
This time, they no longer tried to buy off raw materials but instead focused on acquiring ready-made weapons and magical gears right away.
That is because would also be our most probable scenario to do because of the pressure to be ready in less than a month to travel with a number of notorious prisoners.
All of this seemed to be calculated, and the pressures given to us ever since the last attack from the curse users were all strategically given to take advantage and more in the dark!"
As Leon said this, Emperor Valentin, Kazimir, and Antoine no longer had any calm expressions on their faces.
They all have undisguised anger on their faces. Their hearts burn in anger at the realization of everything they have heard.
While Leon obviously did not mention any proof that it was their empire that the Vanderford was planning to wage war for, every detail of the report was already enough to let them conclude that they were really going for the Empire!
It is plain for them to see that every problem given to them for the past ten months was actually the start of Vanderfords attack on their homeland!