By rights,
as the side that had started the war,
the Black Stone Duchy truly had no claim to the moral high ground.
Although, in an all-out war between nations,
so-called "morality" was at most the icing on the cake. It could not play any decisive role.
Still, having it was better than not.
On this point, the Oda Shogunate had originally been quite confident.
As it turned out,
the Black Stone Duchy had boldly declared that it had come at the invitation of the Shannan Kingdom's royal family to uphold justice.
And it hadn't merely offered empty words.
It had actually produced evidence!
That was quite something.
It was practically a public humiliation on a grand scale!
In front of all the war observers,
the "moral high ground" the Oda Shogunate thought it could claim with ease
had, in the blink of an eye, become the Black Stone Duchy's!
The Oda Shogunate's Minister of Foreign Affairs had been planning to put on a grand display of bombastic diplomatic rhetoric before the two armies.
Now, he was suddenly at a loss for words!
Naturally, there was little else to say in the prewar talks that followed.
At the prime minister's signal, as he stood at the front line to oversee the battle,
the Minister of Foreign Affairs withdrew awkwardly.
The battlefield was left to the commanders on both sides.
The Oda Shogunate's commander-in-chief was its Minister of War.
As for the Shannan Kingdom's commander-in-chief,
it was neither Dicimov, the former Golden Snapdragon Federation's God of War, known as "the man who sees through the battlefield's fog,"
nor General Chen Detong, the veteran former Northern Lands commander known as the "Fox of the Northern Lands."
And, of course, it certainly wasn't Saito Ryutai, formerly the commander of the Oda Shogunate's Third