Before Yu Lian lay an exquisitely elegant imperial palace garden. Delicate pavilions and towers were scattered among lakes and mountain scenery, surrounded by clusters of flowers and the songs of birds. Everywhere he looked, there was elegance and beauty, making him feel as though he had stepped into a paradise on earth.
Yet this paradise was filled with the restlessness and heat of a battlefield.
The whirring of the Imperial armored grenadiers' impact hammers and force-field spears sounded like demons roaring.
Yes, they were all elite armored grenadiers wearing the same model of armor, yet they were fighting one another here. Each treated the other as a mortal enemy.
Yu Lian couldn't help thinking that even during the Galactic Wars, when they had faced Alliance soldiers, these grenadiers wouldn't have been so ferocious. It was ample proof that heretics were worse than heathens—and that humanity's political tradition made civil wars more brutal than foreign wars.
...So, which period of the Empire's civil wars was this?
The Tirillo people had a civilization stretching back tens of thousands of years. They had no shortage of civil wars, whether in the days of their homeworld or during the Galactic Empire ruled by the Dawn Royal House. It couldn't be helped. No matter how glorious the tradition of choosing kings might be, there would always be disappointed contenders who thought themselves strong enough to challenge the result. When they were dissatisfied, they could only settle things by force.
The Tirillo people were, after all, a people with a longstanding reliance on force.
The only difference was that in every civil war in the Galactic Empire, the leaders of each faction were members of that family. Thus, whoever wore the Void Crown was always a dragon king who had fought his way through a sea