Mayne Port, an inconspicuous harbor in the north of the Gallic Empire.
It was no important military port or commercial port, and the nearby waters had no major fishing grounds either, so there were not even many fishermen. It simply existed like this—several piers, lifeless yet somehow alive, stretched lazily across the sea; dozens of ships, neither large nor small, lay moored alongside them; and goods neither particularly valuable nor particularly cheap were piled on the docks awaiting transport.
It was an utterly ordinary port. Occasionally, warships or merchant vessels caught in storms came to shelter from the wind, or fleets that had run short of fresh water came to replenish their water and food supplies. That was all.
Yet southeast of Mayne Port, amid mountains wrapped in coniferous forest, a sizable fortress had been built at the entrance to a hidden valley. A wooden-and-earthen wall more than ten meters high sealed off the valley mouth, which was no more than twenty meters wide. Before the wall lay a trench twenty meters across and ten meters deep, densely packed with sharp steel spikes.
Inside the valley stood orderly rows of houses, a drill ground, and enormous warehouses.
More numerous still were the prison caves carved into both walls of the valley. Every prison cave extended several hundred meters deep, enough to house nearly a thousand people. This was one of Madam Ross's slave strongholds. During the fiercest and cruelest final years of the Hundred-Year Land-Island War, it had once held nearly a hundred thousand captured slaves of other races at the same time.
Madam Ross had inherited this foundation from her father. After her expansion and reconstruction, it had become a military fortress of considerable scale. Two thousand fully armed warriors, relying on the terrain, could withstand the frontal assault