Black Tulip Castle, the Harlan Empire's most important war fortress in the east, was the empire's easternmost salient.
This fortress permanently housed fifty thousand elite troops and could expand its forces to over one hundred and fifty thousand within a mere month once war broke out. It was the Harlan Empire's most important chess piece for threatening the Vias Commercial Federation.
Competitors were natural enemies—between Harlan and Vias, that saying could not have been truer.
Port Vias was the most prosperous and developed commercial harbor on the Western Continent. The Harlan Empire, meanwhile, possessed the Western Continent's largest navy. Both nations had immense ambitions upon the seas, so they were forever snorting at each other and locking horns in mutual displeasure.
The pirates controlled by the Acacia Family frequently plundered Vias merchant ships, while the Vias Mercenaries Guild often posted enormous bounties on pirates. This was the open and covert struggle between the two nations at the civilian level, but once it rose to the level of nations, war became unavoidable.
Even during the Hundred-Year Land-Island War, Harlan and Vias had once come to blows over the sudden destruction of a Vias fleet. The Harlan Empire dispatched one hundred thousand elite soldiers, while Vias fiercely gathered one hundred and fifty thousand mercenaries along with eighty thousand private troops belonging to nobles. The two sides battled bitterly near Black Tulip Castle for three months, suffering appalling casualties.
Had it not been for mediation by the Church and the nations across the continent, and had the threat of the other races not greatly drained the strength of every country, no one knew how long that war might have continued.
In any case, the relations between the two nations were terrible. That had been tradition ever since their founding.
Black Tulip Castle was