[Pessimists envisioned every horrific failure imaginable, yet even exhausting all imagination, they could not depict such a tragedy.]
That was probably the situation now.
Hoshino stood silently at the border, waiting. Across Ursus lay duchies and kingdoms large and small, all shrouded beneath the Empire's shadow. The rift between the regions and the center was like a corpse being torn apart by five horses, and now, that process had come to a halt.
Without any warning, it had stopped in such an awkward manner.
The Empire's wheels had crashed into an iron wall.
"By my calculations, they should be here." Hoshino muttered to herself.
She had not even transformed into Goushinnso Memento. Her opponent could create Titans out of thin air, but Hoshino held the Key of Corruption. This was a battle destined for victory—one could even call it a massacre.
The Kremlin.
A campfire burned in the Speaker's office. The burning pine gave off a greasy fragrance and crackled from time to time. Each crack made the red flames seem even more vivid, as though they had devoured some kind of nourishment.
Vitte waited, tossing another piece of wood into the fireplace as he did.
The telephone remained silent.
He waited. Then, at some moment after the tedious wait, while the flames were still burning, the telephone on the desk suddenly rang.
Ring-ring~~~
Speaker Vitte turned a deaf ear to the ringing telephone. At this turning point in history's great transformation, he behaved like a true dove, doing nothing at all except missing a phone call.
A peaceful morning.
The phone rang three times in total before falling into dead silence.
The Duke's army had suffered devastating losses. The dust produced by the explosion of the Originium furnace, combined with the wounded soldiers, had caused some sort of strange