About half an hour later, the ministers summoned for the discussion withdrew, leaving Grand Duke Rostov alone with His Majesty the Candel Emperor.
Silence hung over the great hall for a long while before the Candel Emperor finally spoke in a subdued voice.
"Rostov, if those incompetents in the Northeastern Province attacked the imperial Royal Guard with three times their numbers, what would the casualties look like?"
Grand Duke Rostov considered this for a moment, then shook his head. "Your Majesty, conditions vary from battle to battle, so that would be difficult to estimate. However, in the previous exercise, three fully manned battalions of the imperial Royal Guard easily routed two local army corps while suffering very few losses themselves."
The Candel Emperor nodded slightly.
A fully manned battalion of the imperial Royal Guard consisted of five thousand men, making three battalions a full fifteen thousand.
The size of a local army corps, meanwhile, was not fixed. The larger ones had forty or fifty thousand men, while even the smaller ones had twenty thousand.
But the Candel Emperor also knew the circumstances of the last exercise very well. The two local army corps routed by those three battalions of the imperial Royal Guard had been nearly at full strength, with a combined total of over eighty thousand men.
In other words, the imperial Royal Guard had routed an enemy more than five times its own size.
By that measure, its performance was even more impressive than the Xinfei Merchant Guild Guard Corps routing a Northeastern Province garrison force three times its size in this incident.
But the Candel Emperor knew very well that the two were not particularly comparable.
First of all, the numbers involved were vastly different.
In the Candel Empire's previous military exercise, the three fully manned battalions