“I can think of several other things you might have been doing, actually,” I said. “Do you have any idea how big of a record you’ve built up, at this point?”
“Wh-Who knows? Never had a memory for that sort of thing. The past is past, right?”
Not by very long at all, in this case!
“How has she really been behaving, Rikuya?” I asked. Taking Mireille’s word for it would be optimistic of me, and I know it. Rikuya, meanwhile, was working as her assistant, and would presumably know how she’d been conducting herself on the job.
“She’s been behaving herself,” said Rikuya. “Aside from the part where she guzzles booze like no tomorrow. That hasn’t changed.”
“I see,” I replied.
“Whoa, hold on a second! Why are you double checking with him? What, you can’t trust me, or something?” asked Mireille, now looking rather indignant. “Anyway, that airship sure got done a lot quicker than I thought it would. Hope I’ll get a chance to see it in the air sooner rather than later.”
Mireille had been in Lamberg until just recently. Apparently, she hadn’t had the chance to see the ship for herself yet.
“Just the thought of a ship that flies through the air is incredible! We didn’t have anything of the sort back in our homeland. I wonder how it works?” said Rikuya out of earnest admiration for the achievement. He’d come to Summerforth from a foreign nation called Yoh, but I didn’t think that had anything to do with his surprise this time. Even native Summerforthians would be shocked to hear that we’d made a flying ship.
“Is it true that this so-called airship can fly, though? I happen to have my doubts,” Maika chimed in with a skeptical look on her face. I couldn’t blame her─it was hard to believe that sort of thing without seeing it for yourself.
“I know it sounds preposterous, and I can’t blame you for not believing me until you see it in person,” I conceded. “Why don’t we all go watch it fly after our meeting’s over, in fact? Would that be possible?” I asked, turning to Shin.
“Yeah, sure,” Shin easily agreed. “If we don’t have to fly it anywhere in particular it won’t take that much fuel, so why not?”
“There you have it,” I said. “While I understand your doubts, I’d like this meeting to proceed under the assumption that we have a newly-invented flying ship at our disposal.”
“Very well,” Maika replied.
“All right, then─let’s get this meeting underway!”
With that, our discussion began. The first matter at hand: what we would use the airship for.
“I remain convinced that our first airship should be used for military purposes. Canarre’s defenses are in dire need of bolstering,” Rietz proposed, opening the subject.
At the moment, sharing a border with Seitz, Missian’s enemy, put Canarre in a precarious position. We needed the military might to repel an assault, but we were somewhat lacking in manpower, and although our castles were better fortified than they used to be, I still could hardly call my territory particularly defensible. We’d managed to repel the last invasion before they could make any progress into Canarre proper, but there was no guarantee we’d be able to pull that off again. Using the airship to aid in our defenses struck me as perhaps the best current application for it.
“I’m in favor of that too,” said Mireille. “If that thing can really fly as high as I’ve heard, then we could lay waste to an invading army just by flying above them and lobbing magic into their formation. Pull that stunt a time or two, and we’ll have the enemy so scared they won’t want to bother invading at all anymore, don’t you think? Especially considering we have Charlotte to do the honors.”
That did indeed seem like a terrifyingly effective option. What could be scarier than being attacked by an enemy standing far outside your own range?
“I can think of plenty of other uses, but yeah, I agree. Using it in battle seems like the best idea to me too. As long as Shin’s okay with that, I mean,” Rosell said, glancing over at Shin as if to appraise his reaction.
That was something that hadn’t occurred to me. Would Shin be all right with his invention being used for warfare? If he was opposed to the idea, it could end up complicating the issue.
“I’m good with you using it however you want, honestly,” said Shin. “The one thing’s that if you’re gonna use the airship we already have in battle, I’ll have to make a few modifications. I didn’t exactly make it with live combat in mind.”
“Oh, really? Well, good,” Rosell said, sounding relieved. “We shouldn’t need to use it right away anyway, so I don’t see why modifying it would be a problem.”
“Do you have a plan in that regard? What modifications would you need to make to make it battle-ready, specifically?” asked Thomas, Mireille’s younger brother. He’d become my retainer just recently, and was sitting in on the meeting as well.
“Well, mounting a large catalyzer on the deck would be tough in terms of weight, but I think we could get a few medium ones on there no problem,” said Shin. “We could install weaponry for non-mages too, if we wanted to, but considering how often people talk about House Louvent’s mages being our strongest weapon, I sorta figured that they’d be the way to go.”
“You figured right. Please operate under the assumption that we’ll be putting mages on the airship,” I said.
We can only put medium catalyzers on it, though?
A large catalyzer would have allowed even dubiously capable mages to unleash devastating spells, but medium catalyzers made that prospect a bit more dicey. Charlotte was capable of casting powerful magic with one, but I had a feeling that the other mages in our unit wouldn’t quite be able to output the firepower they needed. I could only hope that Shin would improve his design to the point that mounting a large catalyzer would become feasible.
“I take it, then, that no one is opposed to using the airship for military purposes?” I asked. No one objected, and with that, the matter was settled. Shin would be making a second and third airship soon enough, and when they were finished, we’d have to consider how to go about using them as well.
We moved on to discussing the proposed construction of a shipyard. It would have to be a massive facility, and there wouldn’t be room for it in the city itself, so we quickly decided that we’d build it a short ways outside of town. Building a facility of that scale would be very expensive, of course, and that wasn’t even starting on the cost of the ships themselves. Just one of them had cost a pretty penny to build, and since they were propelled by wind-aspected aqua magia, we’d need to spend even more money to amass a stockpile of fuel. Canarre’s economy had been booming and our tax revenue was on the rise, but from a cost perspective, building a whole fleet of airships just didn’t seem feasible to me.
“I have a proposal. Why not discuss the matter with King Couran? I’d think he would be willing to invest in the project,” said Licia. “Airships are a compelling idea, after all. I’d think it quite likely that he would take great interest in them.”
That sounded like a very good idea.
“You’re right─King Couran’s the wealthiest person we know, and there’s every chance he’d be interested in the project,” I admitted.
Couran ruled over both Semplar, Missian’s thriving capital of trade, as well as the capital of Arcantez. There was no doubt whatsoever that he had money to spare.
“True…and given that the project has proven successful, we have an obligation to inform King Couran of it sooner or later regardless. It may very well be prudent to request additional funding from him when we do so, as an investment,” said Rietz.
If it got out that I’d hid the news of the airship’s development from Couran, the king I served, there was a real chance I’d be accused of outright treason. Using the airship without letting him find out about it, meanwhile, seemed like a very difficult prospect. That being said, I was still a little apprehensive about giving him the news. He had told me that he wasn’t interested in waging war, but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to believe it. It seemed possible that he could send the airships straight into mass production and use them to wage a war of unification, bringing all of Summerforth under his heel.
If Couran managed to conquer the continent with ease, thus bringing the fighting to an end for a time, then that would be all well and good─but would it really be that easy? Airships would be a powerful asset, certainly, but they didn’t seem like enough to turn the tide of any war to his advantage on their own. The fact that Missian was lacking in wind magistone mines meant that if trade failed us, we could run out of fuel and lose the ability to use the airships altogether.