The Princess’s Scheme
“Alright—those who wish to surrender, throw down your weapons. Those who resist will be slain by Arland’s mighty knights.”
“If you choose to defy us, then so be it.”
When the Arland knight drew his sword, the fortress soldiers meekly discarded their weapons. With the enemy already inside their walls and their main force still dancing uncontrollably, resistance had no meaning left.
By sunrise, the fortress was fully secured. At the same time, the clone dispelled the Dancing spell. Soldiers and commanders alike collapsed where they stood, having danced the whole night through. They no longer had the will to resist.
“Now then, interrogate them about why such a fortress even exists out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“As you command.”
A knight hefted up the commander and dragged him into a nearby chamber. For about ten minutes, screams and the sounds of blows echoed through the halls. When the knight finally emerged, he wiped his fist with a cloth.
“It seems there’s a vein of gold at the bottom of the canyon.”
“Oho.”
The clone’s eyes sparkled.
“However, the canyon is a sheer rift, impossible to descend safely. For now, the fortress exists only to secure rights to the claim. The garrison is posted here to prevent interference from rival nobles.”
“In that case—then I’m the one who discovered it!”
Another clone who had fallen to the canyon floor returned, her arms overflowing with glittering gold.
“Gold!”
“If we bring it back as a souvenir to the kingdom, everyone will rejoice.”
“The Empire hoarding gold? How arrogant. They should be content holding sticks. We’ll take it instead and put it to proper use.”
And so, in an absurd twist, the invading army began mining for gold instead of pressing deeper into enemy territory.
The clones shaped a stairway into the canyon wall with earth magic and forced the fortress soldiers into labor. Alicetia’s Treasury contained a wealth of magic tools for excavation—originally intended for use in Arland—which now enabled bizarre yet highly efficient mining operations.
Meanwhile, the clone who had fallen into the canyon and the clone who had fired her down there with a catapult had erupted into a heated quarrel.
“You dropped me on purpose!”
“Looking at you reminds me of the main body.”
The catapult-launching clone answered sulkily, without a hint of guilt.
“Look in the mirror! We have the same face! Looking at you makes me remember the main body too—and fills me with murderous rage!”
“Very well. Then it’s a duel.”
Thus, even as gold was being stripped bare in reckless open-pit fashion, a magical duel between clones broke out beside the mines. But by noon, news came that the fortress within the Treasury had fallen—and with it, the sweets inside had been looted. The duel ended instantly.
The clones who had once stood guard as “elite” inside the Treasury fortress were stripped of their status and demoted to mere labor clones. Meanwhile, the Treasury itself had transformed into the site of a grand victory feast.
Sweets were devoured in enormous quantities, and the more they ate, the higher the clones’ morale soared.
“Ah… Princess will be in tears later…”
Alicia, still under treatment from a clone, watched as the vast mountain of sweets Alicetia had amassed—regardless of cost—vanished before her eyes.
“Aren’t you going to stop them?” K
azuhito asked.
Alicia shook her head.
“It’s impossible. Besides… how long am I supposed to keep undergoing treatment?”
“This is a fatal wound, so until it heals you must remain under strict rest.”
Apparently, Alicia’s tail had sustained a mortal injury. One of the clones, wearing a craftsman’s expression, was busy collecting hairs from her tail, frantically searching for a way to restore its former beauty.
Thanks to this, magic combs continued to evolve further. The beastman nobility would weep in two senses: while they were on their knees begging for more combs, vast numbers of prototypes were being discarded, and at the same time, even more advanced combs were being invented. Failure truly was the mother of success.
“Underground water’s broken through. What do we do?”
After digging recklessly, it was inevitable—the tunnels began flooding with groundwater.
“No problem. We don’t need to breathe anyway. Keep digging.”
Ignoring the water entirely, The Alicetia army cast aside all common sense and continued to mine gold with abandon.
The vein of gold that should have enriched the Empire was pitilessly stripped bare, and the imperial soldiers, forced into labor against their will, wept bitter tears.
For about a week, the clones immersed themselves in their merry mining frenzy. An impossible mountain of gold was piled into the treasury, and the clones basked in ecstasy. With this bounty brought home to Arland, national development would accelerate even further, they thought. Their mood soared—they believed their “side-job abroad” was on an entirely different scale.
Of course, this was merely the clones’ personal fantasy. In reality, Arland already suffered a catastrophic shortage of labor due to massive ongoing development. Far from accelerating progress, the influx of gold would only weigh heavily on the nobles, who would interpret it as silent, crushing pressure. Many of their stomachs were now in grave danger.
“Woof.”
Coote appeared before the daydreaming, delighted clones. But as a stray monster, his words could not be understood directly.
“What is it, Mr. Coote?”
Coote pressed his head to the ground, then launched into a headstand, spinning rapidly in place.
“Hm, hm. Looks like the imperial army is approaching.”
Through telepathy with his dispatched beasts, Coote relayed the enemy’s approach.
“… Hey, Takuto. Can you make sense of that?”
“You think I can?”
Though words failed, the movements got the point across. The clones, startled, dove into the heap of magic tools carelessly stacked like garbage.
After rummaging for a while, one of them triumphantly pulled out her find.
“A mustache-and-glasses voice changer! With this, we can understand Mr. Coote’s words.”
It was clearly just a novelty party item, but Coote seemed to like it, wagging his tail happily.
He donned the disguise. The clone held up a small mirror for him. Coote examined himself from every angle.
“Yes, splendid! This mustache enhances my dignity. I feel my authority has grown.”
At those words, everyone but the clone trembled with suppressed laughter. To them, he looked ridiculous—but to Coote’s sensibilities, it was apparently perfect.
“Mr. Coote, command your kin to monitor the imperial army. We’ll crush them with our full force.”
At this bold declaration to annihilate the enemy head-on, everyone around her gasped in shock.
"We weren’t digging for gold because we were blinded by greed. Before long, the remnants of the Empire’s main force that had been sent to Arland will return to the Imperial capital. That’s when the real fight begins.
Until now, we’ve just been trampling over an Empire that was like an empty house, with its main force gone. From here on… we’ll be clashing with the Imperial Army. And not with second-rate soldiers like before. Even if defeated and in decline, this is the same main force of the Empire that once sought to dominate the continent.
This is their turf. We don’t have home advantage here. But what we do have is overwhelming mobility. With it, we’ll ravage the Empire’s lands even further."
So spoke the clone, declaring that this was where the real fight began.
Up to this point, the invasion had been against an Empire without its main force. True, this inflicted a massive blow. However, the Imperial government would never inform its citizens that they’d been defeated by Arland. Even if the truth leaked out from somewhere, in this world where information spreads slowly, as long as the Empire denied it, there was a good chance the people would never know.
For example, they could claim that they’d dealt a devastating blow to Arland’s army, and that their troops were now occupying Arland. It wouldn’t hold up forever, of course. A disaster on that scale can’t be hidden indefinitely.
But in such a case, the Imperial populace would not accept that they had been defeated by Alicetia’s army. The citizens of the Granzur Empire, steeped in supremacist ideology, would never kneel to Alicetia, the Arland princess who embodied multiracial ideals. Least of all the Empire’s first-class citizens, who were terrifyingly proud. Even while professing supremacism, they were convinced that among all people, Imperial citizens were the most superior. And so, there was a real danger they would spin themselves a convenient story instead.
That was exactly why they had to trample the Imperial Army inside the Empire itself. A crushing defeat on home soil could not be hidden.
And that would spell the end of the Granzur Empire.
The Empire had grown strong through conquest and oppression. It shoved all its debts onto the “new citizens” gained by conquest. It imposed rigid social ranks, deliberately creating oppressed classes, redirecting dissatisfaction onto them while uniting Imperial citizens by warning of external threats.
For the first-class citizens, that was fine. After all, they were privileged from birth. But unless the Empire destroyed external enemies, the second-class citizens would never escape heavy taxation. And for now, they lacked the power to resist.
But if Alicetia’s army kept stripping away the Empire’s resources, change would come.
The Empire would rapidly weaken. The oppressed second-class citizens would hardly suffer losses at all.
The result would be civil war. Of course, the Emperor would be killed. That would spark the traditional Imperial struggle for the throne. The crown prince, the next emperor, had already been captured. The Imperial princes who had given up hope of ever ascending the throne would now compete fiercely for it.
"As a result, the Empire will be torn apart by civil war and independence movements. And without passing through the Empire, the Central Alliance cannot march on Arland. In other words, the time gained while the Empire is mired in chaos will change Arland’s future."
Arland’s direct neighbors were the Granzur Empire and the Ostland Kingdom. The countries around Ostland were already aligned with Arland, and the shortest invasion route still ran through the Empire. If the Empire fell into turmoil, even if the central powers tried to intervene, Arland would gain time. And time was Alicetia’s ally.
Using Alicetia as a catalyst, Arland was rapidly advancing in economic and technological power. Not just thanks to Alicetia’s Treasury and its factories—within Arland itself, many cutting-edge factories were being built. Even if Alicetia were destroyed now, that momentum could not be stopped.
How many nations would realize this…? No, unless Alicetia was crushed here, the world itself would bow to Arland.
If armed airships and magic warships were mass-produced, Alicetia calculated, Arland could defeat the entire continent’s nations even if they all became enemies. Simply defending its borders would be enough for Arland to secure victory. And the key to that was Alicetia herself.
Alicetia kept her true grand plan secret. The kingdom’s nobles acknowledged the astonishing performance of the inventions she produced, but they did not understand that this was a plan that would decide the fate of the continent. Not even Gilbert understood. Alicetia was working on a continental scale.
No one could even imagine a single nation wielding military might to overwhelm every country on the continent.
"Then let’s teach them in spectacular fashion—just who they’ve picked a fight with. Let the whole continent learn what it means to see the royal banner of our kingdom flying everywhere."
With ten thousand mass-produced Golem Legion troops, the clones marched forth. Their opponents: two thousand private soldiers of the surrounding lords. With overwhelming superiority in numbers and arms, they slaughtered everyone except the commander.
The commander had been the second son of a nearby count. His father, the head of the house, and his elder brother, the heir, had both been serving in the Arland campaign. However, both had perished in the explosion of the magic furnace, leaving him in charge.
As a commander, he was not terrible. The Arland knights judged him to be an unremarkable, adequate man. But the moment battle was joined, a regiment of five hundred Golem Soldiers in the vanguard self-destructed, blowing a hole in the battle line. The rest of the golems poured through. The line collapsed, annihilated without even a chance to flee.
The surviving commander was captured by the clones, who shaved his head into a wild mohawk with clippers, dyed it rainbow colors with a dye that would not wash out for two years, and released him on the condition that he report to the capital.
Humiliated beyond words, the commander wept as he spurred his horse toward the capital. By now, the Emperor would be returning, and would learn that Alicetia’s forces had already infiltrated the Empire.
"What do you think?"
"They’ll definitely send reinforcements. They can’t possibly ignore us while we’re rampaging through their lands."
The clones chatted cheerfully. But Takuto was thinking something else.
(Would that self-preserving Emperor really move…?)
The clones assumed reinforcements would come. Takuto doubted it.
While waiting for reinforcements, the clones once more resumed gold-digging. Meanwhile, they dispatched the Woofers Squad’s far and wide.
The Woofers Squad’s were linked with Coote. As scouts, they were extremely capable. With physical abilities far beyond humans, once they hid themselves even hunters would struggle to find them.
They spread out in a vast ring centered on Alicetia’s army, forming a detection net. With this, a surprise attack on Alicetia’s forces became impossible.
But the Imperial Army never came.
"Why don’t they come!?"
"Come on! You’re the sovereign, aren’t you!? If it were Father, he’d be leading the charge himself!"
The clones raged in frustration. The Emperor, upon returning to the capital, had refused to send reinforcements. If he split what little force remained, his own protection would diminish—that was his reasoning. Even now, his officers were imploring him to send troops and drive Alicetia’s army out of Imperial lands. But the Emperor exploded in fury: "If I send soldiers for such nonsense, then who will protect me!?" And so the army had not moved since returning to the capital.
"Fine then! We’ll dig this place to hell and back!"
The furious clones dug greedily, seizing the Empire’s future revenues for themselves.
By the time Alicetia’s forces left half a month later, the gold vein had been thoroughly plundered.
Moreover, having prioritized mining over planning or safety, they left behind subsidence and groundwater problems. As a result, while the Empire could still technically mine the gold vein, it was no longer profitable—a nightmare outcome. It would take nearly 300 years before the issue was resolved and gold mining resumed. Part of the reason was that this gold vein had been an ultra-secret of the Empire, and in the ensuing chaos, it was forgotten for about a hundred years.
What do you think about this chapter?
