Chapter 28: Who’s the Clown?
The investigation revealed that the Chancellor was guilty.
He was selling his unneeded weapons to several associations. He may have thought that he had dispersed the weapons evenly, but they were all business that the ‘Golden Fleece’ had opened under different names.
Now that I know the distribution route of the ‘Golden Fleece’s’ weapons, I can also see their next move.
The Golden Fleece had extended their influence far and wide. This was just my guess… but I think that the Golden Fleece must have been responsible for the Theanabe Union, for the Chancellor and Regent faction having different commanders, thus dividing the armies, and for having their armies consist mainly of mercenaries instead of their main force.
It was impossible for the two lords to ‘cooperate to create a single army’. They did both want to beat the Theanabe Union, but they were still themselves. The best they could do was to ‘temporarily suspend political disputes while they were engaged with the Theanabe Union’. It was impossible for two people who have been at odds with each other for a long time to cooperate beyond that.
But an army was raised with two commanders as if they were asking to be destroyed individually, and as a result, they suffered a major defeat against the forces of the Theanabe Union.
And now the blame game has begun in the capital. The Chancellor and the Chief of the Ministry of Ceremonies are now reluctant to send troops to the Theanabe Union again. Well, if we lose to the same opponent twice, then our honour and prestige will be in tatters. There was no need to hastily regroup the army and send them back to attack the Theanabe Union since they weren’t an opponent that we ‘must beat’.
War is expensive. A defensive war wasn’t a win-win situation. At best, there would only be prisoners of war and equipment left behind by the enemy.
Nations fought defensive wars even if there wasn’t anything to gain. You could say that this is why nations exist, but that wasn’t the case for the ‘Golden Fleece. For them, war was an act of losing a lot of money with little to gain. They probably didn’t want war. But they will be attacked at some point if they don’t do anything. They can’t even decide when they will be attacked.