Chapter 954 — A Troubled Anluo

She looked toward the market street. Along both sides of the road—newly refurbished only last year—could be seen the new-style streetlamps and the arcane-net devices used to transmit energy. All these technologies came from Cecil; merchants and technical exchangers had first brought them from Cecil into Typhon, and then native merchants and experts had carried them from the interior to this place. These things were evidence of the two nations' ever-tightening bonds; some people rejoiced at them, while others could not help feeling anxious.

From what Anluo knew, those arcane-net devices for transmitting energy were among the things currently causing the most anxiety among domestic experts, for to this day one of the key raw materials in manufacturing those obelisks—raw Hom Crystal—remained firmly in Cecil hands. Though the scholars of the Imperial Artificers' Guild had already solved many of the obelisks' technical difficulties, so long as the source of Hom Crystal was controlled by Cecil, Typhon's arcane net could never be fully autonomous; the pace of its installation would be limited by Cecil's export quotas of raw crystal, and Typhon...

Typhon had no choice but to spend a large portion of its annual export profits buying that raw crystal—and on this commodity, the Cecil men never offered the slightest discount.

It was said that His Imperial Majesty had already taken this matter seriously, and upon learning how the raw Hom Crystal had been discovered, had dispatched large prospecting teams to the mountains at the edge of the western contamination zone to search for Hom veins belonging to Typhon itself... So far those teams had sent back no definite good news.

May they find something.

As for Anluo herself... faced with the growing tide of "Cecil things" in her homeland, she was neither among those who rejoiced nor among those who panicked.

She merely followed the orders of Aldenau and safeguarded Typhon's interests.

Just then, the voice of one attendant came from beside her, interrupting Anluo's thoughts: "Those who just passed by should be replacements for the mechanized mage battle group, weren't they?"

The other attendant looked toward the end of the street, in the direction the troop carrier had gone, and shook his head with a sigh: "Mages are all rich men, and even the mage battle groups in the army are the best-funded units... the knights are still riding horses, after all."

"His Imperial Majesty and his military advisers have their own arrangements," Anluo suddenly spoke up, cutting off the two attendants' discussion. "And it's not a matter of funding that the knightly orders haven't re-equipped—it's simply that most legion-level combat techniques depend on traditional formations and horsemanship. Until that problem is solved, putting knights into war machines would only weaken their fighting strength."

The two attendants nodded at once, and then one of them could not resist another glance into the distance—this time toward the barracks: "This is the second batch of replacements this week."

"...The war priests are under 'protective observation,' and some of the knight-officers have been rotated out ahead of schedule. We need replacements to maintain Winterwolf Keep's fighting strength..." An Luo's brows drew together slightly, and then she shook her head. "Well—the topic from here on isn't suited for discussion in this setting."

The anomalous situation within the Empire's Church of the God of War was no longer a secret anyone could keep. Out of obvious considerations of national interest, Aldernan had recently issued several successive orders, making temporary adjustments to a number of its main legions. At Winterwolf Keep, An Luo's energies of late had gone almost entirely into adjusting the legions' deployments, transferring out compromised units, maintaining internal stability, and shoring up the combat strength of the border defenses. She had been forced to reassign many war priests and devout soldiers who had followed her through fire and blood for years, and had even sent some upright and innocent knights to the rear—under the name of protective observation, but in truth amounting to something close to house arrest.

None of this was easy.

Beyond the pressure she had to face within herself, she also had to face the feelings of her subordinates—the soldiers were manageable enough, for the Empire's fighting men took obedience to orders as their first duty, and the knights were manageable too, for they needed only to be guided and comforted with honor and loyalty. But those priests...

Most of them were very good people—brave, upright, good people—who had committed no fault at all, and yet she had to make them bear unjust treatment. And the priests were not entirely soldiers, either; the war priests were in effect "auxiliary troops" lent by the Church of the God of War to the Empire's various legions as a voluntary contribution. They took orders from the officers, but those orders were now quietly aimed at their faith... Soothing their feelings had become An Luo's most vexing headache of late.

And all of this was still not the whole of the recent bad news.

The second piece of bad news was the fall of the Goddess of Magic.

Even now An Luo could scarcely believe what she had seen and heard over the past while—a funeral, a funeral held by humans for a deity; a joint declaration by two empires; elegies written in the hand of each of the two emperors; nationwide mourning; and the rite of scattering the "sacred ashes"... An Luo was no believer, but these things still exceeded her understanding and her habits of thought, so much so that even today, whenever she thought of it, she still found it hard to believe.

The fall of the Goddess of Magic had unquestionably struck hard at the Empire's vast community of mages. Though that "funeral" had, by some means beyond all expectation, swiftly diverted the public's gaze and channeled off the pressure brought by a deity's fall, the mage community remained unsettled, and the aftershocks had still not subsided even now. The Empire's several main legions all counted great numbers of battlemages among their ranks, and most of the mid- and senior-ranking officers were followers of the Goddess of Magic. Their soldierly identity gave them a stronger sense of duty, so that they would not fail in their responsibilities out of low spirits or shaken faith—but in the end, they were still only human...

The one thing An Luo felt thankful for now was that the battlemage corps had actually been struck less severely by this divine fall than she had expected—because apart from the mid- and senior-ranking officers, the great majority of ordinary battlemages and lower-ranking commanders were not followers of the Goddess of Magic, nor even nominal believers.

They were mass-produced by the Empire out of its schools—trained from childhood, with a uniform template and a uniform curriculum, an utterly utilitarian course of instruction that touched hardly at all on anything having to do with the shaping of faith.

These mass-produced battlemages felt little of anything toward the Goddess of Magic, and amid her recent headaches this was the one consolation An Luo knew—she had even caught herself entertaining certain thoughts that, to outsiders, might seem faintly seditious—

If religious faith could be stripped clean out of the army, it might actually be a good thing. Let the gods' things go to the gods, and humans' things to humans, and perhaps half the troubles of this world would vanish.