The air in the conference room, usually cool and crisp due to Maximilian's hidden systems, felt thick and suffocating after his departure. Duke Alexander, Lord of Caligula, finally broke the oppressive quiet, running a weary hand over his face. He looked utterly drained, the immense stress of his son's defiance aging him decades in an hour. "He warned us," Alexander whispered, his voice thick with a mixture of terror and paternal pride. "He warned us he wouldn't suffer our games. Enoch, that boy, my... Maximilian... he doesn't just govern this city. He has engineered it."
Duke Enoch, the seasoned general and commander of the one hundred thousand-man Western Imperial Garrison, sat immobile. The sheer scale of his military liability had just been thrown in his face. One hundred thousand men—the Empire's primary deterrent, his professional, non-replaceable force—were now a single, terrifying target. It was the only force that mattered in the West, and Max had casually threatened to "render it extinct." Enoch, the warrior who had conquered rival dukedoms, felt the sickening realization that all his battlefield knowledge was useless. His military doctrine—which relied on coordinated movement, supply lines, and the overwhelming force of his war mages and mythril-clad knights—was precisely what Max's threat targeted.
"He leaves us no options," Enoch stated, his voice flat and surgical. "A conventional siege would be suicide. We would lose twenty thousand men finding this 'strategic deterrent,' and the Emperor would have my head. We cannot risk the Garrison." He pushed the charter idea, scribbled by Maximilian on a spare sheet of paper, across the table to Alexander. "He asks for sovereignty," Enoch said, spitting the word out like a curse. "Total independence. No taxes, no military draft. He asks to be a nation unto himself, all for the price of two minor conditions and a vague promise of neutrality." Enoch looked up, his eyes hard. "We must sign it, Alex. We must swallow this humiliation and pray his deterrent is defensive only."
Alexander did not hesitate. He had seen the future in the shattered knee of the Imperial Knight; it was a future ruled by his son's cold, calculating logic. "If Valum becomes an economic power independent of the Empire, the Empire still stands. If you lose the Garrison, the West falls to barbarism or foreign invasion. This is not about pride, Enoch. This is about survival." The father of the mad genius nodded, defeated. He reached for a pen, ready to grant his despised, bastard son more power than any Duke in the realm. "This is not a simple charter, Alex," Enoch continued, his mind already calculating the political fallout. "This is a Declaration of Independence. It sets a precedent that will tear the Empire apart. We must frame this to the Emperor as a necessary, temporary containment measure—a quarantine of a virulent political disease." "The moment we sign that, he holds the high ground. He has absolute power over the economic heart of the West." Alexander sighed, signing his name with a shaky hand. "He will own all our profits, all our raw materials, and now, all our diplomacy with him." Enoch signed next, his signature heavy and firm, a testament to the bitter taste of defeat. "He is now a sovereign force. And we are his client state."
Outside the manor, two distinct groups of men wrestled with a profound crisis of faith and identity, catalyzed by the sight of the shattered Imperial Knight.
The atmosphere among the Imperial Knights was one of hushed, simmering dread. They were the Emperor's elite, the core of the one hundred thousand-man force—clad in mythril armor that could resist magical and kinetic strikes. Their armor represented the pinnacle of Imperial military technology. Now, one of their number, Knight Volkov, lay disabled, his knee reduced to mush by a non-magical projectile. Their strength, their armor, and their training were suddenly irrelevant. The terrifying reality was that the "crude firearm" possessed a force the Empire's centuries of magical defense development had never anticipated. The Knights felt vulnerable for the first time in their lives. The fear was infectious; they no longer trusted their armor, and they looked at the wide, orderly streets of Valum with suspicion, searching for the hidden device that made their very existence redundant. Their fierce loyalty to Enoch was now tempered by a pragmatic, terrifying respect for Maximilian, the engineer who had proven that technology was the counter to magic.
The knights of House Caligula experienced a more complex emotional shift—a mix of awe and profound relief. They had long suffered the arrogance of the Imperial Knights, who viewed them as provincial, second-rate vassals. The sight of the Imperial Knight's humiliation was total validation. There was a strange, terrible pride in their Duke's bloodline. Their Duke was the father of the man who wielded unanswerable power. Valum's technological superiority became their source of proxy status. More immediately, they became fanatically meticulous about following the Valum Code of Conduct. If the Imperial Knights could be disabled and arrested for vandalism, then the laws here were absolute. They went from merely escorting Duke Alexander to actively ensuring their entire party committed no infraction, becoming de facto enforcers of Valum's laws out of sheer, enlightened self-preservation. They began secretly inquiring among the less hostile Valum guards about the precise training methods, realizing that the future of knighthood might involve dropping the sword and picking up the rifle.
As the Dukes retired to their separate billets for a sleepless night of contingency planning, the signed charter was immediately relayed back to Maximilian. Max glanced at the documents, his face impassive. The sovereign charter was the key to everything: political immunity to develop his technology, economic freedom to fund it, and diplomatic cover to continue his expansion and, crucially, to acquire the necessary raw materials (like precursors for synthetic rubber) without Imperial interference. He had won the war without deploying his ultimate weapon. The threat of unanswerable power was infinitely more valuable than the reality of using it. His immediate operational orders were issued: the DEA was to launch a massive intelligence operation to map the deployment and logistics of Enoch's 100,000 men, and his scientists were to begin Project 005: Polymer Synthesis, the essential prerequisite for mobile warfare and future aerial platforms. He knew that Duke Enoch, though defeated, would not rest until he understood the true nature of Valum's defenses. Valum was independent, but the Empire was now watching, desperately, for any sign of weakness. The clock had started ticking on the next inevitable conflict.