Hiroyuki wasn’t like Arkhan in the way that he was given a new life in the body of a baby, he was brought into this world the same way all the other Holy Crux Emperors were. The Theocracy was the only nation that had the means and the knowledge to summon people from other worlds. They had attempted to do this over twelve years ago, but the summoning failed and they were forced to try again. Each summoning cost a great deal and spirited away a human from one of many alternate versions of Earth.

It didn’t take mana or money or time to summon someone, no it took lives to do so. Opening a temporary rift in the fabric of reality to spirit away someone was more costly than simply making people pass out or go comatose from mana exhaustion, instead several thousand lives had to be sacrificed to summon a single ‘Hero’. This was one of the reasons the Theocracy instituted a Human Supremacy policy ages ago. If it could have a source of sacrifices that no one cared about that was plentiful, then it would be able to summon such ‘Heroes’ whenever the Church felt like it.

Every ‘Hero’ was powerful in their own right. In the past, one of the weakest Heroes ever summoned was able make every woman he locked eyes with obey his every word. Another was capable of summoning and binding countless monsters to his will and still another one had intimate knowledge of every spell in existence and could use them all without mana cost. Hiroyuki came with a mastery of all things military, economic and political among some other abilities. He could twist words to suit his desire as if he was an elderly man who had been in politics for multiple lifetimes, and he possessed knowledge of military tactics and economic policies and methods that were far ahead of his time. Each Emperor was given a title to befit their capabilities and Hiroyuki’s was ‘The Emperor of Tomorrow’.

Still, even the ‘Emperor of Tomorrow’ had to concede that he was not going to win this battle with the bickering coalition of nations each trying to throw the others to the wolves and with the antiquated tactics of ‘honorable daylight combat’. He had the full backing of the True Church, so he could pretty much do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, which suited his personality perfectly. An ikemen though he may have been, deep down he was far from handsome and kind.

On his Earth he was a bully among bullies, the son of the principal and grandson of a wealthy and influential multi-billionaire. When his bullying had caused a girl to leap to her death at school, and he got off scot free when his father and grandfather had the incident quietly swept under the rug. People were paid off, silence was bought and he was able to own his school like a certain prince had owned the Kyrellian Kingdom. He was no stranger to his country’s media but was incredibly dismissive about it due to his many years of crushing the other people in his life when they showed even a hint of care for anime, manga or any other media.

He was a total asshole, but he was a handsome and influential asshole, so he got away with being one. His Earth that he came from was one where his nation had won the second World War and conquered the rest of his Earth. How exactly that had come to pass was unknown by the time he was born, as propaganda and ultra-nationalism had rendered any view of history that conflicted with ‘political correctness’ as illegal. His was a world where everything ‘Western’ and “Eastern’ had been made by his nation ‘first’ and was merely appropriated by the ‘gaijin’. Or at least that was how the propaganda had painted things.

…

For the past week the forces of the Crusade had been begrudgingly digging like Rock Midgets under the ground. The leadership had decided to try to undermine the walls before trying a night attack and if they kept digging they would be at the 2/3rds mark in a few days. The network of tunnels was interconnected so that they could collapse a large section of the wall in a single go while giving the sappers the chance to escape. The fact that the tunnels were interconnected would turn out to not be a good idea, however. As the teams mined away, one of them uncovered a metal tube running through the area they were working. A mage was called down to melt the tube so that the teams could keep moving.

This was a big mistake.

As the tube melted, a gas rushed out of the molten hole in the tube and quickly flooded the tunnels with a fog of death. Everyone in the tunnels died in absolute agony as the cloud of G-3 Nerve Gas made the entire tunnel network a deathtrap for anyone who set foot in there. As Wind Mages tried desperately to pull all the poisoned wind out of the tunnels so they could resume their progress, more gas would come through the hole to take its place.

If they could get an Earth Mage down there they might have been able to seal the hole with stone, but at most they could get one roughly 1/4th of the way into the network before they had to turn back or risk not having enough mana to get out safely. What made matters worse is that they didn’t know in which tunnel the pipe was located, as the sappers had been the one to show them the way themselves. Eventually, they simply sealed up the openings into the tunnels and hoped that their forces could get to the wall during a night attack.

Without them knowing it, the Crusaders were just making the the first stage of the Gaian Alliance counteroffensive which was codenamed ‘Operation: Fruitless Endeavor’ that much more of a success. Once 'Operation: Fruitless Endeavor' had been completed, the next stage would begin, and 'Operation: Golden Rule' would spring into action.

…

While the Humans were busy trying to deal with the wall, several Flying Island Fortresses were slowly making their way across the border. They were high enough up in the sky that they would be mistaken for a small dot in the sky, not that any human had the capability to see far enough to discern that there was a slow-moving object in the sky to begin with. Humans rarely looked up that far to begin with, and only ever did so to look for things that flew much closer to the ground, like Wyverns or Dragons, things that actually existed.

If you had told anyone that six flying islands that were filled with Non-Human and Golem Soldiers were in the sky and making their way towards the capitols of the Human Lands, they would ask if you were insane. A dragon or roc might certainly be up there, but an island is right out. And yet, unbeknownst to them, a flying island was headed to the capital of each Human nation, each carrying a deadly cargo. These six were the ones Arkhan knew about, but surprisingly there was one more he didn’t know existed yet, as the two factions had done an amazing job of managing to keep its existance a secret from their maker.

It was a secret base made by both the Zeonic and Federation Factions with more ‘power’ in it than the others, headed straight for the Holiest of Holies for the Humans, the Capitol of the Theocracy itself. How they had managed to keep its existance a secret was unknown, but that seventh Sky Fortress would eventually be the impetus that forced Arkhan to institute a massive shift in leadership and internal policy, but that is a story for another day.