My top speed by now was far and away superior to all but the strongest members of the three nations. Even so, to travel from the front all the way to the Royal City of Rhuun took me a full day. The keepers of the Royal Library were mildly surprised to see me, but accepted Ormin’s note and writ of permission without trouble.

By now, I’d had an idea of just what my hunch was trying to tell me, and if I was right, then even conquering a provincial capital would still have to be considered part of the EASY part of this mission.

The librarian in charge of the section where the history books were kept was considerably happier to see me than the guards. History was apparently something few who were high-society enough to visit the Royal Library ever bothered with.

That felt like another red flag to me, being as unconcerned about their past as they seemed to be about the future. After spending so much time in Rhuun, and at least adjacent to a great deal of socialization in it, I felt like the entire nation was living moment to moment. No, that wasn’t quite right—it was as though they were quietly obsessed with maintaining the status quo.

There were outliers, like General Ormin, but in most of the people I had any interaction with (which I’d started to do quite a bit more ever since my bad feeling started) no matter their social class, they weren’t just resistant to new ideas. They reacted to the slightest suggestion that perhaps things could be done differently, or would be done differently hundreds of years in the future, as though it was an extreme strangeness. One person who was particularly agitated by my talk had even let slip that apparently people were taught from childhood that the greatest virtue was for things to stay the same. And when he was confronted with “Even if you keep having this war over and over forever?” it balked him for barely a second, before he conceded it would be nice if the wars could end but it just wasn’t possible.

I was also having doubts about the conflict having started as a result of ideological differences about the way to strengthen humanity in the first place. Enemies made by ideological difference tended to breed the most hateful conflicts possible, but there didn’t seem to be any real hate between the different nations’ forces. Everyone just went about each battle as though it was their job. Rhuun citizens certainly professed to hate the other two, but in most cases it just didn’t seem convincing to me.

So at this point, what had started as a bad feeling had grown into a question: Just what in the hell was keeping the wars going?

Our search had gone on for hours, and I was just entertaining the thought that I wasn’t going to find something concrete after all, when my helper gave a sudden exclamation. “You found something?”

“I believe so...a record copied from an extremely old time, it can’t have even been 500 years after the Great Reckoning. And it’s strange...here, look.”

I looked...and felt my heart chill and sink. It was an ancient military record, detailing the results of a battle.

The name was recognizable as a provincial capital in Trioron. Clearly, the quiet obsession with the status quo was real, extended to at least that other nation, and went way back. But that wasn’t the bad part.

The document tried to hide it, but only in rather usual bureaucratic ways. A multi-nation coalition force had recaptured the city—for Trioron—from Rhuunan forces.

By Rhuunan forces, as well as the other two nations.

“I don’t think you need me to tell you not to speak of this.”

The librarian gulped and nodded. “Hang on though,” I said, “I’m sorry if this is a stupid question but what’s the ‘Great Reckoning’?”

“We’re not quite sure. But the only account of our ancestors first arriving in this land is that they ‘fled over the sea from their reckoning.’ As calamities go, it could be anything.”

I grunted. Oh, I’m sure...but I think I’ve been given a 2 and another 2, here.

Conjecture #11: The 6th Floor war had gone on in the way it had because somehow, it needed to.

As soon as I’d put decent distance between myself and the Royal City, I attuned the crystal thing Ormin had given me to reach Anna. “We have a problem.”

I explained what I had found. “So once we take Bartisina, the Floor will stop taking it easy on us,” she said, though with grim determination, “not that taking it is still even set in the first place. Although, what should we tell Ormin, do you think?”

I was a bit privately disturbed at the sheer time and effort we then took to come up with a plausible, favorable lie to feed Ormin instead of telling him what we actually found. Anna wanted to fabricate something that would actively help convince him to go through with it, but she was clearly more skilled at outright lying than I was. Since Ormin would surely expected to hear the news from me, she settled on my simply claiming to have failed to find anything.

However, this left us still without a way to convince him to launch the assault. On the bright side, Shirisho’s forces had largely given up on retaking the four towns we already had. So, we had the time to spare for brainstorming.

I took a little pleasure in the fact that in the end, the argument we put to him was mostly my idea. Ormin wanted glory as a successful general to rub in the faces of the conservatives. Taking a provincial capital, we argued, would absolutely get him that glory. And once it was done, sooner or later the period of war would give way to peace and recovery again, and if keeping such a large amount of territory from one of the other nations would be such a problem for the next cycle, there wasn’t really a reason you couldn’t simply cede the city back to them, was there?

And Ormin, with our help, would have proved it could be done—that Rhuun could win the war. Practically give the city back, we said, but use that proof of concept to sweeten people on the idea of acting even more decisively in the future. And “Lady” Anna personally promised to assist him in all possible means of containing the immediate fallout of taking the city in the first place.

And so, the plans for besieging Bartisina were finally made. Of course, lining up the logistics still took a large bite out of the remaining time for our mission. But on Day 80 something, the troops were moved, the preparations were completed, and we were ready to march.