After all the turmoil in Cameliard had finally been settled, Arthur and his party made haste to begin their return.
To travel faster, they chose the sea rather than the overland route.
On the deck of Prydwen, not only the original members of the group but two women newly joined them.
One was the real Guinevere, wrapped in a thick fur coat, faintly smiling into the sea wind. Behind her stood the maid Gendievre, head bowed.
The reason Arthur decided to take Guinevere straight to Nogales was obvious.
No matter how thoroughly the purge had been carried out, he could not rule out the possibility that rebels were still hiding somewhere inside Cameliard Castle.
And beyond that, he could hardly entrust her with peace of mind to an incompetent father who could not even distinguish between the daughter he had watched over for more than a decade and his own bastard child.
On the day they left Cameliard, King Leodegrance and his knights had run barefoot all the way outside the castle gates, weeping as they begged forgiveness.
They had thrown themselves before Guinevere, sobbing and praying that her future would be filled with blessings, and had sent Arthur's party off only after swearing Cameliard's absolute loyalty to him once more.
Standing in the sea wind, Arthur wrapped an arm around Guinevere's shoulders.
"For the remaining two months of this year, the only thing you need to do is eat, sleep, and recover your strength. The formal wedding and every troublesome ceremony will be postponed until next year."
"If that is Your Highness's will, I will gladly obey."
Leaning into Arthur's embrace, Guinevere closed her eyes in comfort.
After returning to the Kingdom of Londinium, Arthur arranged a residence for Guinevere and made her recovery his highest priority, while at the same time beginning to sketch out a grand strategy that would encompass all of Britain.
At present, Arthur's power was unrivaled within Britain.
He had completely subjugated the great island of Ireland, and he commanded mighty Heroic Spirits and elite knights.
In terms of military strength alone, he had already reached a level where it would not be strange for him to proclaim himself emperor at once.
But Arthur's pride would not allow it.
'What, the imperial domain of Londinium is smaller than Ireland, which I turned into a vassal state? That would look pathetic beyond belief.'
It would be a case of the tail wagging the dog. To ascend as the true emperor of an empire in both name and reality, he had to secure at least a proper share of territory on the mainland island of Britain.
That was why the northern campaign was an indispensable choice.
He had to crush and annex by force at least three of the seven great kingdoms of Pictland, and also uproot every last remnant of Dál Riata in the northwest that had not been fully exterminated during the conquest of Ireland. Only then would the dignity of an emperor finally be complete.
And there was one more reason Arthur was so obsessed with perfect legitimacy and territory.
It was Rome, the vast empire across the continent that was reviving with mad momentum.
In the past, when Uther Pendragon ruled Britain,
on the continent, the Western Roman Empire had been trampled into ruin beneath the hooves of the Huns led by Altera.
In truth, Rome's stature had already fallen miserably from its former glory from the moment it split into Eastern and Western Rome.
But recently, the balance of power on the continent had begun to shift violently.
At the center of it stood a youthful boy emperor around Arthur's own age, Lucius Hiberius.
This young and overwhelming hegemon from the Western Roman line had risen with the remnants of the fallen Western Empire and, in an instant, swallowed even Eastern Rome, achieving the reunification of the Roman Empire.
And his advance did not stop there.
Greece, Africa, Hispania, Egyptian lands, Babylonia, Bithynia—one after another, he was reconquering the territories of Rome at its height, literally bringing the empire of myth back down into reality.
Lucius's overwhelming expansion had a deadly effect on Britain as well.
Driven back by Rome's blade, the Saxons and other foreign peoples who felt their survival threatened on the continent were pouring across the sea into Britain like mad, intensifying their invasions in search of a place to live.
They had long fled from Rome and from the Huns, and even after Rome's fall that pattern had continued.
Now that Rome had revived, they were pressing even harder, invading southern and eastern Britain.
"If I call myself emperor while clutching only this pitiful amount of land, all I'll earn is the mockery of those Roman bastards across the continent."
In the war council chamber, Arthur rested his chin on one hand and stared intently at the map of the north.
"That great Caesar, and even Rome at the height of its glory, still failed to conquer northern Britain, Pictland. All they could do was build Hadrian's Wall and scramble to defend themselves. And they never even set foot on Ireland across the sea."
A smile like a beast spread across Arthur's lips.
"Of course, Rome had its own internal problems. But in the end, the result is what matters. Even that great Rome failed to do it. So then... what would happen if I completely crushed Pictland and unified the whole island of Britain?"
To accomplish the feat Rome had failed to achieve.
That was the path by which he could prove himself worthy as the true emperor of the north, one who would not be overshadowed by Lucius on the continent.
"Next spring. Through the northern campaign, I will choke the life out of Dál Riata and force the Picts to kneel beneath my feet. And then I will ascend as emperor of the empire."
Arthur cast that bombshell declaration as he looked around at his people gathered in the chamber.
"And the wedding will be held then as well. I'm not going to bother with the petty nuisance of marrying them one by one. On the day I place the imperial crown upon my head, I will place empresses' crowns upon every woman at my side at the same time."
Arthur had not yet formally held a wedding with anyone.
Of course, that was only in name. Arthur's women were already treated as queens.
At Arthur's sheer audacity—his intent to hold the most dazzling and overwhelming wedding of the age together with the birth of the empire—everyone in the council chamber clicked their tongues, yet none of them could hide their excited smiles.
And so the remaining two months of winter after returning from Cameliard passed in a blur of peace and busyness.
Arthur strengthened his foundations.
Most notably, along with the school construction he had previously declared, he established large-scale medical facilities and worked to solve various administrative hardships, including sanitation issues.
And then there was the improvement of food culture.
Europe's chronic problem was that, compared to the East, it lagged terribly in the development of new food practices.
Of course, it was not a matter of taste. It was a matter of ingredients.
Arthur looked at this and called them idiots so stuffed they deserved to burst. When the East spoke of a great famine, people died because there was truly nothing edible at all.
In Europe, by contrast, a comedy unfolded where people starved to death simply because what they were used to eating was unavailable, even though there were plenty of edible things around them.
There were many cases where people starved to death despite having potatoes, a famine crop, because they simply would not eat them. Tomatoes, too, came from the New World, and because rumors spread that they were the forbidden fruit, people considered them filthy and refused to eat them until they starved.
And that was not all. In the East, they ate even naturally toxic plants as greens after proper preparation, including bracken, and they ate everything edible, even seaweed, which some called ocean weeds.
Another example was pufferfish. In the West, people normally did not eat it at all, but in the East they stubbornly found a way to make it edible and ate it anyway. In Japan, they even showed the madness of aging the roe for years to remove the poison and eat what should have been inedible.
Eels, which people in the East could never get enough of, were, as Arthur had experienced firsthand, treated here as an ingredient people would not eat even when it was right in front of them—not even starving commoners touched it.
That was the reality of Britain as Arthur saw it: these bastards were so full they would not even bother researching how to eat what they had.
So he spoon-fed them himself.
"Boil it, clean it, do something with it already!!!! If you're going to pour oil on it, then fry it and try eating it! Potatoes taste good just fried!"
He distributed oil rendered from hunted Phantasmal Species after filtering out the toxins, improving the people's food culture, and personally spread cooking methods on a large scale.
Britain had plenty of edible crops as well.
Potatoes, tomatoes, corn—crops that should not originally have existed here were, thanks to the Last Mystery, growing in this era alone.
But the people did not know how to eat them, so they simply did not.
Unexpectedly, Britain enjoyed abundant harvests every year thanks to its overflowing Mystery. The problem was that the people did not eat most of the crops, and did not even know how to farm them properly.
Rice and all manner of other crops were simply left unattended, so Phantasmal Species happily devoured them, grew stronger, and then attacked people. It was the same absurd cycle over and over again.
Arthur told the people's aversion to go to hell and, right in front of everyone, cooked continuously for more than twenty-four hours straight to show them how to eat the stuff, lecturing them to try it first and complain afterward.
Perhaps thanks to that, the food shortages in North Wales and in Ireland, where his methods had spread, were resolved.
"This isn't even some other world. I used to wonder why realistic isekai stories got so much shit for using food shortages as a plot point, but after looking at these ancient and medieval European bastards, I get it now. Or maybe it's just a freak coincidence. Either way, these fucking humans are too damn spoiled."
Even after solving the food problem, there were still countless things left to improve—sanitation, water supply, sewage, and more.
Privately, Arthur found himself respecting ancient Rome for having managed all of that.
Of course, he also knew that accomplishing it all would take not merely a decade or so, but likely several decades, and accepted that as inevitable.
That was precisely why the northern campaign was needed all the more.
Why?
Because he needed the human resources of the Picts, an outstanding warrior people. Arthur wanted to conquer Pictland as soon as possible.
In any case, even amid all that, Arthur lived his daily life.
Guinevere, whom he had brought back from Cameliard, quickly regained weight and vitality thanks to Arthur's devoted care and nursing.
As her original dazzling beauty bloomed once more, she also grew close to Artoria in no time, like a true sister, and blended perfectly into Castle Londinium as one of its mistresses.
And above all else, whenever he found the slightest spare moment, Arthur stayed by the cradle, holding Mordred's tiny hand and rubbing his cheek against hers, reveling in life as a doting father.
Any prophecy of rebellion had already been crushed so thoroughly beneath the killing intent of the red dragon that not even a trace remained.
And he continued accomplishing many things—sharing love with those he loved, training knights, and more.
Before long, the fierce snowstorm beyond the window began to ease, and the frozen earth thawed as the season of new life arrived in Britain.
One morning, as the warm spring breeze climbed over the walls of Castle Londinium,
beneath the red dragon banner fluttering over the castle, thousands of elite soldiers and fully armed Heroic Spirits completed their ranks.
Arthur, his entire body wrapped in blood-red battle aura, walked up onto the platform with Caliburn at his waist.
His eyes flashed sharply toward the north, toward Pictland, the land of barbarism and the unknown.
"Rest is over."
A great war of conquest to complete the empire of the north.
At last, the time for the northern campaign had come.
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