Chapter 25: Chapter-25

Elara finished the last page of budget reconciliation just as dawn light started filtering through the windows. The work itself hadn’t been difficult—just tedious, requiring focus and cross-referencing. But what she’d found while reviewing household regulations and imperial law had made her pause multiple times, not from emotion, but from sheer logical incredulity.

The laws governing beast knights were insane.

She spread three different legal texts across the desk and read through them again, confirming what she’d absorbed the first time.

Beast knights—soldiers bred specifically for combat, enhanced strength, and magical resistance—were treated as disposable equipment. They served in the palace guard, yes, and their combat capabilities exceeded human knights by significant margins. Yet every single beast knight was placed under the command of weaker human officers who could override their decisions, assign them to menial tasks, and discipline them without oversight.

The payment structure was worse. According to imperial financial code, beast knights received no salary. Zero compensation. They were provided basic food, basic housing, and basic equipment, all classified as “maintenance costs” rather than wages. In the budget documents, they appeared in the same category as furniture repair and lamp oil.

Elara flipped to the next section—personal service obligations. Her eyes scanned the clinical legal language that translated to: beast knights assigned to royalty were required to provide any service requested, including sexual service, without refusal. Declining such an order was classified as insubordination and carried corporal punishment or execution depending on the royal’s preference.

She set that document aside and picked up another—regulations on retirement and disability.

If a beast knight became injured or crippled in service, they were “retired” to the imperial mines. Not given a pension. Not offered alternative work. Just transported directly to mining facilities where they extracted power stones—the magical equivalent of electricity in this world—under conditions that made her old-world sweatshops look humane.

The document included casualty statistics. Elara read them twice.

Average lifespan of a mining-assigned beast knight: four years.

Cause of death: mine collapse, exhaustion, malnutrition, or “environmental exposure” (which she assumed meant they froze or overheated because the facilities provided no climate protection).

Survival rate to retirement age: zero percent.

She pulled out the final document—creation and selection protocols.

Beast knights weren’t recruited. They were made. Centuries ago, imperial mages had successfully fused human and animal genetics through experimental magic, creating a hybrid species with enhanced physical capabilities and shorter lifespans. The empire maintained breeding facilities where new knights were produced annually.

At age six, children were separated into training cohorts. By age seven, they were competing in elimination trials. The ones who proved strongest, fastest, most obedient—those became palace guards. The ones who failed selection went directly to the mines.

No adoption option. No alternative paths. Just: succeed and serve until you’re discarded, or fail and die digging rocks.

Elara sat back in her chair and stared at the three documents.

She couldn’t feel emotions the way most people did. Anger, sympathy, moral outrage—those were responses her brain didn’t produce automatically. But even without that emotional processing, her logical mind kept returning to the same conclusion:

This system was monumentally stupid.

Not evil—though it was that too—but *inefficient*. Wasteful. Self-destructive.

The empire was breeding super-soldiers with enhanced capabilities, training them extensively, deploying them in critical security roles… and then throwing them away after a few years of service instead of retaining institutional knowledge and combat experience. They were forcing loyalty through brutality instead of earning it through investment. They were burning through a valuable resource—enhanced human capital—as if it were infinite, when the breeding program had clear production limits.

It was like watching a company fire its entire senior staff every three years and wonder why performance kept declining.

Elara pulled out a blank sheet of paper and started making notes.

**Current System Problems:**

– No compensation = no incentive for excellence beyond survival

– Arbitrary human command structure = tactical inefficiency

– Sexual exploitation = destroys unit cohesion and trust

– Mine “retirement” = waste of trained assets

– Child selection brutality = high production cost for short-term returns

– Zero legal protection = creates resentment, not loyalty

She paused, pen hovering over the paper.

The previous princess had cared about this. Had written in her diary about loosening collars, about seeing people instead of tools. She’d probably read these same laws and felt the weight of them differently—emotionally, personally, with the kind of empathy Elara couldn’t access.

But Elara didn’t need empathy to recognize a broken system.

She just needed to see the data.

And the data said: this empire was running a labor model that guaranteed eventual collapse. You couldn’t brutalize your most effective soldiers indefinitely and expect them to keep protecting you. You couldn’t breed sentient beings for cannon fodder and assume they’d never question why they existed. History—her history, from a different world—was full of empires that had tried this approach.

None of them had survived it.

Elara looked at the documents again, then at her notes, then out the window where the beast knights she’d sent to retrieve her research team were probably finishing their night shift, standing at attention for hours without pay, without rest rotation, without anyone acknowledging they were more than decorative threats.

She couldn’t fix this today.

Couldn’t even fix it this year, probably.

The system was too embedded, too tied to imperial power structures, too dependent on noble families who’d built their security around having disposable super-soldiers.

But she could start documenting it. Could start building a case that treating your most valuable assets like garbage was bad strategy, not just bad morality.

And when the Emperor asked what she was doing—because he would, eventually—she’d have numbers ready. Efficiency reports. Cost-benefit analyses. Retention projections. The kind of cold, logical argument that worked on people who didn’t care about suffering but did care about winning.

She filed the legal documents in a new folder labeled “System Analysis” and set it aside.Outside, the sun was fully up now. Servants would be waking soon.

Lisa would probably arrive with breakfast and lecture her about working through the night again.

Elara stood, stretched muscles that had gone stiff from too many hours sitting, and walked to the window.

In the courtyard below, the beast knights at their posts shifted slightly as the morning light hit them. One flexed his shoulders. Another rolled his neck. Small movements—unconscious, human, tired.

She watched them for a moment, then turned away and went to clean up before the day officially started.One crisis at a time.

First: rebuild her household with people she could trust.Second: secure her research team and get useful work flowing again.

Third: survive whatever retaliation the other princesses were planning.

And somewhere down the line, when she had enough power that challenging the system wouldn’t get her immediately executed: figure out how to reprogram an empire that was running on code written by people who’d never heard of sustainable resource management.

Elara walked to the bathing chamber, already mentally drafting the next day’s task list.It was going to be a very long rebuild.

The plan was set. Now all Elara needed to do was execute it.

She spent the rest of the afternoon drafting specifications for each position—accountant, legal advisor, logistics coordinator—cross-referencing old personnel files for anyone who might have clean records and no ties to the Empress’s faction. The work was meticulous, but necessary. One wrong hire could undo everything.

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