"You self-righteous bastard!" Link shouted at Lycaon. "You set Zelda up to have to execute that woman!"

"Yes, I did," Lycaon agreed. "Any lessons I could try to give her wouldn't have amounted to anything without having her apply them for herself. She had to make a choice. Would she administer justice herself? Or would she pass the decision to me, and risk the widow's sons becoming rebels if they didn't understand why their mother had to die?" He smiled. "I'm glad she made the right choice."

"But she didn't have to die!" Link said. "There are other sentences you could have passed besides death!"

"Sir Link," the sheer rage in those two words stopped Link in his tracks. "You are not a king, so I will forgive your ignorance this once. But you do not know what you are speaking of. With an evil such as slavery, there is no demon you can kill to put an end to it. Even if Ohm dies, it will not stop the slave trade. The slave traders will not stop because their patron dies. Fighting human evil with a gentle touch will only be regarded as weakness by the corrupt. No, when evil is so entrenched in a society that the common man sees it as normal, there is only one way to fight it. By making examples of the practitioners until they are too afraid to even think of continuing to practice it, then teaching their children that the evils their parents once practiced were unforgivable so that they continue the crusade."

Lycaon visibly relaxed after that point. "You don't understand. You're the hero, who spent his life fighting monsters and cultists. All you see is that I hurt your lady, in a way that no one else ever did before. But if she deserves to wear a crown at all, she'll come back stronger from this."

"You're a tyrant," Link said, leaning forward. "Tell me, what happens if someone decides the evil you do for the good of your people isn't justified? What if they decide to kill you for it, or use it to justify their own evil?"

"If I cannot enforce justice on my own empire, then I don't deserve to rule," Lycaon answered. "You call me a tyrant? That word is simply a pejorative that men who don't have the strength to rule use to denigrate men who do."

The tension in the room was so strong, Link could practically hear it. He and Lycaon stared each other in the eyes, each refusing to be the one to break it.

As it turned out, neither had to. Seiros, Indech, Cato, and the rest of the Rising Sun Company barged through the door, stopping the tension in its tracks. "We have a situation," Seiros said.

Link and Lycaon quickly stood to attention. "What's wrong?"

Seiros looked at Cato, who placed a box-like device with a crank on the nearby table. "Nemesis's forces previously used devices like these for quick communication. Bartholomew Charon sent us several to spy on them," she said, for Link's benefit. "They eventually caught on that we were intercepting their communications and stopped using them. But we recieved a message on this one today."

Cato pressed a button, and a man's voice played. "Cato? Are you there? It's Isocrates. Nicodemus found Celsus out. I managed to mercy-kill Celsus and get away before Nicodemus could torture the information out of him, but now he knows I'm the only one who knows where the silo is. And just to make things worse, Riegan and Silvia took over Florin while I'm here, and now I can't leave! I have a disguise, and the Order of Iron doesn't know I'm here. But you had better get here quick, before Nemesis does!"

"Who was that?" Lycaon asked.

"Isocrates is the one friend I have left in Shambhala," Cato said. "He was part of a research team, tasked with finding the location of a secondary Agarthan launch base we lost track of. He and I became disillusioned with the Agarthan cause around the same time, but he stayed behind in hopes of keeping the research team from finding the launch base."

"What makes the Javelins of Light at this launch base different from the ones at Shambhala?" Kronya asked.

"The difference is that the missiles at Shambhala are thermobaric," Cato answered. "They are not much different from an immense fireball. The ones at the lost missile base, however, are atomic. Where they land, the very air remains poisoned for decades. Those who survive the blast die slow and painful deaths. If the burns don't kill them, then holes form in their bones, and their veins break open inside their bodies."

Everyone but Seiros and Indech stared at him in shock. "And these were the weapons that the Agarthan Empire used?" Constance said, horrified.

Seiros nodded. "Are you beginning to understand why I want the old world to remain dead?"

Edelgard bristled at that. "I'm sure that you can stop more of these from being made without—"

"Edie?" Hilda interrupted. "Shut up. We don't have time for this."

"What do you mean?" Edelgard asked.

"I mean that Isocrates didn't just send his message to this device," Hilda said. "That's not how these devices work. He sent it to all of the devices of its kind. Nemesis knows where he is."

Everyone stiffened at that, and Lycaon walked briskly out the door. "Tell the troops, prepare to get moving! I want this army ready to march in an hour!"

"And we're going to have to leave off there," Link said. "We're going to be attacking the Western Church tomorrow, so we need to be up early."

Seteth scoffed slightly. "He expects us to sleep easy after leaving the story on that reveal."

"Weapons that could poison the land like that…" Jeralt said. "I can't even imagine something like that."

"Be grateful that you can't," Rhea told him. "In this timeline, are the missiles still—"

"They were destroyed," Kronya said.

Rhea sighed with relief. "That, at least, should let us sleep a bit easier."

I want to take a moment to address the expectations the reader might have had about Lycaon von Hresvelg. He's a man who fundamentally understands how to lead. He's genuinely benevolent, and wants the best for his people. He could accurately be called a great ruler, in the same vein as many of the great kings of old.

But one thing that he most certainly is not is a modern man with a modern mindset. If he was, Edelgard would never have found cause to start her war...or maybe she would have, but her philosophy wouldn't be anything like what it is in canon. Lycaon would find a lot of our modern philosophies worthy of ridicule. He thinks democracy is an absurd concept. And we will see more examples of him rejecting ideas that the modern Western world takes for granted.

Now, some of Lycaon's oppositions to the philosophy of the modern world genuinely are backward and wrong, but with others Lycaon is right and it's our modern world that's wrong. And some of his disagreements are ones where there is no right answer, just a tradeoff. I'll let you decide which is which.