The two monarchs of Arcadia reclined together aboard the flagship of their nation’s Air/ Space Force, the ‘Adeptus Deorum’. Separated by a table not even a meter and a half wide, husband and wife sat facing each other as the Queen of Arcadia informed her King of what had transpired during his coma.

“Are you shitting me?”

“Regrettably, I am not.”

Arkhan, still weak from roughly three years of inactivity, slowly raised himself up from his big, cushy chair. His face was filled with a mix of various emotions, but the chief one among them was anger. It was anger at the ‘Angels’, anger at the incompetent and antagonistic UGN and anger at the damnable cycle that he had unknowingly fallen into and only barely escaped (for now).

“Something this cute was that predatory?”

Arkhan pointed to a picture of Ambassador Cuddli Snuggli with both disbelief and anger.

“Appearances can be deceiving. Besides, it is easier to lull potential marks into a sense of false security if they think you are cute and harmless.”

“And once they sign on you bear your fangs and rip out their throats…”

Asharia smiled and finished Arkhan’s sentence.

“Metaphorically, not literally, of course.”

“Well, we don’t know what those knock-off Pokémon bastards wanted with our people. For all we know they wanted to obtain some exotic livestock.”

Arkhan fell back into his big comfy chair as he let a sigh escape his body.

“Thank you.”

Asharia cocked her head a bit at Arkhan’s words.

“For what?” she asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Arkhan asked back before continuing, “Thank you for not abandoning everyone and everything. It would have been much easier to simply cut and run; I’m sure the option was never too far out of your mind at any given point in time. But, you didn’t. You stuck around, even when everyone was against you. Even when my creations didn’t trust you and Arcadia thought you were just seizing power for yourself, you stayed, and you kept things from devolving into a scene like what ‘the cycle’ would have made.”

Asharia smiled a bit before her face once again became stoic.

“I merely made a gamble, and it payed off. Whether that gamble only payed off in the short term or whether it will pay off in the long term is something I am unsure of, but I have stuck around for the former so I might as well use my immortality to stick around for the latter.”

Arkhan chuckled to himself.

“Well, either way, we still have a lot to thank you for. So much so that I doubt we will ever truly repay you…”

“So how do you intend to start?”

Arkhan let his heavily cushioned seat extend outwards until his body was at a nearly 140-degree angle compared to the floor.

“How about I start acting more like a husband and less like someone who got forced into a political marriage? That would be a start, right?”

Asharia’s countenance shifted a little and she merely responded in as serious and uncaring a tone as she could, “Whatever you feel is appropriate.”

…

“Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will need not fear the result of a thousand battles.”

This was the philosophy behind a new push made by the King and Queen of Arcadia. The royal couple, who had until recently rarely been seen in each other’s company, now appeared together more frequently and had revealed this new policy while in the same room. The two of them were more in sync with each other than they previously had been, and tabloids like the ‘Arcadian Enquirer’ ran near weekly articles with headlines such as, “Royal Blackmail?! How the Dragon-Queen Forced A Relationship!” and “Secrets from the Bedroom! The Secret Kinks of the King and Queen!”.

Naturally, both Arkhan and Asharia paid no mind to such stupidity, but the fact that people were gullible enough to read those things was quite alarming.

But back to the philosophy and policy.

The best way to know the enemy, as Asharia had put it, was to observe them without them knowing. And what better way to observe the enemies of Arcadia (current and potential alike) than to exploit the ever-loving hell out of the fact that Minovsky Particles rendered ships undetectable save by visual-light sensors? A simple design that spread Minovsky Particles like candy on All Hallows Eve was attached to a fast ship that had a couple of MSGs that were tailor made for spying would be all it would take to stealthily spy on any system. With the fact that Asharia had managed to get a copy of the current Galactic Map (complete with Hyperlane Coordinates) from the UGN delegation during their little ‘information exchange’ meant that the new Oculus-class Intel Ships could theoretically go anywhere in the galaxy and spy on anyone.

As a further way to gather information, the Oculus-class ships were crewed solely by Mobile Suit Golems, which made the transmission of information instantaneous and 100% secure.

When the first ship of its class was finished and crewed, it was given a simple task.

“Spy on the other ‘Island nations’ that somehow are not part of the UGN proper.”

They were not given a reason as to why they were told to do this, but it could be easily guessed. When a nation became FTL capable, it was given two choices. It could join the nation in which its system was located, or it could go alone. The ambassadors had stated to Asharia that these nations were also given the chance to join the UGN, but had refused for, as they put it, ‘uncivilized and barbaric reasons’. Given how the UGN was more than willing and able to give any new FTL-capable civilization an incredibly raw deal, both Arkhan and Asharia had a feeling that the UGN had not told the whole truth, if any at all.

The first target for the Oculus-class ship ‘Vision 1’ was the Numol-kai System. The main planet was supposed to be a nature preserve for a special type of mosquito. This mosquito was so rare and endangered that the UGN had forcibly intervened and drove the native population off their home world so as to protect the endangered species. Now residing on the near uninhabitable Numol-kai 4 rather than the verdant Numol-kai 1, the natives had barely any way to survive, let alone thrive. Due to their attempts to resettle their home world, the UGN had enforced a blockade over their new home and had put up a barrier that prevented the inhabitants of Numol-kai 4 from even seeing their former home world.

When ‘Vision 1’ arrived in the system and made its way to Numol-Kai 1, it found the truth behind the UGN’s actions. The ‘verdant paradise of natural beauty’ was long gone. In its place was a brown-grey mining world, where every bit of green and blue had been stripped away by the engines of industry. The ‘Research Station’ that was supposed to monitor the ‘Nature Preserve’ for threats to the ‘endangered Mosquito’ was nothing but a massive and hollow metal shell with painted-on windows and such. The true space station was on the other side of the planet, far from the potentially prying eyes of the Numol-kai People. With ships carrying massive chunks of earth out of the planet’s rapidly dwindling atmosphere, it became perfectly clear that, just like they had tried to do with Arcadia, the Numol-kai had been forced into a raw deal.

With this information in hand, the High Command in Arcadia started to formulate a plan.