Months passed before the construction had finally been completed, and the Martial Union settled into its first colony on Vilun Island.
Rui considered holding a big speech in celebration but decided against it at the end of the day.
This was merely part of a mission, and the settlement would be dismantled once they got over. It wasn't as though this would end up being one of the permanent residences of all those who were partaking in this mission and operation.
The settlement plan was already underway, and Rui had already expected that the G'ak'arkan Tribe would have had their eyebrows raised on more than one occasion since the construction of the settlement.
"The hunting… and the security, they're nothing compared to how impactful this next move is going to be," Rui couldn't help but smile when he tried imagining how impactful the victories of the Martial Union would be on the G'ak'arkan Tribe.
The plan was ready. They had scrupulously fleshed out all of the details and accounted for multiple possible routes that it could go down, as well as developing multiple contingencies.
"Let's go through the final plan one last time," Rui nodded to the diplomatic team. "Stemple, Zeyra."
The two of them nodded in acknowledgment as they walked up to the sets of pinboards in the conference room while Rui took a seat.
"The objective of the K'ulnen Operation is to engage in controlled physical conflicts with the K'ulnen Tribe," Zeyra began. "The constraints and conditions on this operation, however, are not little, and are arguably more important that the actual objective itself."
"The constraints that we will have to be working under include but are not limited to ensuring that the K'ulnen Tribe never dedicates the entirety of its Martial capital towards us. This alone is a complex condition that encompasses several other constraints. This means that we cannot cross any line when casualties or any kind of damage upon their civilian population, particularly the children, elderly, and women. We cannot dedicate the entirety of our Martial capital to each other since they won't settle for anything less than at least matching our effort. We cannot allow their conflicts with the other two Martial tribes to grow less extreme."
Rui nodded. Each of these was a constraint that they needed to adhere to and stay within, otherwise, the entire operation could be damned.
"The contingencies that we have in place all ensure that these constraints never disappear, or if they do slip away, then we have perfectly viable replacements that will ensure that we never engage in an all-out war with the K'ulnen Tribe," Stemple continued. "Having established the objective and constraints, we can move on to standard course of actions that we've chosen… The first step is to trigger regular and frequent conflicts at the human infantry level. As we have gone through before, conflicts at these levels, unless at a gigantic scale, simply do not register much in the radars of the leaders of the Martial tribes. The intelligence department decided it was best to proceed slowly and organically."
Essentially, the conflicts would begin at the human level, before proceeding to escalate. The plan was, to begin with, individual conflicts, before escalating them to group conflicts, and finally bringing in Martial Apprentices.
"The moment one side deploys Martial Apprentices against the other side, we will officially have broken hostilities with the K'ulnen Tribe. From that point on, we suspect that K'ulnen Tribe will most likely not seek to voluntarily escalate the scale of conflict with us, at least not when they're fighting against two other Martial Tribes at once," Zeyra continued.
"This is the idea stage where the conflict growth of scale stagnates, and we can demonstrate all of the long-range prowess we have at the Apprentice and Squire Realms thoroughly. With a good strategy and the techniques of the Longranger Sect, the extreme value of our techniques to the warmongering and power-hungry G'ak'arkan Tribe will be made amply clear. Once we have sufficiently demonstrated the value of what we are offering and get that past their thick skulls, we can move on to ending conflicts with the K'ulnen Tribe."
"Except, as a highly warmongering clan themselves, they are not going to drop hostilities with us easily, making peace with them is highly dubious, thus we have Operation Endline," Zeyra stated, pointing to the final section of the board. "Operation Endline is a covert operation with Squire Kane Arrancar. We abduct some women of the K'ulnen Tribe, and plant them in one of the rival Martial tribes, leaving enough trails and evidence leading to them. Once that happens, we predict that the K'ulnen Tribe will forget about us and dedicate all of their militaristic capital towards the Martial tribe that we framed, putting an end to all of it."
The two of them paused, walking back and sitting down.
The general plan had long been fleshed out, but the details of conflicts were outside the expertise of the diplomatic team. Rui had already resolved that he would handle it with the interim captain and the Longranger Sect. Together, they would be able to figure out the best way to handle the demonstration of their long-range techniques.
"Alright, that wraps things up here," Rui announced to the whole team. "If this operation succeeds, then the next diplomatic talks with the G'ak'arkan Tribe will not be our last. If not, then at the very least we can say that the diplomatic approach will have failed for certain."
The atmosphere was a little tense with those words.
Rui however, was not being entirely sincere. There was, of course, the second plan that he had proposed to Martial commissioner Derun. She had yet to approve the measure, unfortunately.
('She's observing,') Rui knew. ('Observing the outcome of this operation,')
If the K'ulnen Operation failed, then Rui could forget about getting authorization for something much riskier and more difficult to pull off in nearly every way that he could think of.
"Alright, I got some work to do," Rui left the office.
