Hammerblow

Chapter 2

It seemed there was not one man in the country who could get the job done. Floch Forster was seeing his country prostituted, and it nearly drove him mad. So what if the terms were beneficial, if they made friends and money by selling iceburst stone and ultra-hard steel? They were told the treaty was fair, the money was good...

But they were all familiar with the old nobility who used to sit behind the walls, who took and ate and took and ate. Had Historia and her military flunkies done anything but become the vassal of foreign burghers? One would think any scout would have more mettle.

In a similar vein, there was Eren. Eren! Titan Shifter, hope of all mankind– at least, the mankind they knew at the time– and spouse of a foreign bitch who towed the government line. Why he let himself be ordered around by... well, no one was quite sure, not when he could stand up for himself easily. Having power but no will to use it seemed to be the quintessential Eldian story.

(Rumors said that Tybur was of Eldian blood, even if from a shameful, traitorous family. Perhaps she could be redeemed...)

Regardless, Floch knew what Paradis needed. What Eldia needed. They needed a strong government, one as efficient as the military and with a similar strong strategic aim. Men who could look beyond petty profit margins and foreign luxuries, who could see the precarious situation they stood in.

The scheme was obvious: bribe Paradis until they were unprepared, and then destroy them. Historia and the government seemed to have fallen for it, but they had high hopes for Eren. If he was actually fond of his wife... that would pose a serious problem.

Well, he supposed she could be kept around, but if Eren grew too sympathetic to the rest of the world, the country was doomed.

Historia was familiar with numbers and logistics, although her current job required a bit more number crunching than just figuring out rations and how much gas to put in fuel depots. The country's economy was a monstrous tangle of numbers that she and the government could only gently nudge this way or that; trying to get economic success out of that mess was a nightmare.

Still, she had a recipe for success, courtesy of Eren's wife. Regardless of how the marriage made her feel, it was part of a very good deal for Paradis. They were teetering on the edge of a first industrial revolution before contact, while Marley was riding the high of their second.

Electricity, rubber, petrol, concrete. Advanced chemistry. Aerodynamics. Modern man held the world in the palm of his hands, subjugating most every force of nature. She couldn't have imagined leading the ship of state at all as a girl, much less through times like these.

In so many ways, Paradis was left playing catch up, using the Colossal Titans to buy precious time. Sure, they had ultrahard steel, iron bamboo, and the iceburst stone, but they were produced in laughably small quantities. Marley measured their yearly steel output in thousands of tons, and attempts to make ultrahard steel using modern methods had all failed; however, no one was crazy enough to let Marleyan chemists or metallurgists stick their noses into the process.

Iceburst mining was upscaling well– although exhausting deposits was a concern– and she had authorized bamboo plantations on royal land. Hopefully, it would help fill their treasury; modernization was not cheap. Thankfully, all profits would flow directly to the state, considering it was on government land...

They had to install a court to work out issues of land rights in reclaimed territory. Paperwork didn't tend to survive the fall, after all. (Ownership of a certain plot of land in Shiganshina fell back to Eren Yeager, but he was too important to ever actually live there.) At the very least, the land dole had done wonders for Historia's popularity. It was land freely given, from the royal demesne to the common man.