Maximilian's response to the intelligence on the vast, magically potent Kath Empire was not a preparation for war, but a cold, masterful calculation for commercial and political subjugation. Confronted by a rival with five million soldiers and countless powerful mages—a force that would necessitate a costly war of attrition, even with Scorpia's technological superiority—Max chose to bypass kinetic conflict entirely. He would not conquer the Kath Empire with V-2 rockets; he would enslave it with debt, dependency, and the corrosive chaos of a technologically induced internal arms race. This was Operation: Golden Cage, the systematic dismantling of a rival through economic means.
His first and most immediate order, executed within hours of Ambassador Theron's briefing, was a shock to his own industrial apparatus. Max tasked his engineering teams not with producing more Fighter Jets or MSW-2 warheads, but with the immediate mass manufacture of muskets. These were weapons utterly archaic by Scorpian standards, inefficient, slow-loading, and easily outperformed by any SAR or even a conventional bolt-action rifle, yet they held the key to unlocking the Kath Empire's destruction. Max intended to sell this 'new' technology to Kath, a move that carried profound strategic weight. This singular decision was a triple coup: it would bring in an immediate flood of desperately needed revenue, essential for funding Scorpia's continuous military expansion and ambitious infrastructure projects; it would instantly make the Kath military dependent on Scorpian industry for basic war materiel—muskets, perfectly refined black powder, flints, and molds—a supply chain reliance that could be exploited or severed at Max's whim; and most critically, it would be the precise catalyst needed to ignite internal destabilization. The Kath Empire was not a unified state but a collection of regions ruled by powerful, autonomous senators who commanded their own regional armies. With no centralized military command, the introduction of a game-changing kinetic weapon like the musket and black powder was an irresistible temptation. The senators, fiercely independent and competitive, immediately scrambled to secure this new weapon for their armies, diverting resources and attention from external threats to internal arms competition. Max had deliberately and brilliantly triggered an arms race within the empire, guaranteeing that the Kath would spend their wealth and energy weakening themselves.
The muskets, however, were merely the sharp, visible edge of the wedge; the true foundation of Scorpian control was a vast, inescapable web of commercial dependency built on manufactured necessity and irresistible consumer desire. The Kath Empire was slowly but surely becoming reliant on Scorpia for virtually every facet of modern function and luxury. Max continued to sell the 'phased-out' steam engines and their associated infrastructure—telegraph lines, rudimentary electrical components, and heavy industrial machinery—ensuring the Kath modernized just enough to improve their economy and logistical capacity, yet remained perpetually decades behind Scorpian technological advancements. This created a permanent, desperate market for upgrades and maintenance, guaranteeing Max a perpetual stream of revenue and technical superiority. The Kath Empire was caught in a technological treadmill, always chasing the previous Scorpian generation.
The most insidious dependency was built through the everyday lives of the Kath elite. The Kath nobility quickly and comprehensively adopted Scorpian standards of living, viewing Scorpian imports as the defining marker of wealth and civilization. Virtually all their household items and tools were imported from Scorpia—precision-engineered clocks that kept perfect time, advanced, smooth-milled textiles, durable metal utensils, and reliable, sanitary plumbing fixtures. This was a massive, silent psychological victory: the wealthy Kath class literally could not conduct their daily lives with the comfort and efficiency they had grown accustomed to without Scorpian products.
To further ensure control over consumables, Scorpia dominated the market for essential goods and luxury items. Scorpian processed animal products and preserved foods, benefiting from Max's advanced food science and preservation techniques, became the indispensable choice for provisioning both the vast Kath military—ensuring their soldiers were fed with Scorpian rations—and the demanding wealthy class. Similarly, Scorpian-produced alcoholic beverages, standardized for quality and reliable potency, quickly eclipsed local brews, adding a layer of controlled, consumable dependency across all social strata.
To cement his dominance over long-distance logistics and to provide the ambitious senators with another highly visible, powerful status symbol to compete over, Max offered a truly irresistible package. Alongside the muskets, airships that were currently being phased out of the active Scorpian logistical fleet were sold to the Kath Empire. These massive, superior vessels instantly revolutionized Kath trade and internal military movement, allowing senators to move goods and troops between their far-flung regions with unprecedented speed, vastly increasing their power projection within the empire. However, the transaction was meticulously engineered for maximum vulnerability. These sold airships were systematically and completely stripped of all weapons and Mana Shield technology before delivery. The Kath Empire gained immense speed and logistical power—the very keys to their internal mobility—but they acquired platforms utterly defenseless against even a single pass by a Scorpian Fighter Jet. The senators had purchased the illusion of modern might, but at the cost of utter, complete vulnerability to the very nation that had engineered their acquisition.
Maximilian had achieved an unprecedented feat. He had not only funded his own war machine through the wealth of his greatest rival, but he had systematically fractured their political structure, armed their internal competitors, and woven a deep, inescapable web of commercial, technological, and logistical dependency. The Kath Empire was now a ticking time bomb of internal conflict, subsidized entirely by Scorpia, and rendered incapable of uniting or defending itself against the inevitable future. The five million soldiers and countless mages were rendered strategically irrelevant by a stroke of commercial genius.
With the Kath Empire neutralized through this brilliant commercial destabilization, Max could now turn his full, undivided kinetic might on the immediate, active threat on his eastern border: the newly formed Zanzeer Kingdom. The Eastern Dukes and Northern Lords had consolidated into an overt challenge, one that required an immediate, overwhelming kinetic response to shatter their political will before their alliances could solidify.