After returning, I thought up a comprehensive compensation plan and submitted it.
The next step was simply sending out consent forms to all the parties involved.
While we would provide monetary restitution, the broader idea was to craft brand-new commemorative items celebrating our victory over a god.
Right on cue, Tank-sensei came barging in on crutches, his face beet red.
An entirely predictable development.
"Hey! You bastard of a King! What the hell is this?!"
I had figured at least one person would get mad.
Someone with more pride in their personal history and achievements than in the physical object itself.
Reaching the rank of Komusubi put a wrestler well within contention for a tournament title, after all.
"It's a compensation plan."
"Listen here, you bastard! My shiko stomps reached a god! My ceremonial apron earned honorable battle scars! Isn't that plenty good enough as it is, you idiot?!"
"No, you're totally right. As a martial artist, having your technique reach a god is more than enough to be satisfied with. Especially since sekitori are treated almost like divine figures themselves. Having your shiko stomps work even after retiring is something you could brag about to your grandchildren for generations, wouldn't you say?"
"See? So you do get it."
Indeed, I did.
I understood completely.
The sheer exhilaration of having one's sacred ritual reach a god.
And the outrage at feeling like someone was trying to sully that achievement.
Katori-sensei hadn't asked for his katana to be replaced, either.
If anything, his hands were trembling with pure euphoria.
It had reached a god—or at the very least, a higher existence.
Even I was thrilled about it.
Still...
"Even so, from the King's perspective, I have to publicize our victory over a god. Especially given my position."
I decided to just lay it out honestly.
"For instance, say I died and Leonidas-kun defeated a god. If a precedent were set where he wasn't praised or rewarded for it, that would be bad, wouldn't it? If I were a soldier in that position, I'd completely lose all motivation."
"O-Oh... Well, yeah. I guess so."
"So, while Chronos takes responsibility for renting and displaying your ceremonial apron as a Divine Artifact... here is my alternative proposal."
I presented him with another document.
"The Chronos Grand Sumo Association?"
"Welcome, Director. Tank Oyakata, whose shiko stomps subdue gods."
"...I only reached Komusubi, you know. I've never won a grand tournament. On top of that, I wasn't even able to stay in the sumo world for long before retiring."
Tank-sensei had originally joined the sumo world right after graduating junior high.
He quickly made a name for himself and reached the Sanyaku ranks around the age of twenty.
At the time, he was practically swarmed with media coverage.
However, he suffered a stroke of terrible luck.
Caught up in doping and match-fixing allegations, he retired under a cloud of suspicion.
He was cast out of the sumo world without any form of recourse or relief.
Whether he had actually doped remained unknown.
As for the match-fixing, it was shrouded in darkness to this day.
Still, a man like Tank-sensei would have refused to do such things.
Despite having an exemption from conscription as a sekitori, he joined the military in his early twenties.
He probably stayed enlisted until the heat died down.
Since he passed the military's screening, he couldn't have engaged in any doping that would cause a real issue.
There, comrades invited him into pro-wrestling, so he resigned from the military.
He worked as a pro-wrestler, but rejoined the armed forces during the Zork War to avenge his fallen comrades.
Currently, he ran pro-wrestling events and pro-wrestling classes in Chronos.
He was the kind of person who claimed, "I'm just a flaky guy who's lived a sloppy life," but his path wasn't something just anyone could pull off.
He had achieved substantial results in every single field he entered.
He was a man of steadfast principles.
Most likely, he had stayed silent out of loyalty regarding the doping allegations and refused to throw others under the bus.
As a result, he got dragged down with the rest and disciplined.
A man who always drew the short straw.
Just like Saurus-sensei, his luck had been utterly awful until he met us...
"Tank Oyakata is the one who landed a blow on a god."
I stated it definitively.
"Just when I thought Chronos's pro-wrestling had finally gotten on track and life was getting easier, now it's sumo?"
"You love sumo, don't you?"
"Well, sure, I've got lingering feelings about it... I did plan on dedicating my life to it once. But it's also a fact that I was kicked out."
"Wifey ordered a reinvestigation into the doping scandal."
"That puts me in an awkward spot, though..."
"You were framed by the Duke Association, Tank-sensei."
"Huh?"
"The Ozeki at the time was patronized by the Duke Association. They wanted to make him a Yokozuna, so they eliminated any wrestlers who looked like they'd be obstacles."
"Huh?"
"Enlisting in the military back then was the right move. If you had gone straight into pro-wrestling, they would have pressured the promotions and had you blacklisted."
"Excuse me?"
"Power really is terrifying, isn't it? Why do people feel the need to throw their weight around like that?"
"In other words... you... no, Your Majesty."
"Wifey and I, you see... we hate crushing people with authority. We're very careful about that."
The Persion Nation and Ozen were probably the only ones I was consciously sidelining.
If I didn't go that far, they wouldn't learn their lesson! Those stubborn fools!
The ones Wifey was blacklisting were the Duke Association.
Even if I or Wifey forgave them, the people around us never would.
As for unreasonable rulings handed down by Wifey... my birth mother was inevitable, but aside from her, it was just my half-brothers and half-sisters, right?
They were shipped off to frontier planets along with the other descendants of the Duke Association.
There was the pressing issue that it would cause massive headaches if they came forward claiming kinship.
It would be a nightmare if they were left free to spread baseless rumors.
I'd never even met my biological mother, after all.
Not having them killed was merciful enough.
"We're re-examining the Duke Association's past crimes. This story came up during that process."
Not that we were handling it ourselves.
We dumped the whole thing onto Amada.
Purging the losing side of a political struggle was inevitable no matter what.
Especially when they were thoroughly rotten to the core; the only choice was to expose everything and mete out punishment.
The citizens were rejoicing, but our stomachs were in knots.
We couldn't just let our own relatives off the hook, either.
Not that we were pure and blameless ourselves.
Although it had been mostly sorted out, there were unavoidable areas where the accounting between Chronos and the Galactic Empire got tangled up, and an absurd amount of money was being poured in from the Galactic Empire for Chronos's reconstruction.
When the sums were that massive, relatives doing stupid things were bound to crop up.
If it was an immediate parent or sibling, we could personally punch them in the face, force a groveling apology, and lock them in a private cell.
Publicly, it could be written off as a death by illness, but with distant relatives, they had to be made to commit seppuku.
We had actually purged quite a few of our own kin...
See, my side and Claire's side didn't have any relatives trying to latch onto us to begin with, so we were fine.
Ren's family home was a Duke House, so she ruthlessly purged her relatives left and right.
Ren in particular showed zero mercy to her kin.
It was likely payback for how they had treated her and her brother dismissively for years.
Those who distinguished themselves in the Zork War or the outer space wars were properly rewarded, so the balance between reward and punishment was maintained.
In times like this, families with strong clan solidarity like Melissa's, or military faction families like Isono's and Saijou-kun's, had it good.
There were very few ultra idiots running around committing piracy while yelling, "I belong to the Kamishiro Clan!"
Though there seemed to be a few missing persons and unidentified death-row inmates.
Those were extreme cases, though. We had no choice but to dispose of them.
At Kyoko-chan's family home, they supposedly fed offenders to sharks on the spot.
Nina-san's onee forgave people just for cutting off a finger. How admirable.
"Your Majesty... you look exhausted."
Tank-sensei, whose broken bones hadn't even healed yet, looked at me with concern.
"Tell me about it. They still suspect I have a stomach ulcer from overwork, so I'm taking medicine."
It was a liquid medicine that tasted like a foul mixture of toothpaste and plaster.
They told me I was overeating in the first place, though.
"Ah, right. Sorry for blowing up at a time like this. Blood rushed to my head."
"No, as a martial artist, I understand how you feel. We'll be displaying the ceremonial apron, but I'm counting on you for the Grand Sumo matter."
"...Have you already headhunted the personnel?"
"Well, it's a sacred ritual. There's a lot we don't understand about it. We're mainly gathering ritual experts who were unreasonably blacklisted back in the day. Here's the budget."
I transferred the file.
"The budget...? You've gotta be kidding me!"
"Of course a budget of that scale is attached. Right now, sacred rituals are our only countermeasure against gods."
The Armored Rikishi were no good, strangely enough.
They collapsed into comas without being able to do a single thing.
And most importantly, this was the only discipline where a concrete training method had been established during that battle.
Prayers from the Chronos Religion and Buddhist Shinto traditions were effective too, but training practitioners systematically was difficult.
We had to research and compare why certain choirs were effective while others were scattered effortlessly.
Sumo wrestlers, on the other hand, had a well-established training regimen.
It was only natural that they would receive virtually unlimited funding.
The baseball cheer squad?
That was the most unstable method of all!
We didn't even know why that worked in the first place!
I recalled the past few days of endless arguments.
Who could have predicted that a few years down the line, our wrestler would defeat a Yokozuna of the Galactic Empire...
And that it would escalate into a full-scale riot?
Don't look at me—I had no idea!