Claudius took a deep breath, and his expression turned icy.

"We will start with the lecture.

What in the seven hells were you thinking, sending an air wing of your personal army to Witheton, to THE CAPITAL OF AXBRIDGE without informing anyone? For the Gods’ sake, they’ve got magitech machine guns and air targeting sights!

You can’t just do a flyby on a foreign Royal Palace with military aircraft.

What the fuck were you thinking?"

"I made you one." Dominic offered.

Claudius put both hands on the coffee table between them and took two slow, deep breaths.

"That does not make it better.

Not only did your idiots inform another nation that we have military aircraft, they circled the city looking for a landing spot, showing off the abilities of the plane, and then did a strafing run on a goblin pack that was coming for the city guard patrol."

"To be fair, I did not know the last part.

That said, those are not the aircraft that are being made for the military. Those are significantly more heavily armed, carry a large bomb payload, and travel at nearly three times the speed, at altitudes up to six thousand metres, as long as the air generation spell for the pilot is working right."

"You’re saying that what you were showing off were what? Toys that you made for the Barons, after they didn’t meet the requirements for the army?" 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Dominic nodded. "Technically, they did meet the requirements, but we had something so much better that these will never be the main military force. So, they became civilian aircraft for the Barons to do security patrols and travel with.

They can land on any freshly cut hay field or solid pasture.

It really is useful, and the extra flights have changed our whole information gathering network. There isn’t much going on in the Province that we haven’t at least flown over once this month."

"None of that changes the fact that Wistover Duchy has an entire flying army. One that hasn’t been reported to the King, and which has no official designation or organizational structure."

Dominic shrugged. "Every one of the pilots is a titled Nobleman. They’re all part of the Duchy’s sworn militia, and as I mentioned, the planes are privately owned civilian transports with some defensive capability, the equivalent of a coach gun for the driver, in my opinion."

"That’s your defence? You are just going with ’twin linked machine guns are the same thing as a shotgun for a coach driver’ as a defence of building an air regiment?"

Dominic tilted his head as he considered the Prince’s point.

And he did have a point.

When you looked at it from an outside view, hundreds of biplanes were more dangerous than any artillery regiment. If they did actually use them as a military unit, just the strafing runs with magitech orbs of [Explosion] in the possession of the pilots would lay waste to an infantry regiment or most of a neighbourhood.

"Alright, I will admit that I did not consider what this would look like to everyone else. We might have gotten too caught up in the fun of playing with new toys and forgot that there were tactical uses to them as well as the practical and recreational."

"And you fully expect that excuses today’s incident? Do you know how many representatives are currently in the capital asking questions about our military capabilities that I had no answers for?

We agreed during the treaties that we would inform the allied nations about our military capability changes.

And now?

Now, you’re flaunting advanced interceptor technologies over a foreign capital during a long weekend holiday celebration.

Do you have any idea how many dignitaries were visiting for the holiday?

How many Techno Wizards are now asking questions about how that works, and whether they can make one of their own? You were supposed to help the army make an interceptor that could defend the cities, not introduce a new threat."

The Crown Prince was clearly getting worked up by the topic, so Dominic waved off the maid with the coffee, and gestured for the one bringing juice and rum forward.

He didn’t mind taking a cup of rum to the face, but hot coffee hurt.

Dominic was mostly tuned out as the Prince ranted about the envoys demands for transparency when they arrived at the Palace today, only to find that the Royal Family had received the news at the same time that they did.

"Are you even listening, or are you staring out the window, wishing that you could be up flying instead of here doing your job?"

"The second one, my apologies, Your Highness. I will try to focus.

I have sent out messages to all of the Barons about the appropriate procedures for flying into foreign nations, as the planes are considered to be a military asset, though we don’t treat them that way here.

A formal apology from the involved Nobles will be forthcoming, both to the Crown and to Axbridge for the inconvenience that they have caused.

However, I suspect that you are more interested in what I can do to make the foreign dignitaries hounding you for answers go away. The way that I see it, there are really two options.

One, I can write up a lovely sales pitch sheet for you to take back to them, with the general specifications of the biplanes.

They can be sold without the weapon systems, once we have the approval of the crown to distribute them to more than the loyal Nobles of the realm. That would be the easier route, though it would lead to future headaches of a different sort once others started to try to duplicate them.

The second option is to tell everyone but Axbridge that they are a cooperative joint production project, developing the next generation of interceptor aircraft, and that the final designs will be available to the alliance in three to five years, once the testing phase is done.

Obviously, Axbridge isn’t going to buy that line, so you can give them more details to get them on board with the story.

We’re happy to make some for them and ship them over.

In fact, they have two seats, so we could fly them direct to the capital and then fly our boys home."