Among them the easiest to deal with would be the ten thousand navy. Our numbers and theirs are not too different but most of theirs are battleship, cruiser, destroyer, and torpedo boat crew. The Marines that can fight a land battle only numbered two thousand. Therefore they aren’t much of a threat on land.
However, there’s one thing to keep in mind about the Navy. It’s the one leading it, Duchess Ecksel Walter. She’s a woman with character that uses her wisdom and courage in politics, and I heard she used her unique wit to weather the current food troubles. That kind of person probably won’t be striking from the front, but take my back in a surprise move. If she were serious she could probably incite the citizens of the Royal demesne into an uprising, or at least she seemed capable of that. Personally, she’s the one out of the Three Dukes I don’t want as my enemy the most.
On the other hand, the general that’s easiest to handle, but his army the hardest, would be the one thousand strong Air Force.
Their soldiers were basically teams of [a wyvern plus one or two knights], and they had one thousand such teams of flying dragon knights. Those flying dragon knights are a very troublesome enemy. Just the fact that they fly in the air is trouble enough, but the wyverns they’re riding themselves are a mass of fighting force, they can breathe fire and act as fighters or drop gunpowder casks and act as bombers.
On the other hand, there are very limited means of attacking them from the ground. Only firing back magic or shooting magic-strengthened arrows at them. If we were attacked during a siege battle we can retaliate using magic-strengthened repeating bowguns but in a field battle they would be extremely difficult to stop. It seems to be common sense in this world that you’d need a flying dragon to kill a flying dragon. Which means for the Royal Guard who only has a few messenger dragons it would be very hard to properly counteract them.
As an addendum, wyverns are dragons whose front legs had turned into wings, and in this world, dragons with both front and back legs and wings exist. Wyverns and dragons only look similar but they seem to be as different as monkeys and humans. Dragons have racial magic power that is incomparable to wyverns, have great intelligence, and also able to take the form of humans. They had joined together and built an unshakeable kingdom in the middle of this continent where they and humans both hold the boundary between them inviolable.
Among the northern countries there are dragon knights who make contracts with dragons. They are welcomed as the dragons’ companions and in exchange for helping perpetuate the dragons’ descendants, the dragons lend them their strength in battle. Incidentally, dragonewts are a rare breed born from among these knight and dragon pairs (the majority is evenly split between full humans and full dragons). Dragonewts have a low birthrate but their descendants are guaranteed to be dragonewts, and thus they already had the numbers to be considered belonging to neither the human nor the dragon species. The Air Force Marshal Castor Vargas is one such dragonewt.
The dragonewt, Air Marshal Castor Vargas is without exaggeration a one-man army. Being a dragonewt he could take to the skies on his own without a dragon, he is hotheaded and hates tricks, in a word … a musclehead. Certainly, his individual strength is frightening but a commander like that is actually convenient for me. When fighting the Air Force, victory or defeat will depend on whether I can lead Castor by the nose, rendering the flying dragon knights ineffective.
Now lastly, the forty thousand strong Army, this time both the men and the general is troublesome.
It’s not just simple difference in numbers, each and every soldier and their equipment is a rank up from the Royal Guard soldiers. In addition to infantry and cavalry, they also had siege units, and the fire mages attached to them have superior firepower, they are indeed the forefronts of warfare.
And in command of this Army, there is the fearsome General Georg Carmine.
He was an uncommon man that, while having valor that was not inferior to Castor, he did not rely on just that and gave calm judgements backed with experience. In the Annals of the Three Kingdoms he would be akin to Guan Yu or Lü Meng. Honestly, he’s someone who I didn’t want to make enemies of, just like Duchess Walter, but he wasn’t hiding his hostility towards me at all. I might still be able to settle things with a talk if it were Duchess Walter or Duke Vargas, but Duke Carmine first and foremost had unmistakably become my enemy. There are rumors that the he has connections to Amidonia, as well.