Dawn by Yoshiki Tanaka

as these, Yang Tai-long never forced his business or his hobbies on his son, and Yang Wen-li became more and more absorbed in history.
    A few days before his son’s sixteenth birthday, Yang Tai-long died. It was the result of an accident involving his ship’s nuclear-fusion furnace. Yang Wen-li had decided to take the entrance examination for Heinnessen Memorial University’s history department, having only just recently gotten his father’s approval.
    “Ah, why not?” he had said. “It’s not like there’s never been anyone to make money at history.”
    With those words, the father had given his son his blessing to walk the path that he loved.
    “Don’t ever despise money, though. If you’ve got it, you can get by without bowing your head to people you don’t like, and you don’t have to compromise your principles just to get along in life, either. But just like politicians, it’s best if we manage it well and not just do as we please with it.”
    At the end of his forty-eight years, Yang Tai-long left behind his son, his company, and his huge collection of artwork.
    After Yang Wen-li had finished with his father’s funeral, he was kept busy with mundane matters such as inheritance and taxes. And then he discovered the terrible truth: the works of art that his father had so passionately collected prior to his death were, almost without exception, counterfeit.
    From the Etrurian vases to the rococo-style portraits to the bronze horses from imperial Han China, everything was “worth less than a single dinar,” as the government’s public appraiser told him by way of an expressionless underling.
    And that wasn’t all. Prior to his death, his father had mortgaged his ownership of the company in order to cover his debts. In the end, Yang was left out in the cold with nothing but a mountain of junk.
    But just as he had done when he was a child, Yang accepted the situation with a wry smile, mingled with a sigh. He did think it was rather odd that his wheeler-dealer of a father should lack an eye for value only when it came to his beloved works of art. If—just if—he had been knowingly collecting forgeries, Yang felt like that would have been just like his father. As for his father’s company, Yang had never had any desire to take over the business anyway, so he didn’t mind losing it one bit.
    At any rate, there was an even bigger problem. He didn’t have enough money left on hand to afford the cost of going to the top-tier university he was supposed to be attending soon.
    Because of the chronic state of war with the Galactic Empire, hugely expensive military appropriations were putting a strain on the national budget, and funding for education in the humanities—which had no direct military applications—kept getting cut. It was hard to get a scholarship.
    It seemed as if there would be no school anywhere where one could study history for free … and yet there was one.
    And the National Defense Force Officers’ Academy, with its Department of Military History, was it.
    Just before the deadline, Yang sent off his application, and although his entrance exam results placed him far indeed from the head of the class, he somehow managed a passing score.
    V
    In this way, Yang Wen-li entered officer’s school entirely as an expedient. Despite the fact that he was a stranger to both patriotism and belligerent militarism, his course had been set.
    Almost all of the mountain of junk he had inherited from his father he threw away—though he did put some of it into storage—and he moved into the officer’s school dormitory quite literally empty-handed.
    His motives being what they were, there was no way Yang was going to be a top-level student. He diligently studied his military history—and all the wide range of nonmilitary history that made up its background—but he skimped as much as possible on his other subjects.
    Particularly in the areas of weapons training, flight class, and mechanical