I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

However, it was not that there was no ability to fight back at all. At the very least, based on the war footage John Rawls had sent back, Mitia had already come up with a great many solutions and targeted directions for optimization.

For example, although the fact that most Seris soldiers were ordinary people was an enormous disadvantage, after a rough calculation she found that the effective range of magical soldiers’ long-range attacks generally remained within five hundred meters, which was actually quite similar to the optimal engagement distance of assault rifles.

As for the problem of being unable to withstand magical attacks, the solution might not have been as difficult as imagined. For instance, a platoon-level unit could be assigned two specially modified shield infantry fighting vehicles.

No self-defense weapons would be installed on them. Instead, a full set of shield generator devices would be packed inside, allowing them to provide protective barriers for nearby units.

The Elves’ female scientist had also provided her with a new line of thinking—that was to have shields interlock and reinforce one another. The defensive shields in the Elves’ homeland were constructed in precisely this way. A super-large magical shield had been integrated with multiple functions such as invisibility, anti-reconnaissance, self-defense, and early warning.

In theory, the large-scale group shield formed by the interlocking of two shield vehicles in a fifty-man platoon could directly withstand magical attacks from an enemy force on the scale of a hundred soldiers.

As the size of the force continued to increase, the strength of the shield would also continue to stack through interlocking.

However, this also placed extremely stringent demands on the Alliance’s military-industrial departments. Medium and small shield vehicles were easy enough to make, but division-level and army group–level formations would definitely require heavy or even super-heavy shield generators.

The larger the force, the stronger the opponents it would encounter. Not to mention being able to withstand attacks from god-tier powerhouses—if the Witch race had god-tier experts of their own taking action—at the very least, Saint-level defensive strength was absolutely necessary.

Next came heavy tanks, which were also rapidly approved as a development project. The Alliance had to secure an advantage in at least one of the two domains—air or land. A heavy tank platform with a base weight starting at forty tons would allow the Alliance to integrate far more weapons and technologies.

In the aerial domain, if the comparison was limited to fighting the Church’s cavalry units, the single-wing fighter aircraft currently iterated by the Alliance were already sufficient. But when it came to something on the level of a flying fortress, it was extremely difficult to produce a truly equivalent countermeasure.

Setting aside whether such a living target even had a place on the Alliance’s battlefield, the mere fact that the enemy could rely on antigravity levitation was already a technological capability the Alliance had not unlocked.

Airships were considered the closest approximation, but their massive gas envelopes proved that once the enemy could take to the skies, such things were best not used as weapons of war.

Mitia had already issued orders to John Rawls to attempt to steal the Church’s antigravity levitation technical data. If the Alliance could master that technology, not building an aircraft carrier with it would be a waste of its potential.

Right at the beginning of the war, both sides had already delivered so many surprises to Mitia that she had no idea what kind of bizarre things might still emerge once the fighting dragged on.

She was no longer optimistic about light tanks being able to play any significant role. Earlier, she had dismantled the shield generator from the magitech pack. If a quasi-Saint-level spell were to strike accurately, it might directly wipe out an entire tank division on the spot…

Speaking of which, she felt a bit regretful. If she had not dismantled it, she could have directly verified how effective light tanks would be when equipped with shield generators. Now she could only urgently send two sets to John Rawls, asking him to find an opportunity to reinstall them and verify their real combat performance.

Previously, when the Church was operating on the Subcontinent, it had been affected by elemental suppression. The magitech packs fielded by Seris were likewise affected, especially the new-generation cubic energy packs. What level they could actually reach on the Main Continent still needed verification.

At the same time, she also felt a faint sense of relief. Fortunately, there was an ocean and elemental suppression between them. Otherwise, if the Church had landed in such peak condition back when she had yet to develop, her chances of victory would have been extremely slim.

As things stood now, she still dared to say that she could fight them back and forth without the situation devolving into a one-sided rout.

At the same time, the first mainline battleship would be able to complete fitting-out and be launched within two years. With battleships providing escort, the strait would become a natural chasm the Church would find difficult to cross.

After getting through the sudden early phase of the war, the Tsarist Nation of Roshek found that the more they fought, the more something felt wrong. Clearly, it had originally been them who were preparing to attack the Church, intending to strike while it was weak and finish it off.

Yet after enduring the Church’s despicable early sneak attacks, even in direct confrontations they could not gain the slightest advantage…

Was it not said that the Church’s second trump-card army had already been completely annihilated? How did this look anything like a force lacking follow-up strength?

Little did they know that John Rawls had in fact played an enormous role in this. In order to ensure that the Wokingmeh Consortium’s operation would be foolproof, he could be said to have emptied his entire family fortune.

He had formed a special legion that belonged exclusively to the Wokingmeh Consortium. They were uniformly equipped with high-priced imported mechanical body armor, and were even issued Maxim heavy machine guns sourced from the Alliance as one-time support firepower.

At the same time, he had adopted the “three-high” training method: high pay, high-intensity training, and high dietary standards.

While maintaining the uniquely high morale characteristic of Church soldiers, he had incorporated the Alliance’s standard training methods to forge a professional elite force.

Even the legion commander leading from the front was the youngest and most talented individual within the Church—Major General Brinton.

The Church Kingdom could not grant him absolute trust to command a full Church legion, at most assigning him a second-class division.

John Rawls, however, could give him precisely what he needed most—trust. He unconditionally supported all of his requirements. Even when Brinton wanted Alliance infantry fighting vehicles to serve as transport for mechanical soldiers, John Rawls grit his teeth and smuggled in a batch for him.

And Brinton did not betray John Rawls’ trust. While driving the soldiers through high-intensity training, he continuously reviewed, simulated, and refined his offensive strategies.

In the end, on the battlefield, he led the Wokingmeh mercenaries in a rapid assault that seized Golotsk State first, forcing Roshek to contract its defenses and dare not support Chernit State, thus delivering a perfect answer sheet to both John Rawls and the Church.

Golotsk State’s position was extremely important, and it was also one of the most difficult cities to conquer. Built along a riverway, as long as it withstood the Church’s first wave of attacks, subsequent reinforcements from other states could arrive continuously via both river and land routes.

The Tsarist Nation had also never relaxed its surveillance of heavy weapons within Church territory. Unfortunately, the Wokingmeh mercenaries under Brinton did not have authorization to use the Church’s heavy weaponry…

Coupled with rapid nighttime mobile assaults, they caught Golotsk State completely off guard, compressing Roshek’s strategic room to maneuver and support Chernit, leaving Chernit isolated and ultimately captured by the Church.

With the two key upstream states taken, the downstream Roshek State and Loshevgo State would be subjected to a two-pronged attack by the Church. Their change of hands was only a matter of time.

Most importantly, Chernit State led directly to the open sea and was only two states away from the Tsarist Nation’s capital, Vyatletsk.

Even if the mercenaries led by Brinton halted there and merely maintained pressure against Roshek, the Tsar would still be forced to conduct an overall strategic withdrawal and redeployment of his forces.

The offensive pressure on other fronts would be invisibly reduced by a great deal. The Tsar of Roshek absolutely did not dare gamble on the assumption that two Church legions would not dare to advance upstream toward the imperial capital.

Very few rulers possessed such decisive resolve—this could be said to be an overt, undeniable stratagem.