I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

After a battleship had been sunk during the naval battle in the Mosseradel Sea, the Ministry of War immediately recalled Labrand’s fleet to port for resupply, reinforcing it with new warships and fresh sailors.

At the same time, the Alliance Navy’s main force stationed on the Dmitria front was largely withdrawn. Together with four Dreadnought-class Battleships, more than a dozen cruisers, and the two newly commissioned Dreadnoughts,

the Alliance assembled a core battle line of seven battleships, over fifty cruisers, and more than one hundred destroyers equipped with two quadruple 533mm torpedo launchers and six 75mm dual-purpose main guns each, accounting for roughly eighty percent of the Alliance’s surface fleet.

This combined fleet was the Alliance’s trump card for blockading the continental straits.

The Alliance had no idea how many warships and Air Cavalry Regiments the Allied forces could assemble, so it had no choice but to concentrate the majority of its own naval strength and respond accordingly.

Meanwhile, on the Dmitria Theater, Mitia had completely cast aside her previous concerns.

It had been with her approval that Funika dared to unleash a Divine Spell.

While the Military Souls Legion summoned by the Divine Spell rampaged throughout the Church State, the four Half-Gods of the Witch Clan jointly established a long-range teleportation array across the sea.

Half a million Alliance reinforcements from the homeland were teleported directly onto Church territory.

Together with the First and Second Airborne Divisions, which had broken through to Lezhisk, they reinforced Ernesto, while forces on the other fronts split the Church State in two and gradually devoured it piece by piece.

Before the Divine Spell Legion was finally annihilated, it swept across most of the Church State like a giant wooden comb, wiping out the majority of the privately raised armies organized by the nobility, leaving a severe gap in the quality of the Church’s military forces.

The severe economic crisis within the Church State caused unemployment to skyrocket.

Penniless and with no other means of survival, countless people had no choice but to enlist in the military or wander the streets as beggars.

However, by filling its ranks with men who possessed no ideals beyond securing enough food to survive, the Church had drastically diluted the combat effectiveness of its regular army.

Aside from swelling the numbers, these recruits were practically useless.

They also caused senior commanders to make serious misjudgments. Apart from a handful of famous legions, the true combat quality of the remaining units became impossible to determine, leaving commanders hesitant whenever they deployed troops.

When Belzetsk had first fallen, the Church State had not been particularly shaken.

Although they had failed to stop the Alliance’s assault, they had nevertheless accomplished their strategic objective of buying enough time for reinforcements to assemble.

By withdrawing troops from battlefields across the nation and conducting nationwide conscription, the Church’s military had now expanded to several million soldiers.

Compared to such an enormous force, the loss of merely a few hundred thousand frontier troops along the fortress defensive line hardly seemed worth mentioning.

Only now did the Church’s senior generals realize what they had truly lost.

Any nation could cultivate an army filled with fighting spirit and deep patriotism.

As long as a nation endured, there would inevitably exist a group of people who had directly benefited from it.

Their children no longer struggled merely to survive. They had more time and money to receive education, strengthen their bodies, and improve themselves.

Naturally, they became the strongest supporters of the nation—the so-called sons of respectable families.

An army composed of such people possessed high morale, came from prosperous households, and enjoyed excellent armor and equipment.

They were born elites.

Yet under the distribution system of a feudal nation, the size of this social class was ultimately limited.

At best, it was enough to form only one or two elite legions.

Throughout its repeated wars against the Alliance, several of the Church’s elite legions had been destroyed one after another.

Then, during the recent siege campaign, even the remaining elite frontier forces had been annihilated.

The dramatic decline of the Church’s military strength had become inevitable.

However, after years of being unconsciously influenced by the ideology of the Seris Alliance, many Church officers had come to believe that any government could mobilize an entire generation of young people to fight and die for the nation.

To them, war had gradually become nothing more than a numbers game.

Yet numbers had never been the deciding factor in war.

Externally, the Alliance continued to apply overwhelming military pressure.

Internally, a devastating economic depression had left the people yearning for change.

As long as those elite legions—the pillars that stabilized the nation—still existed, they remained a Damocles’ Sword hanging above every lord’s head, compelling them to unite against the foreign enemy.

After all, if they couldn’t defeat the invaders, couldn’t they still destroy you afterward?

But with the frontier elite forces virtually wiped out, the final straw had broken the camel’s back.

The balance of military power within the Church completely collapsed.

The cost of betrayal had fallen to its lowest point.

No one feared postwar retribution anymore.

Although newly mobilized soldiers appeared numerous on paper, many had not even been issued complete weapons.

Like herding livestock, they were simply driven onto the battlefield to satisfy deployment orders from the Church’s Central Ministry of War.

What the central government saw were only the figures on paper—

Five million regular Church troops against just over seven hundred and fifty thousand Alliance soldiers.

But the officers leading troops from the various territories hardly cared who won or lost.

The Seris Alliance had never maintained a tradition of executing prisoners, nor did it pursue accountability for wartime actions.

On the contrary, soldiers who fought bravely against foreign enemies, regardless of race or ideology, were treated with respect.

Those who surrendered honestly were likewise treated as honored prisoners of war.

By recognizing and respecting the national and racial heroes of every people—

Winning with dignity and losing with honor—

the Alliance greatly reduced hostility between opposing sides.

Of course, that was the past.

This was the present.

What the Alliance honored was never the number of Alliance soldiers someone had killed.

It honored courage itself.

Anyone deliberately attempting to undermine unity, however, would receive the Alliance’s famous ”three guarantees” package—

Free food.

Free lodging.

And guaranteed employment.

As for ordinary Church soldiers, they cared even less.

Most of them had spent far more time holding hoes than rifles.

The Alliance’s airdropped leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts repeatedly emphasized democracy, fairness, and opening the granaries to distribute food.

These actions perfectly fulfilled the very reasons many of them had enlisted in the first place.

Moreover, the Alliance neither pillaged nor committed atrocities.

Naturally, they had no desire to resist.

Whenever Alliance troops maneuvered into an area preparing for battle, the locally organized Church forces would often surrender as entire formations before the fighting even began.

Many of them had barely moved at all.

They simply obeyed whatever they were told.

Some regions even witnessed the absurd spectacle of a single Alliance platoon capturing several infantry divisions.

The contrast with the Church soldiers who had fought to the death defending Super Fortresses like Belzetsk at the beginning of the war could not have been more striking.

As the internal military balance collapsed, a power vacuum also emerged throughout the Church.

Business owners and capitalists, who had previously kept their heads down and behaved obediently, began stirring once again.

While outwardly complying but secretly cutting corners and delivering inferior products, they simultaneously incited refugees, unemployed workers, and laborers from their own factories to stage unrest, attacking noble estates and city lord’s residences.

Some business owners even took the initiative to establish contact with the Alliance, providing detailed local maps and intelligence.

This allowed the Alliance to launch targeted attacks against the foundations of the manor lords’ power while driving a wedge between the landlords and their tenant farmers.

Compared to the Church, although the Alliance imposed extremely strict regulations on capital, it remained remarkably fair so long as businesses operated within the rules.

There was no discrimination.

Contracts were awarded entirely according to technical capability.

Most private industrial capital had never experienced the thrill of unchecked, reckless expansion.

Compared to serving as obedient dogs beneath Church nobles—where most profits vanished into taxes and they were constantly extorted by noble heirs—

the Alliance clearly offered them far greater benefits.

At the very least, it provided a fair and stable business environment along with a much larger consumer market.

Especially after the Alliance officially removed the production restrictions on military manufacturing, the military’s demand for weapons became virtually limitless.

The flood of orders on the market was impossible to satisfy.

It could be said that as long as they joined the Alliance,

they would never have to worry about running out of gold coins to earn.