It looked like the Prava Divine Kingdom’s defensive posture had finally been put in place.
The cleric-soldiers pulled out from every region as far as possible were steadily building out the defensive network.
Materials and supplies for that defense were being carried into the Holy Capital one after another. Huge quantities of logs were being roughly processed, then installed in rapid succession across the outskirts as anti-cavalry barricades.
The cleric-soldiers were making full use of their physical abilities, throwing up defensive works one after another.
Even the very lowest-ranked among them could exert the strength of several ordinary adults. That alone made even basic timber processing vastly more efficient.
And when it came to fortification, the effect was even more staggering.
They dug up the ground, laid foundations, assembled construction materials. A single cleric-soldier could do the work of five men, or ten. If it was only something on the scale of a watchtower, they could put it up in a single day.
And so, field-defense installations were being deployed across a broad area.
Anti-cavalry barricades. Trenches for avoiding arrows. The reason they even had a concept like trenches was probably because the spears they themselves threw could easily punch through a poor shield. At close range, they hit with power on par with armor-piercing rounds.
A cleric-soldier was, by itself, an extremely capable combat unit.
For example, they used the technique called magic, allowing them to exert strength beyond that of ordinary humans. As far as observation had confirmed, it varied by individual aptitude, but each one possessed roughly 3 to 10 times the strength of a normal adult man.
And they had durability to match that strength. On top of that, they had endurance.
Their abilities fit the label human heavy machinery, or perhaps human tanks, almost perfectly. And there were thousands of them gathered here. Their total combined force was easy enough to imagine.
And their abilities were not limited to raw strength alone.
They wielded all sorts of phenomena that could only be described as magic.
For example, wind magic.
It was not limited to simply sending out gusts. When firing arrows, when throwing spears, or when leaping themselves, they could skillfully use still air or tailwinds to achieve absurd range and accuracy.
For example, fire magic.
They could boil water through heat generation, produce kindling, and start fires. But that was not all. They could also ignite whatever lay in their line of sight, or use flamethrower-like blasts to burn a target directly as an attack method.
And then there was flame magic combined with wind magic. Flamethrower attacks became broader, longer-ranged, and hotter. By using it cooperatively in groups, they were apparently even capable of large-area attacks resembling fire tornadoes.
Even more outrageous than that, though, was faith magic.
Minor wounds could be healed in a short time, and even severe injuries could be recovered from in a single day. It also seemed possible to do something about the need for sleep, making absurd behavior like staying active nonstop for several days apparently possible.
The sheer black-company labor environment of it °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° all left even the reincarnator Amajio completely appalled.
Putting that aside.
That was the kind of superhuman infantry they had in the thousands. There were several hundred priest-class figures commanding them. And above them, several dozen Grand High Priests. That, apparently, was the structure being used to defend the Holy Capital.
Strategic AI <Iris>, operating out of the Prava Divine Kingdom, had already assigned numbers to all of those units. Since personnel movement in and out was intense, the exact troop count still did not appear to be fixed, but the approximate strength seemed to be 30 Grand High Priests, 450 priests, and 6,000 cleric-soldiers.
The Prava Divine Kingdom was a religious state that recognized Prava’s Law-God Bork as its supreme authority.
Its objective was a single point, and a single point only:
to reach the <Holy Land>.
The scriptures spoke of many things, but the purpose was only that one.
The entire nation strove toward it, and one of its defining traits was its extremely radical exclusivism.
Without a single exception, everyone outside their own people was defined as an enemy. In pursuing the <Holy Land>, all outsiders were obstacles that had to be removed.
That was why they had hoarded strength and made the decision to launch campaigns abroad. To take everything, and make it nourishment for Prava’s Law-God Bork.
Their religious outlook was exclusivist and steeped in an intense chosen-people ideology. It was a strongly hierarchical society, and everything was decided by the strength or weakness of the power called magic.
Unless someone possessed some truly exceptional talent, social rank was assigned entirely according to the strength of that magic.
At the very bottom stood the peasants. Because they could not use magic, they were classified outside the social hierarchy itself, as a ruled class. Since they were on the side being ruled, they possessed little to none of that chosen-people ideology. They had been taught that they were the ones who had not been chosen.
Those who directly ruled over the peasants were the clergy called Jechi Boga, Children of God. These were the cleric-soldiers, who made up the largest share. Though they stood at the lowest tier among the clergy, they still possessed roughly three times the strength of a normal adult male and could use magic as well. Also, because of their lowly station, they were generally serious by disposition and did not resort to unreasonable violence.
Apparently a few unruly ones did exist from time to time, but they were usually disciplined by clergy of higher rank, so it would be fair to say that rule within the Divine Kingdom functioned comparatively well.
The peasants were mainly engaged in food production, while other confirmed roles included working in mines, making tools, and carrying out ironworking.
The cleric-soldiers’ main duties were maintaining public order and settling disputes, but aside from that, more than half of them had been mobilized to exterminate monsters in pursuit of the <Holy Land>.
If anything, that was where the greater emphasis lay.
In the campaign to conquer the <Demon Forest>, actual authority was held by the elite force known as the Chimiya Family. They were the elite among elites, acting solely to cut open the <Demon Forest> and reach the <Holy Land>. They were fanatics as well.
And under the Chimiya Family, large numbers of cleric-soldiers were assigned.
Their role was to handle all the miscellaneous work in place of the Chimiya Family. Carrying supplies, building frontline bases, cutting open the forest, and anything else necessary to let the Chimiya Family focus entirely on defeating the enemies inside the <Demon Forest>.
This time, part of the Chimiya Family, along with some cleric-soldiers, had been pulled away for the defense of the Holy Capital.
From what had filtered through, there had apparently been considerable resistance to that request.
But after being persuaded that if the Holy Capital, the central city of their production base, were to fall, maintaining the <Demon Forest> front would become difficult, they had come out on assignment only very reluctantly.
Strategic AI <Iris>, apparently, had found an opening there.
For the Chimiya Family, the single most important thing was the development of the <Demon Forest>, and by extension reaching the <Holy Land>.
The defense of the Holy Capital was no more than a means toward that end.
Of course, the overwhelming majority of the cleric-soldiers gathered in the Holy Capital were there for the purpose of defending the Prava Divine Kingdom itself.
But the Chimiya Family and those connected to it were aiming at something different.
As a rule, the cleric-soldiers and clergy of the Prava Divine Kingdom did not respond to persuasion.
Calls for surrender had been made in many different villages and towns, but they would not even listen. Their exclusivism was simply too extreme, and on that point even <Ringo> had given up from the very beginning.
That was why the basic policy was to exterminate all clergy.
But in the case of the Chimiya Family, there was one point on which communication might still be possible.
Namely, the <Holy Land>.
<Iris>’s assessment was that an agreement might be possible so long as it involved full support for the enterprise of opening the road to the <Holy Land>.
<Ringo> agreed with that assessment, and even <Eve>, though half in doubt, had tentatively accepted it.
Accordingly, the plan was to demonstrate a certain amount of strength on their side first, then open negotiations with the Chimiya Family.
Of course, since only the Chimiya Family was likely to be open to reason, the rest of the clergy would still ultimately need to be exterminated.
And in that situation—
having judged that all preparations were complete, <Iris> instructed the subordinate Strategic AIs to begin the operation.
It was the start of Operation <Beheading Road Roller>.
◇◇◇◇
“Seriously, ‘Road Roller’ is pretty awful, isn’t it?”
“I believe it is an operation name that expresses the situation succinctly and is therefore extremely easy to understand.”
As she pressed the final <GO!!> button, Eve frowned.
Well, flattening everything in the direction of advance was certainly not inaccurate.
Still, she found herself thinking that once Amajio Silverhead spotted this operation name, he was definitely going to have something to say about it.
