After being forced to step down, the once-annoying nun eloped with me.

Finally, the Listeners would release the smaller golems they had created onto the battlefield, allowing them to climb up the city walls and into the camp along the bodies of the larger golems. The Listeners would then give them magical commands to move freely before riding away on hawks.

This tactic was originally only theoretical and had not undergone any practical testing. However, due to Naruja's strong self-recommendation, Teresa's encouragement, and for some reason, Yang Hao in the Monster Forest decided to approve Naruja's somewhat risky move.

Then, naturally, good results were achieved.

To put it bluntly, the parish's army is nowhere near as good as the military district's camp.

If it were in a military recruit camp, even recruits with only a sword would know to prepare more hidden doors when building the camp, and when installing defensive equipment, they would know to hide the equipment or install a sufficiently sturdy roof to defend against enemy projectiles.

The parish's camp was practically a starting village in an RPG game—to put it bluntly, the parish's soldiers were essentially the soldiers of a starting village.

They just brazenly installed the ballistae on the towers, which were completely exposed except for the railings! Directly!

(It would be strange if this didn't attract some kind of backlash.)

Even Naruja, who knows the least about tactics and strategy, has learned these basics after being exposed to them for so long. Why don't these soldiers know them at all?

Moreover, apart from a few non-commissioned officers and instructors conducting training, there wasn't a single chaplain or clergyman to be seen in the recruit camp...

Even though everyone knows you're planning to send a bunch of cannon fodder to their deaths, at least you should at least make an appearance, right?

Confused, Naruja, with the help of Junying, went to another recruit camp and repeated her previous steps.

It's more like a game than a war.

The two sides in the game are Naruja and Naruja's Golem, while the opponents are the new recruits of the parish.

During this time, Naruja remembered Yang Hao's instructions: create enough wounded, but don't actually kill them all. She had the golems break the soldiers' limbs, but not kill them. She did her best to create more wounded, and even slightly adjusted the logic of the golems' self-regulation, so that the golems would avoid the wounded soldiers lying on the ground screaming in pain but unable to move, and instead harm the soldiers who could still move freely.

After this back and forth, by the night of the 15th, the Northern Expeditionary Force's attacked camp had suffered few deaths, but several thousand more serious injuries and disabilities.

These thousands of people, once the parish priests and the friars rushed to deal with the golem, couldn't just be slaughtered for meat, nor could they be kept alive like this.

Slaughtering and eating them is a good idea, but there are just too many people. Even if all the slaughterhouses in the camps were operating at full capacity, it would still take several days or even weeks to slaughter a few thousand pigs. Not to mention a few thousand wounded soldiers who were fortunate enough to only have their legs and feet injured.

If you're talking about planning to raise one, that's even more impossible—the Church of Light has shield spells, courage spells, tranquility spells, an unparalleled spear of light, illumination spells for illuminating the night, and even forbidden spells capable of destroying an entire area of ​​the earth...

However, the divine magic system of the Church of Light has no magic related to healing.

Not at all. So unless these wounded soldiers receive treatment from a mage, they will never recover.

But what magicians from the Roman Empire would come to the parish now? These two professions are irreconcilable in the Roman Empire. It's already considered civilized if they don't fight on the spot when they meet on the street. You expect them to come and help us treat the wounded?

You might as well say that His Majesty the Regent's Red Cross doctor is willing to come and treat our wounds for free—yes, yes!

Isn't there the Red Cross?! But where are all the doctors?

The bishops remembered the regent's estates that they had once united to suppress, and they pinned their hopes on doctors who practiced medicine—but it would have been better if they hadn't looked for them; once they did, the clergy throughout the Roman Empire felt a chill in their hearts.

Throughout the entire Roman Empire, not to mention Red Cross doctors, even nurses were nowhere to be found.

Those who could escape had already fled, and those who couldn't were mostly persecuted and killed. The closest to them was a doctor named Joseph—who turned out to be last seen in the massacred town of Kargard.

The bishops of the Church of Light were all baffled: What's going on? Why is it that every time we want something, it either disappears or rots away? Why is that?

They sighed heavily and finally came to a conclusion:

These wounded will be slaughtered in batches. But before that, they must be cared for. Otherwise, morale will be unstable, and it will be a serious question whether the Northern Expeditionary Force can even maintain its formation and prevent desertion before the expedition, let alone bring a victory that will determine the stability of the faith for the diocese...

In this situation, the parish outwitted and outmaneuvered Naruja's harassment tactics for more than ten days.

In July, the army of 300,000 suffered more than 20,000 wounded and disabled. In the end, the parish could no longer hold out and simply settled the priests and the friars in various camps before giving up Naruja's idea of ​​continuing the harassment.

But with the priests and the friars on standby in the camp, it was time for Yang Hao's other knife to come in handy.

Previously, Yang Hao had mentioned improvements to the howitzer Golem to Arthur.

Now it's July, and the improvements to the howitzer Golem are indeed complete.

At the risk of going bald, Arthur and the elves improved the structure of the Golem howitzer, giving the howitzer, which was fixed to the Golem's shoulder, a buffer mechanism, allowing it to withstand greater chamber pressure and use more gunpowder, in other words, to launch the shells farther.

Not only that, Arthur also extended the barrel of Golem's howitzer—if the original Golem howitzer's barrel was short, thick, and pointed like a bamboo shoot, then the improved Golem howitzer's barrel is now long and thick.

More robust metal, a barrel structure with a buffer mechanism, an extended barrel length, and more gunpowder used during loading—the direct result of this is that the new model of the Gorem howitzer can now fire shells more than 5 kilometers away!

But if it only makes the shells fly five kilometers before hitting the ground, it's not very meaningful. Although this might be a blow to the morale of the soldiers in the Northern Expeditionary Force's bombarded camps, Yang Hao hadn't forgotten that his goal was to have more wounded in the parish.

To this end, he specifically sought out a "rest time" when Arthur wasn't being approached by the female elves and discussed it for a long time. In the end, they came to a conclusion: since we haven't solved the problem that the shells sculpted from explosive ore are prone to exploding inside the cannon rather than at the target location, why don't we lower our standards?

"As long as it can burn, isn't that enough?!"

"Yeah! As long as it can burn!"

Let's do it!

The two men immediately got to work in front of Viya, the nun, and Finn, who happened to be passing by, and finally completed the improvement of the new shells before July.

This is a special type of shell known as an "incendiary shell." Unlike stone projectiles, incendiary shells shatter upon impact with the ground, instantly igniting the oily liquid that was nearing its flammable point due to absorbing a large amount of heat during firing.

While these incendiary bombs don't cause direct damage to a building like stone bombs, their damage to unarmored units and wooden structures is extremely high!

The entire camp of the Northern Expeditionary Force was built primarily of wood, and burns have always been a serious injury that is difficult to treat, let alone burns caused by being splashed with scalding oil.

Although the Church of Light has a divine spell called "Suffocation" that can extinguish oil fires, it cannot heal those who have suffered severe burns.

And so, under the watchful eyes of everyone, the pastors once again faced a dilemma: to save them, but there was no way to do so; to feed them, these people burned by oil would barely yield any decent meat even at the slaughterhouse, and feeding them for even half a day would be a pure waste of money! But if they didn't feed them, even an army composed of fanatical believers could mutiny, let alone an army composed of ordinary believers...

Well, that's just how it is—Bishop Stephen originally thought that by sending out priests and the Guardians to set up camps in various locations, he could prevent the number of wounded from increasing further, but little did he expect that the elves would develop such an evil weapon!

"Devil! Demon! Demon!"

He flew into a rage, slamming the ledger to the ground. But wisdom quickly regained its footing. Bishop Stephen, panting, returned to his seat. Looking at the map on the table, at the camp that had suffered several inexplicable attacks of "fire rain from the sky," he became engrossed in planning.

Why were only a few camps attacked? Why weren't the larger camps further back attacked? Why did the Eagle Knights stop flying around aimlessly and instead only conduct reconnaissance from the air? Why didn't the fire rain fall directly into the camps when they were attacked, but instead took a certain amount of time to adjust before shooting into the camps from outside the wasteland? Why was there always a rumbling sound before the fire rain fell?

A host of doubts piled up in the bishop's mind, and before he knew it, an emotion called "passion" had been ignited within him.

He suddenly found the war quite interesting. Just as one must gradually unlock the heart of a young boy in his exploration of his innocence, Bishop Stephen suddenly felt as if he had grasped something.

The projectiles that unleash fire rain are nowhere near as easy to transport or manufacture on-site as those stone golems. Considering that the attacked camps are all on the outskirts, Bishop Stephen boldly concludes that the enemy marched directly from the Monster Forest on foot. And if there are no surprises, they must be extremely slow and heavy units, as cumbersome as the counterweight catapults needed for sieges.

The eagle riders in the sky weren't there to scout our troop deployment at all. Their real objective was to observe the landing points of the fire rain launched from something, report back, and then have the troops in the rear adjust accordingly!

In that instant, Bishop Stephen seemed to have grasped a possibility.

He paced back and forth in the room with his arms crossed, speaking eloquently, his eyes seemingly filled with countless fantasies born from whimsical ideas.

Were the enemy's projectiles that fired the rain of fire ballistae? No, that's impossible. Ballistae couldn't fire in such a straight line, much less produce such a loud rumbling sound.

Was that something like a catapult? No, even less likely—if it were the size of a catapult, it would have been spotted by sight long ago.

So what exactly is that thing? What is it?

Bishop Stephen was lost in thought. Unconsciously, he seemed to have rediscovered the passion he had for fighting the barbarians in the past.

His hands itched unbearably, and the image of the handsome boy vanished from his mind. His throat tightened terribly, and the desire to unravel the enemy's secrets relentlessly invaded his nerves, which were already riddled with holes due to his faith.

What exactly is it? Think carefully, Stephen, think carefully—what kind of things could elves and demons possibly come up with?

Elves couldn't possibly cut down trees on a large scale to manufacture crossbows and catapults, and the demons simply didn't have the technology...

What exactly is that?

"what exactly is it?"

Stephen nervously bit his nails, not even noticing that he had bitten his finger until it bled.

what is it?

"What exactly are those things? Thinking back, in the attacks before July, those stone golems, stone golems, stone golems..."

This was accompanied by the nails being bitten off directly.

A sudden flash of inspiration struck Bishop Stephen.

Correct!

Stone golems! Stone golems!

Perhaps other bishops couldn't come up with a conclusion even if they racked their brains, but Bishop Stephen drew his own judgment based on his past military career!

The advanced versions of those stone golems have the ability to unleash rain of fire!

"Think about it carefully, those puppets can use weapons that ordinary humans and creatures cannot use. Even when simply throwing stones, they can throw them a distance that conventional crossbows cannot reach—it's just that their accuracy is very poor."

So what if, just what if, some improved version of a puppet has the ability to shoot accurately at long range, and can launch the [Fire Rain] into the sky at a high angle like an archer, and then let them fall into our camp... then all of this makes sense!

Whether it's the eagle riders observing from the sky, the confusion about why only the outermost camp was attacked, or the loud noises that came with each rain of fire—all of this can be explained!

What attacked us was a bunch of puppets! And those clumsy puppets needed to get close before launching them, and the sound could be heard directly into the attacked camp, which meant that their range was not as far as I had imagined!

Not to mention that their initial shots were never very accurate, so they naturally needed the help of eagles in the air to observe the landing point... just like observing the trajectory of a fire arrow in the night from a mountaintop to determine whether it could hit the enemy's formation. Ah, I see! Ah, I see!

Having solved the mystery, Bishop Stephen was immediately overjoyed.

He was overjoyed, so much so that he even forgot about troop deployment for a moment—but thankfully he remembered in the end.

"Guards—transmit my orders! Have the priests and friars knights, along with a portion of the army, patrol regularly outside the camp, away from the forest! Tell them to be wary of any stone golems! Also, I need them to test the power of those [Booming] weapons. I want to see what kind of weapon killed my priest, leaving him with only his lower limbs!"

Having rediscovered the joy of the battlefield, Bishop Stephen arrogantly issued his orders.

Meanwhile, Yang Hao and Fen led the elves and demons to reshape the terrain of the Demon Forest, preparing it for the final battle.

According to Finn's understanding, as long as the number of believers who flood in at one time can be limited, then whether it is the impact on the priests or the believers, once the number is reduced to a certain extent, it will naturally have a great impact on the subsequent battle.

Therefore, Finn's plan is to construct three different paths outside the monster forest, dividing the entire battlefield into three parts, and using obstacles and cliffs to prevent the believer armies and priests from cooperating from three directions.

"Although this may be self-deception, if we can really force the enemy's army to attack from three directions, then the pressure on our front will be less."

Finn pointed to the ground not far away, where cracks were slowly appearing with the help of the ancient elven trees, and laughed. The ancient elven trees are tree-like beings that can move freely in the Elven Forest. Although they move slowly, their power is real—of course, this also means that the departure of an ancient elven tree will inevitably cause the Elven Forest's territory to shrink.

Finn went so far as to shrink the Elf Forest to allow an ancient tree to emerge. It was thanks to this ancient tree's great assistance that Finn was able to complete the creation of the open area in front of the Monster Forest in less than two months.

She planned to create a horizontal canyon in front, and construct three entrances and passages on the monster forest side. This would force the cultists to attack from below, employing an unfavorable uphill assault to fight the golems and demon axemen who would act as the frontline units. Behind the frontline units, the naturally growing trees would provide the best vantage points and cover—elf archers could easily fire upon the enemies below from the trees.

Most importantly, the cultists in the three passages are isolated and unable to help each other. Furthermore, the elven mages have painstakingly created an "isolation" spell in the open ground, wasting regional magic. While it's unclear how this spell will affect the priests, it should at least disrupt the range of their divine spells.

But then again...

"Your Majesty the Regent, do you really think... the diocese will fight us to the death, instead of abandoning the invasion?"

Fen turned around and asked Yang Hao, who was deep in thought.

Yang Hao simply nodded slightly, then sighed heavily.

“Fen, you don’t understand humanity. You don’t understand what the God of Light means to the people of the parish, and you don’t understand that to the parish, a human life is ultimately just a number.”

"Of course, I value every newborn in the Elf Kingdom very much, you know?"