Ch.293294. Meanwhile, the World.

Same time, Divine Territory.

‘········Sigh.’

As I watched my Avenger Corps members dispatched to various fronts of the Frankish Kingdom, I was looking at their new weapons, the Gatling machine guns, not with satisfaction… but rather with pitiful eyes.

Considering the trial and error I went through in the process of producing these multi-barreled rotating machine guns that spew overwhelming firepower, I believe I’m entitled to such a gaze.

The original draft involved bundling magical rifles that could directly convert magical power into destructive force. Compared to gunpowder-based weapons, this approach was certainly easier to implement and had many advantages.

A similar product using nine bundled magical rifles had already been in use in the Divine Territory for some time, and compared to physical ammunition, supplying machine guns that use the operator’s magical power would be several times easier.

Not only would we have to allocate industrial capacity to produce bullets, but the lead-bullet machine guns produced this way aren’t significantly superior to magical power-based ones.

Various problems arising from carrying separate ammunition, such as weight or the limited number of bullets an individual can carry, are just the tip of the iceberg.

Unlike magical lasers that travel in straight lines, aiming difficulty is considerably higher, and continuous firing often leads to barrel overheating or jamming issues.

The few advantages of gunpowder-based weapons are their stopping power due to having mass, and the possibility of modifying bullets for special purposes…

These advantages alone aren’t enough to justify adopting gunpowder-based Gatlings when magical versions are several times easier and simpler to use, creating numerous problems.

But in the end, the finally adopted version was the gunpowder-based Gatling using real bullets, with just a light coating of the user’s magical power when facing non-material enemies.

The decisive reason why the magical Gatling machine gun with its many advantages wasn’t adopted was that a weapon intended for ordinary people to use turned out to be one they couldn’t actually use.

Magical rifles, and their predecessor magical muskets, share a common disadvantage: they consume an unexpectedly large amount of magical power with each shot.

Even the Avenger Corps, whose magical recovery has been greatly amplified through blessings specifically to operate such weapons, can’t dream of rapid fire—so how could a Gatling be any different?

When calculations showed that six Avenger Corps members would need to be used as batteries just to achieve something resembling rapid fire, how could the Black Sun Corps, composed of ordinary people, possibly utilize this?

Of course, intermediate-level or higher mages could easily use it with their abundant magical power, but at that level, it would be more efficient to just cast spells or swing a sword.

Therefore, the Gatling machine gun was inevitably developed using physical ammunition for tactical flexibility, and fortunately, its firepower seems much more impressive than I had anticipated.

Thanks to the blessing, jamming rarely occurs, and the barrel engraved with cooling runes hardly heats up.

‘·······Good.’

And because of this, recognizing that demons would have no way to cross the Frankish Kingdom’s defense line for the time being, I turned my attention to check the current war situation.

※ ※ ※

In the second invasion, demons created semi-permanent dimensional gates connected to the demon realm through their followers, attacking the real world through these passages.

The number of dimensional gates opened this time: 17 in total.

Seven of them opened in the center of High Elf cities on the Albion island, and I sent Bjorn there to destroy two gates where demons were crossing over while searching for the remaining five.

The other ten gates, unlike those in the High Elf Kingdom, opened scattered across the world.

In the Western Continent, two dimensional gates opened.

One opened in the central Western Continent, where the forces of ‘Despair’ and ‘Misfortune’ joined together in a prolonged battle of attack and defense, while the other opened in the northeastern part of the Western Continent—in the territory of those Rus Khanate bastards.

True to their pseudo-Russian nature, they committed all sorts of foolishness before facing a clean, near-self-destructive defeat…. As a result, the defeated Rus territory has been entirely corrupted by demons and transformed into a forward base.

The Rus people have either become human sacrifices offered to demons, slaves serving as reserve sacrifices, or in many cases, converted to followers and joined the demonic forces.

Because of this, the increased number of demons began attacking in all directions, especially the neighboring Empire of Humanity and the Soviet Holy Republic.

The one fortunate thing is that both these nations are renowned as powerful countries.

The Soviet Holy Republic deployed their proud cavalry for guerrilla warfare while also demonstrating their majesty by using some method to create red blizzards that inflict mental damage, disrupting or blocking large armies.

Since demons use emotions as energy, they have low resistance to mental damage and mental status ailments, making this possible.

Additionally, their proud cavalry is by no means weak, so there’s no need for me to intervene directly for the time being.

……..If things get desperate, I can always deploy the puppy that’s grown considerably larger in the past few centuries.

Meanwhile, the Empire of Humanity was… doing something terrifyingly remarkable.

“Fire, fire!!”

“……Can you hear it? The sound of our budget disintegrating into thin air?”

“Ha-ha! Taxes are explosions!!”

The Empire’s Gunpowder Research Institute, famous for gathering madmen, appeared with new weapons and massive gunpowder-alchemical armaments for testing.

Particularly since the eastern border region already had numerous reconstructed fortresses from the old empire to block orcs and Rus, they were able to skillfully defend against enemy attacks at the border.

……..Though the atmosphere is quite chaotic due to a large-scale rebellion that erupted internally.

And besides the Western Continent, there are as many as eight dimensional gates open elsewhere.

In the eastern part of the great plains connecting the Western and Eastern Continents, demons emerging from a dimensional gate invaded the massive nation to the east—the Jin Empire.

With a total population exceeding 500 million and rulers rumored to be dragons, the Jin Empire is certainly a powerful nation befitting ‘that’ central country, but…..

The current situation could hardly be described as good, even with flattery.

Some emperor-disease patient started a rebellion, and in the process of suppressing it, national power was considerably depleted—right when the full-scale invasion occurred.

“AAAAARGH!!!”

“P-please spare me……”

True to being ‘that country,’ their disregard for human life persists even across worlds, as they hold out by feeding countless conscripted soldiers into the grinder while slowly gathering their forces.

Conscripted light infantry are so cheap and cost-effective for filling numbers, but the Jin Empire’s elite troops are excellent in both quantity and quality.

Most representative are their dragon-horse cavalry, intermediate warriors who ride ‘dragon-horses’—a unique intermediate dragon species descended from dragon bloodlines. These form their premier intermediate aerial cavalry.

Dragon-horses have no wings but can create and walk on clouds to move through the air, and they can also use various mystical arts—druid-type magic—providing sufficient magical support.

Additionally, they possess the art of infusing life into statues made of clay or stone—a different approach to low-cost golem mass production.

This technology usually produces infantry-level units, but recently they’ve been creating various statues as golems and deploying them to the front lines.

Things like giant haetae statues, massive sculptures depicting ancient heroes, and clay statues recreating monster forms.

A dimensional gate also opened on a reasonably sized uninhabited island in the eastern sea of the Eastern Continent, where demons emerging are being handled by ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Conspiracy,’ along with cooperation from the Yamato United Kingdom and small nations of the southern archipelago.

Of course, the nearby Core Republic has also dispatched troops to provide support, not wanting to deal with the aftermath.

There’s also news about three dimensional gates opening in the Southern Continent, throwing the Dark Elf kingdoms into chaos, or one of the three gates that opened in the New Continent being destroyed by natural environmental factors.

……..Currently, I couldn’t spare any attention for those situations.

Rather, now I need to lend strength to the somewhat unstable Empire of Humanity.