CHAPTER 48: HOW A WAR WORKS

I clean the blood with magic while staring at the Saint, watching her reaction.

"H-Heal...[Sacred Heal]" She casts magic on me, and the result is quite obvious.

"N-Nothing?" The Saint is surprised to realize that I was not healed, unlike the common healing where you can’t tell if it worked or not, the more advanced healing magics show whether it succeeded or not.

"[Sacred Heal]...s-sorry P-Pandora I can’t heal you..." She says with fear, but I won’t do anything to her it’s obvious she can’t heal me since I’m not injured to begin with.

’Damn side effect’ During one of my meals, I coughed up blood and ended up ruining the flavor of the dish; it seems that even my own blood isn’t that tasty for me, maybe a mechanism to prevent me from self-cannibalism, since everything that’s alive seems edible to me so far.

Veritus said that Elena is trying to get something else to keep me 100% hidden as human, but nothing yet, all because of the director who is too good at magic and would notice that I’m not human if I only used artifacts.

Now the effects of this pill are showing up, this is the third time I’ve coughed up blood this week, I even had to learn how to use mana to clean the blood that stained my dress.

"It’s no problem, you wouldn’t be able to heal this anyway, just ignore it, it’s common" It won’t be that rare for me to suddenly cough up blood, I just need to clean it up quickly and everything will be fine.

"P-Pandora, are you sick? Do you have a terminal illness?" She asks with some concern.

"Yes? I mean, no, why do you think that?" It doesn’t even make sense for me to suddenly have a terminal illness. Thanks to my adaptation, it’s impossible for me to get sick from anything, and if it’s a contagious disease, I’d get sick for a maximum of a few minutes before adapting to it.

"This kind of illness can’t be cured with sacred magic or healing magic...so I thought..." She says, as if hinting at it would make me angry.

"I’m not sick, just ignore it...let’s end this conversation here" I don’t see a reason to continue this, I think I’ll go home now, I have to finish preparing for the academy.

I also need to sign some papers, look at some business plans and improvement plans for the kingdom, and also confirm the construction of a city around my castle.

Without my confirmation, things like this cannot be done, I’ll have to read a lot of reports and data, and then choose the best options for the growth of my kingdom and the well-being of my people.

"O-Okay, Pandora..." Her expression is strange, it seems she didn’t believe me.

’It doesn’t matter, sooner or later she’ll realize I’m not sick, after all I’ll be at the academy the whole time, it’s impossible for her to keep thinking I’m sick.’ I start to leave the room, the insects have already invaded her body, now I just have to wait for them to modify her until she can no longer be the Saint.

I was a little worried that she would see these little things infiltrating her body, but thanks to her fear, she didn’t even notice, and fortunately the insects don’t cause any pain when entering the body.

I walk through the hallways and pass by the ballroom, exiting through the door and going to the carriage. The coachman opens the door and I get in. Inside the carriage, I start thinking about the academy.

The academy operates on pure meritocracy, and unlike what one might think, you can’t use family authority there, because the academy is a place that is not affiliated with the kingdom. The director, who owns everything, has ensured that social status means nothing inside.

She imposes extremely severe punishments, ranging from mild things like detention to "heavy" ones like being locked up and whipped several times for nobles, there is no greater humiliation.

Of course, this is only "In There," meaning outside the academy you can still be killed if you insult a noble inside the academy and they want to take revenge. However, thanks to this long-standing meritocratic system, the kingdom has a slightly lower discrimination against commoners.

And this is an influence of people from the modern world this world has changed a lot due to Heroes summoned in the past, making it a society more or less close to the modern era.

Although the monarchy still dominates, with power belonging solely to the king, just as magic has developed more than technology.

Thanks to this meritocratic system, I’m technically at the bottom of the academy hierarchy, since I don’t have any accumulated merit, and studying at a disadvantage by having entered late doesn’t help much in this regard.

However, with my power and ability to learn, it shouldn’t take more than a month for me to be close to or at the top of the school hierarchy.

The real point is what I’ll do at the academy honestly, I don’t see the usefulness of studying there, I prefer the studies in the demon realm, so what I’ll do will mainly be taking advantage of the practical classes to strengthen myself.

Steal everything I can from them without being discovered, and discover all the unique abilities. And maybe kill some talented people, like the director and students with a lot of potential.

After all, the talented students of today will be my enemies tomorrow, and I won’t just stand and watch if I cut that talent at the root, it will only be beneficial for me in the future, although if I do that, I must be careful not to make it too obvious.

Another crazy thing I discovered is how wars work it’s totally different from what I thought. Normally, a battle in a war ends when we capture or kill the enemy commander.

But here it’s totally different because of a hero from the past. Due to the demons’ talent in magic, humans had a huge disadvantage because of mass destruction or area-affecting spells.

So this particular hero developed an extremely annoying barrier magic using magical objectification and enchantment. He developed a damned barrier that reflects mass destruction-level magic.

So if you use this type of magic, it will only affect your own army. This project was then stolen, and now all races use this barrier in wars and to protect their kingdoms.

Of course, the barrier has a limit, so it can be destroyed, but even when destroyed, it still reflects part of the power, meaning your army would still take some of the damage, making it not viable to use this type of magic on the barrier.

And even if you’re alone without anyone, if you try to use this type of magic, the enemy army will prevent it, since it usually takes a long time to cast this kind of spell, so you still need an army to fight or protect you in some way.

Thanks to this hero, the dynamics of wars have changed completely, and now the goal in battle is not to kill the enemy commander, but to destroy a hidden crystal that generates this barrier, since the magical objectification creates an object.

When this crystal is broken, the barrier disappears and cannot be made again for a while. In other words, then you can use mass destruction magic without worry. The crystal is near the center, so you just need to search in that area of the barrier.

So in war, what defines the winner is who breaks this crystal first, because the moment it’s broken, the army will be vulnerable to area-affecting magics.

Moreover, until you break this barrier, it’s difficult because it strengthens with magic used against it at the moment. In other words, you have to put so much magic into a single attack to break this barrier that it’s impossible for most.

Thalor said that among them, only Freya, Calypso and Lilith have enough mana to break this barrier alone.

So wars in this world have been completely changed because of this hero, and in the end, the only ones who were at a disadvantage were the demons, who naturally had to stop using this type of magic in wars.

Forcing them to fight in regular battles on the battlefield. Of course, I without a seal can break this barrier, but my current self is impossible. I don’t even have mass destruction magic, and my shadows can’t get that big since they need the ambient shadow to grow and form.

Although I alone could defeat a common army even with this barrier, after all, nothing prevents me from just going out and killing everyone inside the barrier, since it doesn’t hinder magic and doesn’t work on small enough spells.

So I could just go out killing everything in my path until I find the hidden crystal. Anyway, this information is important since I’ll be involved in large-scale wars in the future.

"I wonder who will be the first to try to confront me" Who will be the first to come to war against me?

’I’ll have to command an army...I guess it’s good for me to read military strategy books’ I can’t embarrass myself in these wars, I have to be a commander who knows what they’re doing, after all.

In a war, not only is my life at risk, but also the lives of my subordinates who have trusted me.