In comparison to the half-men, their golems are much easier to describe. They are automatons of stone or metal, usually resembling the form of a generic biped although other varieties do exist. Hold Risha, for example, is famous for its living lions of stone. Nevertheless, I only see three ways in which the dwarven golems are categorized.

There exists this fanatical faction in the Imperial Army that is rabid about golems being the next step of military evolution. They would wish us replace all soldiers with stone and metal in order to have an unbreakable force that does not die, does not suffer from morale, can be manufactured in mass and where an individual is worth a dozen men, a golem would be worth ten.

Needless to say, they are young. Yet they are not so wrong as to be offensive. At the end of the day, I cannot truly blame men for being awed and excited by fancy new toys. And frankly, that fanatical analysis, untampered it is, is somewhat correct. Golems cannot die, they do not suffer from morale and they can be manufactured. Given the right situation, it is true, I would rather have ten golems than a hundred men. It is difficult to oversell these autonomous weapons as any description of them is underselling them. At the end of the day, they are moving stone. There is no man alive that can engage a statue in melee and somehow come out victorious.

Yet there are points which are wrong. The reduction on supply lines does not exist. In fact, golems strain supply lines. They replace the need for food and water with the need for heavy stones and metals and they cannot even perform the duty of being troops unconstrained by natural supply attrition. We cannot send endless legions of golems through deserts as they need dwarven maintenance crews, and those dwarves will need for food and water just as any human would. It is this weakness that ultimately reduces the golems from anything that can project grand amounts of strength to a purely defensive force, for they are far too unreliable and dependent on constant repairs, especially when out on march.

Likewise, there also exists the weakness of no adaptability whatsoever. The golems are unable to improvise or to do things such as serve as military police in putting down rebellions, unless one wishes to eliminate all the civilians in a town. Funnily enough, the men of stone and men of iron should be treated akin to rabid dogs in combat; excellent once deployed, but with no hope at any deeper command chain rather than simply holding a position.

There are some exceptions, some have been built so long ago and had seen so much of history that it felt as if they developed their own style of soul. Ozonith is a famous example of one.

– Excerpt from “Tactical Considerations and Strategic Guidelines”, written by Goddess Kassandora, of War, during the Great War. It barely entered mass print and was instead used as a guide and discussion piece of Imperial Officers.

The Goddess of Lubska sat in her office in her black Imperial uniform. A small band of silver lay on the table next to her. The portraits in the room were all of Lubska’s greatest landmarks or cities. The only pictures of men were of soldiers who had served in the Epan War, one of a private who had ran into a burning house to save a child. Another of a sniper ace. And one of one the local generals. It wasn’t much, but Olonia had wanted her reign to mark a fresh start in the nation’s history.

And Arascus had talked her into it too. She was not here to try and refurnish an old house, she was here to restructure the entire foundations. If the walls needed to be knocked down, then knocked down they would be. And she had done it excellently, working on the Land of Gods project. Olephia’s arrival had been the push Lubska needed to transcend into world-renown with its craftsmen and artists. It may have not been through warfare, and it was not the genius of the urban-planners in Rancais, but the Empire appreciated art, and the Empire paid well for what it appreciated.

Yet now, Olonia sat in her room and stared at a horrendous mess of papers. Everyone in the Empire knew that they were going to liberate the Dwarven Underkingdoms. It was not a secret anymore, Arascus had come out with High King Osonev and proved to the whole world that the dwarves still existed. That explained why almost the entire Imperial military had been sent underground bar the minimal garrisons. Some men had to remain, they would not protect against a White Pantheon invasion, but they should hold long enough for Olephia to turn up. Honestly, Olonia had felt exceptionally smug that she had managed to house Olephia. What better method of deterrence was there than to have the Goddess of Chaos be less than hour’s flight from anywhere in the country? Yet apart from Osonev confirming that there indeed were dwarves underground and that they were in trouble, the Second Expedition was locked down. Civilians would be sent in to assist with building railways, with laying electric cables or water pipes, but they did not get anywhere near the frontlines.

Olonia did not claim to be some expert in strategy, but it did not require an experienced expert or some genius. It did not require someone particularly smart, frankly, even a child should be able to work it out. The lack of information from the troops meant that they were either push so fast that the media could not keep up, that it was going terribly wrong and Arascus was locking down the outflow of information, or that they had come across something the public should not know about.

And frankly, Olonia would believe all three narratives at the same time.

Yet the war did not concern her. Yes, it was Lubskan troops and yes it was Lubskan lives down there, but those were Lubskans who signed up to serve under the Red-White-Black Imperial tricolour and not the White-Red Lubskan bi-colour. They weren’t traitors, of course not, but they simply were not Olonia’s responsibility. What was Olonia’s responsibility were the Lubskans living in Lubska. She, as the Goddess of this Land, had a duty to represent them before the Empire.

And now the Empire was coming to take. The dwarves were tragic heroes of legend, and everyone up here spared a tear for them, but how long would tears last? The Imperial subsidies were a drop in the bucket. The investments into production and urgent agriculture relief was merely throwing Imperial money onto the problem. And at the end of the day, money could get one so far.

It would be a year, at the earliest, before the earliest results of this investiture would be seen. This year’s harvest was being reaped. Great stores of grain were being filled, fruit were being collected, raw foodstuffs were being shipped off to be process or sold directly to shops. Well, that was how it should have gone at least. There was a new buyer in town: The Imperial Bureau of Crisis Relief. The Military may have been a sledgehammer for the Empire, but it almost paled in comparison to the amount of force the IBCR could throw around.

Olonia had seen them fly in construction vehicles on military planes. She had seen tanker aircraft come to refuel bulldozers. She had seen airdrops of screws and planks in her nation’s eastern wetlands. The reason that villages which the whole country decided to forget about were suddenly getting remembered, remodelled, why they had their schools suddenly stocked with the latest technology and why they had local clinics was not because of Olonia’s efforts. It was because Arascus had directed the sledgehammer that was the IBCR to slam through the wall of historical stagnation.

So men from the Imperial Bureau of Crisis Relief had come. So their own architects and planners came to draw lines on maps, so their own machines tore through the ground, so their own hands laid rail and poured tarmac and put up cable. After the Epan War, the IBCR had managed to stem a depression in Lubska by suddenly employing one in twenty-five of the nation although that had been partly at Arascus’ directive too to stabilize the Epan economies. It had left slower than it came, for it came like lightning, but it had left its marks. Now, Olonia firmly believed that there was not a single family in the entire nation that did not have an IBCR letter of gratitude for employment framed on the wall. War had tempered Lubska with patriotic fervour, and the IBCR had come to cash it in.

And through that IBCR had declared a mechanized offensive against backwardness and the IBCR had won.

Won it had, yet it had also made that Lubska accrued a debt. Just as the Empire had cashed in on Lubska’s patriotic fervour, the Empire was now cashing in on the IBCR itself. Olonia brushed her snow-white with her fingers as she stared and analysed the grander strategy at play. It was the same as when Iliyal had taught her of basic war strategy. If a chance was seen, and once the risk of overextension was factored in, then when the enemy lines were broken, one could seize the initiative and charge ahead to claim as much space as possible. In such fashion, a master made that each step he took would give him the momentum to take the next step. Olonia smiled in awe to herself as she leaned back and stared up at the patterned ceiling of her room. It was still early, before midday, and the sun beaming down over the entirety of Zawitz from behind her was too bright. She was Divine, she didn’t need sleep, but her eyes still hurt from staring at tiny little letters for the past two days. She closed them and admired the utter genius that was Arascus’ benign tyranny. She remembered Allasaria’s teachings that the God of Pride was paranoid, and that he thought the entire world out to get him.

Frankly, Olonia did not even disagree with the Goddess of Light. Back then, she had been a mere impressionable girl and took the words at face value. There had been a time when she disagreed with them, just after she met Arascus, but now she had come full circle to the original point: Arascus was in fact paranoid, and he did in fact think the entire world was out to get him. Yet that was precisely why the God of Pride ruled in such an overbearing and yet completely agreeable with fashion: He legitimately thought that he was at war with the entire world and yet he thought he could beat it if he went hard enough and fast enough. Bar maybe his daughter-Goddesses but Olonia knew that there was no chance the man would ever accept a National Goddess into those ranks, so there was no reason to even dream of such things.

Olonia sat there for a few moments, smiling to herself at how smart she was that she had managed to work out should complicated strategies and grandiose plots. Just downright genius. She kept her eyes closed for a few moments more and listened to her own heartbeat as she thought. Honestly, would anyone else see it? That narcissistic of a question finally kick-started the little voice of reason within her mind: Of course they would, it was not difficult to figure out how the Empire operated.

Olonia’s smile dropped. She sighed. She opened her eyes. She sat up straight once again. She went back to the papers at hand. Iliyal had told her this too: A man beating his head against a rock would make more progress than the grandest, smartest, most effective strategy known to man without anyone to carry it out. There was nothing to argue about there. The elf was simply correct. Just because Olonia could describe the general operating pattern of the Empire did not change the fact that there was a letter from the IBCR on her desk right now.

A letter carefully tailored to remind her of the fact that she was still an Imperial subject, that the IBCR would of course come to her aid if the situation were reversed, that the IBCR had come to her already, and that the IBCR was kindly requesting that it would pay market-price for continuous shipments of Lubska’s fresh produce. It was not an option of refusal, Olonia doubted there was even any negotiation she could do. Yet she had to.

The fact that the IBCR had done its own research and included datasets, graphs and predictions from various economists, both from Lubskan schools and from Imperial colleges, and that those reports were talking about Lubska shipping off more than a quarter of this year’s food supply down into the depths was evidence of the scale at which the Empire operated. It was similar in Doschia, except that Doschia was asked to produce basic electrical goods. Saksma had complained how she was going to be sick to death when she had to visit another lightbulb factory.

And the stockpiling in Doschia obviously had an effect. It was stupid and it was borderline inconsequential, but lightbulbs had tripled in price across the continent as Doschia sent its own to the depths below and other nations moved to fill in Doschia’s domestic market. Yet that could be ignored, no one was going to when a cheap lightbulb suddenly became not-so-cheap.

Olonia stared the IBCR request for buying food. She re-read the letter once again to try and buy her people time. No one would cry about lightbulbs, and whilst farmers would love what was effectively another subsidy in the form of an Imperial Bureau as a customer, the market would not.

Yet Olonia stared at it and she could not find a single way to even fight back. Simply refusing the IBCR flat out would not work, she needed a reason. It was not even that the Empire would not let her do it, it was that her own people felt too much gratitude to the Empire to now defy it. Yet… Olonia took a deep breath. She had no clue what to do. No clue at all. An economic downturn was obvious, the IBCR gains would not last forever. Yet…

Just trust it? Would that be the… Olonia’s phone ringing pulled her attention away. The ringtone said it was an Imperial number. Olonia pulled it out of her pocket and…

And why was Helenna calling her? Well, she couldn’t just not answer, could she? “Hello? Olonia speaking.” Olonia answered as politely as she could. Helenna was the Goddess of Love for one, and she was in Arascus’ inner circle for two. One did not go against a person who was either of those, much less a person who was both.

“Helenna here.” Helenna asked. “How are you doing?”

“I’m doing alright.” Olonia stared as she stared down at the letter again. And the mountains of graphs. And everything else that said she was not, in fact, doing ‘alright’.

“Ah that’s good!” Helenna replied. “I have a problem.”

“What’s the problem?” Olonia did not know why she asked it. She didn’t have enough time here already.

“I want permission to borrow the Kaczaw and Zawitz garrisons.” Olonia blinked at the request. It…

“Helenna, that’s thirty-five thousand men you’re talking about.” Olonia tapped her sheet of paper as her eyes became desensitized to the numbers.

“I know, I’ll want your help organising it.” And just like that, Olonia’s eyes refocused on the piece of tragic paper. A thousand and one different problems begged to be settled. Could she really…

“That’s a lot of work. I’m busy right now.” Olonia left her options open. She wanted to be convinced. She knew she did. If it was going to be a no, she would have denied the situation already.

Helenna replied immediately, she must have had a script prepared or something. Or maybe Olonia was just that easy to play. “You’re a Goddess aren’t you? What’s a little playfighting?”

How could Olonia say no? When phrased like that, she simply could not just deny Helenna. And yet she knew that she would regret the words the very moment they left her mouth. There was no way she wouldn’t. It was such a headache… And yet… “Alright Helenna, you’ve convinced me. Go ahead.”  

The Goddess of Lubska smiled to herself. It was shameful she was so easily worked. Yet at least it was a good break from this nightmare of Imperial Bureaus and subsidizing a dying race. It was not a case of handing the work off to some Imperial Bureaucrat, but Olonia knew how things worked here. She would step away from the desk at the best of Helenna, the IBCR could run rampant, she would have an excuse, the IBCR would pin the blame on someone or simply shrug their shoulders. It was not their fault, it was some bureaucrat who did it.

And all would be done.

What would happen would happen. If it happened to work and go along with the best predictions and boomed the economy, it would be everyone’s moral victory at helping feed the poor dwarves. If it happened to go along with the worst predictions and Lubskan food inflation were to start to spiral, then it would be no one in particular’s responsibility.

And with that thought, Olonia got an even prouder one: now she was thinking like Arascus.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep