I Became a Witch and Started an Industrial Revolution

Mitia had no particular opinion regarding the Dwarven Kingdom’s decision to send their little princess to the Seris Federation for political asylum.

Since even the Dwarven royal capital had rushed to the frontlines, the situation there was clearly dire.

And as the first nation to establish diplomatic relations with the Seris Federation, the Dwarven Kingdom naturally received a token of reciprocity—Mitia instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Industry to provide the Kingdom of Sext with a certain degree of military assistance.

This included portions of decommissioned firearms and weapons from equipment replacements, as well as the low-cost sale of some front-loading wheeled field cannons and wooden-handled grenades.

These cannons were different from the high-explosive shell field guns currently in use by Seris—they were specially simplified in manufacturing difficulty, firing solid shot and fragmentation shells with black powder.

If Sext required it, the transfer of technology was also possible.

In fact, Mitia even hoped they would purchase the production technology for these items—otherwise, the designs would just rot away in Seris warehouses.

Of course, the Kingdom of Sext could also imitate old-style weapons on their own, but their quality control was unreliable, and their production capacity was vastly inferior.

At present, most factories in the Seris Federation had already been improved into basic pulsating production lines—so-called “machines move, people don’t.”

Through steam-powered conveyor belts and transfer workers, each workshop employee was only responsible for a specific component’s cutting and assembly, making production incredibly fast.

However, the greatest problem Sext faced was how to safely transport these military supplies home.

After all, the Kingdom of Paria was not foolish—they would never just sit idly by while their opponent grew stronger.

Meanwhile, far away in the Kingdom of Ovinia, Tina had sounded the horn of counterattack after the kingdom’s army for suppressing rebellion had withdrawn.

A large number of oppressed petty nobles and minor estate owners began to disobey orders, allowing the commoners under their command to riot freely.

Without suppression, the peasant uprising forces rapidly expanded, and behind some of these groups were the shadows of those same small nobles and landowners.

Though they raised various banners, most were based on Mitia’s political ideology—because no matter how one looked at it, Mitia’s theory was the only one that could bring them tangible benefits.

“Don’t talk to me about titles or glory—I revolted because I couldn’t survive! I fight to live! Whoever can solve my hunger problem, I’ll follow them. It’s that simple.”

The domestic unrest also affected the situation at the frontlines.

The most direct impact was that they had almost stopped seeing new logistics convoys bringing supplies—everything they used recently came from dwindling stockpiles.

Of course, part of the reason was that Seris’s navy had sailed south to bombard Bonwich Port, effectively cutting off Ovinia’s maritime supply line.

Meanwhile, the frequency of armored offensives on Seris’s front also continued to increase.

Every so often, they would conduct massive bombardments that completely flattened the defensive fortifications the enemy had painstakingly repaired.

Although Seris dared not use infantry in repeated frontal assaults due to the dominance of hand-cranked machine guns, the terrifying ammunition consumption of such guns was making the defenders at the Lalor front nearly collapse.

Moreover, Seris’s armored trains frequently approached the city to shell its military factories, severely damaging their production capacity.

But Seris also had its headaches.

They had already reached the walls of Lalor City before a fresh enemy force appeared, pushing them back again.

That was—the Church’s long-missing mechanized unit.

The three-meter-tall mechanical soldiers couldn’t cause devastation on the same scale as the previous captain-class models, yet they still possessed fearsome combat power.

At range, they could trade volleys with Seris’s field artillery for short bursts.

In close combat, they could easily cleave a tracked armored vehicle in two with just a couple of strikes.

If their magical shield generator wasn’t destroyed quickly, the unit could retreat safely after eliminating the enemy, wait for the energy to recharge, and then return to battle.

Only when they encountered Seris’s new armored vehicles equipped with two to four recoilless cannons would they be blasted into scrap metal in a single volley.

If faced with older quadruple Maxim machine-gun sets or field guns, they could endure one round of fire and withdraw intact.

However, they had a clear weakness—their combat duration averaged only ten minutes before they were forced to retreat, and they needed at least thirty minutes to re-engage.

It was speculated that this was due to the low efficiency of elemental absorption on this subcontinent.

In other words, the glorious days when those officers could flatten infantry columns with anti-air machine-gun trucks were gone—they could now only wait obediently for new armored vehicle reinforcements from the rear.

On Mitia’s side, the reverse-engineering research on these mechanical bodies was progressing rapidly.

By disassembling their power cores, she could roughly grasp some of the principles of goblin engineering.

Furthermore, interrogations of the nuns and Unica had provided Mitia with a fairly detailed understanding of the creators of these machines—the goblins.

In truth, the plight of the goblin race was quite similar to that of ordinary human civilians.

Their magical aptitude was the poorest among all races, their physical potential the weakest, and their appearance—well, far from pleasing to the eye.

Yet the Magic Goddess had not abandoned them.

She had granted them exceptionally brilliant minds.

The mechanical bodies were pure alchemical constructs powered by magitech cores.

Their towering forms allowed the diminutive goblins to look down upon most other races.

These fully metal-built machines possessed considerable physical defenses, while their magitech cores enabled even low-magic goblins to unleash attacks akin to elemental spells.

Most importantly, these constructs were mass-producible.

As long as materials were available, goblins could endlessly manufacture such machines to arm themselves.

This allowed their strength to expand far faster—and far more efficiently—than other races who relied on cultivation for progress.

After all, could a warrior trained for decades ever be cheaper than one of my mass-produced alchemical creations?

After inventing the mechanical bodies, the goblins swiftly entered their golden age—expanding territories and vastly extending their race’s living space.

The territorial expansion brought abundant new resources, and the rich combat data helped further optimize their designs.

Machine iterations grew increasingly rapid, until their peak—when they even created colossal constructs whose power surpassed ordinary saint-level beings.

But that was their limit—for gods cannot be manufactured~

Flesh was still flesh.

The average goblin’s lifespan was only fifty years.

No matter how mighty their machines became, they could not extend their own lives.

More critically, they could not create the most essential pillar of an empire.

Realizing this cruel truth, the Goblin Kingdom withdrew before the divine ranks intervened—abandoning one-third of its territory, drawing the border along the Extreme Ice Mountains, and making peace with the major empires of other races.

At the same time, they released a portion of their research data on the mechanical bodies, helping other nations grasp basic technologies in exchange for a stable external environment—quietly retreating to the far end of the continent, devoting themselves wholly to research.

The other empires and races were content to leave it at that, and peace talks went surprisingly smoothly.

After all, the goblins’ meteoric rise through war—and their near domination of the entire continent—had terrified everyone.

None dared to push the ugly little race too far, lest they truly create something monstrously beyond comprehension.