Chapter 60: The Undead Legion of the Black Eagle Empire

"...I'm telling you, Lieutenant August, I think you need to be more open-minded. Stop acting as if this is some sort of witchcraft!"

"As the saying goes, whatever exists has its reason. Magic is merely science that hasn't been fully explored yet. Even His Majesty the Emperor strongly advocates for magic, so why put yourself through this misery?"

Walking alongside Lieutenant August, a mage holding a hexagram scepter pointed toward his squad as he spoke. Yet, it was evidently not his own squad that Lieutenant August found repulsive at the moment.

"I won't say much about the foul sorcery you people master. You bear the cost yourselves anyway; it has nothing to do with me!"

Lieutenant August sighed, but immediately pointed with a hint of agitation toward the squad crossing the bridge in the distance.

"What on earth is going on with that squad? All I see is the desecration of the dead! The wars we wage should be filled with honor, not stripped of all humanity like this!"

"Have we really abandoned our final moral baseline just for the sake of profit?"

Faced with the somewhat emotional Lieutenant August, the mage beside him merely shook his head and repeated his earlier words verbatim.

If even the Emperor championed sorcery, what was left for them to hold onto?

At this thought, Lieutenant August suddenly felt a deep sense of distress.

His attitude toward the Emperor was, naturally, one of reverence and absolute loyalty.

Had the Emperor not vigorously promoted the development of advanced technology and spent twenty years building up the Empire's industry, how would the son of a fallen aristocratic family like him ever have the chance to join the Empire's new-style military and command such an iron torrent?

Yet, regardless of anything else, he still could not bring himself to accept the Emperor's endorsement of these dark arts!

Establishing magic academies was naturally a good thing, as it would break the traditional monopoly held by those mages and distribute this power to more people.

In his view, however, the Empire should by no means be heavily promoting those three schools collectively known as the Inner Academies!

He possessed no magical talent and did not understand the specifics of these spells.

Nevertheless, the Abyss-school mage beside him, along with another necromancy-school mage dressed entirely in green who was currently commanding an army of skeletons across the river, had already left a profound impression on him.

As for the most mysterious faction known as the Old Gods school—though he had yet to lay eyes on them, he instinctively felt they were far from anything benevolent.

The troop of mages before his eyes felt precisely like the demons and monsters of folklore and myth. When had they transformed into such villainous characters?

Elsewhere, a necromancy-school mage wearing a black leather trench coat, a green skeleton mask, and holding a staff topped with intertwined skeletal spines, was busy directing his skeleton army across the river.

The skeletal troop before his eyes had all been manufactured by him and his squad by slaughtering residents across multiple villages along their route and utilizing the corpses of those villagers.

Naturally, speaking theoretically, he could have excavated a few public cemeteries to produce a massive skeletal force just as well, but warfare was all about the principle of speed being paramount.

Compared to slaughtering gathered villagers, wasn't the speed of digging up a graveyard far slower?

Especially since most villagers preferred to bury their corpses in the mountains after death rather than in fee-charging cemeteries, which only further aggravated the difficulty of collecting bodies!

Glancing at a soldier who held a necromancy rifle in one hand while manipulating those skeleton soldiers through gloves on the other, the mage nodded and shouted to them:

"Everyone, double-check whether the control programs in your gloves are correct! I hope you've included the firing control circuits instead of just letting these skeletons charge blindly!"

The mage's voice had barely faded when a chorus of acknowledgments rose from the front.

Every soldier clutching a green necromancy rifle demonstrated their gloves in turn, revealing a green crystal embedded upon them.

This crystal contained a set of limb-movement programs pre-written by the necromancer; once activated, it enabled the control of these skeleton soldiers to automatically execute firing motions.

Otherwise, relying solely on the soldiers manually operating the skeletons via the gloves would never allow for such intricate actions.

They would only be able to make the skeleton soldiers run back and forth or perform some basic aggressive behaviors.

In the hands of this skeleton army before them, every single skeleton soldier grasped two peculiarly shaped handguns.

Strictly speaking, the design of these things looked far too crude, barely resembling traditional handguns at all. It looked as though a tube and a few pieces of iron had simply been stuck together, with a few rounds of ammunition jammed inside.

If Andrei were to lay eyes on these special handguns, he would undoubtedly be reminded of the Sten submachine gun.

Back in the day, the British Sten submachine gun during World War II was the epitome of simple and crude; extremely rough technology yielded cheap costs, making it even cheaper than a revolver!

And compared to the Sten submachine gun, which at least gave some thought to ergonomics, the firearms in the hands of this skeleton batch retained only the absolute most basic structure of a weapon, caring for nothing else except the ability to fire!

The Black Eagle Empire designated this item as the People's Pistol Model 1, originally intended to arm all civilians during the most perilous moments of the war.

Yet, as the war progressed with unimaginable smoothness—coupled with how crude and rudimentary the device was, boasting an extremely high probability of barrel explosions and jamming—not a single person was willing to use such a weapon.

They had assumed this weapon would only be tossed into a junk pile or end up in the display cases of certain collectors, but a sudden flash of inspiration prompted the necromancer to mount the contraption onto the hands of the skeletons.

At any rate, it suited the skeletons quite well to use these disposable handguns, granting them at least some modest ranged offensive capability.

Ergonomics, barrel malfunctions—none of these needed to be factored in for a skeleton soldier; a skeleton only needed to consider pulling the trigger to make it go bang!

Under the slow guidance of the necromancy soldiers from the rear, despite a fair share of setbacks and even a few skeletons tumbling into the river, this skeletal force successfully crossed the water.

The next moment, as the necromancer blew a whistle for the charge, twenty necromancy soldiers took charge of manipulation through their gloves, and over two thousand skeleton soldiers marched in an imposing formation toward the distant town.

Trailing behind these skeleton soldiers were a few lumbering mechs, alongside a crowd of Black Eagle soldiers bearing varied expressions, many with look of disgust written across their faces.

At the very top of the church bell tower, Lieutenant Unere, who had climbed up to survey the approaching skeleton soldiers in the distance, instinctively tightened his grip on his binoculars, veins bulging on the back of his hands.

"Suka blyat! Every last one of these Black Eagle devils belongs in hell!"

"Let me not catch these maggots from the cesspool, or I'll skin every single one of them alive! If even a single one dies, it won't do justice to my skills as a hunter in my youth!"