The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System

I smile and lick my lips as I watch the army pass our position on the road.

As they are newcomers to this war, they aren't yet aware of our portals, so they are marching in the full belief that the King's army is all the way southeast, in East Rising. So they are more invested in speed than in being careful and scouting the hills.

"I can't believe you were going to do this without me."

"Lovelace? How?"

"I went to your office to check how things are."

"Oh. I'm sorry. This was just at the last minute."

"It's okay. I'm glad I'm here. What's the plan?"

:::

When everyone's ready, I give the signal and we charge down the hill. The slope is not too steep, and each squad has a support mage with powerful strengthening spells.

Ingela, Lovelace, and I are at the front, and we quickly detach from the rest. We're using Lovelace's extreme strengthening spell to create the wedge and separate the slavers from the rest.

It's easy to distinguish them, as the slaves are ragged and bound onto each other, forming columns at the center, while the slavers are flanking and also at the front and the rear. It makes the job easier for us.

In a few strides, Lovelace reaches the front. In the meanwhile, Ingela is at the right flank, and I'm at the left flank.

The rest of our army is still coming down the hill, and the slavers haven't yet had the time to get into formation.

I run in the space between the columns of slaves and the soldiers, blasting one lightning bolt after the other, sending the flank into disarray.

To be honest, I've never unleashed my fully powered area spells onto human beings before. I've done it against monsters, and it's a thrilling experience.

I was worried that I would hesitate when facing humans, but that's not happening at all.

Well, I mean... it's not like humans who forced their way to keep the slavery institution working were anything different from monsters, right?

At least their roasted corpses smell the same.

:::

Two thousand people is too big of a call for one person to defend alone. The thing is, my goal here is not to defend them all by myself. It's just to create the opening for our wedge to lodge itself, while causing chaos and confusion among their ranks.

But I guess I might have overdone it a little bit. Then the rest of the 'left wedge' of our army caught up, half of their soldiers on this side were already dead.

The slavers try to make a tentative formation to reorganize their troops, but I blast it before they can assemble. In a blink of an eye, the one hundred soldiers who were still alive on this side are fleeing.

I jump high to get a better view of the battlefield, and it seems that their whole army is routing. I mean, what remained of it.

The front was utterly destroyed by Lovelace. She killed all four hundred slavers that were there, by herself.

On the right, Ingela created a hellscape of fire and destruction, but around a hundred and fifty are fleeing.

The ones at the back of the column are all dead, as the army managed to cut off their escape option.

And the sun hasn't even fully taken off the horizon.

:::

We left Kwarah in charge of three hundred soldiers to escort the former slaves to a city where the Saint's institution can handle them.

We managed to make it back in time for the next set of meetings with the king and the regular army commanders. Damn, when one thing happens in this war, then all hell breaks loose.

But one of the big accomplishments to show for this night's hunt is that I managed to transport a small army using portals. This makes deploying troops a lot easier.

And that battle also showed how a single OP warrior can make or break a war. And we have some on our side, while they have none on theirs.

:::

After that battle, my job became once more to handle the logistics instead of fighting. It might sound boring, but it's anything but!

Every time I receive some news from our messengers and sentries, I move pieces on a map!!!

Can you imagine my joy??

No?

Hmpf. Simple minds can't access the level of refinement necessary to enjoy proper map-loving activities.

Anyway, I feel like playing those Grand Strategy Games, but for real. Handling productions, troop deployment, random events...

Well, the truth is that I can only have that joy because we're winning, and with very low casualties. All thanks to these portals of mine.

When there's a need to move a higher number of troops, there's a fine sync I have to do with Lovelace. She opens the portal from the main army's location to the destination, while I open another from the arena.

Otherwise I would have to open a big portal to get them to the arena and then another from the arena to the target location to move both the main army and the hidden army there.

And those big portals are black holes for mana. It seems that after some threshold, the mana consumption of a portal increases in an exponential ratio to the increase in size.

So, for now, the only ones who can handle those are me and Lovelace. I mean, Ingela and probably some others could, but at the price of losing their ability to fight for the remainder of the day.

And that's the thing that makes me put down in Logistics management. We're doing heavier strikes on the Blessed's scattered armies and sometimes defending villages against them.

Sometimes we've even transported groups of refugees to safety.

During those confrontations, the Blessed side managed to excommunicate a few of our soldiers. But it seems to be really at an individual-based rate. And then we sniped the priest responsible for casting the spell.

While things are going well in the domestic front of the war, the international front doesn't seem that good. All major nations broke off diplomatic relations with us.

They haven't declared war yet, but we think that it's just a matter of time before they do. So we're hurrying to finish off the Blessed faction before the external war breaks out.

Their army is scattered and demoralized, and the levies have been deserting one after the other. Their leaders don't seem to agree on anything, and their bigger trump - the support of the Church - wasn't enough to turn the tides around.

Their main city, Beaudorf, is in a very tense situation.

With the troops trampling the villages, there isn't much produce to send to the city, nor much goodwill from the populace to send it. So the city garrison and the castle are running out of supplies.

But the Saint's followers are serving free meals to the general populace, so the city itself isn't starving.

When the Blessed noticed what was happening, they raided the place, aiming to secure that food for themselves, only to find an empty warehouse.

Since then, we've played a whack-a-mole game with them. The food is not prepared within the city. The distribution is done through a portal from the Saint's office.

So, when the soldiers show up, the portal is already closed, and there's nothing to be found besides the person serving and the pot from which she's serving.

We have a listening device, so we can send a squad to intervene if there's a threat to the people's lives, but things haven't gotten heated to that point yet.

And we plan to not allow things to get to that point anyway.

Our next goal is to liberate Beaudorf.