Chapter 47: The Anticipated War

A person's thoughts and behaviors inevitably change over time and through the crucible of experience. Karen was the prime example of this truth.

When he first conquered the Goblin Forest, his original intention was simply to develop his domain honestly, growing steadily step by step. Given the choice of peace and stability, no one ever genuinely wished to live with their head on the chopping block.

Yet, ill fortune struck, and he collided head-on with a lunatic's madness, obliterated almost without a shred of resistance.

Though the lunatic's entire attention at the time had been focused solely on a certain young lad, leaving Karen unsubjected to any deliberate humiliation, the harrowing ordeal of having his life entirely controlled and toyed with by another left a profound psychological impact upon him.

Coupled with the fact that Karen had never been a saint to begin with, this trauma instantly reawakened the fierce ruthlessness and iron resolve he had possessed before he managed to firmly establish his footing.

From that moment on, Karen's style of handling affairs underwent a drastic transformation.

Faced with the current crisis, he was merciless, decisive, and utterly unyielding!

He had even steeled himself for an all-out war against the Bourbon Kingdom!

After directly turning Eyrolo into an undead and driving Old Jack back to the Bourbon Kingdom, Karen wasted no breath and immediately concentrated the undead legions under his command.

Aside from leaving behind a small garrison to secure his territory, he even pulled out every single undead laboring in the mines. A massive army of fifty thousand undead was fully assembled and marched directly toward the border of the Bourbon Kingdom!

Simultaneously, he issued an ultimatum to the kingdom: if they failed to meet his initial demands within three days, he would exact his vengeance with his own hands!

The moment Karen struck this defiant posture, everyone watching the unfolding events was utterly dumbfounded.

The upper echelons of the Bourbon Kingdom, in particular, were flooded with a chaotic storm of emotions upon hearing the news.

Fury, bewilderment, and even a lingering sense of grievance!

To think that they—a dignified kingdom boasting dozens of cities and millions of subjects—had actually compromised with a mere necromancer, and done so twice at that.

In itself, this was already a scandalous, deeply aggrieved, and thoroughly helpless state of affairs.

And yet, the adversary still refused to relent? He had even marched a massive army right up to their doorstep, clamoring for them to bow their noble heads or face his personal retribution. Had the Bourbon Kingdom truly fallen so low that it could be bullied to such an extent by a single necromancer?

In an instant, emotions surged throughout the entirety of the Bourbon Kingdom. Countless young men across the nation cried out for war, demanding the extermination of this ignorant necromancer to restore the dignity of their realm!

While the Bourbon Kingdom echoed with grievances, fury, and cries for battle, the Silver Hand faction, which had been observing from the sidelines, was equally stunned.

Though they had been startled initially upon hearing the news of Karen's assassination and the near-destruction of the Dead Market, they had subsequently adopted a spectator's mentality, treating the whole affair as a drama to watch unfold.

They had never imagined the situation would escalate to such an unmanageable degree, primarily because they understood the Bourbon Kingdom's attitude and assumed the worst-case scenario would simply be the kingdom bowing its head to Karen once more.

As it turned out, they had guessed the Bourbon Kingdom's reaction correctly, but they had miscalculated Karen entirely!

Karen's stance was far more aggressive than they had anticipated, marching out an entire undead army to break the boundaries of conventional control.

Nevertheless, the Silver Hand chose not to intervene immediately. Especially after learning that the undead legion mobilized by Karen numbered not the ten-odd thousand stated in their intelligence reports, but a staggering fifty thousand, they simply pulled up chairs to watch the show from the sidelines.

Let them fight, let them chaos-make. Let this grand drama play out to the end.

After all, the Silver Hand stood to lose nothing. Crouched at the periphery, they could afford to wait. If they were truly to intervene, they would wait for the precise moment that allowed them to maximize their own interests before making a move.

As for those suffering the most misery, they were undoubtedly Old Jack and the radical faction behind him—or rather, the remnants left behind by the previous marshal.

From the very beginning, Old Jack had permitted Karen's growth by turning a blind eye.

Furthermore, when Karen was assassinated, it was their constant maneuvering behind the scenes that had forced the kingdom to bow its head to Karen on two separate occasions.

Yet, those two bows of their noble heads had not only failed to resolve the issue, but had instead emboldened Karen to push his luck even further. This dealt a devastating blow to the radical faction standing behind Old Jack.

The King was furious, and the members of the radical party suffered severe punishments. Consequently, when the nationwide wave of condemnation against Karen erupted, not a single one of them dared to utter a word, cowering in silence and trembling in the corners.

With the radicals subdued, the young commanders within the kingdom were suddenly brimming with excitement.

In truth, they welcomed the outbreak of war with open arms.

After all, the kingdom had not fought a major war in a long time. In the eyes of those young officers, once this battle broke out, it would serve as the ultimate golden opportunity to rack up military achievements.

More importantly, not a single person believed this war would be difficult to fight, let alone that the kingdom could possibly taste defeat.

How could the might of an entire kingdom possibly lose to a single necromancer?

And a necromancer, no less, who had just been killed once and forced to transform into the undead!

Thus, they yearned for this war. They yearned for Karen's army to push deep into the territory of the Bourbon Kingdom, yearning for those fifty thousand undead troops to be converted into their own military merits, propelling them to loftier positions of power.

Amidst this fervent atmosphere, the nobility within the kingdom had already begun pulling strings and calling in favors, resorting to every available connection simply to dispatch their scions to the front lines.

Some even begged to be sent directly to Crescent Moon City or Aldo City, terrified that if they lagged behind, Karen's fifty thousand undead would collapse too quickly, robbing them of a prime opportunity to gild their reputations and accumulate battle honors.

Driven by the machinations of these nobles, within a mere three days, the garrison forces at Crescent Moon City and Aldo City swelled explosively from their original numbers of ten thousand and three thousand to twenty-five thousand and fifteen thousand, respectively.

Within those two cities, waves of jubilation echoed everywhere. One could hear young officers and soldiers alike sharing grandiose visions of the impending battle, each utterly convinced that they would slaughter their way through the enemy ranks and rise swiftly through the military hierarchy.

Influenced by these nobles and eager young soldiers, the civilians—who had initially been deeply anxious about Karen's fifty thousand undead and the imminent outbreak of war—finally set their minds at ease.

No one regarded Karen as a genuine threat any longer. Their sole remaining concern was that Karen might merely be rattling his saber under the protection of the Silver Hand, lacking the courage to actually launch an invasion!