The Church's demigod elders, the lofty chief arbiters of the Disciplinary Office, mighty figures with countless bloody deaths on their hands—back when they had led the Order of Penitent Knights in sweeping away heretics across the land, whenever a single heretic was found in a city, they would order the entire city slaughtered. How could people like that possibly care about the lives of mere mortals?
Even if there were rather too many ordinary soldiers in Arthur's legions, even if all the young and strong men of the five northern provinces had been drafted away and the elites of the Gallic Empire's five northern provinces had been emptied out, what loss would it be to the Church if they all died here?
They were merely mortals. Given mortals' breeding capacity, and the Gallic Empire's current population base, the gap would be filled in three to five years at most.
So the Church's chief arbiter grabbed Arthur and told him to stop babbling.
Arthur shut his mouth as well. Savage fury flickered in his eyes as he stared fixedly at Ais Te, endless vicious thoughts churning through his mind. He did not mourn those soldiers' deaths either. They were nothing but lowly commoners; even if every last one died, it would do him no harm.
What concerned Arthur was the tax revenue of the five provinces. Without those young, able-bodied soldiers to work and manage them, how was he supposed to collect taxes from the five provinces? Without tax income, how could he maintain the food, drink, and expenses of the Prince of the North Sea? Such incomparably luxurious pleasures had to be piled up with heaps upon heaps of gold coins.
If Ais Te blood-sacrificed all the soldiers here, wiping out the productive power of the five provinces in one