Falsifying for the Sake of Truth

"Ah... choo!"

"Ah... choo!"

Early in the morning, Victor had barely woken up when he sneezed twice in a row.

"Who's bad-mouthing me behind my back? How rude!"

After that little complaint, he began his daily training.

Anything in this world could be false. Only strength truly belonged to oneself.

Feeling the battle-qi vortex within him continue to grow, his intuition told him that he had joined the ranks of fifth-level knights.

Unfortunately, the Pannosia Continent was so obsessed with strength that its realms were classified according to combat power.

In a big city, he could simply pay to be tested at the knights' guild.

Out here on campaign, he could only rely on his own feeling to judge his improvement.

As the army's commanding general, he couldn't even find someone to spar with.

Winning would be fine, but if he lost, he would lose prestige.

When he couldn't openly preach, his prestige in the army was roughly equivalent to the power of faith.

The fact that it could strengthen magical beasts was reason enough for him to take it seriously, let alone the possibility that it had other uses.

He knew little about the gods.

All the myths and legends on the continent had been embellished and polished countless times.

After the efforts of generations of believers, even the pope probably couldn't say how far they were from the truth.

Ask, and the answer was: "Supreme" and "omnipotent."

Press further, and one had to beware of being accused of "blasphemy."

The only thing he could be certain of was that divine arts truly existed.

According to the church, the power of divine arts came from the gods.

The Tuwu People didn't believe in gods; they worshipped only their own tribal totems. By that reasoning, they shouldn't have been able to use divine arts.

That was where reality contradicted itself. Not only could Tuwu priests cast divine arts, but priests of different faiths could even join forces to cast forbidden spells.

To get to the bottom of this, he had even interrogated Tuwu priests.

Unfortunately, they didn't know the reason either. It had all been passed down from their ancestors.

A pure soul was enough to receive a priest's inheritance, and once they had received it, they could cast divine arts.

They didn't grow stronger through prayer, either. They had to cultivate through their own efforts.

There was more than one contradiction, but the biggest point of contention was the miracles.

The church preached about a great many of them, but they were all stories from hundreds or thousands of years ago. There was simply no way to verify whether they were true.

The series of inexplicable inconsistencies had dispelled Victor's awe of the gods.

If they truly were omnipotent, a crystal that seemed to be a divine spark wouldn't have appeared inside him.

Since the gods weren't omniscient and omnipotent, he grew bolder.

In his view, the divine arts of the Tuwu priests were a power gained by meeting certain conditions.

Since Tuwu priests could obtain it, others would also have a chance once they met those conditions.

Once that mystery was solved, divine arts would no longer be the exclusive domain of priests.

"Commander, we sent men into the valley to investigate. There were corpses everywhere.

"The several thousand enemy troops in the valley were practically wiped out.

"To avoid catching the plague, our men only took a look from a distance before withdrawing."

Jasper reported excitedly.

After so many years in the army, it was only after following Victor that he learned battles could be fought this way.

The thirty-thousand-strong grassland coalition had come in force. Expecting a bitter battle, he had been prepared to fight for his life.

But as soon as the enemy arrived, things began to go off script.

After a series of outrageous maneuvers by their commander, the enemy had been crippled before the two armies even had a chance to face each other.

He didn't know the exact number of enemy casualties, but one look at the corpses in the valley was enough to tell him the enemy had suffered a crippling blow.

"Mm!"

"Pass the order down. Have the soldiers who came into contact with the enemy take a hot bath using wood ash. All other officers and soldiers who came into contact with them should wash as well.

"Boil the clothes they change out of for two hours."

Victor gave the orders immediately.

Conditions in the army were limited, so he could only use this most primitive method for basic disinfection.

He didn't know how much good it would do, but the army's camp was now twenty li away from the gorge.

"Commander, now that the battle is over, how do you think we should write the battle report?"

Clyde came over to ask.

As the army's chief of internal affairs, he also bore the important responsibility of recording military merits.

The previous battle was manageable. Although events had been a little bizarre, they had ultimately fought the enemy with real swords and spears.

They could count the enemies lost in the mountains among the heads taken, then distribute credit for those heads according to each person's contribution.

This situation was different. There had been no direct fighting from beginning to end.

If they recorded what had actually happened, their battle merits would shrink by ninety percent.

Aside from Victor, who had earned merit as the commanding general, everyone else could only pick up a few scraps.

Aside from the mountain company causing the enemy some trouble while fighting in the woods, the only other contribution had come from the cavalry battalion, which had gone out and seized a herd of cattle.

The remaining battalions could claim credit at most for the hard work of gathering hay.

They certainly couldn't reduce the battle merits. That would hurt others without benefiting themselves.

But if they didn't reduce them, distributing credit for the enemy heads taken became a problem.

Who should get credit, who shouldn't, and how much each person should get were all questions.

"Just write in the battle report that our Third Supplementary Army fought a bloody battle, routed thirty thousand Tuwu troops, severely damaged the enemy's main force, the Seventh Tumen, and took twenty thousand enemy heads.

"As a rule, each soldier should be credited with at least two heads.

"Give the mountain company an extra share. For the cavalry battalion, you can add the herders they killed. Distribute the rest according to everyone's performance.

"The numbers of enemy heads credited to the officers and soldiers can't all be exactly the same. Make adjustments where needed and smooth things out.

"You can combine them with the earlier battles and make adjustments internally.

"Draft a proposal first. There will probably be quite a few major battles to come, and we'll need to combine the results and distribute the credit together.

"There must be no discrepancy in the total number of heads allocated to the soldiers. Use your judgment when assigning them to individual battles.

"As for exactly how to do it, take your time and work it out. In any case, it can't look fake at a glance."

Victor spoke after giving it some thought.

Reality was just that absurd. It was clearly a major achievement, yet writing the battle report made it seem like they were falsifying it.

There was no helping it. The officials responsible for verifying military merits in the empire were civil officials.

Those fellows had never been on a battlefield, but they were very sensitive to numbers.

If the battle report showed several thousand soldiers each taking exactly two heads in the same battle, it would certainly be singled out as a textbook case of falsified military merit.

As a result, to make their battle merits look genuine, frontline units had to embellish their reports after every battle.

Only after the initial review was passed would the other stages of merit verification begin. Military merits were confirmed only after multiple checks found no errors.

If the figures at any stage didn't match, the achievements written in the battle report would inevitably be "trimmed of exaggeration."

In fact, this system for reviewing military merits was one of the few achievements left by the Holy Glory Empire's political reforms.

It had originally been established to prevent well-connected people from appropriating military merits and to leave a path of promotion open to lower-ranking officers and soldiers.

It had certainly had an effect. At the very least, after the system was established, no noble's child had ever again claimed to have personally taken several thousand enemy heads in a single battle.

Even if military merits were still appropriated, the number of heads claimed by a great noble's child in a single battle had to correspond to that person's strength.

Once it exceeded the limit, the claimant would face an investigation by the military.

Unlike a conventional review, which required investigation and the collection of evidence, the empire's method of examination was an arena match.

Depending on the extent of the claimed achievements, the military would arrange for a knight of corresponding strength to fight the claimant in the arena.

Generally speaking, someone who had taken thirty enemy heads would face a fourth-tier knight.

If the enemies killed were elites, the opponent would be a fifth-tier knight, and that knight would most likely come from a political rival's faction.

Sometimes the emperor even attended in person, so bluffing one's way through was no easy task.

Any warrior who dared claim more than a hundred kills had better first make sure he was a high-tier knight. Otherwise, once he entered the arena, he could be beaten until he questioned his life.

Credit for personally taking heads couldn't be claimed recklessly, but credit for command still belonged to the generals.

The number of enemy heads taken by the troops under a general's command, minus their own losses in battle and multiplied by a coefficient, determined the general's military merit.

Usually, that coefficient was determined by the enemy's combat strength.