The scale of the beastman army far exceeded Hel's expectations—yet, across the entire Mandrake Principality, not a single word of invasion had been reported.
Once the beastmen crossed the Monster Forest, they would be able to take the unprepared lords completely by surprise.
They wouldn't even need a large army—just a small force could easily annihilate these minor territories.
The two viscountcies Hel had placed her hopes on wouldn't last a moment before being trampled into ruins beneath the beastmen's iron boots.
To protect herself—and to conceal her true strength—Hel had no choice but to alter her original strategy.
Originally, she had planned to "put on a show" when the beastmen arrived, using a few magic cannons for effect.
If anyone asked, she could simply claim they were heirlooms—just a few first-tier magic tools passed down through generations.
In small numbers, no one would pay much attention.
But what she hadn't expected was that the beastmen would launch a full-scale invasion.
A few first-tier cannons wouldn't even make a ripple—in fact, Heim Fortress would be flattened long before she could fire them.
So she needed more—many more—magic cannons to arm herself properly.
But the more she produced, the more suspicious it would look.
Unlike typical magic tools, these weapons stood out too much.
She needed a cover story—a convincing source for all these cannons.
And who better than the Golden Marquis—a man whose territory sat at the crossroads between the Free Nation and the Sacrifice Nation, and who ran an international trade guild of his own?
Of course, that wasn't the only reason. After all, trade with the Free Nation had already been cut off; the marquis wasn't doing well either.
Hel had only two real reasons for choosing him:
First, they had a grudge—so using him as a scapegoat didn't trouble her conscience.
Second, his territory was close enough to hers to make delivery easy.
And since his life was literally in Hel's hands, the Golden Marquis worked with remarkable efficiency.
By the next noon, a caravan of wagons rolled into Heim Fortress.
After demonstrating the power of the magic cannons, Hel put on her best performance of surprise and awe—and "decided" on the spot to order a hundred of them.
Of course, she couldn't pay for all that herself. Officially, Heim's treasury was already empty.
So she gathered all the local nobles and squeezed every coin she could out of them.
After much coercion and "persuasion," they scraped together enough for sixty cannons—about sixty thousand gold coins.
The rest Hel covered herself, reluctantly dipping into her private stash of elemental crystals to make up the difference.
Thus, she "purchased" one hundred magic cannons—though really, it was all money shifting from one of her pockets to another.
Each first-tier cannon was mostly made of refined steel.
At market prices, the materials alone would cost about three hundred gold per cannon.
But most of her refined steel came from the mechanical soldiers' "gifts," with the rest scavenged from goblin stockpiles—
meaning her real production cost was practically zero.
And Hel wasn't selling them for profit anyway.
Her goal was to arm every lord in the Mandrake Principality so they could better resist the beastman invasion.
Given that Mandrake was a poor, backwater region—and its lords not exactly wealthy—she needed to keep the price low if she wanted them to buy in.
A thousand gold per cannon was already the upper limit.
After all, an intermediate knight's monthly pay was only ten gold coins.
That meant such a knight would have to work eight years without eating or drinking to afford just one magic cannon.
Even though cannons didn't need pensions or rest, most greedy nobles would rather hire cheap knights than spend money on machinery.
So at first, sales were sluggish.
But once the beastmen broke out of the Monster Forest and destroyed a viscountcy, the nobles finally woke up.
They realized that no matter how rich they were, they couldn't hire enough knights to defend their lands.
Then, sales exploded.
When running was impossible and fighting was hopeless, spending gold on cannons suddenly seemed like a great idea—maybe, just maybe, they could buy themselves a chance to survive.
Smaller lords could only afford a dozen or so, selling everything they owned.
The wealthier ones bought much more.
Ironically, the biggest buyer was the cowardly Golden Marquis himself.
He purchased two thousand cannons—enough to ring the entire city of Golden Fortress in artillery.
When one of the viscounts managed to repel a beastman assault using his cannons, sales exploded even further.
The first-tier magic cannons packed a punch and had a wide blast radius—
perfect for mowing down beastman grunts.
A single shot could wipe out a cluster of the smaller ones.
Of course, the lords still lacked high-tier fighters.
When faced with beastman elites, they'd still fold like paper.
But the magic cannons' reputation was now unstoppable.
In just three days, five thousand units were sold.
Hel made five hundred thousand gold in profit—
though that was probably the market's limit.
After all, the cannons weren't that powerful.
It still took two shots to kill a first-tier knight.
So the great lords didn't see much point in bankrupting themselves over them.
A few cannons mounted on their walls were enough to deal with enemy infantry swarms.
They were useless against true powerhouses.
And firing them consumed elemental crystals—after one battle, a careless noble might literally go bankrupt.
Still, as the beastmen swept through the eastern viscountcies and counts' territories of Mandrake,
Hel received a new message from the Golden Marquis:
The Grand Duke of Mandrake himself wanted to place a massive order for cannons—but on credit.
Upon hearing that, Hel immediately ordered the Marquis to reject them.
The Mandrake family persisted, trying to haggle down the price.
After several rejections, they finally gritted their teeth and paid full price for five thousand cannons.
Hel pocketed another five hundred thousand gold coins.
Even with ten-gold high-denomination coins, the total ten million gold she'd earned still piled up like a mountain in her necromantic storage space—
a mountain more than ten times larger than the one she had in her Rose Ring.
And best of all, these weren't ancient coins from three thousand years ago—
they were minted by the Knight Empire, perfectly safe for her to spend without drawing suspicion.
So, what was the first thing she did after achieving financial freedom?
Hel's answer: business as usual.
After all, it was just "a bit" of money.
It wasn't enough to buy ten cubic meters of aurum or a few fifth-tier powerhouses.
Besides, there wasn't much to spend on in this backwater of Mandrake anyway.
The only thing that interested her—elemental crystals—had to be specially imported from the capital by the Golden Marquis's people.
Meanwhile, thanks to Hel's supply of magic cannons and the desperate survival instincts of the nobles willing to bankrupt themselves,
the beastman advance slowed—if only briefly.
But the cost was catastrophic.
Every territory near the Watcher's Wall fell.
Most viscountcies and counties were lost.
One beastman army even crossed the River Marquis's lands and advanced right up to the outskirts of the Mandrake capital.