Only the Villainous Lord Wields the Power to Level Up: Volume 5, page 1
Table of Contents
Cover
Color Illustrations
Characters
Map
Chapter 1: Beginning of the Kingdom
Chapter 2: War of Defense
Chapter 3: How to Take Advantage of an Alliance
Chapter 4: Shooting Star, Goddess, and Battle Fiend
Afterword
Bonus High Resolution Illustrations
About J-Novel Club
Copyright
Chapter 1: Beginning of the Kingdom
It had been about a week since I’d announced the founding of the New Eintorian Kingdom, and I was now stressing over something very important: what statuses, positions, and ranks should I give to my subordinates?
Their treatment and job titles couldn’t remain the same. Up until now, they’d all either had no noble titles or been provisionally continuing to use whatever title they’d had under the Runan Kingdom. However, now that I had become king, my retainers couldn’t just remain as they’d been.
At the same time, I couldn’t make everyone a duke. I had founded the kingdom, but that wasn’t the finish line. I needed to keep on expanding it. And to do that, just fighting wars wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to pay attention to internal politics as well.
The subordinates who had followed me all this time possessed loyalty beyond question, but having a clear goal in the form of titles would help motivate them.
Maybe it would be fairest to have them all start on even footing as counts? Sure, I’ll make all of them landless counts. I also need a second-in-command who can unite all of my key retainers.
Erheet fit the bill perfectly.
If I were looking strictly at ability scores, then Fihatori would’ve also been a candidate. He likely had a greater aptitude for domestic politics than Erheet did. But he was still young. Erheet was the only one among my retainers whom the others would recognize without question. They wouldn’t follow someone who lacked his level of accumulated experience and achievements.
In that case, Erheet can be a duke. That’ll make him the only person in the New Eintorian Kingdom with the title of duke, but he’ll be one in name only for a while longer.
Normally, dukes were really high-ranking nobles with domains of their own and counts as their retainers, but I didn’t have a large enough domain to start handing out territory to my retainers just yet. For now, the title would have to remain honorary.
Obviously, once the country expanded, they’d all get their own domains. We were going to keep on gobbling up more and more land. That was the only way to clear the game, so it needed to be done.
The only one I couldn’t give a title to was Euracia. Although she had been following me since the fall of the Runan Kingdom, she was still a princess of Rozern. If I gave her a title when Rozern still hadn’t fallen, they’d think I was treating them like a vassal state, and it would cause a diplomatic incident.
In the time of the Ancient Eintorian Kingdom, the Rozerns had been a ducal house. So, from a historical perspective, you could say she was already a duchess of my kingdom. Regardless, at the present juncture, I couldn’t just go around openly calling her one of my vassals.
I also couldn’t give Gram or Celly titles. They simply hadn’t accomplished anything. Not yet, at least.
With all of that said, I had made up my mind about title assignments for the retainers of the New Eintorian Kingdom.
The next thing to settle on was what jobs to give them.
Currently, the New Eintorian Kingdom had three domains, including the royal capital Brinhill. But because we had taken in refugees, our population had outgrown our land, so I planned to expand into the vacant territory to the east soon.
Yes, into the lands of the former Brijit Kingdom, which I had destroyed.
Because this land currently belonged to no one, I could just send someone with an army to claim it once things settled down.
In addition to the issue of overpopulation within the kingdom, there was a mountain of other things to take care of. These included mitigating a food shortage, developing our farmland, and improving our finances.
I’ll give each of my retainers a job to help tackle all of the problems we’re now facing.
I opened up the system.
You are now the king of a nation. Congratulations.
Kingdom Mode has been added.
A strange message popped up. This one had never appeared in the game.
No, maybe it came up during my fourth playthrough...?
I had recently started to notice that my memories of clearing the game back in the real world weren’t perfect. The gameplay experience just wasn’t in my mind anymore. It was like someone had put a lid on my memory, and recalling anything from back then was like searching through written records.
Looks like this Kingdom Mode is one of those things I forgot.
Anyway, I tried opening up Kingdom Mode in the system.
The change was immediately apparent.
The ability scores I’d been seeing for everyone up until this point were now broken down into more detail, and this mode also added new entries.
Politics and Charisma.
These were clearly stats for internal politics. Up until now, I’d only been able to estimate Politics using Intelligence, and Charisma using Command. However, now that these values were visible, I could make more accurate decisions about aptitude when assigning positions to my people.
Currently, the stat I was most interested in exploring was Euracia’s Charisma score. She had a Command score of 97 with the treasure bracelet Rinkitsu equipped. However, this was an item that raised her Charisma, not Command directly.
That meant her Charisma score had to be over 97.
Euracia
Charisma: 99(+2)
Knew it. Euracia’s got a score of 101, putting her in S-class.
In her case, that high Charisma paired with her high Martial was what gave her a high Command score.
Anyway, I’ll look over all of this later. I need to find out what else Kingdom Mode can do.
With that thought in mind, I looked through the system until I came across another entry that caught my attention.
It was a mode called Manipulate Information.
I pushed the button, and a message appeared.
Will you send a Spy to Manipulate Information in an enemy Castle?
This definitely existed in the game too.
Since it hadn’t come up before now, I’d just assumed it had been removed, but apparently, it was exclusive to Kingdom Mode.
Manipulate Information could be used to spread misinformation in the enemy castle. This fake intel could lower Morale or influence the enemy lord to act in a desired manner.
The Intel skill is required to use Manipulate Information.
Intel is a skill that can be gained by building an education center.
Building an education center requires the Education skill.
Why’s it so complicated? In the game, I could just leave it to a character who was good at being sneaky.
Here in reality, Intel was a specialized skill that only literal spies had any use for. To raise those spies, I needed an education center. And of course, before the center could operate, it needed to be staffed with someone who could educate people.
I can build the education center, but do I have anybody who can run it?
I wanted the facility up and operational as soon as possible.
Manipulate Information was a fairly powerful skill, and because of that, it had been hard to use, even in the game. No doubt it would be even tougher in reality.
But the Intel skill was incredibly useful in and of itself. It wasn’t only used for Manipulate Information. Intel could also be used to send agents into another country and gather information. And the more spies I had access to, the more information I could gather.
Since I was going to continue launching wars of conquest, the ability to learn what was going on in enemy territory would be incredibly important.
Just for testing purposes, I think I’ll take a look at Brinhill’s domain information.
Brinhill
Population: 1,220,000
Opinion: 99
Manpower: 52,000
For starters, there’s the basic information. Now, if I look at the details for Manpower, it should show information on Morale and Training.
This was all info I’d had access to before Kingdom Mode, but now, I could see more detailed info too.
Brinhill Castle Walls
Wall Endurance: 91
East Gate Endurance: 88
West Gate Endurance: 82
South Gate Endurance: 98
North Gate Endurance: 90
It even gave me stuff like this.
In war, this was the most important, core type of information, but obviously, the system wasn’t going to display this much detail for the domains in other countries. I’d have to go to those places if I wanted to check that information.
Still, if I raised spies at the education center and sent them to infiltrate enemy territory, the system would let me learn these things from a distance. And the ranks of the spies I raised in the education center would change the depth of information they could gather.
If the spy had a B-rank Intel skill, they would only be able to gather basic information. However, the higher their rank, the more important the information they could gain access to. I’d definitely have to focus on educating them.
And if I raise spies, I’ll be able to use Manipulate Information.
Manipulate Information could lower Opinion. In hostile countries where the lord was unpopular and Opinion was already low, a little manipulation could really tank an enemy’s Opinion score. And when Opinion dropped below 10, it would cause an uprising like the one I’d experienced in Luaranz. It would be incredibly easy to occupy a domain after that.
On the other hand, if the spy’s rank was low, or if there was someone with a high Intelligence score on the other side, Manipulate Information’s success rate fell.
Furthermore, whether they used Intel or Manipulate Information, there was an increased risk of discovery with a low-rank spy. That was why I wanted to set up a system for raising high-rank spies as soon as possible.
In order to use the system effectively, I needed to assign the right personnel to the right places. To do that, I pulled up the full status list for all of them.
Hadin Meruya: Martial 60/Intelligence 57/Command 70 + Politics 75 + Charisma 65
Bente: Martial 49/Intelligence 38/Command 82 + Politics 21 + Charisma 52
Jint: Martial 93(+2)/Intelligence 41/Command 52 + Politics 2 + Charisma 61
Yusen: Martial 82/Intelligence 60/Command 90(+2) + Politics 71 + Charisma 88
Gibun: Martial 70/Intelligence 34/Command 76 + Politics 14 + Charisma 67
Mirinae: Martial 5/Intelligence 74/Command 10 + Politics 56 + Charisma 80
Euracia Rozern: Martial 87(+3)/Intelligence 57/Command 95(+2) + Politics 42 + Charisma 99(+2)
Erheet Demacine: Martial 96/Intelligence 70/Command 92 + Politics 54 + Charisma 90
Fihatori Delhina: Martial 81/Intelligence 85/Command 89 + Politics 94 + Charisma 85
Ganid Voltaire: Martial 30/Intelligence 60/Command 61 + Politics 43 + Charisma 55
Bertalman: Martial 80/Intelligence 50/Command 78 + Politics 43 + Charisma 45
Serena Dofrey: Martial 2/Intelligence 77/Command 72 + Politics 89 + Charisma 95
Gram: Martial 45/Intelligence 81/Command 70 + Politics 95 + Charisma 75
Celly: Martial 11/Intelligence 62/Command 50 + Politics 75 + Charisma 76
Vintora: Martial 23/Intelligence 68/Command 88 + Politics 87 + Charisma 81
Heina Berhin: Martial 60/Intelligence 81/Command 55 + Politics 76 + Charisma 68
I looked over all of them. Their Politics and Charisma scores, which I had needed to use Command to estimate before now, were about what I expected them to be.
For example, Jint only has a 2 in Politics. It sounds obvious now that I say it, but that really fits him to a T.
Erheet was popular, so his Charisma was high, but his Politics wasn’t that impressive. That was probably because he was such an honest man, both for better and for worse. He wasn’t made for politicking.
Meanwhile, the practical Fihatori, who’d betrayed Ronan, had a high Politics score, which was just as I’d expected. Well, Fihatori was solid across the board. There was a high probability that he would be one of the most important people in the Eintorian Kingdom in the future.
Serena secretly had a pretty high Politics score too... Okay, maybe not so secretly? After all, she was using her political marriage to maintain the balance of power between the different factions in Luaranz.
Gram really was specialized for internal affairs. That was clear just looking at the numbers.
In that case, he might be a good pick for the education center. He’d already been recognized for his ability as a scholar in the Runan Kingdom, and this showed in his Intelligence and Politics scores. Of course, his Education skill must have been high too.
From what Erheet had told me, Gram was a master of many practical subjects, including military science and agriculture. He wouldn’t just be useful in intelligence gathering, but also in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and any number of other areas. But for now, I wanted his Intel.
So, I decided to call in Gram.
＊
“You called, Your Majesty?!”
“How’s Brinhill been suiting you?”
“I’m grateful that you’ve loaned me a place that’s even larger than what I had in Runan! And my daughter...is happy too.”
Gram had started out so cheerful, but his expression darkened a little when he mentioned Celly.
Well, that was to be expected. She was depressed over the sudden departure of Valdesca and constantly sighing. I always knew she must’ve had a crush on him. That’s a private matter, though, so there’s not much I can do about it.
“Don’t let it worry you too much,” I told him. “She’ll calm down soon enough.”
“You...were aware of it, then, sire?”
“Vaguely. She was always hanging around Valdesca, after all.”
“O-Oh, I see. I don’t know what to say. To think she’d be in love with an enemy.” Gram hung his head, looking depressed.
“Let’s not dwell on the matter. I’ve called you in today for something more important. I have a job for you.”
“Do you really? I was just starting to feel bad about fooling around all the time,” he said jokingly, his expression brightening just a little. “I, Gram, will humbly endeavor to do my best! Now, what sort of work did you have in mind for me?”
“I was thinking of building an education center.”
“An education center?”
“Not just any education center. An academy for intelligence operatives. In a time of turbulence like this, information is the most important asset, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Well put!” Gram nodded repeatedly. “Information is the foundation of warfare. It’s no exaggeration to say that the fight’s only begun once you know the enemy inside and out!”
“I’ve heard you’re versed in military science. How are you at this aspect of it?”
“I can’t claim that it’s one of my specialties, but with some time to research, I’m confident I can achieve the results you’re hoping for!”
“It’s in your hands, then. And of course, I’ll offer you all the support you need, both in terms of finances and personnel.”
“Do you really mean it?! I-If you’ll do that, then I’ll definitely get you results! I swear on my life!”
Gram was exceedingly pleased with his new job.
＊
So, on that note, Gram was put in charge of Intel. His job title would be something like “first director of the education center.” I’d be putting him to work training people, not only in Intel but in all types of abilities.
The next problem to solve is agriculture.
Mirinae was already doing research, but since she was working on the project all by herself, things hadn’t improved all that much. Even though she was a former farmer, it wasn’t like she had a wealth of specialist knowledge. She also lacked experience with actually conducting research, so there were limits to how far Intelligence could take her on its own.
Come to think of it, I could use Kingdom Mode to view the Agriculture values for the country as a whole and each of its domains.
New Eintorian Kingdom
Agriculture: 55
Agriculture was tied to provisions, so it was every bit as important as Intel. As such, I needed to assign some more personnel to the task.
If I could raise our Agriculture score, then next year’s harvest would be larger, even if we used the same fields. Honestly, if our score didn’t increase by then, it would probably put pressure on both our food stores and our finances.
The one-year tax exemption period was coming to a close, but I couldn’t just suddenly hike taxes at year’s end. Even if I did, without sales or a harvest, there would be nothing to take from the people. First, I needed to increase the harvest and help the people achieve a stable lifestyle. This would also give the kingdom a wealth of provisions.
Mirinae was on good terms with Euracia, so I was having the latter help out with research, but...frankly, Euracia wasn’t cut out for it. Her abilities were more attuned to war, which was the furthest thing from farming. Besides, she was a princess. She’d probably never tilled a field in her life.
