Blacksmith vs. the System-Chapter 218

“The situation is not good,” she said the moment I raised a silencing field around us. “Vessalian forces are part of the attack force.”

I nodded. It certainly wasn’t good. “A significant force?” I asked.

“Not particularly, no,” she said. “It’s only one enchanted carriage, and at most, there would be six mages in it. But, this time, they are accompanied by a team of guards.”

“Their effectiveness should be limited without environmental mana,” I replied. “Don’t you think so?”

“Possibly,” she said. “But, I wouldn’t put it past them to have a method to solve it temporarily. But, even without it, I’m afraid that their presence would make it impossible to use our previous tactic. Even if they couldn’t block the piercing shrapnel, they could dispel the decaying aura from the fragmented shells, giving Drakkan forces a chance to move forward.

“Speaking of Drakka, what’s the situation there?” I asked.

“Not as bad as we feared,” she said. “Another regiment from the legion had joined their march, this time a thousand infantry, but they are led by only one ascended, one that seems to defer the previous one.”

“That’s not as bad as we had feared,” I admitted. The last two weeks had been enough to completely upgrade my equipment, bringing it to a standard that I had confidence to breach the protective field around their armor, but that didn’t mean I was looking forward to fighting two of them at once.

Their advantages were no joke.

“And the dungeon?” she asked.

“I need you to stay here to watch,” I replied. “The number of boss monsters attacking is well above our expectations, and I’m afraid that there will be another nasty surprise. I will feel better if you’re here to keep an eye on things. Your little band of assassins will have to be enough dealing with the Drakkan force.”

“What do you fear?” she asked.

“A sudden addition of those mutated fighters, or an even stronger boss monsters breaching the defenses. I would have loved to deploy more fighters down, but …”

“All the elites we raised already have their assignments,” she completed. “Don’t you have any trust in the new batch of weapons they developed?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know,” I said. “I had no involvement other than providing them with all the blueprints I could remember from before Cataclysm, checking some calculations, and forging the finickier pieces they requested.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised. “I assumed you were more involved in weapon development.”

I shook my head. “No, just like you, I didn’t have time. Most of my time had been dedicated to forging the higher-end weapons and dealing with the dungeon. And, ultimately, I’m not exactly an engineering genius.”

“Really?” she said with a disbelieving tone.

“Yes, engineering and science require very different mindsets,” I replied. “But, as much as I would have enjoyed discussing the difference between the two, we both have our missions,” I said as I moved, leaving the gate between the fifth floor and the surface open, even if it temporarily hampered the dungeon’s mana production.

It wasn’t too bad since it was daytime.

Rosie stayed on the fifth floor, while I used one of the gates at the outer ring to appear near the approaching army. When I unlocked the interlocked metal walls that protected the gate, Harold was already waiting for me.

“Sir,” he greeted.

“So, almost fifteen hundred enemies,” I said. He nodded grimly. “It won’t be easy.”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“We will defend our land, sir,” he declared proudly as he tightened his grip around his blade, but I could sense his determination, one with a dark edge. “I’ll lead from the front if necessary,” he added.

“Hopefully, it won’t come to that, you’re needed to organize the battle,” I said. “You’re our best field commander.” It was true, but that wasn’t the only reason. After all, the bitter truth was that his abilities as a combatant had been lagging behind despite his leveling, and I could see Harold getting affected by it.

I didn’t blame him. Watching people around him getting stronger while he lagged behind was a tough pill to swallow in any circumstance, but his situation was worsened by the subconscious influence of the System by claiming that he was better than the production classes around him. Not an easy conflict to manage.

But, I had no solution to it.

With thousands of people constantly leveling up, going through class upgrades, and using various external stones, I was able to gather even more information about the process of skill upgrades, directly or through external skills.

Nothing truly groundbreaking, but it helped to clarify some of our earlier findings. For one, we discovered that stats and levels weren’t the only restrictions for the absorption of external skills. Soul power also played a big role, though with some caveats.

There was no limitation for absorption up to Rare. Regardless of the natural absorption limit, everyone was able to achieve that. But, Epic and above started requiring a certain amount of soul strength — one that we still lacked the ability to quantify — to successfully absorb, one that we only learned after letting people do so. Farmers that were limited to Common through natural evolution were only able to absorb Rare, but the ones that were stuck in Uncommon were able to absorb Epic skill stones.

Meanwhile, for the people who got stuck on Rare, it was a bit different. Some were still only limited to Epic, while others were able to absorb Legendary skill stones, which I assumed to have something to do with the cutoff points. My best guess, not everyone who had got stuck in Rare had the same soul strength level, and variance was affecting the cutoff points.

Those facts meant that Harold was limited to Rare skills in combat, one that came with a relatively underwhelming class upgrade, making him lag behind the others quite a bit when it came to combat potential.

And, the subconscious cultural implications from the System, suggesting that he needed to be better than production classes were not helping. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓

“What’s the latest status of the force?” I asked.

“We finally have some tanks to deploy, but they didn’t work as well as we had hoped during the war game,” he admitted. “They are good for dealing with a lot of low-leveled monsters, but against a human army, elites, or boss monsters, it’s near useless.”

I nodded. Ultimately, it was not a shocking result. Tanks had ruled the battlefields during the twentieth century, particularly around the Second World War, because they represented a devastating combination of speed, mobility, and firepower, all features that showed their advantages when the battle lines stretched thousands of miles back and forth.

A world with a System worked differently. For once, the weapons of the tanks lacked stopping power. Any traditional anti-infantry method like machine guns was effectively useless against people wearing mana-alloy armor or wielded shields.

The main cannon might have been more effective, but even that was not a guaranteed kill. More importantly, people were fast enough to dodge them. Not the ammunition itself, maybe, but a giant tank cannon was easy to maneuver around.

Then, there was the protection the tanks represented. In old battlefields, their thick armor could only be penetrated through specialized weapons. And, we had alloys available that could achieve a similar protection, anything that could resist the attacks from an ascended warrior — or someone like me — was still not too easy to create, and better utilized in other ways.

Maybe that equation would change if we could properly automate the production of higher-grade armor, but that was an achievement for the future.

“What did we do with the prototypes, then?” I asked. “Scrapped?”

“No, we took off some of the armor, added extra steam engines, and turned them into armored personnel carriers,” he said. “We can revisit producing the cannons if we start expanding, but with the constant artillery support available, the current configuration is better, playing into our new Elites.”

I respected him for trying to hold his bitterness, which wasn’t a surprise. Ultimately, since our farmers had a higher-than-usual soul strength due to our selection method helping us — a very fortunate coincidence — to field a decent number of elite warriors.

Dragon One wasn’t the only elite team that had been recruited during the last two weeks.

“Give me a summary of our strategy, then,” I asked.

“The evacuation of non-essential personnel is already complete. We’ll start harassing them once they are comfortably in the artillery range. We’ll start with the weaker shrapnel shells mixed with decay shells, the same combination we used the previous time to test their counter-methods without revealing our hand. Also, the mechanized troops are ready to deploy for harassment if they choose to do so.”

“Good —” I started, ready to discuss the details, only to freeze when I felt a stab of pain in my soul, a certain fiery sensation I only felt when there had been a dungeon breach.

I just had another.

“You have the command. I need to respond to the dungeon,” I said as I opened a portal, and stepped through it.