I had been in front of the forge when I felt a familiar stabbing pain, warning of another intrusion. "Not again," I growled as I opened a gate. Though, as I took a step, I couldn't help but think about everything that had happened the last two weeks.
To my surprise, there had been no further attacks, neither from Drakka nor from the heretics, and two weeks had passed smoothly. It was unexpected, especially with our latest revelation about a possible invasion from the other worlds going on, but I still treated it as a serendipitous gift.
Despite my hopes, Rosie's attempts to establish so hidden trade connections had ended up in failure, signaling that we were being observed carefully. She wasn't able to establish a connection for either high-quality skills or for valuable consumables.
Luckily, they were able to identify several tal deposits near the mountain. None of those sources were enough to be treated as economically valuable in the modern sense, but it was enough to fuel our industrial developnt.
A small silver vein, in particular, had been a godsend.
Though, speaking of silver, our forced isolation had a taphorical silver lining as well.
It had allowed to focus on my projects, mostly on my forging and my dungeon tree cultivation project.
I wanted to focus on exploring the existence of the 'soul' and to asure it directly, considering its implications when it ca to the operation of the System, but once again, practical considerations forced to focus on other things. The closest thing to working on the existence and function of the soul was to play with ditation as I tried to get a better sense of fla ditation, doing my best to replicate the sa conceptual idea of the lizards to use those materials easier.
A routine, boring experint with little variation, but it worked. Combined with the various upgrades Terry and Liam had managed to implent to the pressure-rotation system, not only optimizing the chanical parts, but also manufacturing a better stabilizer than my hasty coated wood fragnts.
Adding in my own skill improvents due to constant forging, my raw output increased almost ten tis overall, the effect even more pronounced when it ca to the shrapnels. It wasn't as smooth as my old cast-arrow production, but it was still considerably faster.
It ant, we not only had an impressive stockpile of armor-piercing ammunition, but enough weapons and armor to arm an elite squad made up of one hundred troops, all the while upgrading my own gear to the next stage.
Hopefully, it would be enough to deal with the inevitable attack, the only question being whether the heretics or Drakka would act first.
To top it all off, I had even managed to gain seven more levels, hitting level eighty.
[Smith of Decay - Level 80]
[Health 4800/4800] [Mana 4000/4000]
[Vitality 400 / Strength 360 / Dexterity 240 / Essence 400 / Wisdom 320]
[Class Skills —
ditation of Decay (Mythic) - 260 [Controlled Flow, Superior Sensing, Purification]
Reformation of Quintessence (Legendary) - 140 [Advanced Observe]
Shaper of Quintessence (Legendary) - 174 [Advanced Creative Forging, Advanced Mana Control]
External Skills —
Nurture (Legendary) - 400 [Persistent Growth]
Blade of Radiant Fla (Legendary) - 400 [Incandescent Slash]
Hamr of Avalanche (Epic) - 300 [Shattering Strike]
Spear of Storm (Epic) -300 [rcurial Movent]
Fire Bolt (Basic) - 25
Shoot (Basic) - 25]
While those levels had been fortunate, the source of it was less so. Constant invasions from the breach, getting not only stronger but also more frequent…
Once I stepped through the gap, I ca face to face with a boss lizard stepping through the breach, two of them already out, clashing against the insects as their heads peeked through the gates.
Gates of the new defensive encampnt I had ordered to be built around the breach. It had two layers, one near the gate, enough to impede the approach of the lizards, and another, five hundred yards away — a veritable fortress to contain everything I piled there, from high-velocity spear launchers ard with special weapons to buried traps, enough to delay even a concentrated assault — or at least, I hoped.
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When I had first ordered its construction, I assud it to be overkill. But in the last two weeks, I had dealt with hundreds of boss lizards, which were getting progressively stronger. So were strong enough that, if I had been dealing with them during the heretic siege, our fate might have been different.
However, the pattern of arrival was a bother. Plenty of tis, two of them arrived together, but this was the first ti that three did. I was glad for the defenses, not because I needed them, but because they ant it could be defended even if my presence was required elsewhere.
It would be a lie to say that it didn't have its own benefits — both the relatively easy leveling opportunity and constant material for experints were hard to beat — but that didn't change the fact that it was a worrying trend. I was able to deal with them with ease, and Rosie could as well, but no one else.
At least, not yet.
"Let's see if it will work better this ti," I said to myself as I got closer to the lizards, a cloud of decay around to keep the insect army from attacking , the trick of mixing with the dungeon long perfected.
It was even easier to pull now that all around the fifth floor, decay trees had been spread. None of those trees were as dense as I planted near the breach, but they were still enough to increase the density of the decay aura, to the point that it was several tis stronger than it had been before the breach.
As I got near the first lizard who had been busy biting through the insect army — which still did not include any boss for so reason I couldn't identify — I decided to forgo using my weapons again, and raised my hand, a thick cloud of decay gathering around it.
Another wave, and a thick yet simple hexagon appeared out of pure mana, containing all the decay mana I could pump. Thrice, I repeated the trick, each infusion making it harder to hold the mana.
[-4000 Mana]
[-4000 Mana]
[-4000 Mana]
"Let's see if it'll work," I growled even as I focused on drawing a pattern of mana outside the mana burst. When completed, it had been rely fifteen symbols, mostly a combination of hexagons and triangles, far less than hundreds even my firebolt drew during casting, yet each symbol was far sturdier.
Those symbols were a combination of reverse engineering from Fire Bolt, splitting the aspects of form and nature transformation, and only using the forr. Combined with my previous attempts to understand how mana and its shapes functioned, reversing the skill had been easy, initially. After all, the skill was rely Basic.
Turning that into an offensive skill worthy of using, on the other hand, had proven itself to be a challenge.
The thick bolt of greenish energy hit the lizard, making it roar in anger as its front leg turned into a sickly, diseased limb … for fifteen seconds before its regeneration overwheld the effect.
"Not horrible, but the design needs more work," I said, satisfied with the result. Knowing I could have killed it for a fraction of the cost with a slash of my sword went a long way to undermine that achievent in a practical sense, but there was never a bad ti for so auxiliary testing, mostly because I was hoping to help Spencer attain an Intelligence variant, which still seed far away.
Unfortunately, even when copying from an active spell, my progress was limited. And, that was after removing every single step related to transformation of mana to fire — the real complicated aspect — and handling that part with Wisdom's assistance.
I couldn't help but wonder if that was the right path for Wisdom casting. While my Shaper and Reformation skills had helped to get a much deeper understanding of Quintessence manipulation, I still wasn't sure if it was the right path for offensive spell casting.
Unfortunately, the usual path by Intelligence-based casting required an interlocking pattern of many symbols, which didn't simply work like a mana conduit. Every symbol had its own aning, but that didn't an they worked in isolation. Every symbol added so complexity, which was why my current clone of Fire Bolt had been stripped down to ten symbols, and even that had been achieved through mostly trial and error, and even then, it was a wildly inefficient solution.
I couldn't help it. The relation between multiple symbols was simply that complicated. "It's like dealing with a traveling salesman of hell," I muttered, chuckling at my own nerdy joke despite how bad it was. I couldn't help it. No one I interacted with on a daily basis was familiar with the concept, even though it was a relatively elentary one.
Despite my bad pun, the nature of the problem persisted. The original traveling salesman problem already had a reputation for being difficult to handle algorithmically if one searched for an exact solution.
The trouble ca from the blooming complexity. A problem of three cities had only two possible solutions to compare, and a problem of four cities had rely six. anwhile, a ten-city problem had just over three hundred and sixty-two thousand solutions, and a twelve-city one had just below forty million, all due to the effect of a factorial growth of complexity.
At least, with the traveling salesman problem, there were many ways to acquire suboptimal yet still efficient heuristic solutions, mostly effectively working in splitting it into sub-solutions.
To be fair, the spells might have had similar thods, but if they did, I lacked them, the notes Maria had left were not enough to answer my most recent problems.
"How much I wish she returned already," I muttered. The problems that plagued for weeks, we could have solved in less than a minute, especially since I finally had a decent frawork to approach. Still, I planned to continue to experint while waiting for her to return.
That plan fell to the wayside the mont I saw a fourth step through the breach. "Alright, that's not good news," I growled as I swung my blade and killed the first one, just as the fourth one stepped through the breach, and the head of a fifth one showed.
"Not at all," I growled even as I swung my blade four more tis, rapidly killing them before I sealed them with my mana to prevent the insects from tearing through them … or letting them rot.
The bodies of boss monsters were valuable, but only if they were handled properly. Left alone, they slowly invaded the dungeon with their own variant of energy, weakening my dungeon in the process. While our recent efforts to enhance the decay concept worked well, every boss monster that decomposed freely represented a huge loss from two different directions.
But, watching yet another step in, I instinctively used my focus on the dungeon entrance, only to see a guard hurriedly pulling up a flag to send a signal.
Drakka was attacking once more.
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