Chapter 359: Combat Report from Afar (Part 1)
Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Pranav
Contract Heroes’ jobs weren’t limited to a single faction. In fact, it was the opposite— it was quite easy to issue a job since there weren’t too many Contract Heroes in the first batch. Basically, all the factions and countries within the Ayer Faction could issue a job. However, whether the Contract Heroes would see the job or not depended on whether the job was approved by the internal auditors.
My Contract Heroes system was a service platform, so I copied Amazon’s reviews system for having both buyer and seller reviews. There would be reviews for the job issuers as well so that nobody could intentionally set traps.
However, where my review system differed was in the fact that it didn’t look at how many jobs a faction or individual had issued in the past. Instead, the assessment of their overall trustworthiness was based on their identity, past history, allegiance, and so on.
Simply speaking, if the Holy Church or its related allies wanted to issue a job, they might not even get approved. And even if they did get approved, the information on the job issuer would be marked with a black star of misfortune, which represented that this job issuer was completely untrustworthy. Any Contract Hero who was allured by the potential job reward would have to suffer the consequences of their own poor judgement if the job went awry.
Although I had made the plans for this system, the end result would look totally different when everything was finally carried out. Not only would each manager have their own ideas on how to run this system, but there would forever be a difference between ideals and reality. Yet I had never expected that I would create such trouble for myself in the end.
Due to my special status, I obtained the highest level of trustworthiness according to the review system—basically equivalent to the True Gods themselves. This meant that the Contract Heroes system would forever recommend any jobs I issued first and foremost, as well as guarantee that I was the most trustworthy employer.
This wasn’t an abuse of my authority. It was because I was indeed half responsible for this entire Contract Heroes system. Due to my involvement, it was only natural that I would want to keep the Contract Heroes system running as smoothly as possible. That was why the system gave me the highest level of trustworthiness.
Even though I was no God in the skies above, I needed to deal with both mortal affairs and worry about the overall situation. Any problems that arose meant that I would be the first to suffer since it was I on the frontlines… Simply speaking, I was like a peasant who only had unsavory lettuce to eat, combined with an emperor’s worries. I suddenly felt like I was just a huge scapegoat for everything. I sure do hope I won’t have a typical scapegoat’s end result.
Cough—cough—getting to the main topic, it was quite easy for me to issue all my jobs related to the elemental item Quests. I also explained in the job details that the information was very likely to be outdated and might not be entirely correct. Of course, there was one part where the system was unable to assist me: my greatest trouble, the fact that I needed to pay out rewards.
But that was no obstacle to me. Although my wallet was now empty, and I barely had any Justice Points due to my personal System, I would still be able to pay rewards that people would want.
My job rewards would be… IOUs.
Fine then, I knew that owing people salary was something shameless. Perhaps people would even want to beat me up for this. But my IOUs could be exchanged for items that were quite real and practical: the products of magical engineering.
From the very start, those engineers were my subordinates, together with all the other personnel and technology. So of course their products belonged to me. And currently, Amelia was in a deep sleep, so her Thorn Garden was under my control as well. And I still possessed some treasure hoards from the past. As an antagonist who was always being hunted down, I dug many secret stashes back in the day to help finance my revenge. It would be simple enough for me to draw more than a dozen treasure maps.
Perhaps my wallet was empty, but I did still have some money to my name. And my IOUs were definitely exchangeable for magical engineering products. Now that I thought about it, did that make me tall, handsome, and rich…? Who said that 1.2 meters (~4 feet) didn’t count as tall? Come out, I promise not to kill you!
“I think they should accept this as payment. Even if the adventurers don’t need magical engineering products, they can still sell them for money.”
However, I ended up underestimating the power of my IOUs. The new products of magical engineering were absolutely unique products that I had a monopoly on. They had only been slightly tested out in the battlefield here, but they had already obtained astonishing results on another battlefield.
It was precisely these combat results that caused magical engineering products as well as the Northlands knights to become famous.
What battlefield was I talking about? Auland’s aquatic battlefield!
While I was still busy over here, the battle at the former Auland Empire capital city Kagersi, now known as the Sea Tribe’s Rain City, the capital city Dofeloci, was currently at a stalemate.
This city was covered with sea water, obviously meaning that this was now the Sea Tribe and other aquatic species’ home terrain. In their capital city, they would easily be capable of taking on opponents above their power levels. Even a top-level powerful individual would perish here if they found themselves surrounded.
In such an aquatic battlefield, humanity’s most proficient tactics of swarming with numbers and other strategies would become useless. Even the strongest knight would find it impossible to charge forward at a high speed in water. Knights proud of their heavy armor and high defense would find their armor to be a giant burden, instead. Even if they did fight in shallower areas—where infantry could barely do combat—these heavily armored warriors would find it impossible to stand up again if they accidentally fell over in water that reached their chests.
For the Sea Tribe, no matter how numerous their enemies, all they had to do was withstand the onslaught by utilizing their terrain advantage. This would cause the attackers who refused to give up to become food for the fish.
Use ships? Traditional wooden ships were quite easy to sink. Smaller ships would capsize to the wind and waves that the Sea Tribe could summon, while it was impossible for larger ships to even enter this kind of battlefield.
Based on the common sense of combat, this was a very imbalanced battle. No sane commander would ever choose to attack such a location where the defenders held an absolute terrain advantage. But ever since Auland lost their capital, combat had never stopped at this location.
After all, this place was the Auland Empire’s capital city! It was the military, political, and economic center of an entire mega empire and represented the collective face of the Auland people.
Invaders would typically believe that attacking, conquering, and slaughtering all the inhabitants of a capital city could destroy the will of a country’s people to resist. But actually, no matter what country it was, as long as the people still had some fight left in them, they would treat it as a lifelong shame. People would instead put everything on the line to wash away this shame. I’d already seen too many such examples in history, but there would always be others who proudly made such plans to ambush and conquer a country’s capital without expecting the end result, which was getting dragged into all-out warfare.
“Winter Wolf King” Darsos left amazing achievements behind in the game’s history. This type of character would never be easy to deal with. And, as his experience and power level improved, he would only become more difficult to deal with.
The difference between ordinary people and the ambitious could be displayed in how they behaved when forced to the brink. Ordinary people would despair or rage and try to solve the problem facing them while battling negative emotions. But for the ambitious, brinks were also opportunities. They would laugh out loudly as they faced danger head on and turn the danger into opportunity.
Indeed, Darsos had lost the capital city of Auland. But not even thirty kilometers away, he constructed a new temporary capital close to Rain City. This temporary capital was also named Kagersi, and its style intentionally imitated the old Kagersi, as if this was just a suburb of the capital. Darsos also personally led a squad to patrol this New Kagersi every day, no matter how treacherous the weather.
Every single day, countless people and resources from all of Auland would pass by the New Kagersi’s walls. Every dawn and dusk, the emperor and empress would go out on the castle walls to wave at their citizens.
Darsos stood at the very forefront of every attack to reclaim Rain City. He never trembled, even if Sea Giants were roaring right next to him.
“Our Emperor!”
Two years ago, this way of addressing Darsos was only due to his status. But now, the people of Auland truly venerated him in their hearts.
The forbidden spell which created Rain City was still under effect. Rain City was expanding its territory by the day and would drown New Kagersi sooner or later, as New Kagersi was located very close to Rain City. Powerful sea monsters capable of temporarily leaving the water would often ambush New Kagersi as well. Even so, Darsos adamantly remained in New Kagersi and beat back every one of the Sea Tribe’s ambushes.
The combat situation was indeed going poorly for Auland. Even if Auland occasionally managed to reclaim some territory, they would soon lose it again. The attack to reclaim Rain City was already in its sixty-seventh wave, but zero progress had been made. Still, looking at things from a different angle, the people of Auland had already gotten used to the way that the Sea Tribe fought in all these back and forth battles. The young ones were also maturing through battle, and the entire country was participating in the war effort. Every single government branch and private industry had converted from peacetime to war efforts. Although Auland never won, they also never lost.
Yep, they never lost. Every single attack they made on Rain City would be a short, preplanned battle—an ambush on a certain district to kill off the Sea Tribe members within before speedily retreating. They used only thirty percent of their forces as ambushing attackers, leaving seventy percent behind as backup support. Although this was quite a safe strategy, it was also impossible for this strategy to obtain any decisive results. But judging from how the Sea Tribe members roaming around freely outside became less and less, and how they had contracted their lines of defense, the Sea Tribe appeared to have lost confidence in being able to conquer everything around them.
By now, Rain City had expanded to being less than ten kilometers away from New Kagersi. Despite this, Darsos remained ambitious as always and patiently organized his forces—he even made this area into a practice field for his troops.
Darsos had the foundation to be willful as he pleased as he led a mega empire. However, if you looked at it from a purely logical standpoint, he could have simply ignored the loss of Auland’s capital city.
With two years of warfare, his father, brothers, and brothers’ descendants had all perished. Originally, a powerful emperor would only see his authority grow boundlessly in wartime. The current Darsos now had total control over all of Auland.
Alright, this was also due to his wise, most trusted friend, and most beautiful, most gentle empress. The prior had now become the number one prime minister in Auland, while the latter was viewed by more and more people in Auland as the perfect woman. But only Darsos’ closest and most trusted associates knew that she was actually the number two in charge, only after Darsos.
In every way, the Auland Empire had already surpassed the powerful Auland Empire from the game’s history.
Although their enemy, the Sea Tribe, still conquered and possessed the Rain City, their situation wasn’t going that well, either. More and more Sea Tribe members were joining Rain City. The warm sunlight and free beaches and hot food made the Sea Tribe’s veterans delighted with their new lifestyles, while it also whetted away at their will to fight. They only wanted to conquer more water-covered land and Kagersi’s entertainment centers and actually focused more on their own internal conflicts than the external one.
After experiencing cooked meat, they wanted more. After experiencing the warm sunlight, they learned how to wear noble attire that was incapable of being worn underwater. Nobody went to weaponsmiths, while all sorts of new restaurants and bars popped up. Even their underwater dance halls started playing all sorts of strange new loud music. And although information was limited, it was said that internal conflicts kept erupting every day despite the new Sea Tribe royalty trying their best to stop internal conflict. After all, the Sea Tribe consisted of many different “sub” tribes, and they were quite accustomed to tribal warfare. The so-called new Sea Tribe royalty was simply just one tribe among them, and their authority was insufficient to suppress the internal warfare.
Even as the humans grew stronger and stronger with each attack, and more and more Sea Tribe members got killed with each attack, the Sea Tribe didn’t care. They passively waited for Rain City to expand, believing that this would be sufficient. In their minds, there was no way the humans would dare to enter the deep water areas for an all-out attack. Their true enemies were actually their rival tribes, so having more members from other tribes die was actually a good thing.
The Sea Tribe were busy with their own internal conflicts, while the Auland humans were completely united and fighting with their all. With this balancing out the imbalance of strength between them, the weaker humans obtained the right to be proactive in this battle.
And it just so happened to be that at this time, their absolute authority Guardian Goddess, the Queen of Storms, sank into an abnormal silence. Fine, this was actually because she was recently injured by Ayer. And also due to reasons related to me, their original ally, the Water Elemental Goddess Aylos, had called back her direct subordinates, leaving only the lowest water elemental creatures behind.
Since the two top authorities had left with no explanation and weren’t interfering with them, their internal chaos and conflict could only worsen.
It was amid all this that Darsos organized the sixty-eighth wave of attacks. Yet his goal this time wasn’t to just kill a few of the Sea Tribe.
And, precisely at this time, came Reyne and her Northland knights, accompanied with “Envy” Marsolit, who had sworn revenge.