Chapter 160 – Dragon Strategy

AG - First of Two. They're each about 2500 words but were initally written as one chapter so kind of had some annoying cliff hangers.

He was still recovering, so he read the gazette while pacing around. The sweat dripped from him and as the seconds passed, the breaths, he sucked in were less and less frantic. The newsletter had a slightly altered layout from usual with the first couple of pages dominated by an in-depth analysis.

Does the Dragons and Insects Cooperation provide an unsurmountable advantage?

The article was over five pages long. Which meant it took him over ten minutes to read it and it spelled out exactly how they were exploiting their competition enhanced trait in tandem with their alliance to form something greater than the parts were ever supposed to manage.

For the first time, it made him question the humans’ ability to manipulate fate into supercharging system enhancements. He frowned. Maybe what DEUS had given them was not as powerful as he had thought. Getting more from evolution potions and halving the time it took to create skills was incredible, but in terms of obtaining ranking points it was nothing like what those species had been gifted.

What they could achieve with their bonus versus what humans could was completely unfair. DEUS, he was sure had a plan, but he was uncertain how tricks, feints and misdirections could beat sheer power discrepancy. Even an occasional reincarnator getting a mythical class wasn’t about to shift the balance.

The two species despite starting with lower numbers than humans were waging war simultaneously on three local clusters and were currently sustaining over a dozen major conflicts against different empires of natives. Wide scale battle fronts that they were winning more often than they were losing. Their aggression was only made possible by their competitor status, that stopped alliances from forming to eradicate them. The natives were handicapped and had to wait to be attacked, something the alliance exploited ruthlessly. That and the incredible forces they could amass numbers for the insects and pinnacle assassin powerhouses for the dragons.

The strategy they were deploying was deceptively simple.

The insects abused their competition bonus to have a population approaching a billion in multiple separate locations. With them taking mere months to reach adulthood and a rank in the thirties and forties, they could field multiple armies capable of challenging native empires.

Their modus operandi seemed to be to send an army of fodder that was ten million strong

That attack would have one of two outcomes.

The first is where the natives would defend against them with normal troops. With superior equipment, tactics and usually rank they would normally fight off the invaders with minimal casualties, but they would still take losses and when this occurred the insects would default to a battle of attrition. With hundreds of thousands of new soldiers joining daily, the defenders would eventually be overwhelmed.

The second response depended on the native species’ resources. The relentless attacks would stir the defensive powerhouses most kingdoms had into action. Singular individuals who could wipe out the invasive force. Basically, the nuclear deterrent that most nations cultivated.

That was the role Tom would be best suited for if he took the Magical Tier Empowerment class. Raw magical power that would allow him to take out a massive and potentially unlimited number of low levelled enemies. After all, if he had ten thousand mana even if he was super charging spells the natural regeneration rate would let him cast continuous destruction that only the most high ranked individuals out there would be able to survive against.

These were the types of beings that the sheer quantity of the insect army would force into action and they would quickly turn the war in the favour of the natives. Unfocused numbers were helpless against that sort of overwhelming power.

That’s when the alliance between the species shone. A dragon, or if they were against stronger opposition, a couple of dragons would respond. Not ‘The Dragon’. She kept herself in reserve, but others of her species would come into help. Aided by their competition bonus, which made their attributes hit a hundred percent harder, they would assassinate the enemy powerhouses.

It was bitterly unfair, but that unfortunately was life. Both here and on Earth that had been a universal truth.

The dragons had the size advantage, which meant you probably needed twenty human sized people of even rank to start to match them. If you added in their competition bonus, they could defeat powerhouses who were almost twice their rank. With them all having spent fifty years raising their rank to be between a hundred twenty and a hundred and eighty, there was no one outside an eternal empire who could stand against them. There might be less than a hundred of them floating around, but they were nigh on invulnerable, at least in the battles they were choosing to engage in.

Without the insects forcing the battlefield, the natives, when being threatened by something as terrifying as a dragon would have retreated and refused to engage until they were ready to spring a trap. They might take near catastrophic losses while they retreated and preserved their fighting capabilities, but eventually the dragon would be lured into the right spot and killed. These were all powerful, smart people who had years to prepare areas of their countries to counter outside threats. A juiced up dragon, despite being sapient was not that much of a unique threat. Even a small amount of forward planning would allow native empires to weather such an attack. The fact each of these native kingdoms still existed at all meant that had the capability to eliminate powerful outside forces seeking them harm. The insects destroyed that paradigm by forcing the powerhouses to engage in a location that would not skew the odds in their favour.

Once the powerhouses were dead or fled, the insects would press, and natives would ultimately crumble to the continual waves of fodder soldiers.

It was a devastatingly effective strategy. By themselves, the insects were hard countered by powerhouses, and it was well known that it was a fool’s errand for singularly strong individuals to invade an established kingdom. Such attempts almost always failed both as a result of prepared battlefields and if that didn’t work because desperate natives would enact a ten thousand people sacrificial ritual to destroy the individual invaders.

The species by themselves couldn’t wage an effective war, but together they became a blight on the fabric of Existentia.

“Shit,” Tom cursed as he read.

They were also notably focusing on competition points. They were careful not to wipe out the species, but instead focused on fatally weakening them. All the fighters above rank twenty would be killed and then they would attack the children.

After extinguishing the current capacity to defend themselves and the species’ future by slaughtering the next generation, they would leave and the natives so weakened the natural presence of things like Underground entrances, nearby wildland or terror species s would be sufficient to doom them to extinction. And the two species that made it possible would benefit from the rush of ladder points that would result from their success.

It was diabolical.

Tom spent a moment thinking about what they were doing.

“Fuck you,” he whispered as he flipped to the final page.

1.                Dragons: Current Rank 1 with accumulated points of 854 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 16 million.

2.                Inventors: Current Rank 2 with accumulated points of 794 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 11 million.

3.                Insects: Current Rank 3 with accumulated points of 543 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 10 million.

4.                Giants: Current Rank 4 with accumulated points of 471 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 9 million.

5.                Humans: Current Rank 5 with accumulated points of 378 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 2 million.

6.                Wador: Current Rank 6 with accumulated points of 320 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be 1.5 million.

7.                Chosen: Current Rank 7 with accumulated points of 49 million. Current monthly baseline appears to be less than a hundred thousand.

The ranking ladder had gone to shit. The gazette dropped to land messily on the ground and he put his head in his hands as despair gripped him.

It was a disaster.

Humans had to get fourth or else most of those eight billion normal everyday people in stasis would die in the first couple of months in Existentia. They were currently in fifth with everyone above them out earning them by four times.

The fucking dragons were closer to outdoing humans by ten rather than fucking four!

With the benefit of useless hindsight, he understood very clearly how the other species had approached the competition. They had not pushed for immediate gains instead they had built slowly and steadily until the average fighter could match a native powerhouse. It had taken them fifty years to do it, but they had reached a point where every one of them was a threat and only then had they started flexing their muscles.

The dragons and insects through war, giants through assassination. The wador hadn’t done anything, but they were smart, so they would have a plan. Their flexibility was unparalleled and being able to respec themselves into a completely new build, they, as a nation, could transform themselves to meet any role. If they wanted, they could turn themselves into a unified fighting force that would send chills down the back of every general for hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Or they could go for a more localised approach. Form tailored battle squads with the skills and spells to perfectly counter that of the various empires. It didn’t matter if you had a thousand powerhouses, if you met a team of a hundred with the exact abilities to neutralize your species’ strengths and to exploit the weaknesses you would get slaughtered. A giant game of rock, paper and scissors where the wador would always win and most natives, with the limited classes they had preserved would be vulnerable.

“Shit, shit,” he whispered.

They might not even choose war. They could become master metal workers or golem makers or anything they wanted. If they chose, they could be a nation of craftsmen that would transform Existentia with legendary artefacts. After all, it was not often that pure craftsmen could grab the three hundred class levels that the wador would have access to when they respeced.

He shuddered just thinking about all the different directions they could transform themselves to exploit issues and weaknesses in Existentia society..

He was sure they had a plan and while they weren’t generating points currently, they would have been accumulating power for fifty years and far as he knew they hadn’t taken any large losses. None of the other competitor species had.

Humans had made a mistake. The best, the strongest fighters had perished early when they had been seduced by the fate trap. If they hadn’t been reckless and preserved lives and grown slowly, then Tom could just imagine what they could be doing now. What could a species with a hundred thousand people all around rank a hundred do? Instead of the mere thousands that humans now had. Because that is what would have happened because it was the fastest levelling that had died.

They had been impatient, and it had cost them. If they had played the long game, they would now have an army that would almost certainly be unstoppable.

He balled his fists and wished that he was an adult. That he had been reincarnated forty years ago, and that he had gotten the mythic class and had already pushed it to level two hundred and fifty-six. It would make him unstoppable and that was fine because he knew himself. He wouldn’t have abused the power. He wasn’t the type to go all murderhobo with it, despite the ranking points that would have gotten him. But he wouldn’t have sat on the power either. He could see himself going through the nearby clusters, destroying the terror species.

Unleashing justice. Doing what the insects and dragons were doing in reverse.

If he had been reincarnated forty years ago, then maybe that would have been an option. With the cards he had been dealt, it wasn’t. 

He sighed and looked at the table once more.

The insects were already earning ten million a month and as they rampaged through the local clusters for the next twenty years, most likely destroying literally hundreds of nations, wiping away the future of hundreds of billions of sapients, those points would only increase. They would bicimate (Have one in every two people killed) everyone across four separate clusters, sparing no species.

“Shit,” he whispered. What could he do against that?

Age fifteen where he could start doing something, couldn’t come fast enough.

Right there and then he decided he wasn’t able to wait any longer. He had procrastinated on class selection. The twelve classes selected were probably going to contain the class he was destined for.

For completeness, he would add four more and ask the oracle questions.

“What four?” he asked himself. “Not any more mythics.” He decided. The one he had included was unusual in that the prerequisites he had to do were ones he felt he could reach. That was not the case for all the others he had checked.

Some of the requirements he was closest to reaching was a mythic class that in addition to requiring a legendary class he would also have to have created a tier ten spell from scratch and three tier eight spells. In a thousand years, he might be able to achieve those requirements, but not in the next five, and this was one of the ones he felt he was closest to getting.

Another needed him to have created multiple tier six skills in different areas and corresponding spells. Once more, given hundreds of years and sufficient resources, he had no doubt he could get it, but it was too much for now. Then there were the thousands of classes requiring multiple specific titles, high ranks, specific beast slaying or trial completion those were the ones that were genuinely beyond him.

He slotted four more legendaries into the mix. They were more multi disciplined and tailored to the archetype he wanted to pursue but had been rejected because he had thought their requirements had been too extreme.

It was time to select the class.