The revelation at the music store aside, Alex was devoting a great deal of attention to getting that particular bit of magic memorized. He definitely didn’t change the order of his magical studies just so he could listen to music. The magic was useful enough to warrant the change… honest.
He was still looting the ever-loving crap out of Martes. Going door to door and practicing his fine control with the new systems. He wasn’t expecting too much at this point, the golems and frames he found had been a bit of a letdown if he was being honest.
The amount of work required to get them operational made them almost counterproductive if he wanted them in his forces. He could get a bone golem up in the time it took to figure out what was wrong, much less fix the problem. On the other hand, he now had a full range of golems crafted by professionals available for study. He would of course begin restoring the frames at some point, hell it was required if he wanted to be able to study all the functions they had.
The highly customized nature of the golems was both a blessing and a boon, there were only a few ‘standard’ models. That gave him plenty of research material, not so much on the practical front. His golems had been designed off of standardized files, with interchangeable parts. The only differences were cosmetic. The tiny bits of personality he added to each frame, paint schemes mostly, nothing that made them more difficult to maintain.
He had time, looting a city properly was not something that happened quickly, it would take months at least to search just the areas he was interested in, properly that is. It also gave him time to refine his remote operation for the golems, a chance to expand those forces and test if he could cheese the control limit.
By now he had the scouts mostly operating on autopilot. The next thing to do was to examine the dead zones, his golems weren’t alive, so he had little worry on that front. It wasn’t some death magic field killing all who entered, but the monsters he did see seemed to be controlled. Basically, zombified just by getting within a certain distance, the others just died collapsed and stopped breathing. Sometimes though they were taken somewhere, guided into a lair of some sort. He never saw anything leave.
He figured it was some sort of mental magic, not all that unusual but some of the most dangerous monsters known used it. Mental magic as a general rule was highly regulated/frowned upon. Incredibly useful in many situations, almost impossible to uncover if used wrongly by someone who knew what they were doing. As near as Alex could tell the people of the Nilfstrum Empire didn’t classify any natural magic as ‘evil’ or forbidden. Oh, there were plenty that required caution, an unfortunate number of laws and regulations, but often the best way to deal with dangerous and out of control magics and their users was to have other experts of said magic on your side. More importantly, not discouraging research into those fields, as that gave you the information needed to counter problems.
Counter magic also worked, just not as well, as they did counter each other it went both ways, so one party had to have the advantage. Practitioners of the same or similar magics knew the limit of that magic and could often disassemble the same type of magics. Skill was more important than a contest of pure power. It was simply easier and more convenient to allow magic to practiced relatively freely, you tended to get less angry mages trying to alter the balance that way. A few reasonable restrictions that any sane being would agree to went a long way towards keeping most people on your side. And ready to stop the idiots trying to mess up what they had built by fucking around.
It was unnatural magics that had everyone all sorts of bent out of shape. Demon summoning, dimensional magic (magic from other dimensions, powered and fueled by beings or the dimension itself). Sacrificial and soul magics also pretty touchy subjects. Basically… tearing holes in reality was bad, and you shouldn’t do it. Killing people and offering important things like life and soul to hungry monsters lurking beyond the edges of the world also bad. Destroying or tampering with souls… bad unless you were a god in which case you were not a problem for anyone that was not a god. No calling forth the spawn of hell, or those monsters that lurked beyond the boundaries of the world, to this one. Other than that, they were surprisingly chill.
Alex had little to fear from mental magic users, as a golem controller his mind was stronger than most others. The link to his golems was nearly impossible to use against him, and if it was, he would be at a significant advantage just by being in control of the link. Mostly it was his paranoia that made him safe. Ever since he learned that magical mind fuckary was on the table he had been preparing. Many materials were hard to penetrate mentally, for weaker opponents a good helmet prevented attacks. Others required the attacker to look catch a look or touch to gain a mental link they could use.
Some used their voices to ‘suggest’ things. Proper equipment made that difficult if not impossible. Stronger users might have trouble getting through material, but they sometimes could. Getting past mental wards and spells and enchantments, against someone who controlled golems with his mind, and therefore had trained up the mental muscles and had a high chance of detecting the intrusion and shutting down that connection. Not impossible, but it would take time. Anything that could get past all that quickly, or slowly for that matter, while being undetected, whether subtle or through brute force. Well game over. He clearly pissed off the wrong whatever it was.
This was one area that he actually felt truly confident in. The standard response to mental fuckary from monsters was golems or something similar. If you couldn’t blast it with magic from outside its range or send in a much stronger mental magic user capable of protecting themselves, send a golem to bash the opponent to death. Almost all mental magic monsters were physically weak, those monsters that had mental magic that couldn’t be countered or ignored by other means. Some monsters could confuse people but once you stepped into the realm of actually controlling sentient beings, several orders of magnitude harder, the monster usually had little to no offensive or defensive capabilities that worked without that mental connection. Those that were physically dangerous tended to rely on the mental abilities they had thus when negated… they became much easier to deal with. It was unneeded to be both physically and mentally powerful, and some of the evolutionary theories seemed to be in effect there.
So, his seven golems waited just outside the range of the first dead zone, one would enter and see what happened. A bone golem, the easiest to replace and incapable of defeating the others if it got turned, or the control was physical like anime spider webs or some shit. Alex only kept the passive link up, viewing the golem through his new system. No point in taking risks without a reason after all. He vaguely felt a tingle from the golem, the mental defense runes activating and handling the strain easily. These were pure paranoia, mostly, and an early warning system. The golem didn’t need them lacking a mind of its own but when they got triggered it told Alex all he needed to know.
He had the golem enter the lair, keeping the others out of range. No point in even risking the others if Sieben could deal with it. The lair was disappointingly straight forward, a hole in the ground inside a building. Edged with some sort of hardened slime, the golem just walked right through about a hundred feet (30.5m) in it came to a largish chamber with… a tentacle monster?
A big ass Lovecraftian wanna-be brain with octopus legs? Caressing the monsters it pinned to the walls in slime. He actually knew this one, the name wasn’t important, but it was one of the few monsters that fed on souls as well as mental energy.
This was why you didn’t summon shit from other planes to the one you were on. The monster was a much-diluted creature from another world, it was a literal fucking alien. A few dozen or hundred generations from the original horror.
Well, only one thing to do with that bunch of unneeded bullshit. Kill it with fire. He hadn’t had a chance to test the flamethrowers in combat yet, much less an enclosed area. Sieben raised its arm using its off hand to carelessly bat the tentacles coming towards it down. They were weak, no real muscle, and no caustic slime or barbs. As the flames hit causing the monster to recoil, beginning its slow death as it writhed disturbingly and silent.
Now if Sieben had been human those tentacles would be absurdly dangerous, along with what had to be an absolutely deafening psychic scream. But he wasn’t. So after torturing the creature for a few seconds with fire, and burning the captured and broken monsters to death. The golem ran forward and began stabbing the creature to death. The flames were not ideal for dealing with a large monster, even when liberally doused. Once it was dead Eins entered to harvest the cores, from the monsters… that stupid thing didn’t have one, the whole alien thing.
Talk about a waste of time. He did have the golems burn the place to the ground before leaving. According to his reading they could be quite hard to root out, having a tendency to bury their spawn in the mucus. Later in the life cycle the things would take over bodies that still had life but no soul, using them to travel and establish a new nest. Alex had mentioned that summoning creatures not of this world was frowned upon, yea this was why. They were nasty fuckers.
It also meant he had more work to do in the city. He didn’t want to play the hero but getting rid of these things was a must, the whole possibly world ending if they get out of control thing. It wasn’t like it was hard or going out of his way. He also wasn’t committing to hunting them all over just getting rid of those he could find while minding his own business.
~ * ~
Time passed and the looting started to become automatic, Alex was spending less time every day babying his golems. He had expanded his forces so that two separate squads of seven were working in town simultaneously. Acht, Neun, Zehn, and Elf (eight, nine, ten, and eleven) joined the party. More bone golems as well as the two new heavies, Zwei was leading that group. To be completely accurate he had shifted the groups to keep ‘veteran’ golems with the noobs, Acht and Neun had joined Eins. Sechs and Sieben had joined Zwei. He also gave one of the heavies from Eins to Zwei. Keeping the party balanced and preventing a totally new group of golems flounder in the deep end.
The longer Alex stayed in Martes the more he was convinced to remain as is. He still absolutely wanted out of the wasteland, but his skills had been improving dramatically. The static base station where he could just work saw a massive uptick in improvements. His golems as well, continued to get better and better. He was truly grinding, although farming had a serious point too. Something he hadn’t ever had a chance to do since his arrival.
With time to focus on the tasks without interruption, the doing part of his to-do list was progressing nicely. The travel had given him plenty of time to theory craft, and handle administrative nonsense, not so much for the practical part of his skills. At the same time, he was now working on well… anything he saw value in. Always before he was working to a very specific point, Eins then other golems then Aegis then…. Not the case now, pick something and bang it out whether it was improvement to his systems or tweaking the design of his golems. Getting the surround sound working… or getting a proper work area with a forge and smelter going. Adding key items to the rooms so they stored fully equipped and he didn’t have to reset each time. He had finally gotten there, gotten ahead of the game. Now he had a chance to snowball, Alex had gotten more done since coming to this city than at any other point since arriving.
The forge room was one of the harder setups to get right, he had to distribute the heat and prevent toxic gas build up. Filtering the air was easy enough, the heat was a slightly more difficult problem. Though that was due to him putting it in an enclosed space, he wouldn’t have these problems if he placed the thing outside.
The forge itself was run on the same principles as his flamethrowers fire, wind and force magic, all concentrated in a heat containment area. The lack of fuel like charcoal or wood kept the air quality high, same with the smelter.
They mostly operated the same as modern ones just without propane. As for the heat, one he was in a steel box and two he didn’t want to light up like a Christmas tree to anything that saw heat in the frozen hellscape he was in. On top of the climate controls in the room he added highly heat conductive material on the inside and outside of the room. The interior ones would dump the heat into the water between layers, he set these up like cooling pipes although he didn’t have any good fluid to put in them. The exterior would transfer the cold from the outside to the water keeping it cool, on top of the slow but continual conjuring and banishment of the water it should be good enough for now. He wouldn’t be radiating or venting heat into the wasteland.
The major issue was balance as he didn’t want to pull heat from the forge or smelter when it was in progress, but he also didn't want to live in an easy bake oven either. Some loose isolation enchantments solved that, contain most of the heat around these objects and disperse the rest.
A large screw press joined his arsenal allowing him to shape material much quicker and without mana. The golems were bringing in a steady supply of material and he set up workstations from several shops, a hydraulic power hammer that used cores for a power source. Numerous hand and power tools all using cores or specially made magic crystals began to fill the walls and toolboxes. They recharged themselves if the core was properly made, or if he set up stations, sure they had a limited time to use with breaks to recharge but all of these things let him save on mana. Mana was still one of the big sticking points to his crafting, he needed it for everything. Just the ability to shape metal without using his mana pool was a god send.
Of course, his consumption of cores had also gone up, so hunting and harvesting more became a necessity rather than the pastime it used to be. He was once again destroying a fortune in cores to practice with both his magic and the tools he had gotten. It did mean that he had established himself as one of the factions in the city, hunting down and killing off anything that got too close. His golems zeroed in on any manageable concentrations near their location to go on murder sprees and fuel his prodigious consumption of cores.
The raw metals getting melted down into more manageable bricks in the smelter only to then be put in the forge. Since Alex’s experience with forging consisted of a few youtube videos and watching Forged in Fire he frequently had to use mana to correct issues and try again and again. It was somewhat slow but steady, and as the monotonous days passed, he was using less and less mana.
Stone Mountain military base had been on his list of places to go but he was nixing that idea, after getting a look at what was available, he didn’t think it was worth it. He had most of the designs already from various shops in town. Sure, he had to put two and two together but he was getting a good idea of what he could expect to find and while he was impressed. He just couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for it. His arial drones had shown him the area, as well as the sea, both looked like garbage.
First off Stone Mountain was actually occupied by someone. Not human or anything that looked friendly, why was he not surprised. They had golems not many, but he was in no hurry to test that fight out.
Although he was pretty sure they were necromancers and not traditional golem crafters. The few models that appeared to be more traditional had the look of being possessed rather than operating with a core. The place was also a complete and utter ruin, kind of made sense the military would have fought during the fall, and Stone Mountain had enough golems to make that stick even if the controllers died. All it would take was a few persistent commands.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The sea was a bunch of frozen bullshit he wasn’t even going to think about crossing. Solid freaking ice with visible weak spots and places monsters and animals came or cut their way to the surface. He had even seen a shadow under the ice the size of a fucking super carrier. All that and no idea about the water underneath. Alex couldn’t say “yea fuck that” loud enough, or often enough.
This left him a conundrum, well not really. The choice was obvious, he needed to head to the mountains that surrounded the fallen empire. His drones had gotten a look at the mountains, and he would need to be careful.
The mountains made Everest look positively puny. No way they were natural, the fucking things seemed to be miles high. Why was there no weather here? The damn clouds were lower than the mountain tops, a modern airplane not set for sub orbital flight, might be able to fly higher. That’s right, the tops looked to be far higher than thirty thousand feet, with monsters. Big ones. The drone was extremely far away and he could still see some of them including ‘clouds’ that indicated a high concentration of smaller monsters. Just happily flying about. All Alex could think was “Seriously, fuck this place”.
He doubted he could climb over them, even without the monsters. He wanted nothing to do with going through them, he didn’t even want to think about the life-long project of trying to tunnel. He wasn’t going to discount the possibility of some bastard underground abominations either. That left him only the option of heading east, hope there was a pass or tunnel, maybe a canyon/ valley carved by a river.
He figured his best bet was to see where the river that was being diverted led. That and the mountains on the maps he had appeared to have two mountain ranges running together, tapering off into a somewhat narrow funnel of significantly lower altitude. At the same time that second option was a bit hit or miss as the maps didn’t show mountains that tall in the first place. The lack of apparent roadways or infrastructure going over under or around most of the borders of the empire, kind of made getting his hopes up silly. It looked like the main access was through the east, to the rest of the continent.
It was a choice between risking the ice sea and hoping to be able to walk around the mountainous border, that did not account for the likelihood of needing an actual ship at some point. Risking the hostile environment that was water or staying on land where he was less limited. Not much of a choice.
It might be possible to cobble together some sort of airship, again he doubted he could defend it and the consequences of said airship failing were rather drastic. Possibly survivable but not a good option, he was damn sure he wasn’t able to build something that could go over these stupidly tall mountains. Flying over the ocean was a maybe, but that increased the likelihood of a failure being fatal.
Magic and golems made tunneling or cutting though cave systems maybe doable, very long-term option that one, without blasting progress would be measured in feet rather than miles. Mountains, even normal mountain ranges, being geological features measured in dozens of miles wide at least. He doubted that these mountains were an exception. That also excluded any magical bullshit he might run into, including but not limited to stone he just couldn’t get through.
Alex just wanted out, going over and winding through a mountain range was doable. If people had survived and built a civilization it was likely to be in the more temperate zones, and where other kingdoms/nations had existed in the past. If he followed the existing infrastructure out of the wastelands, he had decent chances of finding something that resembled a more comfortable land at least.
This long and overly in-depth analysis ran in his head, he checked multiple time his maps and histories. Even looking at what little scientific information he had in his books for something he missed. Not finding anything that changed said analysis, he made up his mind.
Alex would kill off the dimensional mind horrors and start his journey east towards the low point in the mountains. The hostile force he planned to avoid, well they needed to get the hell out of his way. The option to stealth through was only partially feasible. If he got caught part-way he would be deep behind enemy lines and surrounded. Better to disrupt and eliminate those he encountered.
The second problem these assholes produced was the changes to the mana of the regions they were in. He needed a method to clean up and protect himself from both an increase in negative mana as well as the toxic interdimensional crap they were making with items like the one found in Three Groves. Nilfstrum had a few ways to deal with this, they usually filtered it. Doing the reverse of what the jewel he stole did, pull in the negative mana and let it combine and degrade into neutral mana. The toxic crap, needed to be refined somehow to make part of the world. That was mostly a matter of isolating it and speeding up the degradation.
Alex would think on it, having been ‘born’ in this hostile mana environment and constantly running healing spells he was largely unaffected. How he would do this or if anything he did would work was partially irrelevant. He would get data and run some studies and experiments, he himself had little to fear for now. Basic shielding was already doable if less reliable than he would like.
For the immediate moment the gains he made by staying in place were too great to ignore. He would milk this place for as much ‘XP’ as he could. Once he slowed down or stopped making easy gains, then he would join the fight in Aegis. Finish off the opposition here and head out. Crush or avoid anything that was in his way, while looking for a ‘safe’ path.
He needed to get at least some space magic figured out first. He was running out of storage, as preposterous as that was, he doubted that the fights against this opposition would be as easy as mowing down dregs and beastlings. He would lose golems and have to repair and replace them.
The next thing was getting those generalist cores he had been sitting on up and running they would help him in the forge and material handling, get some mass production up and running. He decided on medium frames, the extra muscle would help out. They didn’t need to be bulky to hammer away on the oversized anvil, or in the presses. Until he got the generator thing figured out and got some of the more advanced machinery up and running, letting some tireless golems do grunt work. All without degrading his combat forces was the biggest time saver he had. Maybe use them to carve out the preforms of the enchantments. That just meant he needed to shape and enchant the cores, or with a large enough independent mana source he might be able to use them to help. Another long-term plan though. Cracking his knuckles, and his neck he got to work. Letting the totally not a waste of time music fill the work area at earsplitting levels.
~ * ~
Three heavies burst into a courtyard filled with beastlings, crashing through a brick wall and ignoring the collapse they caused, lashing out at any that came close. They were followed by two metal golems and five made of bone. The heavies crushed any organized resistance or large groups, meanwhile the bone golems spread out staying to the outskirts picking of the stragglers and those trying to flee. The two other metal golems stayed near the heavies, efficiently butchering those lucky enough to survive the passing of the massive war machines.
On the other side of the once beautiful city of Martes a similar scene was playing out as an identical force crushed the dregs in their stronghold.
It didn’t matter what was thrown at these invaders as both species tried desperately to hold the line. Nothing worked. Their champions and war leaders fell to the cold calculating attacks, those who tried to rally some defense away from the invaders were thrown from their feet as lethal projectiles came from unseen snipers.
Those snipers leveled arms that resembled crossbows, firing a stone projectile in the .75 caliber range enchanted to remain strong until it left the barrel then to shatter after it penetrated. Shots fired from hundreds of meters away. The wounds left behind were gaping, bloody messes.
Alex inside Aegis stood on a rooftop between the compounds, a few golem bodyguards nearby. He was controlling the snipers from inside as well as the surveillance golems. The attacking force was operating independently. Another year had passed. He had gotten almost all the kinks in his systems ironed out.
For a while he toyed with the idea of non-human golems, even had the designs ready. But archers were too valuable and with a little tweaking they remained able to fight in melee. Obviously, he had figured out the ranged weapons a steel crossbow (semi repeating to be exact), firing a bullet rather than a bolt. A dog golem next to the sniper crushed stone and created more ammo, for when the onboard stores ran out. Muching happily on dirt, debris, and stones, an internal compartment compacted the material and threw more of his half assed enchantments on the results. A few dozen rounds of specialty ammo made of metal for armor penetration, or terrain destruction (HE and AP). They weren’t machine guns, but they would do.
He was ready to move on from Martes, once he was done here, only the invaders would remain. Crude but effective mana and psychic detectors had rooted out the brain tentacle things, including a good number of larval stage walkers in mindless hosts. For different forces that would have been the highlight of the fight. When golems were able to just ignore everything the alien did and beat it to death before purging its lair with fire, they became an afterthought.
Alex would kill of the majority of the dregs and beastlings, with this final blow. They had already been severely curtailed by his relentless harvesting, giving most of the city up to his ‘control’. Running when they spotted the hunters coming for them, cowering in their hideouts. While he wasn’t willing to hunt them down to the last the destruction might be totally unrecoverable for the creatures. Other monsters were moving in, not in large enough numbers for him to bother hunting them down but more than enough to be stiff competition when the dominant forces were broken.
The only remaining opposition once he was done here were the invaders and their fish. He had gotten a good look at them, a mix of gorilla-like monsters and fat upright pigs. Ok they resembled boars more than pigs. Still pigs, ugly faces and tusks stiff wiry fur. It was their organization that made him cautious, as well as the superior equipment. They had magic users as well, nothing too scary yet. Probably apprentice shamans or some such. As for the gear, he doubted they made it themselves. The difference in construction was too great, they were better than beastlings or dregs but not at the level he was seeing.
This force had been slowly subsuming the local population, gaining more and more ground. Using the amphibians like fodder, due to the clearly stunning reproductive cycle and short growth period. His mana detectors also showed the beginnings of the corrupt mana, being spread.
That was what convinced him to delete the invading outpost more than anything else. Alex was tempted to move on, wash his hands of the whole thing. However, these shitheads just had to fuck with shit right where he was standing. The last thing Alex wanted was for the wasteland to become more toxic and dangerous, especially while he was stuck here. Who wanted to deal with magical radiation?
The locals gave this group a wide berth, if they had actively and effectively resisted, he would have left well enough alone. Definitely not the case. Once the dregs and beastling were destroyed he would loot the areas and launch an all-out attack on the invaders.
Snipers constantly picking away at their numbers, full packs of wolves ambushing patrols. Roving death squads of golems driving them into their stronghold. All before he broke down the doors and burned them out. Then he would take the items they were using for study and probably destruction, if he couldn’t repurpose them.
The fights at the strongholds currently under assault would take a while, that was just a numbers game, it took time to kill thousands of monsters even if the outcome was never in doubt. The continual and massive improvement to his golems and designs granted by this city showed their worth.
He still hadn’t used any fancy fantasy materials, much to his inner nerd’s annoyance, but his enchantments had become much more refined, cohesive, and efficient. He still vastly overengineered his core fighting force, giving them a just stupid surplus of power from extra cores. He had also gotten to the point of working with more powerful cores as a starting point, replacing some of the linked cores being used. They were crude combat cores much like the one powering Aegis, it was possible to very slowly grind away and refine them into better versions while in use. Not cost effective in most cases but once he found out about the possibility, he immediately implemented it on any single core golem he had. Incredibly slow but noticeable progression, yes please. It was not ultimately a better option than simply using better material in the first place, but he wasn’t at the point where that was an option.
The other major change was the costly (in terms of power) enchantments to prevent magical disruption of active enchantments. The magical equivalent to the battle between ECM and ECCM (electronic counter measures and electronic counter-counter measures) one tried to disrupt and the other tried to disrupt the disruption. Circular logic, but it made him more confident of dealing with mages and enchantments meant to mess with enchanted items like his golems. It was the biggest worry he had for his golems; he was increasing their resistance to effects beyond the physical. That part they had down quite well.
~ * ~
As the battles at the strongholds died down Alex had his snipers reposition for the attacks on the invaders. With the dominance he had of the city it was easy to move around, and the constant reconnaissance made it child’s play to pick spots to snipe from. Then it was only a matter of time until patrols came under fire. Snipers moved and coordinated to take advantage of the enemy taking cover. Rinse and repeat until the main forces arrived to begin the culling.
Those locations where the enemy were holed up would come under fire, boxing them in waiting for his forces to clear them out. The dozen ranged units and their attached support spread out and began their work.
Alex was definitely done with this city; it was once again time to move on. Just had to finish these annoyances off. Then he would be back on the road, this time using the maps he had plus the magic detectors to locate and remove the problematic jewels. At least until he had a hard counter for that crap. The negative mana of the wastelands didn’t bother him, but he doubted that held true for the corrupt bullshit they pumped out. At least not in the quantities he expected from long term saturation.
He would probably be fine if he remained in his suit, he had no idea what it would do to his golems in the long run. The cores pulled in ambient mana as part of their process, if they pulled in mana basically tailor made to fuck with the ‘natural’ process… too risky. A hard counter was needed, a method to utterly invalidate what was happening. He was looking into both angles, one to protect his golems and himself using resistance, the other to clean that crap up. Doing both was his new goal, on top of killing off the a-holes spreading it around. The miasma (what he was calling the corrupted mana) was just too off, these guys hadn’t been in Martes all that long and he could already see some of the impact. Monster behavior changed, new variants popped up, shit mutated and the creatures died off or changed, birth rates altered. The very fabric of reality in the area felt different, becoming hostile and creepy.
It was different from Three Groves; at a guess these guys were just pumping out as much as possible and not sending the majority off to another location. Or they had more/better jewels making the miasma become this dense. Alex had begun a very careful study of the gem he stole, just to deal with what was going on.
He didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Soooo… these fuckers needed to die.
While his forces cleared out the last of the dregs and beastlings, and other forces moved to put pressure on the invaders. He pulled up some more designs to work on while he kept an eye on the proceedings. The plan of attack was already complete, he had done it before beginning this operation, and had altered it as the battle was ongoing. His storage problem would be solved if he took the time. Alex could now make crude storage devices, small ones from his perspective only the size of shipping containers or an eighteen-wheeler. But he could make as many as he needed, if he took the time.
Since his other devices were still in use, he confined himself to making only a hundred or so, the process was time consuming at best with his storage capacity he preferred to spend time working on more immediately use items. Miniscule compared to the loot a city might offer up, he mostly used these for the bodies his golems created.
On a side note, the riverbed was becoming rather pungent as he dumped the useless meat and organs there, this cleared out several of the larger devices. Along with his efforts to consolidate material into smaller packages with the smelter. The bodies would be collected, harvested and then dumped. He wasn’t going to eat monster meat, though he kept some as bait. The literal mounds now filling the riverbed were just a bit excessive even for a good hoarding gamer with functionally limitless inventory. Alex was even considering just taking cores in the future as he had shitloads of bone and hide, more than he could ever see using to be honest, but crafting material was crafting material.
He equipped the pack leaders and some of his flying drones with his knock off storage items for convenient and safe looting, they never had anything of real value in them aside from monster cores. If he lost them, he would either recover it or make more, and the now tens of thousands of cores he had piled in his inventory made him utterly indifferent to the loss of even a few dozen or hundreds of cores with similar value.
Much like the beastlings in Trenton the fighting and killing had become a chore, the harvesting was a massive pain in the ass as well as a time sink. It had taken weeks to see appreciable progress, the only good part was that he could direct his golems to work on other things while he did, and later hand the task off to golems as well.
Currently he tended to have between 10-15 golems under his direct control and supervision at a time, he was used to it and despite the rather massive leaps he still didn’t have perfect control using his systems. He had no plans to change that, the systems were at the point that continuing to try and improve them brought seriously diminishing returns. Most of the things he wanted were in place, a few of them hadn’t even been used. He thought he wanted them, had gone through the misery of programming it in and debugging afterwards only to realize that he was never going to use it. The level of micro required was too high, his golems could navigate, fight, and harvest most things with a simple command.
For everything else he had his prodigious control to just take command and do whatever it was manually, usually without affecting whatever else was going on.