Novel Full Chapter 550 - A New Start - Setting Up His Interface
"We have only been holding out thanks to the magic towers and their attacks being limited to night." Pelaros continued.
"The latter gave us enough time to repair our defenses and refill the magic tower's power somewhat. However, each day we lose more and our morale drops just a bit more. Keeping order is becoming near impossible. Many want to abandon the city, but that..."
Pelaros clenched his fist, abandoning Kynigo meant opening another path into the kingdom. Sacrificing countless villages and towns to the undead, allowing them to grow their numbers tenfold.
Nodding, Eldrian understood. But he still didn't have the answer that he was looking for. "What happened with the forts, with Vivian's father."
"Commander Arthur..." Pelaros sighed, that had been a massive loss to them all, "They came in force. Escaping the scouts' detection they assaulted the fort at night. Their spells rained down on the fort before the soldiers even knew what was going on."
"Arthur... He rushed to the front along with his trusted generals. They stalled the undead outside the walls. Giving time to the soldiers to regroup, however, it was too late. All they could manage was to retreat, and barely at that..." Pelaros paused, the true part that haunted Vivian was not just this.
"I heard that Vivian was there when it all happened... She was dragged away as her father fought and died."
'Fucking hell, no wonder she's changed.' Eldrian cursed and tried to think of what to do from here, however, Pelaros's next words made him realize that he didn't have time to daydream up a plan.
"We only have about twenty minutes before nightfall." Pelaros sighed as he said this, knowing that there was never a missed day.
"You mean... Then let's go!" Eldrian jumped up and called up his interface, or tried to.
[Resurection cost: 4 levels | Level 35 -> Level 31 <message cost 100XP -> Level 30>]
'Well that is fucking wonderful,' Eldrian sighed as the message effectively cost him another level due to the resurrection resetting his XP to zero out of the required 124M.
To the next level down he had 62.208M XP, so he continued to try and fiddle with the interface.
[Interface construction awaiting confirmation <message cost 10 XP>, confirmation needed <cost 200XP>]
'Sure, let's do this quick.' Eldrian replied, not entirely sure how this worked. So he simply focused on 'clicking' the confirmation button. When he did he lost another 200XP and got a plethora of options.
There was even quite graciously a template for him, which he activated at the cost of one million XP. This gave him the standard player interface, more or less. He still needed to go and activate the functionality, but that could wait.
'Let's see if this works, Map!'
[Map function inactive <activate for 200k XP?>] Nodding Eldrian confirmed activation and called up the map, it had an active draining cost of 20XP each day, which was just the minimum. Functions that could be activated would increase it even more. No functions could decrease the cost.
[Map exploration activated <cost 500k XP>, <drain +50XP per day>]
[Map ally and enemy set- Taurus citizens, Phallos citizens, Ganalin Dwarves - allies. All others - enemies.]
[Map location marker activate <Cost 1XP per identity - Total cost 55M XP>, <drain 5.5k per day>]
'Oh shit! That's too much. Kynigo region markers...'
[Local location marker (Kynigo region) <Total cost 3M XP>, <drain 300XP/d>]
'Still a ton, but sure.' Confirming the action, Eldrian's map suddenly sprang up with blue dots (the color he had chosen for allies) and red dots for enemies outside of the city, everywhere.
It was actually quite overwhelming, so he deactivated the region and instead activated it for the city and for a distance radius of 100km from his location. Which was still plenty and far too much, he would tune it later.
This was just fiddling with what was shown and didn't alter the drain nor cost anything new. He also activated <update>, should he move out of the Kynigo region, for now, he had set the cost as auto-accept cost.
With this, he could clearly see that a large army, probably around a hundred thousand in total undeads, was marching towards Kynigo already.
The numbers were ridiculous, Kynigo after all only had between half a million and a million people (Taurus cities are far less densely populated compared to human kingdoms).
The city's fighting force -back when all the soldiers were here- would have been about equal. But with how things stood Kynigo only had around a fifth of the soldiers left. Roughly speaking, Eldrian was unsure if there was a function to give him numbers but he couldn't dive too deeply into it. And besides, it wouldn't help even if he could.
The situation was dire, that much was clear. In terms of high Tiered soldiers, Eldrian felt that the disparity would be even larger.
'Next; notifications.' Eldrian cleared his mind and headed to that function and did a few quick modifications, making a new function where all things he observed would be logged and archived.
This way he could keep his own account of all the enemies he encountered and analyze things later for similar encounters.
By the end of everything, he had used about seven million XP and would have a drain of 700XP each day.
As he finished this he and Pelaros had arrived at the inner walls facing south, towards Pyknos Forest. Abandoned fields in view, and on the horizon the outer walls could be seen. Abandoned, destroyed, shells of what they were.
A black horde was slowly moving over the abandoned walls in the horizon, blotting out the land and walls alike.
Not knowing what to say or ask, Eldrian instead prepared for war. He equipped all his armor and took out Crysoi while looking at the horde of undead marching towards them. As he waited, he wondered if he might be able to use the map to identify them.
[Identification limited to Tier, use - Observe - to identify. Cost will be 500 XP per identification. <Activation cost 1M XP>, <drain 100XP per day>]
'Not ideal, but sure activate.' Eldrian made sure that it wasn't on auto-identify, since that would surely render him without XP in seconds. Instead, he manually concentrated on a few of the more organized sections and let those be identified.
He stopped doing this after a few activations. Realizing that the cost was too much to use arbitrarily. Getting random skeleton and zombie stats was not worth the XP cost.
Though, he did gain a few stats of random Tier 5 vampires. Probably the commanders of groups of undead. Those did help him to get a feel for the danger that the enemy represented, so it wasn't a total waste.
Pelaros had long since left to take command of things, leaving Eldrian who had been surprisingly quiet during their walk alone on the inner walls.
It was clear why the outer walls had been abandoned, they were never meant to be the line of defense for a siege. They were after all out of reach of the magic towers. No, their purpose was to secure the fields and domesticated animals from random monsters.
After a few minutes, the horde came to a stop just beyond the reach of the magic towers, 1.6km (1mi) from the walls.
Ceph landed next to Eldrian as the horde started moving to attack from out of the tower's reach. Currently, Ceph was in a mix of his Alicorn and elf forms, black wings with emerald feathers sprung from his back while at his side he had what Eldrian assumed was weapons gifted by his parents.
"How does this normally go?" Eldrian asked while looking at the thousands of undead scrambling in the distance. Looking like little more than ants.
AN: A big thank you to everyone who continues to read and support the story on WN.