Bendan and his squad reached the border between the Luon’s and Gizmo’s terrain and quickly disperse in several directions scouring out Gizmo’s region for hidden surprises.

Luon had already gotten the general area of where Gizmo’s headquarters was with his first initial falcon scout, but it had already been over 15 minutes since he had last had any information on Gizmo’s side.

To his surprise Gizmo did not have any tricks regarding terrain manipulation around his base, Luon’s forces encircled Gizmo’s base at a distance. The amount of vision supplied to Luon on the minimap covered every single blemish of darkness except for the location of Gizmo’s base.

The longer Luon took, the more Gizmo had a chance at recovering his losses at the same time. If Luon were to rush a siege, it might cause more casualties for his side instead.

From what Luon can see without approaching too close to Gizmo’s base was a small wall about a meter high and behind it was several muscular green creatures about 2 to 3 meters tall holding large pieces of metallic materials. A giant shield even more massive in size as it took about 2-3 of these Orcs to lift against the wall.

Unluckily for Luon the base placement only made the available attacking positions fan about 180 degrees all around. Only a frontal attack on an open forestless clearing can be made on the ground.

Luon decided to test the waters out a bit, he arranged Bendan and the other 2 Qi Cultivators to launch a volley of Qi Energy Slashes towards Gizmo’s base at those orcs holding the large shields.

As expected Gizmo was prepared this time, he had summoned more Elven Mages channeling barrier magic to block the Qi attacks. If it was a surprise attack, it might have worked but in an area where the attacks can be plainly be spotted before impact caused the effect to drop.

Ignoring the recovering Qi cultivators, he sent a small squad of robotic soldiers who used their guns to spray bullets at the enemy, but the shots stopped at the wall showing no signs of wear.

Taking the opportunity where the robots were shooting the base a volley of arrows came raining above onto the group. Luon could only silent retreat his units to reduce the number of damages dealt.

Luon also tried to do an airdrop with the helicopter from above. He used explosives and robots in hopes to gain an advantage but mysteriously the projectile was pushed by a force of wind and landed on the outer perimeter.

This base was a big turtle shell from the sky, and on the ground, it was almost impenetrable. Big shields and magical barriers, armed with archers and wind magic there was no way to win this match safely.

“Hey, Luon, it times like this you should consider just breaking through with force,” Bendan recommended.

Luon thought about it for a second, if he summoned an ogre those elven mages would immobilize it and whittle it down with arrows. If he summoned a large group of heavy units to start a brawl with Gizmo’s warriors, he knew that his robots had no real chance against legitimate warriors thus making his actual unit count much smaller than Gizmo’s.

To do a proper siege, it was well known to have more numbers than the defending side.

He thought about it really hard and decided to start building a significant amount of artillery and turrets, Luon bunkered them down outside of Gizmo’s base. After a few minutes, Gizmo’s base was under non-stop heavy fire forcing the mages to work around the clock blocking most of the heavy projectiles and diverting a portion of them with wind magic.

...

The orcs bore the brunt of the attack with the heavy shields, in exchange for Luon who was dropping resources like he was burning money the orcs and elves began to tire.

Gizmo was forced to summon more and more orcs and elves to cover the positions he was lacking, he smiled as he rotated the tired ones out with fresh ones. As long as Luon keeps this up, he would have a massive army by the end of the assault.

Unluckily for him, a giant beam came decimating the magically constructed barriers and a large chunk of his orcs and elves.

“What was that?!?” questioned Gizmo as he was too busy arranging his troops around to notice a change in Luon’s forces.

In the middle of the tabletop was a frighteningly large monstrosity, something he didn’t expect Luon to use since he had been dropping money like a gambling addict who never won anything.

Using the tabletop map, he analyzed the beast to find out what it was.

[Flare Dragon]

[Race: Dragon]

[Combat Level: 55]

[Racial Skills: Dragon’s Might, Dragon’s Regeneration]

[Active Skills: Flare Blast, Charge, Rest, Subduing Wave]

[The most fragile and weakest type of fully grown dragons around they rely on their roar ability to knock their prey out cold before eating their meals. They specialize in long-range attacks and spend most of the time sleeping and conserving their energy reserves. Ranked number one for being the laziest dragons around. This dragon is infamous among the community of dragon hunters as the easiest dragon to hunt.]

Gizmo was shocked, a dragon even if it was the weakest was still a dragon.

Gizmo checked the catalog prices for dragons to find it near the bottom beside baby dragons. It costs about 10 minutes of resources.

Gizmo was shocked to find out that Luon was able to save that much with all the firepower he was unleashing.

With another roar, a group of orcs and elves were decimated once again. If this keeps up, Gizmo was bound to lose. He can only hope that with his current forces he can do an all-out charge against Luon’s fortification and come out victorious.

With that in mind before the dragon can shoot again, he used all the remaining points to buy a group of heavy cavalry, wolves, any mobile unit that was able to charge recklessly into Luon’s formation. He had a few points left, and with it, he bought a group of fast rabbits and chickens to hopefully be used to distract Luon’s soldiers even just for a second.

With his remaining forces, Gizmo got up with a rifle in hand he led the charge towards Luon’s forces.

Each and every single unit he had were shot down quickly as rains of bullet came from the Gatling gun placements in front of the artillery.

By the time Gizmo and his remaining men reached Luon’s side, there were only a few remaining. His desperate attack had just eliminated a small segment of Luon’s forces. Gizmo finally realizes why there was such a huge discrepancy on resources. Self-construction, Gizmo had realized it too late, if only he knew earlier, he could have turned this game around.

It was a complete victory for Luon.

...

After the match at Varz, Luon and the others headed back to the dorm room.

“Hahaha, Gizmo I bet you didn’t expect that we would outdo you in resources by constructing everything we need at low costs did you?” Bendan laughs.

“I must admit hiring human workers to construct war resources is quite a unique perspective, but it’s not like it hasn’t been done before. It’s just really unpopular. I didn’t expect such an outcome mainly because I was overconfident and didn’t send an early scout to catch it. And the dragon just decimated my plans at the end.” Gizmo said depressingly.

Hearing Gizmo remarks, Luon was intrigued. Unpopular? Why wasn’t construction used in battles? By using construction methods instead of summoning a helicopter, he could have spent about a tenth of the original cost manually crafting it. With these thoughts, Luon pressed Gizmo onwards to answer his questions.

“Because it’s not realistic, in no way can you start a battle at the same time construct buildings, vehicles, and robotic soldiers. Not only that but where would you have the excess resources to do all of that? Unless you go to the other Solar systems to stack materials in a bunch of intraspatial bags, there's no way to get it for cheap in real life.” Gizmo said.

Gizmo was right on this point, it was impossible to do it in reality and engineers shouldn’t be on the battlefield in the first place.

“Nevertheless you won fair and square, but your strategy has many flaws to it. If I had summoned only a few archers to disable your scouts and sent one of my own I could have waited about 5 minutes before sending a giant ogre to devastate and rush your Crypt of Heroes.” Gizmo continued.

Hearing his words Luon frown because his strategy did indeed have many flaws, although it was something he had thought of on the spot it didn’t change the fact that it only worked in particular situations.

He thought that if Gizmo had summoned a monstrosity how would he counter it? If he had a full team of soldiers, then the 4 of them can stall or stop the ogre rush strategy. In the end, he was still green, this was his first time using the commander system in the war game simulation after all.

Gizmo seeing the changing expression on Luon’s face patted his shoulder waking him up from his pondering state.

Gizmo yawned and walked pass Luon towards his room and said, “Don’t worry about it too much, in tomorrow’s Commander class I’ll take the lead so just get some rest and think about your ideal strategy. In my eyes, your commanding ability is top-notch but with the different types of strategies, layouts, and unit compositions anything can change on the battlefield. There's quite a lot of weirdos who focus on rush and cheese strategies.”

“That’s right the simplest thing to do is eat, sleep, and fight. Hahaha, if you were like me such meaningless study in strategy is pointless.” Bendan bellowed as he ate a large chicken wing while walking towards his room from the kitchen.

Tyron only nodded at Luon and went to his own room.

Left alone in the living room Luon after pondering a bit about the war system decided to forgo further thoughts. A strategy isn’t something that pops out overnight and more importantly to be a commander you need to have soldiers, he wasn’t one right now, so it's a pointless endeavor at the moment. It was more important to read up the cultivation manuals and begin body tempering to create the ultimate body to match his peerless skills.

He entered his room and shut the door behind him. The room was small, and there wasn’t much too it. Just a simple metallic bed with some simple engravings and a white table with a slick and elegantly flat design.

To start cultivating a body tempering technique he had cleared the room a bit pushing the bed and table to one side of the room.

He pulled out the loot he got today and only thought which should I start with first?