Number One Commander - Chapter 72

The match almost immediately started. There were no singing divas to delay it, or time required to strategize based on their opponent. Luon thought there was no need to delay the inevitable by doing some small talk at the start.

They have no information on how powerful Arisa and her team was, on the other hand, Arisa would instead not ponder on what tricks Luon had in store for her.

Her policy was to straight up beat her opponents down by skillfully out-maneuvering their opponents who were also something that Luon had also done.

Soldiers played an important role in this battle, but not as important as the commander.

The match got underway as the Crypt of Heroes began to generate resources, Luon was using his single ramp with high cliffs desert field while Arisa was using a complicated field with many hills, cliffs, and ramps in a stone region.

Her field did not appear natural as the rocks were perfectly formed as if God had personally carved the land for humans to reside in.

For the first few minutes, both Arisa and Luon created scraps and robots for Shizuka and Thomas to toy around with.

Luon thought that if something were to determine the outcome of the match, it would be the value of the engineer’s constructed units.

Sending Tyron to scout their opponents, Luon and Thomas began to build various types of buildings. A factory to create units and workers, a wall for defense, defensive turrets, and a generator to convert natural mana into electricity to maintain the robotic units energy levels.

The factory continued to produce workers as more and more factories were produced, Luon had also created several scouting drones to cover his side of the map, vision is a crucial factor after all.

At this point, Tyron had reported that he had found their opponents base and to no surprise, they were doing something similar to what Luon’s team was doing.

Just as he continued to receive information from Tyron, an explosion came from one of their core facilities, wondering what had happened Luon suddenly recalled something.

‘Invisibility!’ he was so busy creating workers and other units that he had forgotten about Kiri Zen’s natural ability. Luon had yet created a system to detect invisible units yet, and now Kiri was punishing him for his lack of attentiveness.

To her offensive assault, Luon began to construct several detectors which allowed them to see invisible units based on many factors such as mana, wind, heat, and scent. He assigned Bendan with the task of searching for Kiri who continued to harass their base in many ways such as destroying workers.

Hearing the news over the team chat Tyron had also begun to harass Arisa’s base by attacking her worker units.

Although he did not have the invisibility spell that Kiri had, he was able to effectively deal a significant amount of damage with Luon’s invisibility tool and his range attacks.

If he could effectively eliminate Shizuka the tides of the battle would easily be turned, but when he found her, she was sealed inside a machine and was operating all the robots they had from inside.

Unlike Luon who had other humans operate robots remotely, Shizuka had connected them all with her computer system and operated it manually by herself. Her computer screen displayed an eagle eye view of their base as she designates robots to construct robots from her base.

Hearing this Luon told Tyron to somehow disconnect the connection by destroying parts of the building.

How was he supposed to blow things up with an arrow and a bow? Luon’s command was unreasonable, yet he knew the importance of such a task.

Wandering around a bit, Tyron managed to secretly disable a worker and set it next to an antenna shaped object.

As Tyron got to work dismantling the robot to set it to explode without him dying alongside it, he heard a siren and various machinery headed towards his position.

An army of robots soon surrounded him despite being invisible, he then began to wonder, ‘How did they find me?’

His question was answered as Belle and Keyral arrived before him. Belle said, “Why we got a little guest here, don’t we? It’s no use to use your invisibility to hide, Shizuka gave us a detector to find you. Although the range is a little small, Shizuka managed to find you after you eliminated one of her robots and doing some little tricks over here. So stay still, and we’ll give you a swift death.”

With her NG-Arms equipped, she pointed her rifle towards Tyron, and he quickly equipped his NG-Arms to escape. However, just before he was able to launch himself out of the situation, his NG-Arms suddenly stopped working.

Belle looked at him like an idiot as she said, “Did you think we’d let you fly out? We’ve set a restrictive field that would disable all electronics without a special mana encrypted tag. It can’t do much about small devices like bombs and rifles, but its effective enough to disable your NG-Arms.”

Tyron wasn’t able to escape, invisibility and flight were disabled if he had Zythos’ teleportation tool he might be able to survive this. However, such luxury is something he was unable to obtain.

Lowering his guard a little Belle smiled thinking that Tyron had given up, but his expression didn’t have that same intent. Grabbing the robot and charging his mana inside of the reactor the energy readings in his area began to rise.

“Wha- robots shoot him!” cried Belle.

If Tyron managed to disable their communications tower, then they would significantly fall behind. However, before they were able to shoot Keyral yelled, ”Stop! Don’t shoot.”

The robots who rose their rifles lowered them upon her command, all of the robots were commanded by Shizuka. However, on-site decisions were assigned to each of their soldiers. There was no hierarchy of the commands as they followed the last order said.

Belle turned to Keyral and said, “What? Are you just going to let him blow it up? We’re going to fall behind if he does it.”

Keyral shook her head at her response as she said, “It can’t be helped, although he would do us a favor by killing himself there’s nothing we can do to stop it. If anything we shouldn’t add any fuel to the fire by aimlessly shooting at him like this. It would do more harm than good. Also…”

Keyral gave a sly smile as she continued, “I already told Shizuka about the situation, she said all we have to do is receive the parts she’s making the robots do and assemble them. According to her estimates, it may take around 3-5 minutes to set the system back up.”

An explosion resonated throughout the surroundings, with Tyron’s effort he was able to delay the robotics facility by several minutes giving Luon some more time to develop his base, that is without Kiri harassing them.

Bendan who was chasing after Kiri was mad, her swift and tricky movements confused him to the point where he had lost track of her several times already. Without the help of the robots, he would have lost her already. She traveled around the base as if she had owned it. It was to the point where she was better than Bendan in regards to directions despite the fact he had a map.

The first time he found her in the base was when she was assassinating the human workers that were used to control the robots remotely, hearing the cry of unjust harm happening to them he hurried over and managed to repel her.

As she continued to run dodging her pursuers, she tossed several explosives dealing as much damage as possible.Just as she was about to exit the base, a sword flew out of nowhere accurately impaling her into a building. Coughing blood due to the attack she looked towards the direction she was attacked from, and there she saw Luon who wasn’t at the commander table.

Luon taking out another sword said to her, “Rather than letting you continue to reign havoc in our base over and over again, it’s probably better to take you down now while we still have the chance.”

Kiri laughed as she said, “I’m honored that you think that way. However…”

She then pulled out an explosive and said, “I won’t let you easily kill me like this.”

Pressing the button on device nothing happened, she had a dumbfounded face as Luon simply said, “The sword I had impaled you with launches a miniature EMP field, disabling all electronics within less than a hundred meters.”

“You… why would you use this if there was a factory right beside me? You would waste all the materials used for this building!” said Kiri.

Luon gave a sly smile as he said, “Well… I made one factory too many, so it didn’t matter that much.”

Dumbfounded by her response, she was soon eliminated by Bendan who had caught up.

Both teams had lost one member, and the damage that they had caused was more or less equal.

Shizuka was forced to exit the building to manually direct the robots while Luon had to summon more human workers to control more robots, and needed to fix several spots that Kiri had bombed.

As the harassment had ended, Luon sat on the commander table and sent 12 robotic panthers armed with rifles attached to harass Arisa’s base. Traveling over the desert field, the panthers arrived in Arisa’s region unharmed as they continued to scout the region in groups of 3.

Just as they passed a particular corner a series of bullets ambushed one of the groups from behind the wall, the other panthers moved around to corner their enemy but found themselves surrounded with more enemies. Before Luon lost his last panther, one of the human pilots told him that he saw an aerial drone.

Realizing that he lacked vision compared to their opponents he decided it was time to reveal the Farsight Mask. Putting in on his face Luon looked very intimidating, he felt like he was a superhero, but the crowd didn’t think so. With only his face covered he looked rather stupid, they thought it was similar to how there once was a hero who only wore a pair of underwear on their head, at least this mask was better.

Spawning several magical owls, he sent them over to scout various regions, one over his main force, one in his region and another in his opponent’s region. He was afraid that they had something to kill them, so he tested the waters by sending one more to scout what Arisa was doing.

Fortunately, Arisa didn’t seem to have prepared for it as he managed to find her sitting beside two tables. One which was used to summon things from the Crypt of Heroes, the other was a computer with a mouse and keyboard set up. The screen displayed the battlefield, and he saw that Arisa was sending units over to his base with a simple mouse click.

‘Wow, now that’s just not fair!’ Thought Luon. Unlike Arisa, he had to manually command the human pilots to go where he wanted them to. He had to designate a chain of commands to manipulate his troops efficiently, and now all Arisa had to do was a simple mouse click? How unfair the situation was! However, with Luon’s set up, the pilots would operate better than the robots Arisa had, only her numbers were more numerous than his own.

Just as the owl was about to leave Arisa’s suddenly said, “Peeking on a lady from a long distance, are you perchance into voyeurism? How about I fix that little habit up for you.”

A wave of dark red mana wrapped around the owl as it desperately cried out, the magical owl died from her attack.

Luon was not disappointed that he had lost vision of her base. Instead, he was fortunate he managed to receive information about her attack, commanding his squad the human captains Luon had assigned as he sent out the army.

Armed in several vehicles was an army of humanoid robots they departed and intercepted their opponents.

With the expert commanding ability of both Arisa and Luon, the battle had reached a stalemate.

As the battle continued, Arisa’s screen suddenly turned black as she yelled, “Shizuka quick! What happened the camera went out.”

Shizuka replied, “Luon must have shot it down with an air unit, I guess the battle just went up one level higher, ours is coming out just now, however, with these circumstances, there is a high chance we’ll lose all those ground units.”

Indeed Luon had begun to create flying units, from the ground to air the difference between Arisa and Luon’s units began to reveal itself. Instead of consistently focusing on commanding he also worked on the production side by determining what kind of units they needed at the moment. Human controlled warriors can think on their own while Arisa’s was the only one who could control the battlefield. Without vision, Arisa had lost their forefront, and her new reinforcements retreated to their territory to make up for their losses.

Unlike Luon who didn’t necessarily need vision to command his troops as they can personally decide what to do for themselves, Arisa was at a loss. She had more units and firepower, yet Luon’s robots had a more refined set of movement.

Without any further ado, it was time for Luon to make a counter-attack.