NOVEL NEXT Chapter 77. First Contact
Cedric has been watching everything in the dwarf territory while being extremely dumbfounded.
He never thought cannon-making would suddenly become a trend in the dwarf race.
All he can hope for is for the dwarf to not use it to fight among themselves. Otherwise, the destruction it'll cause will be enough to give him a massive headache.
Then, he turned his attention to the elves.
Since he gave them the steles engraved with several training methods, the elves have shared the training method with other elf villages.
Currently, most of the elven villages already knew about the training method and its ability to raise their blessed power.
Many interested elven blessed have visited the elf queen's village to look at the stele in person.
With the spreading of the training method, many blessed elves have tried to follow the method but quickly met with a setback.
The problem stems from the fact that the training method requires a suitable place to be used to its maximum potential.
Without a special place like the valley with the strong wind where Alan first created the wind element training method, the turbulent river where Hars trained, the magic metal vein where Lacius trained, a snowy mountain peak, volcanoes, or other wonders. The training speed from the training method will be extremely slow.
Because of the perfection of their magic forest, the elves constantly lived in a perfect spring season with no dangerous place in the forest.
This leads to the fact that among all element training methods, the elven forest is only suitable for earth element blessed due to the concentration of mana in the forest's soil that's higher than average.
Except for earth element blessed. The only suitable training place that can be found in the elven forest is the gently flowing river that can barely allow water element blessed to train, and places for wind element blessed where slightly stronger gusts of wind occasionally pass.
The most troublesome fact is that the elves are already too used to their slow-paced lives.
Even with the threat he has given, only a few elves often trained their blessed power.
Cedric can only sigh while watching everything.
"Both the dwarves and the elves are extremely talented at giving me a headache."
Finally, he checked the demons that he transferred from the human kingdom before.
The NE infected ant queen has finally recreated her colony and will reach the area where many dwarves gathered.
Inside the ant colony, there are already thousands of giant ants. Among them, around a hundred have become a blessed with average strength at Upper Level 0.
There are also ten ants that have reached Lower to Mid Level 1, and the ant queen that's still stuck at Lower Level 2.
Although the giant ants should've been weaker than the average dwarf at the same level. But the sheer amount of members they have is simply overwhelming.
Currently, the average level of the dwarf blessed is only Upper Level 0. In every city except for the capital, there is only a Lower to Mid Level 1 dwarf stationed.
If the whole ant nest attacked at the same time, they could easily take down any dwarven city except for the capital city that's built on top of their magic mountain.
Of course, that's only if the dwarven equipment isn't included in the calculation.
Depending on the situation and the amount of weapons stored in certain dwarven cities, it should be possible for a dwarven city to survive a giant ant attack at the current magnitude.
It's the elf's situation that gives Cedric a headache.
Previously, he has moved ten Level 1 and dozen Level 0 demons near the elf's territory.
After killing animals and terrorizing the forest they're placed in. There is now a few additional weak demons in the group.
Soon, the demons will also come into contact with the elves.
Yet, even though their enemy is much weaker than the dwarves, Cedric somehow feels they won't be able to handle it.
Especially since the elves have rarely fought thanks to the safety of their forest.
To make sure nothing wrong would happen, Cedric went to check his trump cards, the dragons.
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He mainly focused on the dragons living at the mountain range separating the humans and the other two races.
On the mountain range, the dragons have mainly gathered into two groups.
One group is located in the northwest of the mountain range, while another group is located in the southeast of the mountain range.
Both side already has their own respective dragon kings with pretty much similar amount of subordinates.
Looking at the southeast dragon group that consisted of 10 Peak Level 1 dragons and slightly less than 50 Peak Level 0 dragons, Cedric rubbed his chin and fell into thought.
"As long as I sent a Divine Intervention: Urge and control the dragons to support the elves. At the very least, the elves won't be wiped to extinction from the demon attack."
"It's just I don't know how effective the command from Divine Intervention: Urge will be. Especially since the dragons I created have low average intelligence and are mainly moved by instinct." Cedric muttered while dazedly observing the dragons
"Or perhaps, I could send Lacius to give some support to the elves and help them tide through their weakest phase? But it'll be against the reason why I created the mountain range in the first place."
"Furthermore, Lacius meeting long-lived elves definitely smells like problems."
Cedric felt his head started aching from the stress.
That's when the System decided to chime in.
[How about summoning a hero for the elves? Heroes aren't always used to fight against demon kings, especially if it's a hero from another world. Sometimes, other gods also summoned heroes from a suitable world to handle other mess in their world.]
Cedric dismissed the System, "Not now. I think I can handle it for now."
Cedric then continued to observe the situation in the Crystal Cube world while occasionally studying how to create another race and a better dragon race once his world leveled up.
After all the dragon in his world is more akin to a wyrm instead of a dragon from a high fantasy story. In those stories, dragons are usually described as long-living super powerful intelligent species.
Meanwhile, the dragon in his world only has the average intelligence of a three-year-old child.
While he experimented, the ant colony already annihilated every creature near their current nest and finally decided to start a new nest.
The location they choose as the new nest is coincidentally located near a dwarf city.
It's a dwarven city located close to the center of the continent, but still a considerable distance away from the mountain range Cedric created.
The first dwarf to meet the giant ant colony had been busy mining as usual when several giant ants suddenly opened a tunnel nearby him.
The dwarf that's still at Lower Level 0 and hasn't obtained any power is quickly killed by the ant group with two Mid Level 0 ants in them.
The giant ant brought the dwarf corpse to the NE infected queen who ate it to regain its energy after changing their nests.
The location of the ant colony's nest is located near the dwarf city. Their tunnels occasionally met with the dwarf's mine tunnels.
Although most of the tunnels are empty, the more the ant colony expands their nest, the more dwarves they meet.
After a whole day of expanding their nest, one of the ant groups finally met a tough opponent.
Unlike the lone dwarves that they usually met, one ant group in charge of digging a tunnel has met a group of dwarves with a Level 0 blessed among them.
When the Level 0 blessed dwarf saw the group of giant ants, they initially panicked before swinging their pickaxe to kill the group.
Among the thirteen giant ants, only one barely survived and returned back to the tunnel they dug.
The dwarf wished to follow the ant, but the tunnel that the ant dug was slightly too cramped for them.
Seeing all enemy had escaped, the group of dwarves discussed with each others before deciding to continue mining.
Meanwhile, the surviving ant has returned and brought the news about food to the colony.
The ant colony quickly gathered more than a hundred giant ants led by eight Mid to Peak Level 0 giant ants and a Lower Level 1 giant ant.
They followed the tunnel dug by the ant workers and arrived at the place where the dwarves previously killed the workers.
Although they didn't meet any dwarves in the surrounding area, the ant's strong sense of smell quickly found traces of the dwarves deeper in the mine.
Once both parties met, the dwarves panicked upon seeing a massive amount of giant ants.
Meanwhile, the ants emotionlessly started their attack.
Before the attack, the lower Level 1 giant ant commanded the surrounding ants not to kill the dwarves and only brought them to the ant nests.
The dwarves tried their best to fight off the tide of ants. But, soon after even the dwarf blessed with divine strength became exhausted.
By the time the battle ended, on the side of the giant ants, there were tens of casualties including two Mid Level 0 giant ants. Meanwhile, two dwarves have been accidentally killed while the remaining five have been captured with their limbs either being cut off or broken.
The Level 1 giant ants looked at the captured dwarves before slowly walking toward one of the dwarves.
It used its mandible to pierce through the dwarf's body several times. The dwarf who suddenly got attacked screamed as hard as he could. But, soon he became exhausted and lost his strength.
When the giant ant saw the dwarf had turned numb from its attack, the giant ant killed the dwarf before screeching. In the screech, one can feel traces of the ant's happiness.
If seen by a special sight, mists like NE began to spew out from the recently dead dwarf.
The NE went into the giant ants with most of them going to the Level 1 giant ants.
Once the ants successfully incapacitated the dwarves, they brought them into their nest while ignoring the dwarves' screams and curses.
The next morning, the dwarven city became lively with a lot of dwarves chatting with each other instead of mining as usual.
Usually, every dwarf will return from the cave by evening and only return to the mine in the morning. But yesterday, too many dwarfs didn't return to the city.
If it's only a few, it can be understood as a simple overtime. But when too many failed to return, the dwarf sensed some trouble.
Soon, an investigation team is sent. But they failed to find anything wrong with the mines.
After some discussion, everyone decided to wait for a day to see whether or not the dwarf who failed to return would come back.
Soon, the day of waiting came to an end. Some dwarves have indeed returned, but even more still failed to return.
The oddity has attracted the attention of the city's council representative who immediately sent another investigation team to check the mine. Thankfully, this time the investigation team has found new clues.
Compared to yesterday, there are now several additional tunnels in the mines.
Based on the amount of dwarves that haven't returned, the dwarves can't be the ones to build those tunnels.
That means, there is another creature or group of creatures getting involved.
The investigation teams quickly returned to the surface and reported to the council representative who immediately gathered an army of dwarf combatants to follow the tunnel and saw what lies at the end of the tunnels.