A Black Market LitRPG

Chapter 120: Stealth Ants

A collection of both old and new weapons were in front of Kyle now. Kyle still had the lightning sword from Soren as well as the pulveriser that was a reward from the first Trial of the Horde.

The weapons were good as a melee fighter, but for stopping Count Leon’s forces, who were all armed to the teeth with machine guns and arctech guns, he would need some long-ranged weaponry as well.

Should I make a rifle? Kyle previously had his heavy variant, but now that he had a Race Upgrade to Arcian and a brand-new Version 0 Exosuit, he could support a much heavier weapon now. I’ll need to make a railgun for long-range harassment. Heavy armour piercing.

This time, he was going to make the railgun much more powerful, relying on the sheer weight of his armour to handle the recoil of the gun. Melting down the old gun barrels and remaking a new one, he created a similar railgun as the one he had in Raktor, albeit with a much better layering of engravings along with stability. He needed to be able to engage at ranges of more than five kilometres, where necessary, to prevent being spotted or suffering a counterattack.

The construction of the railgun was much faster than the Version 0 Exosuit, being only half a day as Kyle already knew the design inside out, just simply making it larger in scale.

The cost of firing the railgun hardly fazed Kyle, knowing that the Advanced Arcia Crystal in his exosuit could easily handle that. If he needed to, he could return to base and use the mechanical regenerators to recharge the crystal again, though he was not entirely sure of its discharge capabilities and tolerance. If it’s anything like a battery, fully discharging it would damage it irreversibly.

Kyle considered creating a smaller railgun to take out humans, but he decided against it. He would use the heavy railgun to take out key targets, letting the Versian military do the rest of the work where needed—no need for me to go all out, lest I paint a target on my back.

With the weapons and the exosuit now settled, Kyle had one major problem left.

“The distance from here to Ocra? It’s about fifty kilometres.” Hayden crossed her arms, staring at the fully geared Kyle, who had the pulveriser strapped to his back while his arms hefted the railgun. Kyle was not too used to the new armour yet, so he walked around the base in it, trying to familiarise himself.

“Any tunnels leading there?”

“What? How could there be a tunnel that long? We were guerrilla fighters, not miners!” Hayden looked at Kyle like he was a madman. Does this guy only think about tunnels?!

Kyle had no choice: he would have to head there either via wagon or by mineral ant. The fastest would be by mineral ant, which could easily cover the distance in an hour or so, faster if Kyle really pushed them to their limits.

However, there were large plains between them, with the Keru Forest not spreading towards that direction. Kyle would be fully exposed if he tried to fly over the farms and the plains, easily being spotted.

“There’s no other choice; we have to go stealth.”

“Ste-alth?”

Kyle chose a venom-spitting hornet as his main ‘vehicle’, measuring the dimensions and preparing to work on the shell directly. I hope this works.

He knew that the shell of the mineral ant was simply hardened minerals, so he was now carving arctech engravings on it, all of which were optical illusions copied from the goblin den. He had used a similar device during the auction last year, but this time he would have to design it correctly.

Passive stealth was not an option here: he would have to visually trick every onlooker or observer who so much as looked towards the sky. Such an active stealth implementation already existed in the Galactic Era – interlocked honeycomb stealth panels.

The concept is simple: given an input of light, output the same light in the other direction. This normally required massive calculations, but Kyle believed that he could design an arctech engraving that could do the same thing functionally by modifying the original optical illusion engraving.

The original optical illusion engraving worked on an idea of a preset image that the original creator crafted. As such, the original optical illusion engraving will continue to show the same image regardless of the environment, making it one of very specific use. Kyle originally used it only to cover his face when he left the auction, allowing him to avoid the enforcer trail.

Dissecting the engraving again, he pinpointed the parts where the optical illusion engraving took in the supposed configuration of light to show. He linked it to a smaller version of a light capturer, creating a supply chain of light into illusion.

He worked through the night as he tried to fix the connections, as it was not a simple task to carve on the mineral ant’s shell and combine the two. Instead, he eventually gave up and had to create two layers to allow for proper tracing and routing of the information between light capturer engraving and optical illusion engraving.

The result was hardly perfect – the illusion was blocky and looked as though it was a series of jumbled-up monitors. There were clear seams between the illusions, with a disjointed replication of the scene behind. As Kyle walked around the now engraved venom-spitting hornet, he spotted plenty of flaws. If anyone walked up to within fifty meters of the hornet, the illusion would be plainly obvious.

However, this was good enough for Kyle’s purposes. No one else would be flying in the sky so that the closest observer would be at least a kilometre away. He had Feldon test the stealth functionality, putting Feldon on the venom-spitting hornet and sending him off into the distance. Kyle squinted his eyes as he tried to keep track of the hornet, but even his keen eyes failed to see when the hornet was more than five hundred meters away in a straight line.

With this, everything was equipped and ready to go. Kyle checked up on the progress of the three groups.

Diya had successfully gained full control of Desham in its entirety, with every looter and deserter rooted out by Makoa. The population had declined significantly ever since the revolution. Still, jobs were being created and managed effectively by the former council members working with the workers, re-seeding the fields with new food crops that would take 3-6 months to grow.

For now, Drake’s group has still been continuously hunting close to five mammoth hogs a day, providing enough food for the population. The fruits foraged and fungi collected also provided much-needed diversity in their diets, improving the living standard of the workers.

Feldon’s construction expertise came into play with the reconstruction of the town, along with the building of new temporary housing as well as factories. All the lessons he had learnt from the goblin dens were now utilised, creating sanitation systems and proper work scheduling. His time was also spent educating the newly uplifted slum dwellers on how to manage their new positions of power properly.

There were still bouts of attempted corruption and greed, some of the dwellers wanting to hoard their own wealth or food away from others, a few even stealing from Diya’s food storage. They were punished heavily and immediately executed without trial. This rapid response from Diya only served to entrench the legitimacy of the new leaders further, as the local population truly felt that the leadership was working for them rather than against them.

As such, security had improved dramatically, and the outlook for the future was a lot brighter than before. Even though it was clear that war had already broken out between Versia and Count Leon, the people of Desham were unfazed, feeling that the Count would not bother to attack them.

Diya recruited some of the more patriotic citizens into a military force, Kyle preparing to use them in the future. However, as of now, they were hardly trained or prepared to fight in any war, most never having used a weapon in the first place. Diya had some former military sergeants lead the training, creating a new force for fighting.

Those that had former fighting experience or were former military were all sent towards the underground tunnel base, bolstering the numbers of Drake’s hunting group and practising their fighting skills against mammoth hogs and the occasional corpse catcher in the Keru Forest.

As strong as Kyle was, Kyle knew he would not be able to singlehandedly stem the flow of Count Leon’s forces into Versia. He would need his own fighting force, hence the regular training and battles against monsters in the Keru Forest. But until they were trained, Kyle would need to buy at least a few weeks of time.

The old Nest Informant also kept Kyle up to date on the live movements of the Count’s forces, though the information was sparse.

“We can’t see exactly what the composition of their forces is and how they are split up as well. If we want to stall this conflict, we need to provide this information to the Versian military as soon as possible.”

“I’ll handle that. Where are they now?”

“They are right at the border of Ocra now – skirmishes are already breaking out along the edge of the territory.”

“Good. I’ll bring back the information.”

Kyle donned the Version 0 Exosuit, performing a rudimentary checkout of the engravings. The traces and routes on the internal layers glowed and pulsated as he circulated his arcia energy through them, checking the flow of it while the waste heat energy hissed out of the shoulders.

Hefting a large arcia fuel pack onto the venom-spitting hornet to power the stealth engravings on its shell, he rode it and flew right out of the underground tunnel base, exiting through a tight shaft. With the wind rushing around him, he shot out from the ground, bursting through the treeline into the bright sky.

“Radio check 1, radio check 1,” Kyle spoke into his helmet’s radio engraving.

[Loud and clear.] Feldon was already on the other side, a map of Ocra laid out in front of him with the old Nest informant. They were standing by to mark down the information that Kyle would relay to them. [Have you left the tunnel base yet?]

“I am already hovering over Desham.”

Feldon stuck his head out of the window, trying to spot Kyle in the sky. However, the stealth engravings worked like a charm from afar, rendering it impossible for Feldon to be spotted. [Well, I can’t see you, so I guess it’s working. You only got five hours of fuel, so you’ll have to come back in three hours.]

Kyle looked down to see the entire Desham from above. No one on the ground even looked up at him as he hovered a kilometre above, the sound and resulting air draft from the wings hardly audible.

He turned his head south in the direction of Ocra, noticing that there were already signs of fire and pillars of smoke far at the horizon.

“Understood. Beginning reconnaissance mission. Prepare for map marking. Start from Sector A1.”