The lurking war

A loud buzzing started filling up the air near Keith's base. It has been three weeks since he created that first ballista for the New Dawn guild, and he has been able to progress a lot during that lapse. His project of building a charcoal generator was nearing its end and Keith was doing a couple of tests to check if everything would be working as intended.

As of now, he had a five-foot high furnace supplying an even more impressive generator to which water was being routed by a manual pipe. Keith's end goal would be to automatically activate the wheel of the pipeline using electricity to the machine would be entirely self-sufficient as long as coal was being burned in its furnace.

For now, however, he still had troubles cooling down the steam and having the generator produce any electricity at all.

'This is more complex than I thought.' Keith meditated while working on an alternator. This was the core of essentially every generator in the world. The faster an alternator would be rotating, the more electricity it would be producing. This conversion from mechanical energy to electricity would be accomplished by two magnets : the rotor and the stator. The first one would be the only part that a generator actually needed to rotate and its magnetic field would eventually induce an electric current within the stator coils.

However, Keith could quite figure out the most optimized way to lead steam inside this alternator and make the rotor move around. This was what he was having troubles with and the reason why he was not finished with his project yet.

Up until now, Keith has read a lot of online documentation to have a global understanding on how generators globally worked. His college physics knowledge also helped him a lot in that regard but it was not sufficient to understand all the subtleties regarding an actual design of a charcoal generator.

Fortunately, the 'System' helped him a lot, be it in the smelting of the alloy he was constructing his generator with but also in the assemblying itself. From the first day this game have been released, this crafting 'System' had improved a lot and helped the players being more precise in their movements.

Though, in Keith's opinion, this artificial intelligence amounted to a small, albeit somewhat useful, gadget. He heard a lot of players praising the 'System' like it was a god, but it was only because people have already made a lot of rudimentary tools and this artificial intelligence has been able to automatize the creation of said tools. In the end, for more complex creations like an alternator, the 'System' would not be of any help.

However, Keith had to admit, this was a huge step forward compared to the early days where the artificial intelligence would be more of a constraint than anything else.

In any case, Keith also had to help the New Dawn guild a lot during this lapse. He made three more ballistas for them as well as several firearms they could be using during a battle. Keith completed the design of his first ever cannon which Amber had ordered from him.

It has been quite a time-consuming job, especially regarding the amount of metal he has had to smelt, but they seemed to understand that this weapon could not be made in haste and they gave him of total of two weeks to complete a cannon. This has been more than enough for Keith, who only needed one to smelt and forge all the parts he needed for such a defensive weapons, but he used this delay to focus on his own projects since he was so eager to produce electricity already.

He had so many ideas he wanted to exploit, but all of them required an almost constant supply of energy. This was, for example, the case of a drill design he had started while he was at school. It was four-foot wide and tall, and would most certainly require to be directly connected to a generator to be able to excavate any of the walls of Keith's cave.

In any case, the situation was getting gradually worse for the New Dawn guild. Keith has heard from Amber directly that a war was brewing between the largest guilds of Project Overworld. Up until now, they had only been preparing in case the Pioneers decided to attack them out of the blue, but it seemed like a confrontation would now be unavoidable.

Several average-sized guild as well as a few large guilds have already been eliminated by these 'Pioneers', and their territory was enlarging by the day. The scouts of the New Dawn have finally been discovered by the enemy's own scouts, meaning that the both of them were now clear about each other's intentions.

'I hope everything goes well for the New Dawn guild. They should have prepared strong defense by now.' Keith meditated. Actually, he has been able to catch a glimpse of the large walls they were trying to assemble when he delivered a load of rifles and ammunitions there.

Anyways, Keith has actually been quite impressed by the job accomplished by the New Dawn guild. The repartion of tasks was quite efficient and they managed to build a complete town surrounded by sturdy walls. He felt like he has been visiting a medieval city, and the constant buzzing of people going about their business accentuated this opinion.

Their were all equipped with the same armors made by their own blacksmiths, as well as various types of weapons. Ranging from simple swords to pickaxes, passing by a few firearms Keith recognized of making, he has had a hard time convincing himself he was not in a movie. After Amber showed him around the town like he was some new recruits, she led him to meeting the man behind all of this. 'Alan' was his name, and it seemed to Keith that this man was quite experienced in managing large groups of people.

He gave off a feeling of calm, although the situation was quite tense for the entirety of the guild. The meeting only lasted for a few minutes, but by the end of it Keith has been eager to go back to his base. He has been kind of regretful not joining a guild up until now, but after being confronted to Alan he knew exactly why he had not agreed to the first proposition of Amber.

Freedom was not an option in such a guild, and Keith would certainly have to follow strict schedules so as not to be punished by this authoritarian guild leader.

As for the Pioneers themselves, Keith had little to no idea on what their current organization and armament would look like. He had not seen a whole lot of informations on the forums as of recently, and he had concluded that they must have been focusing on equipping their new members with copper armors and the like. If they had constructed large siege weapons like a catapult already, no doubt the whole playerbase would have heard of this by now because some player would try and get some attention by sharing pictures of said edifice.

'Well, let's focus back on our generator for now. The second cannon should also be taken care of in the next few days so I don't have time to slack.' Keith motivated himself back to work.

_______________

- "How is the eastern wall doing?!" Alan exclaimed at the attention of one of his officiers. Not waiting for the answer to his query, he pursued : "What it the stone cutting division doing already? Shouldn't they have delivered the new batch of rocks as of now?"

The officier did not know what to answer to his boss so Alan decided not to pay attention to him and visit the group affected to stone cutting himself. The boss of the New Dawn guild was constantly feeling on edge since a few weeks.

The more he tried making preparations for the upcoming war, the more he realized there were so many things to take care of. Their wall would not even be finished by the end of the week, but he did not know when the Pioneers would take action exactly. This was mostly due to the fact his scouts have been disovered by the enemy, so he could not check their progress as regularly as before. Everyone had to proceed with more caution, even though the situation required them to work at a much more constant pace than before.

'Hmmpf, seems like they were, in fact, going to deliver those stones to the eastern wall.' Alan calmed himself down after witnessing the job that was being accomplished by his guild members.

In any case, the landscape would be the real advantage in a full-on war between them and the Pioneers. Climbing a mountain would be pretty easy, especially in a game where one's character was at its peak performance. However, operating a large army in those conditions would be near impossible while they were being shot by firearms and other balistical weapons.

'Let's just hope they wouldn't bring enough people, or siege weapons, to raze our base from this world.' Alan meditated before going back in his office. At this point, he was not being delusional and knew a war would be unavoidable. Therefore, the only thing he would dare to hope for would be actual poor preparations on the Pioneers' side.

If they ended up underestimating the New Dawn guild, Alan was pretty certain him and his few hundreds of guild members would emerge victorious after the first battle. Though, the complications would come off after that first battle, since the Pioneers would have time to prepare for their next move.