74 COD Base

Time passed in a flash, a few months flew by, and it was about a week before the war would begin. It would be now that Version 1 of Ultimatum would be released throughout the world, and nearly 400,000 players would log in simultaneously, with around 50,000 players in Gamin alone.

It was true, since Ultimatum was rather popular for the casual players of south Asia. The only problem was that this game was not ready for professional level competition in South Asia.

On the other hand, it was more than ready in Western Asia, Europe, and the North America.

Luke already knew which ones were the starting villages, and was already prepared for it. Due to the large number of players, all of them could not be sent to a single starter village, and the Game Devs placed the players into different starter villages throughout the Gamin Continent.

Luke had already sent out his recruitment squad for this job.

Over the past months, he had already completed building a base that would be able to handle around 30,000 people. It was built about half a day's walk for normal people away from the Conner village. The reason for this was that he wanted full freedom when planning his base, and did not want to be restricted by the Conner Village.

The base was actually pretty well planned. Since Luke had the money, all he did was give a basic plan of the structure, and then made his hired engineers and mechanics do the rest.

At the centre of everything was the tallest building in the base. This was Luke's home, and he would naturally spend quite the amount on it. However, most of the money was not spent on the building itself, but on protection for the building from enemy attacks. He had installed anti-magic coatings of paint to the building's exterior and interior, which gave the entire building a black colour. However, since that was not enough, he personally began to enchant the building like crazy, spending almost all his money on that.

Naturally, he needed more money and therefore he got to grinding fish monsters, allowing his level to rise all the way to 44. However, the levelling speed without the players doing tasks for him was pretty low. Since non-players could not accept quests, he needed to pay them to do things, and although this would accomplish his quests, he'd be bleeding money like nobody's business if he did that. Instead, he intended on doing quests himself and using the money he would earn to keep building his base to strike awe into the players.

By the end of about a month of enchanting, his building was finally complete. It now looked like a building from Tron, with all the glowing blue mana circuits within which were used for countless things, including Luke's favourite, yet one that he did not wish to use, [Transform]. As the name suggested, this spell allowed the building to transform into a giant robot controlled by only Luke. This was a spell he had learnt from his exp-hole, and it was one that would cause tremendous damage to the building's structural integrity just by activating it.

Around the main building, which Luke graciously named 'The Sage Tower', with the description, 'A sage-like building standing tall in the cruel mortal world', was the rest of the base.

It started with the certain important buildings like libraries, schools, as well as an arena for gladiator battles. Most of these were not built completely yet, but were under construction. The entire base was basically concentric circles, with The Sage Tower at the centre, followed by the above buildings. Next came the First-tier residential area, followed by the commercial zone. Next came the second the third-tier residential areas, followed by the training zone, which was the largest zone on the entire base. Everything that followed the first-tier zone was still under construction, with a few months more required to complete them.

Since this was going to be a base for 'Cards of Destiny', he would naturally have most residents be part of his organisation.

He had a simple plan for this.

'Anyone is welcome to live in the 'COD base'. However, no property or land is free, and you need to buy or rent it. Naturally, if you work for me, renting the place infinitely should be no problem. Even buying it would not be a problem in the future.'

This way, he was able to get quite the large amount of ambitious workforce who would be returning 60% of the salary they earned from him by paying for the rent, and most of the rest would also be sent to him when these people buy daily necessities and battle equipment, since all the stores within the city were his own, run by people he hired.

This way, he could keep most of the money he spent on his labour force, and still have them work.

By now, he had almost 10,000 people working for him, from which 5 thousand were just construction workers, mechanics, and engineers. Although mechanics were super humans, engineers were still required to be the bridge between the normal workers and the mechanics.

The rest of the 5 thousand were divided into normal citizens and children not capable of doing much work for Luke at the moment, numbering around 3 thousand, while the rest of the 2000 was his fighting force. This fighting force he was developing for the war, allowing him to gain quite a bit from the war, including his own survival.

From those 2000 men, he had already made most of them sign soul contracts with him for full obedience, and in return, Luke had given them knowledge. He split them evenly between magicians, warriors, priests, and mechanics.

Naturally, these mechanics were not like the ones he had hired for contracting, but were combat mechanics who would battle using mechanically constructed objects like body suits, and turrets.

At the moment, however, they were limited to gun technology since Luke himself did not have many blueprints, restricting their average level at 6.

The Magicians on the other hand could buy almost an innumerable number of skills from him directly, which allowed this class to grow faster than mechanics, with an average level of 9, since most of their time was spent on researching more spells and improving existing spells. However, the class that grew the fastest was Warrior wince all they needed to do to grow stronger was to fight and keep fighting. Most of the people in this pathway had an average level of 11.

The Priest pathway was also growing slowly, but not as slow as mechanics, since all they had to do was meditate to recover mana, and then heal people, leaving their average level at a cool Level 8.

Although this may not seem like much compared to Luke, it was naturally a considerable force taking into account the fact that within a few more months, there would be an army of 200 people divided into the four classes available from Version 1 to 3, with their average level being around 15, it was a pretty decent force. And such a force could only keep growing stronger. Unlike players who needed exp to level up, NPCs could level up without realising it, sometimes even while asleep.

Although they would all reach bottlenecks at level 20, 30, 40, and every 10 levels from there, it was still acceptable to have an army of 1500 Level 19, and 500 Level 29 people soldiers!

At this moment, someone entered his office at the top of 'The Sage Tower'.

"Sir Sage! Max reporting! The Recruitment teams have located the 'special workforce' you were looking for and are now in the middle of conversation with them"

This was max, the little protagonist template kid Luke had found in the village. Since he looked talented, Luke simply brought him over and had the people he had hired teach him everything.

Although the kid was still learning, he was a pretty good assistant, and was dedicated to the job. Not only was he thankful of The Sage taking him in, he was also thankful for the Sage teaching him all of the things he was learning.

"Good" Luke nodded as he thought about his next plans.

'The players have finally arrived.'