'MARCH'

I spent two more hours preparing my own materials and crafting a new suit of armor just like the last with only a few differences.

Each piece of armor now had a stat enchantment worth thirty-five points from the golden divine crystals. Both of my gauntlets naturally raised my Strength by seventy points, my boots together boosted Agility by seventy, next my scaled leggings and upper armor were set with three stones feeding the same enchantment.

Between three stones I came out with sixty points in Endurance for either piece. That came out to a total of one-twenty added to my temporary Endurance pool which became two-forty HP in my side pool. Next came my plated helmet and the hooded trench-style coat covering most of my outer armor.

Both pieces came with the same tripled enchantment with their focus on Intelligence, giving me one hundred and twenty more bonus points in Intelligence. This was only a total of two hundred and forty MP and I did not receive buffs or perks from the bonus stats, but the increase to my actual magic parameters was not small.

For the record, I did not actually need to make a new suit of armor but I felt lie spending the time judging the overall craftsmanship the other players had. Even if they were still in their basic crafting level of Blacksmith or Armorer without an rank-up, they were probably halfway through their first rank or almost to their second rank just from the materials they had all been working with in bulk.

Once everybody had their new suits of outer armor prepared, I gave them all a brief break period of one hour in reality before logging out myself/

From the light coming in my window across the room facing the east, I could tell that it was still fairly early in the morning but that it would be a bright and sunny day. Debating my options, I decide not to spend the next half-hour simply lying in my gaming chair with the massage settings turned on and instead get up to go downstairs where I could hear some faint noises.

My mother was in the kitchen cooking breakfast and both of my siblings were only recently awake and dressed for school. Seeing them awake and preparing their bags for when they would leave in another hour, I decide to give them a special treat. Both of them were made to do ten push-ups every other minute for ten minutes.

With such 'lenient' restrictions, they both actually managed to perform fifty push-ups in ten-minutes. Since they had actually managed such an achievement I turned on the TV and went through several apps before streaming some of the footage from the Lost Divinity dungeons. There were only a couple of clips but they included Stonewall fighting Reptor, the fake walkthrough raid that emphasized the other players more than my own actions, and then my fighting with Orion from a third-person perspective that followed the fight from the side.

Surprisingly, this content took up just over fifteen minutes so they would only be able to watch them all a few times before leaving. After the first cycle, though, they switched to watching only the boss fights by skipping through most of the walkthrough video.

Breakfast was done before the end of the first cycle and was finished by all of us before the end of the second shortened segment. Then my sister started playing with the video settings so that it would play a few frames slower. This allowed them to try and copy my own fighting with Orion whenever I was using unarmed attacks. It was actually pretty cute.

Before they left with my mom for school, I went through my saved content and put together another collage of slowed videos containing different kinds of fighting with different kinds of mobs. After putting them together, I simply emailed them to them so that they had something to watch in school.

Though I doubted they would pay attention to it, I made sure to put in several warnings in the email about not being allowed to share the videos with other people. This is technically the property of the gym and my independent clan. Eventually, money would be made off of this stuff!

After the house was emptied I simply went back up to my room and reclined heavily in my gaming chair for a few minutes before going through the process of logging back in.

When I reappeared in the game it was to find myself standing in the front entrance hall of the cathedral surrounded by dozens of players hard at work making final preparations. Since none of them should actually be fighting in this battle, their preparations were the construction of storage containers and the storage of demonic materials as well as all of their person loots from the dungeon outposts.

Even though they were prone to breaking, Taurian weapons were still loots and many of the lesser rat-faced centaur demons had carried more than one bow. By chance, their bows were still a few tiers higher than the alchemy weapons we were able to craft from demonic ivory or keratin and tendons. However, the weapons made from materials we had treated or even blessed carried more overall effects.

Right now most of everybody's loots and general clan stocks had been sorted out and gathered up. There were some such as Mistress and her elites who were dedicated to their crafts and were stockpiling half-completed suits and equipment that only need a few finishing touches and then to be put together before becoming a piece of equipment.

In this fashion they believed they would be able to control the outcome of the suits even when made by someone else. The current corner we were cutting was preparing the materials for others to fully cut and craft. Their hope was that it would be like buying the pieces to furniture, everything was ready to be put together but the person screwing everything in place will have still made the credenza.

I had no idea if that would work or not since my team itself did not have such requirements and our clan would just have to make do with process materials from the clan store. If it did, though, it would probably be a ground-breaking discovery for cheating the new level restrictions with the self-made perk. People could once again sell their combat crafts to the general public.

For a moment I briefly considered how my weapons were all solid pieces and thus could not be dealt in such a fashion. However, the materials for them were still top-of-the-line.

If I put a block of ancient alloy up for sale back in Sierra, every player in the city would sacrifice at least half of everything they own for a weapon that could one-hit most of the enemies in that region and possibly two-hit bosses.

Now that I had come back to all of this going on, I quickly returned to the back yard where most of my party and many of the other leadership figures had already gathered. Luckily, Zekrom had more or less stood guard over the divided final stockpile of goods taken from the pond.

He did not actually stop them from going through their own bags after actually overseeing their distribution himself, he just kept them from bothering Tragedy's Traveler's shit and the consolation prizes for the other two clans who made it down here. He, at least, endured most of the abuse from unhappy recipients.

Even if they complained to me I could only feel bad for them, I made the pumice and discovered the crystals in the first place. Without me a player like me around, they would have been too busy at the strategy table or on the battlefield to every notice the graveyard. Or to even have Zekrom who inspired these events.

They did, though, come to me with their complaints and it took place pretty much as soon as they saw me coming out. However, I could only say I tried to be as fair as possible on the crystals while keeping the bulk of the golden sand for myself. It was clear tat the substance was not actual gold so it was not as though I had ripped them off from an actual gold mine.

However, the reports I received from the second round of Assimilation were not bad. My physique could not advance but its current level could still be perfected. The perks I got this time included a 'Synthesized' perk for the singular crystalline structures incorporated in my body.

This did not do much besides raise my PDEF by one hundred but even that was quite a gain. Without the bonus stats and in-combat buffs, my current PDEF in full gear was now over twelve hundred points. I doubted this would matter against raw physical powers such as Traytar, though.

This was also probably more specific to my evolved cordycep body than the material itself, but the obsidian was still incredibly strong in that it took a while for my body to actually break down. The original obsidian took moments, the golden obsidian took minutes. That alone had to speak for the toughness of the material.

Just one of their twin-sized bags of golden pumice sand was enough to put a sword in the hands of well over a hundred people. The other one could do the same with shields. That could be seen as a boost to their temporary combat abilities in a mass PVP situation in which they had full access to their clan numbers.

Of course, that was only when one did not consider all of the weapons and armor materials that they had already managed to siphon from Zekrom previously.

After I actually brought that up, though, Donna fell out of the running for arguing over the pond materials which eventually cost Mr. Thirteen to lose his wind over the matter. I mean, they already had tens of thousands of the original divine crystals and had probably worked it out to take more for Thirteenth Incorporated than anybody else to begin with.

Once the distribution of our last minute benefits was settled, I advised everybody to use their clan storage for the safekeeping of all the materials they could not risk in physical storage. It was almost impossible for anything to happen to them if we left them at the cathedral, but there was actual discussion about carrying them with us.

I could admit there was an uncertainty of whether or clans could enter but to burden our people so heavily was both foolish and devious. We WERE technically carrying huge amounts of weapons and armor and materials. After seeing how long one hundred players could survive the tides of war with our supplies, the demons would definitely think twice about our company of pack mules.

Minutes later, our alliance of a few hundred players were all gathering up outside the gates where the other two clans' two parties of one hundred players were still recovering from their day of running drills.

I did not bother to keep track of their practices but I knew they were advised to use simple Roman archery tactics and studying angles and trajectory more than single-target fire. Thanks to this, all of them had some kind of archery skill that was at a sufficient level to work with the alchemy materials they were given to crafts bows for their arrows.

Just because they were given the materials to make bows that could put out an average of seventy-five PATK did not mean they had the proper stats to support archery skills. Even if the arrows put out a matching amount of damage, if they did not have high enough Agility and Intelligence for long-range synergy then they would need tens of arrows to dispatch the lesser demons and undead forces who had at least a few thousand HP.

To this effect they focused on learned how to utilize the reach of their ranged weapons as well as pair them with appropriate elemental magics for more effect. The self-made crafting process alone accommodated these methods, allowing the individual players to personalize their means with a variety of different effects that would eventually overlap together.

While the heads were specifically advised to be enchanted for some form of released-energy explosive magic, the other parts of the arrow pieces alone could be modified with skill or elemental enchantments as well as blessings from various players and their specific gods.

Due to this, the crafting process of using pre-fabricated parts from higher skilled players could open avenues for compiling abilities and parameters that could turn uncommon ingredients epic without the touch of a Divine Designer. I was sad that I had never really though of it myself to begin with and that it took our collective alliance to find such means.

Now that all of us in the proper alliance had gathered, the tired but outfitted players from the other two clans all gathered up into five lines of twenty players that could easily spread out to a single row of one hundred. Once they were gathered beyond the obstacle field before the cathedral property, the head priest skeleton and several of the elite warriors and clergymen lead the march of thousands of skeletons out of the cathedral gates.

They could only leave the property in rows of forty abreast, but the few thousand of them made up an enormous column that stretched out all of the way to the 'vanguard'. When the two groups met, everybody within a mile could hear the overbearing command of 'MARCH' issued by the head priest.

Marching was exactly what they did, reflexively stretching out into a single long row of one hundred heavily armored and burdened players. While they marched, the long column behind the head priest and his group of lance-bundle carrying skeletons began spreading out into matching one-hundred-skeleton rows.

Under this arrangement, it was not long before the skeletons exited the gates and filled up the obstacle course. Then they started marching out from there while maintaining a distance of little less than a hundred yards from the one-hundred-player vanguard. Behind the skeletons, our alliance players who had been waiting rank and file on either side of the gates started marching out only fifty yards behind the skeletons.

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