Chapter 18

The two people had long left, going to their territory and they would get the merchant family to get there. The reason is because the benefits they could get if they did. Author was happily expanding his core when he got a notification.

[ Quest: Downfall of a Noble

Introduction: A noble has chosen to go all out in bringing your downfall, they would leave nothing to chance. Their numbers vastly outnumber your own.

Reward: Second Village ]

This was good for Author. His first village was already at around eighty percent of its full capacity, sure he could increase it, but it would either be small scale increase in which only around another two or three thousand people could live in the village or they would need to reconstruct at least half of the village and move the fields.

So another village would have been nice. He also planned on getting salt which would sell well, he didn't need people knowing about his salt trade so he would just sell all of the salt to the caravans and sell the other things to the caravan and the merchants as well.

He used his demonic authority and looked at the plains that the last army of troops came from and found a larger army coming his way. They were around three times larger than the last group, but that didn't really matter to Author, who now had more troops, more than three time the troops. He had almost a thousand troops to his name. He had eight hundred ninety three troops, which was starting to get hard to pay.

Luckily, as his production of goods and population increased, the caravans sizes also increased, going from three to five carriages to seven to twelve carriages, and more of them had space for his products, not only that but even more caravans started to come, going from a caravan or two a week to three or four caravans a week.

This more than quadrupled his income. This made it easy for him to pay the wages of his troops, which was very good since he had started to get a few knights, pike and pole men, cavalry, skirmishers, and shieldsmen started to pop up.

Their wages ranged from fifteen to twenty five silvers a week. Speaking of wages, turns out, hero troops didn't need wages, so Nick and Olivia wouldn't need to be paid.

Back in the topic of the troops, all of the troops that leveled up from squires were in the advanced tier. Which meant that almost no one in this kingdom could compete with them. And the thing is, these troops were the brainwashed type he used when he was the guardian. Which meant they were monsters on the battlefield. But he had a feeling that getting them any higher than this would be very hard, like very, very hard. He wasn't sure how much experience would be needed for them to level up, but he knew that it would not be anywhere near the amount the other had.

That was because the gap between tiers became apparent with the advanced and expert. Even a tenth stage advanced was like a young child before the might of a first stage expert.

So he was expecting to wait a long time before any of his troops make it past advanced.

The troops of the noble marched forward. The leader, Shook was at the middle of the formation, with his disciples surrounding him. They made it into the forest, the forest from that side was not very dense. The trees were spread out though the bushes did slow the army down.

"Separate the army into three groups, we will attack the village from three sides." The leader said. He wanted to completely surrounded the village and make completely sure they would win. However, spreading your troops thin was not a good idea if your enemies can see you full time.

The noble army marched into three groups that were mostly close to each other. They would split up later, but not when they were so far from their target.

"So we will surround the target and attack from all sides." Someone said to themselves.

"Yep." Someone else replied.

"Why do all of us need to go to smash a tiny village? If I remember correctly, the third prince was there but he only has twenty or thirty people with him." Someone asked.

"Rumor has it that the prince defeated the other part of the army, you know, the fourth of the total troops that disappeared."

"I think they were just cocky and a group of monsters attacked them, if a Minotaur ambushed them, then I am sure over half of them would have died before they could form a proper counter attack." You have to note that a Minotaur had skin almost like stone, strength that can crush iron, and a roar that freezes the body of any normal person not of level two.

"That is possible, but what if the prince was the one who was behind it, maybe he had monster attracting powder and spread it among the troops. Then they would have been swarmed by monsters." Someone else speculated.

"Attack!" Someone shouted. The people could hear blades clash as screams started to resound from the area. The army of the noble were clashing with another force. And from the sounds of it, they were losing, they then saw them.

A group of five people mowing down the people before them like a farmer before. Field of wheat. Each slash of their swords cut tens of people. And they charged into the horde of knights and squires with reckless abandon and cruelty.

They ran through dozens of men and they were just as happy to do so like a kid running to a candy shop.