Bold Assumption

In the final few days before Annie left, the centaur blacksmiths sparked a forging frenzy at High Mountain Keep.

The slaves and the two Ogres served as laborers, spending three days building several earthen blast furnaces along the banks of the Raging Waves River.

In its previous battles, High Mountain Keep had seized weapons and armor weighing more than ten thousand pounds in total. Their quality was generally poor, but they were passable as smelting materials, at least giving them a chance to put the waste to use.

The most prestigious among the centaur Busmi was named Rooney. He selected several hundred pounds according to the weight ratio of pig iron to wrought iron and fed it into the blast furnace. Supposedly, after being smelted again, it could become high-quality steel.

When the caravan had first arrived, it had gifted High Mountain Keep a cartload of flour and a cartload of coal. Now, that coal was being shoveled into the blast furnace's combustion chamber at high speed.

Gunther watched the gradually cooling ingot like a curious bear, unable to understand why melting two kinds of inferior iron together would produce fine steel.

Rooney was quite warmhearted and patiently explained that it was a matter of compatible physical properties. The problem was that he was clearly no expert himself. He repeated the same points over and over until Gunther's head spun.

Richard could not stand the droning any longer. "Do you understand carbon content? Balance the high and low levels out, and you get steel."

This time, Rooney was the one who failed to understand. Carbon content? There was carbon inside iron? Wouldn't it catch fire?

Not long after the ingots came out of the furnace, a company of mercenaries carrying a white flag arrived at High Mountain Keep and escorted away the caravan that had been stranded for many days. Before leaving, Annie gave all the coal loaded on the wagons to Richard. The mercenary captain even presented him with a rather exquisite gold badge set with a ruby, being polite to an extreme.

Though High Mountain Keep exuded poverty from every corner, its military strength was truly formidable. To a trading company whose main business was wilderness commerce, it was an immovable tiger they absolutely could not afford to offend.

Richard watched them leave and let out a sigh of relief. He was not eager for anyone else to see what he planned to do next.

Several experienced centaur Busmi led their apprentices in lining up a row of anvils and began forging the steel ingots into weapons.

Generally speaking, mass-producing military equipment of the same design was the optimal choice. It saved labor and offered many advantages in maintaining quality control. Pompeii had established several large-scale arsenals in recent years precisely for this reason.

But Richard's demands ran completely counter to that philosophy. He required the blacksmiths to make nearly a hundred weapons and pieces of armor, with not even two of them being identical.

He was conducting an experiment—an extremely simple one.

Richard had known for a long time that system soldiers came with standard equipment based on a template. For example, the designated equipment of a Barbarian Great Axe Warrior included a long-handled heavy battle-axe, lamellar iron armor, a horned helmet, and some miscellaneous accessories.

The designs of these items were fixed, and shops even sold them as complete sets.

But because military funds had always been desperately tight, Richard had never equipped his soldiers according to the standard. The Barbarian Great Axe Warriors were still using the militia's three treasures bought in Corun City—a spear, a javelin, and leather armor.

This did not seem to produce particularly poor results. Every time they advanced, their combat power increased noticeably. Thus, Richard could not help wondering whether the system's equipment standards actually meant anything.

Some of the weapons and armor he had the centaurs forge were exact replicas of the system's standard equipment. Some followed common Pompeii designs, while the rest fell somewhere between the two.

Heating, forging, quenching, and grinding—the centaur Busmi were highly experienced, handling each step in an orderly fashion.

Richard distributed all the weapons and armor among the warriors of High Mountain Keep and had them test the equipment themselves and give their evaluations.

The feedback from these big-bellied gluttons who ate their lord out of house and home was astonishingly consistent.

Every one of them was deeply fond of the template-standard equipment, believing it felt excellent in their hands. They looked down on the Pompeii-standard equipment, even finding it awkward.

Take axes, for example. With the template-standard long-handled battle-axe, a Barbarian Great Axe Warrior could strike steadily into a gap barely a finger's width between two pieces of wood. But the moment he switched to a Pompeii axe, that terrifying control vanished without a trace.

Such a difference could not be explained by mere handling. It could only be attributed to the system's influence.

Richard guessed that the Martial Arts granted to the barbarians when they advanced might not teach them how to use an axe in general, but how to use that particular "template-standard long-handled battle-axe."

The barbarians were at least living people, and their minds could bend a little. By extension, they could manage to use other axes as well, though their skill naturally could not compare.

This discovery left Richard both delighted and frustrated. There was far more room to improve their overall combat power, but updating their equipment had also become a problem that needed solving.

Another major matter at High Mountain Keep was that Lord Richard had suddenly issued a mobilization order, demanding that they capture as many Ogres as possible—and they had to be alive.

What was the point of capturing filthy, stupid Ogres? They already had two. Was that not enough? No one knew. In any case, High Mountain Keep had no intention of practicing democracy.

Every resident of the territory had been running themselves ragged over this matter lately. But the Ogres' bottomless appetites and clumsy bodies meant they could not be found in great numbers. Even after exhausting themselves, the people had only managed to bring back a dozen or so.

The creatures were penned up by the river, eating and drinking contentedly as though they had arrived in paradise. The residents responsible for the livestock, however, were fretting themselves gray.

The Ogres' appetites were simply too great. Even after they began feeding them horse fodder mixed with mud, the territory's feed reserves were still plummeting.

Only Nehru, a Shaman Wizard, vaguely sensed that something was wrong.

"Didn't you say that Shamans appear among the Ogres quite easily, and that their spells are very powerful?" Richard asked when he came to find Nehru with a kindly smile. Gunther followed behind him, a cowhide whip as thick as three fingers tucked beneath his arm.

Everyone knew that Gunther never took part in everyday chores, so that whip was definitely not for herding.

Nehru hurriedly nodded with all his might.

"There are nearly twenty Ogres in High Mountain Keep now. Go teach them spells."

"My lord." Nehru flopped to the ground with a thud and hugged Richard's boots. "With brains as stupid as those Ogres', it's impossible for them to learn shamanism!"

Nehru, who knew two shamanic spells, absolutely qualified as a Shaman. That was why he understood even less why Lord Richard valued the Ogres so highly. With the intelligence of those idiots, there was no way they could adapt to a complex battlefield.

"Then how dare you say Shamans can appear among the Ogres?" Richard folded his arms across his chest.

Gunther straightened the coiled whip and flicked it through the air. The iron-studded tip struck the wall with a thunderous crack, blasting a thumb-sized piece of pine into flying splinters.

"They're different from us." Nehru shuddered all over, his mouth moving faster than beans pouring from a sack. "We have to learn from our predecessors to master Shamanic Power, but Ogres rely on awakening. Sometimes they can comprehend Shamanic Power the moment they wake up."

Gunther turned to look at his lord, clutching the whip and itching to try it out. He felt certain the fellow was making it up again.

Richard waved a hand to stop him. In truth, Richard himself was inclined to believe the explanation. With the Ogres' dull, foolish heads, there was no way they could fit anything inside them—let alone spells.