Battle Settlement

Gu Hang sat pale-faced inside an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, resting with his eyes closed.

He noticed the commotion outside, but couldn't be bothered to deal with it.

The battle had taken a lot out of him.

More than anything, he'd taken a direct hit. Psionic Protection had blocked almost all the damage, but it had also drained all his Psionic Power.

That was actually very dangerous.

According to the education on Psionic spells he'd received in his memories, completely exhausting one's Psionic Power could lead to uncontrollable consequences. Death, madness, mental disorders, split personalities... Any of them could happen.

After the battle, Gu Hang rested while checking his Psionic Power, and the results came as a relief.

None of those dire outcomes had appeared. For now, his only symptoms were some fatigue and a bit of a headache. Generally speaking, he would recover after resting.

Still, he'd learned a few lessons.

This time, he'd taken a bit too much of a risk and put himself in danger.

But looking back carefully, Gu Hang didn't think he'd done anything particularly wrong. Yes, he was the governor, but he wasn't at the point where he needed to avoid every hint of danger. His enterprise was still in its early stages. Some things required him to get in there and fight.

This time, there wasn't a single other Psyker anywhere in his entire territory. If he hadn't stepped in personally, there'd have been no way to resolve the situation.

Nor could he have stood by and let Yan Fangxu and the 3rd Battalion he led get trapped in the forest and wiped out.

But the outcome this time was certainly good.

The Primal Angry Owl Sect's method of creating and controlling so many monsters couldn't have been easy to pull off. Otherwise, they wouldn't still be hiding like rats in the gutter. Having used such a tactic and lost three powerful divine officials here, they must have suffered a painful loss.

In fact, they must have been hurting even before this.

If Gu Hang hadn't ordered Revival City to intensify its crackdown on cults and backed them into a corner, they wouldn't have resorted to paying such a price to assassinate him.

Good. You failed to take me out this time. Just wait until I get to Revival City and rip up everything you've got.

After resting for quite a while, he felt he'd recovered considerably.

Only then did he have the energy to properly tally his gains.

This could be called a great victory. Though the losses were the heaviest of any battle so far, the results were just as impressive.

[Slight advantage, gained 86 Grace]

[Losses: 103; eliminated: 6597; captured: 0]

[2nd Infantry Battalion: losses: 77; eliminated: 4447]

[3rd Infantry Battalion: losses: 24; eliminated: 1613]

[Marines: losses: 2; eliminated: 537]

The casualty ratio looked great, but Gu Hang couldn't feel happy about it at all.

Every one of the enemies they'd eliminated had been a mindless monster.

If they'd followed Yan Fangxu's strategy, over the next few months they could have burned out the monsters' lairs one by one, almost without losses, instead of facing them all at once after they'd been transformed.

And that was without even factoring in the three Storm Divine Officials they'd had to face alongside them.

They'd lost a total of 103 soldiers. The 2nd Battalion alone had already lost more than 25 percent of its strength.

Most of those casualties had occurred when the raging winds and dense fog descended.

Among the dead were two Marines he'd just raised to T3. Both had been killed by the most powerful divine official, costing him the 2 Grace he'd invested in them.

The two regular infantry battalions, especially the 2nd Battalion, needed a major influx of recruits.

Gu Hang's entire territory had a population of not quite six thousand. Excluding the Servitor Battalion, he'd already had enough people to support two infantry battalions totaling six hundred soldiers. Their mobilization rate was over ten percent, which was already putting tremendous pressure on the population. And on top of the army, all the rapidly expanding production lines under Gu Hang's control needed workers too.

The excessively high mobilization rate was already hurting production efficiency.

The shortage of young adults in particular was severe at the Waste Mine Society, and had become a bottleneck to its development.

The army's losses would require another hundred people from the labor pool... That was a real strain. Gu Hang could already picture Patel, who was in charge of heavy industry at the Waste Mine Society, tearing his hair out.

That man wouldn't do anything to stop the young men from joining the governor's army. To him, it was an honor, a way of defending the fruits of their labor. But with fewer workers, he really would be scratching his head over how to maintain, let alone expand, production.

As for the other costs... The textile mill was up and running, so they could produce their own uniforms. The relevant designs had already been sent over. The Alloy Plasteel production line could turn out armored vests. They could recover weapons left on the battlefield or make new ones. Even training soldiers only cost 1 Grace per hundred soldiers. None of that was a problem.

The problem was still the population.

He'd have to siphon people from somewhere again.

It wasn't easy to draw more people from the Quintet anymore, and there wasn't much point in recruiting from the lower classes. Gu Hang had other plans for the female captain. There was no shortage of talented people aboard the Quintet whom he coveted. They'd need the female captain's help to wipe out the Primal Angry Owl Sect—or at least strike a heavy blow against them. It would also serve as a reward for Yelicia, but that could wait until later.

That left Revival City and Trash Town.

Most of the people in Trash Town were adventurers chasing dreams of getting rich. There might be a few who'd been through plenty and now wanted to find an honest man... No, who wanted to settle down and live an ordinary life, but he couldn't count on them.

Revival City was an enormous source. Gu Hang wouldn't turn away the refugees who couldn't survive outside its walls.

There were hundreds of thousands of them. Taking them all in at once wasn't realistic, but he now had plenty of jobs and ample food, enough to support a great many people.

With the losses considered, it was time to look at the gains.

Eighty-six Grace. This was the biggest haul Gu Hang had received so far.

It was even more than all his previous gains combined.

It gave Gu Hang the feeling of having suddenly struck it rich.

The joy had lifted much of the shadow cast over him by the soldiers' heavy losses.

He estimated that more than thirty of those 86 Grace had been "contributed" by the three divine officials. The strongest one alone had provided more than twenty.

In terms of Psionic Power alone, that High Divine Official had been a notch above Gu Hang.

But when it came to using Psionic Power, Gu Hang had the exquisite Soul Severing passed down through an ancient family and the system-granted Psionic Protection. He was far stronger than the High Divine Official, who could only borrow power from a local god and wield Storm Sorcery.

In other words, Gu Hang had won because his spells were powerful and he had more people. When it came to Psionic Power alone, Gu Hang, who was only LV2, still couldn't match his opponent.

It was only right that eliminating such a powerful enemy would earn him more Grace.

The remaining fifty or so Grace had come from the more than six thousand mutant monsters the soldiers had killed.

Clearly, the lives of these monsters weren't worth much.

But they had numbers on their side. More than six thousand of them had died, and that had earned Gu Hang quite a bit of Grace.

It was just a pity that the victory rating had only reached "slight advantage." The post-battle Grace multiplier wasn't high enough. Otherwise, he could have gained even more.

Next came the question of how to spend all this Grace.

He eagerly summoned the panel, then saw an old feature flashing, along with a new one.

The one flashing was the Hero panel.

The new one was a feature called Event.