Chapter 76: The End of the Beast Tide!
[System Alert: You have killed a "Barren Plains Fox" beast of Rare rank. You have gained: ×30 Origin Points, ×1 Trained Cattle Herder's Stable Blueprint Package]
[Quest "Curbing the Powerful" completed. Reward sent to the Lord's inventory: Special Building: ×1 Trained Metalworking Artisan Blueprint Package]
[Quest "Lord on the Front Lines" completed. Reward sent: +3 Levels to your Seasoned Mage class]
Kaiden ignored the notifications. The explosion had damaged his eardrums, leaving a constant ringing in his ears. After three waves of upgrades, his ears healed completely, but spiritual exhaustion wasn't something an upgrade could fix.
He glanced across the battlefield. The Emerging Heroes were doing excellent work, but he still didn't know Piedra's status. Worried something had happened to her, he hurried out beyond the walls.
Piedra's situation was better than he'd expected, especially now that she'd regained her freedom of movement. She was no longer defending passively — she'd started launching her own attacks. All she'd needed was a single opening, and it seemed she'd gotten one.
When Kaiden stepped outside, he found Piedra with her jaws clamped down on the iron-jawed hyena's neck. Unlike that beast's hit-and-run tactics, she never let go once. She wasn't afraid of getting scratched or anything similar — defense was her greatest strength.
Seeing she had the situation under control, Kaiden didn't intervene. It was clear the hyena was finished; it was only a matter of time before it dropped dead.
Kaiden headed back inside and immediately began sending the Emerging Heroes to reinforce the remaining fronts. Around then, a new quest completion notification reached him.
[Quest "A Mountain of Corpses" completed. Reward sent to the Lord's inventory: ×1 Gold Treasure Chest]
Kaiden looked at the notification. That meant they'd killed a hundred and fifty beasts so far, but that didn't mean the tide was over. There were still plenty of beasts left, which confirmed his earlier suspicion too — that the actual density was far higher than what the Territory's quests had displayed.
All of today's quests were complete, except for one. Kaiden looked at the second-to-last quest: "Minimal Losses," which still hadn't been fulfilled.
"Looks like this'll be the first quest to fail since I arrived in this world," Kaiden sighed heavily. He still held onto a faint hope, but the front he himself led alone had already lost seven Elite Soldiers.
In truth, he didn't care about the silver treasure chest set as the reward for completing this quest. But the loss of lives left something lodged in his throat that he couldn't shake. Even though he'd lost soldiers before, he still hadn't grown used to this feeling — and he didn't want to.
"I need to review the battle carefully and learn from it." Kaiden realized he'd made strategic mistakes and oversights he hadn't accounted for. That was only natural — he wasn't some war emperor, just an ordinary person thrown into this world like everyone else. But he had to learn from his mistakes so he wouldn't repeat them, and grow stronger.
The battle continued for another hour. During that time, Kaiden visited the different fronts. As he'd expected, casualties had occurred on the other fronts too. Eight deaths, to be exact, all militia soldiers, killed early in the battle when the beast hordes were at their thickest and the Emerging Heroes couldn't protect them in time.
Speaking of the Emerging Heroes, they'd only suffered minor injuries, except for Josh, who had faced one of the tide's strongest beasts, the Wolf King, and taken severe wounds that nearly exposed his internal organs. After using enhanced healing potions and Nora's repeated healing, his condition improved.
In truth, the Emerging Heroes weren't invincible. The credit for their survival went mainly to the mithril armor fitted with defensive runic engravings. Without it, a large number of them would have fallen, and the battle would have been far harder. Kaiden mulled this over carefully — he now had twenty-seven Emerging Heroes, but only ten had proper armor. No, only nine now, since Josh's had been destroyed. He needed to work on this front in parallel with weapons.
In this tide, they'd faced roughly three hundred beasts, twelve of them Rare-rank. The last to fall was the Crow King, which Asra had finally managed to kill.
After this battle, the Origin Points earned alone exceeded two thousand. And despite the drop in blueprint rates due to the end of Novice Support, he'd still gained up to fifty Common-rank blueprints during this wave. All the Rare-rank beasts had dropped Uncommon blueprints as well.
Kaiden had no time to review the blueprints now. The end of the battle didn't mean the end of the work. Clearing the battlefield before sunset and dealing with all these corpses was still a problem.
Wherever one looked, mountains of corpses lay scattered. Without delay, Kaiden asked all the Territory's residents to come out and gather them under the protection of combat units. That day, no beast appeared after the tide's end. Kaiden didn't know if it was because there were no beasts left nearby, or because the thick aura of death hanging over the battlefield was keeping them away.
Dissecting this massive number of beasts the traditional way wasn't realistic, so Kaiden used a method he hadn't touched since his arrival: touching the beasts to analyze them directly. This method reduced the amount of meat units he obtained, but it was the only workable solution.
Of course, Butcher Gol was left to handle the Rare-rank beasts' dissection. Their bodies were treasure troves in their own right — even their blood was collected in special containers with great care to prevent any spillage, since every drop was valuable for crafting mid-tier potions.
Kaiden felt a slight pang of awkwardness. In his fury, he'd completely blown the fox apart. Its blood, even its meat, was gone entirely. But he felt no regret. If he could go back, he'd do the exact same thing. It was the least that damned beast deserved.
Kaiden let out a heavy sigh and tried not to dwell on that moment. But another thought crossed his mind.
"What about the rest of the lords...?" he murmured, then opened the Global Chat without delay.
Unusually, he found the chat free of the usual flood of discussions. There were only a few cries for help, curses aimed at this world, and weeping. But what truly shocked him was the number of lords remaining.
"My god!" Kaiden could only draw a cold breath in disbelief. Out of a billion lords, just over six hundred million remained. And that number was still dropping rapidly!
End of Chapter 76.