1699 The War Reporter

He was a leader of a big smuggler group, one that had the ability to smuggle goods, weapons, and even people in and out of this world. That meant he got more ways to learn about the ongoing battles once it happened and had more hands to deploy and collect loot.

Hye didn’t admit it out loud, but he was quite envious of Smiggy, from those smugglers. They were like picking gold out from the dirt, without the need to exert any effort at all.

He knew he had no power, no means to mimic their actions. And yet he couldn’t prevent himself from envying them. And he wasn’t alone in this, the nymph lady also felt the same, much worse than him actually.

She lived her entire life sticking by the right side of life, and yet she now realised she wasted her life for nothing. Smugglers like Smiggy could earn a hundredfold more than what her entire impact would struggle to earn in a year. And the most frustrating thing about it was that they could do it just from a single war!

As Hye expected, she was leaning towards being a smuggler and an outlaw. A merchant like herself, an experienced one on top of that, knew more ways than Hye to get and sell the loot she gained.

She kept dreaming about going with William towards outer space, and venture through the more hectic war going on up there. She didn’t think about the dangers awaiting the two of them, blinded by greed and desire to collect more.

As for Hye, he kept waiting for Smiggy to return back to him while counting the loot he gained. “A bit more than seven thousand small spaceships… Around three hundred medium-size ships, and two big ships… I scored a huge score this time, hahahaha!”

He knew with all this, he could build up his fleet, one that could take part in the ongoing war up there. “I only miss soldiers… I need to harvest the Heart Crystal…”

The last time he checked, the fruits were still lacking little time to get harvested. He knew there was still a week or so before he could harvest everything. And he had to live through this week with the warriors he had.

Each spaceship would accommodate a different number of warriors. The small ones would take a thousand, medium-sized ones would hold tens of thousands, and big ones would host hundreds of thousands. That meant he needed around ten million warriors to be ready.

He had just two million ready, as he invested most of the crystals in the heart. Once he harvested it, he could raise this number by ten folds.

It might seem enough, but he knew it wasn’t. With what he had, he could only arm up one-fifth of what he had. Not to mention he wouldn’t be able to take more spaceships out there, a thing that he wanted to do.

“I need to adapt…” Hye knew he had no other way to solve this problem except by adapting. Even if he could muster one-fifth of the entire force, he could use different approaches to do so.

He could just arm up one big ship, one-tenth of the medium and small-sized ones. Or… He could just use the small ships in total force, alongside more than half of the medium-sized ships.

He’d still have more warriors to use, and he decided to let them board other ships, and kill everyone on board, preparing them to be taken away and stored by him.

“I’ll go for the second plan then,” he was dead fixed to grab more spaceships from up there, so his choice was quite expected, “now I need to think about who is going to board the fighting ships, and who will wait to hijack others…”

The first choices that came into his mind to deal with the hostile ships and kill everyone on board were the Soulers and Reapers. The two were machine killers, fierce in any melee battle.

But there was a catch. If there was any stronger enemy, higher than level one out there, then their task would be impossible. He might even lose too many of them in the end, making such exchanges powerless.

“I lack a race that can scout and gauge the enemy powers from far,” he sighed, feeling like even with all the warriors he had, he still lacked in many aspects.

“When are we going to move out? Huh? I want to go to space right away!” from time to time, the nymph lady would ask him this, making him roll his eyes.

At first, he bothered to answer her, but after her repeated questions he dropped doing so. He let her speak without giving any answer as if she was speaking to herself or to a deaf wall.

“Check the main channel, there is news about the war up there,” after two days, she suddenly shouted, and stood up from the bed, while pointing to the air in front of her.

“What news?” Hye instantly opened the local channel of this world, and there he found a thread that attracted much attention. It got the name of the war of all time, a name that sounded like an exaggeration in Hye’s eyes.

But he didn’t care about that and hurriedly opened the thread. The writer claimed to be a reporter, one who was on board one of the flagships in outer space, doing a regular and routine interview with soldiers up there when the enemy appeared.

He spoke in great detail about the battles up there, how there were endless streams of spaceships coming from all directions. He mentioned many things, things that Hye didn’t know about.