Three miles west of Bastion, the swamp was being completely redesigned.

Warlord Gorak stood knee-deep in muck, pointing his pickaxe like a conductor’s baton.

“Deeper!” Gorak roared at a crew of fifty Troglodytes. “The Sun-Men ride heavy beasts covered in iron! If the trench is only waist-deep, they will just step over you! Dig until you hit bedrock!”

The Troglodytes were essentially human excavators. They tore through the mud and clay at terrifying speeds, creating massive, jagged ravines hidden beneath the swamp water.

But a trench is useless if the enemy can see it.

“Elder!” Gorak yelled over his shoulder.

Old-Shell, the massive Shell-Kin elder, lumbered forward. His shell was laden with massive slabs of slate and porous rock hauled from the Deep Roads. With a heavy grunt, Old-Shell and his kin laid the stone slabs precariously over the tops of the trenches, creating fragile ‘bridges.’

Then, the final touch.

From the tree line, the Root-Father stepped forward. The ancient Treant merely pressed his mossy, wooden hands into the soft earth. Thick, creeping vines and wide-leafed swamp ferns instantly sprouted, weaving over the fragile stone slabs.

Within seconds, the deadly sinkholes looked exactly like solid, grassy ground.

Gorak tested it, throwing a heavy boulder onto the camouflaged trap. The slate shattered instantly, and the boulder vanished into a twenty-foot-deep pit lined with sharpened Star-Iron spikes.

“Good,” Gorak grinned, his tusks showing. “Let the shiny knights charge. The mud does not care about their rank.”

While the physical traps were being laid, the chemical warfare division was having a breakthrough.

Inside a reinforced cavern near the Bio-Reactor, the brightest minds of Bastion were gathered around a bubbling glass vat. It was the first time an inter-species science team had ever collaborated in the Sector.

Moss-Eye (Kobold Scholar) stood on a stool, adjusting his quartz spectacles, frantically scribbling formulas on a slate.

Sludge (Mud-Skipper Alchemist) was perched on the edge of the vat, his wet skin immune to the toxic fumes, carefully stirring the concoction.

A Lizardman Scribe from the Grey-Fins was measuring the ambient humidity and temperature.

A Troglodyte Shaman was grinding glowing cave-mushrooms in a mortar.

“The Golden King’s armor is plated with pure gold,” Moss-Eye explained, pointing a claw at his slate. “Gold does not rust. Gold does not tarnish. It is highly resistant to standard decay.”

“But,” the Troglodyte grunted, pouring the glowing mushroom powder into a beaker, “Gold is soft. They must have steel underneath to stop a spear.”

“Exactly!” Moss-Eye chirped. “So we do not attack the gold. We attack the joints. The leather. The iron rivets.”

He looked at Sludge. “Add the Heart’s Bile.”

Sludge picked up a vial of highly concentrated, unpurified green sludge—the toxic waste filtered out by the Bio-Reactor.

He poured three drops into the vat.

The liquid violently changed from black to a glowing, furious neon green. It began to eat through the stirring rod.

“Behold,” Moss-Eye whispered reverently. “Crawler’s Kiss. It is sticky. It burns at four hundred degrees. And it accelerates oxidation by ten thousand percent.”

The Lizardman scribe dipped an old, scavenged iron sword into the vat and pulled it out. Before their eyes, the iron blistered, turned bright orange with flash-rust, and crumbled into powder within five seconds.

“We put this in clay pots,” Sludge gurgled happily. “We throw pots. Sun-Men become soup.”

Up in the Void, Red watched the acid eat the sword. He watched the Treants hide the spiked pits.

His followers weren’t just praying for a miracle. They were engineering their own salvation. The Troglodytes brought the brawn, the Shell-Kin brought the infrastructure, the Treants brought the stealth, and the rest brought the science.

“They’re ready for the tactical layer,” Red noted, feeling a surge of genuine pride.

But Red’s mind was already three weeks in the future.

“A human soldier burns about 3,000 calories a day in a march,” Red calculated, pulling up a blank interface screen. “Sixteen thousand troops. That’s 48 million calories a day. Plus fodder for the horses. Plus clean water.”

“Aurelius thinks his demigod Paladins make him invincible,” Red smiled. “But a demigod with dysentery is just a very shiny corpse.”

Red began to draft a new set of blueprints. He didn’t need to intervene on the ground. But he needed to make sure that by the time Aurelius reached the traps, his army was already dead on their feet.

Red zoomed in on the glowing golden dots marching across his map. Through the roots of the Omni-Web, he could feel the terrifying thud of sixteen thousand boots.

He focused on the vanguard—the Paladins. The root network sent him seismic feedback. They were heavy. Too heavy for standard humans.

“Full plate armor,” Red murmured, analyzing the data. “Probably enchanted. Magical wards against heat and kinetic impact. If Razor-Fin stabs them with a bone spear, the spear will shatter. If Gorak hits them with a rusted iron club, they’ll just get angry.”

Red opened his resource tab. [ STORED MATERIAL: RAW STAR-IRON ]

“You don’t fight a tank with a pointy stick,” Red said to the empty Void. “You fight it with depleted uranium.”

Red opened the [ BLUEPRINTS ] interface. He selected the basic designs for spears, mauls, and arrowheads, and applied a material override.

[ UPGRADE APPLIED: STAR-IRON FORGING TECHNIQUES ]

[ COST: 3,000 DP ]

He downloaded the knowledge of how to fold and temper the magic-resistant metal directly into the minds of the master smiths.

Down in the Industrial District, the heat was unbearable. The thermal chimneys belched thick, black smoke into the swamp sky, hiding the city beneath a canopy of industrial smog.

Warlord Gorak stood shirtless before a massive blast furnace, his gray skin slick with sweat.

Standard fire couldn’t melt Star-Iron. It was too dense; it absorbed the heat. But Bastion didn’t rely on standard fire.

Krug, the Kobold High Priest, stood beside the furnace, channeling the Violet Flame directly into the coals. His scaly snout was locked in concentration, his hands glowing with holy heat.

“Hotter, Priest!” Gorak roared over the roar of the bellows, swinging a massive hammer.

“The Flame provides!” Krug wheezed, pushing the temperature past what normal physics should allow.

The Star-Iron finally yielded, glowing a furious, blinding white.

“With this… begins a new age…” Red muttered.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep