Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!

Chapter 34 Every second counts

First came the obvious—the one and only task Theo couldn't complete while burying himself in the underground.

And so, he started by cutting down just enough trees to satisfy the requirements for the one building he judged paramount for his plans—the constructor's office.

'It's a good thing it takes more stone than wood,' Theo thought as he felled one tree after the other, intentionally cutting them down in the survival fashion, only to then gradually turn their trunks into blocky resources by switching over the manner in which he portioned them off.

'But still... It's all but a question of how long it's going to take to have it built.'

For but a moment, his eyes moved over to the timer that relentlessly continued to tick away.

[19:28:33]

Now that Theo was in a proper hurry, his tree-cutting speed... grew to nearly a stall when it came to the number of trees he cleared out, all for the sake of getting more planks out of each tree he harvested.

And by the time the timer struck eighteen hours until the invasion, Theo finally reached the quota he set for himself, only to stash his axe without even a moment of hesitation, switching over to his mining pick while already moving to the shaft he unearthed previously.

"Now, for the iron and the nails..."

Dropping down all the way to his mining base, Theo quickly used up a petty amount of stone to set up a wall-sized section for simple furnaces before filling them all with a stack of wood each and then using whatever sparse amount of ore he managed to gather while mining stone.

'At the very least, I should be able to figure out the recipe with those fifty ores I've got from my passive,' he thought, only to set up a fresh, short algorithm for himself before closing his eyes and breathing out, falling right into the embrace of his zoned-in state of mind.

Snap.

Theo came back to his senses after what felt like but a second... if a second could ever make his muscles go from well-rested to properly warmed up and in the perfect state to keep going.

His tunnel also grew by quite a lot, reaching all the way to the one goal Theo failed to accomplish in his previous mining run—the ore vein.

"So that's it..." Theo muttered, sparing but a single moment to rest his hand down on the stone of a slightly different color that proved to be unsurprisingly harder for him to mine.

"As much as I would love to just mine it all away, though, I really don't want to risk exhausting it all in the moment of need..." Theo sighed away before shaking his head and picking up the slack as he started to mine not the ore itself but all the stone around it.

A process that soon turned out to be quite herculean, with the ore patch following the rules of the voxel-based games he knew rather than the blocky one, reaching far and deep throughout the stone in an extremely irregular manner.

"This is making it hard to mine around it," Theo spoke out in frustration as he had to change the direction of his mining yet again in order not to hit the iron vein directly. "But at this point... I guess there's really no point worrying about exhausting it. Rather than that... just how the heck is this vein supposed to be within the area of my mansion?!"

Shaking his head with exasperation, Theo raised his pick and struck it down against the reddish stone, only for the notification that appeared to be slightly different than what he was already used to.

[Mining: 24%]

[Mining: 48%]

[Mining: 72%]

[Mining: 98%]

[Mining: Completed]

Since this wasn't the stone he was mining, his stone-related perk didn't apply, forcing him to mine through the whole hundred percent of the block's endurance. And as if to spite him in the face, the system decided that he lacked a whole one percent of damage to mine out a single block with four strikes, forcing him to execute a total of five moves per block!

Before he could mine any substantial amount of stone, however, both the smelting and the crafting of the nails finally came to an end, allowing Theo to finally make the first of the few steps he outlined in the mental plan he drafted for defending his belongings.

"I wish to build the constructor's office!" he screamed out into the darkness of his underground base. A darkness that then slightly lit up when a strand of light emerged from his chest, only for the resources in his inventory to start to vanish, stolen away by the construction process.

A process that came with yet another timer.

Thankfully, a timer that was within what Theo could still allow.

[1:00:00]

[59:59]

[59:58]

[59:57]

'An hour, huh?' the young man thought, only to fall down on his ass and take a long breath to replenish the scarce oxygen in his lungs.

'With four hours' building time on the warding towers and ten hours necessary for the stone wall, I should be in the clear, especially with how those are supposed to decrease once the office is completed,' Theo thought, allowing himself just a few moments of rest.

A rest that came at the cost of the precious seconds ticking away from the red numbers on the invasion clock.

"Now, to the next step," Theo muttered to himself as he raised his eyes up to the dirt-based roof of his underground base.

Then, he sighed away.

"Trenches. I need a lot of trenches. And then, just for good measure, bunkers."

Theo's plan was simple, warranted by how he lacked the time to come up with anything complicated.

He was going to dig individual trenches between the stone-wall-to-be and the wooden palisade before turning each of them into simple stone bunkers and then connecting them all into a network of underground tunnels.

But while those bunkers would offer him nothing but some degree of protection, he still had to find a way to attack those that dared to invade his lands!

And for precisely that reason, Theo dared not to give himself more than just a single moment of rest.

For right now, he only knew of one way to ensure he would get his hands on the one weapon—simple, yet effective and deadly enough—that would also work well with the idea of those bunkers.

A weapon that was cheap on its own but required him to satisfy the steep material costs of the specialized industry that right now would sap away pretty much all of his wood, most of his stone, and quite a lot more iron and nails than what he could afford at the moment.

"I'm not going to let anyone take this place away from me," Theo muttered with a grim look on his face as he pushed his body back up, his hands tightly gripping the handle of his pick.

"And for that, I need three things," he commented out loud as he breathed a heavy sigh and snatched ten more ingots that his furnaces managed to smelt through as he rested.

"Iron tools to get all the resources in time, enough iron to get the specialized industry..."

Theo took in a breath as the fires of determination reignited in his eyes.

"And then enough crossbows and bolts to make anyone stepping into my lands regret they didn't turn away instead!"