Age of Adepts

Losing nearly a hundred magical machines before the battle had even started was an immensely painful loss for the goblins.

Of course, they weren’t heartbroken over the magical machines, but the goblin mechanics within the machines.

The one hundred magical machines that had fallen from the skies could be put back into use after a quick repair in the factory. However, the dead goblin mechanics would remain dead.

While the goblins were frantically escaping, the most excited of the adepts wasn’t Endor. Rather, it was Mechanical Girl Sabrina.

She possessed the ability to assimilate alchemical machines after she activated the mechanical core insider her body. The hundreds of magical devices crashed around them meant a hundred tiny treasure chests were waiting for her to open them.

Sabrina was like a little girl that had unintentionally wandered into a mysterious treasury. She was so excited that she could barely speak. A colorful detection beam shot out of the mechanical eye underneath her silver mask. The beam wandered around the oddly-shaped magical machines while the eye itself scanned for the mechanical systems installed within the devices.

One could tell that the Goblin Empire had no concept of streamlined mass production. All of their magical machines looked like delicate and well-crafted pieces of art. Each of the hundred magical machines had a unique style and sparks of creativity to them. With one look you could tell that different master artisans made each of them.

It was because the Goblin Empire had the machines crafted by craftsmen that a single goblin engineer would be responsible for all the mechanical parts of a single magical machine. They would even be in charge of deciding the ratio of metal used in the alloys. Even something as tiny as a metal screw would be decided by the goblin engineer!

The benefits of this meant that every machine was carefully managed by a single expert. All of them would qualify as great pieces of work.

Mechanical Girl Sabrina walked between these handcrafted pieces of art, trying her best to find mechanical parts that would be beneficial to her.

Sabrina immediately gave up on the goblin firearms.

There was no other reason for her decision. Their offensive power was just too low!

There was no changing the fact that the goblin firearms were the lowest grade of weapons, even if used in a barrage. Of course, if Greem were willing to put in some effort and etch Explosive Runes and Piercing Runes on every single one of the bullets, then they would have some worth as long-ranged auxiliary weapons.

Goblin flamethrowers were a weapon that the goblin machines often used for mid to close-range area suppression. The flames they blasted out didn’t contain any elementium components. Instead, it was a combustion reaction that occurred from a kind of alchemical dust coming into contact with the air.

Alchemical fires like this often had temperature limits. They could only reach a maximum of 2500 degrees, even after stacking their effects. Converted to the energy strength system used by the adepts, the attack would be worth no more than a hundred and twenty points of power. An attack of this level might be enough to threaten a First Grade adept, but it would be a massive joke to expect to use it against a Second Grade adept. Especially a flame immune fire-adept like Greem!

That was why Sabrina regretfully gave up on the goblin flamethrowers after taking them off of the machines and playing with them for a while. However, she did keep the flamethrowing stones hidden inside them.

Sabrina took apart seven or eight magical machines in a row and quickly became enamored by many of the delicate components within.

XD-57 Circular Rocket Guidance System.

GG-117 Miniature Rocket Backpack.

Magic Power Regional Bomb*.

Magic Energy Beam Gun.

Goblin Auto-Balance Gyroscope.

Goblin Energy Spectrometer.

……

There were too many strange kinds of equipment, each with a unique purpose; Sabrina was utterly caught up in the sheer number of options. Greem had nothing to do, so he decided to run over and help her.

First, diversifying Sabrina’s means of attack was a necessary step in strengthening her combat ability.

Given that case, the XD-57 Circular Rocket Guidance System was her best option for realizing ultra-long range attacks.

The XD-57 stored five miniaturized goblin rockets. It had an attack radius of approximately 1200 to 2400 meters. This attack was almost four times beyond the range of an ordinary spell and was almost at the limit of enabling assaults beyond the scope of sight.

Of course, the rocket’s explosive damage could only reach seventy points. Moreover, most of the destruction relied on pure physical damage from the shrapnel. Adepts using their defensive spells would very easily defend against it.

As the goblins had no such thing as proper long-ranged guidance or the ability to use Spirit to guide the rockets, the so-called Circular Guidance they came up with was mostly an estimation of sorts. The Circular Guidance had a deviation range of thirty meters within a firing distance of five hundred meters. This range would go up to a hundred meters when firing at a target a thousand meters away. If the enemy were two thousand meters away, you would probably be better off eyeballing it.

That was due to the limitations of the goblin mechanic’s bodily attributes. Even with the help of goblin enhanced goggles, the sight range of an ordinary goblin was only around fifteen-hundred meters. Any further past this distance and a goblin mechanic would become blind as a bat, even if their weapons could reach that far.

Whether they could hit the enemy and whether they could strike them where they needed to had already become an impossible question that only the goblin god could answer!

Naturally, Sabrina had no such problem.

Even without the use of magic, Sabrina could easily sense everything happening in a one-kilometer radius with her Spirit and mechanical eye. If she used Magic Eye, then everything within five kilometers would be perfectly displayed before her.

Sabrina could very likely perform ultra-long range attacks from beyond the range of the goblin’s sight with vision like that. Of course, she would first have to perform some modifications to the goblin rockets. More importantly, attacks like these didn’t exhaust her magic power at all.

The ammo limit was a problem that the goblins hadn’t solved. They could only bring with them as much as the machines could carry, and the machine would become a useless suit of armor once the ammo ran out. However, as a mechanical adept, Sabrina possessed plenty of spatial rings. That was why ammo would never be a concern for her.

Sabrina couldn’t wait to try the idea out once Greem had analyzed it for her.

She couldn’t help it. Even though she was in the Goblin Plane, the first imaginary enemy that she defaulted to when she started combat analysis was still an adept of the same Grade. Her mind would automatically abandon all weapons that couldn’t be of lethal threat to adepts of the same Grade.

However, she was currently in the Goblin Plane. This equipment might not be that useful against adepts, but they were appropriate as weapons against the goblins.

Apart from the XD-57 Circular Rocket Guidance System, the GG-117 Miniature Rocket Backpack was also extremely helpful for Sabrina.

She only needed to make some small modifications before the GG-117 could become an excellent tool for partial evasion and repositioning. With the use of the rocket propeller, Sabrina would be able to move in any direction as she wished during combat. Moreover, her movements would have no patterns to speak of. The device would make it challenging for the opponent to predict where she would be at the next moment.

The Magic Power Regional Bomb was essentially a modification of a magic energy battery that turned it into a bomb. It could generate magic energy interference in a twenty-meter radius, effectively disrupting mechanical cores that had lost their energy shields. Of course, they were nifty equipment against adepts as well.

If the wild magic energy disrupted an adept, it would be a tremendous burden on their elementium balance. This adept would lose all ability to cast spells until they were able to neutralize the rampaging energy with their reserve elementium energy!

The Magic Energy Beam Gun functioned in the same manner as the magic energy bomb. However, the means of attack was through an energy beam. Its range was only a mere twenty to thirty meters, and the strength of the attack only reached thirty-five points. Any further and the magic energy beam would have its balance and stability destroyed by the elementium in the air; the beam would no longer deal any damage after that.

Greem couldn’t help but frown when he figured out the principles behind the magic energy weapons.

The enemy hadn’t seemed to have such magic energy weapons in the last fight. Yet, just six days later, they had already come up with such developed magic energy weapons. This terrifying research and development ability worried Greem.

In all honesty, if Greem and the others had engaged the magical machines the same way they had last time, without knowing of these changes, they would probably have been left with an unforgettable and painful memory.

Fortunately for them, Endor was with them this time. A single Poison Halo had managed to decimate an entire army of magical machines. This turn of events had to be beyond the expectations of even Prince Gazlowe!

Greem didn’t even really need to think. He could imagine the comedic tantrum that the mastermind Gazlowe would be throwing when he saw the wrecked and crashed magical machines that littered the entire place. Anyone else would naturally be in a lousy mood if their undefeated army of magical machines, that cost mountains of gold and silver to make, were destroyed in a single move by a hideously ugly old witch.

Even with the entire plane under their control, the Goblin Empire had no more than a thousand men in their magical machine army. Endor had exterminated one-tenth of that number in a single blow. Anyone would be coughing up blood at this point!

Of course, now that they had discovered so many useful items, the three adepts were not going to hold back.

With Sabrina in the lead, the three of them turned into a demolition team sweeping across the field, dismantling all the components of the magical machines that they thought useful and stuffing the parts into their spatial rings.

The three of them had never been properly trained in the disassembly of combat magical machines. There was no way they could be gentle in the process of taking the robots apart. They tore the machines into pieces with brute force.

By the time they had completed all their rounds, this place had turned into a graveyard of magical machines. Metal plates, screw, copper gears, pipes, and metal shells were scattered all over the place. All metallic components and unique equipment that radiated magic energy became their spoils, packed together and stuffed in their rings.

The few machines that had survived and looked on from a distance were furious about this. Yet, there was nothing they could do but clench their teeth and jump up and down.

However, Greem had clearly underestimated the vengeful nature of the goblins. Just as he was happily stripping the machines, a series of spatial ripples suddenly appeared in the air above him.

With the amount of knowledge he possessed, Greem easily figured out that this was something being teleported over from a different location.

The goblins know how to teleport?

This redundant question had only just surfaced in his mind when Greem remembered the interplanar teleportation device that Snorlax had received from Gazlowe.

[Sensing unnatural spatial teleportation ripples. Recommending host remain vigilant. Countdown beginning. 5… 4… 3… 2…1… ]

As the Chip’s notification rang out, a hole the size of a human’s head opened at the center of the spatial ripples. An alchemical chicken forged purely from metal emerged from the hole.

The chicken let out a strange cluck.

”Self-destruction initiated.”

A terrifying explosion that had been amplified several times appeared no more than five meters above Greem’s head as his expression turned sour.