The Martial Unity

The war between humans and the arakai reignited after just a month. The moment the interdiction force was healed, the arakai immediately returned to their conquest of Arima III, and the humans retaliated.

What surprised the arakai was how well the humans had adapted to the disadvantages they faced. With human ships proven to be completely obsolete against arakai warships, they had simply phased them out and had decided to bank on dwarven ships instead. This made their fleets smaller and thus harder to target. It also made their fleets smaller.

And the best part was that Martial Artists, and several other pathwalkers, were quite compact despite being powerful. Thus, the reduction in ship quantity didn’t affect their logistics that much.

Of course, it did affect the therianthropes, who were often accompanied by large bio-engineered beasts, and it certainly affected the giants, who had yet to participate in the war, but the remaining pathwalkers, specifically the Martial Artists, the evolutionaries, and the tekvores, were still highly functional despite this arrangement.

Unfortunately, even dwarven ships were only able to endure arakai onslaught; they weren’t able to dish it out nearly to the same extent. Which meant that their only proven way of defeating arakai warships was to rely on pathwalkers.

Of course, even that was not going to remain true for long.

One of the ways that the combined research effort of much of human civilization’s researchers and developers had been focused on was coming up with a solution to overcome arakai defense technology—specifically, prothanite.

Within the manifold, for the past fourteen months, dwarves, tekvores, and even humans had poured much of their effort and time into coming up with new technological systems that would allow them to sunder the arakai ships like they were ordinary vessels.

Research in this direction had charted out some promising results, but not enough to figure out a solution immediately.

There were some research teams working on simply replicating arakai technology and using their own exploding prothanite shells against their enemies, but even if they could reverse engineer such advanced technology, it was not realistically a viable solution. Prothanite was very difficult to create. The arakai were extraordinary for creating such large amounts of it.

Another research team focused on trying for other forms of hyperdimensional technology that could be used to potentially damage the arakai warfleets. However, this was more vague and less concrete. It was less of a proper research project and more of an open-ended goal.

Another avenue of research and development was to rely on simply heavier and stronger weapons that used volume to scale damage, but the damage needed to bust arakai ships was so high that each weapon would have to be several times larger, clearly far too large to be fitted on ships.

Each solution had some potential on paper, but couldn’t be manifested and realized in a short amount of time. The dreams of trying to rapidly develop an effective anti-arakaian offensive weapons system were not dreams that could be fulfilled in the short term.

However, that didn’t mean that all endeavors of giving human civilization an edge in the war had failed. From the manifold flowed a stream of weapons crafted by none other than Transcendent Dwight. The Martial Transcendent had taken time out of his busy schedule for the past fourteen months to complete the most pressing of the many commissions that he had received from some of human civilization’s finest warriors.

He particularly paid attention to Transcendent Candidates and Martial Corporeals, along with some of the strongest pathwalkers from the other races of human civilization. Although his projects were important and would give human civilization an edge in the long run, he also needed to support human civilization in the short term as well.

Weapons such as the Twin Winds that Kane had commissioned gave humanity’s strongest warriors the ability not only to impact the war much more substantively, but also to have greater tenacity, allowing human civilization to preserve its highest firepower. The success rate of battles fought on all three battle fronts in Arima III was meaningfully improved by the proliferation of such weapons.

Instances where dead-lost conditions were reversed by a powerhouse wielding an extraordinary artifact were not uncommon. However, as far as Transcendent Dwight was concerned, these were merely limited showings of his power.

Soon, human civilization would see his full power.

”It’s finally time.”

In front of him was a three-dimensional hologram featuring the life-sized blueprint of what was perhaps the greatest war asset of dwarven civilization.

God’s Hammer.

It was a mech that was, by itself, the greatest combat machine that any dwarf or perhaps any human at all had ever created. Nothing else came even remotely close. Not even the best of dwarven warships or superweapons, it was entirely in a realm by itself.

And that was before Transcendent Dwight had upgraded its design.

In the past fourteen months, he had dedicated himself to primarily one task: overhauling the blueprint of the machine and elevating it to a transcendent status. His goal had been straightforwardly simple.

To create a machine that was so powerful that it could fight Administrators head-on and emerge victorious.

After all, even though he was a Transcendent Craftsman, he had no combat power of his own. His power came from being able to leverage his creationary power to create artifacts that could fight on his behalf.

If it was just a matter of time for the other races in human civilization to get their hands on Transcendent pathwalkers, then the dwarves would not be able to keep these pathwalkers in check with the existing God’s Hammer.

That was why he had dedicated a lot of time to upgrading the blueprint. He leveraged his formidable mind. The vast knowledge and intellect he had cultivated over centuries allowed him to meaningfully upgrade the design from scratch. He had also continuously used his Creationverse over the past fourteen months to create the necessary Transcendent-grade esoteric substances to truly elevate God’s Hammer to another level.

And now, it was finally time to culminate more than a year’s worth of labor.