Chapter 144: Discipline and Focus
Carlos stayed with Noah discussing the care they should take with setting up Noah's new entrepreneurship for a few more hours.
When Carlos left, it was already past 15:00 (3pm), and Noah was a little disappointed for not having received any notification of any Exp gained.
He thought he would receive notifications whenever a monster died at the hands of the imp, but unfortunately that was not how it worked. As Patrick had not yet contacted him, Noah assumed that he would only receive the message when they were outside the Fortress, which would make all the exp he received probably come at once.
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Meanwhile, inside the Rank F Fortress that Patrick had invaded, people were impressed. Among everyone in the invasion group, nobody remembered meeting Patrick, since he was always far below average, but not as much as Noah, who didn't even have a useful Blessing before, despite having a lot of knowledge.
So, when the party saw Patrick summoning a little "red goblin", they just thought it was some weak monster as well, but they were happy because Blessed who summoned monsters were always very well liked. After all, having another pair of arms to help in the battle was much more useful than someone who gave off a small electrical spark, as Patrick previously had done.
What really impressed people was when the invasion truly started and they met the first group of monsters.
They usually had a standard tactic, where the warriors would try to attract the monsters' attention so that the archers and wizards would attack from a carefree distance, but different from what they imagined, the summoner commanded his "red goblin" to run towards the monsters, disregarding any kind of strategy and concern for the others.
This of course attracted quite animosity from the rest of the group; they imagined that that "red goblin" would simply die against those monsters. After all, it was a single goblin against 4 hyenas.
But in front of all the 15 Blessed, going against everything they were used to seeing (even Patrick), the little "red goblin" was so fast and agile that the hyenas couldn't get any bites in on him.
He dodged the bites with great agility, and whenever he deflected, he used the sharp claws in his hand to make a big cut on the skin of the hyenas.
In just two minutes, the "red goblin" had killed all 4 hyenas with only a small cut on the side of his waist.
That was enough for the other Blessed to look at the "red goblin" and feel a little apprehensive. They had been fighting monsters for years, and seeing a monster like that, which maybe had the strength of a Boss, made them wonder what they could do if that monster went crazy and tried to kill them.
Fortunately, the "red goblin" returned to the side of the magician who summoned him and stood there obediently, ignoring the cut waist he had.
Because of the actions being so far from what they were used to, the group was momentarily lost and did not know what to do. That was until a big muscular man approached the wizard who had summoned the "red goblin" and said something to him.
"Do you want me to heal the wound he received?" The big man with the intimidating appearance, in fact, was a healer, and with a slightly uncertain tone of voice, he decided to offer his healing service to the "red goblin". After all, if this creature continued to fight with them, the risks their term world face would definitely fall by a considerable margin.
Patrick had been very nervous seeing that big man coming straight towards him. For a few seconds he thought the man could be angry and want to fight with him because he was using a monster to fight, or something like that, but as the man only wanted to help, Patrick was relieved and opened a big smile on his face while accepting the man's help.
With the link he received from the imp contract, Patrick could understand some of the things he was feeling or thinking, even though those thoughts were very shallow, but there was something that surprised Patrick when the man started to heal his wound.
When the golden energy of healing reached the wound of the imp, Patrick felt as if he was absorbing something, something of that energy was entering his body and was staying there, adapting to something else already in him. Unfortunately Patrick didn't understand that, so he just understood it as something natural to the imp, but if Noah were there, he would have recognized that feeling, because he had been through something like this before. After all, his [Healing Flames] was developed in exactly the same way...
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Meanwhile, Noah at home had left the thought of the exp points he would receive from Patrick's Fortress and decided to apply some hypotheses that he and Carlos had during that time.
Firstly, when Noah realized that the biggest cost of the skill was in fact summoning the imps, and in order to keep costs low, Noah had developed an idea.
His energy recharged much faster than that of a normal person, and his stats had a big influence on that, so he wanted to make the most of it. With a wave of his hand, Noah made five more pentagrams appear on the floor. From each pentagram came a small imp with a curious gaze looking around itself, but other than that, nothing was readable from their expressions. Noah knew they were waiting for commands from the superior demon who was in their presence, in this case, Noah.
At that time, Noah had a total of 12 imps summoned, 1 for Patrick, 5 that he had summoned when he was demonstrating to both of them, 5 that he had just summoned now, and the last one was the one he has given to Carlos, who must have summoned him at home to leave as a watchdog. He had most likely summoned the imp at home to test out its capabilities in terms of strength and such, but this meant that Carlos only had one more summon left.
Looking at the 10 imps called up from the training in front of him, Noah wanted to test what they could do that would be useful in the long run. The biggest mana consumption was just to summon them, so leaving the 10 imps summoned consumed less energy over time than it took to resummon them.
He had already asked them to fight with each other when Carlos was here, but that was just a matter of measuring their strength level. Now that he was alone, Noah thought about doing a different kind of test.
"Train together with a battle partner. Try to learn the most effective way to use your attacks," Noah said with a serious look as he issued an order as a general would.
The imps didn't even think twice about starting to attack each other and try to follow Noah's order.
Noah knew that even though they were an "artificial" existence, they still had intelligence. After all, the way they carried out orders meant that they could understand commands very well, and that they probably had a memory bank, and also when he had tested it with Carlos and told the imp to do something again, the imp knew exactly what to do, without Noah having to say it again, that is, he remembered what had happened earlier.
The imps' "training battle" was complete chaos. It was something so disorganized that Noah felt a little uncomfortable while watching it. But as the minutes passed, Noah realized that a change was taking place there.
The fight, which was once full of disorganized movements, was now beginning to take on some form. They were learning to think a little about how best to attack without leaving an obvious opening. Of course, the improvement was almost imperceptible, probably needing days for an actual tangible change to happen, but that was something that made Noah even more excited about these monsters... After all, maybe they could rise from the strength of Rank E to a higher rank!
Terrence and Lilith joined him at some point to watch the imps fight, but they soon lost interest, going to do something more interesting around the house. Only Noah stayed there for hours while watching the monsters fighting and occasionally giving a loud command, or advice, to improve their battle. As they would never disagree with one of his orders, they were the best type of sponge to absorb knowledge. After all, they did not doubt the source of the knowledge and took it as an absolute truth.
"Discipline and Focus, two of the main characteristics of a perfect army..." Noah said to himself in a low voice as he watched the imps' development.
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