Overlord Drath looked toward the students, then to Karl’s beasts, who were doing their best to teach them new things, explaining theory even during the lunch break.
“How hard do you think that you can push those new Elites without damaging their potential?” He asked carefully.
“We have a potion for the five orphaned volunteers that might immediately push them to Awakened, but then they will need significant time to recover. The ones with bonded beasts will grow closer to the growth rate of their partner, though. The System will help them grow faster, but pushing the Elite to advance will only create an imbalance where one side is stronger than the other. It happens to me constantly, and I’m constantly working to keep both myself and all the members of my team in balance.
So, there is only so fast you can push them, and they will eventually need practical experience to help them grow.” Karl explained.
Drath sat silently as he mentally calculated something. “So, Awakened by autumn, then Ascended by second year is realistic for most of them?”
Karl nodded. “If their growth rate holds, or whoever takes over after my team is reassigned keeps them on the same training regimen. I can’t speak for other methods, but Ascended by the end of the first term shouldn’t be a problem.
We’ve got some clerics over there taking scientific notes on everything that we’re doing so that they can try to replicate it with others. Some of the advancement is directly due to my own skills and my team, though. So, I would expect limited gains from a repeat.”
Drath chuckled. “Like following the same diet and workout plan designed to maximize gains, but having the second group do it without steroids.”
Karl nodded. “Something like that. The real issues won’t start until Commander Rank, though.”
The Overlord sighed.
“Oh, I am well aware of that. What I was hoping was now that I’ve got some system equipment from the Dungeon, I might be able to boost some of my Sergeants.
They’re already established in the army, so if I can grant them a system and smash them up to the Ascended or Commander Rank in a matter of months, I can give the units a champion to maintain morale.”
“Not the officers?” Karl asked.
Drath shook his head. “The officers make plans and give orders, the Sergeants carry them out. We don’t need powerful combatants giving orders, we need them fighting.”
Cara laughed and nudged Karl. [Promoted past the point of usefulness.] Drath noticed the exchange and waited for a translation.
“She says they have been promoted past the point of usefulness.”
“In a battlefield sense, that is true. The Lieutenants still lead larger teams, but beyond that, they’re rarely on the front lines, other than the Commissars.”
The Commissars in question were a Special Forces team from the Church, part of the Inquisition in charge of military morale. They were all insane, as far as Karl could tell, but they made the Red Dragon happy.
“I take it that they’re making plans to spread this rapid training method as soon as possible?” Karl asked, knowing that the Overlord in charge of Military Strategy as the First General of the nation was not here on a whim.
Overlord Drath sighed and nodded. “There are two competing plans right now. One wants to make a potion that will boost freshly tested Elites to Commander directly, burning their potential in the process. The other group believes that we need to find a way to use your rapid training methods on more soldiers.”
Karl nodded. “Actually, I think that I have a solution for that. I have been thinking about it for a while, and if we can find a number of young beasts like the Cerro Hatchlings, I believe that there is a way to bond them to those with the potential to become an Elite.
I had a System Quest for it, and it had a sixty percent success rate among the Special Forces students, as you likely already knew. I believe that with Runic Talismans, I could initiate that mental bond, and those with the potential would gain a Class. Most likely Beast Ranger.”
“And why didn’t you mention this to anyone?”
“Because the rest would probably die. The Elite Program has a roughly one percent fatality rate. Initial numbers for this method are twenty to thirty percent rejection, with a ten to twenty percent fatality rate. The outcome is significantly better, but you can likely reach those numbers with the equipment testing this year. It’s just that they will mostly have the basic classes, and not an advanced one.
The First Advancement Trial that is now happening at the Cathedral Temple for Commanders and up allows us to upgrade classes, and from what I can tell, Beast Ranger would normally be an option then, to upgrade Rangers.” Karl offered.
Drath took out a binder of papers and began to flip pages. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
“Yes, that is correct. We have observed a small number of them who have advanced to Beast Rangers after entering the Commander Rank Dungeon. It is listed as a Commander Rank minimum requirement, but it appears that your method might be able to do it early.
That would be a huge bonus for our forces. Cerro Knights charging to break enemy lines before the infantry follows behind them is a bit primitive as a military tactic, but if they’re Lightning Cerro, and the Knights are the Sergeants, they can defend their units as they charge.”
Karl laughed at the thought of lines of Cerro with infantry running behind them on the attack.
“You know, they’re actually better on defence. Mine likes to pair with the Red Dragon High Priestess, and they work together on the unit buffs, while the Nature Cleric does the majority of our healing.”
Drath smirked. “You haven’t told her that you can give her a chance to have a monster as a pet, have you? The Nature Priestess I mean. We might not have any left if they knew.”
Karl shook his head. “I don’t think it would work. They’re already claimed, their class won’t change so easily. They didn’t get an option to change even when the rest of us were doing our Advancement trials. But if I learn to create a skill that will let them talk to monsters, they might never get anything productive done again.”
“Is there another way to reliably create specialists? The random assignments are great for Elites, but I need uniform training regimens for hundreds of soldiers at a time. We can do that with warriors, at least the ones who have their whole Skill Tree active, which I’m not certain will be true of all the new Elites. Lack of data, you understand.”
Karl looked through his skills, using the restrictions listed by [Skill Book] to determine if there was anything that he could give them all to create some sort of uniform class.
The problem was that most of his skills were either specialized for beasts, or usable by more than one group of Elites, so there was no guarantee that those who used it would awaken the same class.
“I think that most of them should have a fully active System. All five that I awakened with items had the skill tree. It’s mostly just the Serum that was incompletely activating the Elites. Well, that or something has changed with the appearance of the higher rank active dungeon. That was when the majority of my inactive features were awakened.
But if we want to activate only one class, that could be an issue. We could narrow it down to Warriors and Rogues, or various casters. But I don’t see a way to only get one type.”