100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 727 - Rescue

Five days passed after the Interweaving Trial ended.

The interval was deliberate.

Lootwell had announced the five-day break as preparation time before the Team Trials began, giving every participating force a chance to review what the earlier stages had exposed and prepare for a much larger kind of event.

The Interweaving Grounds remained busy throughout those days, just as Lucien had expected. Four-person teams returned to test combinations that had failed under pressure, craftsmen adjusted their designs, and factions reviewed recordings that had exposed weaknesses they had never noticed during ordinary training.

The coming Team Trials gave them another reason not to waste the time.

Unlike the Interweaving Trial, this would not revolve around small groups of four.

The Team Trials were meant for the larger forces that had already registered before the Grand Intercontinental Competition began.

Major factions had entered their own contingents from the start. Some relied on long-established units whose members had fought beside one another for years, while others organized their participants according to role, realm, experience, and battlefield function.

The beast factions had done much the same according to their own traditions.

Independent participants had been more complicated.

Many had already registered as coalitions before the competition opened, gathering people willing to operate under the same banner for the Team Trials.

Some coalitions had formed around complementary Laws and professions, while others grew from old friendships, temporary alliances, shared goals, or simply the belief that they would have a better chance together than scattered across the battlefield.

The five-day preparation period gave all of those forces time to refine what they already had.

They reviewed formations and communication methods, adjusted the roles of scouts and healers, practiced emergency signals, and studied the people they would actually have to rely upon once the battlefield became chaotic.

More importantly, they confirmed who would be listened to when several powerful people wanted to do different things at the same time.

Lootwell did not appoint their commanders for them.

That would have defeated half the purpose.

Faction forces entered with the command structures they already trusted or selected commanders from among the people they had registered. Independent coalitions had made the same decisions among themselves.

Some chose their strongest member.

Others preferred someone with more battlefield experience or a better understanding of the people under them.

A few factions placed commanders who were considerably weaker than several of their own subordinates.

Lucien found those choices more interesting than the obvious ones.

A battlefield commander did not need to personally defeat everyone under them.

They needed to make everyone under them useful.

•••

When the five days ended, the Team Trial sectors opened.

The scale alone made the previous events feel smaller.

Entire sections of the preserved region had been divided into simulated war zones.

Ruined settlements stood beside broken roads and defensive walls. Rivers cut through valleys containing supply routes and evacuation points. Forests concealed hostile formations, while shattered fortifications overlooked routes that could become either lifelines or death traps depending on who controlled them.

Lootwell had not created identical battlefields.

It had created comparable problems.

That distinction was important.

The teams entering them were not equal.

They were never supposed to be.

Some contained Ascendants beside Transcendents.

Others possessed Eternals.

Certain beast factions had members whose bodies alone gave them advantages that humanoid races could never imitate.

Suppressing everyone to the same realm would have made the competition easier to balance.

It would also have made the entire exercise useless.

A real war would not lower an Eternal’s strength because the person standing beside them was weaker.

So Lootwell did not equalize the participants.

It classified the forces instead.

Their overall battlefield capacity had already been evaluated through realm, number of members, Laws, racial traits, equipment, healing capability, mobility, defensive strength, formations, and other factors that actually mattered when an entire team fought together.

The stronger the registered force, the harsher the battlefield prepared for it.

An Eternal did not receive weaker power.

They received a problem worthy of an Eternal.

A smaller independent coalition did not need to compete directly against a faction containing several ancient experts.

It had to solve a mission designed around what its own force could reasonably accomplish.

Placement remained within battlefield classifications.

What Lootwell compared was not whose army possessed the greatest raw strength.

It was how well each force used the strength it already had.

That was as fair as Lucien wanted the Team Trials to become.

War itself would offer them much less.

•••

The first part of the Team Trials began with rescue operations.

There was no long explanation.

Every team received a battlefield situation, an extraction zone, and the information they would realistically possess upon arriving.

Then the trial began.

One faction appeared outside a ruined settlement where hostile constructs had broken through the outer defenses.

Another entered a collapsed fortress with survivors scattered beneath damaged structures.

Several beast teams were sent into terrain where wounded targets had been separated across a wide area.

Other forces encountered damaged supply convoys, trapped defenders, blocked roads, or groups that could no longer escape without assistance.

The objective sounded simple.

Bring as many people back as possible.

It stopped feeling simple almost immediately.

One powerful team entered a ruined town and cleared the main street with overwhelming force.

The attack was impressive enough to shake several damaged buildings.

It also brought half of one structure down across the evacuation route they had intended to use.

The spectators cheered at first.

The cheering faded when the team spent the next several minutes opening another path.

Elsewhere, a weaker group approached the same kind of problem differently.

Their scouts moved first.

Defensive specialists secured two intersections while mobility users located the injured. Healers did not follow the strongest combatants into battle. They stayed where the wounded would actually reach them.

The team destroyed fewer enemies.

They finished sooner.

When the first scores appeared, nobody needed an explanation.

The difference was visible.

•••

The rescue operations quickly exposed people who had been almost invisible during the individual competition.

Scouts became valuable because finding danger early meant nobody had to fight through it later.

Defensive practitioners became anchors for evacuation routes.

Healers who understood battlefield positioning prevented injuries instead of merely treating them afterward.

Even people specializing in transportation, terrain alteration, concealment, or communication suddenly found themselves determining whether an entire team succeeded.

Some commanders adapted quickly.

Others discovered that giving an order was easier than understanding what that order would cost.

An independent coalition attracted attention after entering a sector with several injured targets trapped beyond a collapsing defensive line.

Its commander was not the strongest person in the group.

He was not even close.

Several of the coalition’s combatants could have defeated him comfortably.

He still sent the strongest members to hold two narrow approaches instead of allowing them to chase the hostile constructs gathering farther away.

The scouts opened a route.

The healers moved with the evacuation group.

When one combatant asked for permission to pursue the retreating enemy, the commander refused.

The enemy escaped.

So did every injured target.

The coalition finished with almost all of its strength intact.

A few spectators who had questioned the commander’s appointment became noticeably quieter.

Lucien recorded the result.

That was the kind of person a war could use.

•••

Other scenarios were less forgiving.

In one sector, a team reached a section of the battlefield just as the terrain began collapsing around two separate objectives. Several wounded targets remained trapped to the west, while a cache of strategic supplies lay in the opposite direction.

There was not enough time to save both.

The commander made the decision quickly and sent the team toward the wounded.

By the time the last injured target crossed into safety, the supplies had already disappeared beneath the collapsing terrain.

Their resource score suffered because of it, but their rescue result remained intact.

Another force faced a similar choice later and tried to recover everything.

They managed to save more material, but the extra time cost them several extraction targets before the team could reach safety.

When the final results appeared, their placement fell well below the first group.

The reaction across the observation districts was quieter this time.

Nobody denied that the second force had worked harder or attempted more.

That was precisely the problem.

They had tried to accomplish everything when the battlefield had already made that impossible, and people had paid the price for the hesitation.

By the end of the rescue operations, discussions across the factions had shifted away from the usual questions of raw strength.

People were talking about evacuation routes, medical positioning, reserve forces, communication delays, and the point at which an objective stopped being worth the cost of pursuing it.

Lucien had no reason to stretch the exercise beyond that.

The rescue operations had already shown what he wanted them to show.