100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 781 - Coordination

Lucien resumed direct control of Lootwell soon after.

That did not mean Vivian disappeared from the administration or that everything returned to the way it had been before the temporal regions existed.

If anything, Lucien did the opposite.

He began rotating people.

Those responsible for keeping Lootwell running spent part of their time outside, handling the work that could not simply be abandoned, then entered his inner universe when their turn came to train. Others returned from the accelerated regions to take their places.

Vivian followed the same arrangement.

So did the senior administrators.

Lucien refused to let the people who carried Lootwell on their shoulders become the only ones denied the advantage simply because they were too important to leave their desks.

At first, the transitions were awkward.

A few administrators returned after months of internal training only to discover that someone else had reorganized half their department while they were gone. Others came back noticeably stronger and immediately found themselves buried beneath reports that had accumulated during what felt to them like a long absence but had barely been weeks outside.

They adapted.

Lootwell always did.

More importantly, the rotation worked.

The city continued functioning while more of its people gained access to years they otherwise would never have possessed.

As Lucien’s control over temporal flow improved, he expanded again.

Several new zones appeared inside the inner universe, each separated carefully enough that the differences in time would not interfere with neighboring regions. Some remained dedicated to Lootwell, while others were opened to people who had stood beside them long before the coming calamity became obvious.

The Obsidian Collegium received access first.

The Silent Monastery of the Ninth Bell followed.

Lucien did not treat the opportunity as payment.

He simply remembered who had been there when cooperation had still been inconvenient.

Now that he could afford to share more, he did.

•••

The inner universe gradually developed its own rhythm.

At one training region, Marie stood atop a shattered plateau and stared at the spirits below her with an expression that suggested she was reconsidering several life choices.

The spirit facing her had once been a young earth spirit whose greatest achievement was accidentally destroying a hill while trying to reinforce it.

Now it had a Nihility Body.

The hill would probably have preferred its earlier version.

Marie raised one hand.

The earth spirit responded instantly.

The ground beneath the training field folded upward, not as a crude wall but as a layered defensive structure whose density shifted according to where the incoming attack would land.

A fire spirit struck it from the other side.

The first layer melted.

The second redirected the heat.

The third collapsed deliberately and buried the fire before it could spread.

Marie nodded.

"Better."

The earth spirit visibly brightened.

Several hundred meters away, Kaia was less generous.

An explosion rolled across another section of the field.

"What was that?"

The fire spirit in front of her looked proud.

Kaia stared at the crater.

"I told you to contain it."

The spirit’s enthusiasm diminished.

Sylra laughed from above.

Marina, standing beside a lake that had not existed ten minutes earlier, ignored both of them.

Their spirits had changed tremendously.

The Abyssal Tempering Pools had allowed many of the more mature ones to form Nihility Bodies, and months of accelerated training had given them time to grow into those bodies rather than merely possess them.

Some were already beginning to approach the point where Eternal was no longer an impossible distance away.

But realm advancement was only part of what the elemental women were building.

The more interesting development had begun with the contracts.

At first, only a handful of spirits chose partners among the talents training inside Lucien’s universe.

The results were good enough that others followed.

A contracted spirit was not simply another fighter standing beside someone.

The connection between them carried intent.

A swordsman did not need to shout for the wind spirit beside him to redirect an incoming projectile. The thought passed through the bond before his mouth ever opened.

A mage working with an earth spirit could begin constructing a formation while the spirit stabilized the terrain around it without waiting for instructions.

In battle, those fractions of a second mattered.

The connection reminded Lucien of the Concord Pact, although the nature of the bond was different.

What mattered was the same principle.

Two beings that understood one another without needing constant verbal coordination could fight as something greater than two separate individuals.

The elemental women took responsibility for making sure that advantage did not become a disaster.

Marie was particularly strict about compatibility.

Kaia was particularly strict about courage.

Sylra claimed she was strict about personality, although Lucien suspected she mostly rejected anyone she found boring.

Marina simply watched people long enough that unsuitable candidates usually became uncomfortable and left on their own.

Somehow, the system worked.

The contracted pairs trained together, failed together, and gradually learned how to move without getting in one another’s way.

Lucien watched one exercise where a young spear user and a water spirit spent the first three attempts ruining each other’s attacks.

By the tenth, they stopped colliding.

By the thirtieth, the spirit had learned to shape the battlefield around the spear user’s movements before he completed them.

By the fiftieth, their opponents began complaining.

Lucien considered that a healthy sign.

•••

Elsewhere, Eirene and the Lunarians had found an unexpectedly compatible partnership with the Obsidian Collegium.

The Lunarians excelled at layered formations and precise magical structures. The Collegium, meanwhile, possessed the sort of battlefield calculation that could turn a good formation into something much harder to break.

Eirene handled structure.

The Grandmaster handled prediction.

At first, their methods clashed.

The Lunarians preferred elegant stability.

The Collegium preferred whatever survived contact with reality.

After several simulated campaigns, both sides began stealing from one another.

A Lunarian formation that once relied on perfect positioning learned how to deform without collapsing when half its anchors were destroyed.

The Collegium’s battlefield arrays became considerably more efficient after the Lunarians removed three layers of unnecessary complexity and quietly asked why anyone had thought they were needed.

The Grandmaster had not appreciated that question.

He had appreciated the result.

Lucien watched one of their later simulations from a distance.

A formation covering an entire valley shifted twice before the enemy reached it.

The first adjustment followed the terrain.

The second followed a calculation the Grandmaster had made after predicting where the opposing force would attempt to break through.

By the time the attack came, Eirene had already moved the weak point somewhere else.

Lucien smiled.

That partnership had not been planned.

Those were often the best kind.

•••

The Silent Monastery developed differently.

Vivian spent more time there than Lucien expected.

Virel and Aniel were frequently beside her, along with members of the Celestial Race and several specialists whose abilities focused on healing, purification, reinforcement, and protection.

Seraphine eventually joined them.

That changed the entire structure.

Lucien had always known Vivian was capable of command.

What he had not expected was how seriously she would prepare once she decided that she would stand on the battlefield rather than remain behind Lootwell’s walls.

She did not attempt to imitate Lucien.

Instead, she learned how to hold together the parts of a battlefield that Lucien normally handled instinctively.

She studied troop movement.

She learned how long healers could sustain continuous operations before efficiency collapsed.

She learned when purification teams should move forward and when doing so merely placed them inside the next attack.

She spent internal months failing simulated campaigns where no amount of personal strength could fix a poor decision made twenty minutes earlier.

Then she stopped making those decisions.

By the time Lucien began observing her later exercises, Vivian no longer looked like someone learning how to command.

She looked like someone who already understood that command was mostly the art of deciding which problems could be allowed to exist.

Virel and Aniel supported her naturally.

The Celestial Race filled many of the gaps.

The Silent Monastery provided discipline and techniques that strengthened the entire support structure around them.

Seraphine became the quiet center of the medical side.

She had no interest in battlefield glory.

Lucien respected that immediately.

Her concern was what happened after someone was dragged out of the fighting with half their body ruined and an authority they did not understand still eating through their wounds.

She trained healers to deal with injuries that ordinary medicine could not touch.

Purification specialists learned when corruption needed to be removed immediately and when doing so would kill the patient faster than the contamination itself.

Medical districts ran simulated mass-casualty events until chaos became procedure.

Vivian would command the battlefield if the larger war finally came.

Seraphine would keep that battlefield from consuming everyone who survived the first impact.

Neither role was glamorous.

But both of them mattered more than glory.