Chapter 251 — Drills and a Proposal for Improving Melee Weapons

He had only asked offhandedly, never expecting that this mercenary knight, usually so sloppy and careless, could produce results so quickly—but to his surprise, Byron immediately broke into a smug grin: "You've asked the right man. I actually do have some ideas!"

"Oh?" Gao Yang was somewhat surprised. "Let's hear them."

"Hold on, I've got a blueprint too!" Byron said cheerfully. "It's at home, not far from here. I'll be right back!"

Byron was a man of formidable drive. Once he had Gao Yang's permission, he simply activated Sprint and Charge and vanished from the training ground in a trail of dust, leaving Gao Yang and Philip staring at each other in place. After a long moment Knight Philip managed to squeeze out: "He can draw magic-conductor blueprints now too?"

Byron's residence on Knight Street was close to the barracks, and with a professional knight's fleetness of foot, Gao Yang did not have to wait long before he saw the knight come dashing back in a whirl of energy. Sure enough, the man was clutching a rather large paper roll—that must be the blueprint he had spoken of.

"This is it," Byron said, coming up before Gao Yang and unrolling the blueprint with great excitement. "I worked this out together with a few rune craftsmen from the mechanical workshop. You know, drawing blueprints isn't exactly my strong suit..."

Only then did Gao Yang nod in understanding, and at the same time his attention was already drawn to what was on the blueprint. It was indeed a design sketch for some kind of melee weapon, shaped like a sword or saber, and he could tell it was still only a conceptual framework. Both the grip of the blade and the base of the blade showed spaces reserved for runes and magic-conductor devices, but no definite structures had been drawn there yet. Beside the sketch were written many functional requirements and ideas—clearly, the discussion was not yet finished.

Byron noticed the imperfections in the blueprint as well, and he smiled: "We haven't reached a conclusion yet. There's a lot still under dispute."

Gao Yang had already seen some of the things he had been hoping for in that sword design, and he said at once: "Disputes are nothing to fear. Tell me your view."

"Here's how it is—you should know, I was a mercenary back in the day. What sets mercenaries apart from professional knights or soldiers is that we don't have so many fixed conventions and rules. Whether it's weapons and equipment or ways of fighting, everything starts from practicality. Outsiders looking at our gear would think it a chaotic jumble, but we ourselves know that every weapon and piece of equipment exists because it is 'needed'—it has its own environment and scenario of use," Byron said, unusually taking the initiative to bring up his mercenary past as he began to explain his train of thought. "So I've been thinking: under what circumstances do our soldiers need to use melee weapons, and what kind of battlefield environment will these melee weapons have to face?"

He paused, then went on: "The Cecil soldier already has the thermal ray gun. Word is that a higher-tier arcane missile launcher and an electric spear have also entered the design stage. Each of these is more powerful than the last, and when soldiers use them in massed formation they can even take out mid-tier transcendents outright. These ranged attacks are enough for them to destroy the vast majority of enemies. So there are only two reasons they would fall back on melee weapons: first, their own ranged weapons can't be used for some reason—broken, say; second, the enemy has strong magic resistance, or simply possesses a trait like 'stray-shot deflection.'

"The second case is obviously what we should be preparing for.

"Our soldiers aren't short on magical attacks; what they lack is stronger physical killing power. The rune craftsmen and I ruled out the traditional approach of enchanting the blade with elements to add magical damage, and turned instead to ways of increasing the sheer destructive force of the blade. The more common methods in that vein are physical enchantments like Sharpness, Weight, and Armor-Piercing, but those enchantments either offer limited improvement or can't yet be converted into spell formations, so we didn't consider them either...

"In the end, we came up with two proposals: one is the 'mechanical sword,' the other the 'molten-cutting sword'..."

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