Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 79: Ring of Fire(arms)

"Finally…"

Theo muttered, watching how the water slowly filled up the ditch, spreading left and right as it flowed throughout the whole of the trench.

"After working hard for so long, it’s finally… finally done!"

With the electrifying trap now ready and only missing the water for completion, Theo no longer needed to get himself involved directly in the process.

For as long as the water extractor operated, more and more water would flow into the ditch.

That’s why, rather than wasting his time just sitting on the edge of his simple moat, waiting for it to properly fill up, Theo moved to finally complete the very last step of his preparations.

And that was to finally make proper use of the relatively narrow strip of flat ground between the moat and the wooden wall around the core of his manor.

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’By now, there should be more than enough materials for me to craft all of them,’ Theo thought as he lingered around the surface for just a little bit longer, creating a total of ten small holes reaching as deep as his production floor and positioned all around the perimeter of the wooden wall.

In theory, just one of those holes would be enough for him to bring out all the ammo-carrying conveyor belts, but…

But by using only one path for all of his ammo to pass through, he would inevitably create just a single point of critical failure. Or, in other words, if anything were to happen to said path, then it would only be a matter of time—quite a short time, to boot—before all of his guns turned silent, rendering most of his defenses entirely useless.

"And it’s not even the same as with the cable, where hardly anything can happen to it after I buried it underground and then made sure to encase it all in the reinforced concrete," Theo thought, recalling the moment when he went ahead and actually pulled out a bag of cement before mixing it in a makeshift wooden bowl into a concrete he could actually pour, as opposed to creating just an already set slab of it through his system.

Contrary to the cables, the conveyor belts actually moved items rather than just pure energy, making it a lot easier for the monsters to notice it and thus opt to try to mess with it.

Still, with just how little effort it took for Theo to prevent this problem from even appearing, it felt like a no-brainer for him to just make sure it never came to be in the first place.

With the holes in the ground done, Theo then rushed down his usual path to the underground, no longer able to afford himself any time to do things leisurely.

’It took me a lot longer to get this electric trap done than I thought it would,’ the young man complained in his thoughts, daring not to open his mouth to do it out loud as he jumped from one step to the other, never bothering to stop and thus crashing into the walls of the staircase just to kill the momentum of his descent.

With so many hours spent excavating the trench, covering its walls with concrete, adding the iron rods, and then connecting them all with wires, the time bought by the monster statue had now decreased from nearly an entire day to just above half of it. And given Theo’s desire to still get a good night’s sleep before the show would go down…

"I really need to hurry it up a bit," he muttered to himself right as he dropped down to the actual floor of his underground base, where he no longer had to worry about biting away his own tongue over some needless speaking. "At the very least, though," he then sighed… Only to come to a grinding halt as he realized his mistake.

"Why did I even go down here?" he asked out loud, only for his hand to magically find its way to his face, slapping it with a noise that then resounded through the entire cave. "Why did I bother when I can access all the storage units from up top anyway?"

Shaking his head over his own stupidity, Theo held back the curse welling up in his mouth before actually doing the only thing that he could to make the trip to the underground worth it.

And that meant, besides just collecting the resources he needed to build the guns on the surface, checking on all of his production lines!

Now that the factory had run its course for some hours, all the potential bottlenecks caused by all sorts of possible mistakes would come to light, allowing Theo to fix them while there was still more than enough time for them to produce whatever it was that would be in short supply.

And so, while moving around to collect the necessary materials for the gun emplacements, Theo also made sure to fix all the small mistakes he spotted.

A missing connection to the power grid here, or a cable that connected two machines together as opposed to connecting them to the nearby power pole. A missing belt between two dividers, a missing connection between two connectors in line…

All of those small mistakes led to the decrease of overall productivity while upkeeping the same energy cost of running all the machines.

After all, even if they didn’t do any real work, they were still all in operation mode. And be it for the sake of simplicity, real physics, or some other aspect that applied to real life but not to games, rather than only putting a strain on the power grid when they were actually running, Theo’s machines continued to suck away at the sweet, sweet electricity regardless of whether they were idle or working in full swing.

Thankfully, the limits imposed by those small oversights only served to annoy Theo by making him feel like he was wasting power for nothing, by making him feel angry for all the materials he would have had if not for said oversights. When it came to how much they affected the actual output of the factories Theo managed to set up by now, though…

The effect, at most, was minimal. And while it would multiply with time if left unaddressed, leading to massive losses…

Theo wasn’t operating an enterprise where a production bottleneck meant a waste of resources he had to purchase.

No, ultimately speaking, the only ever cost to the materials that his machines would, for various reasons, fail to process, was the electricity. And with how it could be produced with little to no effort on Theo’s end…

Was there really any reason to actually care?

Still, it was in the process of actually moving all over the factory floor that Theo recalled the very reason why he stepped down to the underground, a thought that made him plant his hand down on his face with quite the force yet again.

"Right! I still need to bring the ammo up!"

This task, for all that it was worth, was extremely simple.

All Theo had to do was first locate all the holes he drilled in advance. Then, keeping their positions in mind, he simply dragged over the already existing belts with ammunition to directly underneath each of the pre-made holes before switching from belts to conveyor lifts and then building them up as high as his system would reach.

Thankfully, there was no need for him to climb halfway up and then dig a pathway from each hole to the next to be able to reach the current end of each of the conveyors, all so that he could build it up some more, not when just the first part of it covered well more than half of the total hole’s length.

Or, in other words, his system could reach far enough for Theo to just climb all the way back to the surface and then connect the conveyor lifts from there instead!

With all ten of the holes now occupied by said lifts, Theo could finally put the production floor behind him as he started the arduous climb back to the surface.

’The more I do this path, the more I want to just get a lift capable of moving me up and down…’ Theo thought, knowing full well he didn’t really have the time for such folly… Even if, in the end, it would allow him to conserve both time and the energy he would otherwise spend either descending or climbing back up from the depths.

Once Theo emerged back on the surface, however, all panting and sweating… He only started to move even faster than before, moving around the perimeter of the wooden wall with the building overlay over his eyes as he selected spot after spot, only for the timer to appear as resources started to flow out of his chest towards those new building zones.

Then, with just a fewteen more minutes of added effort in creating a circular ring of conveyor belts, supplied by the ten secondary inflows from the underground, before connecting them to the already existing bases of the gun turrets Theo crafted.

In this way, even if something were to happen to the ring at any point of its circumference, only nine out of the hundred guns would ever be disabled due to the missing supply of ammunition - and that was already the worst-case scenario possible. In any other way, maybe three, maybe five guns would go silent… meaning, with the cover of all the other guns making sure he’s safe, Theo would be free to just run around fixing whatever issues the invasion could bring to bear against him!

Yet, even with all of it, Theo only managed to take a breath of relief when he placed the last gun, pretty much just in time for the first one to finally finish its construction, allowing Theo to witness how the boxes of ammunition moved on the belt, feeding into a roughly ten-meter-tall statue of modern might, only for it to then come alive as its huge, perfectly round barrel moved up, only to then swivel around with the help of the inertia driver, making it seem as if it used the front of its barrel as some sort of an eye that swept through the insides of Theo’s compound in search of a potential target.

Upon finding none, the massive, house-sized gun simply rested back to its initial position.

A few steps next, another gun came alive, doing the standard sweep before resting down within its reinforced lodge.

By the time the third gun came online, however, Theo already turned his back to the scene, his eyes focused on just two very specific things he could care about in this world.

First, the window of his bedroom appearing as soon as he moved through the gate…

And then the system timer, indicating that he managed to complete the job in just the perfect time.

[11:00:00]