Ultimate Gamer System: Factory Must Grow!-Chapter 75: New Resolve

In the end, the only thing that Theo could do was run.

Yet, even with his time to do so running out… he couldn’t JUST run.

No.

First, he had to ensure that running away now wouldn’t lead to disaster a few moments later. And for that sake, while already walking backward through his tunnel, he pointed his universal tool up, right in the opposite direction he moved.

’Faster!’

Hurrying himself in his thoughts, Theo pressed the button and twisted his hand at its wrist, adding up another stretch of the tunnel ahead.

Then, pretty much as soon as his hand moved back to its natural orientation, his mind already rolled the excavation projection by ninety degrees while keeping it rooted in the exact same starting spot as before, adding a side tunnel to where he expected the arachnid to emerge.

Just a few steps down the original tunnel, Theo added another leg to the underground passage. And then another. And another.

Switching directions, angles, and everything, he continued to make the area where he expected the boss of the area to arrive more and more convoluted. And when the tremors reached the point where the stone ceiling of the underground appeared to collapse at any possible moment…

Theo finally switched his tool back into construction mode, sealing the very tunnel he was in as he turned around and ran with all his might.

At first, there was no change to the mess the descent of the Chief Voiderling created. The whole underground continued to shake as before, dust continued to fall out of the stone walls of the passage, and the noise of something smashing through the rock continued to send chills down Theo’s spine.

Yet, as he ran… all of those things grew smaller, less significant. And as he filled up another stretch of his expedition tunnel with the very same material he got from excavating it…

Silence.

Blessed silence.

’Am I safe?’

With just the sound of Theo’s heartbeat filling the narrows of the tunnel, he refused to take this silence for a good… No, for a definitive sign of a successful escape.

Not when he had much better tools to do so.

’Let’s see…’

Looking up, Theo first confirmed that the Souls-like interface of the Chief Voiderling was now gone, replaced with the usual overlay Theo was much more used to.

That still wasn’t the definitive answer he sought, though.

And a second later, after going through all the subsystems of his overlay, Theo finally found it.

[Chief Voiderling (level: 1442) Searching]

"It’s no longer hunting," he muttered to himself, slumping down onto the rock to catch a breath.

Theo didn’t allow his rest to last longer than just a few seconds, only to stand right back up and then turn before just walking back while still making sure to seal the passage whenever his construction tool would allow it.

By the time the long stretch of the dark tunnel finally gave way to the slight hints of distant light, Theo was all drenched in sweat.

Not from exhaustion; just walking was no longer enough to get him tired on its own.

He was drenched in the cold sweat caused by the thousands upon thousands of times he repeated the scenario from just before in his thoughts, analyzing every possible way in which it could go wrong.

"I was careless," Theo sighed as he spoke to himself, only to then smack his fist into the stone of the tunnel’s wall, "too careless!"

Ignoring the pain of his bruised fist, Theo gritted his teeth as he continued to walk ahead, eager to put this whole expedition behind him.

If not for his stubbornness in automating even the things he could easily solve with just a tiny bit of manual labor, he would never have found himself in the circumstances he encountered. And even if the Chief Voiderling was merely a hint of what was about to come during the invasions on his claimed land…

It only served to reinforce Theo’s simple belief.

"I need weapons. A lot of them, as soon as possible, and make them hit as hard as is humanly possible… no, even harder than that!"

All the exploits Theo’s system allowed thus far were the greatest example of things going better than would normally be humanly possible. And now that Theo had encountered the true dread of the Outlands… what was there to stop him from abusing his system even more?

Now, however, rather than just a distant need, one imposed by just the over thirty hours remaining before the next attack, the task of getting weapons pushed its way all the way up to the top of Theo’s list of priorities. And as he thought about everything he would need for the sake of those weapons, his desires turned from just fleeting thoughts into a concrete plan.

A plan that Theo rushed to put into motion as soon as he took his first step back into his production area-to-be.

’First, early-stage processing.’

Pulling out the system-born designs for both the guns and their ammunition, Theo quickly came up with a nice, round number of a hundred gun emplacements before using that very number to multiply the gun’s rate of ammo usage, earning himself the production rate his factory had to meet.

First, the guns.

Given how Theo only needed a limited number of those and how they could be constructed with rather basic items, he quickly set up a small production line, caring not for the proper throughput ratio, only making sure none of the machines would choke due to the insufficient supply of the ingredients they took to produce their outputs.

Then, with the first system running after just a fifteen-minute short build, Theo moved on to the much more robust project, one that would take nearly every last bit of copper his mine currently outputted. And with it, a project that forced Theo to make sure everything ran perfectly smoothly unless he wanted a majority of the copper he could get to end up wasted, doing nothing but sitting idly on his belts while waiting for his energy-hungry machines to process it.

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"Each gun can shoot through a pack of ammo per ten seconds," Theo muttered to himself as he verified the numbers, using a burned-off stick to draw with soot directly on the production’s stone floor. "That means, for one gun, I need six packs per minute. And for a hundred guns, six hundred of those per minute."

That wasn’t a small number by any means. Thankfully, with this entire build only resulting in the bottom-most tier of the ammunition, it didn’t really require all that much ingenuity in the design, relying solely on just repeating the patterns over and over again.

And so, Theo started to work, dragging a line of copper ingots away to a manifold array of a whole ten constructors, each capable of processing each ingot into ten casings. Then, after dragging over another line of copper, he would array them together with the line of casings, putting them together into the combiner, capable of processing a total of twenty casings and one copper ingot into a pack of simple ammunition.

How did the production process within the machine work? Theo didn’t have a clue. Yet, the only important thing for him was that, at the end of the line, the combiner would spit out a familiar-looking box filled with a slight variation of the modern ammunition he saw in movies.

"And with it, the first argument of power was born to this world," Theo muttered to himself as he picked up a single bullet out of the box, only to then squeeze it up in his fist, deforming the whole thing into but a bit of tangled metal, no longer resembling anything Theo could remember.

Then, he discarded the whole box before taking a breath and raising his tired eyes.

In the process of the recent… event, he had forgotten all about his exhaustion. And now, with the breath of the Chief Voiderling still sending shivers up his spine, he gritted his teeth and went straight back to the start of the process.

After all, he had only completed the first out of the many production lines he needed!

"Now, just to replicate it… five more times?" Theo muttered, his hands already manipulating the universal tool while arranging the next row of constructors right next to the first set. "Five more times, and the song of my guns shall never stop!"