Darius continued with his 'divine' work of creating life. Each life he brought into the world became sentient and whole, immediately sent into training as their number grew rapidly.
By the time the full month had passed - i.e. an extra two weeks - Darius had made more than 500,000 troops and got them training. He spent an average of 2 seconds creating a body, 1 second infusing the Soul Nourishing Lunar Dew, and 2 seconds shuffling them into a pod.
He and Miranda were like a crazy fast and efficient assembly line, and their work was one that would leave any soulful being speechless. Any human who watched this happen would probably suffer an existential crisis like no other.
For the purposes of war, Darius allowed the first batch of troops who had been created on the first day to come out, since they had completed their one-month training.
He didn't know the state of Fraterina's war preparations after one month, as he had been completely holed up, but he was smart enough to make sure that his people would not be left stranded due to his tendency for perfectionism.
Around 17,000 troops were released from the pods, their actions and demeanors no longer like new souls brought into this world, but ferocious monsters that had seen blood, bathed in it, drank it, and generally revered it.
100 years had passed, each second had felt real to them in the virtual reality pod. The wealth of experience they had accumulated made them even mentally older than Darius himself, but only a slight bit!
Darius was aware that all of these men and women lacked a proper name, yet instead of giving them numerical designations, he simply had Miranda assign them codenames.
Once they obtained enough merit in war and experience, they would be allowed to purchase a name of their choosing and an identity as a Citizen of Safemoon using War Points from the AI.
Each of them had naturally been given a high-power HoloBrace, as 50% of their 100-year training had been based around it. Their ability to make decisions, allocate troops, check their kills and recognize friends from foe depended on it.
With Satellite coverage, Miranda had the entirety of Faust under her eye, so even if one of them got 'stranded', they actually wouldn't be. Unless those HoloBrace got cut off from their arms, they would be 500% efficient warriors.
Without them, would be 350% efficient (compared to the highest standard of a fighter on Fallon) as the other 50% of their 100-year training had been to prepare them for the case they ever lost their HoloBrace.
There was no need to intentionally keep such an obvious weakness.
After sending out his first batch, Darius continued working, as the number needed to be bumped if they were to have a fully pronged war. The good news was that he had also begun work on his elite troops.
He'd harvested a batch of semen from his soulless male creations injected with Phoenix blood in their genitals. In truth, the survival rate had been a somewhat disappointing 3%.
The rest had their balls explode and worse.
There had been one whose balls kept burning up and then regenerating, reincarnating itself through nirvana until it became rejected by his body due to the sheer difference.
There had been another whose balls had always remained around molten temperature yet had never melted, causing the host intense pain until he had been put down.
There was one who seemed fine, but any time he peed, it would scald his urethra, and you could imagine how that felt.
The three who had survived were indeed special. The first one had mutated, and his member had become no different from a large bird, losing any human traits.
The second one had retained a human dong, yet he was unable to get hard at all. Nevertheless, despite being impotent, one did not necessarily need ejaculation to harvest semen, not to mention there were ways to force it up.
As for the third one, he had a human dong and seemed fine. He had ended up the most normal of the batch, and they had even managed to successfully mate him with the weakest human female, impregnating her without issue.
In fact, his virility actually turned out to be a bit horrifying. The AI had run tests on it and discovered that he could literally impregnate anything with enough effort.
A random dog, cat or heck, even mouse, if bred, would give birth to a demi-phoenix mixed with its bloodline, introducing a new species to Faust.
You could sure as hell expect that Darius had experimented with this. The cat had given birth to a fire cat, the dog a two-winged flaming dog, and the mouse a heatmouse.
These experiments had continued with all sorts of animals and monsters. Heck, Darius was sure that if he were to build a catacomb with levels and tossed them there, he could manually create a fire dungeon of a unique kind.
Speaking of dungeons, that reminded Darius about his plan to create more dungeons in Safemoon, at least one of every type as well as dungeons with more than one type.
He now had enough CP to create triple element Basic Dungeon Cores, so he would certainly work on that after this was done.
Sigh, Vena had done him a great favor by removing how he formerly leveled up through Quests.
Now, he could afford to take his time and develop himself without any worry or hesitation, unlike before where he had been forced to develop for a bit and then 'work' for a bit to 'please' her thanks to Caesar's deception.
Do you think he would have ever gotten up to run to Pokterr or Ludo otherwise?
Darius kept all the resulting specimens alive and allowed them to reproduce individually to increase their numbers at first before allowing them to crossbreed. This would be a long-term experiment, so he left under Miranda's care.
Of course, the reason he created the men with the Phoenix race semen was obviously not to create unique monsters and become some sort of bizarre monster rancher.
Arguably, Darius did dip his hands into many fields, but the main reason for this was for the production of his elite troops!
So, how were they faring?
