"Any ideas how long they'd resume their march, how big their final army would be, and the probability of mages coming along?" Asked Elena, the current second-in-command of the war.
"We don't know yet, I'm still trying my hardest to gather some more intel. It's getting harder to do trade outside after they found out we were vampires," said Erina.
The first-in-command, Lucky, told a guess, "the numbers probably wouldn't fluctuate much considering the goblin kingdom is in the midst of a civil war as well."
"As for the mages, I think it's guaranteed. There's no way they'd let vampires exist in their kingdom. We're like a plague to them," he added.
"We should not worry about the army's arrival for now, we should worry more about the mages," said Lucky.
"Anyone here have any idea how powerful the kingdom's mages are?" He asked.
One by one, the people in the room stated their knowledge about mages.
"I know a bit about mages, they rank from 1st Circle to 9th Circle. The lowest being 1st Circle and the highest being 9th Circle. They say that a 1st Circle mage is equivalent to around 10 regular soldiers. And the higher in Circle they go, you can multiply their equivalence by a hundred times. So a 2nd Circle mage would be equal to 1,000 regular soldiers," explained Brutus.
"I once saw a 2nd Circle mage eradicate more than a thousand soldiers in the Elven War, so their power levels aren't necessarily set in stone," said Elena.
"M-my dad was a 2nd Circle mage. He'd always tell me that he'd one day be a royal mage. Apparently, you can apply to be a royal mage once you reach the 3rd Circle," added Aroi, the son of the former goblin chief of Oer back when it was just a small village.
"So it seems that we are at least fighting 3rd Circle mages of an unknown number, each equivalent to roughly around 100,000 soldiers, huh?" Said Lucky.
'We're fucked,' he thought.
"Let's not lose hope yet. Mages are extremely rare. Erina, prioritize finding out how many mages would come," ordered Lucky.
"Understood," said Erina.
"Brutus, Rocks, Macks, start replacing the wooden log walls and ramparts with steel-reinforced concrete walls. We need to strengthen our line of defense," he ordered.
"Yes, Boss!" All three exclaimed.
"Ella, help the researchers with the gunpowder experiments. We're so close to achieving the best ratio. You'll also be helping me and the dwarves design the new guns."
"Of course!" Agreed Ella.
"Elena, lead a small unit to neigboring territories. Entice them to come to our city to become vampires. We need more numbers to defend our city," he ordered.
"On it!" Exclaimed Elena.
'Since vampires can only reproduce by turning others into vampires, we cannot risk turning all our goblins into vampires. Doing so would halt our growing population,' he thought.
"Alright, today's meeting is dismissed!" He announced.
****
After everyone left the war room, Lucky sat on a chair and sped through his thoughts.
'There's an oddity in my vampiric lineage. For some reason, some of the goblin vampires could reproduce normally through sex. However, their children were normal goblins. Once or twice could be coincidental mutations, but more than a hundred vampire goblins have already had children.'
'I know my vampiric lineage is unique. We're the only vampires that are still "alive" after turning. And from what Erina gathered, vampires immediately cease living once they turn into one. Vampires are technically alive, but normally they're living solely through their blood. They stop breathing and stop pumping their hearts, and they directly control their blood circulation through the blood itself. As if they're a sentient colony of blood, puppeteering a dead body.'
'I guess the vampire serum that I took either didn't originate from this world, or it is from this world but mutated when it entered my body. I'm guessing it's not from this world, or rather, planet. That's the reason why I and my lineage of vampires are both alive and are vampires.'
'To a vampire in this planet, every organ in their body except for blood are secondary. And thus, most of their organs atrophied if they didn't consciously use them. Thus, they also apparently do not think through the brain, they think through blood. It's very possible that they think through the brain as well, but I can think of it as them having their brains as a computer that they could use when they want to think harder and better.'
'This also applies to their reproductive organs. They are, simply put, infertile. Why? I don't know yet, but I hope we survive this war and find out later on.'
'Goblins are incredibly fertile and have a fast gestation period, meanwhile, vampires are infertile. I'm guessing that my vampire serum also had a similar effect to fertility, because the vampire goblins almost never had children when the normal goblin usually already had 3 children within a year.'
'It's higly likely that my unqiue vampire bloodline makes the body produce less sperm or eggs. So even though I could beat it now and shoot some loads out, they might just be blanks or almost blanks.'
'So does this mean I can have children with the girls?'
"Children...." he quietly muttered.
'Phew, slow down. Our relationship isn't going anywhere. I need to focus on the war. We need to survive the war first.'
After straightening his thoughts once more, he began jotting down his plans for the war on a small pocket-sized notebook.
'There might be a way to counter the mages....'
'First, we need tons of gunpowder. No gunpowder's too weak, we need copious amounts of nitroglycerin, which we already know how to make from our guano research a couple years ago. We can use it to make dynamite, which I thankfully already know the recipe of.'
'Second, we need a stabilizer for the nitroglycerin to make the dynamite. But the problem is that we don't have any way to get diatomaceous earth, the stabilizer that was used for the first dynamite on Earth. From what I remembered, they come from fossilized beds in lakes or ancient dried up seas. The problem is that even if we know where to find them, we don't know what they look like and how to extract them. Since the war is imminent, I have to quickly find a replacement for it.'
'Finally, we need fuses. Thankfully we're already close to finding the perfect gunpowder ratio, so making the dynamite fuse would be easy. We just need to seal it within a paper tube and reinforce that paper tube with more paper. We have glue after all.'