"Did you guys hear that?" Skya mumbled interrupting the others.

"What are you talking about? I can't hear anything." Tecla replied. Even though the others stopped drinking, she wasn't intending to put her beer down just because one of them was apparently hearing things.

"That's exactly my point." Skya mumbled before grabbing her staff, "This place is never quiet. Sonya, Misha, something is seriously wrong here."

Both of them knew that Skya was correct. Their guild was never this quiet no matter what the time was. The recruits always keep partying especially as they had no dungeon to clear anymore. But now, all of a sudden the noise had stopped coming. They were so down partying themselves they didn't realise it till now. 

All four of them jumped up. Every drop of alcohol from their blood was gone in a jiffy. Tecla, the tank lady, was forced by the others to make the first move as she slowly inched towards the doors leading to their room, while the others assumed position right behind her. Their abilities were on hold, ready to strike down the enemy.

However, before they could even get a chance to start a fight, the windows behind them blew open. Broke glass rained on them like a hailstorm. The next moment, dozen upon dozens of combat automatons made their way into the room through the window. 

The strategy of the four people proved to be horrendously wrong since the tank had left the crucial damage-dealer as well as weaker members behind to protect themselves. Tecla ran to help her team but she only managed to take two steps before the door was thrown away and managed to hit her in the head.

This two-way attack made it impossible for them to defend themselves from two sides. Tecla might have been able to hold off the attack from one side with Skya's buffs, but that would have left their other side unprotected. There was no way they were going to be able to defend and fight back at the same time in the current scenario.

If they hadn't been surrounded from two sides, they could have pushed through but now, they had no chance. It wasn't like they couldn't defeat Arnold's automatons. They could have if there weren't so many of them. 

Sonya had never thought Arnold would still try to attack them after the announcement was made. But the fact was that he did. No one except him could have made such high-level combat automatons, so there was no doubt they were under attack by him.

If a fight was about to break out, then Sonya and her team were going to lose for sure. However, she wasn't one to give up without fighting. Especially when they were fighting against a bunch of tin wrapped robots.

"Skya, psychic link now!" Sonya roared as a plan came up in her mind.

Skya nodded and immediately established a psychic link between the four of them to converse mentally. It was their go-to move to communicate during fights. This way not only were they able to hide necessary information from the enemy, but their communication speed was also faster at the same time. Sometimes a difference of mere mini seconds was able to save their lives and that's why it was super important.

However, they were just about to realise their petty tricks to save their butts wasn't going to work against the ones they were facing. Arnold and his elite summons weren't the only ones getting upgraded every now and then.

The automatons were given frequent updates as well, and one of the most recent ones among those upgrades was the ability to deduce what their enemy was thinking just by scanning their facial expressions. This technology that Devon, Talos and Arnold came up with together had an astounding accuracy percentage of 95%, which was quite a lot. 

On top of that, the automatons had a link of their own which was much faster than their weak psychic link, to say the least.  So in a way, the automatons were no longer dependent on listening to what their enemies were saying and then analyze it to come up with a way to counter them. 

Now they could know about their enemy's plans while they were in the middle of coming up with one. Or in other words, it was safe to say that the Automatons had become 'creatures' who were over-analytical. Their enemies would still be coming up with one plan and in the meantime, the automatons would come up with at least ten plans to kick their as.ses using a plan none of them would have even thought of.

Arnold's might wasn't the only reason his empire was functioning without any problems. His intelligence played a pretty major role in it as well. And Sonya was just about to realise that as Talos walked into the room.

"I suggest you put your weapons down and we will get this over with right away. In an easy way, of course." Talos asked them to surrender, "We'll just break a few bones here and there, thrash your place while we are at it and call it a day. But that is if you do as you are told. But if you want to do it the hard way, then we can hunt your loved ones down, kill them, and then come to break you as well. It would be a long process but it would be fun, for us. The choice is yours to make."

"Don't waste your time here and go threaten someone else," Sonya yelled back at him. "We have seen the notification. None of the vassals or paladins can harm each other till the next round started. So your-"

"Are you blind?" Talos said in his emotionless voice, "Do I look like any one of those to you?"

"But you serve him-"

"My master isn't here, is he now? Neither is he aware of what I'm doing here, in the first place." Talos voice was still as emotionless as before, the only difference was that Sonya and the others could feel the hostility in his voice for the first time, "So tell me how can you blame someone for doing something if he wasn't even there to do. So, I'm gonna ask you once again for the last time. How is it going to be? The easy way or the hard way?"