"I knew I should not have chosen the night shift," Arin thought as he looked out toward the portal and the valley beyond it. The hillside already looked considerably worse for wear, but what caught his attention most was the sheer number of arrows covering the ground. It had only been half a day, give or take, since they had arrived, yet there were already so many arrows embedded in the hillside that it was becoming difficult to see the actual earth beneath them. Considering how quickly the battle was consuming ammunition, Arin was beginning to understand why everyone treated arrows as such an important resource.
No one was stupid enough to go around collecting the arrows they had fired. For one thing, most of the arrows lying across the hillside did not even belong to the people currently standing there. They had been supplied specifically for the operation, meaning there was little personal motivation to risk one's life recovering them. If the arrows had come directly out of their own pockets, perhaps some of them would have developed a very strong emotional attachment to every single shaft.
The second reason was considerably more important.
Nobody had the time to collect them.
Even if someone wanted to recover the arrows, walking down toward the battlefield to gather them would be an excellent way to get themselves killed. The corrupted creatures continued emerging from the portal in waves roughly every fifteen minutes, leaving very little time for anyone to relax, let alone crawl across a battlefield looking for ammunition. Anyone foolish enough to walk into the danger zone simply to save a few arrows would probably become another target before they could recover anything useful.
"But we do go through a lot of arrows," Arin thought as he stared at the hillside.
The sheer scale of the consumption was beginning to sink in. There were only around five hundred archers available, and even that relatively large number had been divided into three separate shifts. Arin's shift was the third one, meaning it had only just begun, yet the hillside already looked like someone had dumped an entire warehouse of arrows onto it. If this was what happened during only half a day, he did not particularly want to imagine what the battlefield would look like after several weeks.
"No wonder all the big players buy arrows whenever they dip below a certain point," Arin thought.
For the first time, the reasoning behind that habit made perfect sense to him. It was easy to look at arrows as simple ammunition when considering one archer, but the moment hundreds or thousands of archers began firing continuously, the numbers became absurd. The situation became even more ridiculous when the fighting was expected to continue for weeks rather than hours. A military force could burn through an enormous stockpile without even noticing it.
That also explained why the arrow market had become so important.
The stock market itself had recovered from the shock it had experienced when mana first appeared. As a boy, Arin had heard plenty about how badly companies had been hit during that period, especially weapons companies. Roughly ninety percent of them had gone bankrupt during the initial upheaval, while the remaining ten percent had survived largely because the governments had stepped in to rescue them.
That period had eventually become known as the day it rained bankers.
It was a name people had given the event because of the sheer number of financial institutions and financial professionals who had suddenly found themselves in desperate situations. The phrase had once been used constantly when people discussed the economic chaos created by mana. Yet with enough time having passed and the stock market once again filled with money, it almost seemed as though people had forgotten how close the entire system had come to collapsing.
Arin found that rather amusing.
For something called the stock market, there was surprisingly little actual stock available on it anymore. So many companies had disappeared during the year mana first arrived that the number of publicly traded businesses had never fully recovered. Then Gaia had begun providing frankly ridiculous loans, and the entire incentive structure for companies had changed.
Once businesses became large enough to qualify for the stock market, they were often already wealthy enough to obtain a loan from Gaia's system and establish their own faction. That created a problem for anyone who wanted to sell shares to outsiders. Founders and executives did not want random people outside their faction owning parts of their company because ownership could provide direct influence over their growth and access to cultivation resources.
Cultivation resources had become far too important for company owners to casually give outsiders influence over them. A shareholder was no longer simply someone who owned a piece of a company and expected a portion of its profits. Depending on the company's structure and faction, ownership could potentially affect access to resources that directly influenced the company's development.
So why would anyone willingly give that power away?
They generally did not.
As a result, much of what was actually being traded on the modern stock market consisted of futures rather than ordinary shares. Futures had become extremely popular because there was more than enough money moving through the economy to make them highly profitable. Investors were willing to put enormous amounts of money into expectations about what industries would need in the future, particularly when there were obvious signs that certain sectors were about to experience massive demand.
And right now, the market was hotter than ever.
The opening of the secret realms had created a massive influx of money into industries connected to warfare, defense, logistics, weapons, transportation, and every other field needed to support the enormous military operations taking place around the world. Governments and factions were preparing for prolonged fighting, and that meant enormous quantities of war material would have to be produced.
Arrows were one of the clearest examples.
Everyone knew there would always be a price point at which armies would buy arrows, no matter how much was being pumped into the market. As long as the armies were fighting, arrows would be consumed, and as long as arrows were consumed, someone would have to produce replacements. That certainty had caused an enormous amount of money to circulate through the arrow market.
The estimates were almost ridiculous.
At any given moment, around the world, roughly five hundred million silver coins were moving through the arrow market. Arin had initially thought that number was absurd when he first heard it. Five hundred million silver coins was more money than many small nations earned in an entire year, and by small nations, the estimates were talking about countries with around ten million people living inside their borders.
That was an insane amount of money for something as simple as arrows.
But as Arin stood there and watched another wave of arrows disappear into the battlefield, he began to understand why the market had become so enormous. He had calculated that every archer fired at least a thousand arrows during each shift. With five hundred archers divided into three shifts, the number of arrows being consumed over a single day was already enormous.
And they were going to be there for weeks.
"Damn," Arin thought.
Their situation was admittedly somewhat unique. Most armies were not standing in front of a portal that continuously produced enemies every fifteen minutes, and most archers were not firing thousands of arrows over such a short period. Even so, the amount of ammunition being consumed was enough to make him reconsider how cheap he had always thought arrows were.
Their own guild and family-made arrows were even more valuable.
The arrows produced by the Sonnenbergs were handmade, which made them considerably better suited for mana use. Because every arrow was carefully constructed by hand, the mana could travel through the material more easily. That mattered during prolonged practice and combat because the soldiers did not have to fight against the resistance created by poorly assembled materials.
The resistance might have been small, but when someone was using mana constantly, even small amounts could become significant.
A mass-produced arrow could technically work, but that did not mean it worked well.
Sonnenberg arrows, on the other hand, were designed specifically with mana flow in mind. The difference made them considerably more valuable, particularly for people who spent hours practicing or fighting with mana-infused weapons. Their arrows therefore sold for considerably more than the general market trend, and the guild could never produce enough of them to satisfy the demand throughout Europe.
That shortage had created an entire industry around cheaper alternatives.
In practically every city with reliable access to electricity, workshops had appeared that paid people to assemble arrows. The workers would put together the shafts, heads, and other components before bundling the finished products and selling them to brokers. Those brokers would then list the expected production as futures on the market.
It was a strange system, but it worked.
The arrows could only be sold through the futures market because they were merely assembled products rather than finished mana-infused ammunition. The materials used in them contained no mana, which meant they lacked the characteristics that made the Sonnenberg arrows so valuable. Their biggest advantage was that they could be produced quickly and in enormous quantities.
Unfortunately, they also had a limited shelf life.
After roughly a year in storage, those assembled arrows were essentially finished. The materials would no longer hold up properly, and even firing them once after that point could leave them unusable. That meant the cheapest ammunition was also the ammunition that had to be used first. There was little reason to store it indefinitely when everyone already knew that it would eventually become worthless.
Arin understood why the market worked that way.
It also explained why nobody worried about the Sonnenberg name being used to sell fake arrows. Their family was simply too trustworthy, and nobody would dare impersonate them. Pretending to be a Sonnenberg business in order to sell inferior ammunition would not merely be a business dispute.
It would be asking for real problems.
Arin returned his attention to the battlefield just as an eagle-shaped corrupted creature fell out of the sky. Its wings had already been shredded by the concentrated arrow fire, and before it could recover, its body suddenly went up in smoke. Another threat disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared.
Arin lowered his bow slightly and watched his own arrows land neatly on the ground after passing through the target.
He looked at the battlefield again.
There were still countless arrows covering the hillside.
"Yeah," Arin thought. "We really do fire a lot of arrows."