Pillar of Yita

Unlike the intricate schools of thought among Alchemists, traditional Combat Artisans are generally divided into four schools: Construct Lord, Immortal Knight, Supreme Choice, and Controller.

The Construct Lord faction, also known as the Oristh School, is the earliest and most traditional school of Combat Artisans, commanding multiple Flexible Constructs to achieve complementarity in battle. The school’s theory posits that a single Combat Artisan can constitute an entire squad.

The Immortal Knight School originated from Colin-Ishurian. The philosophy is to determine the outcome of a battle with a few high-quality Flexible Constructs. Unlike traditional Combat Artisans, they typically operate a single, more powerful and complex Construct during combat. Those commonly referred to as Pseudo Dragon Knights are also broadly considered part of this school.

These Combat Artisans focus on teamwork and gathering information before battle but lack the ability to adapt on the fly, as they require time to switch out Constructs and Plugins.

The Supreme Choice is a rather unique faction among Combat Artisans. They often focus on enhancing their own combat abilities, seeing the skills of Combat Artisans as a supporting means, and often taking up other occupations such as warrior, ranger, among others.

Some Invokers jokingly say that the Supreme Choice are the real Combat Artisans. However, in reality, the Supreme Choice School from Rotao has never been mainstream among Alchemists and is even considered heretical.

The last, the Controller School, is in fact just another name for Fairy Masters. Given the diversity among Fairy Masters, they are collectively referred to as the Controller School.

The school of a Combat Artisan is not an ability in itself, unlike ranger, warrior, and druid combat styles, or the scholarly knowledge of Magic Guided Conductors and Elementalists, which can provide extra benefits after being studied.

In essence, the school of a Combat Artisan is due to the differences in the skills learned by Alchemists and the distinct tendencies they exhibit in combat styles. In fact, in Eteliria, such characteristics can also be observed in other occupations, though not as pronounced.

For example, warriors have numerous subdivisions under the categories of Guardian and Close Combat, and Assault.

The existence of these schools is essentially due to the limited time and energy of individuals (or in the words of the Chosen, the limited experience gained within a finite amount of time), leading people to choose to specialize in one direction.

After thousands of years of development, Eteliria’s career system and all its branches have benefited from the extensive experience of predecessors. Especially after the establishment of the Adventurers’ Guild, the system was further refined with the arrival of modern Earthlings who excelled at summarizing and generalizing.

Each profession, each school, has been validated by predecessors, leaving behind countless insights and experiences.

Therefore, for a typical Invoker, all they need to do is select a profession and a school that fits their combat style preference from the suggested options.

As for the creation of new schools, that typically happens after an Invoker reaches a certain height and ascends to the second world. In fact, under the mainstream branches, many peculiar schools are born daily. Some have a far-reaching impact, while others are fleeting.

However, regardless, the main schools of various professions have hardly changed over the past hundred years.

Of course, Eteliria’s high degree of informatization and liberalization also mean that the boundaries between professions, and between schools, are relatively blurred. Most of the time, Chosen and native adventurers do not focus solely on one school; they may waver between two or more schools.

Overall, however, they still have a preference.

Take Colin-Ishurian, for example, where the Immortal Knight School is widely disseminated among the natives and even affects the region’s Invokers subtly.

However, Fang Hong has never been a proponent of any school. He only studied Alchemy for a few months at Kapuka, and he’s almost entirely self-taught as a Combat Artisan, so he hasn’t had the chance to be influenced by such trends.

Therefore, his choice tends to lean toward the traditional school of Orides, yet is not exactly the same.

As mentioned earlier, different schools result from Combat Artisans mastering different ranges of knowledge. Combat Artisans from the Orides School often choose skills that strengthen their control limit from the early stages of growth.

For instance, the theory of low-precision operation, this theory follows the idea that more is better and is jokingly referred to as the F2A-type Skills in the community.

Why F2A-type Skills? Because in a widely played ancient real-time strategy game, F2 stands for select all, and A stands for the attack command.

The concept is typical — sheer numbers trump all. Just select all and send the whole family in one go; as for operational precision—sorry, it doesn’t even figure in the dictionary of this theory.

Low-precision operation Skills significantly reduce the precision of operations by a Combat Artisan but also greatly decrease the ’CPU’ load when controlling an individual Flexible Construct, thus allowing the control of more and larger groups of Flexible Constructs.

Of course, this is an extreme skill within the Orides School, chosen only by those fanatical about zerg rush tactics. Even within the Orides School, the debate over this skill never ceases.