Apinsig
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Chapter 216 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-05-11 15:54:43 +0000 UTC----
If there won't be a chapter release on weekdays I will notify that in discord. I was sick again and my health is bad so this might keep happening more. I will still try to write 5 chapters a week but I do not know how well I can keep to that schedule.
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The next day I woke up quite late as I wanted some more time to sleep. While others might think that the harvest we did was hard work for me it was quite pleasurable and more like a vacation. This vacation is now unfortunately over, and it was time to get back to hard work.
I took a few minutes to wake up Goose by petting his feathers and after I fed him and myself, I sent him away for his own work while I got back to training. A few hours later I was able to finish today’s strength training and before I went up to the village, I jumped into the river to get the sweat off my body.
I have started running slower to the village as the road between my home and the village is not holding up well to the constant superpowered travel. It’s unfortunate how much work needs to be done in the village, so we simply don't have enough time to worry about roads. Hopefully next year we can start upgrading the roads but then again, the priority would probably be a road to the swamp dungeon instead of my home.
There are now almost 20 apartment buildings finished and many more are being built. If we are lucky, we might be able to build them before winter comes. Storage space expansion has gone well, and we have enough space to store everything we need although the expansion is still ongoing so we could be prepared for the next season when we will be planting even more.
The Thorn Rose Company sent us a message that they won’t be able to get a caravan here because of all the war that’s currently happening so we will not be able to sell our food, which is actually good news. They were still willing to open a portal here so we will be able to get some critical items.
Of course, they weren't willing to do this if I wasn’t willing to sell them so many high-quality bows that I have made during the summer. If they only knew that the best bows I gave to the Vikings. I also made some specific strength longbows for the archery unit of the legion.
We currently have 260 legionaries and only 40 of them were archers but this was just the start. Training has gone slowly as the legionaries spend a lot of time building. But thanks to that we have a rudimentary palisade around the planned town expansion.
The current area under the control of the legion is just fenced off so people don't come snooping around and so our training would not be visible to everyone. In the future, we will have tall stone walls around this place so we would have a proper fortress for defence.
The plan is to eventually build quite a large fortress with an underground safe area for the citizens of the town that is going to be around it. There will also be an entrance to the underground food storage and plans are being made on how to block other entrances so we would have access to the entire town's food storage during a siege.
Now you can never make anything completely safe, but we believe we can delay anyone getting in for quite a while and even after that we will make sure that whoever wants to gain access will have an even worse time progressing towards the fortress. This is unfortunately also a long-term project but for the military, it is quite high on the list.
I spent some time looking over the recruits who were training. They had made quite a lot of progress as they were now able to fight in formation, march 30 kilometres a day in formation and their overall fitness was quite high. There was still a lot of work to do but they were already a decent fighting force. Finally, I called over one regular legionary, one low-rank commander and one legionary archer. They ran to me and saluted me by putting their fists over their hearts.
“Follow me,” I ordered and then started to walk towards the temporary building we had set up where we could hold military meetings and run the day-to-day operations. I sat behind my chair and continued to look at them without saying anything. After about 15 minutes they finally started to squirm, but I continued to just look at them. I wasn’t trying to be creepy but sometimes it’s necessary. As I continued to look at them my energy was constantly being consumed by my training plan development ability.
During the harvest when I had more time to think I had an idea. What if my training plan development ability could be used to gain a specific class? The three are here so I can try to make a regular legionary, leadership legionary, and Archer legionary class training plan. Now I didn’t know if the current training plans being made can lead to a class or will just give me a training plan that will most fit with my image of those classes.
In the end, I need to add a bit of my core energy, but the overall consumption was a lot less than with my own training plan. My ability didn’t confirm anything, but the training plans were quite comprehensive and even had something things I hadn’t thought about. Like teaching them tactics on how to defeat enemies that are a lot shorter than normal. I finally stopped looking at them as I started to go over the training plans in a bit more detail.
The training plan wasn't perfect, at least not for real battle. It was focused more on reaching certain skill goals. Some certain abilities seem to be quite important to get. Certain classes did need specific skills so currently I was inclined to believe that I had succeeded but I didn’t want to sacrifice our military power in the hopes of gaining a certain class that I wasn’t actually going to force on anyone.
The three legionaries who were still standing in front of me were not happy when I once again started to stare at them. One of them wanted to ask a question but I moved my eyes instantly to his and gave him a menacing stare. A bit of sound came out of his open mouth, but he closed it quite quickly when he got over his shock. After about an hour I started to look over a new training plan that made me smile. This was more like it and with the other training plan I made I also knew what skills and abilities we need to focus on.
“You can leave now. Get back to whatever you were doing but send in your commanders and their aides. They promptly gave me a salute and quickly left. I waited until everyone was here. “You are all here for two reasons. One, we are going to record down and start following a training plan that I have developed for our Legionnaires. When we start to develop more unit types, we will replicate this process.”
“The second thing we need to discuss is our fight against the undead army that is currently under our command. There are too many of them and our legion needs the practice.” There was silence after my proclamations but soon people started to ask questions.
Of course, they were more concerned about the undead fight, so we started with that even though I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t understand that I wanted to leave that for the end. The plan was actually quite straightforward. The legion was going to move out in five days and have three days on location to make preparations for the fight. We were going to use our archers and artillery and even allow for stationary fortifications and traps. When the undead see us, we would no longer be able to control them so it would be a real fighter meaning everyone needed to be on high alert.
While the planning for the fight will continue tomorrow after the general plan was laid out, we started with the training of our legionaries. I do not know what they were thinking I was going to tell them, but I was certain that what I was telling them wasn’t what they imagined. I could see how their eyes started to go wider when I started to talk about the second-year training in extreme detail but when I started to mention certain skills and abilities with the level targets, I wanted our legionnaires to meet they were quite shocked. When I told them why those targets were important a few of them stared at me with an open mouth.
“General Dirt, this is quite a lot to take in. I will not even start to mention the ridiculously detailed training but how would you even know that those skills are needed to gain a class? You said that you do not know the name of the class or classes. How can you be certain that they would have anything to do with our current army structure? I have never heard of any class that has a legionary name in it.” One of the higher commanders asked me.
“I will be honest I am not completely certain that there are any classes like that or that some of our soldiers will be offered those options, but I believe it is not a bad idea to try and even if it doesn't work everything, we have discussed will give our soldiers a better chance at surviving.” After I finished saying that everyone took a moment to think about it, but they all agreed. And so, another long night began as there was a lot to write down and discuss.
Someone came up with a good idea that it might be beneficial to make these training plans into a book that we could later give out so the trainers and recruits could have a good resource to learn what they need to do to become the best legionary they can.
The following few days went quite quickly as all legionaries stopped training. They started to pack up and prepare everything needed for the upcoming expedition. The undead army was already on the move after Goose delivered the letter detailing the route they needed to take.
Not everyone was happy about this decision, especially the council members responsible for building as the legion provided a lot of manpower, but this fight needed to be fought before the winter began.
I also spent almost half a day meditating on the weather to learn what winter we were going to have. The news was mixed. It wasn't going to be as harsh as last year, but it wasn't going to be ordinary. The winter was going to arrive early, but it will also end a bit sooner than normal.
