Apinsig
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Chapter 187 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-03-22 18:10:16 +0000 UTCWhen I got back to the soon-to-be demolished town, I found myself having some free time. It was time to find out what the rest of my traits did and hopefully figure out some of the abilities I have gotten as well.
The first one I started with is sharmar’s organ. This was the first trait that actually added something to my body instead of changing it. Next to my heart was an egg-sized organ which I have tried to ignore until now.
I still didn’t know how to feel about it. Could I possibly get a trait that would add two arms completely changing how I looked? I hope not. Connecting the trait to my core took a while but when it was done I finally understood what it did and I have to say I’m quite glad that I have it.
Originally the organ was from a crocodile-like creature that lived in the swamps. This organ helped filter out any contaminations from the bloodstream like parasites, poisons even harmful bacteria.
The next one I added to my core I didn’t much like. Hunting steps literally made me creepier when I was moving. It did seem to have a mental component so I could control it to an extent, and it did affect others' minds. But it still sounded kind of useless, but I guess you can't get lucky with every trait.
The next one was battle spirit which turn out to be quite useful. The stronger my conviction the more power my body could handle. An incredibly useful trait which will allow me to push myself even harder during those crucial fights. I haven’t really gone all out for a really long time and even in the raid dungeon I didn’t give it my all, but I was quite certain that in the coming fight, I will need to put everything I have on the line.
Ever quicker was the trait that I didn’t know what it could mean, and it was the trait that took the longest to connect and understand. Currently, it barely had any effect, but it might be my most useful trait to date.
It allowed my body and mind to get used to my constantly rising strength. During my stay on this planet, I have felt multiple times when my mind was quicker than my body or the opposite. This trait is supposed to help overcome that problem. While it might take some time, I will always be able to fix any imbalance.
Illusion sight was just supposed to be a trait that would help you see illusions for what they are but with my other traits and abilities it became a lot stronger than that. Even I don’t know its true capabilities simply because I don’t have anything to test it with.
Life giving energy and life’s vitality I already know what they did. Life giving energy changed my energy so I could better use it to support life and life’s vitality gave my energy a big boost whenever I used it to support others. If I was a healer my healing spells would have been 3 or 4 times more effective.
When I finally finished with all my traits, I had been in this town for over a week. Over that time more and more people showed up and we were now working at all hours dismantling all the houses.
There were 420 houses, shops and other buildings. Almost all of them were made out of wood. But the houses weren’t the first things we dismantled. It was the gate as we needed to make a bigger entrance so we could bring out full-sized logs that the houses were made out of.
It was slow going at first but now there were almost 200 people working. Every house was looked over and emptied of all of its contents. If an item is useful it will be placed in piles waiting to be taken back to our village if not it went into the burning piles.
What surprised me was how much people hide in small corners of their homes. In almost every house we found something. Most often it was a small bag of coins, but good-quality weapons and healing potions and powders were a close second and third.
It was interesting to see what people thought important to hide. There were some personal effects as well like pictures or letters. Those went into special chests that will later be brought back to the village. The chances are almost zero that anyone alive will hold any of these items valuable but in my opinion, if even one person retrieves an item all this extra work would be worth it.
Since I was now free of dealing with the traits, I started to help dismantle the houses. The hardest part for others was getting the roof of the house. It was a hard job that required a sledgehammer and a lot of work. For me, it was quite pleasant and helped me think about the information I received. Goose was successfully able to retrieve the information Mirhit was able to gather.
The number of troops that I predicted might make it here will most likely be lower. More importantly, the timetable of their arrival is being pushed constantly back thanks to a small mining town that’s proving to be a lot more difficult to conquer than the slave king first thought.
The town was nestled against a rocky hill with only one side exposed and that side was fortified with a quite strong wall. It turns out that a lot of people who lived around there figured that it would be a perfect place to hold out.
Because of that the population of the town was a lot higher than anyone expected, and they all had a desire not to become slaves. Unfortunately for them, their fate was sealed. The slave king’s army was still quite whole and while the siege will take more time the town will eventually fall. Every day that those people can hold will give us extra time to prepare and while they will never know it I will forever be thankful to them.
From the reports, I know that the slave king’s army has quite a lot of ranged units. It would be quite bad if they reached us. But I have special plans for them which will eliminate them as a problem. The biggest problem is that the slave king brought his entire former first-rank adventuring party with him. If they all come here, we will be fucked. I would still try to give it my all but I do not know if I could defeat them all.
There were a lot of things that needed to go right for us to have a chance to win but I have seen a lot slimmer chances turned into complete victory. All I can do is try to stack the odds in our favour and hope that luck doesn't turn against us.
The next week went by in a blur. I spent my time working on my energy control, helping dismantle the town and using the alchemy shop to make some healing powders. I had gotten my alchemy up to basic level 5. I had messed up another batch of the healing powder the third one for today when I finally stopped and looked at my small notebook again.
There was no report given here and there wasn't supposed to be for another day. This small notebook was connected to another which was held by the team that I was counting on to deal with the range unit of the enemy army.
But last night almost 20 undead were spotted by the scouts coming from the east. We dealt with them quickly enough but dealing with them wasn't the problem it was them being here that was the problem. All undead were supposed to be collected and guided to the ambush site ready to spring on the approaching army.
From the last report, there were almost 2000 collected but that would not be enough. I just hope that there weren’t any problems during the last four days that might have caused them to miss some undead groups.
What was interesting about those reports was that the undead didn’t seem to bunch up into huge hoards without a good reason. It was something interesting and quite possibly important for the future but right now it was nothing significant.
The next day I finally got the report I was waiting for and understood what had happened. They had found a small horde that had a semi-intelligent leader. The horde itself was almost 300 in size. It took them a while to track and wait for the perfect opportunity to kill that smart undead so they could take control of the horde that it was leading. There was some strong undead there which was good news.
The mining town itself was still holding on. I was impressed and wished that we could have those people in our nation. To be able to hold that long against such odds was legendary. But from that report, I got their defences were already crumbling and I suspect they will fall into the next few days.
Still, a town that was supposed to be conquered in three days has been able to hold out for three times longer. I honestly don’t think I could have done any better which means that they must have a really capable leader who knows war.
I kind of hope that this person is able to survive and finds a way here. In the future, we will need people like that. There are some promising talents in the military right now but nothing to that level. They will be good commanders, but they won’t be generals.
Perhaps it won’t be so important to have so many generals as in this world there are ways to communicate over long distances and travel those distances a lot faster than medieval technology should allow. But I would still feel safer if every future fort had a capable general who could keep defending even without support from the rest of the nation.
