Apinsig
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Chapter 304 Homesteading in a fantasy world
🕑 Added 2023-09-01 14:27:14 +0000 UTCNow that all important things were taken care of, I was able to focus on mentoring my apprentices and starting to grind skills again. Winter slowly started to take over, and I could feel how the land's life retreated; it almost felt like everything around me was going to sleep.
That, of course, wasn't the case. About a week before the big meeting started, we once again needed to mobilize our army, but this time only the Vikings. There must have been a dungeon break-up high in the mountains past our iron outpost.
It was a low-rank dungeon. So, fighting the monsters wasn’t the problem; it was the rapid response that we needed to do. But the Vikings were trained for that, so they took up the defensive positions around the iron outpost before the monster horde reached us.
This time, nothing would have happened if they hadn’t made it because I was so close, but it was good to see that even without me, everyone was doing their jobs excellently and ensuring that the United Freeholds' people would be safe.
The fight took about three hours, but the only moments that were dangerous were in the first 30 minutes, where there were truly a lot of monsters. The monsters themselves were weird—a mix of goat and wolf. After the defensive battle, we moved to clean out the rest of the monsters from this mountain as not all attacked our position. This was kind of nice for my throwing practice because using my bows would have been overkill for anything up here.
When we reached the broken dungeon, I let one of the units take point but followed them quite closely. It seems that no matter what broken dungeon you go into, it would feel like a horror scene, as everything was so wrong and it felt like only ghosts still took residence in this dungeon.
I let them break the dungeon core, but I captured the seeds. Now we had three more, and when I reached the capital, I found out that we now had a way to store them for a longer period, so we could save them up for later use. Currently, we didn't do that, as there were still open spaces around the capital for dungeons.
Only a few days later, it was time to start the meeting. It was held in the largest room we had, and for the first half-day, we just went over current numbers and what we had achieved this year. It was quite impressive, but one thing that was highlighted was that there weren't really any new refugees from the local area. Our population has still grown a little bit, thanks to the connection we have with Verdia. It was quickly mentioned that currently, we have plans to expand that avenue for gaining new people.
It was honestly incredibly impressive seeing all that has changed. Keeping everything working and expanding has taken a tremendous amount of work, and I was incredibly glad that I didn't have to do any of it.
When we reached the numbers for people's classes, I was even more impressed by how much information we had and how much has changed for the regular person who also had access to this much information.
During the next spring, one of the new large buildings that will be built will have only one purpose, and that's to deal with everything related to the achievement page. There, every citizen can get access to all the information the United Freeholds will have access to, but some things will be restricted, like the darker side of the achievement page, but only to those people who aren’t initiated into it.
We already had multiple gangs in the capital that held different territories, although everyone here just called them guilds, like the Red Knife Guild and so on. None of them were allowed to mess with regular citizens. While currently they weren't directly helping the capital, the skills that they have learned here and the class levels gained have already helped us keep our compound in Verdia safe from thieves.
We also seemed to have an assassin guild, but currently, it was only three people who had done that line of work before. Practicing for them isn't something that we can fake and something that we want to allow in our nation. How to handle this type of guild was also on the list of topics for later on, and I was kinda interested in others' ideas of how we could make this work because, honestly, I had no idea.
The first day was so long, and my head felt like it was smoking from all the information, but after a good night's sleep, I felt ready for the next one. Eventually, we made it to nation planning, where sites for outposts that will eventually grow into villages were discussed, as well as the construction of major roads that would connect everything.
However, I immediately saw a problem, so I stood up to speak. "I'm afraid that we are doing this backwards. First, we need to look at our defensive strategies before we start planning road networks and future villages."
After those words, I walked to the front of the room where a large map of our nation's territory was hung up. "It will depend on the terrain and area, but our nation's defence will be split into sections where effort will be placed in a strategically important position where the headquarters for that section's legion will be built.”
“A legion will be about 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers plus support staff. So, their headquarters and fort will be at the minimum the size of a small town. For fast movement and supplies, the headquarters will need to be connected to a major road network."
As I looked around, I saw everyone following what I was saying, but I also saw faces of dismay. There was a good reason for that because currently, our entire population would make up a full legion with support staff.
"I can understand your concerns and that I might be thinking too far ahead, but a fully functioning legions headquarters would be for the far future. Those places will not right away be that big; we will slowly build them up like everything else." At this point, David started to ask clarifying questions; After that he clearly understood what I meant and quickly started to explain the defensive and logistical needs and how that would affect the local area.
I have thought quite hard about the defensive headquarters and how we should build them, and what their purpose should be. If you wanted to have a castle that would be incredibly easy to defend, just build it on top of a mountain with an incredibly narrow and long road up.
Supply it with enough food to last for years, and even 100 men could keep it defended for years against armies 1,000 times bigger. But that would be all that you could do: just defend the castle and be safe inside it. But that would also mean that you would be trapped in that castle, and the besieging army could do anything they wanted to the land around it.
No, what we needed were places that could project strength but also be strong enough to defend against superior numbers. A legion's headquarters needs to be able to project its strength throughout its entire defensive section so people can feel safe and could just live without worrying about rogue war parties or hordes of monsters showing up and destroying everything. Soon after that, the bigger meeting ended, but smaller, more specialized meetings happened simultaneously after that.
While I wanted to go to most of them, I needed to focus on the military side of things as my input was actually necessary there. There were also some votes for some decisions on what we will do and what we won't.
I was surprised at how many people waited until I voted so they could back me up, but that luckily allowed me to get one decision passed that wouldn't have happened if people didn't follow my example.
I wanted more compounds in different parts of the world, similar to the one in Verdia. The main problem was the cost of it, but I believe it will be incredibly important for the future, especially because everywhere around the world there are a lot of refugees who are looking for a new place to live.
When the madness was over, the winter had truly arrived, but I felt the itch to explore. Fortunately, I could explore and make credits at the same time because we now had so many missions to survey the lands beyond our nation's borders.
