The village of Echportic where Russel found himself working was located at the bottom of a shallow valley within the highlands. The buildings were built close to each other and numbered no more than 60 in total, all built on the northern bank of a small and shallow river that wound its way through the bottom of the valley floor.

Echportic was nothing impressive; it was just a collection of modest wooden houses and a few barns all crowded together for safety from the cruel environment. The perimeter wall of the village was made from logs and surrounded the settlement in its entirety, however, there were some sections that had succumbed to time and nature and were in a state of disrepair with vines and ivy covering decaying wood.

The village had 3 main entrances which according to Munro, was apparently relatively good news, with one each on the East Northeastern, West Southwestern, and North Northwestern sides. There were rough dirt roads, if one could call them as such, that ran from each of the gates to the middle of the village from each gate allowing for a couple of relatively clear main routes to the centre.

Prior to their arrival at the village, Aurora had already posted guides for a number of different tactics they could use into the guild's evergrowing Caelus Wikipedia within the text channels, which were currently only available to the guild’s leadership. He had personally taken a while to understand how they all worked, far longer than Munro and his men, but that was to be expected. He was just a kid from the streets while they were battle-hardened veterans.

Some tactics were somewhat familiar to him, he had seen them mentioned in history classes when he was back at school, while others at first seemed revolutionary, but upon further thought seemed quite obvious. Although with how much Aurora had likely seen in from the future, it made sense that she would have encountered all sorts of things like what was written.

Due to the presence of magic, large scale battles played out far differently from how ancient and medieval warfare on Earth was conducted. The tactics Aurora explained in her guides reflected this perfectly. While sometimes the roles of some of the units within Earth's historical militaries were replaced by magic, such as catapults with a skilled earth mage, the diversity of options created by magic was truly vast.

However, as Russel currently understood it, most of the outlined options were sadly unavailable to them for now due to their low levels and the fact that they couldn't freely control their mana.

And it was a strange prospect, the fact they would eventually be able to control their own mana. Aurora had only mentioned it in passing and that they should all pay attention to how their skills felt while they used them, which meant that what he was actually feeling was true magic, an honest to god mind-shattering revelation to get his head around.

Either way, from the options they had available, ALD Munro and the other officers had all agreed on a mix of staggered defensive fortifications at the three entrances. They planned to use the entrances of the village as a bottleneck to first blunt the gnoll's initial charge and bog them down into a narrow space that would become a kill box.

The first layer was a foot or so deep ditch that would cause the charging gnolls to stumble. They knew from Aurora’s detailed explanation of how the gnolls had fought when against her that they were brash and barbaric, using their strength, speed and pack tactics to overpower their foes with a quick and devastating blow.

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From this, they concluded that it was highly likely that the gnolls would just rush straight at the village and attempt to enter through the open gaps in the wall left for the roads, following the path of least resistance. They would hopefully enter the gates of Echportic with a lot of momentum which they aimed to take advantage of, making use of the walls blocking most of their line of sight and so they ran straight into the trench which would easily cause many to stumble and fall straight into their second line of defence, a bristling line of wooden spikes.

The wooden spikes in question had been made by the members of the guilds as they had marched. In part to prepare supplies to fight the gnoll tribe and in part to give the players something to do on their long walk over, each player had been given a number of straight wooden branches and a knife to sharpen their ends.

They hadn’t been able to procure as many as they initially planned thanks to the tribe attacking early, but they had made enough to use fighting in their first attempt where the amount of damage they dealt would be critical for their next attempt if they failed.

While it would by no means hinder higher level gnolls who would be able to run through it mostly undamaged thanks to their high defence, the spiked barrier would be able to hurt or even kill some of the lower level gnolls, contributing to removing one of the tribes main advantages: numbers.

It would however hopefully slow down the gnolls long enough for the players specialising in ranged attacks to be able to rain down everything they had on the unsuspecting enemies. *************

The last layer was an additional trench a meter behind the line of spikes that was planned to be far wider and deeper than the first and aimed at hindering the gnoll's movements, hopefully forcing some into a lower position for the close-ranged players to be able to easily eliminate.

The trench that was being dug to be a metre wide and deep produced a lot of dirt that they were using to create a modest earthen rampart behind the trenches. The crude rampart was designed to give their side some additional height and some further protection when the gnolls finally reached them, hopefully reducing the tribes level and agility advantage.

The number of defensive strategies that they had planned and begun implementing based off Aurora’s guides, as well as ALD Monro’s own experiences, honestly impressed Russel. He was a little stumped at first when he first saw trenches mentioned in Aurora’s guides, but he supposed that it made sense. They were used back in the Roman period, and were still a very viable tactic in the most recent modern wars, so if guns and grenades didn't change their importance, the addition of magic wouldn’t change much either, only increase the absurd things they could do with them.

In the end however, he had to admit that most of the defences relied on the players to make the most of them, and he was concerned that the others would flinch and falter at the first battle they would be in. Like Aurora had explained after she wiped that Iron Gits guild, it was one thing to face this type of fight in other games, but when everything was so real like now, the impact of everything on the senses was an aspect of Caelus that hit people very differently.

Hell, when he first had a murderous goblin running at him, he stumbled. At least all the players here had fought their fair share of goblins before coming here, so it was not a complete baptism by fire.

Either way, Russel had been directed to the northern gate alongside 60 other players and some of the military guys, where they had spent the last hour and a half digging trenches or getting the wooden spikes in place.

Russel also had a chance to speak to some of the locals who had stayed to help, one guy in particular being a middle aged man who Russel had learnt from casual conversation was a farmer responsible for one of the fields on the south side of the river.

It was an interesting conversation, and he had given Russel a few tips on how to handle the spade he was using, one of the additional ones the village had lent to them to speed up their progress. He had never actually used a shovel before having lived in the city his whole life, but he wasn’t clueless by any means. The old guy just had far more experience and knew how to better use one from his many years in the fields.

While he was digging, Tyrell was not far away using one of the wooden spikes to create holes for the other players to slot the remaining sharpened branches into. As one of the few players in the group who used a hammer as a weapon, he was selected for the task.

The primary defences were now almost completed, forming the shape of a U inside the village entrance. With the large numbers of people they had able to work, they were only limited by the number of tools available so they were able to quickly dig the first two trenches at every gate, and then moved to creating additional ones further back that served much of the same purpose. While they didn’t have the desired additional wooden spikes, they would still be somewhat useful in supporting their defences.