The next morning, everyone showed up on time to the meeting, including Mike, who served a classic breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs and toast. The most common issue the council faced was with recruiting so they opted to have message boards set up throughout the town where all of the recruitments would be posted. Then they would each get a designated building and recruits would head there. All recruits and council members were paid from the town's coffers, though Grim was trying to be frugal to conserve as much as possible, especially since he had no idea how much they had.

The only person who had new orders was Amelia, "I want you to be ready, we expect the siege to begin around when the final boss finally wakes up. In one week, I want a ramp set up on the main road so we can get on and off the walls easily. It can go right behind the gate because we will also be closing the gates on that day too. The single person doors will remain open but guarded and people can walk in and out beneath the ramp. When it comes time for the siege, we may need to wheel cannons up and down for maintenance as well as swap the people on the walls."

"If someone needs to be removed from the wall on a stretcher I want that to be as easy as possible and frankly, pulleys are not gonna cut it. Your skills and the stronger wood here should make it possible, let me know if you have any issues. I need you to get that ramp built as soon as possible in prefabs so that we can deploy it quickly when the day comes. That also means the rest of you need to make sure that anything you need done that involves a cart going through the gate, needs to happen in the next few days, mostly applicable to you Jen."

He had already gotten Noah to create a small informational brochure containing the spells that he wanted the casters to learn. He handed the brochure to the fully plated caster's representative, who's name he learned was Kenneth. He had transcribed Fire Ball and Force Ball for the siege casters while the non siege caster's would focus on Gust and Fire Bolts. After that, the meeting was adjourned and Grim and Noah spent the day helping the different council members with recruiting and making sure the town was organized. For Grim, it was mostly creating and casting temporary flashing lights around large signs to get peoples attention. For Noah, he mostly spent time organizing which buildings would be allocated for what purpose.

The next two council meetings passed much the same, there weren't any specific problems yet as people seemed to still be ramping up. Grim was expecting all of the problems to happen all of a sudden and all at once. He had the crafters working on crafting a few grappling hooks on chains and winches that would be fired with a ballista. Really they were just large barbed arrows with chains attached to the back, grappling hook was just more indicative of what their use would be.

He also had them start building steel plates for simple barricades that could be used to section off a part of the wall if necessary. If the builders didn't have time to make them, the crafters would have to. Luckily there were a lot of builders with not a lot to do outside of the war, so there were no issues so far. The biggest issue was that they were quickly running out of wood and they didn't want to go anywhere near the forest because that would be too close to The Grove for comfort.

He had thought about launching a mission to collect wood but decided that would leave them too exposed. Not only were their enemies in the woods, they had leveled up there. They likely knew the woods and how best to hunt within them. Launching a mission at this time was also too expensive in terms of man power and time, neither of which Grim could spare. It wasn't like they desperately needed it, he was just going to have to ration it's use from now on. If it wasn't essential or could be made from metal, which they had a ton of, then it just wouldn't be allocated any wood.

Grim also had some things he needed from Felix on that day too and luckily he found him just after he had returned from scouting the final boss, still completely soaked through.

"Felix, I have a few things I need from you."

"Alright, shoot" He said.

"First, how many credits are in the city's coffers?"

"325 million or so."

"Oh, well that makes things much easier. Next thing, I need you to help me scout the enemy. While I can fly, I can't fly that far and I'm not that that stealthy. Also, I can't actually see very far. I was thinking every three days, starting today you and I go on scouting trips. Figure out the enemy's position and stuff like that."

"I can do that, won't it be pretty easy to spot me though?"

"That's why I'm going to teach you some very basic stealth right now. I can't cast spells you don't know around you so I can't keep us invisible but I can teach you some basic soul magic."

"Oh cool, this won't take too long though, right?"

"The soul magic, probably not. The scouting, I only need to see into the forest around The Grove. I highly suspect they will use that area to build themselves up. There's enough wood there for them to build a stupid number of siege engines if they wanted and it's pretty close to the city."

"Yeah I guess, they would need a lot of engineers and crafters though."

"Guess we'll find out, huh?"

"Alright, how do I go invisible?"

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"You don't. Not now, not with this. Instead I'm going to teach you that thing where people's eyes kind of just brush over you and they have trouble paying attention to you."

"Not quite as cool, but still very useful, alright how do I do it."

"Some quick backstory, what do you know about souls?"

"Similar to mana, there is soul matter all around us, souls are a collection of soul matter and they have layers with a core soul in the middle and a bunch on top of that."

"Yup, pretty much. Essentially, the way this works is it takes advantage of people's instincts. Your instincts are based on your soul and when you look around a room, your soul sees other souls, because they stand out from the soul matter around you. Ever walk into a room and get a ‘vibe' from someone? Find you can sense the bloodlust on some people, the arrogance on others without them actually doing anything? You'll start to notice aura's on higher level people too at some point. That's just this basic trick taken much further and weaponized."

"Oh, so I have to make my soul look like the soul matter around me?"

"Exactly."

"How do I do that?"

"You can see your soul, what you have to do is see past your soul. See the soul matter around you, then slowly blend your soul into it. Not literally, but just try to smooth the transition to the soul matter around you. It's impossible to do this fully as your soul will always be denser and you can't do this with your core soul, but the top layers should be enough."

Felix sat down and began meditating then, over the next few minutes, became increasingly difficult to notice. Once he was done, Grim judged him as being about 90% of the way to a perfect soul camouflage. He had expected Felix to get to 20 or 30% then work his way up to 50, but he had clearly forgotten that Felix was just some kind of monster in human skin.

Felix opened his eyes and Grim wrote, "That will do, how are you so fast by the way?"

"Meditation skill, time dilation."

"I see. Alright, ready for our first scouting mission?"

"Let's go."

"Last thing, take the mask. Just in case someone does notice you, it should make it so they just kind of forget about you."

"Good call."

Felix pulled out his surf board and Grim dropped the robes on the bed then floated into Felix's left hand. He flew out the window and towards the forest. To remain stealthy, they flew high up within the clouds until they were close by. Felix had passed by The Grove when he was hunting down all of the dungeons, but he hadn't gone near it. All he had seen back then was a single building between the trees.

As they lowered down , through the cloud cover Felix made sure to camouflage his soul and they got their first look at the settlement. It was comprised of almost 2000 buildings split between permanent wood buildings and tents, from Felix's rough estimate. Most of them were only big enough for a person or two and a lot of them were covered in leaves making it hard to get an accurate count. While the vast majority of the buildings appeared to be single person homes, there were a few standout structures.

In the middle of The Grove, right where the map icon was, was a massive wooden building that was obviously System made or upgraded. It was made entirely of treated wood with steel holding it all together and was the size of a stadium or a massive warehouse. Felix doubted any settlement could have had the time alone to build a structure like that from scratch in the tutorial let alone acquire and process the materials. Someone building his tower by their lonesome might have been more possible than this colossal structure.

Next to it, just a few hundred meters away, was a massive lumber mill. There were dozens of logs going through the mill at once only for the cut wood to be carried off by a team of people into the colossal structure. Both the lumber mill and the building in the middle of the settlement were producing a cacophony of sound. Just outside the colossal structure, almost a kilometer to the west, where most of the trees had been cleared, were 4 large structures on wheels. Around them, people were constantly moving and loading them up with barrels and crates.

Finally, there were almost a thousand people engaged in combat training. Three quarters of them were shooting targets with bows while the rest were sparring with each-other. That was all they could gather at the moment, so they headed back to the tower. Grim asked Felix to give him permissions for the town management so he could manipulate the map and other things. Felix debated it for a few moments then agreed but asked, "Doesn't that mean you have to interact with The System?"

"I'm fine interacting with it, I don't want it to touch my soul though. No stats, no leveling. For the other stuff I just have to talk with it, kind of. It reads your intentions so I just need to broadcast them."

"Alright, anything else you need from me?"

"Nope, I have to go make more plans now. I'll see you in three days?"

"Yup, I'll be right here or in the lab."

Felix returned the mask to Grim who equipped it and the robe then flew back down into the lobby.

Felix walked down into the lab floor and began preparing for the final boss. He had spent a while thinking about what he should do to prepare and he had come to the conclusion that his biggest problem, was likely going to be mana. If the other bosses had taken at minimum a quarter of his mana pool, and The System recommended 200 times the number of people for this one, he would need a lot more mana.

While he could have spent the entire time creating consumable batteries to replenish his pool, and while that would likely be enough mana, that approach had problems. For one, consuming the batteries took time. It wasn't a lot of time, but it also wasn't negligible. The batteries would also create dead time where he couldn't do much because he was stuck consuming them.

Ultimately, he had decided on a different approach. While he hadn't used this aspect of his profession much except for in the last puzzle dungeon, it did include the creation of magical contraptions. All of the ones he had worked on in the dungeon were household items like ovens and freezers. However, Felix was pretty sure he could use the same concept, along with consumable batteries, to create disposable weapons.

Luckily, he also had a hundred dungeon rooms worth of loot in the form of random components he could use to craft weapons out of. He started with simple wands that could cast a few spells before being expended. From there, his crafting got more creative. He created cannons, hand guns, flame throwers, grenades, and other contraptions. He mostly focused on general use items, but he also created some weapons he just couldn't resist making.

He had a few particularly powerful cannons that he wasn't sure were entirely safe to use as well as a few bombs that all used almost double his entire mana pool at once. He knew that these were a waste of time because he had to enchant the outside of the cannon to be more durable as well as inscribe the spell, instead of just the latter. Even though he knew that, he just couldn't resist making them. He first planned out all of the weapons ahead of time so he could optimize his time and began with the simple weapons. . . . . .