The fight with the goblins went exactly as expected leading Logan to once again ponder whether or not goblins actually are sapient. They are listed as sapient but aside from some basic tool usage he hasn't seen any evidence of their supposed sapience. Then again, he can't rule out the possibility that they've simply gotten complacent, never before having had to deal with an enemy that can reproduce faster than they can. It could be, he suddenly realizes, they believe they are whittling him down. They are to be fair just not as fast as they are being whittled down by him. Not to mention all that mana he is getting from killing them. Putting that mana to work he quickly grabs five western expansions. As he does, he can feel his instincts calming down even more. He also gets to work digging out the area around the residential buildings. Leaving a bit of stone and dirt where the basements would eventually go to help Yangus and Adam figure out where to put the walls of the basement. Although he does leave designing the inside of the basements completely up to Yangus.

After that he sends another group to lure more goblins to their death. Even with both goblin camps appearing to work together he was confident that he could still wipe them out eventually. That didn't mean he could afford to get complacent though. So, he suggested that one of the flying recon teams be sent as close to the goblins as they could get without risking being seen and try to get a better understanding of what was happening. Are they in fact cooperating or was one goblin village conquered by the other. If it was one camp helping out another it could mean they were capable of a higher level of understanding than they had yet displayed. If, on the other hand, it was one camp conquering another it could mean that a single group can own several camps. Neither idea was very appealing to Logan since either one would make his job harder in their own way.

With that done he decides to look at what he has managed to accomplish so far. The people in his care are happy and healthy. They've even managed to form a thriving community and start to raise a generation of kids who will hopefully never know what it's like to be someone's property or arguably worse be hunted for food. As for the town itself there is plenty of room for everyone, although he is still looking forward to the day when he can station his creatures outside of town. Not only would this allow him to prevent enemies from even reaching the town, but it would also free up more space for the people. After all a third of a square kilometer isn't as much space as he would have thought. Especially, when he considerers the thousands of creatures some of which are truly massive. True most are decidedly on the small side but those are also the ones that spawn more frequently adding a cumulative effect to the amount of space they take up. Ok so plenty of room might be a bit of an exaggeration. That said he isn't nearly as crowded as he was even just a few months ago. Partly from sending the rats and dire rats to antagonize the goblins into attacking and partly from the expansions which were mostly an indirect result of those attacks.

Looking at the residents, specifically those choosing to fight, it seems he might have been a little hasty in his assessment that they had probably peaked. As he watches the newest round of tournament matches, he considers that perhaps the difference lies in the fact that before this the majority of them probably wouldn't have felt any need to push themselves. Choosing instead to conserve their energy and only fight when they had to. Sure, they trained but even then, it was usually to keep what skills they did have from getting rusty. Of course, this was all speculation, but he honestly couldn't see an army of thousands of warriors and mages as strong as his losing to anyone. Their population was also steadily rising with some mothers now on their third and in some cases even fourth child. Still other women managed to have their first child after several failed attempts. Turns out fertility is no more a sure thing here than it was back on earth. It was good to see the residential area actually start to look the part with kids running and laughing with each other.

Carver for his part isn't nearly as buff as Logan thought a blacksmith would be. Not that he's weak but it seems blacksmithing is more about skill and not so much just hitting a piece of metal until it does what you want. In fact, most of his strength seems to be in his hands instead of his arms. Either way Logan is glad to have him here to work the iron being mined. Although now that he thinks on it the iron in the mine never seems to deplete. He decides to keep an eye on it after they are done mining for the day and figure out if it is being replenished and if so, how exactly. For now though, he continues looking around on the surface.

Allyson's apprentice has reached the stage where she can make the potions without needing any help or supervision. This frees Allyon up to concentrate on researching new types of potions. She hasn't had much success thus far. the alchemist journal and the notes helped a lot but there were so many ingredients she didn't have while others were tricky to harvest. There have been some interesting discoveries though. Such as the fact that the same ingredients use to make healing and regen potions when combined in the right or wrong way creates a goop that causes anything it touches to age rapidly. Not even the entire creature or plant or whatever but specifically the part that it touches. As amusing as it would be to use in battle it's way too time consuming and resource intensive for what it does. Besides which she still needs a way to contain it and it literally ages everything it touches. It also doesn't last very long. Allyson just can't justify the amount of runes that would be needed to keep it stable and ready to go. She also learned that combining the various fluids of the creature can have interesting results though she still hasn't worked out how to get those results to happen on demand. Right now, she is working on designs that would allow the ingredients to be mixed a few seconds before the concoction is to be used.

The scouts return just as he finishes his mental jog around the neighborhood. They report that the goblins from the second village seem to be in complete control of both camps. The good news is that both camps are down to about a third of their strength. This confirms what he already knew. He isn't going to be able to farm them for mana much longer. He did find it odd that they didn't just merge the two camps into one seeing as, to him at least, one strong camp is better than two weak camps.

Later that night Logan was paying extra close attention to the iron when he noticed a small portion of his mana get diverted into the remaining ore and ... basically ... well ... grow, for lack of a better term, more iron. That explains why it's called an iron ore node instead of an iron ore deposit. It was a very small amount of mana that was needed which is likely why he hadn't noticed it until now. It would seem being aware of mana flow is not the same as actually observing it. He could stop this process and keep the mana, but they needed the iron more than he needed that small amount of mana. Besides once the current generation of kids started having kids of their own his mana would skyrocket. So really it was an investment in the future. That's what he is telling himself anyway. Not that it wasn't technically true but in reality, he would have allowed it to continue even if it took most of his mana because he still worried about the people.

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Unfortunately, it was back to business as usual after that. This meant a lot of just waiting around. If it hadn't been for the tournaments and the mock battles. He's not sure how he would be able to cope with not being able to do anything. Thanks to all the iron from his mines, the mock battles are a lot more intense than they could otherwise be. That combined with the fact that the people fighting are more durable and have much more stamina means that you never know what might happen during a mock battle. As for the tournament fights Logan is considering making an even bigger arena although he is still waiting a bit because he wants this to be the absolute last time he has to build an arena for combat. If he decides to even build another one. It's not just the melee fighters either as the mages now have a significant mana pool they can draw from as well. Oddly this doesn't affect Logans mana income rate despite the fact that the mages collectively are pulling in huge amounts of mana. Nowhere near the amount he is pulling in but still. A natural biproduct of such huge mana pools is that their spells are now way more intense.

When the goblins finally arrive, he's more than ready for them. They come in such small numbers that he allows the humans to take a much more active role in the battle instead of just picking off stragglers or those that make it outside the circle of slag slimes. The still outnumber the humans 2 to 1 but being the weakest of the sapient creatures that isn't as much of an advantage as it might have been. Especially since Logan isn't exactly sitting this one out. One more fight like this and he may consider sending something larger to see if he can go ahead and finish both camps. For now though, he just sends a small army of dire rats to draw out another attack.

After the battle he finds that even with the mana he got from his passive mana income the fight only gave him enough to expand four times. He is disappointed at first, but then he reminds himself how much he actually gets with each expansion. He can even start to see a few of the tunnels that snake off from the main cavern underground. One of them gets within ten meters of the residential area's underground section. Still, even dwarves can't dig through ten meters of stone without at least some effort. That's even assuming they know where and in what direction to start digging. He still doesn't have the entire cavern but at least now he is much less likely to be completely blindsided like he was during the dwarves' last underground attack. Once he does get the entire cavern and can more easily secure it, he's already decided that he isn't going to waste so much usable space.

His musings about whether the cavern would be a good place to build a giant arena are interrupted by a commotion in the makeshift throne room. It seems that Siobhan had been sending the recon teams further than he dared send them. Not a huge issue given that they can fly now so can travel much faster. The issue it seems is that they found a group of humans well inside orc territory. They landed and gave them directions to the sanctuary. They even offer to give some of them a ride, but it seems none of them wanted to leave the others behind. While that is understandable it does mean transporting them a few at a time isn't an option. As it stands it will take them just shy of three weeks to get here on foot and that is assuming everything goes perfectly. Admittedly if there was a clear path the same trip could probably be done in less than a week. One of the down sides of a hidden city is not having any roads leading in or out. Not that being hidden helped it in the end. There is talk of sending the army to meet them halfway. the problem with that as Joel was quick to point out is that such a large group would surely be noticed. The idea is to get them here safely and that means avoiding combat for now. Eventually it's decided that once the ground based recon team returns from checking destroyed kobold camps for signs of recent use, they will be sent out with one of the flying recon teams acting as a guide. Hopefully they can meet up with this newest group and guide them back here. Logan is cursing his lack of control. While it has improved it's still not to the point where he has enough control over his creatures outside his domain to force them to allow themselves to be ridden. Otherwise, he would have just sent a flock of giant black eagles with the flying scout.

This will be the first time in a while that he's actually rescued anyone. This thought fills him with joy. To distract himself from constantly worrying about their progress, he decides to check in on one of his other projects. Doing a quick head count he finds that he will probably have enough spiders by the time the goblins are dealt with to start sending spiders to deal with the dwarves. He hadn't forgotten about the Dwarves or their slaves, but since he has no real way of gathering meaningful intel ahead of an attack, he decided to take a different approach.

When the goblins do finally arrive the attacking force is so small that he barely has to lift a finger to aid in the defense. Some humans even begin testing out throwing spears in combat. The only drawback, which quickly becomes apparent, is that once the spear is thrown the person becomes unarmed. Fortunately, they are able to duck back behind traditional melee fighters before the goblins close within melee range. A few hobgoblins do get spells off, but they are weak and easily countered by human mages. After which the human mages return the favor by lobbing spells of their own which decimate the goblin lines. The rest of the battle progresses in a rather predictable manner.

Before the battle has even officially concluded Logan sends an army of Dire wolves to attack the goblin camps. Fearing that this might not be enough to finish them off he sends an Army of regular wolves the next day as soon as the arbitrary time limit has expired. Hopefully if any goblins from either of those camps survived the dire wolf attack the regular wolves would finish them off.

With that done he decided to prepare for the new group which should be arriving in less than a week. To that end he looks to expand again. Unfortunately, the latest battle with the goblins didn't even get him the equivalent of a full week's worth of passive mana build up, so he is once again only able to claim four expansions. He once again claims the area to his west as that will give the people more houses to work with. This also gives him even more of the cavern and while he doesn't yet have it all he can see the two cavern walls curving back in towards each other. He can also see a few more tunnels snaking off from the cavern. No wonder it took them a while to pinpoint how to get to the dwarves' hideout through the underground cave network. Hearing about the expansive tunnel network and seeing it are two entirely different things, and he reminds himself that he is still only seeing a tiny fraction of the actual maze of tunnels between him and the dwarves.

Just over three days later the newcomers finally arrive. There were six males and three females. This group ranged in age from around 11 or 12 to 24. They were scared of his creatures at first but seeing as the other humans paid them no mind and they weren't harming any of the humans it didn't take long for them to realize the weren't a threat. Apparently, there were more but they were slowly picked off by Orc hunters. With no real safe space, as far as they knew, all they could really do was try to avoid lingering in one area too long. It seems that they didn't actually think that a truly safe space existed, even after meeting up with the ground based recon team. They came in spite of that because the very idea of it gave them hope and a reason to keep going beyond mere survival. Surprisingly only three of the men and one of the women decided to take up arms. Two of the men apprenticed under a few of Yangus's apprentices' former apprentices. One man decided to help tend the field. The other two women it turns out showed some talent with shadow magic.

Roughly a week later one of the flying recon teams reveals that the wolves and dire wolves were defeated. They did manage to completely wipe out one of the goblin camps and do significant damage to the second one though. That wasn't exactly the news he was expecting but it just means his plans for the dwarves will have to wait a little while longer. For now, he is tired of dealing with the goblins so this time he sends an army of stone wolves to finish them off. He wants to give them as little time to reproduce as possible.