First, he saved up enough for the level ten upgrade in the process confirming that he did indeed get a second spider spawner. Then he spent a few weeks getting the new spawner up to level nine. Unfortunately, even with the second spawner essentially doubling the spawn rate it was still going to take a while to get enough swarms of the larger spider variants to do more than just be annoying. Still, it did cut the time he would have to wait in half. For a long time, he considered just getting duplicates of all his spawners, but he does still need to expand as well. He will get duplicates of all of them eventually but for now he is satisfied with the rat and spider spawners. With the rat spawner alone he has gone from having to wait a few months between attacks to being able to send out an attack about once a month. Besides which he can't shack the feeling that he is nearing an important milestone in regard to his growth as a dungeon/sanctuary. Even though he has never acted much like a dungeon or even considered himself one the system still does which occasionally has its perks. Convenient since there doesn't seem to be a sanctuary category, even though he and the human consider him to be one.

The next group of rats he sends out he tells to head straight north for a bit before turning towards the orc camp. He hopes that will keep the orcs from guessing that they are all coming from the same place. Of course, every group he sends out has the same basic command to not harm humans. Still, he decided as much as he would love the mana from killing them inside his border, he really just wants to secure the area. According to recon team alpha, one of the flying recon teams, the first group of rats managed to do a lot of damage before being wiped out. Fortunately for the recon team their relatively small heads are hard to spot next to the giant bird that commands the attention of whoever or whatever sees it. this makes it possible for a recon team to watch the battle as it happens and report back on the results almost immediately. Something he really should have considered but luckily Joel did. Logan has to admit that for flying units being a totally new concept Joel has managed to integrate them into his plans surprisingly well. It turns out Joel is a natural strategist, able to easily incorporate new ideas into his strategy and not be bogged down by tradition. Although to be fair Logan isn't sure how much of that is due to the humans not really having a military tradition anymore.

A month and five expansions later he is about to send out another group of rats when he feels Cid trying to get his attention. It seems like the dwarves are amassing outside the entrance to their city. It's about time. Honestly, Logan was starting to think they didn't care about the group that he defeated several months back. He does wonder what took so long for them to retaliate but he's not going to question it. He could use the free mana after all. The recon teams are doing their best to keep an eye on the dwarves but even flying it takes a while to get to the dwarven city and back. That said he should know about them heading this way within a few hours of them heading out. This means that he doesn't need to constantly worry about when they attack will come. He's going to have about two weeks even after they start marching.

He had planned on getting a few more expansions before upgrading another spawner to level 10 but given the current circumstances he decides to go ahead and upgrade the wolf spawner. He is confident that what he had could have handled it, but he figures it's better to be overprepared than underprepared. As for the dwarves, they were taking thing a bit more seriously than the previous group. It seems they were determined to not underestimate the humans a second time. A recon team manages to catch them not far from the dwarven city meaning they must have recently departed. This time they were sending one thousand troops in four separate groups. The first group has 400 dwarves then there are three groups of 200 each. Logan is very interested to see how this will play out as it will be his first time fighting an actual army of dwarves and his first time fighting someone using tactics other than just 'attack' which Logan thinks shouldn't really count as a strategy. He isn't sure why they are group up the way they are, but he understands that they must have a strategy in mind. with the remaining time he places the wolf spawner and manages to get it to level 6 before the dwarves make it to within a day's travel from his borders.

It's now that things start getting interesting as the groups split up with two going southeast, one going northeast, and the larger group continuing on straight ahead. Logan suggests having the recon teams fly back in a more round-about way so as not to draw attention to themselves. So far, the dwarves believe they are only fighting humans, better equipped than they thought but still just humans. A group of giant birds flying straight towards them circling a few times and flying straight back repeatedly might give the game away though. As the largest group got to within sight of the city and stopped, he had the flying recon team pack it in for now and just had the normal scouts keep an eye on them. It didn't take a military genius to figure out what they were up to, and he has to admit that it would have worked if it were just humans here. It might have worked regardless, if they'd tried the same thing this time last year. Now though he just has to many things to throw at any potential problem to be concerned. He is still worried about the races working together though, as well as a potential attack from another dungeon. Short of that though he believes he has outgrown the threat that a single race could pose. At least when it comes to defending against an attack.

Over the course of about a day he watches as the four groups get into formation around the formerly abandoned human town. He wonders for a moment why they don't just attack before it dawns on him that they are probably waiting for something. What exactly they are waiting on he isn't sure. He hasn't exactly been just sitting there waiting though. Thanks to the time that the dwarven strategy bought him he managed to save up enough for the level 7 upgrade on the wolf spawner. Aside from that he does a quick check to make sure his creatures are evenly distributed along a line roughly 10 meters inside his border. He could attack them now and catch them unprepared. Honestly though he kinda wants the mana gained from them dying inside his border. It's already taking way longer than he thought it would to expand out beyond the town. Speaking of which he is mildly disappointed that he already has a complete picture of everything outside the town, still there is always underground, or something the human scouts failed to notice. He should really focus on the immediate issue though. He may not be worried about them getting past his defenses but that doesn't mean he can afford to get careless. After all, if they were going to get past it would most likely be when he isn't paying attention.

Early the next morning the dwarves begin their attack just as dawn breaks. Rather brilliant he has to admit. If you can't communicate with each other, then using a universal signal like sunrise to coordinate timing is the next best thing. He intentionally kept his spiders out of the fighting. He had other plans for them. The birds however quickly proved their worth. Logan almost felt sorry for the dwarves, between pecking them with their beaks, and in the case of the smaller birds specifically aiming for the eyes, to clawing at them with their talons, to, in the case of the larger birds, just straight up lifting them into the air and either letting gravity do the rest or twirling around to build up speed and hurling them into the side of a building the birds where really doing a number on them. Combined with the Wasps and their poison effects the dwarven front lines were a disorganized mess. Still, they pressed on and soon came to the slag slime wall that had stalled out or even stopped every advance so far. Unfortunately, this time it was Logan's turn to be surprised. As while the Dwarves did not possess the ability to use magic like the other races, they were by far the most inventive and were apparently very good a creating and using runes. Their armor seems to be enchanted specifically against temperature changes. There has to be a limit to it though and he can see the runes glowing brightly trying to keep up with the heat the slag slimes are throwing at them. Sensing that the runes are nearing the peak of what they can handle he sends his lava wolves and fire mantises to quite literally turn up the heat and try to overwhelm the runes before to many of the slag slimes are taken out. At first it doesn't seem to be working but then he feels something. Something familiar and yet new. He is getting mana but from where, it's been literally years since he's been confused about the source of mana gain. It takes him a moment but eventually he works out the source of the extremely dense mana he is getting. His first clue was the look of horrified shock mixed with intense pain on the faces of the dwarves just before they melted away. The only one he needed really. It seems that when a rune breaks, instead of an explosion or whatever else he thought would happen it simply dissolves kind of like cotton candy in a bucket of water releasing the mana used to create it into the air where it is automatically absorbed by him. It also seems like the more mana you pour into a rune the more powerful you can make it because these runes contained a LOT of mana.

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With their runes now proving ineffective they are forced to fall back. Logan guesses that the runes were how they generally dealt with mages. He also guesses that they aren't used to their runes failing. Noticing that this does seem like the perfect opportunity to send in the nightmare gophers to really mess with their heads, Logan does just that. The nightmare gophers manage to turn their fear of having their flesh melt away into a full-blown panic. While that's going on he sends a mix of boars to flank the groups and cut off their retreat. With their formation now in complete disarray he sends in the snakes and raptor chickens to finish them off. It doesn't go as smoothly as he had hoped though and he does end up losing a lot of the stuff he sent against them but at the end of the day he manages to wipe them out without too much trouble. Their strategy ultimately worked against them. Giving him four small groups he could easily manage instead of presenting a solid unified front. It also helped that he knew exactly where they were planning to attack and what they're formations looked like. Information that's hard to gather when your recon team is just trying to make it to the sanctuary before the enemy does without getting spotted by said enemy. If he hadn't been here though the dwarven formation would have been the right call to box in and then capture the humans regardless of how well armed they are. A thought he decides to keep to himself.

As he begins to relax and mentally go over everything that happened during the battle he goes ahead and gets the secondary wolf spawner up to level 9. He briefly wonders why there is no level 10 for the secondary spawners. The only conclusion he can come up with is that it's to prevent young cores from just filling their dungeon with the first spawner they get. Giving credence to his theory that dungeons once served a purpose beyond the one they serve now. It's all intellectual anyway as he has no way to prove or disprove any of his conclusions or theories regarding dungeon history on Thana. Now is not the time for such idle speculations. After shaking his metaphorical head to clear it he gets back to work and quickly buys seven northern expansions. He knows that he should probably double the remaining spawners, but he figures that it's going to be a while before he has to face any sort of organized attack. At any rate, he is certain he can handle whatever they send already. Besides this latest batch of expansions pushed him over some threshold and now he can send out 75 creatures per day instead of 50.

With his newfound offensive power he wastes no time in sending out an army of dire rat swarms towards the orc camp with orders to kill anyone who isn't human. He is a little disappointed that he'll have to wait a little longer before sending out an army of really giant spider swarms. He has a plan for the spiders that involves all their various sizes, except maybe the monstrous spider and really monstrous spider because he still only has a handful of monstrous spider swarms and a single really monstrous spider swarm. He also isn't really sure he wants to have that many monstrous spiders swarming around, never mind their building sized variants.

A few days later the team sent to the abandoned human city returns. They apologies both to Siobhan and to the sanctuary, through Cid, for being gone for so long but explain that there was so much history and culture there among the ruins that they didn't want to leave. Their feelings are completely understandable. Logan doesn't doubt that he would probably feel the same way in their shoes. Still, they didn't return empty handed. In fact, their packs are overflowing with books. No official documents though. According to the recon team it appears that they either took those with them or destroyed them to prevent them being used against humanity. The abondance of new reading material would be greatly appreciated at any rate. Already there was a group forming outside the makeshift thrown room in anticipation both of hearing what the recon team saw and of getting a chance at the new reading material. Logan is quick to point out that clues about their ancestor's culture can be found even in books designed for entertainment. This seems to give Siobhan an idea. Turning to Cid she asks if the sanctuary can make copies of all the books. Logan is stunned for a moment, both that he hadn't considered it and because he genuinely didn't know. To be clear he knew he could copy the books, it was the words on the pages he wasn't sure about. He was confident it would work though and was given one of the smaller books as a test. He felt bad dismantling the book, but it was the only way to acquire the design. When he was done he was surprised again, not only could he recreate the book, but he found that he could also turn the random plant fibers in his inventory into paper. He's pretty sure paper back home is made from wood or at the very least requires a specific type of plant fiber, but he isn't about to argue if magic is going to make his job that much easier. He quickly dismantles the remaining books and makes an exact replica of each of them. He would like to make copies, but he doesn't have enough plant fibers having never had a reason to gather it before.

Soon the books are handed out. Siobhan makes it clear to everyone that they are to be returned to the library when each person gets done reading them so that others can enjoy them as well. The recon team wants to return to the abandoned city and Siobhan is about to allow it when Logan has Cid suggest that they allow the other flying recon team to go noting that a fresh set of eyes may see something the first team missed. They are understandably upset by this and start to argue about how they already know the layout of the city pretty well. A single look from Joel puts an end to that though. They understand the reasoning behind Cid's suggestion, that doesn't mean they're happy about it. Siobhan thinks about it for a minute before deciding that Cid's idea has merit. Logan's pretty sure she only went with it because she believed it was actually his idea and not Cid's, but he didn't force her to choose it. Even if most of the humans would still do whatever he said the fact that she even considered not doing it showed that she was starting to think for herself which he chose to take as a good sign that they wouldn't need him to make every decision for them soon. He's still going to defend them though that much is a given.

As for which way to expand after he is a good distance outside the city in all directions. He was going to just continue expanding in all directions but now he is thinking he might expand down towards the other human city. It's always nice to have a goal in mind and after hearing them talk about it he kind of wants to see it for himself. That will be many many years from now though.