If he had known that the upgrade to the spider spawner would be a spawn rate increase, he would have gotten it back when he upgraded the other spawners. Dwelling on the past isn't going to accomplish anything though, so he doesn't think too much more about it. Besides, he has the very real possibility of an impending attack to prepare for. With that in mind he ponders whether he should upgrade his spawners again. One the one hand, he was able to fend off a very substantial force last time the elves attacked and still had a lot of creatures left to fight with. On the other hand, most of what he had left was relatively small stuff. He also isn't sure how much larger of an attack they are capable of mounting.

Eventually he decides to air on the side of caution and get the upgrades. First up is the slime spawner and what he gets defies explanation. Even in a world of magic it makes no sense. According to the spawner it's a rock slime. It somehow manages to look like a solid stone and a lump of silly puddy all at once. Watching it move around doesn't make it any less confusing as it somehow appears to be both rolling and crawling. The second upgrade he gets goes to the wolf spawner which turns out to be just a simple spawn rate increase. Same with the boar spawner. The spider spawner upgrade however finally gets him that 16-meter spider he has been dreading. Sure, they will be invaluable during battle but outside of battle they do take up a lot of space. Considering three of the last five upgrades were spawn rate increases, and one caused the spider spawner to produce house sized spiders, he decides that he needs more space, so his human residents aren't drowning in creatures.

Over the next few weeks he buys five expansions to the north. This gets him several ... what he has decided are middle class dwellings, being nine meters by fourteen meters instead or six by fourteen, and a few houses that make what he had been calling mansions seem small. As he watches beta team return, he notes that it has taken longer for the elves to attack than he thinks it should have. The recon team itself reports to Joel, whom Siobhan has placed in charge of all things military, that they have not found anything. After a brief conference with Cid, Joel agrees that it is strange the elves haven't attacked yet. Since there are a few people in the recon team who speak the elven language, they are sent down to check on the elves. Against Logan's better judgement, they are ordered to hang around the elf camp for a few days and try to ease drop.

Next up, the newest recon team gamma is sent to the east to check on things there. Not because they are likely to find anything but because this area is already fairly familiar to them. Joel thought that it was a good idea to send them some place they were already vaguely familiar with for their first mission.

A couple of expansions later and alpha team returns. They report having found only tracks leading further south. Logan is pretty sure they weren't their last time a recon team checked that area. Although there isn't a lot they can actually do with the information right now, Joel and Siobhan both agree any new development is worth keeping an eye on. After allowing them to rest for several days, during which time Logan buys another expansion, Siobhan decides to send them north. Logan does convince her to send them directly north so they will be as far from known orc and goblin camps as possible. He's all for searching for random wandering humans but he still doesn't want to kick the hornets' nest just yet if they can avoid it.

A few more days and Logan is ready to expand again. This time however he expands south, getting more of the residential area. After the expansion he takes note of the fact that beta team would be getting back about now if they hadn't been ordered to stay a few days and eavesdrop. He can only hope that decision doesn't come back to haunt them, but if something does happen it will be a good lesson for Joel. One Logan will make sure Joel doesn't forget. Part of letting them govern themselves is allowing them to make what he considers to be mistakes and helping them learn from them. He knew they wouldn't do things the way he did but to have the recon team basically set up camp right beside the elves in order to gather intelligence is not worth the risk in his opinion. Another southern expansion and beta team finally returns. It seems the elves have realized that the humans are protected by a sanctuary so any attacking force would need to be massive. This is bad because it means that any force the elves send will be far larger than any they have sent before. The one silver lining is that they don't seem to know that the humans themselves are more than capable of putting up a fight. Probably not against hundreds of elves, at least not with more than a few casualties, but Logan still doesn't plan to ever let them face that many alone.

After being allowed to rest for a few days beta team is sent back to the elf camp to keep an eye on things there. Logan agrees that they need to keep a much closer eye on the elves but cautions the recon team not to grow overconfident in their ability to remain concealed. A few days after they leave, he buys another expansion in addition to the one he bought while they were resting up. It's looking more and more like the elves, or that specific camp at the very least, are a problem that's going to have to be dealt with sooner rather than later. The problem is he doesn't have enough control yet to send a large enough force to do more than delay the elves next attack on the sanctuary by a week or so. Besides that, he is just now recovering the units he sent down to help free the slaves last time. On the flip side, according to Cid, elves unlike his own creatures or even the goblins are not so easily replaced, having an even longer childhoods than the humans do to them having nearly triple the life span. Logan doesn't think too much about that realizing he has no idea what the average life span of a human is on this world, and it's been so long since anyone died of old age most humans don't know either. The average life expectancy is around thirty years but that tells him nothing about human life spans. The important thing is this meant that sending small forces to slowly chip away at their numbers could still work if he was smart about it. A large amount of patience and restraint would also be needed to make sure he didn't overcommit, leaving the sanctuary vulnerable. Eventually, he decides to put such thoughts aside for the moment to focus on other things.

A few expansions later and gamma team returns. As expected, they didn't really find anything useful. This was still a good first mission though since they did find where the kobold camp had been which reinforced that they made the right decision joining the community inside the sanctuary. After a few days rest, during which time Logan expanded again, Siobhan started to send him up to the northeast, but Logan was able to convince her to send them just east of the elf camp. His reasoning was that they needed to make sure they weren't establishing other camps nearby they could retreat to or launch surprise attacks from. As such the recon team was told that along with other camps, they should watch for signs of paths being worn in the soil which would indicate a lot of elves using the same route. Something Logan felt a recon team should already be on the lookout for, but he wasn't going to say anything.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

one week and two expansions later alpha team returned with two children around the same age Siobhan was when she first stumbled upon the sanctuary. Apparently, they had been running away from a group of three orc. The recon team was able to defeat them rather efficiently. The fact that they had the element of surprise as well as much better armor and weapons helped certainly but there had to be more to it. They must have gotten stronger than Logan realized because he could remember a time it took six of them to deal with a single orc who was half dead from poison anyway. Sure, they had to use all of their healing potions and some of them still required a healer but that was a remarkable improvement in skill, nonetheless. There were enough people in the community now where he didn't feel the need for them to be useful right away, not that he would ever force people to do anything. For their part they were just happy to be some place where they didn't need to live in fear all the time. The kids also confirmed that there were a few small groups of humans about a month's journey to the north, something Logan had suspected but chose to keep to himself until such time as they could actually do something about it. A month was simply too far to travel when you didn't know exactly where you were going. Plus, the longer they were out the greater the risk of them being found regardless of how careful they are. He wanted to leave a sign for any who traveled far enough south that sanctuary was near, but, since less than a third of humans could read and nobody seemed sure if the other races could read human writings or not, he couldn't think of any easily recognizable sign that wouldn't also tell his enemies where to find him.

He thought about letting Siobhan send them north again just in case they were able to find more humans. In the end though, he was able to convince her of the wisdom of dealing with one problem at a time and the elves were still a very real problem. A few expansions later and team alpha was heading just west of the elven camp. He had already made up his mind about sending more recon missions north in the near future since humans were starting to wander far enough south to run into the recon teams. He tried not to imagine orc camps further north possibly pushing them south. At least not until the one elf camp was dealt with anyway. Which honestly might not take as long as he fears or could take much longer depending on what the next recon team reports.

Taking advantage of the lull in action he looks over his community. He does still consider it his community even though they require less and less direct help from him, aside from protection, and are quickly becoming more and more independent. the first thing he notice is that Yangus and the other woodcutters have begun to specialize. Yangus is more focused on architecture, while Kitt is focused on making furniture, and Lott is focused on shaping wood into useable lumber. He wondered who would train the newest apprentices the community might gain in the future, since he wasn't sure if Kitt or Lott's specialization was closer to general woodworking. Either way between them and Carver's group he hadn't needed to use his own material manipulation ability in a while. Speaking of Carvers group, they now had two forges going, with Carver choosing to remain in the makeshift forge. Logan would have thought for sure Carver would move to the actual forge, but he was proud of the little forge he made with his own two hands. He did take time to show his two best apprentices how to properly take advantage of the forge though.

Moving on it looked like, judging by the notes all over the place, Allyson had learned enough about the magic grenades to know she was missing an ingredient but not enough to know what that ingredient was. She was confident she would know it when she saw it though, apparently. He wanted to talk to her directly, but at the same time he didn't feel it was important enough for him to summon Cid all the way there. She was in the middle of an experiment anyway by the looks of it.

The next few days he marveled at how fast his community was growing. The number of children was remarkably high considering the number of people who couldn't have kids for one reason or another. Jankin had even started walking not too long ago. He still didn't feel like he was even close to a sustainable population thanks to the number of people who couldn't conceive but he was making progress and hopefully a more potent healing potion would help with that.

Over the next week as he waited for news from one of his recon teams, he bought two more expansions. Giving him a lot more residential buildings for his residents to use. Not only that but each expansion south brought him closer to the elf camp. Not a lot closer but still closer. He chose to look at the big picture, three meters ain't much but three meters twice a week for a year and you end up with a lot more than just three meters. Granted he never expanded one direction for an entire year but that was beside the point as he was still expanding regardless of what direction. Eventually his territory would expand for kilometers in all directions. Beta team returned shortly after the latest expansion. They reported to Joel that the number of elves continued to grow although the wolf attacks did cause them to have to send for additional forces to replace what they lost. They also reported that there were only about 3 slaves. Joel guessed that they had gathered most of their remaining slaves together earlier in an attempt to goad them into attacking. At the time however they didn't believe there would be any animals involved in the attack. Wrongfully assuming any rescue attempts would be carried out by humans only and any creatures would focus on defending the sanctuary itself as well as any humans that just happened to be inside it. Logan found no reason to doubt Joel's assessment of the situation.

Logan and Joel agreed that the best course of action was to wait for the elves to attack since the strength of the force Logan could send out would barely put a dent in their numbers. That didn't mean he wasn't going to try and goad them into attacking before they were completely ready. To that end he sent out 50 lesser wolves since they were easier to recover than his larger creatures and their lose wouldn't affect his strength to much in the grand scheme of things. A few days after that he bought another southern expansion before sending beta team back down with a few lesser wolves to act as an early warning system for the elves attacking. Just like before if the elves were on the march the recon team would give the order for the wolves to return early.

The following week he bought two more expansions the second one getting him a bird spawner. He quickly upgraded the bird spawner a few times since the first few upgrades were practically free at this point. The spawner came with a crow and the first upgrade gave him auto spawning. He briefly wondered why it was called a bird spawner and not a crow spawner. Chickens were technically birds, but they came from a chicken spawner not a bird spawner including the ones that no longer resembled chickens. He got his answer after the second upgrade though as that gave him a raven. These birds were the size you would expect them to be for their respective species. He wasn't too thrown off by this since he had long since learned that the first few upgrades always produced relatively mundane results. Upgrading again gets him a black eagle with a nearly two-meter wingspan. Just as he was wondering when they would get to the 'good stuff' the next upgrade grants him a giant crow. In truth it's not that much bigger than the black eagle having a three-meter wingspan. It is however giant compared to the other crows. Sensing a pattern, he decides to hold off on upgrading it further for now. Sure, he could use them in the upcoming fight but then what. Despite how much he has grown his territory is still relatively cramped. The last thing he wants is for his flying creatures to blot out the sun over the human town that is finally getting properly established.

The morning after buying the last upgrade for the bird spawner, for now, recon team gamma returned. They didn't find anything that would indicate the elves were attempting to establish another camp to the east. Before he could think too hard about what that meant for the elves' plans, the two lesser wolves he had sent with alpha team came running back into the sanctuary. This was the signal he had been both waiting for and dreading. Unfortunately, since beta team had only been gone about a week it meant that the elves were already fairly close. He informed Cid about what was coming, who immediately informed Joel and Siobhan. Logan was quick to plead with them to only send in the human army as a last resort, although he did share with them that if the elf army was as big as he fears they may end up needing to fight regardless. He also suggested the humans gather around the area leading to his core with noncombatants taking shelter underground.