The recon team have had a few days to recover so he sends them out to the east to check on the kobold camp. He isn't sure what they'll find but he is hoping that they would have just barely fended of the elvish attack. If he gets lucky, he can catch them with reduced numbers and the recon team can stealth kill enough of them to sneak the captive humans out. The day after they leave he buys another northern expansion and it's now clear that the town hall is where the human army made their last stand. There is enough of the city within his territory to see the pattern. A large circle of untouched buildings with the town hall at its center. He also gets another small room which even Cid has no idea the function of. Then again, he was never actually a resident back before the city was lost and even Joel who is still the oldest resident was but a young child when the city was abandoned. Logan only contracted Cid because at the time he didn't think the city had been abandoned very long, but now Cid has to go to Joel for answers whenever he asks Cid anything related to the city.
With seemingly nobody left alive who knows the purpose of the weird 10 by 10 meter room to the east of the town hall it falls to him to decide what to do with it. It is three stories tall with stairs around the outside leading all the way up to the roof. This would suggest a guard tower but if that's the case it's in the worst possible strategic position. Also, without ranged weapons aside from magic what would even be the point of such a tower. It could also be for messenger birds he realizes. The railing along the outside of the roof which leaves just enough room for a 185 cm person to walk up the stairs without ducking could in fact be a perch for messenger birds. Either way he decides not to mess with it in case he ever gets a flying unit besides wasps.
On top of all that the expansion also gets him a box labeled alchemy ingredients. He still isn't sure how he is able to read the language but he's glad he can. The box has been sealed using a series of runes designed to keep the contents fresh. Allyson is delighted to receive the box and immediately begins trying to plant as many seeds as possible. Afterward she spends a great deal of time studying the ones without seeds to see if there is any way to get more using what she has. It turns out some of them can be grown by simply planting a small piece of it. others require special conditions to produce a seed. There is also a few alchemy ingredients from the animal kingdom. Namely a set of vials labelled frog urine, slug slime, Ice wolf blood, and Air mantis hearts. Some Allyson will have to keep an eye out for whenever she goes exploring. The other two are ironically readily available even though they are listed on the vials as extremely rare. Naturally the residents are reluctant to kill even more of his creations. He isn't thrilled about it either, but the ice wolf blood at least can be extracted without killing the wolf. It will require the aid of a healer though. He knows that a needle could do the trick without the wolf needing to be healed after, but he has no idea how a needle even works much less how to explain it in a way these humans would understand. There is unfortunately no way even with magic to remove the air mantes' heart without killing it.
By the time he is done going over everything he got in the expansion and helping Allyson by donating a little mana to help the plants grow faster. As well as how to incorporate that into his future plans a whole day has passed. The next few days is spent pondering the future of the human city itself. A thought just occurred to him. Eventually his boarders will extend well beyond the city. When that happens, the humans need to be ready and able to handle their own day to date affairs. He plans to not just save humans from extinction but to restore some form of human society as well.
As he ponders this, he buys another expansion. Which doesn't get him anything noteworthy. Including inside the storage area. Over the next few weeks he buys four more expansions. Most of them were just more of the same. The last expansion however was a little unique. This time he gets his first true dungeon monster. In the wide-open field north of what he has decided is a messenger bird tower until proven otherwise, there now lies a slime spawner. The Slime almost looks like an inanimate blob except for the fact that it can move around at will. The spawner is also unique, being a strange pond of multicolored liquid that the slimes just sort of crawl out of. He can't wait to start upgrading them. Being his first creature not based on an existing earth animal he truly has no idea at all what to expect, and that makes him almost giddy with excitement. The base form according to what he can gather by focusing on it defeats enemies by slowly dissolving them. Apparently, the slimes body is slightly acidic meaning it can dissolve almost anything it envelops given enough time. There are two major weaknesses Logan notices right away. One is that the slime is only slightly acid while the other is that it has a top speed of a whooping 200 meters per hour meaning it's not exactly a rapid responder. In fact, he doubts that he'll be able to use them in an actual battle unless the slimes just happen to already be where the battle is. One benefit is that being ... well ... living slime means they are immune to all types of bladed weapons. Eager two find out what he gets next he quickly buys the first two spawner upgrades. The first one rather predictably automates the slime spawning the second one however produces a slime with a much more potent acidity. A fourth upgrade gives him a slime in a form that sort of resembles molten iron and was called the slag slime. These are, if anything, even slower than the other slimes topping out at 150 meters per hour. The one useful perk is that they generate more heat the more of them that are in an area, but they have to be in physical contact for the effect to activate. He Thinks about the best way to utilize them and then it dawns on him. He has the Super dino chickens and the Dino chickens come up to the surface and orders the slimes down into the underground area where their lack of speed, and in the case of slag slimes potential to start fires won't be an issue. He also has Carver go down and place heat resistance runes on the walls, so they don't accidentally melt the walls. Although Carver warns there is a limit to what the runes can do. As long as they aren't touching each other it should be fine.
Before he can buy the fifth upgrade the recon team returns. They do not however have additional people with them. It turns out keeping that camp has become very expensive lately and the recon team got the impression the loses both in terms of slaves and kobold lives was starting to add up. Their pride won't let them be pushed back though, so instead they are stationing twice as many soldiers and mages to guard the camp. The recon team also got the impression that those kobold were already on their way when the elves attacked and that more would be arriving every week until they found and eliminated the elvish camp once and for all. This put Logan in a bind. On the one hand he wanted to free the Elvish slaves before the kobold attack but on the other hand he didn't want them to realize they had been played and form an alliance. In the end much as it pained him to do so he decided to wait it out. He is reasonably certain he can rescue the enslaved humans later. After all slaves are a valuable commodity. The conflict between the kobold and the elves would end soon. When it does, he can begin slowly whittling down their numbers just like he is doing now with the goblins.
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Speaking of goblins he quickly has Cid organize another 20 warriors plus their lesser wolf companions and three more fire and air mages each to go poke at the goblins. Ordinarily he wouldn't expect the same trick to work twice but goblins aren't known for their brains. Just like last time he sends more 20 more warriors plus their lesser wolf companions and another 2 fire and air mages three days after the first group left. Just like last time they should meet up when the first group is on their way back in a hurry. He makes a mental not to send the recon team to get a rough estimate of how many goblins are left after this is all said and done. When they return this time the number of goblins 'chasing' them is pitiful. In fact he estimates it will only take him about a week to recoup his losses from that battle. The second the last goblin falls he orders the recon team towards the goblin camp. If that was the bulk of their remaining forces his plan is working better than he thought it would. If it's not they may be starting to learn, either way he needs to know.
With that taken care of for now he buys another expansion. This one doesn't hold any surprises for him. He knows it will probably be a while before he gets another spawner. He's still a little surprised by the Slime spawner. He had seen all sorts of magical creatures when he had looked for spawners to buy but he had figured there was some rule in place to only give him creatures he was at least vaguely familiar with. His mind raced thinking of all the possible creatures he could get now that his options were not so limited. Although technically he guesses they never were, and he'd just lucked out with the first several spawners being things he recognized.
While waiting on the recon team to return he buys another expansion with similar results as the last time. The next day they return having spent nearly an entire day observing them. Their best guess is that there are between 50 and 100 goblins. It was hard to get an accurate reading do to them all looking alike. The minute differences were just too small to pick out from as far away as they needed to stay to avoid detection.
The question was did he want to strike now or wait and try to lure even more of them into his trap. He could finish them off now although probably not without losses. The human army numbered well over a hundred if you included all the mages. In fact, most of the humans in the sanctuary were combat focused. Even the ones that weren't he noted were still focused on aiding the combat focused ones in some way. Be it with food, healing potions, or weapons and armor. If you add in their lesser wolf companions the number of active combatants ramps up to over 160 easy. He could count them all but that's too much like paperwork. On the flip side he could lure them into one more ambush which would significantly reduce the chances of casualties when he did send the army to wipe them out. This would take time though and anything can happen in a week, especially when magic is involved. In the end he decided to send a small group of warriors and mages to lure more goblins. This time though he would have the humans on standby ready to charge the goblin camp as soon as the group which had been lured in was defeated. Just like always three days later he sent more warriors and mages to aid the first group who were no doubt extremely exhausted by this point. The group that was 'chasing' them was quite frankly pathetic. They might have given him trouble back when all he had was what he now refers to as the starting area. As it stands, he barely lost any units this time around. He did end up waiting four hours so the people just got back could participate in the raid, despite the fact that he'd originally wanted to send the raiding party out immediately.
After sending them out he buys another expansion then spends the mana he saved up from the last two groups he lured in to buy three more expansions for four total. This actually does manage to get him the rest of the town hall. This also grants him access to a former alchemist's handwritten journal containing several extremely advanced alchemy recipes along with descriptions of the various ingredients and how to acquire them. Allyson who would have been thrilled with just a few more ingredients to work with was beyond overjoyed to get the journal. This she explained to Cid would speed up her own research by years.
He wanted to send out the recon team to check on the elves but everyone who could safely leave the dungeon were gone to attack the goblins. He hadn't realized how much he relied on the human scouts but right now he'd have no idea an attack was coming until it was here. It was a little unnerving knowing that there could be an entire army just outside his perception. He calmed himself by remembering that the kobold and the elves are both to busy attacking each other to worry about attacking him and the dwarves are too far away to even notice him.
A week later the raiding party had returned. They lost several lesser wolf companions but thanks in part to their overwhelming numbers not a single human life was lost. Sadly, the camp itself didn't have anything useful. Before they left for the return trip the fire mages made sure anything flammable was reduced to ash and the air mages scattered those ashes to the point where it would be hard to tell there was ever anything there. Logan would have to send the recon team to see what lay beyond the former goblin camp at some point. Right now though he allowed them to celebrate this small victory. He was aware that on a global scale he most likely hadn't even put a dent in the goblin population, but they didn't need to hear that just yet.
The celebration lasted for a whole day and night. After which he allowed them to recover for another day. So it was around three days before things began to return to normal. He was curious about what lay beyond the goblin camp but he needed to keep an eye on what was happening between the kobold and elves. That in mind he sent them south to check on the elven camp. Neither side could afford to keep throwing bodies at each other indefinitely, so he had the recon team just sit back and observe. He bought five expansions while waiting for the recon team to return, two north and three south. It was time he stopped ignoring the other three directions after all. at the very edge of his northern expansion near the eastern corner he gets two 7 by 7 meter foundations which apparently use to be single person dwellings and were two stories tall. Apparently, some people preferred the coziness of the smaller house to the roominess of the larger ones. The southern expansion was mostly just half of several of the smaller 6 by 14 meter dwelling, which matched the pattern for that area. Of course, he was assuming that they would be 6 meters based on the other buildings in that area.
The recon team returned and reported that the elves had apparently abandoned their camp in the south. It would seem that they no longer feel the camp is worth the lives required to maintain it. Well, that and Logan imagines they're tired of losing slaves. Them abandoning the camp was not entirely unforeseen but he was hoping to rescue a few more groups of slaves first. Aside from that though, this development was both good and bad. Good because he only really had his east side to worry about. Bad because the kobold only had them to focus on and they would eventually rediscover the sanctuary. He doubted the same trick he used on the goblins would work on the kobold. Even if it did though, the kobold camp is too far away and even then the trick would likely only work once.
The recon team was allowed to rest for a few days before being sent out to check on the kobold camp. He had no doubt it would still be there, but he wanted to know what their numbers were like. More to the point could he effect a rescue with minimal risk of lost lives. He wanted to make sure he came away from the fight with a higher number of humans than he went in with. Still planning for the future and looking for a good number of residents that would guarantee genetic diversity for generations to come. Speaking of generations one expectant mom looks like she could go into labor any day now and several others aren't far behind.