Well, the last week has been productive though not as much as i would have liked. I have managed to complete my fifth water formation, which gives me extra peace of mind. As i have said before, this formation was particularly nasty piece of conjuration which has been a majority of my work in the last week. I will not put its affect into documentation until i have used it against the enemy for once at the very least.
Though i do have to admit that if i had this particular formation working things would have been so much easier especially with the siege. I wouldn't have to take such a risky move to get rid of the enemy at the very least.
Regardless it is complete and that means that I have a truly good chance of holding my own on against the snowlords and their hordes or so i hope at the very least. It is also a point that i have never faced of against the snowlords and the soldiers here have also not faced them before. It is all second hand information which is not reliable at the best of times. Well, from now on though the formations are more simpler and are more focussed on the nurturing aspects of the formation.
The last two earth formations and the last water formation are meant for the structural modification of the environment. It is a bit complicated, but it is preparing the environment for the planting of the copperback. While that is nice, the major benefit of this is the fact that the three spells will have a direct effect on the ground, make it harder and harder. While it is slower than even the iron skin formation it still a long term benefit. After all, you won't be able to support a mighty tree if it got uprooted due to its own weight.
Among these, i have only inscribed two, one which is called as earth compression. While i have never cast this spell the spell is quite simple. It is going to be compressing the earth to make it more dense and durable.
This function of it will be supported by the earth spell earth relocator and the water spell solid flow. The two spells will work together to provide the compression spell with a steady supply of earth to compress.
Still, while the nurturing aspects of the formation are still not going to be very much useful in the short term, but the hardening effect might be useful at the very, granted it is much slower than the iron skin. The druids are all about the long term after all. they can spend centuries, if not millenias in their forests crafting them into the ideal forts. Makes them bloody hard to conquer too.
The iron skin reminds me that i still have work left on that front. Well, one of the key aspects of my plan to eliminate the icebeasts was that shamon had to be able to simulate a breach into the southern gate at will. That was the only way these bastards could be able to lure in those damn beasts and the iron skin spell was built to ensure that something like that would not happened at the very least not easily.
Iron skin works by essentially creating a mould of the user( or the building in my case )which the user does almost instinctively by modifying the runes of that spell. This spell does not really have any way for us to modify this mould, though that does lead me to wonder how does it work for the humans because we humans do not have a specific shape you know.
How does a teenage druid practice this spell without choking on this spell because his body has grown in that period is beyond me. Well, I don't know the full spell. The only part of the spell taught to me was in relation to the formation. So maybe they have extra components.
Well, i guess i should get back to the topic. Due to the mould, there are many layers of metal mana on the gate which have essentially set for the lack of a better word. Very useful to have when enemy icebeasts are puking bolts of ice mana at, or piling the bodies of the dead against it as the metal mana will take the brunt of that.
Not very useful when the gate has to fall at your command. Thankfully, in that situation you had a bunch of corpses piled against the gate which was a plus. All of that weight were causing quite the bit of strain on the gate.
Regardless, the trick here was not to focus on the gate but rather on the hinges. It was still a problem that the hinges were still a part of this mould. Thankfully the thing with hinges are you cannot place them fully in the mould, as they have moving parts which would be stopped the instant that the iron skin started setting.
Unless you want to keep the door fully closed or fully opened or whichever state the door was in, of course. that is one of the disadvantages of iron skin. After all, does it really matter if the strongest part of your defense has been strengthened a hundred times if the weakest part of it is still the same.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Anyway, i tweaked the hinges of the gate and essentially made it so that the hinges will not be a part of the formation at the command of shamon. That along with some very controlled explosion to get rid of previous layers of metal mana was just about enough to bring down the gate.
That also means that at the moment the iron skin formation has a very clear weakness, which i certainly have to hope that the enemy will never find out about. Right now i certainly do not want to take the risk of trying to restructure the iron skin again. I have essentially been plucking cards from a house of cards with each change that i have made to the formation.
It has been due to significant luck that the entire formation has not yet collapsed. That means that it is becoming a bit too risky to mess with the iron skin formation unless i want the entire thing to fall. I have already removed a failed formation from the core, so i really do not want to lose one of my core formations this late in the game.
So where was i, the southern gate is a point of weakness for the fort and there is little that i can do to help. I do have few ideas, but most of them are not something that works for the present situation, but could be somewhat helpful. That will take work, which certainly I do not want to put in now.
With the enemy about to strike us at any second that is a risk that I have no desire to take. That has been another source of worry for me and shamon for a while now. There has been no enemy action on us for a while now. Maybe the enemy has exhausted all of its available troops in this fight. Maybe they were preparing to come to the place personally or maybe they were preparing an even larger numbers of troops to throw at us. Maybe it was both. all we know is that the snowlords were supposed to already be here attacking us but they have not even appeared. Even dealing with ten troops would have been better than this unnatural inaction from the enemy.
Shamon has been in an even worser situation than me. He has had little work to keep him busy like me and he has been spending the last couple of weeks trying to keep the troop morale as high as he could while also clearing up all the remains of our previous fights. They simply cannot chuck the corpses of their own and the icebeasts in this frozen wastelands.
It is hard for things to rot this far north but there is always a risk of diseases spreading. The best option would be to burn them all, turning everything to ashes. We do not have any options for that here, so it is the next best option for these guys. That would be to dig a massive pit and chuck all of these bodies into it.
The only problem is that the ice in this place is supposed to rock solid in the winter. Everyday almost all the soldiers in the fort have to go quite a distance from the fort to dig until they are tired to the bones, while bracing themselves for ambushes. All of this while the numbers of soldiers are beginning to hit worrying numbers. Thankfully or not, even that task of theirs is about to end in a couple of days.
That has been another worry for shamon, who has been trying to negotiate reinforcements from the other forts. While snowwinders politics is not something is not something that i claim to understand it looks like things have not been going well.
I will try to explain it as well as i have understood it. These are a bunch that do not want to seem weak. The very act of asking reinforcements has undermined any image of strength that shamon has built up, which means that shamon is in a weird position. All of the other fort heads will not actively trying to mess up shamon and this fort, but they are certainly making things very annoying for him.
The one thing that the two of us could agree on is that it is the calm before the storm and now is the time for us to grow our aces. There was simply no way that the enemy was going to leave us alone after investing that much to get rid of us. The silver lining to all of this has been that the ruin will have been essentially left all alone in all of this mess. Normally also the snowlords have little desire to mess with the magical ruin but with this fort to act as a lightening rod, they was simply no way that the ruin will be threatened.
Trevor and the two idiots are good soldiers but they are not really that powerful. At the moment, i would be more comfortable with the fact that the scholars are there. They might not know enough to safely run even one of the things in there but they are more than capable of bringing the entire thing on the enemies head.
The only problem would be just how much of a instinct of self preservation those bunch have left. The scholars are beings of a singular focus after all. There are significant percentage among the scholars that would give up their own lives if it meant that they could preserve another ruin. They are a obsessive bunch that might just deal with devils if it meant that they could grow their knowledge. Fuck, that reputations of theirs is the reason that they need guards like us in the first place.
Well, it is more likely that i will be attacked so i have no desire to worry about them. Fuck, it almost feels as if that bunch is nicely enjoying a vacation in this battlefield. It is not like jealousy is going to help me though, at the very least now. I am going to certainly make a note of it though.
Somebody among them is going to suffer( certainly not the scholars and Trevor, but there are two idiots who would make for nice punching bags though and there are many formation i want to test that is going to make them suffer in interesting ways.)