image [https://i.imgur.com/OJRnN8m.jpg]
Prismatic Shield did wonders for my damage mitigation. Each head bit for 25 points—only a third of what the gargasaurus inflicted—a creature only five levels lower. The shield shaved off a quarter of each hit.
Yula issued a single command after we jumped into melee. “Surround!”
We repositioned ourselves to opposite sides of the hydra according to the plan she communicated with her fingers. I tried to keep at least three heads pointing at me, and she did the same on the opposite side. Heads straining in the opposite direction spoiled the creature’s lunging bites. Standing on opposite sides of the monster, we pitted each of the hydra’s heads against its brethren. Half attacked me while the other lunged for Yula in the opposite direction. Once we stabilized the creature between us, missed monster attacks filled half of the event log.
Whenever Yula pulled aggro from a head I considered mine, I Charged into the beast. I drew extra damage, but the maneuver pulled the errant head’s attention back to me.
Not only did splitting attacks work against one another, but we also shared incoming damage. If I tanked this beast, even with my new shield, the seven heads would have poured over 100 damage from a single round of bites, not counting critical hits.
We didn’t have time to use Imbue Weapon during combat, but Charge proved essential for aggro control. With so many nipping heads, I only cast instants. Rejuvenate and a single health potion served as my only sources of healing. Casting a six-second spell like Restore remained out of the question.
Rejuvenate couldn’t out-heal the hydra’s damage—even with our controlled burn tactics. That’s where Yula’s advice came into play. Once we held three heads, we focused on the seventh head first, the one in the middle. The middle head proved the hardest to hit, but killing it reduced our incoming damage by one-seventh. By that point, our health pools had emptied by half, even after consuming health potions.
I could barely see Yula on the other side of the monster, and whenever I could, I swiveled around to keep the hydra between us. I focused on one of the three heads assigned to me. It became a damage race against the creature, and my defensive maneuvers helped me prevail.
Killing the head reduced my incoming damage by 33 percent. My remaining health totaled only 50 points—but with only two heads attacking me, Rejuvenate held me steady.
By that time, Yula had lopped off another head on her side.
The battle got easy after I decapitated the next. Yula and I healed ourselves as we fended off the remaining sets of jaws. We performed Charge maneuvers with impunity, and soon, the hydra collapsed into the well-trampled mud.
Congratulations!
You are level 17
You have gained a level. You have increased your stamina by 1 and intelligence by 2. You have received 1 power point. You have 1840/2020 experience points toward level 18.
All those hours of training in the academy paid off. Not only could I cast spells, but I offered solid melee support. This battle involved fighting off several heads simultaneously, and my defensive skills held. I performed as Yula needed.
Would any of these heads regenerate? The thought lingered in the back of my head while I fought. When the behemoth fell, I wasted no time in retrieving its cores. Creatures in Miros didn’t respawn, especially without a core, but I took no chances.
Pulling seven yellow cores from the hydra’s mouths tingled my imagination about how to use them. It amused me that the core bonus, Unified, hadn’t done the beast any good—we’d defeated the monster with Yula’s divide-and-conquer strategy, pitting the heads against one another.
The orc huntress recently replaced her leather leggings with a better set using the yellow core from the karst caradon. Including a bump in agility, the mutation bonus provided resistance to extreme temperatures—it did little good on a continent with a moderate climate, but the core also boosted her stats.
I also noticed taking Imbue Weapon had unlocked the Inscribe Rune power. The spell’s description left much to the imagination, declaring it rendered its caster with an understanding of magic’s structure. What did that mean? Did I have to find a rune first, or did the power provide magic blueprints? If Iris and Fletcher fought alongside seasoned warriors, maybe one of them knows how to use Inscribe Rune.
Searching for loot in the bellies of monsters disgusted me. Narratively, magic items inside monsters came from the beast swallowing other adventurers. The allure of magic items usually made the grisly chore worthwhile, but the recent feast of orcs and kobolds explained the pinata of lackluster arms and armor. I made a mental note to wash everything off in the lake before adding it to my inventory.
We found a sack of blue diamonds. When Yula first saw the bag of gems, her lip curled. “See symbol? Ess imperial symbol. Zees ees too much for kobold. Many orc clans have fewer gems. Why carry to kobold? Nozzing here ess worth blue diamond.”
Her confusion convinced me to search the hydra’s innards again, but I found nothing else. We combed the debris scattered across the clearing—the torn armaments showed orc and kobold origins. The orc armor bore imperial insignias matching that of the bag—marks of the Redbone Clan. Yula could distill no meaning from the scattered remains.
I widened my hunt to the bushes beyond the clearing, finding only bits of armor. As usual, I collected them to repurpose for the camp’s metal needs.
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“Maybe the kobolds mined the diamonds—like giving tribute or paying the orcs to do something?”
Yula pointed to the bag’s symbol. “Bag ees Redbone Clan. And blue diamond comes from orc mountain, not Highwall.”
Perhaps the orcs wanted to buy something valuable. I cast Detect Magic, but nothing in the area glowed. Without more pieces to the puzzle, I saw no reason a bunch of orcs brought diamonds into kobold country.
Yula, lost in thought, disclosed nothing more on the subject.
We’d concluded that both parties arrived independently. Remains of a small campfire set by kobolds showed they’d picked the location—a rarity, as kobolds rarely used fire. At night, the kobolds missed the telltale signs of the hydra’s territory—only caring that the trampled ground made a clearing. Had they not been so lazy, they might have avoided death.
The monster attacked from the water, destroyed their boats, interrupted their gathering, and trapped them in the clearing.
We found a backpack with a kobold map, but it made no sense why they would sell the orcs a map of their own territory. Yula didn’t recognize its crude glyphs, but we identified the northwestern shoreline of Otter Lake. A circle marked a spot of significance further inland, roughly 20 miles west of Hawkhurst.
Yula took the diamonds. This fortune served as a currency of her people, and it seemed fitting in her hands. I had plenty of gold already from the ward worm. I yielded any claim to the gems with a solemn nod.
The orc noticed me admiring the yellow cores—a fortune in their own right. “Cores make great weapons. Good for defense, no?”
“Yeah. We could make a cool full-armor set or split them between weapons. Warriors wielding them could all attack simultaneously.” When she volunteered no comments, I asked a follow-up question. “What about the map? What do you think it is?”
“Eet ees nozing. Kobold fooleeshness. Kobold only value ees slave to gnoll.” Her lip curled in distaste for the whole affair—a rare exhibition of emotion.
“Zees is done. We go home now, yes?”
Perhaps Yula’s animosity for the orc emperor and his clan clouded her judgment, but this map pointed toward a mystery. Even though we had an incomplete picture, I couldn’t argue. We’d already burned through enough daylight of a winter’s day. If an experienced huntress didn’t want to be on the lake at night, I let the matter rest.
We returned to the water. Yula and I salvaged the intact canoe for our own. We collected the orc paddles and launched into the lake, each taking a watercraft home. The return trip took longer, and Yula enjoyed brief breaks while I caught up with her, but we returned before dinner got cold.
Fabulosa gave me the stink-eye when she saw I matched her level. We’d fallen into a competition to be a higher level—although she seemed to be the only one who genuinely cared. I preferred to rank up my skills, even though I had barely any time to do so since becoming Hawkhurst’s city planner.
After dinner, Yula and I told the camp about our battle against the many-headed monster.
Rocky made a chef’s kiss when he heard we’d harvested the hydra’s carcass. Akin to fish meat, we’d not harvested anything like hydra before. The lean white meat wouldn’t improve our camp’s health ratings, but another flavor improved our comfort rating.
When I showed everyone the map, Fabulosa alone expressed interest. “What do you make of it, Yula? Do you think it’s a dungeon?”
Yula flapped her hand, giving her protégé the same answer. “Eet ees nozzing. Kobold fooleeshness.”
“Well, I think it’s peculiar. It’s off in the mountains, by the looks of it. And it’s only about ten miles south of the route to Basilborough. That’s only half a day’s journey into kobold territory. What do you think, C-Belle?”
Charitybelle shrugged. She and I tried making an atlas from local maps in Belden, hoping a pastiche from various sources might paint a more complete picture of the continent’s interior, but we found little success. The difficulty revolved around distinguishing mountains from one map to another. Although kobolds lived in the Highwalls, I couldn’t imagine them embracing cartography. My girlfriend’s lack of enthusiasm expressed similar doubts.
Fabulosa frowned. “Don’t you wanna see what it is?”
Charitybelle grunted noncommittally. “I don’t know. One day.” I could see the gears turning in her head. Leaving Hawkhurst worried her.
Fabulosa poked Charitybelle’s stomach, causing her to giggle. “We gotta get you leveled, hon. We’re 17, almost twice your level. We gotta fatten you up!”
After squirming, Charitybelle relented. “Maybe after the motte and bailey. It’s a given we can’t leave without endangering the settlement.”
After dinner, I surveyed the beginnings of our motte and bailey. Ally and I chose the meadow’s center for a construction site. At 40 yards across, the footprint included little more than modest construction stakes in the ground, marking the palisade’s perimeter and moat. Except for the stakes, nothing stood. The workforce had barely begun harvesting the raw ingredients—logs and river reeds. Braiding reeds into twine helped hold the wood in place.
The build window didn’t have interactive functionality, so opening it didn’t freeze time. Like the map interface, I could check it out while doing something else.
Building Status
Motte and Bailey
Remaining Build Time
Efficiency
Workers
20.1 days
135 percent
22
Technically, it only took a couple of days to erect, but the prep time for digging, gathering wood, and braiding together rope involved enormous amounts of labor—far more than blueprints showed. Depending on morale, it could be a month or longer.
As the days passed, more dwarves wore rugged new garments, each tailor-made for the individual, featuring capes, hats, and pullovers for working in the rain. An assembly-line uniform might have been more efficient, but giving everyone a distinct look looked better.
I wanted nothing special for undergarments. Charitybelle seemed frustrated by ready agreements to whatever style or configuration she suggested. To me, everything looked fine. My usual bar for fashion revolved around clothes without visible food stains—not that I admitted it to her.
Charitybelle and Greenie worked on blueprints for a town hall that minimized masonry. Town halls needed to project a lasting impression. Without a stone floor, they needed floorboards, requiring specialty woodworking tools that added to Rory’s long list of blacksmithing needs. After a week, they made blueprints that the game validated as a town hall without the use of extensive masonry.
Charitybelle and I joined the work crew as they moved from lumbering to digging. Once again, working alongside the dwarves made me self-conscious. They rarely used picks to loosen the soil. We frequently stopped and rested, panting as we watched our fellow citizens tossing great rooster tails of dirt behind them.
“Angus, don’t you guys ever need to rest? Your proficiency with shovels amazes me.”
Angus looked puzzled. “Wha? Ye call this digging? This counts for naught but a surface sweep, innit? We don’t even kiss clay until 10 feet down.”
Greenie disappeared into the Dark Room to work on logistics. It made sense that he spent little time outside, at least during the day. Goblins avoided the outdoors during the daytime if they could help it.
Our visiting dignitaries, Oscar and Glenn, lifted not a finger toward building the camp’s future. They lounged or talked to Greenie indoors. Their detachment probably worked for the best—they might have slowed things down and caused friction by wanting to do things their way.
Their carefree presence made things a little awkward, and everyone looked forward to their return home.