“Why does this keep happening??”

“I have to say that this is the first time I’ve seen a goose kill that many minions. I mean, this goose is stronger than some bronze adventurers already.”

My farm was barren of life, following the Goose’s rampage through it, wherein it killed every last one of my minions. Fortunately, my buildings and tools were left alone, not to mention my farming plot, where the plants still slowly grew taller with every passing minute.

“Nothing to do but keep pressing on,” Imu said positively.

After spawning five new minions to replace my lost ones, and urging the gatherers to venture in a different direction than where the evil goose kept arriving from, Imu regarded me with his bulbous eyes.

“We need to do something about that thing. Every time you lose a minion and have to replace them, we are wasting valuable time. Not to mention! When your minion dies, all its experience vanishes.”

“That’s really bad!”

“Yeah… obviously…”

“But what can we do? It only gets stronger each time. Did you not see the way it uppercut my Builder’s head off with its wing?”

“Geese are not supposed to be able to do that, clearly there’s some illegal performance-enhancing drugs involved.”

Imu was back to lounging atop the loom, watching the Builder hand out the pants crafted by his predecessor.

“See if you can make a fence or something. It seemed reluctant to touch your buildings for some reason, so maybe that’ll keep it at bay until we can deal with it properly.”

Following his advice, I concentrated on the Crafting List and vocalised what I sought with my mind, hoping I actually had the ability to make it. Luckily, the list obliged:

[Crafting List]

>Structures>Walls

—Garden Fence (Workbench)—

A short wooden fence to protect your farmland and gardens from pests

Required Materials: Wood

—Stone Dyke—

A short stone barrier to protect your farmland and to keep your cattle from wandering off

Required Materials: Stone

—Simple Wall (Workbench)—

A simple wooden wall for keeping predators away from your buildings

Required Materials: Wood

“Make the wall,” Imu advised.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Instead of making the Builder do it, I concentrated and spawned a sixth member of our little farm. Surprisingly, this one only cost one-fifth of my essence to make. I immediately had him craft himself a Stone Hammer and get to work making the stakes for the wall.

“Remember to keep enough wood around for the next house. Also, did you notice your experience increased?”

“It did?”

“Because you’ve been making so many minions, you have now maxed out your spawning ability, hence why they are now the cheapest they’ll ever be.”

“Why can’t I see my own experience?” I asked, sullenly. I felt left out, just like when I was the last of my family to grow legs in my childhood spawning pond.

“For that you need a Scope,” he answered, before flipping through the pages of his Encyclopaedia. “It seems it doesn’t unlock until you evolve into a Hamlet, but it’ll allow you to obtain Minion Sight, Creature Sight, and Self-Analysis, all of which are going to be very necessary for you to thrive.”

I felt the urge to evolve stronger than ever now, and hastily spawned two more minions, who I assigned to gathering wood and stone, respectively.

When my essence has recouped, I spawned the final two minions that my limit allowed, and put them to work erecting the stake-wall that Builder #2 had been busy making.

“What now?” I asked.

“Now we should build the barn.”

I looked up the crafting entry to see what was needed:

[Crafting List]

>Structures

—Barn (Workbench)—

Enables Material Storage and Sorting

Required Materials: Stone & Timber

“Where should I put it?”

Without replying, Imu placed a blueprint for the building near to the farming plot.

After the two newest minions had finished hammering the stakes into the ground, so that a simple metre-and-a-half wall ran from the trunk of the central tree and outward for about five metres, where it stopped at the border of my demesne, I immediately sent them on to help building the barn.

“…You really need to take better care of your minions.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean!? Look at their hands for Hell’s sake!”

“Oh… Sorry.”

“Apologise to them, not me,” Imu scolded me, as the two minions with their bloodied and broken hands hurried to their new task.

Sorry…

The pair stopped and looked in my direction, then tilted their heads from side-to-side, while scratching their bald rubbery heads with their mangled fingers.

“Hell grant me strength,” Imu muttered, looking as though he was about to throw up. “Even zombies take better care of themselves than your minions, I swear. They have zero self-preservation. But you’re also not helping them. If your minions are this stupid, it’s because you’ve failed to guide them properly.”

“I’m still really new to this!” I defended myself impotently.

“Soon that excuse won’t work.”

As the pair continued onward, they began lugging heavy stones and timber towards the blueprint, repeatedly dropping their heavy burdens as their compound-fractured hands were incapable of holding on to anything.

“This is too gruesome to watch…”

Eventually, after some hours, and having to replace the mangled and exhausted workers that had ruined themselves on building the wall, my farm now had a barn, into which the harvesters and foragers, as well as the farmers, quickly shifted the gathered material into neatly assorted piles and mounds.

I had realised that I could reabsorb a minion to refund my essence, and that’s what I’d had to do, since Imu wouldn’t stop yelling at me for worker abuse and ranting nonstop about something called ‘labour unions’ and ‘healthcare’.

“What’s the next step?”

“You just need to build one more house, then you can evolve.”

“Yay!”

To really undermine my enthusiasm, there came the unmistakeable honking roar from just before my newly-erected fence.

“Not again!” I whined.

“Quick, I have an idea!” Imu forestalled my despair. “Have one of our unassigned minions take those weird squash-looking vegetables and offer them to the Goose!”

I quickly obliged and sent a stoic minion to his certain death, as the Menace vaulted my new wall and started spewing fire from its beak and into the air. Then another head lifted from under its wing and started ululating its death shriek. As I looked closer, I also noticed it had two new webbed feet and two additional feathered wings.

“Oh Hell! It evolved!” Imu announced, as he observed the Monstrosity through his bubble scope thing. “It’s now something called a Goose2!”

“Wait! I think your plan is working!” I replied optimistically, as the brave soon-to-be-clubbed-to-death minion reached the wall and the beast astride it.

The Goose2 paused its menacing roar and fire-breath combo to observe the minion, then its fire-breathing head reached down and grabbed one of the squashes, before flinging it high into the air and catching it on the way down, chomping greedily and violently, so the juices flew all around. It repeated this until the minion ran out of squash, then it looked at him intently, its two long necks coiling together while it quacked quietly.

My minion counter went to 9 / 10 as the fire-breathing head uncoiled itself and took a chunk out of my minion’s neck and throat, before shrieking proudly and leaping from the wall to soar through the sky above my farm, breathing fire into the air and roaring in its honking voice.

And then it was blessedly gone.

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” Imu muttered.