Starting resources have been deposited for each faction.

The system deposited 100 hog meat for us. It was enough for another farm, and another farm meant the potential for more workers and warriors. I ordered the construction of the farm which took ten workers out of the queue for the barracks. Once they finished construction, the workers would have to stay and work on the farm.

I could feel the restrictions on my forces lift, they could now be sent out of the village and onto the battlefield. My plan was to send out a strong force immediately, but I thought that waiting for a few more warriors to be trained might be a better call. I couldn’t delay too long, or the enemy would have a chance to get their economy going and eventually overrun me with greater efficiency.

“Top, what do you know of the valley’s layout?” I asked.

“We’s here, elfsies is dat way and the humies is da other way. Never seen the little twerps, but I assume dey across from us. Not sure, but sumpthin good is in the center of the valley. Might be we should finds it first?” Top suggested.

The battlefield was an odd one, and now that all the vision restrictions had been lifted, I could see a bit further. A massive ring of mountains hemmed in the valley that was our battleground. The road I had traveled to get through the jungle and to the village led to a narrow pass in the mountains, and I suspected there was a similar pass near each of the other villages. My village was situated at the edge of the valley, close to the mountains. The others must have been spread out around the ring an equal distance from each other.

Facing the center of the valley, if we moved along the ring of mountains counterclockwise, the humans waited, and clockwise around the edge of the valley would bring us into conflict with the elves. Top gave a hint of something interesting in the center of the valley, so maybe that should be the army’s first stop, after that, I wasn’t sure which opponent to take on first.

“Do the other villages know about the thing in the center of the valley?” I asked.

“Dunno, but I guess so, it ain’t no secrets that sumthin is dere,” Top replied. That might change things, if all the other factions knew about whatever bonus was in the center of the valley, they would push hard to get it for themselves, that meant, while the others were skirmishing over the prize, their villages wouldn’t have their entire force available to protect them.

“Once we get a total of 16 warriors take them and twenty workers out to attack. I’ll let you choose which opponent. Do you want to go after the humans or the elves?” I asked.

“Gimme a crack at them flouncy elves. Dey needs a good thrashin,” Top said with a string of drool running down his chin.

“All right, go get them once our warriors are ready,” I ordered.

After Top and his forces left, there would only be eight workers remaining in the queue to be made into warriors. With two warriors per barracks being trained every minute, it only took two minutes of training to convert the warriors that I had assigned to Top’s force. I wanted to wait and process more, but I felt time slipping away. It would be too easy to convince myself to keep waiting until more forces were ready, but I needed to resist the temptation and send Top out now to go out and stomp our enemies.

The system forced me to remain here in the command post, but the system hadn’t said anything about my minions. I ordered my three summoned creatures to join Top’s forces. Even a few extra fighters might mean the difference between victory and defeat. Before they left, I hit the summoned creatures with Empower Minion, granting them an extra rank of power.

Unfortunately, my troops from the village didn’t function like the dungeon defenders had, and I couldn't duplicate or buff any of them. I did duplicate Marvin Glum before they left, he was my best fighter and even if he fell in battle, this could very well become a longer fight and I might have enough time for the cooldown on duplicate to expire, and perhaps even enough time for the figurines to recharge after one of my summoned creatures was destroyed.

With everything in place, Top led his force of 16 warriors, 20 workers, 2 Glums, 1 Rupert, and 1 hound. It was a large strike team and the orcs all seemed pumped up and ready for a fight. Top even had them all chanting “get em” over and over again as they jogged toward the elf village. From the command post, I was able to monitor their progress. After they left, I realized that it would be good to keep tabs on the other enemies that were lurking in the valley.

As the remaining eight workers were converted into warriors, I sent three of them out as scouts, one to find the humans, one the halflings, and one to see what was up with the center of the valley. My time working with Glenda and Hoen in the dungeon had trained me to keep track of multiple views at once. While I couldn’t focus on everything at the same time, like the dungeon core could, I was able to shift my focus between my scouts and Top’s force without getting confused.

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Construction on what would be our sixth hog farm was going slow. The workers had built the fence to keep the hogs in and were now working on a stable and feeding area. Where the hogs would come from was a mystery, but I figured it was going to be some kind of system hocus pocus once the structures were completed. After the scouts were sent, and the last of the workers in the barracks queue were trained, I had five warriors to help defend the village. I placed one in each of the watchtowers and had the final one stand guard outside the command post.

The command post sounded like a rather impressive structure, but like everything else the orcs made, it was slapdash, yet somehow functional. Large wooden beams held up walls that were made of whatever materials they could scrounge. It was apparently a high orcish design detail to add bones and spiky things on every surface they could. However it might have looked, it was my home until this stage of the arena challenge was completed.

A check back on Top reminded me to activate Forced March. As the ability hit, the orcs’ trot became a noticeably faster. My summoned creatures were able to keep up, but they would probably be winded if the elf village was too far away. Given the curvature of the mountains around us, it couldn’t have been more than a few miles to the next villages.

Only a few minutes later, the elf village came into view. It was located in a similar spot as ours, but it looked much nicer than my place. Instead of muddy hog farms, the elves had neatly tended vineyards and the farm workers moved about plucking grapes into large baskets. Once the baskets were full, they poured the grapes into an opening in the side of their command post. Here at my village, the workers slaughtered the hogs when they got big enough and dumped the meat into a gore encrusted hatch at the command post.

Whatever summoned being that was controlling the elves spotted our attack quickly, and the farmers rushed from the fields to retreat behind the village wall. While my hog farms were ugly and smelly, at least they were protected behind the wall. The elf workers on their farms were exposed to anything that might come running out of the woods. It looked like most of the elves were going to make it back inside the safety of the village, but Top and his orcs were closing in on a few stragglers.

Just before they reached the stragglers, the elves turned and tried to use their farm tools to defend themselves. Top hacked apart the first of the enemy farmers, his heavy axes crunched through the shovel that the elf used as a makeshift weapon. Axes bit deep into unarmored elf flesh, leaving only a bit of mana vapor behind.

A quick check of my village status showed that the kill had gained me two hog meat. It was a rather gruesome way to gain resources, but Pillage and Plunder seemed to be working just as the system described. I had been a bit worried that I’d have to assign workers to haul the bodies over to my command post or something, but the system seemed to take care of everything for me. Top and the other orcs were stopped as the gates of the village closed in front of them. In total, we had taken out eight enemy workers with no losses or wounds to our troops.

Protected behind the walls, elvish warriors started to pop over and fire arrows at my forces. The village wall wasn’t impressive, only around seven feet tall, but it did sport firing steps to allow the elves to limit the time they were exposed. Given that the wall wasn’t all that tall, Top decided to not waste time hacking open the gate and instead jumped up, grabbed ahold of the wall, and hauled himself over.

The other warriors followed Top’s example and we soon gained a foothold on the wall. My orcish warriors easily handled the pair of elvish warriors and the dozen or so workers that tried to stop them. More elves poured from the buildings, responding to the attack as they tried to defend their village. I didn’t see any other enemy warriors remaining, and the elvish workers weren’t all that effective in melee combat.

Back in the center of the valley, it appeared that, as I suspected, the other factions were moving to secure whatever the treasure was that waited there. Each of the other three factions had sent a small force to take control of a stone altar at the center of a lightly forested area. They must have needed to secure the altar to unlock whatever advantage the system had placed there. My scout could see a pair of elf warriors and ten or so workers fighting against a similar number of humans.

My opponents weren’t supposed to be able to send out their workers to fight, they were supposed to only be used in combat to defend their villages. It must have been some ability the system granted them, as each faction seemed to have the same number of workers available. I had at least one ability that was orc specific, Rub Some Dirt on It, but the others were universal, so having a way for the other challengers to send a smaller force of workers outside the walls of their village made sense.

At the center of the glade, a halfling was sneaking up to the altar while the humans and elves skirmished. Suddenly, the elves turned and ran, moving back in the direction of their village. The humans were able to cut several of them down, before turning to engage the halflings. Before they reached the halfling, the humans spotted my scout and charged at him. My scout was giving a good account of himself, but he was outnumbered ten to one. He managed to kill a human worker and wound a warrior before finally being cut down.

Back at the elf village, Top had broken the enemy defense, and the surviving elves were retreating to the command post. Top had lost two of his warriors and nine workers in the assault, but they had slain at least forty enemy workers. Rupert was also a casualty, as I could no longer see him, and a check of his figurine showed he was slowly being regenerated.

A blast of fire caught my attention as a young woman stepped from the command post, her hands raised as she prepared another spell. The first spell had caught Top, two warriors, and the duplicate Marvin Glum. Top was still alive but looked to be badly hurt. It remained to be seen whether my orcs could overcome the rest of the elves as well as a summoned being with magic and other skills at her disposal.