Chapter 281. Ominous Threat.

I didn’t have to wait long for a threat to show itself. A flashing icon appeared on the trade route between my cavern and the gnomes’. Another blinked at the dungeon entrance. Looking first at the trade route, given it was much closer to my headquarters than the dungeon, I could see a small group of attackers fighting against a gnome trade caravan and their squad of guards.

It was more of the forgotten ones, but these were larger and more formidable than the ones that had attacked my marketplace before. Standing over six feet tall, the forgotten ones dwarfed the gnomes, but the gnome defenders didn’t balk at tearing into them. Even the caravan workers were fighting hard, they held stone spears that they gathered from the trade cart.

I sent the kobold squad patrolling that trade route to assist, and it looked like there were only a half-dozen of the forgotten ones attacking. Between my squad and the gnomes, I figured we had that attack handled. I shifted my view over to the dungeon to see what was going on there.

The dungeon attack was far more serious than the trade caravan one. A horde of cultists had burst from the dungeon, this time, supported by more of the smaller forgotten ones. Just outside the dungeon entrance, an adventuring party was trying their best to defend themselves, but they were being quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

My tariff station guards sealed the main doors and took up positions inside. Two of them held crossbows that they began to use through arrow slits in the walls. At the watchtower, the guards had also retreated inside, and the door there was even more sturdy than the one at the tariff station. Inside, half the kobold warriors guarded the door, while the others moved to the battlements.

One of the kobolds at the top of the watchtower was working the repeating crossbow mounted there. Heavy bolts fired from the weapon with a sharp clacking sound. Each one found a target in the swarm of attackers, and each hit was usually a kill. Two crossbow wielding kobolds on the battlements joined the fight, adding their fire to the mix.

The final ranged attacker was the kobold sorcerer among the tower defenders. With a mad cackle, the sorcerer began to hurl blasts of flame among the attackers. His actions reminded me that I could do the same. Concentrating, I unleashed Flame Bursts among the attackers that were focused on the adventurers.

I had five charges of the spell, and each charge fired five bursts of flame. My spells pushed back the attackers, giving the adventurers a chance to run toward the tariff station. A system prompt appeared as they reached the front door.

A party of adventurers seeks refuge inside your tariff station. Do you wish to allow them entry? Y/N.

I granted them entry and the kobolds inside quickly unbolted the door and swung it open to allow the adventurers inside. Only three adventurers had survived the ordeal, but among them was their healer, a human woman who immediately began to heal her party as the doors slammed shut behind them. My kobolds closed the door just in time as several of the cultists started battering the door with their weapons.

With the upgraded stone structure of both the tariff station and the watchtower, I didn’t think the cultists or the forgotten one monsters were going to get inside anytime soon. For now, it was a massacre as my ranged forces, bolstered by the adventurers and fire from the watchtower, tore through the foes assaulting the tariff station.

So far, they hadn’t attacked the watchtower directly, and instead were focusing on the more lightly defended tariff station. It appeared the flow of attackers from the dungeon wasn’t stopping anytime soon, as more and more groups of cultists and the forgotten ones kept emerging from the swirling dungeon entry portal. A system prompt appeared to explain what was happening.

Inspired by their wakening god, the forgotten ones and their servants rise inside your zone, seeking to eradicate all life as a sacrifice to their forgotten god. The Temple of the Forgotten Ones dungeon will continue to release waves of increasingly powerful attackers as they attempt to overwhelm your defenses.

Inside the depths of your mountain, more of the forgotten ones awake, and will ceaselessly climb from the dark places of the world and attack your forces. Beware, this is just the beginning of the assault, and the longer this stage of the challenge lasts, the more powerful and numerous the forces assaulting you will become.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

New war coordination options have unlocked.

New commands for your forces have unlocked.

New options have opened in your marketplace and with the Gavelox Trading Consortium.

Okay, it looked like the dungeon and the middle of the mountain were going to be continuous spawning points for the attackers. Eventually, they’d overwhelm me, but the longer I held on, the higher in the rankings I’d climb. Before I began to organize my defenses, I checked out the new options I’d unlocked.

The war coordination menu was pretty simple. I could select an ally and request that they send forces to a particular point on the map. The places I could send them were limited, mainly just the faction cities and crucial crossroads. For now, I held off on shifting any of my allied forces, they were needed to defend their homes in case another spawn point appeared nearby.

I had plenty of mercenaries I could use, as well as my kobold warrior squads. That brought up the question of whether I wanted to keep patrolling the caravan routes. It might be better to bring my troops in and turtle up at several critical points. Doing so would add to my defensive ability, but it would also jeopardize my economy if attacks on the trade routes began to happen.

As far as the marketplace and consortium. They offered an outlet for my resources. Both had cut off any mercenary offerings, or upgrades, but I could funnel a portion of my resource generation into them. Those resources would be used to generate replacements for any losses I sustained, both among my mercenaries, and my kobold forces.

Along with the option to funnel resources to the market and consortium was an announcement that I would no longer naturally generate replacements for both workers and warriors. I sent half my resource flow to the marketplace and half to the consortium. My marketplace gave me around double the value in replacements per resource than the consortium, but I could only send a maximum of half to each.

With all my buildings maxed out, I really didn’t have anything else to spend my resources on unless I wanted to build something new. More watchtowers would be nice, but I doubted I’d have the time and resources to start them at rank zero and bring them all the way to rank five where they really became effective. Any of the resources I spent on building meant that losses to my existing troops would take that much longer to be replaced.

For now, to allow the resources to keep flowing in, I kept the existing kobold trade route patrols in place. The exceptions were the squad patrolling the road connecting the dungeon, and the squad protecting the road between my cavern and the gnomes. The squad from the dungeon I sent to reinforce the forces occupying Shoremarch.

As for the squad inside the mountain, they were already helping to clean up the last forgotten ones that had attacked the gnome caravan. The attackers had been defeated, but with a never-ending flow of attackers soon to arrive there, keeping them on the trade road was suicide. I cancelled that trade route but found that I could now redirect the caravan to a slower, overland route to the gnomes.

There were no roads on the overland route, but I still needed those trade resources to keep flowing in. The gnomes would probably also need the trade income to keep their troops in fighting shape. As for the squad patrolling that route, they were redirected to guard the new overland route I’d created.

I’d stop the enemies spawning in the mountain at the wall to my cavern, where I reinforced the kobolds guarding it with a squad of human mercenaries, the elf archer squad, and the kobold snipers. As a final addition, I pulled the ballista crew from the other wall to protect this one. It was going to be some time before the attackers from the dungeon fought their way to the entrance of my cavern, and the ballista would do more good skewering forgotten ones that were already starting to appear inside the mountain.

Back at the dungeon, the attackers were multiplying, and I was starting to see some of the larger forgotten ones emerge from the dungeon entrance. As more enemies swarmed out, they began to assault the watchtower as well as redoubling their attacks on the tariff station. As the attack on the watchtower progressed, I got my first look at the goblin mines I’d purchased.

Popping out of the ground, a mine scurred toward the attackers like a clockwork spider. Once it was close to its target, the mine exploded in a blast of shrapnel that cut down several cultists and forgotten ones. When one mine detonated, another pulled itself out of the ground and continued their suicidal defense of the tower. I never did get a count of how many mines there were in each field, but it had to be a substantial number given the overloaded cart that had supplied them, not to mention several workers in the crew also hauled crates of the mines.

However many of the mines there were, it wasn’t going to be enough to stop the enemy, but it would buy me time. The longer I survived, the more chance I had that another competitor would fall, and I would move up in the ranks. A new threat flashed on my interface, one approaching the city of Shoremarch, and one that seemed to warrant a system announcement.

The forgotten ones rise not only through the dark places under the earth, but also from the depths of the sea. A new horde has awakened and will soon make landfall at Shoremarch.

It looked like the forces I’d sent there were going to have to go into action almost immediately. While I waited for the enemy to show themselves, I ordered the kobold workers with the mines I’d sent toward Shoremarch to mine the road just outside the city. The city was going to fall at some point and the invaders would undoubtedly use the road there to speed their passage deeper into my empire.

A final system prompt appeared, announcing the end of the first full day of the final stage and giving me a look at how many contenders remained.

You have survived the first 24 hours of the final challenge. Continue to survive for a chance to earn additional rewards.

Remaining contenders: 2181/2432.