We put together a regiment to begin to train while working on keeping the city going with all the changes we needed to make. Rutherford, Vokin, Tristan, Randal, Aeolith, and I would go out hunting every day to see what types of monsters we could find. Occasionally we would mix it up with a dungeon crawl as well to add to the fun. We sent runners to the villages to deliver messages to have them let Jewelston know when monster attacks were coming in so that we could handle both the safety of the outlying villages as well as use the opportunity to gain some experience. This proved to be a very valuable strategy as we were getting intel on where to find monster nests and taking them out before they had a chance to spread and hurt the people, while also gaining some much-needed experience.
Some of the fights, like the goblins and wolves, were less of a challenge and didn't give as much experience, but several of them, such as the trolls, were a valuable source of experience as well as a learning experience in fighting. While slower than many opponents, the trolls were sentient enough to make the fight more challenging by being more organized than wild monsters. Their high regeneration rates also proved a challenge as well. I bought the spell Magic Missile for Tristan as well, knowing he needed another offensive spell, and it proved to be a great boon for the team. While it wasn't the big damage dealer that something like Fireball was, it was a great distraction. And since he could sling three missiles at level one of the spell, it meant he could catch their attention by hitting them in the face. It seemed as though no matter the species, they all seemed to absolutely go wild with anger when hit in the face with a missile.
Those moments of rage would leave an opening for Rutherford, Vokin, or me and we could take advantage with strikes to the stomach or other vital areas. In one fight though, we weren't fast enough to regain the monster's attention and poor Tristan ended up running around in circles around a tree to escape a particularly angry large snake. He screamed in a very unmanly pitch the whole time until Vokin was able to get his axe into the snake's neck. He denied the whole thing later and we gave him a good ribbing for it.
After a week, the first of the city's defenses were ready and we were able to see the first of the Light Crossbows and Light Blast Cannons rolling off the assembly line. Well, not really an assembly line since that hadn't been invented on Hogarth, but the idiom fit well enough. The crafters had set up some dummies in a training yard and brought Sandra, myself, and Harlow to see what they could do. The Light Crossbows were pretty impressive, each shot blowing off an arm or a head when hit. The light shot across the yard in a blurring shiny bolt, so they wouldn't be especially stealthy at night and hit the dummies with an explosive force that caused a small explosion on impact.
The Light Blast Cannons were even more impressive. A mage would stand behind the cannon and put his hand on a plate that he could feed mana into. The filling process took about five seconds, and then they could fire the cannon with a lever on the side of the barrel near the rear. When it released, a large ball of light similar to a cannonball would streak across the yard and when it hit a dummy would explode with much more force than the Light crossbows. It was enough to completely obliterate a dummy, leaving nothing but a small black spot behind it and a smoldering stick that had been holding the dummy up. We stood there in shock at the devastation it caused. These would be awesome up on the walls for any kind of defense, but especially against the Shadow Beasts.
The Light Catapults were still in production, but we were not surprised by this. They were much larger and needed to be crafted with more detail to prevent them from exploding. One morning there had been an explosion in the crafter's district from one of the warehouses working on the catapults. One person died in the explosion from standing too close, and several others were seriously wounded. We had to put more safety measures in place to ensure that they didn't have any more casualties after that, but they assured us it was a freak accident and the person who had died was being careless in trying to overpower the catapult to check how much mana it could hold, despite being told that they were crossing the line. With that kind of issue, we were willing to wait longer for them to have a working and, more importantly, stable working prototype.
After seeing the crossbows and cannons in action, we got to work getting the current stocks put in place on the walls and in the hands of the guards on the walls. With these in place, we felt better about the security of the city going forward. There were one hundred crossbows and fifteen cannons. If they could keep up this production rate, we would be fully stocked in two more weeks with backups beginning to pile up behind them. Some of the resources were expensive, but we compensated for that by promising to sell some of them to a couple of the larger towns nearby as well. They would be able to reverse engineer the defenses to make their own eventually, but that was actually a good thing. The more others had, the better prepared they were for attacks as well. I couldn't be in every city for an attack.
With the defense plans going well, we continued our daily excursions to find monsters to fight. We continued this daily for another week before taking a break. By the time we had decided to rest, I had gotten all the way up to level forty in my growth. Looking over my stat sheet, I was very pleased with my progress.
I still had quite a few skill points to spend, but with the rising cost of skills, it was getting harder to decide what to pick. Tier one skills cost only two points each. Tier two skills were five points each, and tier three skills were ten points a piece. At those costs, I had to really be sure of what kind of specialization I was going to be before I picked some. After some consideration though, I decided that I should take two more of the level two skills and picked Domination for Aeolith which gave her the ability to temporarily influence the mind of enemies, and Defense Breaker which allowed both me and Aeolith to use a charge ability dealing extra damage against heavily armored foes. We hadn't faced many heavily armored foes, but a charge ability would let me cover ground much faster than moving across it on my own. After buying those two options I looked at the tier three options with my remaining sixteen points. I first looked at Draconic Attack options.
Well, that was a bit of a kick in the teeth. If I wanted to upgrade my Strong Blow skill I had to choose what appeared to be a specialization. All the options would be nice and it would have been nice to have a couple of them in tandem. I would love to have taken a combination of the two such as Force Blow and Bloody Blow to cause a bleeding effect as well as the ability to force them back from me for space to complete another attack, but such is life. I continued looking at the other options.
Once again I was struck by the ability to only select one type of tier-three skill in this tree. There wasn't much that would pair extremely well, but it still stung to be forced to pick one. I guessed this was going to be a common theme with these higher-level tier skills.
With only two options, this was an easier decision to make than the other attack skill tree options. These wouldn't mesh together anyway.
These options made more sense. It would be really an overpowered attack if I could take all of these options. Being able to shoot longer short-wave attacks at multiple enemies would mean I could sit back and just roast enemies as they came. All of them were appealing though, this was going to be a tough decision for sure on what type of fighting we planned to do most often. Each option could be used in different scenarios. For now, I decided to look at the Draconic Defense tree path.
Again all good options. This was getting tougher and tougher as I looked through more skills. But I had to make some decisions or we would stagnate with the same options as always. Looking at the next option I noticed that for the first time, there were no options for the net skill to advance. It appeared Shield Charge was the height of its skill ability and didn't have any options for tier-three skills. Shrugging as there wasn't much use in trying to figure out why with the limited resources I had, I moved on to the next section, Dragn Senses.
So this skill tree did allow for more selections. It made sense as they weren't offensive and wouldn't add up to super advantages that might be considered too overpowered.
These were great options especially if we were tracking someone. At this point though, they weren't likely to give us another edge in the battles we had been fighting based on the style of fighting we had been using so far. That and my senses were already improved to nearly superhuman levels with the Dragon Sense skill already. Any more and I might be completely overwhelmed. I imagined activating one of those enhanced skills right as someone in the party let an especially bad fart go from some bad food. I would likely pass out. Shaking that thought from my mind I looked at Draconic Mind next.
Only two options were available for this skill, but they were really amazing. Only being able to pick one was also a bummer, but again would be really overpowered to put them in a fog, disrupt their mental faculties and blind them temporarily.
Two more really great options. Charm was a big boon as when confused it had a possibility of causing the enemy to attack others around it, but with Charm, it would all but assure they fought for our team. Looking at the skill tree again, I found the second skill with no tier-three skills. Divining appeared to be the limit of the skill and that made some sense. Divining already told the intent of whoever it was used on and I had no idea what additional information I would need about determining someone's intentions. That only left Domination.
Three more great options that could be useful if attacked by a larger creature and fighting them became too much for us. The drawback was that they would need to be at a lower level than Aeolith for it to be effective. With that, I was only left with Draconic Spirit.
We hadn't been in any aerial battles thus far, so these options didn't seem to be as important to me as the others. They were enticing and options nonetheless. But I could likely put many of these on the back burner until later. But I decided that I needed to look at all my options in case something really good was available.
We hadn't been in large pitched battles yet either, but being the mayor of Jewelston meant that it was more of an option than it was before. Though these still weren't as valuable as the others might be to ensure we survived long enough to help fight the shadows. Looking ahead I didn't see much use in Aerial Combat past what we already had, but I said I would look at all my options.
Some of these actually were harder to pass on than I had expected. They essentially consisted of the ability to dodge any attack, a force push, and a charge attack in the air. If we were fighting more air battles I would be seriously considering getting at least one of them. Looking at the last option, I was disappointed to find out that there were no advancements for Dragon's Hope. I had been told it was a special skill by Al'Doran, but I was hoping for some sort of advancement that would allow for maybe more castings or something to make it easier to fight multiple opponents. I just had to deal with the hand that I had been dealt though. Reading through the options once more I decided that attack was likely my best option for the time being. I chose to take Bloody Blow for Strong Blow to give a bleeding effect, Poison Claws for the additional damage it gave, and breath shots to give me and Aeolith more options for targets with our breath attacks, again thinking of what happened when we fought more shadow beasts. I wanted us to have as much of an edge in the coming battles as we could.
With those options selected, I closed the skill tree menu and went to spend some time with Aeolith on our day of rest. After two weeks of fighting it was so nice to finally get a chance to relax for a bit. The city defenses were coming along nicely with more and more crossbows and cannons coming to the walls for defense and making me feel better about the possibility of impending attacks that might happen as this was our base of operations. I reached the Dragon Roost and went to lie down with Aeolith. She was resting peacefully in the roost and when I lay against her she stirred sensing my presence.
"I see you added some new skills to our list for fights. You made some very good choices for us. With these new poisoned claws and the breath attacks, we will be even more deadly than before." Aeollith said to me mentally.
"I'm glad you like them. And I like that you are thinking about being better at fighting. We will need to be eventually as there will come a time when we have to fight more of these shadows than we ever have before."
"I know. And all of our preparations will help us to emerge from those battles victorious. We have not been idle and many of those shadows are small creatures we can tear apart."
I chuckled at her confidence wishing I could feel the same level of ease about those battles that she did. Deep down I was truly concerned that we would not be able to defeat so many of the beasts all at once. Especially if they had more generals like the last one that had ended up killing Al'Doran. If there were creatures that could kill him, what chance did a poor fool like myself have? Thinking like that was getting me nowhere though. I was just ruining my time with Aeolith. I settled back in her scales and set my mind at ease with the knowledge that she was close and I had nothing to worry about for the time being.
We spent most of the day together and just enjoyed napping on and off so near to each other while the hustle and bustle of the city went on around us. Sandra came for a visit once after lunchtime and brought us some food. I graciously accepted and ate the food and had some of the ale she had as well.
"I hate to be the one bearing brad news, especially on your day off, but there isn't a good way to say this. there are Shadow Beasts marching toward the city. We have received a large influx of refugees from the surrounding villages who are all saying the left as soon as they saw them for fear of what happened last time." Sandra said, her mood going dark.
"What? Where? How many? How far away are they?" I questioned, all of my questions trying to get out at once.
"There are a lot. An army worth. Most of them seem to be small, but they do have one really large shadow with them. They should be here by nightfall."
My stomach dropped at this announcement. They had decided to come after all. And it was sooner than I had hoped for. I had hoped to have more time to prepare, but we had to be ready now.
"I need to get my armor. Are the defenses on the walls ready?"
"Yes. We have readied every guard and have begun to get able-bodied men from the city to be ready to fight. Callan, we can push them back. You have helped us prepare for this and we will be ready. We would likely have been overrun without you, but you are here, and the defenses give us an edge against them. Go get ready and we will finish the preparations. Meet me on the eastern wall two hours before nightfall. Tonight, we fight back."
