Maxwell

Rowena and I walked through the goblin village with a bit of trepidation. We might be allies, but it was hard to remove the idea that goblins weren’t the enemy. While the creatures weren’t horribly disfigured or filthy, they were still unpleasant to look at. It also appeared that Razz cared little for the village’s hygiene and health. From the looks of things, he had focused on the bare minimum on infrastructure and poured everything else into military.

The simple huts were falling apart, while the few buildings that were made from more durable construction were also worse for wear. I tried to keep in mind that Aurora had attacked him just the other day and that they might still be recovering from that, but I was finding it hard to do so.

Rowena’s foot sank into a mud hole on the street causing her to grimace. I couldn’t blame her. If you were unlucky, there was a chance it wasn’t just mud you were sinking into. She pulled her foot out and gave me a look that said she was ready to leave. Now that I thought about it, my friend had always had a thing for cleanliness. It was sort of surprising that she was playing a beast knight. Though perhaps the compulsion to be clean wasn’t quite as strong inside the virtual world.

Razz emerged from the only building made from stone in the entire village. It was clearly meant to be the keep in a fort. There was even space set aside for walls and a moot to be added later. He walked over and held out a green hand. “Ah. My trusty ally. I was wondering when you would visit.”

“Sorry, Razz. I meant to come sooner but things don’t always work out like you’d want.”

“I completely understand.” He glanced around at the village before leaning in close. “I’ve been trying my hand at managing the NPCs. I feel I might have made things worse. Also the Inquisition should be here soon, but I’ve barely prepared my army with all the tediousness of the tasks around the village.”

“None of the other players you have with you are able to do this sort of work?” I asked with concern. I really didn’t want to have to manage his village forever. If that was the case, I would merge the two villages as soon as possible into some sort of dual city-state.

“No. We all liked to fight on the front lines, but only I was offered the lord class. I’m not sure if you know but the bonuses for a lord class are off the charts in late game.” Razz sighed before turning to look at the Fort. “As I said before, the one member of my crew that enjoyed this crap happened to be off during the event. I’ll be honest, I looked down on him a little, but now that I’ve been forced to walk in his shoes for a few days, I wished I had been a bit more accepting.”

I reached out, gripping his shoulder. “What’s done is done. Let’s get this place back up and running. Also. I sicked our vampire problem on the coming inquisition. Even if she fails, their numbers will be reduced making things easier for us.”

Razz laughed loudly. “Playing the field. I bet you would have made a great politician.” I chuckled softyl. I feel like telling him that my parents were pretty high up the political chain in my country. Razz led us into the Fort and pointed to a desk covered in rough parchment. “Here you go. Feel free to use this space as you see fit. As for managing the village, I believe you’ll understand everything better than I could. I just ask that you gear this toward the military. I get a bonus toward various skills.”

“I’ll see what I can do. If I find anything I think will affect you adversely, I’ll be sure to send you a message.”

“Thanks. I’m going hunting with the crew. We should be back in… three maybe four hours.” Razz turned to leave.

“Razz! If you find any mana stones, could you lend them to me?”

“I know a few spots with monsters that drop them. I’ll make you a list later. For now,” he pulled out a sack from his inventory then handed it over. I took it and was surprised by the weight. It was several pounds.

“That should be around sixty or seventy mana stones we’ve collected. We don’t have anything that uses them. Crafting that requires mana stones is higher level after all.”

“Thank you. This is a great help.” Razz nodded before leaving the keep. I turned back to the desk and swallowed nervously. I glanced over to Rowena. “Want to help?”

She gave me a smile. “I’ll do my best.”

A few hours passed as we went through everything. Razz’s friend had a good head on his shoulders. He’d been in the process of making the village self sustainable. From the records, the goblin nation had a good deal of interconnectivity. The towns monitored the villages, while the cities watched the towns. I guess when a warlord might rise up at a moments notice, it was good to keep an eye on things.

The goblins lived mostly on hunting and mushroom farming. Where I gained new elves through the portal, Razz gained them from breeding pits, or a Primordial Mud Den. It sounded disturbing, but after checking the information in the menu, a lot of the details washed away by the system. If you looked at the pit from the outside, you’d simply see a mud pit where workers had to dig free new goblins. Razz had the thing upgraded to level three letting him produce nearly a hundred goblins a day. That wasn’t a bad number. The only drawback was that the pits had to be fed food to produce the goblins. So, they weren’t free like my portal. Without food the output dropped to a tenth of the max. He must have done so in the last few days since he told me his numbers were around fifty when we first talked about it.

Looking over the infrastructure of the village, everything Razz needed to be independent was built. The vampire raid had just damaged everything to the point that they were currently inoperable. The amount of wood and stone needed to repair the village was high. In the thousand of units. The problem was that Razz had redirected most of his workers to the food and breeders. It was a good short-term plan and would allow his numbers to increase rapidly… if he hadn’t set all his new arrivals to immediately be sent to any of the five barracks in the village. This meant his worker supply stay stagnant.

To make matters worse, he had a sizable gold stash. I guess raiding and pillaging paid off. It would have been a good thing if only he wasn’t spending almost four times as much gold as he was making on his army. To maintain such a level, he would have to constantly go out conquering. From the records in the village treasury, it looked like he was personally suppling the gold through adventuring.

“It’s a bit messed up, isn’t it?” Rowena asked after we had gone through everything.

“Thank god Razz is an idiot. If he used even a quarter of what he had here, he could rapidly rise to power.” It made me wonder just what this friend of his had been planning. I would have thought that he’d explain all this to Razz while they worked on the village. Unless… “Rowena. Can Lordship be taken?”

Rowena leaned back in her chair and stared off into space. “Of course. You become an Arrogate Lord. If you were a ranger that managed to take lordship from someone then you’re class would change to Arrogate Ranger Lord. No one is sure why the system gives certain people the lord class, but it makes it clear that you can lose it.”

I rubbed my chin as I considered that. I couldn’t imagine life without the village by this point. The NPCs might be code, but so was I now. They might as well be my new family. In fact, several of them had started to make lives for themselves in the village. With close to eighty new elves arriving every day, the dynamics of the village were constantly changing.

Popping my neck, I leaned back over the paperwork. The first thing I did was set the newcomers to be spilt down the middle. Half would join the work force, while the other half would continue to head to the army. Unlike my portal, the breeding pits released new goblins at a steady rate over the day. I tried not to think too hard on that fact.

I set a few benchmarks for the various industries and began to assign work around the village. It would take a day or two, but soon things would start to rapidly develop. While working in the village menus, I saw several ways that I could improve my own village due to the way Razz’s friend had built his up. I could see the logic behind everything he was doing. It also made me sure that he must have planned to steal the throne from him at some point.

The question I had to ask myself was should I tell the man. He seemed to regret how he treated the man in question. It might be best to just let it lie. That was what I would do for the time being. If it ever becomes a necessary fact to disclose then I would do so then.

Razz returned with his crew a few hours later as he said. They were covered in mud and blood but where all in one piece. As he walked into the keep, his eyes went to something out of focus before he grinned. He dismissed whatever message he got and walked over to us.

“I was right to leave it to you. Happiness is up almost fifteen points since this morning.”

“Your advisor had been a brilliant man. Everything you needed to separate from the goblin nation was already in place. The vampire attack simply hit you where it hurt. I’ve set everything to correct itself, but I had to pull some of the new goblins from the military line up and put them in the worker force.”

“How many?”

“Around half. You need resources if you want to get this place back in working order.”

Razz slammed his fist into his open palm. “I know but all the iron is a bit out of reach!”

His theme was Master- Ironworks. While the first few stages only used trace amounts of metal and focused mostly on wood and stone for the foundation, he must have thought he couldn’t repair them without the upgrade costs. “To upgrade, yes. You had enough metal to repair everything though.”

“I did?” He asked looking at me with a bewildered expression before he simply broke into loud laughter. “Of course I did. I told you I’m an idiot.”

I stared at the laughing goblin before sighing. “Razz, I know we have an alliance and you’re under my command, but how about you give me the village completely?” He might lose his lord class but I felt he would be happier in the long run with something less tied down.

“Ah. You mean to make me a vassal. I was wondering how long you would make me wait.”

“Vassal?” Rowena asked saving me the trouble.

“Do you know about Arrogates?” We both nodded quickly. “Well, if someone took a lordship all on their own then general another person would come through and take it over while it was weakened. To combat this, you’d have a player go in and capture a territory then that person could become the vassal of another lord player. That way their Founding stone would be protected back in the capital. Of course, you don’t have to capture a place. I could become your vassal. With our villages so close, they would like merge if we reached city level two or three.”

I looked over at Rowena. She appeared to not know any of this. I had to remember that she knew a great deal, but even she had only about three days of playing over me. There was only so much you could learn during that timespan. I stood up and moved in front of Razz.

“You would be willing to be my Vassal?” I asked seriously.

Razz face lost its humor. “If this was just a game then no.” He turned and looked out the still open door. Goblins were moving around going about their tasks while the raid group were disturbing meat and other materials from the hunt. The setting sun made it quite the sight. “But it is no longer just a game. I never cared about the NPCs before, but over the last few days I’ve been talking to them. Learning about them. Some of them have tragic stories. Lives worse than anything I could have imagined back on Earth outside of a movie.”

“That’s pretty deep.”

Razz nodded as he turned back to me. “I still want to fight. Combat gets my blood pumping. Fighting with your life on the line is truly an altogether different experience. I can fight easier if someone handles all this for me.”

I thought Razz was nothing more than a warmonger fool. I had seen glimpses of intelligence of course, but it was always in combat. I guess under all the green skin he was still human. I didn’t regret not trusting him, but perhaps he had just showed me that I could at least attempt it.

I stretched out my hand. “Very well. Let’s make you my vassal!”

“Awesome! While we’re doing that, I’ll transfer full control over to you. Just give me an army and I’ll be a happy camper.” He grabbed my hand and we shook on it.

I grinned at the honesty of the man. “Sure thing.”

We talked about the matter for a while longer. To become my vassal he had to come to my village and pledge his alliance to me. The ceremony could be as grand or subdued as we wanted it which made matters easy for us. I figured no time like the present and gathered everyone outside to teleport us.

Before I could do so, however, the sounds of a distant explosion echoed through the air. From how low it was, it must be quite the ways off. I thought quickly then grabbed Razz and Rowena’s shoulders before teleporting us up the mountain. I hopped us down the mountain until I spotted the disturbance. A battle was taking place roughly fifteen or so kilometers from the village.

Amongst the vampires, I spotted the woman from the other day. She was using what looked like a rifle to fire into the enemy ranks while the vampires were liberally slaughtering the goblins in the advance party. “They were this close?” Razz asked surprised.

“Looks like they wanted to launch a night assault. Clever and devious. Hard to believe you were once aligned with them.”

“Goblins take feats of battle very seriously. That is why I’m worried. If she dominates them too thoroughly, we might have a much bigger problem on our hands.”

I dropped down on a boulder content to watch the show. “As long as she buys us some time, then we’ll deal with that problem down the road.”