1.37 Bob the Builder

[Wave repelled, town functionality unlocked]

Rocky spent the latter half of day waiting on his unconscious teammates. The notion of rest was foreign to him, about as divorced from his nature as stone was to a hammer.

Nevertheless, Rocky tried to rest, because trying to understand the dozens of menus appearing before him was tiring, even to an untiring golem like himself.

Well, trying to rest might have been an exaggeration. Rocky’s green core winked off, and the rock sat in several minutes of abject silence before deciding that ‘this is boring’, and he headed off to oversee his golems.

He walked out of the encampment, looking at the piles of canine corpses that now littered the ground. His iron golems had been hard at work for the last several… however long it took for the sun to begin setting, bringing the bodies outside.

‘Well, nothing to do here. What to do, what to do… Oh! The town overview maybe?’ Rocky pulled up his town overview. What had once been a map and a few simple options, was now a veritable forest of possibilities.

Now that drew Alina’s attention, who perched herself on Rocky’s shoulder as he had undergone his ‘adjustments’. “Hey! You’re not editing town stuff without me, are you? Are you?” The sprite poked the left side of Rocky’s face, then flitted over to the right, bounding back and forth, repeating the motion until Rocky gave an uncertain ‘no?’ as a response.

“Perfect! So what you’re going to do is select the materials tab, okay? No, that’s the map. A little to the left there, perfect!

[Rocky’s Wooden Fort (No Name Selected]

[Location: Plains Biome]

[Wave Status: 2]

[Available Materials (units):]

[Wood: 223] [Grass: 0] [Stone: 0.25]

[Available Worker Units for Resource Collection]

[0 Humans] [2 Iron Golems]

“Ohhhh uh, that’s not looking too good.” Alina’s voice confirmed Rocky’s worst fears. He would have to build his fortress out of-

“Wood! Yeah, at least there’s wood. Try selecting the blueprints tab now.” The sprite seemed to be trying to convince herself, but Rocky was altogether too busy wallowing to hear her. Obediently, he tapped on the ‘blueprints’ tab.

Speaking of workers, Rocky had managed to regenerate two of his felled golems, but the third proved too far gone to bring back, its core having ruptured under the prolonged battering of three different wolves. In its place, Rocky used his [Summon Stone Golem].

Ironically, the golem brought forth was, once again, not stone, but iron. Its arms were in the shape of axes, and its stature brought it a full half foot taller than Rocky’s other summons. Its midsection was a bulbous orb absolutely covered in spikes. A reflection of Rocky’s fears of another monster downing his golems.

It took Rocky several minutes to really shape its being however, the large torso making it so that its legs and feet had to be similarly large, sizing and resizing until they resembled some sort of normal ratio of legs to body.

[Available Worker Units for Resource Collection]

[0 Humans] [3 Iron Golems]

“Collect..” Rocky sighed, “wood.”

The last canine corpses had been dumped, and all three of Rocky’s golems marched off towards the tree line, cutting down, clearing leaves from, and carting the logs back into their fort, the result of which were beginning to pile high in one corner of the camp.

His helper rubbed her hands together with undisguised glee. “Oooh, can I name them? Nevermind, don’t answer them. I’m gonna name them. How about… Bob? For a certain loveable character I’ve come to admire in human media. He’s so dreamy, building everything a town could need with his tools and yellow cap...”

“Bob? Which one are you naming Bob?”

“All of them!”

Rocky held up a hand, “I don’t think-

“Bob it is! Next up on the block is building your camp up.” She gestured to his already open blueprints page. “Put your storehouse near the center, and construct this market in the corner. No, a little to the left.”

Rocky continued to randomly shift around the building placement until Alina anger had reached a boiling point. “NO! You absolute idiot, just put this storehouse, two spaces to the left of where it is. Okay, good. Now next, you’re going to want the market in the corner. The System makes it a safe zone, so you can stick it in the corner there. Good!”

As before with Rocky’s lacklustre attempt at constructing a well, schematics for said buildings seemed to appear out of thin air, taking the shape of transparent blue blocks in the shape of the buildings in question.

Rocky diverted his iron golems, who actually had hands to the construction, leaving his new bulbous axe golem to collect wood logs and branches for the buildings.

[Error in construction, replacement possible. Replace ‘stone’ with ‘wood’? Y/N]

With great pain in his core, and after several minutes of prodding by Alina, Rocky finally caved, selecting ‘yes’. ‘Ah, is this what Harold meant by bittersweet?’ The joy of seeing his camp built, but the shame of its construction with lesser materials.

Reordering the construction queue at Alina’s request, so that the storehouse would take priority, Rocky’s next menu ‘destination’ was the treasury tab.

“Oh, nice! You already have 1500 System Points.” The happy fluttering resumed. “As soon as the market’s up, you can purchase building materials and other stuff with it.

Rocky felt the light emitting from his core brighten. Now that was interesting. “Can you purchase stone with these Points?”

The sprite nodded, the happy flapping had ceased. “Yeah, but why would you when you could- oh. Uh oh.”

Some cross between panicked and nervous, the sprite made her case. “There’s no reason to buy stone with the SP. Not when you could buy stuff like better weapons and gear, or even stronger materials with it! With enough SP, entire worlds could be conquered with the right allocation, and you want to spend it on STONE?” Her voice reached a frantic pitch.

Rocky, for his part, nodded along. “Stone is the best material, why wouldn’t I buy it? Its existence makes everything else equally inferior.”

The sprite pinched the bridge of her nose. “The-then what about your golems? Are they inferior, just because they’re made of iron and not stone?”

“Of course not, iron is just stone, but several shades lighter.”

“Oh. Ooooooooooh. I see, I see.” Hope again graced her face. “So you wouldn’t be against buying stronger stones, like steel or titanium? I can guarantee that they’re hundreds of times stronger than your average rock. Err, no offence.”

Rocky nodded, this made perfect sense. “Why wouldn’t I buy the strongest rocks available?”

The smile turned into a full faced grin. “Okay, okay, just make sure that I’m being kept up to date whenever you buy things with your SP, okay? I’ll make sure you get the absolute strongest stones available.”

The two agreed, and Rocky tapped on the next tab, the map. By now, it encompassed most of the clearing, with blue dots denoting citizens, clustered in the center of their wooden fortification. ‘Still not awake, then.’ In green were Rocky’s summons, clearly seen either constructing the storehouse, or chopping down trees at an inhumanly fast rate.

And then a number of red dots, all arrayed on the edge of the treeline. ‘Monsters, stalking the fort.’ It made Rocky nervous, but as long as they didn’t come in the same numbers as the wolves had during the wave, it would probably be alright.

What was more intriguing were the yellow dots, denoting ‘neutral sentients’, who Alina described as other humans. The dots were racing away from the clearing quickly, brushing past monsters and wildlife alike.

“Huh, you might want to stay on alert.” The sprite was considerably more serious now. “They’ll probably be back, with more humans, if anything I’ve studied about humans in their media thus far is accurate.”

Rocky nodded. With nothing to do but wait, maybe he would try that sleeping thing again.

#####

‘Shit shit shit shit shiiiiiiit!’ Somewhere in the not-so-distant forest, a group of humans was far more stressed than Rocky was.

That damned golem had actually drawn every monster in a huge radius with the sound of its axes felling trees. And with no ability to attack the golem itself, one didn’t have to be a genius to figure out who they would be killing instead.

The ranger pulled a dagger and stabbed an offending Orangutan Screamer in the eye, barely pausing to pull the weapon out before sprinting after his team.

They would have to come back with help.