Chapter 25 - A lot of goblins

Day 28

Just when Neo finished his goblin chiefs for the arena, he got a notification that his research was completed. Before even thinking about anything else, he selected the next tier of the research facility as the new focus.

Research facility Tier 2

Bonus to research point generation: 25%

Maximum amount of researchers: 25

Cost reduction 90%(MAX) from scientific education

Research points 0/100

After this, he had a look at his new trap designs. It was a little underwhelming. He just got a pitfall, a arrow and a spike trap. He decided to wait with his trap placement until a few days before the adventurers arrived.

Then he shifted his focus back of his newly created goblins. He didn't have enough steel at the moment and he didn't want to create more with mana right now, after all he was building the blast furnace for that. So he just used the steel equipment from his raiding force. When all the goblins were equipped, he ordered the first two groups to start the fighting. While they were at it, he used 1000 m² from his eleventh floor to build a regeneration facility next to the arena. Just when he finished, the first fight ended too. Ten goblins died, twenty-six were wounded. Only four goblin were still unscathed. He ordered the wounded into the regeneration facility and then started the second fight.

Each morning, he would replace the losses and those that were still hurt and the fights would start again. He hoped, he would see results from this savage training as fast as possible. Maybe, he should create some kind of ranking between the teams, but then again, these goblins were not really sentient, they would not care.

With the improvement of his creatures out of the way and the steel production not as urgent right now, Neo decided to shift his focus on a new project. He needed to find a way to disguise the outside activity a little bit. He had two basic ideas for it: Renaturalization or destruction - He was not quite sure yet, which way he wanted to go. One way was to simulate a large goblin attack. He would order his goblin shamans to carpet bomb the surrounding area, he could mention this to Mike so the boy would tell the guild that he found the dungeon because of the explosions from the fight. It would be pretty neat, because nobody expected a dungeon to just leave corpses laying around even on the outside. He would have to made it look like a large group of goblins attacked him and where then beaten back and the dungeon collected the corpses. The other option was to grow grass on the inside of the dungeon, let the goblins move it to the outside and plant it again. After finishing the planting, he could teach his shamans some nature magic and they would let the grass grow some more, concealing the tracks and make the area surrounding him look like a big glade.

He pondered over this issue for a while, he didn't ask Luna, he already knew what she would say. Then he came to a decision. Carpet bombing would depend to a large degree on how Mike would be able to sell it. He didn't know the boy very good, but for him he didn't look like a person that was good at deception.

If the renaturalization plan should work, all indications of the goblin activity had to disappear. He summoned Biff and five of his other shamans to the dungeon entrance. Then he created skill books for them so they could use some basic nature magic, which could be used to speed up plant growth. His first order for them was to go to the now empty goblin hideout and to use earth magic to close up the entrances with landslides. On their way back, they should use their nature magic to speed up the growth in areas where the goblin tracks were easy to spot. He especially pointed out, not to just use the magic on the path, but to spread it out a little so it was less obvious.

When the goblins were on their way, he shrunk his eleventh floor a little bit and created a new room on his first floor near his dungeon entrance. He stopped when the room reached a size of 1000 m². He put stone on the floor, then came a 5 cm thick layer of dirt and after this was finished, he started to grow grass in there. The thin dirt layer over stone, would make it later easier to roll up the grass and to transport it. After that, spread some weeds between the grass and had an eye on it, so that the distribution would look normal. In addition he created some small bushes that would be put near the border of his new glade. Before he started to grow the grass, he gathered 500 goblins, equipped them with shoves and buckets and ordered them to remove the plants on the glade. If later, when the adventurers started building their houses, a layer of grass was found beneath some earth and another layer of grass, they would know that something wasn't right. Neo decided to be better safe than sorry, he had more than enough goblins for the task anyway.

It took him only two hours and his first batch of grass reached a height of 40 cm, he decided this would be enough and the rest of the growing would be done on the outside. He divided the grass in pieces, each three meter long and one meter wide. After this he ordered another 100 goblins to begin the rollout on a side of the glade, where the goblins already finished their task. He created four iron dollies with wooded wheels to help the goblins with the transportation.

With nothing left to do for now until he needed to grow some more grass, he decided to get back to his blast furnace. It was still standing on the sixth floor and the silver conduit he created, was no longer able to reach to his core. He decided to put it in the ninth floor, where he had a new plan for a goblin fortress inside a large cave.

At the moment the floor consisted out of a 50k m² sized empty cave. He decided to use 10k m² of it for his goblin fortress. Neo created a one meter strong granite wall to separate the cave in two parts. In the middle of the wall, he created a three meters high and two meters wide double door made from heavy wood. Then he spend another 10k m², which he removed from the eleventh floor, to increase the ceiling height of the inside to nine meters. He would increase the height on the outside later, he wanted to keep some extra floor size as a reserve on the eleventh level.

Inside the fortress, he left an inner yard free and started to create some primitive stone buildings around it. He created three larger stone buildings, each covered a ground area of eight hundred m² and he used the same type of double door on them, than he used on the entrance. After finishing this task, he started to move the room with his blast furnace to the ninth floor. He set it so that it connected to one of the three buildings which were placed with one of their sided to the outside of the cave. He painted a large red X on the door to warn the visitors that they should better stay outside. He didn't want them to destroy his blast furnace and created a guard detail of 20 goblin chiefs. If some idiotic adventurer ignored the warning, it would be their own fault. The first exploration team would probably just wipe them out, but they would warn the others to look for doors with an red X.

Before he could get to the next big task, he had to re-grow the grass and respawn the casualties in his arena. When the grass was high enough again, he started with the big task to move his arena and the regeneration facility to one of the other reinforced buildings. With the size of them and the breaks he had to made to re-grow grass, he needed almost a day for this task. Again he spawned 20 additional goblins chiefs and painted an X on the door. If somebody really was ignoring it, he would be in for a hell of a surprise. Depending on the time of day, he would have to face up to one hundred E10 ranked goblin chiefs. Not even a D rank group would survive that.

Inside the last reinforced building, he created two stories. The largest room, which would contain the passage to the next floor, extended over both stories. On the second level, he created a balustrade around the room and placed ten blue goblins with bows there. It would probably be wiser for adventurers to eliminate them, before they entered the first level of the boss room. There he placed one of his chieftains, three black elite warriors, a shaman and another three normal black goblin warriors. Neo decided to create no additional goblins for now, he populated the rest of the buildings with the 150 black goblins that survived the raid. At last he moved to entrance hallway to the tenth floor to the boss room.

The most promising tactic for the divers would probably be to silently open the entrance, then clear out the thirty small buildings one by one, before attacking the boss building. Otherwise, if they made to much noise, they would risk to get swarmed. He ordered the goblins in the red X buildings not to leave them.

Then he got back to his blast furnace. Normally he'd liked to use orichalcum for the heating coils, but he didn't have enough of it yet. So he decided to go for a copper-orichalcum alloy. He created 40kg copper and 20 kg orichalcum in front of his dungeon core. Then he used telekinesis to lift it into the air while he used fire magic to melt it down and mix it. After finishing this, he absorbed it again and started to create his heating coils and installed them at the bottom of the furnace.

Next on his list was the control unit. Sadly he needed to use 600 gram mithril, half of his reserves, on it. Neo created it in a way goblins could operate it. The only control element was one large iron lever for turning the furnace on and off. Then all that was left to do was to reconnect the silver mana conduit, but he didn't had enough silver for that.

Neo decided to get it done and started creating more silver out of thin air. With his higher mana regeneration, he would be able to create 1.5 tons of silver a day. He needed to take some breaks, to grow more grass, but after 30 hours he was able to connect the blast furnace to his mana gathering formation on the 12. floor.