As Dave worked to get me a few hundred pounds of persevered lamb, I started to plan out my next move. I would be stuck down here for a few days while Dave made traveling food for me. Not all of the lamb could be turned into Jerky as some of it was too fat, so he was also making biltong and salted meats. He could use dungeon spices but not added foods, so he couldn’t make pemmican as I didn’t bring in enough lard or berries.

I sat in the corner of the room, thinking. “Wish I could leave and come back. The 7 hours needed could mean that more goblins are up above. But if I leave now, then this was all a waste.”

Dave called out, “Not a waste really, the dungeon would get the mana from the conversion of lamb. So there would be some gain. You could also take biltong and hang it in the dungeon master’s quarters once the Jerky is done.”

I smiled, “You’re right I don’t have to be in here the whole time just the till the stuff requiring heat is done. That means I have a bit of time to figure out what I am doing up top.”

Not for the first time, I wished that I had a way to write out what I was thinking of. It always helped me to get my game plan in order to use a whiteboard. But the absolute lack of reading thing derailed that. So I paced and thought.

I started to work through things and mutter as I went, “The tunnel makes it so they can get in to the top. Even if an orc has to bend over they could still come through easy. So what I need is something that actively attacks them.”

My brain started to mull over the actions that I had taken in the past. The totem was good, but it was too easy to overcome and too hard to make. I just didn’t have enough suitable wood to make it. The Forest of Peaceful Rest was good, too, but it was made for just the undead. The question was could I adapt the trees to fight goblins, orcs, and gremlins.

I stared off into space a bit, “I am sure that I could get them to spew out steam like the totem, but that would end up burning down the forest. Also, getting it to attack all of those would be easy. The question is can I get it to only attack those things?”

I dropped into a chair. “I hate that I don’t have anything to work with!”

Dave looked over at me from the kitchen area and just shook his head. “You know you can pull up the shop and take a look.”

I took a defeated breath. I was so used to having to do everything that I didn’t even think about the things the dungeon could give to me. Only that I had food here and someone to talk with. Even though I just bought gear for Blink.

“Thanks for the reminder!” I yelled as I pulled up the interface.

Dave wasn’t needed to get things as I was the dungeon master. I could access the store interface and dig around inside it myself. For free, I could get many basic things like torches, simple bolts or arrows, and small clubs. It was the list of clubs that I was looking at. I was both happy and sad that, at least in the free listing, the clubs were only divided into light, normal, and heavy. It would have been nice to see if there were throwing sticks or shillelaghs on the list.

I pulled one of each to see the size that I was dealing with. The light club was what I would have called a stick. It was about two feet long and a little more than an inch around. The normal club was a baton like a cop would carry before they wanted to play martial artists. The heavy club was a baseball bat in size but knobby. Of the three, it was the light club that mattered.

I pulled out one of my knives and started to carve. I had just around a full day left before I could get back up to the hole in my defenses. By the time I did, it would be just over an hour from the time I killed the hunting party.

“If I put these in the right places, I might get a chance to play a tower defense with these guys. Turn the trees into towers and just let them keep coming through the one hole until I have enough in place to take care of them.”

A day later, my time in the safe room was up. I had made five more tree growth stakes, and Dave had prepped me about 70 pounds of travel meat which would be more than enough for me unless I bogged down again. Almost half of it needed to finish hanging in my quarters, so I tossed it all through and then headed back out the top.

For the goblins, it would have been about an hour, and so I was hopeful that they still hadn’t figured out what had happened. If they weren’t worried as of yet, I would have a much easier time setting things up. If, however, they were already looking for their enemy, then I would end up fighting my way through.

I had wanted to turn the trees into lightning trees, but I got worried that if I did that, I might cause a massive fire to break out. So since I knew stone spheres could be made, I cribbed together what I was hoping was a tree that would shoot the same type of rock as my ring did. I wasn’t sure that it would happen because I was working with runes, and the ring was proper enchanting.

I had to give up the Lay-to-Rest as I needed the room on the light club both for runes and power. There was only so much that I could put on something this small and expect it to work. I also once again didn’t cap the growth age of the trees that I was going to link to. They would grow as large as they could in a healthy way.

When I came out of the dungeon, nothing seemed to be wrong. I made my way quickly across the upper valley to the hole in my defenses. As I approached where I had just fought, I fought what I hadn’t wanted to see. It turned out that they had gotten worried and sent scouts and those scouts had long enough time to get back with support. In this case, the support was a complete hunting party and an orc.

While I had taken on this type of battle before, I had my assassin with me. This time it would just be me and my equipment with a chance for them to get back up and no thoughts that I would. Which meant that I needed to play this much more carefully than I had before.

I snuck past the hunting party as the gremlins were spreading out to find signs of me. I wasn’t sure how good of trackers they were as I could see the little ruts I had made when I dragged the sheep away a little over an hour before. Yet, somehow they didn’t see them or at least didn’t know what it meant. The gremlins seemed to act more like close spotters than hunting dogs or real scouts. Which was good for me.

I had moved into the most dangerous part of my plan. I was between the tunnel and the hunting party, which meant that I could get pined in quickly if they knew I was there. My goal was to set the tree growth stakes near the game trail but just out of sight of the tunnel. If they didn’t see their people die, they wouldn’t know what was going on. Which could let me take several groups of them out.

I whispered to myself as I planted the first stake, “Let them thin themselves out for me.”

The tree I connected the stake to grew a bit straighter and the few minor twists it had in a branch spun out. Then it looked like it almost shook itself as a few dead branches fell. It had been a lopsided tree because a few years before, a tree had fallen and clipped it on one side. So it twisted two of its long branches around, balancing itself out. This had been the most movement that a tree growth stake had caused and impressed me. I hadn’t thought that they could or would move around like that.

The problem with all the twisting and shaking that it did was it wasn’t entirely quiet. In fact, it was quite the opposite of quiet. By the time I realized how loud this thing had gotten, the hunting party was upon me, and sadly, it seemed that they also had a reserve group from the tunnel side that chose to see what was making all the noise.

I planted my standard into the ground under the tree.

Then I dryly said. “This is going to be fun.”

If the totem’s runes would have kept it at smoke or steam, I would have put those on the tree, but since it seemed that the totem was leveling toward the fireball that I wanted, I couldn’t use them. I tried for stone spheres like my ring would do. So I was taken by surprise when a stone cube went flying out from the tree and flattened the nearest goblin. It appeared to be a 1-foot cube of magical stone like what I could make.

“I guess I got the shape wrong.” I said as I dropped the totem off at the edge of my shield near the hunting party.

I had the orc with the hunting party on one side and two orcs from the reserve on the other. None of them looked like much as they were in leathers with bows and didn’t seem to be the hardened warriors that I had been dealing with. So when I popped off a stone sphere at the one from the hunting party, I was surprised to see him dodge it.

Then I was more surprised to see the speed at which the arrows started to come at me. The three orcs just started putting arrows down range at me. They weren’t even aiming, just trying to get the arrows to drain my shield! I was having enough problems seeing them from just the arrow impacts, but the poison steam was also making it hard on me.

So I returned fire with my short bow. Because the areas being hit on the Stone Air dome would turn opaque, I managed to land two arrows before the orcs moved. I had wounded the one but not killed it. What did seem to kill it, however, was the slow-charging stone cube.

The tree didn’t cause the cubes from the trunk like I thought it would. Nope, it casts the cube from a branch but not always the same branch. It seemed that it wanted to try to shoot at an angle which I was happy with. Especially when the cube it plugged out creamed both of the reserve orc scouts. While it killed the one that took the hit, it knocked the other to the ground long enough that I was about to put a bowling ball through its head.

The other one didn’t know what was happening because of the thick hot, poison fog between it and me. So it didn’t realize that the tree was trying to kill it. I was delighted with the way the tree worked when the arrows stopped. By the time the fog cleared out, the goblins and gremlins which had closed in were dead. I had to put a few down that were on the sides, but with my knives and the few regular arrows, I had finished them off nicely. The orc that had been with the hunting party hadn’t died on the first block that hit it. Nope, that joker took three to finish.

I had 4 more trees to stake, and so I moved quickly to finish that off, giving them overlapping fields of fire. Then I took the time to look at the monsters. The goblins didn’t have much with them that I could use. Much like the orcs, they seemed more geared for hunting and less for war and so what they had was just less.

The rusty weapons they had I used to feed my equipment, hoping for a level-up. The bows the orcs had were better sized for me, but even with my improved strength, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to use them. I needed to do something like what I did for Blink. A crossbow would be much better, but it was just so bulky.

At any rate, the leathers they had were just clothing but I still took it. I might be able to change them around to make them fit me better. They each had a good hunting knife, so I took those. I might sell the stuff to Dave and get something better for me. I was still lacking a good layer for my legs.

“That was a happily uneventful battles.” I said as I headed back to the safe room.

* * *