The Bandit Raid Pt 1 (II)

Her eyes slipped to her level. Twenty-two. Her entire focus was on surviving that battle she hadn't realized that she made it beyond level twenty, beyond what she was aiming for. She had killed a lot of bandits, about a full dungeon's worth, excluding the box head's kills which weren't exactly high. Her eyes started sifting through her skills, her special abilities, spells. She couldn't find anything new, including no extra reward stat points or reward skill points which she could really use beyond the ten she got from the tenth level.

Please, there's gotta be something. I can't give up. I got past level twenty. There's something I'm not seeing yet. I really don't want to abandon this place, despite my rousing speech in the morning. I probably get something every ten levels. There is something here I'm not seeing, I just have to have hope.

She scrutinized everything until she started looking into her stats. As she tracked every stat that she had and slowly moved from one to another, there was an extra stat now appearing in the list, hidden below Crafting Time so it was easy to miss. It was called Crafting Cost. Selene had calmed down and looked at it carefully.

Drops the cost of crafting schematics?... by how much?

She threw sixty points into it and ten points into Crafting Time. There was nothing else she could see that would benefit her nearly as much as that if she had just gained it. She looked at the Skill Steampunk Mechanical Engineering and threw fifty points into that as well, having twenty points left over. She now had zero Attribute Points, twenty Skill Points, and a whole lot riding on this. She exhaled carefully as she opened her inventory and brought up the craft request for the walking washing machine. There was a request on the top of her menu list stating "What resources to remove, zero of six" as well as arrows pointing left and right next to each material. She focused on metal ingots, which disappeared from the list, one of six appearing now. She held her breath audibly as it caught in her throat. The dev removed tar, oil and the primitive auto core and finally glass. That was all of the resources required, as the burner and hydraulic units were made from the metal.

She set the craft into the queue… and received a black X telling her it couldn't be built. "Fuck, I knew it was too good to be true…"

Try allowing one resource to stay, or maybe only remove a bit of it.

Selene added back the metal ingots and then played with the arrows, increasing a green bar across the metal requirement until it had reached roughly ninety percent. After a few moments of nothing happening, that green bar disappeared along with everything required in its highlight being taken with it, only now requiring ten percent of the metal now. Her jaw dropped. She put that into the queue, and crafting started, this time with twenty-four minutes to build it instead of one hour. Steampunk Mechanical Engineering was allowing a speed up for it and she didn't realize it, as well as the extra ten percent from Crafting Time. That skill was cutting whatever time remained after Crafting Time by another fifty percent, if it involved Steampunk; if it didn't, the effect wouldn't apply. She had been an idiot for not putting points into it further. Steampunk Mechanical Engineering also provided boosts to the accuracy and targeting speed of the basic automatons she noticed, as the crossbow traversal in box heads just in her view increased by fifty percent, drastically increasing where they were scouting and their range. They looked like slower auto turrets now, which was an upgrade. For all she knew, it was a fifty percent boost for all their stats across the board. The dev pushed her hair back a little and laughed, this time actually happy despite mentally chastising herself hard for not investing in it sooner. Her eyes roamed down a little to other schematics before falling on her actions bar. She was twenty away from reaching the capability of using Late Steampunk. She hadn't looked at the bar since she started, just hearing the bell each time it told her she was ready to tech up for Early Steampunk and Late Middle Ages.

Her mind was boggled by this. She was almost about to pass out, but there was still at least a little strength left in her to craft gunpowder, finally, by removing the Sulfur and saltpeter requirements and only needing a little charcoal she got from a mud mound she crafted from water and dirt outside the fort and taking the fuel from one boiler. It filled an inventory slot quickly. She then slowly went to the tar braziers and refilled each one of them, refilled the steam ballista, and repaired the basic automatons. Ding. Late Steampunk tech up allowed. She slowly walked over to one of the box heads and teched up, losing all her resources in doing so. She now knew how to make a standard automaton. In her mind, a silent prayer was rambling off as she pulled a walking washing machine into her inventory and dismantled it for parts, as she was too tired to go down into the mine, then another and another until she had enough to build the upgrades for a fabrication unit, dropping the costs significantly. She scrapped all of them, risking a second assault that would overrun her, but she was going to take that risk. It would take another two days before Volgo could bring all his men here, potentially on horseback this time, or three days if the rest of his army didn't have them. The usage of parts upgraded the fabrication unit to the new improved model and required more materials in crafting. Luckily, all the ones she didn't have could be removed, at least six of them.

The Crafting Cost Stat apparently worked off ten percent would remove one resource system, with anything below that removing ten percent of whatever resource she targeted up to ninety percent, one through nine. This was an RTS mechanic for one game she had played, but it was a stat you could pick compared to any other useful stat for other players. There were no factions really, just custom armies you could build with special improvements you had yourself. Crafting Cost would make it easier for a turtling player to hold their ground. There were a few skills like that in the game, all unique, all extremely useful for whatever strategy you were going for.

Once the first new automaton was crafted after twenty-four minutes, she was about at her breaking point for sleep and walked to the cabin, pretty much ready to drop no matter what. She put the automaton out of her inventory and activated it. It looked like a mechanical humanoid body with a begoggled face and no mouth, just metal. The optics rotated and zoomed in on her, its creator. "Greetings madam, what would you like me to do for you?" it asked in a proper generic British male accent, very comforting. "Go mine." She was blunt. It bowed to her. "Understood madam. Do you have a pick axe for me to use in this endeavor?" it asked. She pulled one from her inventory and handed the tool to it. "Understood miss. I will go mine for ore." It walked from the cabin with an ever so slight hiss of hydraulics, with exposed gears and machinery inside. There was barely any noise coming from it, no clanking of feet as it headed down into the mine or rotating of cogs, relatively silent. It was a massive improvement over the box bots.

She couldn't stand it any longer as the dev walked to the bed, slowly took off her chainmail after healing one more time and winced from phantom pain. Her nerves were still detecting damage despite nothing being there anymore. She wondered if Ash was feeling the same as well. Just as soon as she had all her chainmail off, the world went dark as she fell towards the bed.

Three Weeks, Five Days, 12 pm

The Auburn-haired woman slowly awoke half draped over the bed and looked around groggily. She barely remembered what she did before she passed out, her legs half off the bed and her arm wrapped around a pillow. Ash was sleeping besides her, with Blue nearby, not making a noise. Luna was right next to her head, and none of them wanted to wake her up, despite probably being hungry for breakfast. The dev slowly got up and checked the clock, showing noon. She had one and a half days before Volgo got here maybe two and a half. She didn't know if he'd push his men into a death march. That could be to her benefit though, with less bandits to fight.

"Shit… I needed that sleep though…" she muttered to herself as she pushed her hair back and walked outside to make some food. What she saw sitting outside the mine was astonishing. There were multiple sorted piles of ore sitting there, waiting for her to smelt them. The woman walked over to each pile, checking to see how many pieces there were. She could barely hear the sounds of the pick axe down below hitting against metal and stone. The new "standard" automaton had done some serious work while she was asleep, all by itself!

The X Light version wasn't as sturdy as a human being, just like the basic automaton, but it could work at the same level as any man for labor or cleaning. When she would make more, and she was sure there were going to be at least one hundred for the sacrifice, they could be relegated to maintenance, refueling of the boilers, guard duty, mining, woodcutting, farming, cooking and cleaning up the fort. She might make one just to act as a butler for the cabin, doing the laundry. She looked down at herself. Her clothes hadn't been washed for a few days, and the practice with the training dummy had made her stink due to no time to bathe beyond the washcloth and cold water, which wasn't very pleasant.

She shoved all the ore into her inventory and got it to smelt while she cooked. "Blue, Ash, go hunt. Bring back whatever you find." They both got out of the gate with her opening it, and Luna shot after them. "Luna! Wait!" she was chasing after Ash. She wanted to help. The little white wolf was no longer little, as she had gotten bigger over the weeks. She was roughly two thirds the size of Blue, which was almost the size of Ash, and she wasn't even fully grown up yet. For all Selene knew, Luna was going to grow up to be massive, maybe even rideable. There were still quite a few months before she could be considered an adolescent, however, the woman had no idea just how old she was. Maybe just reaching three months? She didn't know that wolves started becoming full fledged hunters at six months to help carry their weight, and two years old before they were considered adults. Luna had to be pretty young compared to her brother and sister, that was amazing to her. She wasn't the runt, she was going to be powerful once she got even larger.

The wolves came back after an hour with one rabbit, a vole and a field mouse. Luna wasn't too impressed with the mouse she caught, but she was learning. "You'll get there Luna, don't worry." She yipped as she dropped the mouse at her feet to cook. Once they were finished eating, Selene had her ingots. She threw away most of the costs for the standard automatons except for a few ingots of metal, then built one more. It was sent down to the mine just like the first one.

By this speed, I'll be stuck with barely even reaching one hundred of these things. I'm not thinking logistically. I need to adapt to Steampunk and not being alone anymore.

Throwing more points into Steampunk Mechanical Engineering seemed like it might work, but she felt like she needed to diversify how she was tackling this issue. While it might make crafting automatons faster, she needed to get a broader view of all of this. "Logistics… Logistics! That's a skill!" She looked up the skill in her list. Sure enough, zero percent. She threw her last twenty remaining points into it and suddenly gained two new special abilities. Her smelting or refining of raw materials was now going twenty percent faster as well, for all stations, and she got a twenty percent boost to the effects of all tools used on stations. Some of the tools gave a twenty percent boost in crafting speed, so it would give an extra four percent on top of it. Others gave almost up to forty percent, bringing the efficiency to almost fifty percent in speed. This wasn't combining different tools on the same station either, it added up very quickly.

That's it! I need to expand, it's just like playing an RTS right now or a 4X game. Build up the infrastructure more, mass produce. I'm sitting on one or two stations with just five smelters and five forges. I need to bump that up massively. Two fabrication units. It cost so much last time, but with the lowered requirements…

The two special abilities she gained from Logistics were "Multi Task" which added a hovering magical "third arm" made of adaptive metal that she was able to shove in her inventory to act as a tool for anything she wanted, adding a fifty percent speed boost for one hour with a two-hour cooldown. The second ability was "Sign in Triplicate" which made any paperwork, specifically spells or perk crafting or even ink crafting, take one third the time as a passive. Without any modifiers, spells took twelve hours to craft a magical scroll, with three hours used to craft the ink. With tools, it cut down the time to almost eight hours total. With stats, it cut that down to four hours. With this special passive, she'd be pushing out scrolls or perks if she needed them every one hour twenty minutes. Oddly, Steampunk Mechanical Engineering didn't provide any special abilities, but the effect was already noticeable. The fact it gave fifty percent stat boosts for everything steampunk was worth not getting special abilities.

She focused on getting five automatons into the mine before she started on making a second fabrication unit. Meanwhile, she was looking at any tools she could add to the new steampunk stations, new attachments for the furnaces and smelters and forges she was going to get. Selene moved to the regular cave not to mine for ore, but to build a new cave network going down to the mine, expanding it outward so that more automatons could work in it. If two automatons mined a vein, it would be done twice as fast going from different directions. She also used spare metal to upgrade her smelters and forges, combining them into a foundry. It took five smelteries and five forges to build one foundry with added metals, but it was totally worth it. She then added five blast furnaces to the first one. The foundry alone was smelting almost twice as fast as all the previous stations combined, with casting the ingots at the same time. She was going to get at least five of these, hopefully ten of them, but not until she got more fabrication units.

As she barely got enough metal to make a new automaton station upgrade for standard automatons, this doubled the speed of producing the newer versions, along with giving them a pick axe each time. She was running out of wood now, so the next five automatons were made to go out and cut down trees with axes. By midnight, she had thirty-six X Lights walking around, with six of them cutting trees. She brought those in after nightfall, but the amount of resources they were bringing in was surprising. They were a far cry better than the vending machines on legs. "Drone, what's your combat accuracy like?" she asked one as it started going down into the mine. "One hundred percent madam." That meant seventy-five percent against a moving target, while the box heads were fifty percent against a stationary target or thirty-five percent against a moving target. That was over double the accuracy. "Is this with no modifiers?" she asked, a question popping into her mind. "Yes madam. Do you wish for the full modified accuracy?"

I knew it! Steampunk Mechanical Engineering is modifying its accuracy and all other stats across the board! Their hp was probably higher as well, with maybe an armor rating now as compared to the box heads. This means… they can take damage before going down far better than those old clunkers… and this was the X Light, not a Very Light.

"Yes please." The X Light stood there for two seconds, calculating the new numbers. "One hundred fifty percent." That meant he'd hit no matter what with a crossbow… or a musket. She could make gunpowder now, or any other innumerable special weapons now that she was in the middle of Steampunk. She could only imagine the cool special things she'd get from Advanced Steampunk Era. While it might be useful to build something she thought might be a machinegun, the schematics needed to be tested first, which meant things she understood right now instead of experiments. The last thing she wanted to make was a weapon she thought was a machinegun and it turned out to be a spray paint gun.

"Understood. Stand there for one minute, I am… transferring you to my inventory." "Understood miss." It stopped and stood at attention before the portal absorbed inside.

I just want to test something, just one thing. If it doesn't work, it's not the end of the world… but I just want to check…

She stopped production of automatons from one fabrication unit and told it to dismantle that automaton she had just built. It would set her back an hour, but she just wanted to check something. Half hour went by as the automaton was taken apart. She received all materials, including the ones she had removed with crafting cost. She could gain resources without trying to find them! There was a standard auto core in her inventory that she knew she didn't make. She couldn't scavenge enchanting essence from it, she somehow knew that, but if she shoved all of that into the foundry and smelted it down, it looked like she might get enough for one and a half of them. This meant she'd need to build a fabrication unit just to dismantle them correctly, not build.

She worked through the night with Lesser Rejuvenate keeping her awake and some stamina and anti-fatigue potions. The dev was going to sleep during the day while they all worked and the fabrication units would build more, setting a waypoint for them and having the automatons "auto drop" from her inventory once they were complete. They would auto equip a pick axe made at the forges installed to the foundry and get to work, without disturbing her while she slept as they made very little sound. Before that, however, she had spells in the works, going for X Greater Medium Resistance which would allow her to just start at fifty percent, ten percent more than X Greater Lesser Resistance until it reached maximum quality. She didn't stop with one writing desk though, she now had five. X Greater Greater Resistance right after which sounded stupid but she didn't complain, X Greater Fireball for AOE fire strikes, X Greater Reinforced Armor which was the next step from Armored Skin which she could cast on the automatons and even the walls themselves, X Greater Medium Heal which was the next tier above Lesser Heal, X Greater Instant Heal which seemed to have a cooldown of ten minutes but always healed fifty percent of the hp, X Lesser Speed boost and X Greater Speed boost for two boosts of forty percent and one hundred twenty percent to give her a total burst of speed for one minute of one hundred sixty percent movement speed. It could even be used on Asterion as well, or the wolves.

There were more she was going to get, even an X Greater Lesser Mechanical Repair to get automatons back on their feet faster, as well as once that was done, she'd get the stronger form of that. She also wasn't going to just use automatons and some traps installed in the walls now. Once she had five fabrication units up and running, and finished sacrificing one hundred X Lights, it was 10 am. She had been here for three weeks, six days so far, and she knew that Volgo was probably just over the horizon just resting their horses and maybe letting his men not die of exhaustion.

The five fabrication units built up five Very Lights, which looked beefier than the X Lights. While the X Light was not suited for combat at all, the Very Light was now on par with a human in almost all regards, excluding natural combat armor with the metal paneling now covering most of the body. They were suited well for guard duty or security now.

A Light Automaton was not light at all, being equal to a peak human in terms of speed, agility, strength and combat capability. They were more equivalent to Captain America wearing full battle armor. Just ten of these would probably win against two hundred bandits in melee, not even fighting behind fort walls. This is even before Steampunk Mechanical Engineering has an effect on their stats.

Mediums were in fact walking tanks, probably the equivalent to the ancient game series Halo with their Spartans or Warhammer 40k with their space marines, but on steroids and even stronger armor. They were effectively light tanks walking around.

Heavies were… heavy. The power they brought to a battlefield was impressive, equivalent to a Main Battle Tank with all the trimmings. If one of these showed up against a medieval army, there's not much they could do against it. Despite both the medium and heavy being bigger than the lights, this did not mean they were any slower, having stronger hydraulics and actuators to get into a fight faster, with more areas for sensors to keep vision around them. The problem was it couldn't fit where the medium could if entering a building. This would be a combined arms group unit, having it guard a door while Lights and Mediums breached and cleared a building, or fired through windows... maybe straight through walls.

Very Heavies were damned close to walking buildings, with enough firepower if equipped right to level a good chunk of a middle age city. This was overkill right now. It might be possible to use it as a mobile command center for groups of units later. Selene thought about a potential command network with chain of command set up through sergeants and lieutenants, all the way up to generals. She'd have to look into potentially getting a personality core built for certain special units.

Extremely Heavies probably shouldn't be considered "infantry" anymore, or for that matter a vehicle. Their size was that of a city block, weren't all that slow, and were close to untouchable bar… multiple… nukes or the magic equivalent dropped on it.

All of this was just for the automatons, this didn't include steampunk vehicles, aerial defense like planes or airships, naval vessels or brand-new fortifications whether permanent or portable. Even automated artillery and auto turrets had this quality tier. There were even spider mines and ornithopter drones that could be crafted, as well as helibots as a bigger variant of the ornithopter. She wondered if an X Heavy Spider Mine might be nicknamed "Bunker Buster."

The most interesting thing she did notice was each time she built one of the automatons, it had a level in her inventory before its "launch." The V Light automatons were right now level twenty-five each time, but there was an "upgrade modification" for the fabrication units to add levels each time she implemented that part. At the moment, she needed all the resources devoted just to building quantity versus quality, excluding the quality tiers for the "equipment," but later, she might be able to get Light autos at level… what, one hundred? Five hundred? One thousand even? Mediums even higher? There probably wasn't a restriction, just like for her.

Level twenty was fine right now, as she figured the bandit leader Volgo might be at that level, maybe a few above, twenty-five at max? If he was a dungeon boss, it would take a lot of damage to send him six feet under. Thankfully, there were auto mortars that could do that job quite handily, auto turrets to turn him into a fine pink mist, and soon to be one hundred V Light automatons to blast him. That wasn't even including the installed defenses on the fort itself. Materials could probably be changed out, swapping the iron they were made of right now for straight steel, maybe titanium? Graphene? Maybe make some steampunk energy shield? Reflection shields? Faraday cages installed in the frames? Anti-magic fields? All of this seemed to be an upgrade to the fabrication unit itself, providing some weird pseudo magic steampunk software update to the automatons, even to their physical capabilities and materials. Selene didn't want to question it, as it did what she would need in the future, and would drastically cut down on replacement and maintenance time for all units in the field.

Her access to weapons improved as well. No longer did she need crossbows, as there were now gunpowder weapons, electrical weapons, phlogiston weapons or flamethrowers, explosives and rockets, even Steampunk rail guns and chemical lasers… even plasma. The list kept going, with a huge increase of what she could make now that she didn't have to worry about the specialty materials, at least a good chunk of them right now. Those would probably go up the more complicated a schematic got, but that just meant she needed to level up more to get Crafting Cost to one hundred percent, maybe two hundred percent, or even more. There were probably schematics in the far future that would take easily five hundred different materials. For now, it was gunpowder, just because the special weapons actually took more fabrication units custom designed for them, and she needed to focus on the here and now, not building a few of those weapons and hoping they had an effect. That here and now was numbers of units that could fight, with awesome gunpowder firepower with known effectiveness. Gunpowder could provide in that regard easily until after this battle. Then it was laser beams and lightning guns with testing.

I think I'm still doing something wrong… I'm building Very Light automatons that are the standard ones. So… can I specialize them? Make them faster at just one job?

She halted automaton production and swapped a fabrication unit with more materials to a specialized creation kit. Once installed, it wasn't removeable, only upgradeable to the next quality tier. She built the first unit to make a specialized mining automaton, and once it was dropped out of her inventory, she turned it on. It looked similar to the primitive box heads albeit larger, but instead of the stubby legs it had four halftracks and two fairly large drill arms on the sides. It was paneled very well, built from the ground up for mining, with no need for a pick axe added, along with powerful spotlights on the top. The "Driller" as she wanted to call it, went down into the mine, bypassed the other automatons, and proceeded to utterly destroy the tunnel it was in, filling its backpack with vacuum hoppers attached to the arms. Once it was full, it rolled back upstairs and acted like a dump truck, dropping all ore and a little stone on the ground. Its efficiency was quadruple that of the previous standard X Lights with pick axes. The only thing slowing it down was it had to come up to the top and drop off the payload. She was going to fix all of this.

As she built another, and another, she started taking the materials and building a mine cart system down deep in the tunnels, allowing them to dump their carried resources into the carts before they auto drove back up to the top. She then built an "Inventory hopper" right there that looked like a desk pendulum toy without the hanging metal in the middle, but a portal that lead directly to her inventory. In this way, she never had to pick anything up, the automatons deposited directly there. In the future, she was already thinking of changing the mine cart system in favor of a conveyor line with added extensions each time they went deeper underground, with the ore dropped on the conveyor belt and brought up to the inventory hopper. That would have to come after this final "bandit battle." Right now, she wanted to improve gathering of wood, and wasting what she had just built would be foolish.

More! More efficiency!

She purposely modified the second fabrication unit to build woodcutting automatons, which looked similar to the Drillers with buzz saws on the arms and two spare arms for grabbing the cut trees. Once she had five of each, there was almost nothing slowing down the constant flow of resources to her. She needed to build up the defenses more though, as twenty-five hundred bandits would get through the guard of… well, ten right now. She built six more fabrication units, one for spider mines, three for standard automatons, one for ornithopters, one for auto turrets. Selene pushed it a bit by making a seventh for auto "cannons" not to be confused with the modern equivalent, and a eighth for auto mortars. The ornithopters were her eyes in the sky, sending constant feedback to her Hud right before her eyes if she needed it. Considering all of the new bots had optics of some sort, she could switch through their vision like security cameras, and be warned if they saw something suspicious. She could technically also install steampunk security cameras on the walls, but the auto turrets she was going to craft would make those not very useful unless she added… really nasty defenses.

Electrified walls or posts to create an invisible electrical fence? Flame nozzles? Gas projection emitters? All of it could be refilled on the fly with a new inventory core she added as a modification to each automaton and defense. It would instead of using its own inventory or bags to reload ammunition, and potentially run out, to enter her own inventory and take what was needed to reload the weapons. As long as she had the resources, they would keep firing. The time was now 1 pm. She ate lunch with the wolves, not being afraid right now at all. Her fear was completely gone.

I'm tired of being the one that must survive out here like some scared animal, hoping things didn't find me. Now, I'm going to show that asshole he picked the wrong fort to mess with.

Selene went out and built wiring into the walls and posts, flame nozzles, gas sprayers, even built up vertical raising walls from the ground fifty feet high with massive hydraulics, not to keep the bandits out… to keep them locked in. This time, none of them were escaping. She was going to wipe them out. To power all of this, there were multiple hidden generators with cabling running underground.

"None of you seem to understand, I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!"

Her fabrication units just kept pumping V Lights out for the walls, while the dev changed storage crates from holding crossbow bolts to spare triple long barreled arquebus guns due to not reaching Renaissance yet. A V Light was assigned to the "guard" in front of them with five arquebus in each crate, with a sixth held by the guard. When the guard fired the three bullets, it would swap the weapon to the V Light behind it, then grab a new one from the crate. The support automaton would then reload it and put it back in the chest to be used again.

X Light auto turrets were ready to be set up on the walls, with brand new upgraded corbels and arrow slits replaced with bunkers to protect against arcing arrows and allow the guards to fire out in almost complete safety. The turrets themselves had built in blast shields, so they didn't take much damage from the front at all despite being X Lights. If they got hit from the side though, they were probably disabled. She hadn't yet built up the quality tier for them yet, and frankly, she needed mobility more than stationary weapons. The whole fort needed to be one adaptive system, capable of defending from all sides while artillery fired down on the opposing force. The auto mortars and auto "cannons" loaded with grapeshot would fire constantly, making catapults and Arteirobolos absolutely obsolete. There was even a manual auto mortar she was going to use for herself to rain death down on things outside.

The dev even went so far as building auto repair tools that were single use, similar to a potion for the automatons and fortifications to use. If one of them went down, they could repair each other with those. Right now they were X Minor repair tools, but she was hard at work getting them up to Very Minor and Minor. She figured that they would be at Minor level by tonight, alongside the new Minor Healing Potions. The X Minors were now useless beyond a papercut, the V Minors took too much to heal the shoulder wound, the Minors at least would cut the amount she needed to drink in half. She'd probably get an upset stomach, but she wouldn't get to the point of needing to vomit. While Selene would love to have Light Healing Potions, that probably wasn't in the cards due to time constraints, but she has been wrong before. Maybe she'd get lucky and Volgo's army would have to slow down a bit.

Once she was sure her fort was almost complete, with some minor addons later, she went back to the cabin and took a small nap. It was going to be six hours this time, which would allow her to wake up at 8 pm. Plenty of time to get some dinner eaten, finish up any fortifications that were minor or back up, and add any extra autos she felt would help out. There were now two ornithopters in the air providing aerial reconnaissance, which would alert her immediately if they detected the army moving in. They already saw the army in the far distance, still a good fifteen hours away or more if they went for a dead sprint, which obviously wouldn't happen. They might attack her in the night again probably tomorrow, but she was definitely ready.

Before going to bed, she checked her fort listing on her map. It was 2 pm, with thirty V Light automatons with more on the way; five auto mortars with one spare manual for her to use; ten auto "cannons" loaded with grapeshot; thirty X Light Spider Mines, due to how fast the fabrication unit pumped them out; six auto turrets; five Phlogiston flamethrowers installed on the wall ramparts; the boilers were upgraded and doubled the amount so that they would alternate in rebuilding the steam vent pressure, cutting down the time to a quarter what it was; twenty-eight ornithopters with small repeating crossbows as the arquebus had to be reloaded. There were also the two scout ornithopters without weapons.

For the basic defenses, she now had the walls upgraded to "Light" armoring quality and made entirely of reinforced concrete with steel paneling on both sides; flame nozzles added to combine with steam nozzles and gas nozzles, with sinking gas that stayed below ten feet and the fort sealed against flow in at the gate; metal corbels to hide behind and reinforced bunker stations that could be shot from by the V Lights. The gate was updated with a complete sealed armor system to block off the two openings that Ash and Blue escaped from the last time, allowing her to remove the barricades and add in bracings. The whole gate almost looked like a giant airlock. There were also multiple generators created that powered multiple high beam spotlights emplaced on the walls, lighting up the area when required. To add to that, there were in fact Steampunk flare systems to launch onto the battlefield, turning night into day while they floated in the air.

For her "economy" she now had at least six Drillers and six Woodcutters, along with three Farmers now. There had to be two more of each garden plot built, which allowed her to leave them alone and they would be tended to even without casting spells. Technically, with being able to dismantle for more materials and "cheating" the spare resources back into her inventory, she didn't actually need any resource gatherers, but right now it was much faster for them to mine and cut trees. Maybe in the future, once she purposely built more fabrication units to build and dismantle automatons in her inventory for an endless supply, she would stop mining. She could sadly imagine strip mining the whole continent, which might be bad for the people who wouldn't be able to compete with her. She would stop herself from doing that, as it could collapse the economy. Until then, she needed every fabrication unit building, not destroying. There was now a mine cart system installed in the super mine. There might be a free wheeled auto cart she could craft when she woke up for the Woodcutters, but that could actually wait. A healthy chunk of the forest was cut back now, letting her build the trap walls easily with a long sight line. Everything within a ten-kilometer radius was now gone, with not even tree stumps. She giggled at a thought of making bulldozer automatons to level the ground outside once this was all over. This would work. She wasn't going to be laid siege to, she was going to stop this army once and for all.

For consumables, she had already crafted fifty Minor Healing Potions and hoped to maybe squeeze in a sacrifice to Light, fifty Minor Stamina Potions which were already adding twenty percent of her stamina each time, Minor Anti-fatigue Potions, at least twenty Medium Heal scrolls and a whole lot of Reinforced Armor scrolls to use on just about everything right when the army is sighted nearby by the scout ornithopters. There were going to be no losses on her side, no wounded wolves, no damaged automatons, no crossbow bolts in her shoulder. The dev was even thinking about building one V Light automaton just to assist her if she did go down, giving it multiple healing scrolls so that if she did get wounded it could remove any projectiles like a combat medic and tourniquet if bleeding is bad, then use the scrolls.

As she took off her chainmail and laid down in bed with just her underwear, the wolves came up and took a nap with her. "Nobody is going to hurt us anymore guys. I'll make sure of it."

Given the power of the Steampunk Eras, it certainly could be true, as they weren't exactly standard Eras. That gave them a whole lot of leeway in advancement. Before her eyes closed, she checked her character sheet one more time, happy with what she was seeing. The dev checked her tech tree and looked forward to Advanced Steampunk Era in the future. There were certain schematics that lay in there that were true game changers to anyone who would think they could take her on, she saw a few. What also seemed to have appeared were two new Eras just below Advanced, Super Steampunk and Space Steampunk.

As she went to sleep until 8 pm, she knew things were going to be interesting. She would make them regret underestimating her. Volgo didn't even know what he was walking into. If his runners told him about how the defenses were before, he's going to be in for a world of hurt now with the new Late Steampunk Fort.