log 007

Right now I am sitting in my office at the temporary fort. The snowwinders are legendary for their ability to construct and this building that I am sitting is the perfect example of why.

Would you believe that these bastards built an entire fort in a single week. Granted, the building is quite weak in terms of durability (strong enough that a single punch from me won't pass through the wall but if I were to channel mana it would collapse the wall), but I have a feeling that is more related to the materials used rather than the way the place has been constructed.

The fort itself is just like any other fort that you can find on the continent. You have a central building surrounded by a wall. There are four gates to each of the cardinal directions. The place is big enough to comfotably support two hundred people, but can be easily maintained by a hundred people if they are ready to do a bit of work. This includes patrolling mainly.

I am not particularly good at construction work, but I can tell that the materials used for this building certainly would not be good enough for creating a fort. Any other place or any other people using these materials, I am sure that the fort would collapse any second but here I am sure that something quite defensible can be made out of this buildings.

That won't be the case, as is since the building is pretty fragile, but that is where I come in. Right now, my major work is to complete the central formation as quickly as possible. Most fort formations also do the work of increasing the forts durability after all.

The snowwinders follow a very classical method of using formations in their forts, which is by essentially having one super strong formation as the base, which will be doing all the core work that is supposed to be done such as a defensive formation, an environment control formation and so on.

While this greatly reduces the amount of resources needed to be invested into the thing, reduce the over all amount of mana being consumed by the formation and also give me more options to work with but it also greatly increases the complexity of the formation that I will have to build. I will also need higher quality materials to make such a product, but that is not my problem as any materials that I will be needing will be managed by the frozen peaks.

Anyway, it is about time for me to meet the person that is incharge of the fort, whom I can spy from the edge of vision. One point that I find about these people are how ordinary they look. The snowwind empire is almost legendary for the way they have built their territory in one of the bloodiest lands that can exist. I had assumed that they would look like superhumans, maybe like a smaller version of a giant.

This is the first time that I have looked at a snowwinder properly, especially with the way that we isolated in the frozen peak. It was almost as if the frozen peak was like a ghost house, granted we spent most of our time in a single room.

"Soldier shamon, am I getting your name right.", I speak, causing the soldier who was standing next to me to snap to attention.

"Yes, captain.", shamon replies.

"Good, have you prepared the resources that I have requested of you.", I ask him.

"Yes, captain. All the maps that have been left to us by the dwarven miners are being gathered as we speak.", he replies. For a second he has a hesitant expression, as he asks. "Captain, what is the use of these maps now. Any mines that might have existed in this region have already been completely dug out by the dwarves and anything that has been left is not worth the effort of mining it."

"I have my reason of doing so, shamon. All I can do is assure to you that what we are doing here is not a waste of time.", I reply, not answering him. These are trade secrets. More importantly it will take too long to do so.

"Anyway, while these maps are gathered, give me a description of the enemy that we are going to be facing.", I ask him. I have reports on the snowlords, but that does not mean that my knowledge will surpass the knowledge of a local of this place.

"The snowlords themselves are extremely tough enemies to fight, captain. Their magic allows them to command the icebeasts. Those are the threats that we should be facing mainly. Every year during the invasion, the snowlords send entire hordes and armies of ice beasts to keep the army busy. These temporary forts are actually a way for us to counter these beasts. Our duty is to hunt these beasts and if possible to acquire their carcasses for the ice peak. If it is the ice beasts, we will fight atleast a troop of the ice beasts. A troop of ice beasts is a pack of eighty classless ice beasts lead by a first class ice beast, who are called as a troop leader." shamon speaks. "other than that This one does not have much idea as to what their magic is exactly, but everybody says that their breath is capable of raising storms and the ice storms that we have to face every year are caused by them. There might be some element of truth in this, but not that exaggerated."

This man is good at his job, in brief he has described the main threats we are facing and the possible threats that we might be facing, without exaggerating any more than necessary. This man reminds me of my master's general. He is a man of a similar soldierly disposition.

"Are there any other threats that we will be facing here.", I ask again.

"Well, there is the threat that we might have to face a snowstorm. I have no idea as to what we can do to counter it, unless you manage to craft the central formation. Even then we can't be sure if the fort will last. It all depends on the strength of the snow storm, captain. Some can even threaten the frozen peak.", shamon speaks. "You don't need to worry about this any time soon though. This is just the beggining of winters. These storms are more likely to appear in the middle to later part of winter. "

"still, Is there any way for us to predict if a snow storm will hit us at the very least.", I ask.

"During the winter, the snow storms are nearly impossible to predict, captain. With the presence of the snowlords and their weather magic it is even harder to predict.", shamon replies" for all we know we could be hit by a snow storm this very minute. It is a risk that we have to take."

"Fine, pass on the dwarven maps to me once you have gotten it. I will start to work on the central formation.", I command him.

He marches out of the room in perfect form as I begin to work on the formation. I have a feeling that Trevor would like this man. One of the good things about the snowwinders is that they are quite liberal with their materials( with their formations atleast, they have built this fort in a dirtcheap manner.). Normally materials are roughly classified into nine classes, with a class eight material having the ability to act as the core for a class eight formation. Another thing to be noted is that spells also have similar classification methods, a spell capable of creating a class eight formation on inscription is called as a class eight spell.

Now that the basic definations are out of the way, I will get back to business. The snowwinders have give me a material called as the bronze bark. Bronze bark is a druidic material with the quite the bit of history of usage. I have a feeling that I have been given this item because of my armour, which is something that I have created on the basis of druidic spells. (which is the case for nearly any spell that has a tree at its core.) Anyway, bronze wood is a pretty solid material to a level where nearly all druids made use of it in their defences in one way or another.

That means that there is a lot of options for me to work on the given material but only two of which I can any significant use out of. Bronze bark has three main elements which would work on it, which are earth, water and metal. One option that I have is I can focus on the metal and fill my formation with spells that will increase the durability of the fort. This I think can be a pretty decent option for this base, but that means that the formation that I make is purely defensive in nature and there is simply no scope for adaptation using this formation. It would essentially be like that the materials of the fort have been increased in durability by almost two classes, but given the base material I am working with it is not going to be very impressive.

The other option is that I can fill the spell with spells that complement the earth and the water side of things. The defensive boost that will give me is pretty little compared to if I were to go the other way but it will also give the option for me add quite the bit of water based offensive spells to the formation and also give the formation more options to grow, especially since the formation I am building is druidic in nature. Every power has a different focus when they are building their formations. The druids focussed on growth. These guys almost always built their formation with a living tree at its base or some material like the copper bark which can almost grow in any location. The formation was meant to nurture the tree and at the same time do whatever is its purpose.

By the way, another thing that I have to note about formations (something that I always forget to mention) is the chaining of a formation. For example I have a class eight material as the formation core, I have to inscribe a class eight formation core with a single class eight spell and ten class nine spells. Similarly, class seven core can have a single class seven spell, ten class eight spell and a hundred class nine spells and so on until the numbers get a bit ridiculous at the class one stage.

That is why a class eight formation is going to the very edge of my capabilities because I have to inscribe eleven spells into this formation core. Even the vine armour of mine took nearly the entirety of my trip here to inscribe. Granted that I was not focused on it exclusively since I had to take care of the airship formations too .(The airships are not exactly what you call a complete formation, since only a single spell has been inscribed. Sky bamboo has the potential to be class six, but it is rarely used as a formation core since it barely has any durability. A class six formation core has to be able to handle the strain of a thousand spells you know. You can already see the state it is in with a single spell.)