Progress

After we ate lunch, the four of us went into a lounge. I took a nap, and the others did some things they needed to do. About an hour later, the stealth field was finished. Alfred woke me up, and we went outside. The only thing that changed was the sky. It had become a much darker blue than before. I asked Alfred why, and he said that the stealth field worked by shrinking things to microscopic sizes, and it creates an area around us to hold and shrink everything. That field is what I was seeing.

"What should we do first?" I ask Alfred.

"We should build a training grounds and barracks m'lord. A basic barracks will be enough, and that will cost one thousand gold. On the other hand, we will need an advanced training ground, and that is going to cost us five thousand." He replies as we walk towards the mansion.

"Why do we only need a basic barracks but an advanced training ground?" I ask.

"We only need the basic barracks because it can hold fifty soldiers. We need the advanced training grounds because the training you are going to endure will require special equipment."

"Hmm, ok, sounds good. We can build them then." I say as I pull up the menu.

Homestead Main Menu

Operations

Upgrade Homestead

Defenses

Recruitment

I select upgrade homestead.

Upgrade Homestead Menu

Civilian Structures

Military Structures

Scientific Structures

I select military structures and find the barracks and training grounds. I choose to build the basic barracks, and it costs one thousand twenty-five gold. In the description, it says 'The basic barracks has space for fifty soldiers and increases soldiers stats by three percent. It has two open bunkhouses with twenty sets of bunk beds and five private rooms for officers.

The Basic barracks are required to hold a force of more than ten warriors.' After selecting a location between the main gate and the mansion for the barracks, and confirming the build order, I get a notification: Your Basic barracks will be entirely constructed in one hour. That's fast.

The description of the barracks got me thinking, so I ask Alfred, "What about housing for the workers? Do we need any more?"

"Not yet m' lord, the mansion can hold roughly three hundred workers, and the quality is high enough for nearly any worker we could get. The barracks aren't going to take very long to build. Let's go watch them build it." Alfred says and starts walking towards the barracks.

I follow him as I order the construction of the training ground in the area of land between the mansion and the stealth field.

It costs five thousand three hundred gold and is going to take three hours to build. It is a rather large amount of land, and the training grounds do not fill it all. As I level it up, it will begin taking even more land to train more people at the same time.

I take a quick peek at the description of it: The Advanced training ground has space to train one thousand soldiers and provides a thirty percent increase in training speed. This training ground includes specialty training for many fields and, as such, is one of the minimum requirements for a newly founded kingdom.'

As we get closer to the under-construction barracks, I see people flying around at lighting speed, clearing the land. It's like watching time-lapse of construction. Several hours going by in the span of a minute. It's really an amazing sight watching the workers build the structure, and in an hour, they had everything done and working at 100% capacity.

The entryway to the barracks is a double door with a rounded top, entering into a smaller building. The first building is built with a mix of logs and stones. There is an eight-foot-tall stone wall branching off the front of the first building, wrapping around and attaching to the back of two other, larger buildings.

Maximus comes out of the barracks heading towards Alfred and me. As he gets closer, he bows slightly and says, "Hello, My Lord, I wanted to thank you personally for building barracks for the soldiers and myself. Even basic barracks are better than sleeping in tents and will raise morale and the strength of the soldiers."

"Not a problem, my friend, I'm just following my advisers' advice. I want to have this place running as smoothly as possible and have Alfred train me to an acceptable level, as soon as possible, so I can go explore a little more." I say as we all walk into the barracks.

Maximus looks over at me, "Allow me to give you a tour, my lord." He proceeds to walk me through the building. The first building is wooden with wooden furniture. Everything is polished very nicely. It has an open ceiling where you can see the bottom of the roof and the support beams overhead. This building has two officer quarters in it. That is where Maximus and his chosen temporary second in command will be staying.

We enter a room with wooden desks and chairs that looked very comfortable. I see a woman I have never met before sitting at a desk, frantically going over paperwork. She looks like she has dark red hair, is around five foot four, is very skinny, and she is wearing something that looks to be a cross between a suit and a dress. We stand there for a moment before she finally looks up and instantly bows her head, "My apologies my lord, I didn't see you there" she looks up, "My name is Synthia, I am a good worker at the admin worker stage. How can I help you?"

"I am just doing a tour of the barracks with Maximus at the moment. We were just passing through." I say, before asking her, "What are you doing? It seemed like you were pretty deep in your work."

She looks at me and sighs a little bit. "Indeed, I was, my lord. I am currently sorting the paperwork of all of the workers and soldiers on the homestead. It is the information on how much everyone is being paid and how well trained they are."

Suddenly having a moment of thought, I say, "Ohhh, that reminds me. What are the stats of the workers that we recruited last night that should have arrived today? I am assuming you were part of them."

"Indeed, I am my lord. I came in this morning with the rest of the workers and soldiers. Janna assigned me to data collection and organization. Here is the list of our current forces, both workers and soldiers." She hands me a list, and I look over it. We currently have one average subpar worker, eight average workers, two average advanced workers, four good well-trained workers, Synthia, who is a good admin, Janna, who is a good supreme, and the priestess, whose name and full rank I don't know yet. It seems like I was pretty lucky and got a few decent people from the recruitment. I look up and ask, "How long does it take to train a subpar craftsman to a sufficient level to work?"

Synthia looks at me and says, "I have never met a lord who was willing to keep a subpar craftsman. I believe that it would take roughly a week to turn a subpar craftsman into an average craftsman, provided the craftsman can retain information as well as the average worker."

Still looking at the paper, I say, "Ok, let's get that done. Everyone is welcome here. He will prove useful at some point." I move on to the list of soldiers, and we have: ten spearmen, four average basically trained, two average well trained, two good well trained, one good advanced, and Maximus, our good supreme. We have seven swordsmen, two average basically trained, one average well trained, and four good well trained. We have five hunters, two average basically trained, and three good well trained. The final warrior is the Gladiator. I have yet to meet him and don't know his name or his full stats.

After I finish looking over the list, I hand it back to Synthia and say, "Thank you, keep up the good work. Maximus, if you are ready to continue, lead the way."

Maximus slams his left hand to his chest in a salute and says, "Yes, my lord." and we head out of the room. The next room was a hallway. On either side were the bedrooms for the officers. At the end of the hallway was a door into the courtyard. As we walk into the courtyard, I can hear the sound of wood clanging together and the occasional yell in pain.

There is a wall between the training and the door, presumably to prevent people from damaging the door, with the only way to enter on the left. Maximus tells me the soldiers were doing basic training in the courtyard while waiting for the training grounds to finish.

I follow Maximus and Alfred around the corner and instantly go into stealth. There is an eight-foot-tall, blue-skinned, four-armed man, wearing no shirt and what appear to be, hide pants, standing in the middle of the courtyard facing off against eight men with a sword in each hand. I continue along the wall on the left until I am behind the strange warrior when suddenly Alfred and Maximus both realize I am not behind them. They look around frantically, and remembering my ability, Alfred yells, "MY LORD HE IS NOT AN ENEMY."

When Alfred yelled, the soldiers quit sparing and noticing Maximus snapped to attention, including the Gladiator. I feel like a dick, so I don't reveal myself until I am in front of the troops. It was amazing. The look on the soldiers' faces as they finally start seeing me. I appeared right in front of them, between them and Maximus. None of them saw me sneaking in front of them: even Alfred, Maximus, and the Gladiator hadn't seen me.

Almost as suddenly as I appeared in front of them, the Gladiator flexes all of his muscles, gives a battle cry and charges at me. Alfred moves to intercept him but suddenly stops. I just stand there. As he approaches me, I see his swords coming down on me, but I still refuse to move. Even with all four of his swords in a singing arc straight for my neck, I never budged or showed fear. I knew he could, and potentially might kill me, but I also know that no reaction I could do would possibly save me from all four swords, so I just stand there.

The Gladiators four swords swing into me so fast, for a second I thought I was actually dead and just didn't realize it. The Gladiator had so much control over his swords that he stopped them from a full-speed swing, as the swords touched my neck. Four thin lines of blood appearing on my neck, I smile at him and bow my head slightly and say, "I apologize for seeing you as an enemy, that was a mistake. If you'll stay, I would be grateful to have you on my team."

"You are dumb, but brave human, and I can appreciate that. You have earned my loyalty," he says as he comes to attention and salutes. Then he introduces himself, "I am Jambo. I am, as you already know, a gladiator. Gladiators have no classification or skill level. We are in our own bracket, we are foot soldiers, not leaders. Please do not put me in a leadership position. I don't want it. You want something dead? It's done. Something dead quietly? It's done. But don't ask me or any other gladiator you happen to recruit, to lead."

After he is done talking, he reaches his upper right hand for a handshake. I shake it without hesitation and say, "You got it Jambo, I'll let you know if I need anything, and you do the same. If you need anything, just let me know."

At this point, I finally take a real look at my surroundings and see racks of wooden shields and swords all over the courtyard, Some dummies for punching and hitting with swords, and even a few real swords and shields. We move on to take a look inside the barracks while the soldiers continue their training.

Inside the barracks are four large rooms and several smaller ones. Two rooms full of bunkbeds and sinks, two large communal bathrooms with showers and toilets, and several rooms for officers and special units to have their own space. Things looked good, so we move back out into the courtyard and spend some time with the soldiers. I did a little bit of sparring, but I could tell the soldiers were worried about wounding me.

After about two hours in the barracks, we decide to leave and make our way towards the currently under construction training grounds. It takes us about twenty minutes walking at a decent pace to get to the training grounds. Jambo came with us without saying anything. As we come up to the construction zone, Jambo says, "Why have you guys built an advanced training field already?"

Without hesitation, Alfred answers, "Because our lord needs specialized training." Suddenly Jambo looked very confused. He looks back and forth between Alfred and me a few times before finally speaking up.

Looking at Alfred, he asks, "Wait. So in the courtyard at the barracks, you weren't magically concealing his presence?"

Alfred smiles. "Nope, that was all him."

Jambo looks at me. "What the fuck are you? I have never had something manage to avoid my gaze without magic before. Are you a magical creature in human form?"

"I mean, as far as I know, I'm pure human. I entered this world in a forest three days ago." I reply as we take a seat to watch the construction progress on the training grounds.

"You must have an overpowered ability to be able to sneak up on me. The world has blessed you. Beware most blessings come with a curse of some sort." Jambo warns.

"My lord has already expressed his feelings of something bad approaching, we will be spending as much time as we can in the upcoming days to get the army ready for action."

We sit and chat about random things for another hour or so before the training grounds construction speed field lifts. As soon as it does, a furious Janna comes flying out towards me faster than I thought she would be able to move, yelling, "YOU MOTHER FUCKER I'M GOING TO KILL YOU."

I don't even have time to react. When she reaches me, she slaps me harder than iv ever been slapped, like she wanted to send me into next week. I go flying and slam into a tree. When I finally came to, writhing in pain, I could see Alfred and Jambo holding her back while she was yelling things I couldn't understand in my dazed stupor. I pull a health potion out of my belt, Alfred gave me a few to hold on to just in case and drank it. A few seconds later, I could finally hear what Janna was so upset about.

It turned out that queuing up two buildings in a row to be constructed immediately was a bad thing. It had her running back and forth between the two construction efforts without a break. While the production goes so fast for us, the workers experience the job in real-time. She spent nearly three weeks with almost no sleep.

She was exhausted, and understandably so. She was the only worker with a high enough rank to supervise the construction efforts and had to be there to make sure nothing happened so that they could finish the construction on time.

After Janna calmed down, I apologized and promised that it would never happen again.

She leaves to get some rest, and the rest of us continue into the training fields. The entrance to the training fields is similar to the barracks. The main difference is that the fields behind the building are not walled in. There are rows of training weapons and shields of all types in a massive row of racks in the middle of everything. There is a large building without much detail at the end of the training grounds. Alfred and I head there, while Maximus and Jambo explore the fields a little more and prepare them for training the soldiers.

We reach the building, and it looks almost like a large warehouse made out of rocks with a wooden roof. We enter through a set of large double doors, and inside is just a hallway. The building is roughly two hundred feet long and one hundred feet wide. We entered into the building, looking down a two hundred foot hallway with doors on either side of the hallway.

We walk all the way to the end of the hallway, where I see a door with strange glowing markings, almost like hieroglyphs but different. Alfred looks at me and says, "This is where we will be training my lord. It is going to be very hard, but if you succeed, you will become stronger than you can ever imagine. This training as the added benefit of making you stronger the longer you are in this world." We enter the training room, and my mind is blown. This cant be the room we just walked into.

There is a small cottage, about a hundred feet away from the door, a garden with vegetables on the right, Apple and pear trees on the left, a forest and small mountain behind the cottage, and when I turned around, I saw a field with what looks like harnesses attached to platforms with giant logs on them. I could see what looked like a white wall behind the field.

I looked at Alfred, and he is looking at me, laughing at my confusion. "The runes on the door are an expanding formula giving the room an area of one square mile. The advanced training field is so important because of this room. This room will slow downtime for us.

Two days spent in this room is an hour outside.

We can safely stay here for twenty real hours, or forty days, before we must leave for twelve hours to give the rooms runes a chance to recharge. You are going to train in here for a minimum of six real-world weeks before I will allow you to leave the homestead. I already know you are going to want to leave alone, so to ensure your safety, we will train until you are stronger than anything that should be nearby."

We head towards the cottage. Looking a little closer, I see that it has two windows and a door on the front and a small porch with a rocking chair. I start to wonder who is taking care of all of this as we walk through the front door, and I get my answer. Inside the room is a small young-looking woman. She is not short but not tall. She is very skinny, has dirty blond hair, and has an empire dress that is mixed light green and white, almost like it was tie-dyed. She is very pretty.

I had unwittingly stopped dead in my tracks when I saw her, and she looked at me, laughed, motioned to a chair next to a simple table, and said, "Please take a seat, my lord, I'm glad to finally meet you. My name is Sophie, I am an elf." As she speaks, she pours two cups of tea and sets one in front of me at the table. That is when I notice that she has pointed ears. I pick up the tea and take a sip. It is, without a doubt, the best tea I have ever had.

"I am the caretaker of this room." She said, looking out the window like a mother looking at her baby. Taking another sip of tea, she says, "My job is to stay in this room and take care of the plants. I only leave when the room needs to charge. I will also be cooking for you and tending to your wounds while you are here." At this point, I look around the cabin a little more, and I notice a bookshelf full of health potions. I look around a little more and see what looks like an alchemy set.

I look back at Sophie and ask, "Are you an alchemist as well?"

She looks at me, a hurt look in her eyes. "No, no, my dear lord. I am a potion brewer, please don't lump me in with those damn buffoons. A potion brewer, as the name suggests, brews potions from ingredients, using and enhancing the properties of the ingredients. An alchemist tries to change the properties of something into something else. Completely ruining the nature of the things they make."

"I apologize I was unaware, I am glad that I have a potion brewer on my side then. As much as I hate to say it, I already know I'm going to be using a lot of those potions." I say while I look at the potions on the shelves.

She smiles again, damn that smile, she looks evil and like a goddess all at the same time, and says, "Yeah, you definitely are going to use a lot of those potions."