Chapter 118: Months

With the danger of the dungeon gone, months began to fly by. The town’s population grew. Dairy-producing Hings were captured and partially domesticated.

Milo’s iron vein proved to be more than sufficient for his needs into the near future, and between his and Rhodia’s output the town was soon furnished, paved, and awash in all the tools they needed to do their work.

Mizu’s tireless work pace was harder to see than Milo or Rhodia’s, but in hardly any time at all, she had dug not only the wells they needed, but the beginnings of a working sewer system that could be improved and expanded over time.

Arthur came to think of people like them as processors, people who made lasting things when they had the materials and time to work with. Lith, Skal, and Kout were producers, people who generated the raw materials others needed to do their work. They’d pull wood and food out of the wilderness like magic, providing the fuel for the engine of the town’s production.

Outside of that cycle were the helpers, people who perhaps didn’t produce much of substance themselves but who made everything go faster. Lily was growing fast, and despite being on some kind of forced skill-acquisition slow track, she could improve almost any project just by hanging around it.

Part of that was her suggestions, which were becoming close to indispensable. But even her presence had an effect, some sort of fundamental leadership buff that improved the pace of work even though it remained too small to be given a skill and a name. Once the wall was completed and the town was a bit more secure, Milo had noticed the effect and even ran a test to verify it was real. As soon as they knew for sure, Lily put herself on a schedule, splitting her time between each piece of major work going on in the town to make sure everyone got a little of what she could offer.

With Karra’s work, no test was necessary. She built very little where she could avoid it, but the sheer amount of heavy work she could do was astounding. And somehow, she never slowed down. Arthur had tried to make her take a break at one point, only to find that it nearly killed her to stop working to any substantial degree. She had Karbo’s hyperactivity genes in a way that caused Arthur to theorize about a shared infernal ancestor with even higher energy levels, and to shudder at the thought.

Arthur was kind of a helper-class too. His tea smoothed out fatigue and made everyone’s days just a bit better. After he finished his daily rounds, he’d work with Spiky and Leena to plan future work for the town. It was a lot, but still just a fraction of his responsibilities now that Karbo’s initial reports had gone out to the general demon world and settlers started pouring in.

A month after Karbo told the world that there was a settlement with paved roads, stone and brick houses, a mostly-finished wall and a consistent water supply, the town had welcomed their new agriculture class settlers. The existence of at least one ore deposit and a supply of Slapstones, however depleted, was enough to get a few miners. And a dungeon meant the assignment of a warrior class to work alongside Lith in keeping the monster population in check.

It turned out Coldbrook was way ahead of the game, as settlements went, only lagging behind others in food and entertainment. On the other hand, the twin town mascots of semi-trained Pratas and a little girl with a class were cherries on top of the we-have-everything sundae. People were pouring in. By the time the cold season had broken, the town had more than fifty people with all sorts of classes, all working as hard as they could to make up for lost time and build the foundation of the town.

“You don’t have to report to me every day, you know.” Arthur pulled a kettle off the heat and poured near-scalding water into the sweetest, creamiest drink he could make right now. He was out of sweetberries, but Kout had found a local substitute in the form of a watery tuber that grew at the base of some trees. Somehow, it tasted like cherries. Arthur added a double-serving of boba pearls to the mix, threw in some violence-enhancing majicka, and handed it over to a surprisingly small, weak-looking hand.

“Yes, I do,” Onna said. “I’m the chief guard of this town, Arthur. You’re the mayor. It’s a good, necessary habit, even if there isn’t much to report.”

Onna had read Karbo’s reports that a new settlement town needed a guard-slash-dungeon-clearer, figured out which one it was, and jumped at the chance to rejoin her friends. At first, she had become the defacto leader of the town’s guard. Later, when other dungeon-hunting classes showed up, she had kept the role by being simply stronger than everyone else.

“She’s not wrong, Arthur. Stop hassling her about this every morning.” Lily was sweeping up the shop and helping Arthur prepare for the day, something she still regarded as her primary duty, no matter how much good she could be doing elsewhere. “She has things to do too.”

“Fine, fine. You win. Tell me what’s going on,” Arthur said.

“Not much, really. The agriculturalists have another field up and running,” Onna reported.

“Planted, or accelerated?”

“Accelerated. We have more farmers than we have room for fields right now. Karra is going to be plowing some land outside the walls soon to handle the overflow of labor.”

“Is that too much food?” Arthur asked. “We have grains and vegetables covered, I thought.”

“No such thing as too much food. We can store what we don’t use, or sell it. This field is rope-weed, though. Literally for making rope. Which we really are short on. It’s our second non-food crop.”

Arthur nodded, then looked out from his counter across the town at the hill behind his house. Officially, his brick-lined terraces of tea plants had been their first non-food crop, a luxury field of plants that had been sprouting and growing well even before the farmer-classes super-charged the process. There were dozens of different colored flowers and leaves on the slope, an isolated rainbow set up against the edge of the cliff.

The days of limited food were also over.

There were still some things the town didn’t have, but all the staples and popular vegetables were more than covered. On top of that, a few more conventional cooks had joined the fold, working significant hours at the plaza dishing out soups, breads, and kebabs while leaving the beverage-work to Arthur.

“What about Corbin? Have we seen him?” Arthur asked.

“He checked in this morning. He went two days out this time. There’s some normal beast activity, but nothing much we need to be worried about near the town. It looks like Daisy chases off almost anything big enough to be a threat. And no signs of monster waves.”

“Well, good.” Arthur stretched out his back a little and began cleaning up the last bit of mess from the morning rush. So far, the town had managed to keep to a pretty stable schedule regarding meal times, which meant he now had a few hours to burn. “I think I’m going to go on a walk. Would you two like to come?”

“I would!” Lily jumped up immediately. She was on a forced day off, only allowed to do light work around Arthur’s shop and nothing else. After months of constantly helping everyone, this meant she was bored out of her skull. “Can we go see the Hings?”

“Sure. And the road. Onna, are you in?”

“Not me. I have some dungeon clearing to do. Especially if we want enough meat for dinner.”

Arthur nodded and smiled. He was glad Onna was here, and not just because she put in a lot of work to make sure they didn’t all get destroyed by a dungeon break. She had always been just a little bit tougher and stronger than the average demon, hanging out on the far end of what was defined as nice. In a remote town made up mostly of crafters, farmers, and artists, the rock-solid rough personality type really did make Arthur feel a lot safer.

Plus, it keeps my girlfriend happier. Win-win.

The first part of their walk was around the town itself. Onna had told Arthur about the fields, but he wanted to get a look at them himself. They were glorious. Farmer classes were described to him as being able to make things grow in places they shouldn’t, but their class did much more than that. The agriculturalists’ majicka infusions also made plants healthier and more productive, while at the same time making them grow faster. All Earth’s science couldn’t hold a candle to what they could get a field of crops to do.

His tea plants were the same. The amount of space Arthur had carved out for tea was well beyond what he could actually use in the shop, even as the demand for his product grew. Milo had been fiddling around with some automated machines over the last few months, and what excess Arthur grew was now getting machine-processed, dried, and stored for other people.

Getting to the fields was its own kind of fun. Months of Karra-and-Rhodia dual effort had resulted in all the major roads the town would need, stretching all the way from the gate through the town and terminating near the beach. These roads ran past clusters of shops, some of which were occupied and some of which were still waiting for the right person to fill them. And the roads even branched into dozens and dozens of homes, and hundreds of plots that had yet to have houses built on them.

“I don’t believe how far it’s come. Even from yesterday.” Lily pointed at a small division of houses-yet-to-be-built that now had well-defined edges between each property and large foundation pads that were visible from a distance. “The stampers do so much, so fast. What will we use them for once they’ve finished the big stuff in town?”

“Roads to other places. Some of them are already splitting time doing that. We have five miles of good road going straight out from the gate. Once they all get on that project, we’ll be connecting to other towns in just months,” Arthur said.

“You look worried about that.”

“I’m not really.” It wasn’t a lie. Arthur’s sneezing still continued and left a slightly worrisome tint on what was happening. “I think it’s because sometimes, everything is moving so fast that it feels a little out of control. And I shouldn’t even want to control it in the first place. I’ll get used to it.”

They prowled the town and the surrounding areas for a few hours, checking out new shops that were opening up and even going out to look at the growing operations around the mine. Eventually, they made their way to the Hings just as Arthur had promised. What had started out as just a few of stray animals had grown to about a dozen through a combination of more wild-animal captures and a remarkably short gestation period that resembled the reproductive timing of a bird rather than a milk-providing mammal.

Soon enough, they were done. Arthur left Lily playing with the friendlier of the Hings while he circled back to share information with Spiky and Leena, who in turn showed him the quantified, recorded-as-numbers versions of all the things he had just seen. They confirmed it. The town was doing well, much better than even the rosiest of estimates would have guessed at. And all with less involvement from Arthur, who was increasingly being left to his own devices.

And that was good. Because as much as he had enjoyed the early days of the town, he was about to get a vacation, courtesy from a vote of all his closest friends and counselors. For the next two weeks, he wasn’t allowed to touch a single bit of planning, miscellaneous work, or any other task that didn’t have to do with his primary class.

Under strict threat of forehead-flicking, he was to go back to being a tea shop owner, focusing on that and only that. And he couldn’t have been happier about it.