The Book of Dungeons - A weak to strong litRPG epic

As I accompanied Yula toward the settlement’s boundary, I told her what Chloe and Charitybelle had seen.

“Kobolds. Dees ees strange. Kobold fears orc. Eet must be ambush.” Her countenance betrayed her uncertainty in the matter. “Only five dead kobolds? Zees too ees strange.”

“How so?”

“Kobold would be great in number against orc.”

“Maybe they carried away fallen bodies?”

Yula shook her head. “No. Kobold has no honor. Ees dirty creature. Does not bury dead.”

“Would you want to investigate?”

She replied after a long pause. “Dangerous on foot. I zeenk maybe make canoe.”

She seemed ambivalent about the mystery, so I didn’t press the issue. If she felt raw about the news, I couldn’t tell—but I might have missed her cultural cues. Either way, I didn’t want to push her buttons if she wanted to investigate.

When we reached the watchtower, I asked the big question for the day. “Do you want to try out the watchtower or patrol?” It was a silly question. Yula preferred the forest, but I had hoped she might want to change things up and relax in a perch.

Yula shook her head without hesitation. “I find wood for canoe frame.”

The prospect of getting a canoe buoyed my mood as I faced another tedious shift as a lookout. I wished Yula good luck on her patrol and watched her continue into the forest. I climbed up the watchtower and settled into my position as overwatch.

The watchtower wasn’t high enough to see over the trees. Instead, the canopy turned transparent to the tower’s occupants. The structure extended our radar coverage into the northern forest, giving the entire settlement an early warning if red blips appeared.

The dull watchtower shifts and my sleeplessness made the risk of napping very real. When I settled in, I kept myself awake by counting our exterior threats—dinosaurs, vargs, goblins, spiders, kobolds, and now, orcs. On how many fronts could we actively defend ourselves? What would that mean for Hawkhurst if orcs sent more to investigate the debacle down south?

I watched two green blips travel north and beyond the tower’s range—one a biped and the other a quadruped. Yula had summoned Mugsy, and the two scouted the area.

Ally’s crash course in geology taught me that Hawkhurst Rock counted as a natural anomaly. She called the vast expanse of soil between the mountains pluvial fans. The erosion runoff provided suitable farming, but our distance from a summit made it unlikely that the region would offer significant rock deposits.

I kept awake throughout the uneventful day by doing something I hadn’t done since Belden—casting spells to rank up my skills. Drawing from past mistakes, I never dipped below 90 percent of my mana and cast Compression Sphere, Read Magic, and Restore on myself to rank up nature, arcane, and light magic skills. I cast Mineral Empathy and Communion once a day, and Compression Sphere had a five-minute cooldown, so nature became the most challenging school of magic to increase.

The dwarves worked to the 5-minute cadence of thunderclaps. My Compression Sphere acted as a metronome. Instead of a whistle, silence marked the workday’s end, ushering dinner, socializing, and relaxation.

Even with the triple bonus of Applied Knowledge, the incremental improvement seemed barely worth the effort. Still, my tenacity bore fruit, gaining me another rank in nature magic by the day’s end.

Between casts, I chewed over ideas of paddling down the western shore. If Fabulosa returned with guards or mercenaries to help guard the camp, we could give it a go. It would only be a one-day trip if we encountered nothing formidable.

Building the camp took longer than I’d thought it would. With the keg party close, the dwarves seemed keen to finish their work. Today’s 62 percent construction efficiency meant middling progress, but it would improve after the party.

The festivities remedied the crew’s discontent. Since I wasn’t a worker starved of calories—I didn’t partake in the ale. And the noise of the revelry foiled any chance of falling asleep early.

The party produced the desired effect of raising the camp’s morale from 27 to 47 percent and inflating the day’s efficiency to 101 percent. The event’s high spirits wouldn’t last, but it would buy us enough time to complete the sawmill.

Days in the watchtower passed at a glacier’s pace while the dwarves worked on the sawmill. I’d long since grown bored with the view, and there wasn’t much activity besides watching critters rustle through dead leaves.

Most of my thoughts dwelled on investigating the orc-kobold incident. The mystery obsessed me, and as long as I prioritized jobs, I wanted to assign myself to a fact-finding mission. I mentally prepared counterarguments in case anyone objected.

My mind wandered to future possibilities. I strategized about how to level up Charitybelle. Iremont expeditions and Sune Njal came to mind, but the vargs would return, and troglodytes might find us. I hoped Fabulosa picked up enough scouting skills to avoid kobold, goblin, and weaver territory.

While these thoughts occupied my head, the itch about the orcs always returned. What business did they have with kobolds on the western shores of Otter Lake?

While I daydreamed 60 feet above the forest floor, the colliers removed charcoal from the charcoal mounds—the yield infused our blacksmith with the means to make a plow. It wasn’t the sexiest development, but a plow meant more food for the workers and a higher health rating.

The loggers and colliers worked close to Yula and me, letting us intercept threats. The efforts to collect wood served three goals. We needed more charcoal and timber for a sawmill and also a barn—our next building.

A canoe counted as our fourth need for wood, but Yula took care of that herself.

I occupied the watchtower for one more day before one of the Silverview brothers, Bernard, replaced me. Relinquishing my post helped my sanity and changed their status to militia members. Bernard and his brother, Blane, didn’t mind taking turns every other day. I suspected their fear of heights made their shifts less relaxing, but the tower served as an excellent treatment for conquering their fears.

Rory wanted more assistants once he got the forge running, but I told him he could only have Fin. Hawkhurst couldn’t spare anyone else. Rory gave me the impression he had grown accustomed to having everything his way. Indulging our blacksmith wasn’t a luxury we could afford.

Rory and Fin shoveled charcoal onto the torodon cart while the colliers raked earth from the smoking mounds. They hurried the fuel south, fired up the forge, and went straight to banging out a plow. Specified jobs reduced our labor pool, somewhat offsetting our recently improved morale. Still, multitasking produced a plow the next day.

Having a plow promised more specialization. Ally assigned Mack and Jenneth Bluebreezer, a married couple, to serve as Hawkhurst’s first farmers. They fashioned a harness, hooked it up to the torodons, and tilled a field.

Spinach became our initial crop. It provided minimal calories, but it quickly sprouted. Three weeks after raising our flag, we planted our first seeds and injected fresh green into our diet.

After the work crew gathered lumber for the sawmill, there wasn’t a need for anyone in the watchtower, freeing Yula and me from our regular watch and patrol duties. We could do something more exotic, like striking out west, searching for another quarry or the right tree for a canoe.

While we scouted, Yula taught me a few things about canoes. We could make a dugout canoe, and the large trees offered the option of carving a houseboat, but dugouts took months to create, weighed a lot, and required special woodworking tools—most of which the work crew monopolized. Rory would undoubtedly accommodate us, but his efforts ought to focus on our settlement’s survival.

We could fashion pontoon canoes from reeds growing along the river. Porous reeds provided buoyancy. We could quickly gather and bind them with cords made by braiding reeds together.

Yula mentioned bugbears using reeds for kayaks further upstream. However, we needed boats with lower profiles for our windy lake. Pontoons moved slowly and had tracking problems—the wind would blow us around, making paddling in straight lines difficult.

A sail would be ideal, except sailing fell outside Yula’s area of expertise. No one knew how a sail worked. We had a day’s journey ahead of us, so the huntress stuck to what she knew—a canoe frame wrapped in tree bark.

We needed a boat because Yula rejected the option of hiking south. The unfamiliar territory had too many swamps filled with venomous creatures and poisonous plants.

I learned about venoms during our patrols. Yula stopped to show me edible and inedible plants and fungi. That’s when I learned the difference between poisons and venoms. Poisons counted as eaten or touched toxins. Venoms came only from bites or stingers.

I’d learned a little about plants from the illustrated books in Belden, but their pictures conveyed only the number of points on leaves and their shape. Pictures didn’t accurately portray colors or features like bumps, textures, or spikey edges. Books couldn’t show differences between lateral and vertical veins or the distance leaves grew from their stems. Illustrations gave a poor sense of size and how leaves changed at different times of the year.

We had no luck finding another quarry in our westward scouting, but we happened across a gum tree suitable for making a canoe.

Standing on my shoulders, Yula cut a vertical incision along the trunk and carefully peeled the bark off in one piece. Sap got everywhere, and we both wiped our fingers on the grass to clean them. We spotted a thick knot of gum on a high branch only after we skinned the trunk, so climbing it appealed to neither of us.

As we rolled the bark into our inventory, Yula mentioned something that made little sense. “Ess shame moons aren’t een hiding.”

The more time I spent with her, the better I pieced together her phrases, but her words stumped me. “Hiding moons? Do you mean like a new moon is all in shadow?”

The huntress covered one flat palm with the other. “No. Hiding. You must know, one behind.”

She didn’t mean the phases of the moon. I squinted to show I didn’t understand.

“When moons line-up. Ees possible to jump great deestance. Ees fun for orc cheeldren.” Yula’s eyes distanced from a reminiscence of her homeland.

Fun for orc children? She talked about an eclipse! From her description, I guessed lunar conjunctions created periods of low gravity on Miros. Gravity didn’t work that way, but perhaps it manifested from the magical physics keeping Miros’s strange satellites in orbit.

“When does this happen? How long does it stay that way?”

Yula shrugged. “No one can say. Hiding moons are queeck, one meenute or two maybe.”

Miros had four moons, but I’d never experienced low gravity, making these lunar eclipses uncommon.

With the astronomical unlikeliness of a conjunction solving our dilemma, I cast Compression Sphere to bounce myself into the air. I gave up after realizing I couldn’t attain enough height.

Yula finally lanced the gum deposit with arrows tethered to a cord. After she pulled it down, I stashed the gooey mess in an old sack. Wiping our hands on the grass, we readied to leave.

Before we started for home, Yula reached for her bow and crouched on the ground. “Toothy dino comes—ees dangerous.”

“How do you know? I don’t hear snapping limbs or shaking ground.”

The huntress shook her head. “Shaking ground scares animal.”

Yula’s words dispelled another myth about dinosaurs. Giant bipedal predators didn’t make heavy footfalls when stalking for food. Tremors only scared off prey—namely, us.