Chronicles of the True Wizard

The time for the next scouting mission arrived to interrupt Felix's crafting so he and Grim headed out to fly over The Grove once again. This time, there were about 50% more tents at around 1500 and they were mostly located around the siege machines that had started appearing. Next to the wheeled structures in the clearing there were now a tower, 2 battering rams with massive logs inside of them, a trebuchet, 4 catapults and 2 galleries alongside another 2 of the wheeled structures that likely carried supplies. There were also a lot more people training with almost double the archers and double the people sparring.

"Guess that removes any doubts that they intend to attack us, huh?" Felix wrote on one of Grim's pages.

"Yeah, pretty much. They could be presenting all this to our city as a welcome present but I doubt it."

"Yeah, that doesn't seem too likely. You going to be able to hold out against all this? I suspect they will have at least 5 times this many siege engines and people considering how quickly they put all this together."

"Yeah, all of that is less than what I plan to prepare us for."

Felix and Grim flew back to the tower and Felix continued to craft increasingly odd weapons in his lab.

Grim flew down to the lobby and began planning out the siege with more accurate numbers of what was happening. His estimate was, similar to Felix's, that there would be at least 5 times as many of everything they saw. That meant that he wanted to prepare for 10 times as many of everything, at least. Unfortunately that wasn't really possible so he simply planned to do the best he could to defend the city.

The biggest issues he faced, were the 5 towers. The battering rams were annoying, but the solution was to fire a barrage of projectiles at them until they were destroyed and realistically, the gator gate should hold for a while. The projectile based weapons could be blocked with the Griffin's protection buff, but that had a major issue, using Griffin's protection blocked projectiles from both sides. If the city used it, the enemy could start up their battering rams and wouldn't even need to defend them. Griffin's protection was a last resort and only to be used to defend against projectiles that were fatal to the defense of the city.

Grim planned to have 10 total winched grappling hook ballista bolts crafted to help deal with the towers. Other than that, the rest of his plans remained mostly the same. The only other thing he wanted to do was to check on something in the library that he remembered seeing when Felix had attended math class.

In the library, he read through the index node and found what he was looking for. Some of the very first upgrades the city had bought back when it was a Major University Town, was all of the courses. Those included Siege Offense and Siege Defense courses. Grim signed up for both, which were available at any time because they were System run. Now that he had permission to use the towns money, he paid for them out of the city's absurd coffers.

He didn't learn much from either of them, having read the record of many wars himself, but they were excellently structured courses that tried to teach the basics and some intuition. There was even a test at the end that Grim was a big fan of. The test tried to test problem solving and intuition more than memorization. It asked what the right thing to do was in a complex situation with reasoning. The courses were exactly what he was hoping to find.

He flew as fast as he could into Felix's lab and interrupted his work on a massive cannon that he didn't have time to question, "Hey Felix, I'm going to make two of the courses in the Vault free to take for the next month. Any issues with that?"

"Go for it." Felix shrugged.

Grim could have done it without permission from Felix, but he just wanted to be sure. He flew back down to the index node and made both courses free. At the meeting the next morning, he presented his proposal, "I have made both the Siege Offense and Siege Defense courses free for the next month in the vault. Anyone who is participating in the war and passes either test with a grade of 80% or higher will get 2500 credits. That means they can get a total of 5000 credits on top of their salaries, as a bonus."

The council members seemed moderately excited and Grim hoped the citizens would be more excited about the proposition. Having people be more aware of how sieges worked was crucial to having as many people survive as possible. What had initially inspired Grim to look for the courses was that he realized he would have to explain to the soldiers how to use the grappling hooks to topple towers. While it seemed obvious, you wanted to wait until the tower was close to the wall then pull it from the top to the side. If you pulled it forwards, it would roll right up to your walls and you would be screwed. This was also important to know for the casters who would be using force spells as they would also be responsible for taking the towers down.

The courses covered this and much more. It covered what to do in most situations Grim had been planning for. Things like what to do when you are injured, someone near you is injured, a building is lit on fire, you are a civilian and need to evacuate. It also covered the basics of simple siege engines and how best to counter them.

Grim spent the next couple of days making sure everything was running smoothly. He checked on the ramp the builders were making for getting on top of the walls. He also checked on the crafters who were working on a handful of trebuchets to use as well, now that they had crafted thousands of bows and hundreds of thousands of arrows. The training had been going well for everyone, as expected some needed armor and weapons and some of the volunteer medics were unfit to treat anyone without risk of infecting the wounds with vomit.

The next scouting mission arrived and Felix and Grim flew over The Grove once more. This time, there were three towers, 4 trebuchets, 8 catapults, 5 ballista, 8 galleries, and 2 massive ramps to try and climb up the walls. Grim had planned for most of that but hadn't overly thought of a ramp.

It was kind of a ridiculous notion as towers were just as effective and didn't need to be a hundred meters long. He had Amelia working on a ramp inside the walls but that one wasn't mobile and would be set up far ahead of time. He wasn't sure just yet what the best answer was to those but he suspected it was something along the lines of roll flaming or exploding barrels down them. The other option was that their supporting posts could likely be cut or burned, given enough mana. There were also about double the number of tents as last time as well as almost double the people sparring and training.

They flew back and Grim descended to the lobby so he could iterate on his plans.

Felix went back to the lab and finished up on a few grenades he had been working on. He knew the final boss was some kind of octopus or water based creature so about half of his weapons were based on or included some amount of lightning. The grenades he was finishing up were a combination of force and lightning with some extra force added when he threw them. With those complete, Felix turned to something he had fantasized about creating for a few days now.

In his inventory, Felix had a common steel longsword. While he wasn't the greatest with blades, he could hold one while casting spells so there was little reason for him not to. His plan for the long sword was to enchant it's hardness as high as he could then add a battery to it's pommel that powered a simple heat enchantment. The high heat should counteract the overblown hardness and create a superhot sword for slicing through tentacles. At least that was the hope. He figured he would also add a forceful swing enchantment and the option to power it from his own mana pool.

He created a proof of concept using a simple steel plate to make sure the metal wouldn't warp too much when it got hot and tested it with some force spells. He tuned the ratios a little bit then planned out the entire enchantment on a practice sword. Once he was happy with it, he enchanted the real sword. He was very happy with the result, unfortunately he didn't have any live flesh he could really test it on, but it did make him feel slightly like an evil sci fi character. It was essentially a glowing red sword capable of cutting through steel relatively quickly.

It did not recharge itself though so Felix gave it the biggest battery that would fit in the pommel and spent time to make identical copies so he could switch out the battery on the fly. Once that was done, he had just enough time to finished a few more simple weapons before he had to go scout with Grim once again.

They flew together over The Grove, easily staying hidden with Felix's basic soul magic. This time, there were about 5000 tents around the siege equipment all made of leather with some using leaves to camouflage themselves to their surroundings. They neglected to put leaves on their roofs though so it wasn't difficult to spot them from the air. There were now, in total, 4 towers, 3 battering rams, 8 trebuchets, 12 catapults, 12 ballistae, 16 galleries, 2 massive ramps, and 16 various wheeled structures. The various structures seemed to contain supplies as well as explosives, judging from how far they were placed from the rest of the equipment and people. There were also upwards of 15k people training.

They flew back together and Grim headed down to find Henry at his forge, "Henry, I need you to spend some time working on explosives of some kind. If we can roll them, great, otherwise we put them on carts. This is lower priority than the grappling hooks though, how are those coming along?"

"We were never going to have time to make 10 with chains and we tested one and it screwed with the flight of the bolt. Instead we are just using thick rope, it should hold up fine though. We are finishing up the last one now, it'll be done by the end of the day."

"Excellent, have them placed evenly over the front wall, where we talked about."

"Yes sir."

"How about the portable walls?"

"Those are all done, we moved them next to the front wall for now."

"Good work."

Grim headed out and flew over to the wall, where there was now a massive ramp that ran from on top of the gates down to the street. It was as wide as the street at about a dozen meters and descended at an angle of about 30 degrees. The ramp was supported by posts and beams which meant people who needed to leave the town could still do so, just not with a cart or animal. The gates had also been completely shut save for the two single person wide doors located next to the main gate. At this point it was almost a certainty that they were going to be attacked. It was possible The Grove was planning on attacking Icewatch, but that notion was doubtful at best.

He also checked on the grappling hooks as well as the reserve arrows around the town. He had also commissioned pulleys for the other walls to move either injured people or supplies up and down more easily. There would be a small number of people manning those walls because most would either be focused on the front gates or be dynamic, moving to where they were needed most. By the time the next scouting mission came around, about a quarter of the recruits had taken the courses, only three quarters of those had passed either test, about half having passed both. The grades were a little worrying but they could retry the course as many times as they'd like so Grim hoped those numbers would go up.

Felix and Grim flew together over The Grove and this time, any doubts that Icewatch and The Grove were working together were crushed. There were about 9000 tents now, with about 4000 of them, the new ones, being made of untreated hide with the fur on the outside. Something that was evidently designed for a colder climate. Oddly, all of the fur tents appeared to be on large wheeled platforms.

About 80% of the people in the camp were training and the lumber mill was finally slowing at about half capacity now. For the siege engines, there were 2 more trebuchets, 6 more catapults, 8 more ballistae, 8 more galleries and another 10 random wheeled structures. They all appeared exactly the same though so it seemed like The Grove were supplying all the siege equipment and Icewatch was simply there for man power. The only other surprise to be found was an enclosure full of forest animals and a reinforced hole with stairs dug into one side.

Neither Grim nor Felix knew what the hole was for. The other animals were clearly for food and transportation. Grim had expected everything else though so his plans didn't change much. He feared had to do with tunneling beneath the walls but he was expecting that too so he continued on with his plans. He did commission some more countermeasures for tunneling though.

Felix continued to make weapons in his lab focusing on utility and mobility this time. He wasn't sure how to make a rod of escape as he didn't know how to trigger a spell upon breaking, but he knew how to make the rest of it. He instead created balls containing batteries that he could cast to launch himself if needed. All it required was a simple caster targeting node with a force spell and a direction. He set them to simply launch him forwards and upwards then created a couple others for just forwards. Once he was done with that he created a couple of cold bombs so he could freeze a chunk of the water if needed. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .