Homesteading in a fantasy world

With the dam idea, the strategy for this war started to become more reachable. There were still too many unknowns to finalize anything, but there were certain things that we could all agree upon that needed to be done no matter what would happen.

We needed staging points for all three armies, and they would need to be built up so they could store a lot of resources and also ship them to the army when it's deployed. This was going to take a lot of effort, especially because two of the armies were going to need to move quite a long way while constantly being ready for a battle.

A lot of scouting would need to be done to find favorable ground, so if a battle did happen, we would have the advantage. We would also need to find a way to reliably gather updated information about our enemy's troop movement, yet none of us had any good ideas on how to counter the luck aspect.

A lot of things needed to be done, yet strategizing wouldn’t help us get those things done, so it was time to start actually preparing for the war. One hope I still had was that if we prepared enough, they might give up on the idea of attacking us.

We would need to ask a lot of our citizens, especially if we wanted to build the dam. The meeting where we informed the politicians about the current situation was a grim affair, especially because we didn't even have an idea if we could build the dam that fast or to such a size that it would matter. Not to mention that we weren't really that confident in winning the war even after that.

The other nations' representatives left soon after, so they could start preparing their nations for war. For us, we announced it the next morning. I was beside the speaker on the platform as we once again had to announce another war that was coming towards us, this one even worse.

I, however, barely listened to the speech. What I did focus a bit more on was the reaction of the people, but mostly I channeled energy into my design mindscape ability to try to figure out how to build the dam so it could withstand the amount of water we wanted to collect behind it.

It was slow going, but I had considerable energy reserves and regeneration, so I should get a proper design in a few days. The people obviously seemed worried, but I could see determination, which was good enough for me.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who needed to balance how much of our workforce we could divert to the war effort and how much needed to stay so our nation wouldn't collapse from the lack of necessary resources and services.

When the meeting ended, I gathered a team of engineers, miners, and people who have been working on logistics. When I explained the plan and what was going to be needed, I learned a few more colourful curse words.

After they all calmed down a bit, I was able to explain to them about my ability and how I wanted their input. While I was completely confident that I could design a functioning dam that would work for us, it didn’t mean that we would be able to build that dam.

For example, I had a workable design finished in two minutes, but it was basically just a solid piece of rock that suddenly appeared in the river. It worked perfectly fine, but it would be literally impossible to actually build it.

In less than 15 minutes, we figured out that we needed the input of builders as well. Another 15 minutes later, the builders explained that even with the abilities at their disposal, they wouldn’t be able to finish this within the time frame we had access to.

After that, we needed to move into a larger room because we needed the input of the mages as well. Now, we were actually getting somewhere. Slowly, a plan started to take shape, but a lot of the ideas needed to be tested.

So, in three days, we had more than 100 people working on this problem. Even Francis was close by, as we needed to test how much he could actually pull because a few of the stones that we needed were going to be really big.

Transporting to such a faraway place was also not reasonable, so scouts were sent out to find closer locations where we could quarry stone. We needed incredibly large pieces of stone, but thankfully with my ability to fuse together stone, everyone was able to breathe a sigh of relief as we would be able to quarry smaller stones. These would still need to be stupidly large, but at least they should be manageable.

The situation in the town had also changed, as now 24/7 the smithies rang with the sound of striking metal. The only place with more activity was the fletching yards where thousands of arrows were being made.

Our archery unit was now big enough that even a brief engagement with the enemy would use up millions of arrows. We were going to need a lot more of them because they were going to be the main weapon we were going to use to keep the enemy at bay while we continued to retreat.

We weren’t at full mobilisation, but we had enough time to train up fresh recruits to add to the war effort. We were also looking for outside mercenaries to hire, but that didn't look promising as currently, the prices were so high simply because so many needed the services of mercenaries.

There was another option of hiring adventurers, but they really weren't suited for this kind of job, and I wasn’t too sure about how loyal they would actually be to anyone who would hire them.

There was also no chance of getting any other nation close to here to join us for this war, as they would rather use this opportunity to attack us instead. Fortunately, the biggest alliance couldn't do that as the queen and her allies couldn’t declare war on us. While things didn’t look good on getting extra help, it didn't mean that our people stopped working on that front.

What was good news was that we would be able to use all our soldiers and capable fighters in this war, as we would leave the defence of the home front to the goblins and the druids. There would still be quite a lot of Viking units that would patrol our borders, so we could eliminate any intruders trying to infiltrate our nation. They should learn pretty quickly that they wouldn't be able to hide inside our borders, but we still needed people strong enough to take them out.

On the 15th day after the other nation's representatives left, I was standing on an unassuming hill that was almost 20 kilometres from the future location of the dam. This was where our quarry would be built. There was enough quality stone here that we could build three of the dams that we were planning to build.

Francis and two earth mages were currently working on making a strong enough road to transport the large pieces of stone we needed to the construction site. What didn't help was the snow and the low temperatures, which would continue to get worse as time went by.

A lot of the workforce consisted of Vikings, as even the legionaries didn’t have the endurance and strength to work this job. We would need to rotate them out with other Vikings because they would need to stay sharp for the coming war.

Even with all of this, it was still going to be a close call if we would be able to build this fast enough. It would actually take around a month and a half for enough water to be collected before I would feel secure about this path being inaccessible to them.

I would also not be able to leave this place because they would surely try to sabotage this if they found out. The chances of that are low, but knowing that luck is on their side, one of their scouts would probably get lost and stumble close enough to see what we were doing.

I would actually prefer it if they would send some elite warriors here because every one of them I could kill was one less who could threaten us during the proper war.