“It’s fine,” Alden said. “So once that firebreak is ready in a week or so, we will get Daelus to throw a few fireballs at the trees. It will burn everything till the firebreak to a crisp within a day—including any monsters hiding there, which will make the village safer—at least until more monsters start to come in the coming weeks. As far as fresh meat is concerned, the hunters will just have to walk a little further. It won’t be a real problem because we're only burning a small area. The rest of the forest will stay just fine.”

  “This can work!” Roderic grinned. “I can't wait for the day we'll have a clear line of sight from the watchtowers. I don't even remember if I've ever seen such empty ground around the village.”

  “You are going to see a lot of firsts in the future,” Alden chuckled. “Once that is done, those laborers will start digging the foundations for making a new and much bigger wall surrounding the village. My target is to leave an empty stretch of 200 meters between the current village walls and the new one we will make. That space will be necessary for a lot of future projects I have in my mind. Then there will be another 500 meters, or uh... 900 sticks of empty land beyond that, which the crossbows will cover. We already have clear ground of around 80 meters beyond the walls. That means we’ll need to burn the forest for around... 700 meters, including the firebreak of around 30 meters.”

  “That will be a hell of a lot of wasted wood…” Vusato commented. “I know that we are planning everything assuming the village is not going to be run over in the winter, and basically everyone in the village already has a wooden house, so we probably don’t need that much wood anyway, but it still seems like a waste. At least it will be used in the new walls, I guess…”

  Alden shook his head. “No, we are not going to make another palisade wall. Log walls are not going to do anything to prevent the monsters from breaking in after the snowfall, or we wouldn’t be making a new wall in the first place. It will be a brick wall, much taller and thicker than the log wall we currently have.”

  “You mentioned a brick wall earlier too…” Roderic said. “I’ve heard of brick houses used in the neighboring human Kingdom of Tuzalko—which is quite richer than this kingdom—but never of brick walls. Do you even know how to make bricks like them?”

  “I do,” Alden chuckled. “I’ve never been to that kingdom, but yeah, there’s hardly much difference in what a brick is. It’s basically just shaping clay properly and baking it until it gets hard enough to be used as construction material. Thankfully, the village is located close enough to the Lokir river. I saw there was a lot of clay on the banks when we visited it last time. That’s where we will put another group of iron miners, who will work as clay diggers now. They will bring the clay in wagons from the river to the village, where Daelus’ huge fireballs will bake it into bricks quite a bit faster than the time it normally takes. By the time we start to get fresh bricks, the foundations for new walls should be ready, so we will put those men to start working on making the walls. It would have been better if we had someone who could oversee the construction, but I guess—”

  “Actually,” Vusato interrupted, “I think I know the right person for it. There is a middle-aged villager, Orvik, who can help us with that. He is the one who goes to the northeastern outpost location every spring with a few dozen villagers and helps to rebuild the outpost for the Rangers every time the monsters run it over in the winter. He doesn’t have the knowhow of constructing anything with bricks, but he does have a lot of experience in construction otherwise. He oversees the rebuilding of the watchtower, the palisade walls, and the housing for the Rangers in the outpost every spring. Otherwise, he works as a foreman in the iron mines.”

  “Perfect!” Alden grinned. “This Orvik will be the foreman for the new construction then. Tell him not to go to the iron mines tomorrow, so I can talk with him about it in detail. And that’s the overall plan to improve our defenses before the winter.”

  “What do you plan to do with all the empty space between both the village walls?” Roderic asked curiously. “You mentioned some... projects?”

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  Alden nodded. “We are going to need to become self-sufficient in a lot more things if we have any hope of surviving this winter, and the future ones which are going to be even more dangerous, from what Daelus' told us about the reports the mages and the rangers gave to the Duke. So, in the future I plan to smelt iron right here, and then convert it into steel as well. Then instead of selling ore, we can sell those iron ingots and steel to significantly increase our revenue, while we will also need that steel for other things I plan to make in the village in the future."

  Vusato was surprised. "You even know how to smelt iron from ore? And how to make steel too?"

  "Of course," Alden said, "or I wouldn't even be talking about doing that. I told you I received a lot, and I do mean a lot of memories when I woke up that day."

  Vusato smiled. "God has really blessed us this time... He healed you right before Lord Edaroc's passing, and gave you those memories too—before the very first winter we'll have to stay here. It seems those memories are going to be the village's salvation this winter."

  "We can only hope it will be enough..." Alden exhaled. He continued, "Apart from the ironworks—which is for the time the immediate needs of survival have been taken care of—a brickyard will need to be made here immediately, since it will be dangerous to do that work near the river, which will only attract monsters which can somehow sense any large gathering of people. The clay miners will have to be there, obviously, but the more we can minimize any gathering of people outside the walls, the safer it will be. Of course, we are only going to do those things at quite a small scale in the beginning, but in the future when we increase our production we will have to take those factories away from the village because of the health hazards. But it will have to do for now." He added, "Still, that’s only half the reason. The second usage of that empty land between the two walls will be for making new housing for people."

  Vusato frowned. "But hardly any people are homeless in the village... You also said that we are going to burn all the trees, instead of felling them for wood."

  Alden shook his head. "We will still stack up the logs we get from making the firebreak, which will be more than enough for our immediate needs. But we are not going to make houses from wood anymore. With winters as cold as they are going to be, the wooden houses of the villagers will simply not be enough. It was different when everyone stayed within Garitus for the snowy months. Their stone walls are what, like 50 meters high? Likely even more. Those huge walls stop nearly all of the freezing wind from coming inside, which is why people could survive even when living in slums there with barely any shelter. But now that everyone has to stay here—with winters of Sarnok far harsher than those of Garitus—the frigid wind and the snow will take a lot of lives by themselves if people keep living in those wooden houses. So I am going to make brick houses here. Or rather, brick apartments, since we will make them in a multiple story design.”

  “I guess that’s why people in the Kingdom of Tuzalko prefer brick houses,” Vusato muttered. “They are further away from the northeastern gap between the Pinotians and the ocean, so apart from their northern areas, the rest of their kingdom is much safer than ours. So the winterly migration to fortress cities isn’t something which is common there. Perhaps that’s why they have the money and the safety to build brick houses for everyone.”

  “Perhaps...” Alden agreed. “But we will need to make better housing here by necessity. Those brick houses are what’s going to protect our people from the winter. They are also going to be much stronger and safer than the wooden houses people live in. That means even if any monsters manage to break through the wall, or if any flying monsters swoop down, people can just hide inside their homes until the guards take care of them. That's not possible in wooden houses.”

  Vusato nodded slowly. “New, tall brick walls to protect the whole village and brick houses to live in… if it all works out like you said, the village will be unrecognizable in a few months.”

  Roderic grinned. “I am not sure about brick houses, but the brick walls are certainly going to be vital in defending from the medium-sized monsters, even after the help of scorpions and Daelus’ fireballs. I do hope that the larger monsters skip the village this winter. Otherwise, we are all dead anyway.”

  “You don’t care about brick houses because you don’t get cold,” Alden snorted at the burly man. “Still, we have to keep a positive mindset here.” He looked at the majordomo. “How many workers go to the iron mines? I need to know how many people we can put on other tasks.”

  ***

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