After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World

Clank! Clink!

Inside the massive hall underground were thousands of people, guards, and slaves. Among them were several hundred goblin slaves, and...hundreds of dwarves.

There were dozens of trebuchets lined up, all with different progress. There was also an area creating the other weapons, like certain types of bows and arrows, as well as bombs.

There were different workshops for the bombs. Not a lot could be made by batch, but there were still many times more than what most cities could produce.

Not that other places had any idea of this, of course.

Evos stood above them on a mezzanine floor that had an overview of the entire workshop. It was a place that never stopped running because he hoped to stockpile as much dwarven equipment as he could.

Even if their effects at the city level were limited, and any improvement was a long shot, they could make up for the shortcomings with the quantity.

”To think I had to reveal a portion of it so early...” he said, admittedly dissatisfied with Balthazar for asking him about anything. The other subsidiaries would never dare to request dwarven weapons—they did not need to.

Revealing more than one might already alarm some territories, but that territory Valov was eyeing was truly interesting, so he decided to take a risk.

All these years, he had been careful about revealing even a bit of his arsenal, just to avoid trouble. It was also slow to build up, so he had to be mindful of the potential losses.

After all, the dwarves were so sluggish to make these things by nature, and it was only in the past decade or so that the first products bore fruit in his time as a Lord.

During this time, after all these years, the hundreds of dwarves had only managed to make a few hundred of each type of weapon. They shall make more and more as years pass, generation after generation.

He also had to manage the dwarven population. The dwarves, fortunately, had long lifespans, but maybe because of this, they were fine with working so slowly.

This also meant that each one took a while to be productive, and even less so as they got older. As time passed, he needed more and more new blood.

It had gotten more and more difficult to procure these things from slave merchants because they were getting better at hiding, so Evos (and many others) had to force the dwarves to procreate.

Unlike the orcs, the dwarves’ fecundity was not too far from humans. It was just that they were so...slow and what they considered to be the age of adulthood was much older than other races.

Evos had forced the dwarves to procreate more than once, requiring each female to give birth at least twice in their lifetime, or else they would be punished.

Now, there were dozens of dwarven children being cared for by some old female dwarves and goblins at a small section of this large tunnel. Every so often, the crystal wall that divided the main work area from the nursery would be open for dwarves to see the children inside.

The young ones also served as hostages, er, ”inspiration” to the existing dwarves there, especially the children’s parents.

With new territories popping up, Evos wanted to increase production. His eyes were fixed on the nursery. Should they put a few children over a fire? Maybe that’d get these lazy dwarves to work harder.

He had given a dozen or so of several types of dwarven to Valov for that war of theirs, as Balthazar requested. At first, Evos thought they were being presumptuous. How dare they ask for so much of his assistance? He had never asked for it before, hadn’t he? And when he did, he was asking for too much!

It was like they were battling a territory at least one tier above them!

It was just that Balthazar was so confident that they could lose, and it wasn’t something that a man would say easily.

So then Evos thought, was that enemy really much stronger than he thought?

Because of Hassen’s direct support as well as Valov’s strength, there were very, very few towns that could be a threat to Valov Town. Balthazar being threatened like this was an affront to Hassen City as well.

Balthazar then presented him with various products from Alterra, which indeed made people greedy. The massive technologies, the infrastructure, and so on, were truly attractive.

They had also started producing several magic tools, as well, some of which had once been from Bleulle.

It was obvious what happened there, wasn’t it? He was surprised they took so long to figure it out. How good were those people to hide these things for that inordinate amount of time?

Furthermore, while there were still plenty of things hidden from their eyes, they found out that all the Golds were there as well! All of them!

Similarly, he told this to Bleumrick, who sent him tons of blus in exchange for additional support. In exchange, they wanted those toolmakers back as well as the Golds, which was fine.

That guy definitely jumped too far too quickly, got too overconfident, and underestimated the Golds’ connections. Now he was still handling the aftermath, heh.

Knowing those guys from Bleulle, the fact that they hadn’t jumped to Alterra to regain the Golds meant that they had already failed.

Not even considering the toolmakers, who led their own industries, everyone knew that they were having trouble maximizing the extraction of Blus. The fact that they hadn’t kidnapped a Gold already meant they were really not capable of doing so, and this was actually the trigger that made Evos lend so much to Balthazar.

In any case, neither of them, as cities, could do much in this war except send support like this.

The limitations of wars were not to be trifled with, and as old territories, they knew more than others. Even so, the support he gave was extremely valuable, and Valov had no reason to lose anymore.

Valov now technically had the support of two cities.

If Balthazar still lost, he better kill himself!