Chương 99: (B2.35)

35) Bookkeeper Ellen"Are you sure you're okay? You can go back to the inn and rest," Theodore suggested. Leona shook her head.

"No, it's fine. Just sitting around will make me more nervous, and this is fascinating." Theo turned to look at the Onroc Academy Branch that was still under construction, whistling softly.

"Yes… it is that." Ellen had to admit that Theodore had been much more tolerable since the Adventuring Party incident. He was still an arrogant and self-important jerk, but his concern for Leona's condition seemed genuine. Maybe she'd been too hard on him. Not that she was giving the money back. Clearing her throat, Ellen gestured to the rapidly-growing frame of the school.

"Since we're essentially the same person, we're very efficient when we want to work together. We can have this framed in under a day because the foundation was already there—though we're running out of foundations in good condition. It will probably be usable within a week… mostly. A proper roof will take a little more time, and furnishings and detailing like doors and shutters will take longer of course."

This was technically day three of working on the Academy project, so the cluster of Ellens currently on duty was quickly fitting the roof sheathing into place. Carpenter's seasoning trick had allowed them to use wood for the framing that they were confident wouldn't shrink or warp much something that even experienced crews rarely had access to. Carpenter couldn't season everything, but a lot of the wood was fine being green once the frame was fitted properly.

"Even high Level architects and construction teams struggle to work that fast," Theodore noted with a frown.

"It's been done, but it usually takes several specialists and a veteran construction team. Any faster requires outright magic, and that gets very expensive. This is… abnormally fast. I'm surprised you don't have more already built." Ellen adjusted her glasses and turned to look at the ongoing construction. Unlike Theodore, she could see the translucent image of the building that Mason and Carpenter had designed… including the precise measurements for each and every beam or plank needed.

Every nail, every join, every layer of resin was already accounted for in exact amounts.

"We have a few interesting advantages to help," was all she said out loud.

"Also some of us have some minor magic that isn't very useful in general, but happens to really work well in speeding up this kind of thing. Maybe with some actual training we can do even more." A turn toward the longhouse had Ellen sighing loudly.

"And as for not having more done… we had to figure out how to do this. A lot of our early building was before we were even Tier 2, and by the time we hit that and started getting real useful Perks and stuff, it was winter. I'm sure somewhere in some Ability tree there's a way to cure mortar during winter, but we don't have it yet." She squinted even as she spoke. The new structure for the longhouse was already present, shimmering dully.

She'd nearly missed it because it was inactive at the moment, but when she concentrated it sharpened enough to understand. Mason must have been satisfied with Carpenter's changes and set it down in the interface already. How fast can we build now that we have all this working together? she wondered. The Settlement Interface had steadily given them more and more features as more Ellens hit Tier 2. She'd figured that much out on her own by talking to Merchant, her sister-self.

The interface was only fully usable by a Founder, but all of them could access a lot of the functions… and each of their Classes contributed to its capabilities. Hunter Ellen's Landkeeper Class gave the interface its ability to assess the population of plant and animal creatures in an area, so long as it was within the bounds of Ellen's land and Hunter Ellen had passed through the area recently. Once Hunter had unlocked some Abilities, optimal routes and trails showed up on the map as well.

Fisher's Homesteader Class gave them the ability to see the fertility of the ground. Ellen was pretty sure Miner, once she hit Tier 2, would contribute mineral surveys or something equally useful. The other Classes that the new Ellens would eventually choose would provide more new things to try out in the interface. They'd lost the rough map of the dungeon now that Scholar was dead, but the general shape of the dungeon was visible, and at least she could tell they'd successfully freed the mana plume.

"When you negotiated for an Academy I never thought you'd have one up so quickly," Leona said from behind Ellen.

"Did you have any um… Ellens in mind for taking classes? I'm not sure I'm ready to teach yet, it's been a long time. I thought we'd be getting an instructor from the Academy but there's no way we can get one on this short notice." Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. When Ellen turned around, she didn't get a chance to answer before she flinched.

The earth rumbled slightly as an embankment rose from the ground further down the mountain, solidly defining the boundary between the budding village proper and the surrounding wilderness. It was meant to protect against floods, but with the recent reveal of their situation, Militia Ellen had pointed out the need to have better defenses. Theodore turned to watch this process, then looked back at the rapid construction of the Academy underway.

He tucked his hands behind his back while he observed, pondering with a crease of his brow. His eyes turned to Ellen.

"You're shifting the land around, you can raise buildings within days… how long before you have a full village ready?" he asked quietly.

"This is not normal." Ellen shrugged and tried to play innocent.

"We had it all planned out ahead of time, and that means we have all the materials pre-cut." She gestured downhill toward the wood piles, one uncut lumber and the other cut properly.

"We had to borrow the mill for some of it, but we can't keep doing that, so our smith is going to try to make a blade as soon as we get the materials, and we'll build our own sawmill." That one wasn't as far along as Ellen would like, either. She turned her vision to the river, further upstream than the kiln. The image was there—a faint outline of the planned building—but it was not nearly as complete as the rest.

None of the Ellens knew how to build a proper sawmill or waterwheel, so that entire plan was still tentative while Carpenter tried to learn how the existing one in the village was built. The look Theo was giving her was a little uncomfortably intense… but at last he turned away, scratching at his beard.

"And what about the dungeon? Can you tell anything about it and when it may reopen? If you lose your major source of income, all of this comes crashing down."

"I'm not so sure about that," Leona said, shaking herself out of her funk for a few moments.

"From the look of things, they're already nearly self-sufficient. There's an iron mine nearby, and plenty of timber. They wouldn't be living extravagant lives, but without the dungeon they'd at least be left alone… unless you had other plans?" The older man grunted.

"I do want to study them sometime, but that can wait until the Academy is up. Gaspar will need to know what's going on here, of course… but I would prefer to have a little more understanding of the situation. The mana level has risen again, and it's almost to dangerous amounts. Every time it starts to ebb, there's a major burst." He looked at Ellen again, but she didn't meet his eyes. If he suspected the cause, he wasn't saying it out loud… but she'd have to explain things someday.

As abrasive as the man was, he didn't seem like he was evil. Ellen wasn't ready to trust him yet, not with the knowledge that murdering her and her sisters could produce massive waves of mana.

"The dungeon can't stay closed forever," Ellen pointed out.

"We can't know exactly what its structure is right now, but we have been able to confirm it no longer has access to the mana plume. It will have to open to feed, for lack of a better term. Meanwhile, the mana plume is providing us with some interesting options we didn't have before, and tapping into it should give us some form of income."

"You should hope that," Theodore said, his face still holding that prominent frown.

"Though I wonder if the mana plume was here all along, or was a result of the surges? They tend to be permanent fixtures, so if the surges caused it, that's a concern we need to consider." Ellen shrugged and gave a wry smile.

"We don't know that, and we have no way of finding it out now. None of us had any ability to so much as a guess at the mana level of the surrounding area when we first arrived anyway. We do know that the mana plume has been around for quite a while, but we didn't discover it until after the dungeon was discovered. For that matter, we don't know how old the dungeon is. We suspect it is pretty new just because of how undeveloped it was when we first went inside." Leona spoke up, "When was that, anyway?"

Her eyes looked a little more lively, without as much distraction as before. Ellen hoped that was because her professional interest was pushing the trauma of what she'd seen out of the way.

"Early autumn was when we first found it, I think," Ellen replied.

"I don't remember exactly, things were a little busy then. There were only four of us at the time, but the ones who might remember better are… you could probably ask Smith, she'd probably remember. I didn't have any Perks to help with memory back then." Theodore was scratching his beard again and staring upward toward the bald knob of the small mountain's peak.

"A strange dungeon, a mana plume, surges of power, a steadily-growing community of clones that can build a village in a few weeks…" He looked back to Ellen and sighed.

"I know you don't like me, and I don't particularly like you," he continued.

"But with all these sorts of things happening, and so many adventurers starting to collect just around the mountain, word's going to start spreading quickly. If you want to have any sort of life of your own, I suggest you really focus on getting your village up and ready. If you're viewed as already established, people less enlightened than us will be more likely to accept it." Ellen frowned at the statement.

"I don't like the term 'less enlightened' there, but I guess we are pretty worried people will misunderstand. I know adventurers have been trickling in more frequently, but so far they've been able to sit and behave because we can't really control when the dungeon will open up again." It was terrible timing for her to say that. Ellen truly believed what she said, and she was confident that things would remain under control when she said it.

She'd barely had time to draw breath after speaking before the notification popped up in the Settlement Interface, causing all the Ellens to pause what they were doing and look toward the village as one. AFFILIATED SETTLEMENT UNDER ATTACK The Treetop Inn in [UNNAMED SETTLEMENT] is under attack.