The first day of retaking this island went about as well as we could have hoped. There were some injuries caused by both fighting and navigating at night, but other than those, things went well. From the reports we got in the morning, the yellow light of the flashlights seemed to be quite useful because it never alerted any of the camps that anyone was approaching. The yellow blended in well with the light projected by campfires, and allowed ambushes to go off without a hitch.
Some, but not all of the camps had imps in them, but almost all of them had low level goblins, meaning that some demons are clearly summoning new imps. We definitely didn't clear out everything, but we're confident we managed to clear out a significant portion. The bad news was that by the next night, the camps had again gone dark, meaning that one way or another, the enemy caught wind of the attacks. We've chosen where we're going to establish our base of operations on the island, and have already started regrouping everyone to begin the slower process of fully clearing the island out.
Unlike the last island, where we had to return because of a full cargo hold, for this island, we only had to return one time to restock on food supplies after 44 days of clearing the island out. After that, it was only another 22 days until the island was deemed fully cleared of enemy demons. Quite a bit shorter than the last island in total.
When we returned to stock up on food supplies for the army, we had an update from the mainland waiting for us as well. While things haven't quite gotten desperate yet, the frequency of attacks by demons on the southern end of the dwarven continent have increased in recent months, and they fear the demons have started to claim control over larger amounts of the mountainous interior, allowing more forces to be directed outward. Basically, the speed at which the demons are mobilizing and conquering is faster than the other races are able to keep up with.
I've already seen firsthand that it's probably going to take decades to properly recapture the dwarven continent based on how long it takes to recapture our own islands. Though, as I understand it, there are still feral demons that roam around on the continents pretty much continuously, which is why they have adventurer parties. So they probably don't really need to kill off all the demons to be satisfied, they need only to be rid of the powerful ones.
Soon we'll get the opportunity to look into this firsthand and get a better feel for the scale of the problem and get a sense for how much help we can be, if at all.
As I'd predicted previously, the last island didn't take long to fully clear, coming in at only 7 days in total. Unfortunately, Kao's old fortress was decimated by artillery fire in order to speed that process up. I thought it would take a little less time, but between transport times, loading and unloading the army, and waiting for the fort to fall, it took a few days extra.
We made it back to our island after 9 hours of travel, and unloaded the army. They've earned themselves a month or two of break before we try to make them do any work again. That said, I have given the construction corps another directive to start building out naval housing moving forward. Right now our naval demons don't get the option to take a break, but when the time comes, I want it to go smoothly.
I also didn't have a good opportunity to set up range tables for the guns on our ship. Between our demons searching through the underbrush and not wanting to alert enemies or draw attention to ourselves on the boat, we just didn't get a good chance for it. If it turns out that we'll need the guns in the near future, we can set up shop off the second island and use the clear cut tree pathways to get more data points for ranges. Right now we have a few basic points, and some interpolations of that, but it really doesn't compare to having a proper range table with easy lookups.
We've taken a bit of time to recuperate before we head out towards the mainland. Overall we took fifteen days to look over the ship, enjoy some fresh food, and leisurely haul the goods to the ship that we plan to bring with us. This was all despite the protest from Shasta that we needed to move faster, given the situation. Normally she's quite pragmatic, so it was somewhat surprising to see her urging for us to hurry up.
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Haste makes waste, however, and when it comes to hauling explosive weapons of war, I'd rather not take the risks related to hurriedly transporting and packing them. I want a well rested crew, and a double check of everything before we head out. I don't want there to be an accidental explosion that sinks the ship because someone is too tired to properly secure a crate of artillery shells.
Speaking of which, we've made specialty crates just for the artillery shell transport. The crates are made from wood for the purposes of shock absorption, have internal racks that hold the shells, and have been loosely filled with shaved wood for further cushioning. Given each shell plus propellant weighs about 90 pounds, we've packaged them in groups of 3, which including the crate's weight, means that each crate is about 270 pounds, and it's generally a 4 man job to haul them without tiring out.
For this first trip, we're bringing 10 artillery pieces, each coming in at about 4 tons including a mobile carriage to allow them to be moved easier. A section of the deck opens up to allow larger items like this to be loaded into an upper cargo bay, so it isn't too much of a problem for the trip there. However, after talking with Shasta, there is some concern that there won't be a good place for unloading. As far as she is aware, our dock is probably the only one in the world that can actually load and unload such heavy equipment thanks to the steel framed cranes we have.
So, part of our time was spent gathering all the components to build out a crane for unloading all this equipment as well. We'll transport those components along, and then we'll have to work with Kao or whomever we can to get a crane installed that is capable of unloading our artillery pieces.
Between the food we'll need for both directions of the trip, the crane, the artillery pieces themselves, 300 artillery shells are being designated for our magazines for the ship itself in case we run into any trouble, and 4000 shells as the complement to the artillery pieces, we still have about 600 tons of spare cargo space on the ship. After some discussion with Shasta, I agreed that we could bring along a few tons of preserved food extra, and about 100 tons of salt. We've gathered an enormous stockpile of salt, and it's incredibly valuable for war efforts like this.
If the dwarves have spare stockpiles of lead, zinc, or copper, I plan on trying to negotiate for quite a bit of it, since we're giving up quite a lot of our own stockpiles of those metals in the shells we're giving away. If they don't have any, then it's a matter of betting on the dwarves being able to retake their continent and repay their war debts to us, voluntarily or otherwise.
Shasta and the handful of dwarves that were too afraid to leave before will be coming with us as well. Elora prodded a few times to join us on this trip, but I declined her repeatedly. Whether her plan was to spy, sabotage, or simply observe things firsthand, it wasn't worth it. There is a chance she simply wanted to help, but considering the situation with the elves taking a backseat to defend their own continent, I'm not taking any risks.
I was somewhat surprised by how quickly we managed to make it to the dwarven mainland. When you've spent forty some odd years on an island, seeing the horizon covered by land rather than water feels unnatural. Between the better pace of our ship, and a lack of reliance on cooperative weather, it took us three and a half days to get to the mainland. In the middle of the second day, the ambient atmospheric mana levels seemed to level off at expected levels without any remaining deficit, though I do wonder what the ocean levels would look like by comparison. Perhaps a future scientific vessel can help with that sort of study. I'm actually quite intrigued by how the mana levels might change as we get closer to the land and the gap to the inland sea.
Shasta did a pretty good job of navigating us to where we needed to be. We've arrived along the dwarven continent, but as she's pointed out, in the distance there seems to be a gap in some of the mountains we can see up the coast. That's apparently the gap that leads to the inland sea that the continental races all use for trade. By the time we'd arrived, it was already sunset, so while we could make out details along the mountain peaks, it's harder to spot anything else, other than the occasional light from artificial sources coming from the occasional living space scattered about the landscape. As we got closer to the continent, the prevailing winds have shifted to be more focused toward the continent, and specifically now they're headed toward that mountain gap. It's not like the wind is slow either, it's averaging about 20 miles per hour according to our wind speed gauge combined with our own velocity.
Honestly, without a self-propelled vessel like ours, navigating this whole area seems like it'd be very hard. I'm feeling quite a bit of respect and appreciation for what the merchant went through to bring trade to us. I'm actually a bit surprised that more dwarves didn't want to stay on our island until a proper vessel from the mainland could pick them up considering the risk a wind powered vessel would face here. It'd be all to easy to basically crash onto the coast due to these winds, though I suppose if that happened, you'd still have made it home.
