While waiting for more updates from the mainland, I've still been working on the air liquefaction and separation facility and designing out the academy. Two days after the last update, we had a large meeting with all the ministers who were available at the time to discuss how matters are going on the island. Things have been quite busy, but with a lot of new directions being taken on projects, Zaka had decided it was a good idea for everyone to get together and discuss matters.

Some of the updates were more interesting than others. Fishing yields have been steadily increasing for almost a year now, and it seems to correlate with the removal of the remaining leviathans. The situation on that front has reached the point where finding new clam leviathans is taking some time. They aren't moving inward towards the island as much, so they're having to search for them in deeper water using the weighted line method. As much as I'd like to try to develop sonar, that would require a few years of research, as I'd need to work on a lot of electronics as part of development.

We haven't set up the dwarves with any magical ovens, as we've been using most of our fluorite on weapons. This has led to a steady decrease in the amount of forested land on the far side of the island. While some of that is fine, as we do want to develop some of that land for agriculture, it does lead to higher erosion and risk of landslide. We've agreed to build a few smaller fluorite crystal growth chambers that can be utilized for domestic products. If we can get them to cook with magical ovens, it should reduce their wood demand and slow the rate of depletion for forests.

As far as fluorite is concerned, while the previous mine is getting closer to depletion by our estimates, a new fluorite deposit was found by the dwarven miners in the mountain. It's quite deep inside, but they closed up the shaft for the time being. There are always concerns about natural deposits, due to the nature of fluorite when exposed to mana. They usually aren't pure fluorite, meaning they end up producing magical effects, which often times are dangerous. They aren't exactly the same color as our currently mined deposit either, so they likely won't just produce heat.

While no method will be perfectly safe, I laid out plans that should make it at least somewhat safe for extraction. Normally, the dwarves aren't as concerned with it deep underground, but we've configured our mountain tunnels to have higher than normal mana thanks to embedded mana crystals. So I proposed using zinc fluorite along the tunnel path to the fluorite as a method of using up most of the mana, with the zinc fluorite itself acting as an indicator. If it doesn't glow near the natural fluorite, then the mana should be low enough for extraction. After that, they'll have to manually pulverize the natural crystals, to reduce their mana interaction rate, then melt them down into fluorite glass, which doesn't react at all. That glass can then be moved to our fluorite processing facility.

Another topic of some importance was naming. Specifically, we had four locations that needed names: the dwarven settlement on Kembora, our proposed trade city on the dwarven continent, and finally the academy city along with the island it will be built on. Some of the ministers have pointed out that Kembora is actually quite a misnomer, as we're largely producing weapons of war as our primary economic output while our name roughly translates to "We're friendly". While I wanted to object that the intent after the war is to switch our production from weapons to peacetime product, they're honestly more right than wrong.

That really took the wind out of my sails for naming, and honestly even a lot of my intentions for these projects, at least during the meeting. After all, would the academy even really be useful for forwarding science, or will it just turn into something of a political tool? Will our trade city just end up as a military staging ground? Even if the initial intent is one thing, it's very easy for it to end up being primarily something else. Technically, we're being friendly with the dwarves, but I see the other demons and, to a lesser extend, the elves as adversaries, so are we really friendly?

Even without my input on it, the names were similarly decided based on their initial planned purpose. Thurnra, which translates to 'of the forge', was the name decided upon for the dwarven settlement on Kembora, since they came here to develop industry for the war effort. Ketdrath, 'connecting stronghold', was the name decided upon as our port city on the dwarven continent.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The second island will be named Drazvok, which literally just translates to 'second land' as a compound word. In essence, it's name is unchanged, with it becoming a proper noun as one word, rather than a noun and adjective pair. The academy city on Drazvok is going to be named Vekmora, which translates to 'place of learning'. Despite the fact I was doing a lot of second guessing, at this point I just agreed to whatever names the ministers decided. I put off naming things because I don't like doing it anyway, so these names are fine to me, I just hope that they don't also end up as opposites of what they are planned to be.

After another 30 days, with two more tanks and multiple machine guns being shipped, the returning ship had a new update. The main demon force had clashed with one of the two main dwarven armies. The dwarves won, and they did so quite handedly. When the main demon force had come over a mountain ridge to assault a defensive position, the dwarves were positioned behind two foothills out of view from the mountain. Once most of the demons were engaged in close range with the fort, the dwarven force engaged in a pincer movement, trapping them. Over a dozen tanks began firing at range on the demons, while dwarves closed off the escape routes.

Three tanks were damaged, and a few hundred dwarves and humans died, but the demon army was completely decimated. They're already aiming to meet up with the other half of the main army, and are aiming to assault and capture the dwarven capitol. As they move, they'll have to clear out some areas along the coast, though our ships will also be assisting with that. There are backline logistics and construction teams that are also going to be rebuilding the defensive positions that are recaptured, and upgrading them with new designs to utilize their newer machine guns.

The larger air liquefaction and separation facility is nearly ready to come online. It'll probably take a few months of testing before it's fully operational at full capacity as well, but after that, it'll be producing dozens of times as much liquid air products as we currently do. With that much extra nitrogen and oxygen, I could start considering utilizing them as parts of other processes, like utilizing nitrogen for inert working atmospheres, and pure oxygen as part of extremely high heat furnace processes.

The first sign something had gone wrong on the dwarven continent came 24 days after the last update. Over the course of three days, 27 eagles arrived on our island. Those eagles were flustered, and caused severe issues due to the number of them all arriving at once and fighting for territory. An emergency meeting was held along with leadership of the dwarves on our island. With their approval, 7 of the eagles ended up having to be killed, due to their aggressiveness towards residents, both dwarven and demon.

Three more days later, and a ship we had sent out to deliver a tank returned. Aboard that ship were portions of the crews of three other ships. Over the past few years, our navy had expanded to a total of 9 ships. We've had 5 committed to patrolling the dwarven coast and assisting in the war effort.

We were informed, however, that three of those ships were destroyed by leviathans. During the attack on the dwarven capitol, the demon lord Malagord ordered ParTor to be shattered. The resultant mana shockwave killed nearby demons and overloaded all the tank's engines that were in the area. Most of the dwarves within the tanks at that time were killed in steam explosions. The mana blast also disturbed the eagles that began attacking indiscriminately. Despite the steam explosions, the machine guns on the tanks were still operable for the most part, and support crews for the tanks were able to move up to operate them.

The result was an incredibly bloody battle, with the dwarves eventually retaking their capitol after heavy losses. They also killed the demon lord Malagord. I don't know for certain, but I'd assume the sudden blast of mana, mixed with a change in the ambient mana levels probably provoked leviathans in the ocean, resulting in them attacking our ships that were in shallower water near the coasts. Overall, losses were heavy for all sides.

We'll have to wait for more reports on the actual conditions of the tanks as to what we'll need to do for repairs. With ParTor gone, the eagles that were nearby began leaving the area around the capitol, which led to many of them moving to our island. I witnessed a lot of grief from the dwarves in Thurnra. ParTor was a symbol of their country, as are the eagles. They must be feeling an extreme amount of loss. They did recapture their capitol, but at such a loss of life, and practically all the symbolism that their capitol stood for, I don't know if they truly feel like it was actually a victory.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.