Struggle in the Steam Age

Huck Conglomerate, a dwarf who once served three generations of Viscount Surrey.

The grandfather of Robert Surrey, Viscount of Surrey, rescued the dwarf who was almost killed in an accident, and then the two sides established a deep friendship in the process of opening up new territories.

In the next two generations, the Surrey family and the dwarf got along very well, and the dwarf naturally became an important partner of the Surrey family.

As a member of the conglomerate family of dwarves who is good at various buildings, Huck Conglomerate also participated in many constructions related to this noble territory after becoming a retainer of the Viscount of Surrey, so the construction of this city Naturally, it also has a lot of unique architectural styles of dwarves.

To give the simplest example, after entering the building of the Viscount's Mansion, the interior space of the mansion that appeared in front of Lawrence looked much larger than the outside.

After careful observation, he found that this was not using some kind of rare space magic, but directly digging a large amount of space on the mountain behind the building.

"This Viscount's mansion, including the entire city outside, was built by three generations of people." Viscount Surrey introduced proudly.

"Not just the Viscount's Mansion, but in fact, most of the entire city is hidden in the mountains. Those stone buildings outside occupy only a small part of the entire building. "

"This should be the style of dwarves." Safiel commented in a low voice while looking at some rough-looking sculptures in the room that revealed a certain sense of beauty.

"I visited a dungeon built by dwarves when I was studying abroad in Briton. The buildings you built here look very similar to the style of that dungeon."

"The construction of the whole city has indeed adopted a lot of our dwarven construction techniques." Huck Conglomerate, who was sitting on the side smoking a hookah, showed a proud look on his face.

"After all, the temperature in this place is too low. Compared with building those buildings with thick walls to keep warm, it is obviously more reasonable to dig holes in the local rocks."

"More importantly, there were some natural spaces inside the mountain where we are now. As long as we manually open some passages, we can easily obtain some solid usable spaces inside the mountain. "

Having said that, the dwarf showed a very proud expression on his face.

"You know, for us dwarves, these rocks are like our home. We can easily use the characteristics of these different rocks to follow the trend, and finally reach our goal easily."

"The whole city can be regarded as a fortress buried deep in the mountain, but from another perspective, the space on the mountain far exceeds our needs." said Isabella, who was sitting on a soft sofa .

"I was really taken aback when I first came here, because at least 30,000 to 50,000 people can live in the entire underground city, and now most of the space inside is empty."

"Are you completely empty in this space?" After hearing Isabella's words, Lawrence turned his head to look at Viscount Surrey and asked in confusion.

"You see that your place is so cold in the wild, and there are not many areas that can keep it above freezing point on a daily basis. Then why is there such a large vacant space in the urban area that is not used?"

"This is mainly because my territory is too large, and not all of us live near this city." Viscount Surrey shook his head and said.

"With the discovery of coal mines, almost all the former fishermen in my territory chose to work in coal mines for safety reasons instead of continuing to engage in dangerous and hard fishing work, but those herdsmen are still doing their own work. Simple work done for generations."

"Compared with fishermen or coal miners, the traditional work of reindeer herders is obviously more attractive." Isabella quickly added.

"Therefore, there are at least 2,000 herders engaged in reindeer herding and almost the same number of venison and deerskin handlers on the territory."

"But you know, the number of animals that can be raised on this land is much smaller than other places. So these herdsmen are naturally scattered throughout the territory.

""For them, even if they know that there is a warm space to live in this place, they will not run back and forth for more than 20 kilometers a day just to live in the city. "

"On the one hand, those herders don't have the energy to waste time on the road. On the other hand, if those reindeer herds run such a long distance every day, there will be various problems, which will seriously affect the quality of these reindeer. output."

"But I think it's safer here." Safir looked at the thick stones that make up the ceiling and walls of the room and said, "The settlements in the wild are hard to resist the attacks of most wilderness races—"

"But there aren't many wilderness races here." Dwarf Huck shrugged and said, "At least I haven't seen a few large-scale wilderness race attacks in this place for so many years, and the worst one was just one A white dragon in his prime attacked here once."

"What's going on here?" Safir subconsciously turned his head to look at Lawrence and asked.

"Whether it's wilderness races or wild beasts, they basically have to eat." After being said this, Lawrence immediately reacted.

"It's not like we can find food everywhere on our island, which naturally limits the number of monsters."

"That's right, that's it." Dwarf Huck slapped his thigh fiercely, then pointed to Lawrence and said. "The main threats to this place are some wolf population communities and wolves led by winter wolves."

"However, the number of these clusters often does not exceed 30, because too large a population is not suitable for survival in this cold and barren land."

"It's really different from our side." Safir said with a smile. "The goblins on our island are in groups, and they can even organize a charge of tens of thousands of goblins towards us."

"Actually, the safety of this place was not that high before." Viscount Surrey scratched his hair and said. "Although wolves headed by winter wolves are more accustomed to moving further north, those gnolls are not a problem that ordinary people can solve."

"However, with the popularity of various gunpowder weapons and the construction of a large number of field bunker buildings, the wolf man has gradually ceased to be the enemy of those shepherds."

What Viscount Surrey said is indeed a fact, although in the cold weapon era those jackals were stronger than ordinary humans in wars, and they destroyed many human settlements in their early years.

But after entering the industrial age, humans with a large number of cheap gunpowder weapons quickly bridged the physical gap between themselves and this group of jackals.

According to the custom, the wolf man often chooses to attack that group of intelligent races at night. However, in the face of those specially reinforced rooms and the rooms guarded by seven or eight gunmen who have received simple training, it is basically impossible for these jackals to successfully capture those double-layer temporary garrison points built with stones.

Especially in this era when various industrial products have become cheap due to industrial development, those temporary camps not only have solid stone and steel walls with a thickness of more than 70cm, but also installed the same in the only entrance and exit. Windows and doors are constructed of steel.

For those Gnolls who dug their fortifications by kicking their claws other than torches, it was basically impossible for them to break through such fortified settlements. Especially in this place without even a big tree, the jackals couldn't find raw materials to make a hammer.