Chapter 56: Staged To Go
Now that things were settling down on the lines, and the extra forces that had come to try to breach where the fresh weapons ran out had been defeated, Dominic turned his wagon back to the city gates.
He was going to have to make it back to the smith’s quarters in the Palace and get everything packed up and ready in three hours, then have lunch before the assembly at noon for the forces to head out on their hunting trip.
Now that he knew that the majority of the Royal Princes would be accompanying the groups, it had a wholly different feel than when he thought it was just some reserve guard regiments going on a walkabout in hopes of finding something.
They wouldn’t send such well-trained and respected members of the Royal Family out without an excellent reason, Dominic assumed.
It might be some sort of test to see if they were qualified for the roles that they were taking on in the future, or even the ones that they held now, but it did seem like the King of Cygnia was taking the possibility that an outside force was organizing the Ogres and Goblins against him very seriously.
For once, Dominic even managed to return to his room from the front lines without any blood at all on him.
But he still went for a shower, enjoying the last hot water he was likely to see for a while, unless one of the rigs had a proper shower rigged up instead of stopping by a river.
It wasn’t like travel showers didn’t exist. The stores even had multiple options in both mechanical and magical heating devices, but for a travelling military group the temperature of the water was less important than the quality, and they didn’t want to waste stored water unless they had a water witch or a wizard with them that could replace it.
Once he decided that he smelled decent enough, Dominic packed a few of the scented soaps in his Inventory Cube and looked around for anything else that he might need.
He traded the "lucky" tempering oil with the oil from the sealed bucket for his travelling forge setup, and then double-checked his belongings. It looked like the important stuff was all here. He didn’t own enough to have to consider how much would fit in the cube. A few outfits, the tools and his pile of spare parts and trash drop items came to a little over half its capacity.
Today’s Hobgoblins hadn’t given him anything good but the mana cores, but that was enough to keep his forge working with his usual efficiency. Or, he could feed them into his new spell book and start levelling it up. With every spell cast at the same level, he would be at a huge advantage once he had a few more spells and some levels into the book.