Now that Durus had a decent number of mages, it was so much easier to get
things done. Construction was easier than it would probably ever be on
Earth, and the monsters had become more of a common nuisance than a real
enemy. A monster came in, a town mage was assigned to dispense with it, and
they did. No one had died from an attack in decades, and no one had been
seriously injured in several years. The Durune humans knew what they were
doing, and their population continued to rise at a predictable rate. They
stopped planning for new towns ahead of time, because each one would only
take a matter of weeks, depending on which mages they had access to for a
given development, and how complex they wanted that town to be. People did
still want to move to new places though; that was a value that wasn’t going
to change anytime soon, so whenever the need arose, someone would be there
to make it happen. They would keep planning to build them until something
changed about their situation, which it did. Fort Frontline proved to be one
of the best ideas that the mages had ever come up with, but it was beginning
to be less effective. The monsters were seeking out people, and to get to
most of these people, they would usually end up going through Frontline
first. That stopped being such a reliable outcome, though. For reasons no
one could tell from this end of the broken portal, starting around 2077,
monsters were coming in faster, and more abundantly. Experts still weren’t
sure exactly what was on the other side or even what these things were—and
no one was brave enough to investigate—so there was really no way to know
what was causing the influx, but it could prove to be a problem.
The Fort Frontline method was no longer good enough on its own. The monsters
were simply going around the fort, and not because they were becoming smart
enough to avoid it, but because there were too many of them now, and they
didn’t exactly travel in a single file line. Fortunately, there was a simple
solution to this. All they would need to do was build a second military
outpost. The tenth town, insomuch as it was a town, would be called
Fort Salient. It was built closest to the portal ring than anyone ever
thought it was possible to survive. While it was a crapshoot where on that
ring a monster appeared, they did seem to come through more often on the
Southwest side. So that was where Fort Salient sat, within clear view of the
ring. It was the first thing these monsters saw, so they always went right
for it. The strongest fighters in Fort Frontline, and elsewhere, were
assigned there. If you were posted at Salient, it meant that the source
mages saw potential in you. They wanted you to fight in the war until its
bitter end, and there wasn’t a question whether that would happen, only
when. Seers were predicting the end of the war, but seers are always
purposefully vague. They’ll only give you enough information to make it to
your destiny. If they just laid it all out on a roadmap, you would probably
try to change it, and screw everything up. Some people interpreted this omen
to mean they needed to go on the offensive, instead of just defending
themselves, and Fort Salient became the first staging ground for these
battles. This was when it turned back into a true war, complete with damage
to infrastructure, and casualties. Some called this year the beginning of
the end of the Protectorate, but most agree that it would have fallen much
sooner if not for the brave men and women who fought here.
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