As I set up the gate, I worried about how to explain to people why we were claiming a toll. What we were doing was technically robbery, but I found a simple way to make sure they understood it was the lord’s fault.
I was able to set up a large video screen near the gate. It turned out my tablet had functions similar to what an administrator would have had in the game. I could review not only chat logs, but also video replay. The audio was intact, and I was able to set it up so that the clip would play on the screen. I couldn’t understand what the lord was saying, but the same wasn’t true for the people visiting the city.
The clip began at the moment he made everyone else leave the room, and ended after the point he tried to grab me. It was from a third person perspective, as well. I’d originally wanted to set it up to keep playing over and over again on a loop, but I decided that would be too annoying for the guards. In the end, I set it up so that there was a large green play button beneath the screen. When a guard pushed it, it would play the whole clip.
The guards themselves were originally Spriguardians, a defense-oriented Sprigoblin variant, but I upgraded them to Faeguards. They looked like regular Sprigians, but they wore heavy full plate armor. There were ten on each side of the gate, all of them level eleven. In other words, they were pretty robust. Since they controlled the gatehouse, they could limit the number of people who were allowed in at a time, so the numbers game wasn’t ever going to catch up to them. I had Ursa wait nearby, too, just in case there was any trouble.
With the overwhelming force of my gate guards and the video evidence, everyone paid the toll. Well, I say paid, but the guards basically had instructions to take fifty percent of fruit imports and five percent of other food imports. If they weren’t bringing in food, then the guards had orders to just take money. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how they valued their currency, so they just took a few of whichever coin they had the most of.
After a while, we formed a theory of which coins had the most value and which had the least. The lord’s soldiers showed up, but the guards didn’t open the gate for them. They tried going into the labyrinth, but they lost. I made sure they were only ever knocked out and sent back to the entrance, though, so nobody died. Yeah, as it turned out, I could set the violent areas of the labyrinth to “stun” rather than kill challengers.
After a few days, we noticed more people were leaving the city than entering. I figured the food situation had to be getting worse, since merchants probably lost quite a bit of money due to our tolls. I made sure to record everything we seized, and who we took it from, so that we could pay them back later.
In most cases, when the people we’d taken stuff from left the city, we returned the things we took. In the case of fruit, which would rot if it was left too long, if they didn’t return within a certain amount of time, we’d eat it ourselves and then compensate them with similar fruits later. The people seemed puzzled when we returned their stuff, but it seemed to help us avoid a lot of resentment. After a while, I think word got around that we weren’t really trying to steal things, we just wanted to limit the resources going into the city. Hence the drop in imports. I didn’t know exactly how fast information traveled in this world, but I felt like we were making progress.
I wasn’t sure how many people lived in the city, either, but I was fairly certain the food situation was beginning to deteriorate. Not much food was going in, and it seemed like they didn’t produce much within the city itself.
To help the regular people, I expanded the dungeons and made a food market near the gate. This actually worked really well, and we were able to sell a lot of fruit to the citizens. We didn’t know how to price the goods, so we went pretty cheap. The goal was to offer relief to citizens who weren’t able to afford rising prices in town. We were also able to get rid of perishable vegetables and other food we confiscated that would go bad if it was left for too long. We fairly compensated the merchants in those cases as well. In the case of meat, we would sometimes give them edible parts of monsters my Irregulars hunted in the forest, which were actually considered rare and valuable in the city. Many of them actually profited in the end because we took their stuff. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time.
After we set up our little food market, a bunch of soldiers showed up and tried to seize the food for themselves, but my guards knocked them all out.
Apparently Hegram and his group had left the city while I wasn’t looking, which was a shame—I kinda wanted to say goodbye to them before they left. Maybe they had avoided me on purpose. I wasn’t sure how close they were to the local lord, but I hoped this incident wouldn’t impact my own relationship with them.
We kept up the blockade for about two more weeks. The city was much less lively now. Many of the citizens left and didn’t come back. I actually had my Faegoblin Irregulars watching the roads to make sure people stayed safe as they fled. I was also able to determine where some other towns and villages were, and I set up Way-Point Flowers near all of them. Oh, Sprigoblins normally became Faegoblins at level ten, so I made sure to power up all of the Irregular teams that patrolled the area. Faegoblins were taller and more slender than Sprigoblins, and their skin was more blue than green. They looked a lot more reliable, as well.
As the blockade was about to enter its third week, a large military force appeared. They were dressed about the same as the local lord’s men, but they were flying a different banner. I wondered if they were reinforcements from somewhere, but I wasn’t worried. There wasn’t really anything they could do to stop me. Maybe they were here to bring the local lord to justice... The thought crossed my mind, but I brushed it off. No way things would work out that well.
Mixed in with the army was a caravan of fancy carriages, all bearing the same crest as the banners the soldiers were flying. I discussed the situation with my guards, and we decided to wait and see if this force was hostile before acting.
When the force drew closer to the gate, the carriages moved to the front. I told the guards to open the gate and allow the carriages in, but they stopped short of the entrance. A man emerged from the most elaborate carriage, flanked by guards. He wore an ornate but tasteful blue robe and a red mantle. His face was adorned with a full beard, but it was well maintained. Atop his head was a golden crown, and at his belt was what looked to be a sheathed broadsword. His blond hair reminded me of the local lord’s, but his was much healthier looking. This man was definitely a king, or whatever they called them here.