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"Greeting Commander Orin and warriors from the Rock Claw tribe… and other tribes." one of the more ornately armored men said as he stepped forward. "First, let us get introductions out of the way."
The ornately armored men began by gesturing to themselves, "I am Druvak, chieftain of the Kharuni tribe; this is Chieftain Valzera of the Velkath tribe; Chieftain Tuharan of the Omariq tribe; Chieftain Rael of the Teshari tribe; Chieftain Morgun of the Dranthu tribe; Chieftess Zehni of the Zuhmai tribe; and Chieftain Sovan of the Narakwen tribe."
Orin and Voro gave a polite bow befitting of greeting a foreign chieftain. "I am Commander Orin, of the Rock Claw tribe, son of Grud, and this is Voro, my brother and second in command." Orin said as he gestured to his brother.
Chieftain Druvak nodded and said, "Come, let us discuss things further in the command tent."
Orin and Voro looked at each other before Voro nodded and waved forward two of the senior hunters to accompany Orin while he stayed back with the rest of the men.
In the command tent, Orin was offered a seat next to his two senior hunters. He then began the meeting by asking, "Seeing that all the chieftains are here, does that mean the battlefront is stable or at least at a stalemate?"
The chieftains looked at each other before Druvak replied, "There are multiple skirmishes between scout groups as we are trying to find the enemy's main force, and no doubt the enemy is trying to do the same, but we managed to narrow it down to four areas." he said as he pointed at four circled areas on the makeshift dirt map.
Orin nodded as he studied the map and asked, "So, what are we up against? Your emisaries were vague on the answer."
Drucak nodded. "That is because it is still not confirmed. From what we have gathered so far, we were facing off against two medium tribes and three smaller tribes."
"Were? Has there been any change recently?" Orin asked as he caught the implication of the past tense.
"As of one week ago, we encountered warriors with different tribe markings. After asking around, we discovered that another small and medium-sized tribe has joined the enemy's side." Druvak replied.
"Do we know their numbers? How big a force are we facing?" Orin Asked
"Before we sent for you, we were about equal, maybe a little more on their side. Now, without your reinforcements, they will definitely outnumber us by a lot." Zehni, chieftess of the Zuhmai tribe answered.
After looking at the map for a few moments, Orin asked, "So, where do you need my men to be deployed? I mean no disrespect to the fighting capability of your tribes, but we prefer to fight on our own, as we are more used to our own style and command."
As Orin asked this question, he glanced up at the faces of the chieftains before him. While most of them showed no sign of reaction, two of them looked mildly relieved at his request to separate themselves from their forces.
That by itself was a benign reaction to his professed preference of command. But combined with the way the emicaries have been acting on the way here, Orin could sense something was amiss. Even so, he pretended that he did not notice and moved on to the next topic.
Eventually, they came to an agreement on when and which objective they would be moving on to and how they would coordinate their strikes on different target locations.
When Orin got back to his men, he spoke loud enough for only Voro to hear. "Tell the men to make camp, we march at first light tomorrow, and when we openly deploy scouts, tell some of them to split off and keep an eye on our allies. Something does not smell right."
Voro nodded and proceeded to carry out Orin's commands, and as the bustle of camp being set up around him, Orin discreetly kept an eye on the allies who requested their help, looking for any signs that might give him insight into what they were scheming.
***
Back home at the Rock Claw Chiefdom, the World Language research was abuzz. With three symbols to play with, Grud and his family have been finding different ways to manipulate the symbols, and more importantly, what traits all three symbols share when being manipulated. Some aspects were universal across all three, but most were specific to their symbol, and there were even some that worked with one symbol but not the other.
For example, the Cold symbol alone could only cause the temperature in the manipulated area to drop; that was it. But when the Water symbol was cast in the same area, it made the water cold, and after a few seconds of the caster channeling all their mana into the Cold symbol, it produced ice. And after playing around with the symbols, one of Grud's children discovered that they could make ice sculptures if the one casting the Water symbol manipulates and maintains the water into a certain shape long enough for the other person casting Cold to freeze the outer layer of water.
This led to hours of fun and mana-exhausted shamans retiring for the day.
With the creation of ice being the proof of concept, they started mixing and matching the other symbols. Eventually, they discovered that mixing two different symbols was not always a one-to-one ratio thing, which led to more experimentation. And since a person could only cast a single symbol at a time, it took at least two people to cast what they temporarily named "Mixed Symbols".
When they tried mixing the effects of Fire and Cold, they only ended up with a weaker fire. But when they mixed Fire and Water, with the Water symbol in a much lower ratio, they produced steam, and with more experimentation, the two casters can coordinate where to direct the steam.
But all that was small potatoes compared to what Grud had assigned his children to do: find a practical way to use these symbols. Because besides using them in combat, they hadn't found a way to keep the symbols active on their own without a shaman powering them, and Grud didn't want to reveal their battlefield use just yet.
This meant that they needed something to stand in for the shaman, which led to the beginning of the primitive version of the study of material science. As they tested anything and everything to see if it could interact with the symbols, Grud eventually tapped on his other children in other professions to provide test material. Everything from plants, rocks, ores, metals, animal remains, and even human remains.
Eventually, they got to the rare stuff. Monster remains. Grud had been hesitant to use it for testing because ever since the long winter, there had been no monster signthing. Larger wildlife that was worth hunting was starting to return to the area, and Grud hoped that monsters would follow to fill the gap in the food chain so he could get his hands on more monster material.
When they tested the symbols on the bones of a monster, they discovered that there was far less degradation compared to when it was carved on more common materials. For example, when the Fire symbol is carved on a normal chunk of bone, the whole bone would catch fire and burn to ashes in a matter of minutes. When the same thing is done to a monster's bone, the burning was localised to the area the symbol was carved, and took hours to burn through.
The same phenomenon applies to every harvestable monster part that could be preserved until they got to the extremely limited amount of monster cores Grud had. As a safety precaution, they chose the Cold symbol to test the first monster core and took an inordinate amount of time carefully scratching the symbol onto it to make sure the core did not crack.
When the symbol was finally engraved, they kicked start the symbol with their own mana, and the symbol worked as expected. The main difference from the other monster parts that they tested was that the monster core was able to sustain itself.
When they timed how long the monster core could sustain the symbol, they found that it could last for somewhere around two and a quarter days.
After the monster core ran out of mana, they inspected it and found that there was almost negligible wear on the monster core that spread out from the symbol, but wear nonetheless.
The next thing to do was to see if the monster core was reusable. So when they tried to start up the symbol again, they found their mana being greedily sucked up by the monster core. It took the better part of fifteen minutes before the monster core stopped taking in mana, but the Cold symbol was working as it had previously.
As they were observing the symbol-engraved monster core in the testing room and rubbing their arms to try and keep themselves warm, one of Grud's daughters said, "This monster core would do a great job at keeping our food cold and preserved like we do in winter."
Speaking her idea aloud got the gears turning in her siblings' minds. "That… is actually a great idea! With this, we can preserve food even during the summer!" one of the brothers exclaimed. "All we need is to dig out a cold room and have a shaman top up the mana in the monster core each day. There are no shortages of shamans in our family or even the tribe, and it's not like all of us will use up all our mana every day. We can keep this up forever!"
"Just one problem," another brother said, interrupting the excitement. "There is already a small amount of ware on the monster core after just two days of testing. If this goes on, it will most likely destroy the monster core, and we do not have a lot of them or the monsters to replace them."
That quickly dampened their excitement, and they returned to brainstorming and testing.
A few days later, they came up with a solution. Instead of engraving the symbol on the monster core, they carefully polished the Cold symbol off the monster core and instead engraved the Cold symbol on a band of copper that was designed to be looped around the monster core.
They took inspiration from their father's armor and weapons by using glue mixed with powdered monster core to let the mana from the monster core properly interact with the symbol-engraved copper.
And it worked.
After a few more days of testing what they dubbed the "Cold Core" in a cold room they specially dug for it, what they predicted would happen, happened. With each day, the cold room was kept cool by recharging the Cold Core before it totally ran out of mana, and the symbol-engraved copper showed wear a lot more advanced than it was when directly engraved on the monster core itself. Each day, the copper looked more and more tarnished, and when they fiddled with the tarnished parts, they found that it was extremely cold and brittle to the point that when Grud picked at it with his fingers, he broke off a piece instead of bending.
But that was the point. Copper could be easily replaced or melted down, re-engraved, and reused, while a monster core could not. As for the glue mixed with monster core powder, all they needed to do to reuse it was to heat the glue over a fire to make it sticky again, and put a fresh piece of copper on it, and the Cold Core was ready to be used again.
With this, Grud's family got the world's first refrigerator.
Grud's children took advantage of this. They expanded the cold room and built shelves inside it to store their own family's perishables.
When the rest of Grud's wives discovered the cold room and what it could do, they were thrilled. With food that could last longer, they now had more options for cooking without stressing over what to use before it spoiled.