Chapter 20: Tagkarit, Zone 3 and Mountain Fortress (Zone 1 Extension)
Personal System Calendar: Year 00014, Day 1-28, Month XII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6858, 1st to 28th day of the 12th Month
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Reviewing the Zones Left Behind
The second to the last month of the year has arrived and with it came the review no one had gotten around to yet.
Within Maya Village, Zone 3 and the mountain fortress (Zone 1 Extension) had been left largely to their own devices while the rest of the village pushed through its expansion period. That was not neglect exactly. Both zones were stable and self-sufficient enough that they hadn't needed the kind of attention that Zone 2 and Zone 4 had demanded. But stability wasn't the same as it being developed, and the department heads had agreed it was time to bring them into line with everything else that had been built up over the past year.
Zone 3 came first in the discussion.
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Zone 3 — The Beast Folk Enclave
Zone 3 was a small community by every measure. Eight communal homes spread across a population of around two hundred and ten. Each home could house up to fifty people, so the current population wasn't anywhere near filling the available space. Each communal home also functioned as a farmhouse, with two hundred and fifty square meters of farm and garden area spread around it. The chief had mentioned recently that guests were expected at some point. He didn't say when or how he knew. He just said so, and the council took note of it without pressing him for details.
The walls of Zone 3 ran for seven hundred and fifty meters. At their south-eastern end they touched the base of the mountain, which gave the zone a natural rear defense that no amount of wooden palisade could match. Where Zone 3 connected to Zone 2 the walls were simpler — wooden palisade construction with a tower each covering a hundred and fifty meters to the entire wall's stretch. It was the weakest section of the village perimeter and everyone knew it. Upgrading it was on the list.
The plan to bring the communal home count up to ten was already in motion. Two additional structures would go up to accommodate the expected arrivals. The three large Lokoroko greenhouse complexes in Zone 3 were the first prototypes ever built in the village and were still operational. Those would likely expand to five complexes in the near future, following the same model that had proven itself across the rest of the village by now.
The food arrangement in Zone 3 was different from the rest of the village. The beast folk there were not primarily farmers at least for those in the Kotoko Clan. They were hunters first. Carnivorous by preference and habit, though their diet was varied enough to include what the Lokoroko Clans greenhouses produced. The communal homes functioned partly as farmhouses with spread-out garden areas, but the bulk of their caloric intake came from hunts into the surrounding forest. This was what the Kotoko clan was built for. They were exceptional hunters and they also gave vast knowledge with the surrounding territory which is on par with any hunter within the village.
The tax arrangement with Zone 3 had been in place for a while now and it worked well enough that nobody had suggested changing it. The village took thirty percent of the excess produce and game above what Zone 3 needed for its own winter stores and pantries. The remaining seventy percent was purchased from Zone 3 at eighty percent of current market value. This gave the beast folk there a source of income without requiring them to engage directly with the village market system, which most of them had little interest in navigating on their own.
Chief Kotoko handled the transactions on behalf of his community. His brothers helped. The proceeds were distributed to the individuals who had produced the goods. It was a straightforward enough system once you understood that the beast folk here operated on an entirely different relationship with commerce than the rest of the village. They understood money. They just didn't naturally think in those terms. Bartering was more instinctive for them. The village had worked around that rather than against it, and the arrangement had held.
Beyond the food and commerce side, Zone 3 citizens were entitled to the same baseline provisions as any other villager — free sustenance and housing. In practice Zone 3 barely used the sustenance provision because they fed themselves well enough on their own. What the village had offered instead that actually meant something to them was monthly medical visits. A team from the medical department made the trip out every month for a full healing session. Zone 3 had its own healers and didn't strictly need outside help, but they accepted the offer and the relationship had been good since.
They also had four wild Grimfangs living in the zone. One of them was Scratch. The other three had come with him or followed after. The Kotoko hunters had a closer relationship with those four than anyone in the main village did, which was saying something given how Scratch had integrated into the broader community over time.
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Zone 3's Own Achievement — Domesticated Boarats and Rabbiets
The single most unexpected development in Zone 3 had nothing to do with the greenhouse expansion or the wall upgrades or the tax arrangement. It was the Boarats.
A few years back a group of Kotoko hunters had caught four Boarat piglets and brought them back alive. The idea came from watching what the village had done with its own livestock program. If the village could domesticate common animals, there was no reason in principle why the same couldn't be done with Boarats, which were available in numbers in the surrounding forest and provided excellent meat. The experiment started small and was largely ignored by the rest of the village at the time.
It had worked surprisingly well.
The current population of domesticated Boarats in Zone 3 was capped at thirty per year. The fifth generation of captive-bred animals was noticeably calmer than the original four, though not by enough to make anyone careless around them. They were still wild-natured underneath the domestication and the village had specifically decided not to fold them into the main supply chain for exactly that reason. The inherent danger hadn't gone away, it had just been reduced. August had looked at the current generation himself and noted that the domesticated setting had kept them at the common rank size rather than growing into the larger variants you encountered in the wild. That was a significant finding on its own.
The Kotoko clan had also gotten Rabbiets into a breeding program. August had lectured the village at some point in the past about the types of beasts in the immediate area and Rabbiets had come up. The beast folk had apparently listened carefully and then gone out and figured out how to catch them, which was not a small feat given how fast Rabbiets moved. Whatever method they developed they hadn't fully explained, but the colony was now established and producing.
Rabbiet meat was good. It had found its own corner of the market in Maya Village and traded regularly. The fur and leather had also moved well, picked up by the village's clothing and light armor industries where Rabbiet hide had proven soft and durable in combination. The discovery that Rabbiets responded well to a particular fruit August had mentioned in that same lecture had also helped with keeping the colony healthy and manageable.
Both programs were Zone 3's contribution to the village's livestock production and both had been driven entirely by the Kotoko clan's own initiative.
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Tagkarit — A Fishing Settlement Growth
Tagkarit had also been through a significant expansion period.
Before the refugee redistribution, Tagkarit had around twenty-two homes spread across a population of three hundred and thirty people. A small community built around fishing and logging, with a separate section of buildings across the river connected by two bridges and was also accessible by boat. That layout still defined the settlement but it had grown considerably. Forty additional homes had been constructed to absorb the six hundred refugees redirected from Maya Village when the main population count climbed past what the village's existing housing could comfortably take.
The homes built in Tagkarit were not the same design as what you found in Maya Village. They were adapted to the waterfront context and came in two distinct types.
The first type was the Fisherman's Modified Row Longhouse. These were built along the waterfront for the fishing families. Each structure was divided internally into three living sections, each section holding up to five people. The entrance to each house was at the rear facing the land side. The front of the building faced the water. From the water-facing side extended a ten-foot deck platform interconnected between all the waterfront homes, serving as a shared pathway to get from one house to the boats. The garden arrangement for these homes was two elongated plots, each ten by four meters, running along the path leading to the land-facing entrance.
The second type was the Modified Row Longhouse for homes further from the water. These followed the same internal division of three sections per building but were oriented differently. They faced the main road rather than the water and had two garden fields per house section — two plots of ten by four meters at the back and two of six by four meters at the front.
Both types were longer and wider than what Maya Village used for its standard longhouses. Each Tagkarit longhouse ran a hundred and eighty feet divided across its three sections, fifty feet wide, fifteen feet at the peak. Individual chimneys for each section. Cellars running the full length and width of the structure at fifteen feet depth.
The Fisherman's Modified Row Longhouses on the waterfront couldn't be fitted with underground cellars because of their proximity to the water. The solution that was provided was straightforward. Those homes got an additional five feet of height added to the interior, and that upper space was used for storage in place of a cellar.
Across the river there were eighteen Fisherman's Modified Row Longhouses and twenty-two Modified Row Longhouses. The settlement sat behind wooden walls with two towers at each cardinal entrance capable of mounting ballistas. The remaining towers functioned as lookouts.
For the next round of construction the village had agreed that new builds in Tagkarit would include provisions for domesticated poultry alongside the standard garden plots. The fishing families had asked about it and the request was reasonable. Tagkarit already had two dedicated greenhouses for its own population's dietary variety. Those weren't production-scale operations. They were there to supplement a community whose primary food source was fish and whose grain supply came from Maya Village. The market stalls in Tagkarit served the same function as an outpost of the main market, mostly run by people who had recognized the opportunity to give Tagkarit quicker access to village goods without requiring a trip to Zone 2. Three tavern and inn buildings handled the accommodation side for visitors.
The fisherman elder who held a seat on the council had already submitted a formal request to the relevant departments outlining the settlement's plans to expand capacity to fifteen hundred people. The groundwork for that expansion would be the next thing Tagkarit put its attention toward once the current housing was fully settled.
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The Mountain Fortress Apomayon — The Last Line of Defesne
The mountain fortress that occupied the Zone 1 extension had been running as a quiet, tightly controlled installation since it was first established. By current count it could house around two thousand and five hundred villagers that are evacuated from the main village. There was a separate area that was made deeper between the dwarven community and the roughly fifty humans who worked the mine shafts and stone quarries inside the mountain. The dwarves were the ones tasked by the village to manage the fortress. While the humans worked alongside them.
The fortress was not somewhere you wandered into. Entry and exit were controlled by twenty-one specially selected entrance guards, the most elite personnel the security department had assigned anywhere in the village. Inside, five patrol squads of five guards each covered the interior passageways and the dwarven residential sections. The total security force within the fortress numbered fifty-one. The access protocols were strict. Only personnel with the appropriate clearance came and went on regular days, and there were parts of the interior layout that were not public knowledge for good reason. The fortress was planned as the village's last line of defense and was designed to be treated as such.
The dwarves had a warrior culture of their own. It was currently inactive in a formal sense because the village's security protocols gave them the structure they needed without requiring them to operate independently. They were integrated into the broader defensive framework of the village rather than parallel to it. When they came down from the mountain it was usually to the taverns in Zone 2 after a long shift. They drank what was available and were generally good company once you understood how they communicated, which was directly and without much ceremony.
The dwarven and human residents inside the mountain didn't have their own dedicated food production. They relied on what the village provided. Supply runs went up regularly. It was a clean arrangement and it hadn't caused any friction.
Now the proposal on the table was a significant one. The fortress needed to grow.
The current capacity of two thousand and five hundred civilians and one hundred and fifty soldiers was adequate for what the fortress was before. But it was no longer adequate for what it needed to be in three to five years when the village population was projected to push toward twenty-five thousand. A last-resort evacuation point that could only absorb a fraction of the population it was supposed to protect was not functioning as designed.
The expansion target was twenty-five thousand.
| Category | Current | Planned Expansion |
|---|---|---|
| Civilian capacity | 2,500 | 25,000 |
| Emergency food storage — 6 months | — | 6,250 tons |
| Emergency food storage — 1 year rationed | — | 12,500 tons |
| Underground water storage | — | 4 large installations |
| Level count | — | 5 levels |
| Per level footprint | — | 122m x 122m at 4m ceiling height |
Five levels cut into the mountain's natural stone depth. Each level at a hundred and twenty-two by a hundred and twenty-two meters with four-meter ceilings. The combination of Earth elementalists and the dwarven masons already living inside the mountain made this achievable. They already knew the stone they are working with. They already had the tools and the experience and the established working patterns that any outside crew would take months to develop. The fortress expansion was exactly the kind of project the dwarven community had been built to handle.
The food storage target was built around the evacuation scenario. If the village ever needed to move its full population into the mountain, six months of comfortable provision and a year of rationed supply was the operating margin the council had agreed on. Underground water tanks would go in alongside the expanded storage levels. The infrastructure would scale with the space.
Construction planning would go to the dwarven and human teams inside the fortress. They would determine the sequencing and the method. The village would provide whatever supply and coordination they needed from the outside. The fortress had to be ready before it was truly needed, and the timeline to get it to the twenty-five thousand capacity target was the next three to five years.
Given how fast everything else in Maya Village had been built, that was not an unreasonable timeline. It was an aggressive one. But by now the village had gotten used to those.