Chapter 52 - Nodular Gnarled Club Please Follow

“No doubt, it’s these days, the last three days of every tenday, he will definitely come back,” Gos, trotting behind Gaven, said with absolute certainty.Comparatively, Gos remembered this day better than Roar did.

Because these were the hardest days of every tenday for them, in order to fill Roar’s big belly, they often had to go hungry for several days.

“Alright, no training today.

You do the usual and collect the tribute,” Gaven confirmed the plan for the day.

“Collect tribute?” The half-ogre scratched his bald head, shaking it, “No go, their tributes are trash, not tasty.

Roar is already full, uh…

my lord, you don’t want to drive Roar away, do you?

Roar pledges loyalty to the lord, won’t run away, won’t collect tribute anymore.”

The half-ogre had a rare moment of enlightenment, but he put it to the wrong use, thinking Gaven was testing his loyalty, so he hastily showed his loyalty by thumping his chest.

“The lord asks you to collect tribute, not really for the tribute, but for…

whatever the lord does, he surely has his profound reasons.

You just need to follow the lord’s wishes and that will be enough,” Gos guessed Gaven’s intention to some extent, but wasn’t entirely sure.

“Really?” The half-ogre paid no attention to the pretentious Gos, his simple gaze fixed on Gaven.

“When I tell you to collect tribute, I do have my own plans.

This time I’m not sending you alone, I will bring people, following behind you.

You just need to follow the usual route, collect all the usual tribute, and hand it over to us.

If you don’t like what they offer, bring it back and let our cooks work on it.

Once the task is done, I’ll reward you with a barrel of ale,” Gaven nodded, not planning to explain too much to the half-ogre.

Considering his capacity for understanding, Gaven’s plan was too complicated; the half-ogre probably wouldn’t get it.

He just needed to play his usual role.

“A barrel of ale?” Just hearing it, the half-ogre nearly drooled.

He had tasted this beverage on the night of the welcoming at the Cangya Tribe.

With the first sip, he had liked it.

However, when it came to distributing ale, Gaven didn’t allocate based on size.

The same mug that was large in the hands of a gnoll became a tiny cup to him, barely enough for a mouthwash, a mere taste.

But with a barrel, he could probably enjoy a proper drink.

The half-ogre was immediately invigorated, thumping his chest, “Let’s go, collect tribute.

I will collect a large amount of tribute for the lord.”

“This is your new weapon,” Gaven pointed to an open space nearby, “Try it and see if it feels right.”

The weapon of Roar, the half-ogre, had long been burned by Gaven for firewood.

It was not only clumsy but also stank terribly, not even worth recycling.

On the open space lay a giant wooden club, still, but it was made from a thick branch of a Vanda tree.

This type of nodular needleleaf tree was famously sturdy and an excellent choice for making bows and weapon handles, with a small grove on the nearby mountains.

The newly crafted giant club was somewhat shaped like a baseball bat, only much longer and thicker.

The nodular nature of the Vanda tree was perfectly demonstrated on this weapon, forming bumps the size of eggs, which would also enhance the club’s lethality.

The giant club was polished smooth, especially the latter half meant for gripping, which was tightly wrapped in burlap to prevent slippage.

It showed the Vanda wood’s golden yellow, with a unique, misshapen beauty.

“This is for me?” Roar was somewhat in disbelief.

“What, don’t you like it?” Gaven remembered the half-ogre’s unique aesthetic.

“Like it, like it a lot,” the half-ogre nodded hastily, finding the nodular deformity very much to his taste.

“Try the feel, mainly the balance.” This weapon, naturally, came from Gaven’s hands.

It was a craft forced upon him when he was a slave at the Santarin Association. Googlᴇ search ɴovᴇl(ꜰ)ir(e).nᴇt

Many times he had to make do with what was at hand and create temporary weapons, a giant wooden club being the most straightforward and rough.

This time was the first he made a weapon for a larger figure.

Though he had previously used the Enlarge spell to test it himself, his strength was significantly less than the half-ogre’s, so the feel was quite markedly different.

“Good, good, good!” The half-ogre grinned broadly, continuously praising as he swung his nodular gnarled club, which buzzed with each motion.

Talking to him about the feel and balance of the weapon was like playing the lute to a cow.

Having used crude tree stumps as weapons for most of his life, now possessing a weapon custom-made for him felt incredibly natural; why would he have any other demands?

Even someone as clueless as Gos could sense that with the new weapon, the half-ogre had become even more formidable.

Because the speed of his weapon swings had considerably increased, dodging his attacks had become much harder.

Aside from Gaven, there were few who could easily evade his wide swings.

With his new weapon in hand, Hou’s mood was very cheerful; as he walked, he kept swinging it non-stop, bringing misfortune to the roadside flowers, grass, and saplings, all knocked aside in disarray.

Fortunately, the half-ogre treasured his new weapon and didn’t foolishly decide to strike the roadside boulders.

This also had a benefit: Gaven and his companions wouldn’t lose track of him, they simply followed the trail of fallen flora to find where the half-ogre had gone.

Using the half-ogre Hou to collect taxes was Gaven’s way of killing several birds with one stone.

Finding the sources of Spirit Crystal Stones was just one of them.

Another was to further leverage the half-ogre’s influence in the vicinity, particularly over the Gnoll Tribes they encountered.

Whenever they encountered such tribes, Gaven and his companions would wait for the half-ogre to strut his stuff before appearing alongside Gos.

Then they would start their double act.

Gaven subdued the half-ogre, putting on the air of a mysterious and profound master.

Gos, on the other hand, would feign authority and start persuading the tribe, urging them to join the Blackwell Tribe family, employing threats and temptations with a natural flair.

Although not many of the Gnoll Tribes would join the Blackwell Tribe on the spot, the message had been conveyed.

In the following period, they would certainly try all means to spy on the Blackwell Tribe’s situation.

As long as the Blackwell Tribe maintained its current rapid expansion, those tribes would be forced to reconsider Gos’s proposal today.

The third goal was to exploit the Goblin Tribes as much as possible; even though most of what they got from them was junk, every little bit helps, and it all added up to a considerable amount.

The most important aspect was the zero-sum game at play.

With the rapid expansion of the Blackwell Tribe, their range of activities would gradually increase, inevitably leading to conflicts with the neighboring Goblin Tribes.

It was unlikely that they would join the Gnoll Tribes and in order to survive, they might resort to violence.

This was essentially a way of weakening future enemies.

“You can’t stand by the river without getting your shoes wet.”

Not even Gaven had expected that a routine tax collection would encounter a hitch, let alone the half-ogre Hou.

The half-ogre was barred outside a simple Goblin Camp, and the goblins above shrilly declared, “From today onwards, we no longer need to give you tributes, we have a new guardian.”