After the wheat was harvested, the tax collectors would come around the village.

Enri was obviously worried about how she was going to explain the presence of the goblins in the village.

Should she say they were summoned beasts, or that they were her henchmen, or maybe she should say…

Enri had the feeling that they were always concerned about her.

It wasn’t limited to worrying about her safety, they were thinking about her feelings too. What could she do for these goblins?

What could she do for these rowdy and reliable new members of her family…

♦ ♦ ♦

Using the still-clean back of her hand to wipe off the sweat trickling down her neck, Enri bundled up the weeds she had just finished cutting. The large pile of shredded plant matter gave off the fragrance of freshly-cut grass.

Her body was tired from working long hours in the field and the way her sweat-slicked clothes clung to her body made Enri uncomfortable.

To lift her mood, Enri stretched herself out.

As she did, her eyes swept across the sprawling fields.

The wheat they’d planted had grown slowly but steadily, and as the harvest season approached, the wheat would slowly turn golden. Although a wheat field painted gold was a beautiful sight, the weeding work before that was both essential and annoying. If it wasn’t done, that golden field would also be a very lonely one.

Her labour now was entirely for the sake of the harvest to come.

She straightened her body to let her stiff muscles loosen, and to let her tightly-wound body relax. The wind felt refreshingly cool on her skin that had been overheated from long hours of field work.

The wind also brought the sound of a commotion from the village to her ears.

It sounded like something banging on something, and shouts for getting people to combine their strength as one. These were sounds that had never been heard before in the village. At this moment, the village was working to turn all manner of plans and ideas into reality.

Of these plans, the ones with the highest priority were the wall surrounding the village, and the construction of the watchtowers. It went without saying that all these were projects were intended to turn the village into a fortress.

Carne Village stood at the edge of the Great Forest of Tob, and the forest was the home of many wild beasts, or in other words, dangerous territory. It would be impossible to live in peace without the protection of sturdy walls.

However, Carne Village was laid out in neat rows of houses radiating from a central square in all directions. Without anything like a wall in place, anyone could easily enter the village. Until recently, the village had been peaceful and the wild beasts did not enter, even though it was right next to the forest.

That was because the mighty creature known as the Wise King of the Forest had continually expanded its sphere of influence, and as such, no beast dared move around in the forest near the village. So the village defenses were comparable to a wall of steel.

And then, all this changed due to human intervention.

The knights of the Empire attacked the village and killed her parents. As a result, nobody in the village held on to the hope that things would go back to the way they used to be.

In contrast, the goblin troop leader, Jugem, had proposed the fortification of the village as a countermeasure against such a scenario. Once he mentioned that the goblins would be unable to protect the village if it was attacked again due to lack of their number, the motion immediately received unanimous approval from all parties concerned. This was because even now, many of the villagers were still having nightmares that woke them from their sleep.

The first step was to dismantle the unoccupied houses and use them to build a wall. Of course, those materials were insufficient on their own, so they would have to enter the forest to cut down trees for lumber. Since entering the forest’s depths might mean encroaching on the Wise King of the Forest’s territory, their harvest area had to proceed along the outskirts of the forest toward the distance.

Naturally, the goblins were the ones who provided security for the wood-cutting villagers.

As a result of them taking on that task, the villagers’ distrust of the goblins had almost completely disappeared. Part of that was because human knights, who were of the same race as themselves, had attacked them. Even if they were of the same race, they had tried to take the villagers’ lives. In contrast, the goblins worked under Enri to contribute to the village, even though they were of a different species. The decision of which side to trust was no longer one which could be easily settled by deciding along racial lines.

And the most important reason was that the goblins were strong. They could serve as warriors to take on the duties of sentries, and when people were hurt, the goblin priest Cona could heal them.

It was difficult to despise goblins like these.

In this way, the goblins managed to establish themselves in the village in just a few short days and quickly became an indispensable part of village life. This could be seen from the house the goblins lived in; no consideration had been made of the fact that they were from another race, and a large house had been built close to Enri’s own home in the middle of the village.

Although the villagers and the goblins had worked together on the village defense plan, there simply weren’t enough hands to make the work go quickly. As such, in the beginning they had only built simple fences.

As fate would have it, the Wise King of the Forest, who kept the monsters at bay from the village, became a follower of a certain black-armored warrior and abandoned its territory. Although they had managed to complete the fences with great effort, the villagers could not take joy in their accomplishment, but instead sighed about their rotten luck.

However, a sturdy wall now defended the village.

The cause for this turn for the better was the labor wrought by the stone golems that had been brought to the village by the beautiful maid that served the village’s savior ― Ainz Ooal Gown.

Golems were inexhaustible constructs; when given an order they would silently execute it, and their strength far outstripped that of a human being. Although their lack of dexterity meant that they could not perform certain tasks which required precision, their participation in the work had enabled it to proceed with an unbelievable speed. With the effort of the unsleeping and untiring stone golems, the construction of the wall practically flew along.

They could accomplish the tasks which the villagers and goblins could not, such as chopping down trees and transporting them in large quantities, digging pits, or laying the foundations for the walls. What should have taken years to accomplish in theory had instead been finished in a matter of days, and the constructed wall was even bigger and sturdier than expected.