Meanwile, the autumn has begun.
One of the new recruits on the very first day of draft said that he is a big fan of Pickahu17 and his fighting style. He claimed himself an ideological sucessor of him, and demand to call him Pickachu18 from now on. I have no doubts that he is going to be a legendary warrior.
Just when we were talking about those matters, I heard screams outside. Ambush, another one, a dozen of them! Elves were jumping from every single tree and from every bush around. Around 70 elves with grizly bears - that's a truly massive raid. I tried to position my archer squad to shoot them from afar, but I failed miserably - we took the main strike before other squads came to help. 4 marksdwarves were killed, I had a severe wound in my chest and huge blood loss - I managed to kill 3 of damned elves though.
They didn't have any chances to beat us in melee fight though. It was a massacre on the ocean beach.
Soon after that I was brought to the hospital with several other dwarves and fell into unconsciousness...
Later I was told that the best warrior in that battle was 'Coattails' - he scored 37 kills by now, which is the best result in the fortress, which placed 'youngbab' to the second position with 34. Pickachu18 has shown a promising results, as I predicted - 5 elves while being an absolute novice! He got some light injuries of the leg though.
In our Axington squad 'SpeciesUnknown' did 7 kills, although 'Weasel' is the leader with 9.
As I was lying in the hospital and listen to the reports, I could conclude that things gets a bit tougher for us. Several dwarves are depressed now, including our baroness DerpyDev. No tantrums or berserks yet though. Too many corpses and remains - I ordered to start doing a pit for them as fast as possible. We will fill it with magma in the future, now we just need to save space.
And for the Armok sake, someone make soap! Our doctor said to me secretly that Coattails shows signs of infection and may even die... I don't want to end like that too!
Just few days after the battle a dwarven caravan came. I could not miss such a chance, and we bought as much metal bars and equipment as we could, among with several bunnies and other (less important) animals. We were selling meals and silver crafts. For the next year, I ordered mainly more bars and equipment.
A minor alarm happened in the cave outpost. I was nervous expecting intrusion of Forgotten Beast, but it was a Sightless - a disgusting creature with tentacles, remotely resembling a human in the upper body. It almost killed our guard dog and injured a metalcrafter, before our cave squad put the thing to rest.
The corpse pit with an automatic dumper is operational now.
Just in time - elven remains are scattered here and there, and miasmas are not adding to overall happiness.
Some tantrums started to spread. No deaths or serious inguries so far, but this is worrying me.
We have 7 or 8 dwarves who are quite miserable. Seeing 'youngbab' full of optimism and cheerfulness [ecstatic with -64k stress] in this harsh times is something that helps me a lot. I tried to cover most obvious complains - we have now sufficient amount of silver goblets, so all dwarves can drink with comfort, but that is clearely not the main reason for low morale. We just need to pack all dead bodies into the pit and wait over, untill the horrors of seeing remains would sink in memory...
A dwarven child made an artifact wooden cup for his daddy Lunardog15! This was the nicest thing I have seen during the year.
Another assault from the the caves, two Disfigures - a strange humanoids.
One of them almost killed two guard dogs and slipped without being noticed by our cave squad, and later a stonecrafter was killed on the main stairway. Later the creature was killed by one of our surface military. The second one was intercepted and easily killed at the cave outpost.
I decided to remove one wall of the cave barracks, so our squad would always could see if someone is trying to enter the fortress from below and engage immediately.
After recent elf attack, our people turned against being ruled by the filthy elf. The anger of our citizens was so intense, that the former mayor were executed at a specially organized site.
No doubts, this fact greatly horrified other elves of the fortess - all of them are now archers in Sneaky Raiders, training and preparing for future raids against their kin. Not an easy destiny - but no one promised that Bandithorses is going to be a resort for them.
The winter days has come.