The time passed and soon Gabriel had finished the garage. He moved everything that he hadn’t used to build it and also brought some of their winter clothes in the new building. It was relatively spacious, considering the size of their house.

The garage had the shape of a rectangle, and it was about three times five meters while the height varied because of the roof of the cave. At its lowest it was about one meter tall, but it reached all the way up to four meters of height.

Gabriel wasn’t sure if he’d ever need to store something so tall, but the entrance had been made with plans for that as the doors went all the way from the ground to the ceiling and they were wide enough to let most objects of such height in.

Now their house looked much tidier, though Gabriel was quickly running out of activities to do. He didn’t have anything else to build, so he crafted more tools and improved the ones he already had, but these tasks were also exhausted.

He tried to do some decorating with wooden arts and crafts, but he was never satisfied with his products and called it quits due to frustration. He was better suited for tasks with less detail, he told himself in order to quench his inner doubts.

But he still was missing things to do, he couldn’t stay static. He tried farming inside the caves, but even though it took care of his free time for a while, he then had to wait for the plants to grow and he needed to find something else to do.

He thought about what had recently happened and the most notable thing within the last few months was the visit from Colly. Unannounced she came very close to the mountain and if she was an enemy things would have been bad. So, he started planning on some defenses.

First, he started relatively simple and inside the tunnels and clearings inside the cave system planted some physical barriers that, if activated, would at least take some time to go through. This was already good enough as it’d give them time to prepare and fight back against any attackers, but Gabriel wasn’t satisfied.

He thought of implementing a similar feature outside the mountain, but it wouldn’t work as well, and it would take much more work. Just a tiny hole in the defenses made them fail, so he would have to do something else.

He thought of constructing some traps, but Arabelle or Piti could fall into any of them, maybe a scout of a nearby country, village or anything civilized could get either see them or fall victim to them and both tensions and suspicions would easily arise, forcing Gabriel to either fight or escape.

But with all the time and work he had put into this place he really didn’t want to leave. He’d do so if forced, but he wouldn’t worsen his situation deliberately. He had to go for another method which wouldn’t be easy to spot and wouldn’t activate when it wasn’t needed.

He would create some magical traps that’d be disabled through another spell which could only be deactivated inside their home. It wasn’t going to be accessible, in order to prevent any visitors from seeing it. But there was one main problem with his plan and that was where he’d get the energy to create so many spells and keep them always ready.

He could create them with his own mana, but the traps would lose their strength over time. He probably could plant some rich-mana plants near them so they wouldn’t deactivate, but it’d make their location too obvious, so he would need to plant them all over the forest.

But this wasn’t the costlier part of the plan, because the spell that would let all others be active would need to constantly exert a force on all the other spells. The other option was for the main spell gave all the others enough mana to be active while the rest of the time they’d only be a structure, probably underground to prevent any distortions caused by nature. Below ground it could also happen, but it was less likely.

Not sure with what plan to got with he flipped a coin he had made himself. It wasn’t of good quality, but he was bored and had a bit of surplus of metal, so he experimented. The carving was his face on one side, with barely noticeable horns and his sisters on the other, with one of the horns gone, as she was now. Well, the horns were still small if he compared with some animals he had observed.

Gabriel’s horns were about two centimeters tall and quite round while his sister had her full horn at about five centimeters of length, though it was mostly covered by her hair and the broken horn had been broken all the way to the two-centimeter mark.

He only made a single coin because he quickly realized that it wasn’t as easy as he thought and he was missing some tools that would make these coins easier to do, like a mold to at least make them take their circular shape.

The coin ended up with his sister’s head on it, so he’d create the safer option that would require a lot of mana saved up so it could activate all the defensive spells at once. He started working through the easier part, making each spell, but this still took him quite some time as he hadn’t worked with detail recently and although some of it could be lost due to the size of each contraption, he still had to be careful while constructing them.

During the same time, he observed their surroundings in search for anything that could serve as a mana storage, but he didn’t find enough. To his sister’s surprise he started letting her out of the mountain, yet not far enough for her to escape. During this time, he wasn’t actually observing over her, trusting that she’d stay home and built the secret room where the traps would be activated.

She was still acting dumb but realized that there were traps installed on the ground, which could hinder her escape, had she not found them right now. She realized that Gabriel wasn’t doing nothing at home and putting two and two together she knew that these contraptions would soon be much better hidden through something her brother was building at home.

Therefore, while her brother was working on hiding these traps, she memorized their location and rebuilt her plans that required a helping hand. Her brother was quite territorial now, so it’d be harder to get someone to help her.

While she thought about this, a pair of men came closer and closer to her back. She acted as if she didn’t realize they were there and “guided” them to the mountain. Her brother had also realized their presence and before Arabelle could enter the cave, the men made their move.

They fastened their approach and unsheathed their weapons to fight Arabelle, but Gabriel fell on top of one of them, dealing quick damage and blocked the others attack with an axe. The man below him groaned and tried to stand up, but Gabriel stomped his hands and head while also battling against the other invader.

When Gabriel managed to defeat his standing opponent, making him fall, he quickly thrusted to the man below, killing him after so much suffering. Going after the man who was now trying to escape his grasp, he didn’t realize that his sister had taken a piece of the now-dead enemy and stored for later use.

She had taken a piece of their uniform or what seemed to be their uniform at least what it probably was. She quickly scurried into the caves, before Gabriel finished this other man as well and prepared to act as if she had always been there and was scared of what had happened.

Her acting skills weren’t really that good, but Gabriel had barely interacted with her, so he wasn’t really sure of her usual reactions and accepted her fear as true. He calmed her down and then grabbed her to their home immediately, keeping her shut in there to “keep her safe” but he also wanted to work on the outer spells now that he couldn’t work inside.

What he didn’t know was that his sister was searching their abode for any secret doors or anything that could guide her to the control room. She managed to find the doorway, but it was locked with a code she didn’t have time to unlock. She could’ve broken the spell and entered but this would only make Gabriel wary of her and wouldn’t give her the chance to explore the room or rooms enough.

Gabriel came back as the sun set and they continued their routine, but now Arabelle was confined to the house and then the clearing besides it while Gabriel set up more and more spells to trap any opponents. But before he could say that he was done another intruder approached the mountain they lived in.