He briefly wonders how his sister is doing. He hopes she is managing well without him. Then, suddenly, a feeling of unease creeps over him. Something feels wrong.

 "Why is it every time we build a barricade, there's a counter attack?"  He asks, glancing at Hank with his ocean eyes gleaming as he notices  slickly unpleasant moisture exude through the pores of  Hank's skin as he is sweating nervously.

 "I just get this creepy feeling that we're being watched." says Hank while working on upgrading  his 

favorite weapon, which is his trusty clockwork chainsaw. It  is a steady and obvious clanking sound that draws Olaf's attention to the larger man as he works.

By observing Hank, one may  assume he is an intelligent worker, but one would be mistaken. He lacks the ability to think in a team. He works well in the smaller, confined spaces of a barricade, but if it weren't for Olaf, he would get himself into terrible trouble.

Olaf remains silent for a moment and then, he sits beside Hank. He pats Hank's shoulder and attempts to muster up encouraging words, but he fails because cold nervousness is crawling up inside him too.

So, in order to get another opinion on the situation, he stares at Omer's direction, giving him a helpless look.

Omer dipped his head towards the cold air, yet the snowflakes melted on his face, unable to penetrate his leather duster which Olaf is jealous of. This coat was a treasure, a gift from his  mother. It kept Omer nice and toasty warm, no matter what the temperature. He looks up from the potion he is working on. "You're being paranoid again, Hank. Relax, we're fine." 

Hank doesn't look convinced, but  he takes a deep breath and stops sweating.

Olaf steps back to let Durge, a heavily bandaged man with a chubby belly and a huge hammer join him, and help him to finish building the barricade.

Once again his friends are doing their best to protect it, but this is not work that they were meant to do. They are not warriors and they are not soldiers. They are not trained to stand against the constant attacks of monsters. Olaf, however, is a survivor and a fighter.  He cannot let them die because he needs them to help him build this barricade. 

 They hear a bunch of noise outside like a warzone. Growls, screams and the clanging of metal fill the air along with the trampling of feet as if thousands of men went to war in this valley. However, these are not from men, not from something earthly, something that is supposed to be fathomable to the unwary mind of humans,  and not from any kind of beast that Olaf has ever heard of or met. It is infact so terrible, that he feels the calmness leave him in an instant. His heart beats faster and he feels the hairs of his back rise.

 It does not take long to begin ramming the barricade in an attempt to break through for the first group of monsters that look like unholy children of an undead goblin and a fiend.

"Alright you guys, stay strong, I'll be back as soon as I can." Olaf says to his friends while adjusting his  creamy-mint jacket of his camouflage-battle uniform, and runs off to fight the monsters. He's a veteran commando who once killed 100 soldiers in a mission and wounded 18 of them. He can do it. However, this isn’t human soldiers that he is dealing with at the moment. It’s something far more sinister and unfathomable to human understanding.

Goosebumps dances all over his body.  It's as if it captured the essence of struggle and survival, its both uplifting and epic, like he's ready to take on the legions of hell. Yet it's also sinister and evil, as if this is the destiny of man, to struggle against forces beyond our control. 

The mealots in this first wave are rather pathetic. Indeed, some of them are so pathetically weak that they are able to be crushed by the ram attacks of the monsters behind them. Still, the fact that so many of them can be killed so easily is a sign of things to come, for as soon as the mealots in the front have been dealt with, a new wave of monsters begins to appear.

 These ones are larger, meaner and far more resistant to damage.  It appears that there are classes and ranks among mealots. The first wave was packed with the weakest foot soldiers of these fiendish creatures.

Olaf needs to stay to fight, but he also needs to build the barricade higher.

He picks up a heavy stone and hurls it at the mealots like a shotputter. It demolishes two or three of them. They may be large and tough and have a lot of meat on their bones, but they are not made of steel. 

However,  this is far from enough. The mealots reform in the meantime and charge again.

Some of the more intelligent ones realize that he is attacking their comrades and begin to target Olaf instead. 

He is smart enough to use the palisade they  have already built as cover, but a few foolish mealots still find a way in.

One leaps at him from the top of the palisade like a monkey that has gone mad from isolation.

 Knowing well that he is too strong and fast for it to really matter, but he chooses to use his  influence over gravity to crush it under some massive tusks he picked up, like an anthill might crush a cockroach.

A second one manages to get through the palisades by jumping on Olaf's back. He spins around like a dancer trying to avoid an embrace and ends up knocking this mealot into the tusks as it lands on his back. Olaf then pushes this tusked mealot off of him and the creature lands on the hard tusks with a bone crushing crunch and a lot of grayish and somewhat transparent, slimy blood spills out that looks like mucus  coming out of several orifices and the mealot's spindly limbs are flailing like a broken kite's strings.

However, more and more of them find a way in and he feels the pressure. 

What he needs is the perfect defense, something that will stop everything, but be simple and easy to make.

In his spare time, Hank used his mechanical  skill to make a ballista, an ancient military type siege engine in the form of a crossbow to hurl large bolts, and has better accuracy than a catapult at the expense of reduced range, with enough power to destroy a monster's skull, while Durge crafted a simple giant spiked ball. 

When the time comes, Durge jerks his huge mustache and quickly loads the giant spiked ball into the ballista and ready his trigger finger. It's uncanny how loud and powerful the thing is, almost like a catapult. 

Hank also used his mechanical skill to create a repeating crossbow out of a sconce, which he grabs and draws his bolt  firing it like an oversized pistol at one of the new breeds of beasts that have made their way through the barricade. 

Olaf can see the bolt going towards one of the mealots that have breached the barricade. It flies true, but he feels it has less than lethal power, but efficient enough to at least wound the monster. 

The mealot squeals in pain as the bolt slams into its skull, but does not go down. 

Olaf fires his own bolt, though he feels it goes wide.

He reloads and fires again, passing the ballista over to Omer who takes aim at one of the larger monsters. He pulls the trigger and the bolt flies true, hitting the mealot in the chest, but it's only enough to cause it to stumble backwards.

Meanwhile, bouncing his chubby belly, Durge sprints and takes in charge of the catapult, a device or weapon for throwing or launching large objects in long range, fires and loads in a stone. He looks at Olaf and grins, "Come on, get out of the way, I need to reload!"

Olaf is about to object, but he sees a large chunk of the stone go flying and directly into one of the mealots. It squeals in pain as the meat and organs are torn apart inside of it. 

"Reload!" he says gleefully.

Olaf grabs the shell casings and quickly reloads as he  fires again. This time the stone slams into the monster's head, and it's no mistake either. The mealot's head blows apart and chunks of meat and gore shower down upon him.

The battle is going well enough that Olaf can focus on other things, like building up the defenses of his castle. He makes  trip wires around the palisades and inside the castle itself. If a zombie should stumble into any of these, the death penalty will be inflicted upon it.

The moat is hard to get to, but he finds a way. There is a  constructed bridge of wooden planks and rope. He plans to attract the creatures, then having Omer light it on fire.

 The mealots cannot cross it, and the heat will harm any that touch it. He uses this to trap a large number of the beasts, then just like that the  bridge goes up in flames, killing all the mealots within.

For now, the wave of mealots is at an end. However, they know another one is coming, and soon.

Once few weeks go by, and sure enough, a new group of monsters will come screaming out of the blue at them. 

Mealots are a strange race of zombie-like creatures that are indigenous to this world as if a god trapped them in this dimension.