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He figured that a good first step was to materialize a kind of rough "false castle" aboveground. As long as it was all materialized, it wouldn't matter as much if it got obliterated. Plus, since nobody would actually be living in it, he didn't have to worry about things like insulation and heating and plumbing.

It was mainly just to help conceal the doorway to the Entry Tower. The longer the enemy spent wandering around on the surface, trying to locate the way inside, the more time they would have to organize their real defenses.

And it was kinda fun just creating entire towers out of his iron. He found himself spending perhaps a little too long on them, comparing them against pictures of real buildings from around the world and trying to make them look as believable and cool as possible.

He'd never been to the beach before, but maybe this was what building sand castles was like. He'd always wanted to give that a try.

He couldn't go quite as nuts with it as he might've liked, though. It required a gigantic amount of iron, after all. Multiple buildings, each with multiple floors. And all that iron that he devoted to this project would count against his volume limit while he was in the area. He had to exercise some restraint, unfortunately.

His preliminary results were looking pretty alright, though, Hector felt. Nothing as visually impressive as Stasya Orlov's work, of course, but it was a decent start, at least.

It helped that there was already some aboveground construction going on in the first place, so he could weave the iron buildings into and around them. The only real issue was making sure that his phony iron castle didn't get in the way of any of the real buildings that were still going up. Sure, the ones up here weren't as important as the eight towers underground, but they would probably still get used eventually, one way or another. He didn't always want to receive guests underground, especially with all the Rainlords down there.