Monterey was, it turned out, named after the highway it had been built near. There was a road sign sitting proudly in the center of town, next to the town hall. This town had clearly been here for a few years at least. There were multiple permanent buildings, and Josh saw something that looked like the beginnings of an observatory. There was a large telescope at the top, though the rest of the building was flimsy, little more than scaffolding.

This town was dead too.

In this case, Josh suspected the problem wasn't a mistake during the reset. Rather than a bunch of escaped monsters, the town was infested with monstrous birds. The town was filled with crows and hawks the size of dogs, with feathers like leaves and beaks like old wood. There was a buzzard the size of a bus, perched on top of the town hall, surrounded by dozens of its smaller brethren, its eyes blazing with green fire.

There were dozens of the monsters, perched on every building and squawking at each other. Every once in a while they would fly down to the streets, presumably still fighting over the scraps of meat left in town.

“So,” Josh said. They stood on a hill overlooking the town, too far for the birds to take notice of them. “What are you thinking?”

“I suspect it is as simple as it seems,” Darius said. “Likely an adventurer brought back something that caught the attention of the monsters. A natural treasure, or perhaps simply a particularly delectable haunch of meat. This attracted too many flying monsters for the town to deal with, too quickly, then the fighting attracted more, so on and so on.”

“I meant should we burn out the monsters, or just move on.”

“Oh.” Darius adjusted his glasses. “Well, my blueprint does require monster feathers. Specifically, Air-affinity feathers. Basic-tier are fine. We would find more than enough here.”

“Got no fire magic, though.” Mary stretched. “Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to give it a go if everyone else is, but I've only got so many bullets, don't I? Maybe save it for something else.”

Ruth nodded, though she still looked down at the town with sadness. “Maybe someone can do something with this place if the monsters are cleared out, but that's no reason to get ourselves killed over it!”

The Jungle had hardly even started to crawl in through the wall, so the actual buildings were almost untouched. If not for the splashes of red everywhere, from this distance the town could be mistaken for normal. Except for the lack of a citystone, and the birds.

“How far to the next town?” Josh asked.

Darius didn't even need to take out his map. “A few hours. If we really wanted to restock, then come back to clear this place out, we could.”

“Yeah, if that place isn't a vulture-picked corpse too,” Mary muttered.

Thankfully, Mary was wrong.

Gilroy Crossing had been built in the ruin of a shopping mall, as far as Josh could tell. It was hard to be sure, since the Jungle had consumed almost everything of the old world. The old parking lot had been cleared of the trees and undergrowth enough to show the remnants of the ancient asphalt. The buildings had that look of being built on old foundations, and were the blocky and functional shape of a world that was more concerned about efficiency of construction than surviving a siege.

The wooden palisade around the town was tall and strong, with spiked tops to deal with climbers. There were plenty of guard towers that looked ready to deal with airborne monsters, and there were two strong gates. One faced northwest, back towards the City, and one faced southeast, out of the valley.

The wall encircled a relatively wide area, on the scale of parking lots, but not on the scale of towns. Even with people willing to be rather cramped, they couldn't fit more than a few hundred inside the walls. Most towns dealt with that by just encouraging people to go build a new town somewhere. This wasn't always the best solution, as town charters were extremely expensive. Founding a town without a citystone was possible, but it would lose out on major advantages.

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Josh thought Gilroy's solution was ingenious. Obviously they couldn't expand the town wall every time people got a little cramped, so instead they constructed smaller circles of walls nearby. Two of them actually abutted the town directly, with gates allowing passage between the towns. Would they be called suburbs?

There were more circles of walls, mini-villages that were little more than a handful of buildings. Maybe all the buildings in one circle belonged to one family. In fact, as they were coming down the road, he heard roars from one of the more distant circles, and wondered if it had captured monsters.

Josh could already tell it wasn't a perfect system. It was probably a nightmare for the guards to patrol it all. But it was certainly better than letting everyone rough it outside the walls. This way, everyone was close enough to trade and help, while still being far enough to quarantine one circle if something went wrong.

Their little party walked up to the guards at the main gate. Josh and Ruth had decided to wear masks to prevent scanning by the Identify skill, and Darius had pointed out that it would look suspicious if they were the only ones masked. Now all four of them wore face-concealing masks made out of bark and leaves. Josh had actually received a blueprint and a laughably small experience reward for making the first one. They made the group look like cannibals wandering in from the mountains. Josh tried to smile reassuringly.

There were only two guards, though there was a large bell that could call more at a moment's notice. The woman, wearing a massive shield taller than she was, had the bored expression of an experienced guard: Completely uninterested, but ready to leap into action. The fact that they were all wearing masks clearly didn't make her happy, but she didn't say anything about it.

“Hello, and welcome to Gilroy Crossing. What's your business in town?”

Next to her, the second guard was picking something out of his teeth. Josh was much less confident in his readiness.

Mary cocked her head, hands on her hips, to display her gun holstered there prominently. “We're here for the Estival Day celebration, innit obvious? We came all dressed for dancing.”

Josh cuffed her upside the head. “Come off it.” He turned to the guard with a grin. “Sorry about her. She followed me home one day and I never could get rid of her. We're hoping to put down roots here, if that's an option. At least hunt some monsters and buy some treasures.”

The guard nodded. “There's no fee to come in, though if you want to claim some land you'll need to talk to the mayor. Welcome, and hope you can make something of yourself.”

Inside was much the same as every other outpost town Josh had ever seen. The walls loomed over everything, as most buildings didn't want to poke out too high. People walked around with a guarded, but not paranoid air, and everyone was armed with at least one weapon. Josh noted that bows seemed to be the most common, meaning the Archer class, but he also saw plenty of people who he suspected were Rogues, Mages, and even a few people who seemed to have already refined to Swordsman or Pyromage classes.

There were plenty of buildings, and Josh was surprised to realize most of them weren't private homes. That was what you normally saw out here, as most of these towns had been built by individual settlers, one or two at a time. Instead, there was a long row of shops and businesses, ready to greet any newcomers to the town. The large building nearby, the one that Josh suspected had been built on the bones of the old shopping center, seemed to serve as a silo or storage.

Of course, at the center of everything was the crystal.

It looked like a red teardrop gemstone, carved by someone who gave up before they finished polishing it. It was three meters tall, pointed end straight up, and covered in rough facets and angles. It floated gently a meter or so off the ground, rotating slowly in place.

This was a small citystone, as were all the crystals outside of the City. Josh could tell at a glance that it was no more than Basic-tier. Advancing a citystone required something special from a Craft class.

I can do something about that, Josh thought with a start. Or Ruth, maybe. He didn't actually know how to advance a citystone. It hadn't exactly seemed important before. He knew he should have paid more attention in class.

The path led straight to the citystone, so all four of them walked up to it. Without saying a word, they all put their hands on the crystal.

CONGRATULATIONS! You have completed the quest: Kill Four Boars! Reward: 80 experience.

This repeated for all eight quests that they had been given by Paul back in the vanguard outpost. 640 experience wasn't much, of course, and none of them managed to level. Still, it was something, and they all took a moment to grab another full load of extermination quests. They focused on birds, in the hope that they could clear out Monterey and finish their quests at the same time.