Getting over the wall wasn't actually that hard. The guards couldn't watch all of it, and there were always gaps. The north-west, where they originally tried to surrender, was one of the most guarded stretches of wall. That was the direction where they were pushing farther into the Jungle, so there was always lots of traffic. The guards knew to keep their eyes on it.
The east, on the other hand, was nothing but mountains. No human settlements, and even the Jungle's monsters didn't bother attacking from that direction. So why bother putting any people on it? The wall was tall enough to discourage anything too excessive.
The guards did wander by every once in a while, but that was no great obstacle. Everyone knew their patrol patterns, and unlike the more important parts of the wall, the guards didn't bother with surprise shift changes or anything of the sort. They showed up, made sure there weren't any holes in the wall or ladders with people clambering over them, then went back to their lunches.
Once the guards were gone, the criminals brought out the elevators again.
Josh and the others covered their faces with rags made from a ripped-up shirt when they approached the wall. This prevented the Identify skill from working on them, and was standard practice for any criminal except the worst of the worst, who worked with the government and didn't need to hide.
They paid their fee to a bored-looking level 12 Attacker, then waited for the elevator to come down. It was a simple wooden platform attached to a rope and pulley system, nothing complicated. They were pulled to the top, where they found the cheap wooden crane hidden inside an alcove between two buildings, attended by a few Mages who used their magic to do most of the heavy lifting. Once Josh and his group paid another bribe, they stepped through one of the doors on the side of the skyscraper.
Inside, the place was a dull warehouse. Nothing but echoing concrete floors and stacks upon stacks of supplies. Josh didn't even know what this place was supposed to be storing. Maybe dry foods or something else important but not urgent. Something to justify having armed guards, but little police presence.
Instead of immediately going down the stairs or taking an electric elevator, Josh led his friends out onto the skyscraper's balcony.
Josh loved the City.
He hadn't grown up here, obviously. He had been born in a small town to the east, past the mountains and just at the edge of the state line. When it had been destroyed, he and his sister had traveled west, looking for the medical technology he had needed to survive. He had been a sickly child. They hadn't settled in the City. In fact, it was years and years before they settled at the base of the Tower, and even then they only stayed for a few years.
Every time he came back, he had to smile at what he found.
By the time of the Last Raid, when the greatest heroes of the world were pushing through the Tower to conquer the final challenge, the only humans left were here. Squatting in the ruins of one of the richest cities in the world, huddled against the base of the Tower like children around their mother's skirts. It wasn't a city, it was a refugee camp. Josh had seen the pictures. Old, dirty tents as far as the eye could see, arranged haphazardly around cook fires and scavenged machines put out for communal use. It was an impressive stand against the end of all things, but it had failed. Everyone died, and all that remained were the eight heroes who survived the Last Raid. When the Eight Immortals came down from the conquered Tower, they found nothing but dry bones, destroyed ruins, and the Jungle.
They established the Burn Line by the simple method of raining down fire from above, but they hadn't been able to hold onto a very large area for their descendants. They started in a small circle around the base of the Tower, the shantytown that had sprung up near the end of the world. As the population increased, people were able to expand the Burn Line more carefully, recovering artifacts and relics from the old city instead of just burning everything.
However, the first generation had never forgotten the oldest lessons from when space was at a premium. Therefore, rather than building outward in a suburban sprawl, they built up.
Skyscrapers rose high in every direction, a thicket of metal and glass made by human hands. Hundreds and hundreds of skyscrapers, some broad enough to cover an entire block, many small enough that two or three could fit, and some so thin that they looked like needles from this distance.
The new City varied drastically from the cities of the Old World, however. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the way that the skyscrapers were connected to each other. Great skyways crossed above the streets, letting people walk between buildings without ever having to go down to the ground. It was said that you could visit every building in the City without ever going outside, crossing from one building to another, forever.
It was more than just the skyways, though. Every skyscraper had rooftop and balcony gardens, some had waterfalls splashing down from a hundred floors up. The City was green and alive in a way that no Old World urban area ever was. This was not a part of the Jungle any more—that was the point of the Burn Line—so plant and animal growth was not accelerated. Even just this small balcony they were on now had a full garden on it. These were just ordinary plants, bushes and vines and even full trees, cultivated and cared for by people who wanted a little more life around them. Even in a world where the trees could get up and attack you, people wanted to be surrounded by the life of the world. And here, more than anywhere else, it was safe to do so.
This was all thanks to the powers granted by the System, Josh knew. Few machines had survived the Fall, mostly tough trucks and cars. As far as he knew, not a single construction crane had been recovered in working condition. No, the City had been built almost entirely by hand. Even without the [Crafter] classes, high-level people were strong enough to lift cars, could cut stone with their swords, and could fly or use telekinesis. In the later months of every reset, the City was a buzz of activity as Earth Mages found and shaped what they needed, Air Mages lifted people and materials, and Fire Mages welded everything into place.
Josh had been surprised to hear of how many architecture books had survived the Fall. He would have thought that everything would have to be learned from scratch, and he knew that none of the Immortals were architects or urban planners or even librarians. As it turned out, in the waning days of the Old World, some people with classes from the [Scholar] role had been worried about losing everything. So they collected every book they could find, downloaded everything that was reasonable off the internet, and printed everything out using every means available to them, magical and not.
The result was that when the Eight descended back to Earth to find the entire human race dead, they also found entire warehouses full of books, computers with high-density storage mediums, and magical stone tablets. It was astonishing how much was saved.
Of course, having the knowledge and being able to use it were two very different things. So much of modern technology was impossible to replicate without extensive support networks. It didn't matter that they knew how to make computers with micro circuitry; they didn't have any intact factories to make them. They didn't have the factories to make the tools to make the factories. And no matter how much power a Mage had, [Combat] classes were not designed for anywhere close to fine detail work. Even a great Fire Mage couldn't reliably forge a decent screw.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Though they couldn't see them from here, Josh knew that there were cannons lining the walls, modeled after ancient fortress cannons instead of any modern firearms. They were little more than metal tubes on a swivel, designed to direct a gunpowder charge to propel a massive metal ball. Like so much of the City, there wasn't enough technology to spare for anything more advanced.
That didn't mean there was no technology, though. They took an electric elevator down to the ground level, then used a trolley to get closer to their destination. There weren't any cars around; most people walked, and deliveries from the outlying villages were handled at the wall, then shipped in by electric rail line.
Josh had always loved the City. It was so different from what had come before. It was more crowded with people instead of cars, people just walking about on their lives. He saw old men sitting on street corners, parents wrangling their children, and even schoolkids in uniform.
Kids. Going to school. Not fighting on the front lines, not desperately trying to level in order to fight back the endless tide of the Jungle. Just... living their lives like nothing was wrong.
It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
There wasn't as much greenery down at ground level, where the skyscrapers blocked out much of the light. There were a number of hardy trees planted at strategic locations, that sort of thing. Instead, the streets were lined with rock gardens, murals ranging from masterpieces by professional artists to simple doodles by children. There were even small ornamental rivers running down many of the old streets, replacing the old thrum of cars and trucks with the pleasant burbling of water. Not bad for a place that was technically halfway to a desert.
“Oi,” Mary said, sounding amused. “You press your face against that window any harder, you're liable to break it.”
The other three didn't seem all that interested in the sights. Mary and Ruth, he knew, had grown up here. Mary hated the place for reasons entirely related to her family, and Ruth had probably spent more time exploring the wilderness than walking the streets. Darius appeared to be taking notes on something. Perhaps that was his own way of appreciating the beauty around him.
Of course, as beautiful as the City was, it was also fragile. Josh knew that better than anyone. Normally, the monsters weren't the real issue. Those cannons might be primitive, but they got the job done, especially when paired with high-leveled [Attackers]. No, the real danger to the City was food.
Two million people called the City home. With all the vertical construction, that was a lower population density than you might expect, but it was still loads of people, who needed loads of food. Rooftop gardens weren't even a blip on the radar there. Everything had to be grown from outside and shipped in.
Growing the food wasn't the problem. Any farm on the Jungle side of the Burn Line measured its harvests in hours, and even a small farm could easily keep up with the demand of hundreds of people. The problem was shipping it into the City. As always, it was the supply lines where everything was at its most dangerous.
Josh breathed in deeply, taking in the clean mana of the air. On this side of the Burn Line, all mana emanated from the Tower, rather than from the Jungle. It was thick and easy to use, like cream just waiting to be spread on toast. The mana in the Jungle was wild; sometimes it was thicker, sometimes it was thinner, and sometimes it manifested as an elemental monster that wanted to rip your face off.
It was good that the mana was so thick here, because the City could not survive without magic. Even ignoring the ornamental features that needed a dedicated Mage to make them work—those waterfalls didn't just come out of nowhere—most of the City's electricity was generated directly by Lightning Mages. There were waterwheels and wind turbines to pick up the slack, especially early in the year, but this trolley wouldn't work without magic. They wouldn't be able to charge the electric trucks and cars that brought in food without mana. They wouldn't even be able to reload the cannons on the walls, because the freight elevators were powered by electricity that came from mana.
Sometimes Josh thought the entire City was a beautiful model made out of spun sugar. Sweet, but so fragile. Liable to dissolve if it encountered even the slightest real problem.
And he had showed a dragon that it was here. That thought made his gut twist. All this could fall, and it would be his fault.
After they got off the trolley, they slipped through the side streets, sun shining down on them. It was a hot day, but it was always hot around the solstice. They had to avoid people as much as possible, to reduce the risk of anyone getting close enough to use Identify on them. Their crude masks would help, but people would ask too many questions. Eventually, the police would be called. If the gate guards had been told a fake brainwashing story, surely so had the police.
Still, their destination wasn't far. Mary's aunt did much of her work in the east portion of the City, so her headquarters was nearby. Specifically, it was in an old park or golf course, converted into a community center and then claimed as a base of operations.
This was one of the only parts of the City that was still flat without any skyscrapers. Healthy, cut grass created a lush carpet, and trees a hundred feet tall provided ample shade. The Jungle might not be accelerating growth in this area any more, but the trees had been given eighty years to grow. It was an exquisite picture of cultivated natural beauty.
There was one single-story building in the center of the park, nothing too impressive. It looked like a modest home, though without as many windows, with a few winding stone paths leading to and from it. If not for the armed guards standing outside, it would look like a nice place to live. A quick glance told him that all three of them were between levels 20 and 23.
Seeing the levels of the guards almost made Josh stop on the path. It had been surprising to see the City guards had already reached level 16. It was a bit hard for reclaimers, people working at the edge of civilization and fighting constantly, to reach that this early. But here were three people who had almost hit their second class advancement. Josh, Mary, and Ruth, who had all been leveling at a frankly absurd speed, had just hit 18, hardly three days after the reset. Darius was at a more realistic level, at 14. How had these people gotten so high so fast?
People were taking risks, he realized with a sinking feeling. No method of power-leveling was completely safe, and if he had a guess, they weren't just capturing monsters and slaughtering them after the reset. If you fed a monster bloodstones, it would level and be a bigger experience boost when you killed it. The only problem was that this required making the monster stronger... strong enough, perhaps, to break free of whatever was keeping it in check and going on a rampage.
That was dangerous. Villages died that way, out past the Burn Line, when they accidentally made a level 56 Porcine Fire-Bomber or whatever. He didn't even want to know what would happen if a monster got loose in the middle of the City.
After a moment, he decided it didn't matter. They weren't here to level.
Once they got within sight, the guards raised their rifles and pointed them at the group, but didn't say anything. Ruth and Darius stopped, arms up, but Josh and Mary pulled them along.
It was only when they got to within a few feet—far enough that they couldn't lunge for the guards—that they stopped and waited. The guards nodded.
“Masks off,” the one in front ordered. “What's your business?”
Mary pulled hers off first. “I'm here to speak to my aunt.”
The guard looked at her, nodded, then turned to the others. With a sigh, Josh pulled off his mask, then gestured for the others to do the same. He saw the exact moment when the guards used their Identify skill, because all three flinched back and raised their guns.
Darius stepped in front of them and raised his shroud. Thankfully, the guards didn't actually attack. They glanced at Mary, then slowly lowered their guns.
“You try any tricks, we shoot,” the guard said. “No more warnings.”
It seemed they had heard about the mind-control as well. At least they were being more reasonable about it.