We return to the safe zone and, after we find William, he gathers a few people to discuss the issue at hand.
That means me, Emily, Jessica, Pops, William himself, and a handful of others that are part of the defenders. I don’t see Brent or Karen anywhere, so I ask about them. As it turns out, Brent gave up the mantle shortly after the town meeting. He’s still a fighter and part of our defenses, but for the meantime, he doesn’t want more responsibilities than that.
Losing him is a nasty blow, but I understand. The man has a wife and a kid he needs to spend time with. In the end, how much he can take and how much he's willing to give are his calls to make.
As for Karen, she took James a few hours earlier and they left the safe zone. I’m afraid we lost them as well, but even though she didn’t tell anyone where exactly she’s going, she promised William she’d be back in the evening. I nod and don’t say anything, but inwardly, I pray she won’t find out I blew up her neighborhood just yet. If she does, I don’t know how I’ll squirm my way out of that one alive.
Since everyone is here, I tell them about our findings and my initial idea that I discarded in favor of reporting back. In return, William tells me what Mike's group found. It's another boss, but this one is a mutated black bear that's about the size of a minivan.
And just like the skunk, the bear boss is stationary for the moment, gathering its horde.
“What do you think?” William asks.
I'm once again tempted to step back. Just say that I don't know, and let him come up with a plan. But he’s clearly trying to turn it into a group effort, so I pretty much have to pitch in.
“We should wait until tomorrow morning,” I say. “Once the apartment buildings are integrated into the safe zone, we can move everyone there in advance. Then I can take a small team out to fill the path from here to there with mines and trigger the wave.”
William nods, and one by one, he turns to the others to ask the same question. Emily says nothing, as usual. Jessica is down for my plan, volunteering herself and half of her pets for the mission. Pops thinks it’s too dangerous, and the others don’t have much to add besides agreeing with him.
It’s a tight spot to be in. The longer we wait, the harder we’ll get hit. But acting early is just inviting trouble to come knocking on our flimsy walls.
We keep discussing different plans for a while, but nothing better comes out of it. Some propose going for Mike’s boss first, since its horde is smaller at the moment, but it’s likely to be the higher level one if the size of the boss itself is anything to go by. We simply don’t know what we’re dealing with, and that’s too big of a risk to take blindly.
“Let’s talk to Kurt and see how many explosives he can make by tomorrow,” I suggest. “If he can craft enough of them, we tackle our boss. If not, we go for the other one.”
I get a few nods, so we send someone to fetch Kurt. He finds us a few minutes later, looking like he hasn’t slept ever since he started production.
“Did you test my bombs?” He asks as he nears us.
I shake my head. “Something else came up.”
“Then why’d you call me here?”
I explain our findings and plans once again, then I ask Kurt for his opinion. He lets out a deep, exhausted sigh as his shoulders slouch.
“I have enough materials to make a bunch of pound mines, they mainly need fertilizer. I could have twenty ready by next morning, maybe more if I get a few people to help me out.”
“What about boom rods?”
Kurt shrugs. “Another five or so? The problem with those is how much mana each one takes to craft.”
I ponder the new information for a bit, trying to fit it into the bigger picture. Twenty pound mines aren’t enough for a minefield around the safe zone, they’d barely be enough to plant along the way. The problem isn’t with their yield, but with the unreliable trigger mechanism and with how far apart they’ll be planted. Half of them might not blow at all, and the chances that a monster will step right onto one is slim to begin with, even in a horde.
“Could you make smaller versions for a minefield around the safe zone?” I ask after a minute of silence.
“I can make them a tenth the size, but the smaller they get, the less damage they’ll do.”
“I know, but around the safe zone, they’d act more as distractions to break up the horde. What about those trigger mechanisms, did you find a way to make them more reliable?”
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Kurt shakes his head.
We discuss some more details and finish up the plan. He needs to get at least a couple hours of sleep, and in that time, William will go through the lists James and his friends made to see if he can find any chemist type classes to help Kurt with the process.
His first priority is to craft another five boom rods, then at least thirty pound mines. If he'll still have time, he'll make smaller mines to plant around the safe zone.
The others will return to their defense duties, and I'll take another chunk of workers from the population to reinforce the apartment buildings.
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Come evening, the progress on the safe zone expansion is great. With help from the mages, the project is ahead of schedule. The new walls are almost half-way to the apartment buildings, and about seven feet tall throughout. They won’t stop a concentrated assault or a horde, but they’ll keep stray monsters out so we can function on a day to day basis.
We’ll need some kind of early alarm system as well, but that’s not something we can manage now.
I gather people for the task of reinforcing the apartment buildings, and I end up with many more hands than I need. The non combatants are getting bored, so they throw themselves at any work they can do that doesn’t involve fighting. I go around looking for about thirty people, but in half an hour, I have over a hundred of them.
It’s far from a problem, though. The more, the merrier. I break them up into a few teams, each with their own leads and responsibilities. Ten people go around to the stores to collect tools and materials. Twenty of them need to start emptying the ground floor apartments of furniture. Another twenty will take that furniture apart for anything we can use, such as planks, nails, or hinges.
The remaining sixty odd people get divided into another two groups. Half of them get to digging trenches around the buildings themselves, making secondary walls out of the dirt. The other half, that I’m a part of, go into nearby patches of forest to get wood.
I also take ten fighters with us to keep the workers safe, and I give Emily the choice between playing defender with them or doing manual labor with us. She wordlessly pulls out her bow and walks away.
Gathering resources without power tools is a pain, but we grit our teeth and push on. Since I have the highest strength attribute, I take an ax and start cutting down the trees. I expect it to be easy, and for the most part, it is. Except I find tougher trees once in a while that need quite a bit of force to chop through.
On a hunch, I get a classless person to give it a shot. The man who takes me up on the offer is a good head taller than me and about twice as heavy with muscles. Yet, when he takes the ax from me and takes a swing at the tree, he can barely chip the bark.
I didn’t consider that possibility up until now, but the ambient mana affects the flora as well. Will we have to worry about carnivorous plants in the future?
The answer is most likely yes, but on the bright side, it looks like we’ll get stronger building materials as well. I get back to work, but for now, I avoid the tougher trees. We don’t have the right tools to harvest and process them, even the sturdy felling ax I’m using is already showing wear after only a handful of them.
Going forward, I give every tree a probing tap. If I find it soft, I take it down. Others come up after me, clearing the branches with hatchets and portioning the trunks into manageable logs with crosscut saws. We try to shove them into our inventories, and while I can manage it, the others can’t. A bit of testing later, we figure out that you need to be able to lift something to put it away. That makes sense, otherwise people would throw cars and houses into their inventories to cheat the system.
For the meantime, they gather the processed logs into piles. I send word for a few fighters with high strength attributes to come and help with transporting everything.
“Tell them to bring us some dinner, too! We’ll take a break when they get here!”
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The work goes well for the most part. There are the occasional monster attacks or injuries when someone swings their hatchet with a bit too much enthusiasm and hits their own leg, but the system healing takes quick care of that. By midnight, we collect just about enough logs for what I have in mind.
I recall the workers back to the apartment buildings to help dig the trenches, and I stay behind with the fighters to help with transport. Even though we have the strength to lift the logs and pull them into inventory, they don’t stack. A couple of fighters looted a flatbed trailer from somewhere to overcome that limitation, and although the six of us together can barely pull it along the rugged terrain when it’s full, it's a good solution.
We load it up, then we fill our inventories as well. A few of us pull, a few of us push, and we get the heavy thing moving at a steady pace. I’m in the front, using a length of chain looped through the trailer’s A-frame to pull. Emily joins me, silently taking one of the chain’s ends to help out. But even though her level is higher than mine, her class isn’t geared towards strength. She turns red with the effort in moments.
I don’t want to shoo her away, so I propose an alternative. Let me do the pulling while she does the guiding, adding her own strength to the mix only when needed to get over obstacles.
It takes a handful of trips to get everything back, and we start using the logs to reinforce the outside of the buildings at ground level. Some of them we stick into the ground, flat against the walls to block access to the windows. Others we angle both towards the building to act as supports, and away to act as spikes that will hopefully deter the monsters.
After everything is connected with planks, nails, and ropes, the earth mages add their own spikes to the mix to offer a bit more binding power. It’s far from perfect — hell, it’s far from adequate — but it should withstand at least one wave.
The doors get some reinforcing as well, but we can’t completely block those off. I consider it for a while, but besides the stairs, we don’t have a way to get everyone up and down quickly. We’ll have to post extra fighters at the entrances.
By the end, the handful of once beautiful buildings start looking like proper apocalyptic fortresses straight out of a cheesy end of the world movie where gasoline is scarce and people dress in too much leather.
At about four in the morning, I finally retreat and go find a place to sleep. The work is mostly done on all fronts, so I leave the others to finish up. Emily joins me, and together, we head down to the police station to crash in one of the cells.