There was a brief silence following the explosive announcement. Kyle stared at the faces of those surrounding him. He wasn’t really sure what was going on. Monster didn’t gather and attack people, right? They only guarded their territory or maybe ambushed you. Kyle watched as his uncle quickly shifted from the amicable laidback person he knew him to be into a rough, drill sergeant type persona.

“What’s the status report? Do we need full mobilization or just supporting fire? What’s the threat level?”

“They said it would be a level four, but Nadia’s team had just came back from scouting. With them there it’s only a level three.”

Carl thought for a minute before issuing instructions.

“Sarah, Li, and Walt I want you three to suit up and make your way to the on-call barracks. If they don’t already know what the situation is, tell them it’s a level three alert in the second tier city and to be ready for deployment if the situation changes. Ori, I want you to stop by the dispatch area and let them know the situation and pick up anyone with AOE long range bombardment skills. And take Kyle here with you, he should fit the criteria. Dismissed!”

Kyle suddenly found himself wrapped up in a whirlwind of activity. His aunt briefly filled him in while assuring him she would catalogue his skill crystals while he was gone. Ori relayed a few more details on the situation to Carl before taking Kyle with him on a run through the city. He went slowly at first, assuming Kyle as a mage type would not be able to keep up, but soon found himself running at full speed. They quickly transitioned to a special rooftop road designed for quickly getting from one place to another without pedestrians getting in the way.

Kyle soon found himself following Ori into a building called ‘The Monster Subjugation Dispatch Area’, although most people just called it dispatch for short. Less than five minutes later the two of them were joined by fourteen more people and they then ran off, at a much slower speed, to the teleportation area to get to the second tier city.

There were individual teleportation areas throughout various points of the city, but mass teleports, which typically referred to groups of five or more, were almost all done in the Teleportation Station, or just the station for short. Kyle had never been there before, and was awed by the giant structure and the mass of Humanity moving in and out. Ori quickly talked to someone in charge and the group was ushered to a higher floor where the departure points to get to second tier city were located.

The Teleportation Station was basically one giant battery array with teleportation arrays and formations that drew on the battery’s power. The battery array could be charged by mana crystals, or by people directly inputting their mana into it. Teleports often used millions and even billions of mana, so it was necessary for the formations to have a large power source if they wanted to be used in a timely manner. There were people with abnormally large mana pools and high regeneration rates that had no interest in combat whose job it was to dump all their mana into the battery array.

Kyle watched with interest as someone led them into a largish room, before they quickly activated the teleportation formation. Kyle was awed by the flow of mana throughout the building and continued to watch it until they vanished, and then he was hurried out of what had to be the station of the second tier city.  

Kyle hadn’t really thought about what to expect, but coming out of the second tier city’s teleportation station to daylight was not it. The First City was built underground with only a little sunlight filtering in from an opening far above, so Kyle had unconsciously assumed that the second city would be somehow underground too. He was very much mistaken. After a run through the city, Kyle and the group finally reached their destination atop the outer wall of the city and he had a chance to look around.

The view was breathtaking. Kyle had seen some amazing sights during his trip through the secret training area, but the scale of this was on another level. The city was made up of multiple parts. It seemed like Humanity had originally built a stronghold here, and then kept expanding it. The city was divided into walled sections that got progressively bigger surrounding what had to be the original fortifications. Kyle currently found himself on the outer most wall of what had to be the biggest section of the city, which must have made it the newest. But while the city itself was awe inspiring, even if parts of it appeared to still be under construction, it was what surrounded it that truly took his breath away.

A windswept prairie surrounded the second tier city.  The wall Kyle was standing on was hundreds of feet high, and it gave him an unparalleled view of the surrounding fauna. Fields of long grasses, flowering plants, and small shrubs stretched into the distance, where the fields eventually gave way to a savannah. All that would have been enough to awaken Kyle’s awe for nature, but what truly made the scene before him spectacular was the army in the distance.

What had to be hundreds of thousands of minotaurs and spelled lemurs were camped a few miles away. The minotaurs looked as you would expect, with bovine looking bodies that stood on two legs, human looking arms, cloven hooves, and a bull’s head. The spelled lemurs looked like regular lemurs, although perhaps a bit larger, with strange looking tribal patterns inscribed on them that glowed and pulsed with mana. It was hard to tell from here, but it looked like the lemurs were drawing symbols on the minotaurs, which Kyle guessed were some sort of monster enchantments.

Ori led everyone to a command post for assignment. Kyle could see groups similar to his streaming onto the wall at various locations.  There must have been people coming from all over the First City, not just Metal City, which Kyle thought made sense. When he got to the front of the line he had to show his relevant stats and skills using his ID card to someone in charge, and was then guided to his post on the wall.

He ended up grouped with five other people. Kyle’s only real AOE skill was his Ice Storm. It created an area of hail and sleet that damaged those caught in it over time and could potentially freeze them solid. The others in his group also had AOE ice skills, and the idea was to combine their effects to create something more powerful than the sum of its parts. The leader of the group explained to everyone that they should save their most powerful skills for when the monsters got close to the walls. They could bombard them from range in the meantime if they had the mana to do so while still holding mana for their ice AOE.

There were thousands of people spread across the wall ready to repel the incoming monster assault. But even with that much raw firepower it still was not enough to stop the minotaur and spelled lemur horde. The sheer number of monsters, and their magical nature, would enable them to close in and start a direct assault on the city. If that situation came to pass it would be deemed a level four threat, which meant that monsters had the potential of actually making it inside the city.

Kyle had asked the person next to him about what was going on and why everyone seemed assured of a positive outcome and why the threat level was three and not four. His neighbor seemed to only know as much as he did, but the leader of the group was able to explain.

“It’s because Nadia Rahal and her team are here. Actually, really only because of Nadia herself. You see that tower in the center of the city? That’s actually a giant enchanted magic cannon. It can be powered up with a battery array like the teleportation stations are, and can then be activated to fire supercharged skills. The problem is almost no one can use it. It takes an insane amount of mana control, and most people can only use it to output the same damage as around the six of us combined. Nadia has a skill that gives her unparalleled mana control, and she is able to constantly fire of barrages of magic equal to the combined might of at least a thousand people.”

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While this information was shocking, it only confirmed Kyle’s suspicions about needing a mana control skill. He had skills that should be able to do things that he wasn’t able to make them do, and he thought more control was the answer. A good example was his Rapid Air Bullet skill. He had actually managed to fire twenty bullets from one hand now, and was able to fire forty per second using both hands. But when he did that, their power was about a fourth of what it should be. It was actually more efficient to fire off less bullets as he could make sure they were full power.

Kyle stood there in thought while Humanity assembled their defenses. When Ori had barged into his house, he thought the second tier city was in the midst of fending of waves of monsters from crashing into its walls, not that he would come to help out and end up standing around. Someone asked why people didn’t sally forth and engage the monster horde from range, to which their group leader replied that the spelled lemurs could also attack from range, and it was better to engage from the safety of the walls. The city walls also were enchanted to passively buff their defenders with increased damage and mana regeneration in addition to providing a magical shield.

The flow of people coming to man the walls eventually trickled off, but it was another two hours or so of waiting before anything happened. The first thing Kyle noticed was the shaking, as the minotaurs began a war dance in preparation for battle.

The shaking continued to grow, until it bloomed into a tsunami of sound and force as the minotaurs let out bellowing shouts and started their charge, with the spelled lemurs right behind them. Kyle had fought large groups of monsters during his stint in the secret training area, but he had to admit he was a little intimidated by the sheer noise coming from the teeming mass of monsters before him. The bellows of the minotaurs and the screeches of the lemurs combined to create a cacophony so immense that Kyle wondered if it couldn’t be heard in the First City.

The first blow came from the giant magic cannon, presumably operated by Nadia. The monsters started their charge from multiple miles away, and despite the powerful momentous charge it still took some time for them to get in range.  Kyle remembered seeing a movie by a famous Japanese director that had giant titans in it that could shoot laser beams that exploded. That was what the magic cannon shot looked like. A large beam of light streamed into the monster horde, and then seconds later a large explosion followed, originating where the beam had hit.  

Soon the defenders with super long range skills joined in, and fire, lightning, and ice rained down on the on the charging horde. Kyle also fired some mana bolts, but it was hard to tell if it had any effect amidst the veritable confluence of skills impacting the enemy.

The horde pressed on, and soon magic was flying back at the defenders from the spelled lemurs. But the shield on the wall protected them from harm, and the defenders were able to focus purely on offense without worry for their personal safety. Kyle had to turn off his Magical Vision skill, as it allowed him to see magic and there was an information overload from all the skills and spells flying around. All the raw mana in the atmosphere created its own kind of pressure, and he found himself sweating despite not being under any real threat.

After a few minutes of charging through the magical bombardment the monsters were finally closing in on the city wall. This meant it was time for the closer range, and often more powerful, AOE skills to take effect. Kyle used his Increased Power skill to supercharge the effects of his Ice Storm, and then used Forced Activation to overwrite Ice Storm’s cooldown period and overlap its effect. All along the wall surges of earth and fields of fire and lightning joined giant meteors and frozen wastelands. The once peaceful prairie was turned in a monster meat grinder of gigantic proportions.

Kyle was riding an adrenaline high when the monster wave finally broke and retreated over ten minutes later. Over half of the horde must have been killed in their initial charge through the barrage of skills, but they had kept on coming. There were only two places where they actually reached the wall, but even then they never came close to breaching or scaling it.

There was still a lot of work to be done, and a large part of that involved looting the monster corpses. The dungeon was very resilient to damage, and if left alone the prairie would be back to its former state within the week. The monster corpses needed to be taken care of though, and Kyle’s help with the looting was welcomed with open arms, especially when he said that he had a skill that could increase his loot drops.  

It was gruesome work, and some places, like the areas hit by the explosion from the magic cannon, were only filled with charred body parts and piles of meat paste. Kyle kept at it for over three hours before he couldn’t take it anymore and had to call it quits. He took his final batch of loot and dropped it off at one of the many collection points. The merit points were still being calculated based on the spoils, and Kyle had a chance to make a note of what part of the spoils he wanted to receive. Much of it was going to go towards the future generations and Humanity’s stockpile of skill crystals, but the defenders were allowed to put in a request if they wanted a particular kind of skill.

Kyle put one in for a skill that he was compatible with and would grant him the biggest addition to his mana pool, despite any other restrictions the skill might have. His idea was to combine it with the mana pool skill he already had to enhance it further. Generally when skills were combined they lost many of the restrictions that might have once made them undesirable, but most people couldn’t level undesirable skills as easily as Kyle could thanks to his skill leveling title.  That wasn’t even taking into account having access to the ten combination points needed to combine the skills to get a more powerful one without the defects.

After reporting for duty and teleporting to Metal City, Kyle stumbled back home, bleary eyed from the long day. As soon as he walked in the door he was tackled by Sarah, and would have been knocked over if she didn’t catch him.

“What took you so long!? I was worried sick! The battle was over a long time ago. Carl has been back for over an hour already! I wanted to go find you, but I didn’t want to miss you coming back. You should have come right back. What if something happened to you? I was really worried!”

Kyle was overwhelmed by Sarah’s barrage of questions, and his aunt luckily rescued him before Sarah could continue to badger him.

“Let the poor boy rest. He’s obviously exhausted. He probably stayed behind to help loot since he has the skill Increased Looting. Kyle, there is some food for you in the kitchen and then you can take a rest afterwards.”

Kyle thanked his aunt, and then moved into the kitchen and started eating the lasagna his aunt had cooked for him while Sarah watched over him like a mother hen. Li came into the kitchen shortly after he got back to say hi. Walt didn’t stop by as he had already fallen asleep, since it was technically nighttime in the First City. Seeing Sarah hovering, Li decided to cause some trouble.

“Oh my Kyle, you look incredibly pale. You really should get those wounds under your clothes looked at before you bleed out.”

Although she really should have known better as it was almost impossible to receive actual wounds after the Change as it was all converted to damage, Sarah immediately seized on Li’s words.

“What!? Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

Kyle rolled his eyes at Sarah’s response to Li’s remark.

“Sarah, relax. I’m fine. You can’t even get wounds anymore.”

Li sat back to watch the fun, having easily set off Sarah’s protective instincts.

Sarah started examining Kyle more closely.

“How do I know you aren’t just saying that? You do look pale. Li’s right, you must be injured. What happened? Let me see.”

“I’m fine. C’mon Sarah, can I please just eat and then go to bed. Just look at Li, it’s clear she only said that to start trouble.”

“I don’t believe you. You’re trying to deflect attention away from yourself and it won’t work. If you won’t tell me where you are hurt I’ll just have to figure it out myself.”

Sarah then jumped on Kyle and started to try and forcefully strip him, looking for non-existent wounds, which if there were any would only have made them worse. Li eventually fell off of her chair in laughter as Sarah only stopped when Lisa came in and yelled at them all for making noise while Mickey was sleeping. Kyle’s protests of innocence fell on deaf ears, and he had to finish dinner while listening to his aunt’s lecture on proper table manners and how his time in the dungeon must have turned him into a wild man, as there was no excuse to eat at the table without a shirt on.

After eating, Kyle went up and collapsed in his bed, although only after Sarah had made sure he truly wasn’t injured. Kyle actually thought he was lucky Sarah let him out of her sight in the first place. She must have been worried sick while he had been gone. Maybe he should have come right back after the battle, despite the looting giving him more merit points. Kyle was too tired to worry over it though, and soon fell asleep, dreaming about what kinds of mana skills he could get with his merit points.