Bradley left his room, and went down to get breakfast at the hotel first floor, the hotel staff were panicked at the large number of early risers, and tried desperately hard to maintain their buffet. Bradley called out for the chef he picked up towards the end of the mission, “Paul Danson! If you are in here, approach me!”
Paul slipped down the stool, and hobbled over to Bradley, “What do you need sir?” Bradley put his arm around his shoulder, “I hate to have to do this, but in return I’ll give you a pay raise. I need you to help the cooks back there keep us fed for this week. Especially if we want to retain our mana.” Bradley took a deep breath, “Could the head chef please come to the dining area!”
The head chef scrambled to come out, his hands were fidgety and he was repeatedly twirling his mustache, “I’m sorry, we aren’t used to this many people so soon. We are doing our best! Please forgive me and my staff.” Bradley laughed, “No worries sir, we actually have a chef among the members of our squad. I was hoping that he would be able to help you and your staff if possible.”
The chef eased up, knowing he wasn’t in trouble, “If he’s able to help, then we’ll gladly take him. Thank you sir.” Paul and the head chef headed to the back and Bradley heard him call out, “Reinforcements!” and a bunch of laughing. After that the rate of the food was boosted, and the mana regeneration of every member of the team was boosted thanks to Paul’s cooking.
After a week of struggling to maintain meal times, the Holten Hotel managed to keep up with the returnees desire for garbage regular food, instead of goblin meat. Bradley picked at his breakfast plate, even with the mana regeneration boost thanks to Paul, the food itself had very little mana in it. Bradley pulled out a cooked goblin steak, and ate it with his biscuits and gravy, hoping that any mana would help out this slump he’d felt since returning to Earth, and it did a little.
“This is an order to all USDC members who utilize mana more than just their status window! Eat your meals along with at least half a pound of goblin meat. That is all.” An exasperated sigh and the sound of people pulling meat out of their inventories rang through the dining hall.
Any members of Squad 0 slowly descended over breakfast time, as the group with the most freedom. Devin came down during the announcement and seemed excited, “It’s now an order to eat that tasty goblin meat, heck yea. I’ll be right back, your food looks really good, gonna snag me some.” Devin crashed his plate down across the table from Bradley and pulled out a Goblin steak just like Bradley and began to dunk it in the gravy. “This is damn good.” No one in Squad 0 complained, many actually missing the taste of goblin meat and the boost to their mana.
Finally, after a month of planning and resting, they were being shipped off to their branch. The drive was 3 and a half hours from where they were staying in Pittsburgh. The area had a large parking facility, capable of holding 60 armored troop trucks, three five story tall housing units, each able to support 400 people, and the main building, two six story buildings stapled together with a bridge across the 4th floor.
Squad members were organized based on gender and squad to decide who lived with who in a dorm style organization. Within the squad, those of higher level had the authority to select roommates. Squad 0 had private quarters on the 6th floor of the main building west side, while the main office was on the 6th floor of the east side.
The first thing Bradley did when he arrived was take a bath for the first time in about two decades. He went through his room and found the oversized room, lounge, and even TV a bit ridiculous, but he was more surprised that there were 20 units prepared if Squad 0 expanded any. Bradley scanned over his status page as he sank below the water, and smirked at how far he had come since the very beginning.
When Bradley went to his assigned workspace he found a private building with a workstation, and a loading and unloading zone for a large amount of shipments of military ammunition. He had a tablet with the list of orders already in, along with buttons meant to handle the confirmation of receiving and sending.
Bradley quickly finished his $30 million dollar load of ammunition work. ‘The cost per enchant ended up at about $40 dollars per bullet, meaning that if you can kill a goblin in around 50 bullets you can profit about 2 grand per kill. That’s an investment of 2 grand for a normie if they wanted to do some high stakes work.’
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Bradley chuckled at the ridiculous realization that he just supported everyone’s wages for like 3 months in a single day. He glanced over his tablet, and noticed an order for 500 goblin swords for the Army as well. Bradley sighed, “Guess I’ll have to use a crystal today. Damn.” Bradley charged himself back up, and shouted like a maniac for a bit until 500 goblin blades were done. He had the idle forklift guy move both orders into the semi-truck, and hit confirm on both orders’ completion. The truck then immediately closed, and drove off.
Bradley approached the forklift guy, “Hey, how much you make just sitting around here everyday?” The guy was a bit nervous, “I think I’m making a salary of 60k a year working here.” Bradley nodded, ‘I bet the trucker is the same. The money made is so much, that having idle hands and quick delivery beats the cost of missing a deadline.’ “That’s really cool, keep up the good work. Just don’t mess with my stuff and we won’t have any problems.” The forklift guy nodded, and moved to the other corner of the building.
Bradley had given everyone a week to get used to their new living situation before the first mission, so he had time to tinker around, and the other Squad 0 members had time to train any of the other Squads that wanted to. ‘Apparently the training facility is really cool, but I need to upgrade my equipment now that I actually have free time.’
He modified his wrist-launcher from having 6 arrows ready to fire and then that’s it to a pressurized mechanism that loading new arrows after each shot. He could fire one at a time in rapid succession on a single arm. The clip held 12 shots, and he made it and loaded it personally so he had a blueprint to allow him to easily load his clips precisely.
He also created a custom ogre blade, one that slotted into an armband slot for his left arm. It reached out past his hand about a foot, and was pointed into a spear at the end of the blade. If magic was sent into the armband, the blade would be launched forward using Magic Cannon. Since the blade would be launched less often, a Tier 4 crystal was used in manufacturing as it would have a bigger difference, while the wrist launcher used the easier to get Tier 3 crystal from orcs.
He modified a pair of boots to use a scissor lift design made out of an ogre corpse for durability, and set up a crystal to Catapult and Magic Weapon the secondary bottoms to launch him upwards. ‘With this I’ll stop having to break my arms and legs to get what I want. At worst these will just break after a few uses. I have the Blueprint so it isn’t a big deal.’
Bradley went outside to test the shoes first, “Let’s hope I don’t die,” he sighed. He jumped, and activated both shoes. They gave a boost upwards similar to when he broke his leg to jump, around a 14 foot vertical, but the problem was they didn’t easily close. The shoes didn’t break on launch but instead the lift segment broke on a landing.
Bradley face planted and groaned, “Fuck my life,” he stood up, “Warm Waterball!” Bradley took a deep breath, “Windblast!” Bradley cleaned himself up, went back into his shop, and didn’t come out for an entire day until he was ready to test again.
He created replaceable latching soles. These would allow for the spring to fall out when they reached max extension at around 6 feet, and made it easy to replace soles after use.
He came out, and did another launch test, this time reaching 15.5 feet as the weight of the shoes were greatly reduced. He landed firmly on his feet this time, “Success, thank god.” Bradley sighed, “I should go to the cafeteria. Where was it again?,” Bradley scanned his view across all the buildings, “Ohh yea, first floor of the west wing.”
Bradley trudged into the west wing, and noticed how spacious the west wing really was. There was enough seating for 2000 people at a time. Bradley waved at those who waved first, but quickly stood in one of the 10 food lines to avoid too much public attention. He managed to land himself in the monster food line since it had the least amount of people and ran into Paul on the other side, “Hey Paul, how have you been so far?”
Paul smiled and prepared a big tray, running to and from some of the other food lines, “I really enjoy it here, people respect me, even the combatant employees. I saw what you got at the hotel most of the time, and I prepared you something.” It was a bed of biscuits, with some juicy cuts of orc meat slapped on top, with a serving of eggs, gravy, and cheese over the top.
Bradley grabbed the tray and stared at the pure joy of it, “Paul you are the god of mixing regular and monster food. Next time try making an Orc gravy to go with it and I’ll get your pay boosted.” Paul leaned over, “I already beat you to it.” Bradley smiled, “You are amazing, thank you Paul.”
Bradley left and sat down, and absolutely devoured his American Diner x Monster breakfast. He was starving, and tired, and thirsty from just working at his station for a full day, only taking a break to take calls from HM. ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten. I have been enlightened. Blessed be Paul, the god of food.’