Suddenly Bradley got a phone call from HM, “What do you need bud?” HM responded, “At least call me bossman you damn kid. Anyways, I found out where the 30k residents got shipped off to. They’re being held in a temporary shelter in Cleveland right now. The government wants nothing to do with em. What should we do?”

Bradley smiled, “Inform the government that since they are all awakened it would be a waste to imprison them again, and instead they should pay their dues to the nation. Tell them we’ll turn them into more squads, deal with their housing, food, etc, but in return we want similar subsidies per person like Detroit had. If they argue too much, tell them we’ll take a bit more than their best offer.” “What if they won’t send them over?” Bradley smirked, “It doesn’t matter if they do or don’t right now, what matters is we get the discussion going, and they realize it would be easier for us to deal with it.” “Ahh that makes sense, I’ll get off here and get to it. Good work on those contracts so quickly. Keep it up!” Bradley hung up, and got back to his delicious food.

With that, the status quo was handled, each person there had a job to play, and missions to run a few times a month. Devin handled most of the training, Ben and Kathy handled most of running the place, HM was a mouth-piece to pretend he had control, Trisha handled healing after or sometimes during missions, and the rest trained and trained and trained.

Bradley tinkered in his lab for a bit longer, and during that time he leveled up his mana manipulation skill. “Conditional Spell Caster? If I had to take a shot in the dark, it would be something like logic based magic. Let’s test it: Absorb the mana in the air, once the mana density reaches 50%, fire forward.” Bradley sat there, watching the mana pool up in his hands, slowly watching the white light get stronger, then suddenly the orb began spitting out fire until it disappeared.

“God fucking damnit, fire forward means go forward not spit fire forward!” Bradley cussed for a while after that. And over the course of a few weeks managed to find some keywords that actually worked the way he expected to and wrote them down in his journal. Each failure was even more annoying because a window would pop-up asking if you would like to add this to the spell list.

It wasn’t all bad for Bradley though, as he picked up a few new gadgets thanks to the tinkering. He had built a device that could be slotted into either of his armbands. The device used three crystals as each one could only handle a singular process unless it was a higher level. The tier 4 crystal collected ambient mana from the air as fast as it could, unless it was empty in which case it did nothing. The second crystal would do nothing unless injected with mana, and would transfer over the first crystal to the third crystal, and that third crystal would fire out the mana forward in a beam at a set intensity rate.

In other words, Bradley now had a magic charge beam that needed little magical input, but if given input could increase the duration of the device’s fire. The only problem was it was good for a single shot, then was worthless for a while, since it would need to be recharged.

Bradley also came up with another idea while filling in an order for goblin swords, that there was a distinct advantage for using materials from other dimensions. He thought back to how he constructed his magic gun, and the swords, how after the blueprint is formed, you can attempt using unshaped materials as the input, while letting the rest of the material go to waste. He went through the arduous task of carving out a chunk of bone.

‘God fucking damnit, why is this bone so fucking hard.’ Bradley had to use a knife covered in magic to even be able to shave any off. When he had made the sword, all he did was apply magic to a grinder, but that wouldn’t work here. He needed precision and an odd shape. It took several attempts and about a full working day, but he managed to create his first bone bullet.

‘If I make the whole thing out of bone, I don’t think the gunpowder would blow out the bullet. It’s better to leave the flimsy metal.’ Bradley marveled at his gross creation, ‘I guess the new world runs on corpses, but hey, so did the old one. This time it's just more literal.’ After constructing a metric fuckton of bone bullets with his supplies, he had HM inform the government of his new product, and called in a few friends for a quick stroll into the goblin forest of Detroit a week later.

Kathy gave Bradley a smile as they trudged through the forest, “Glad to have you on a mission, Ben and Devin have been handling their roles well, but it’s not the same, no offense guys.” Devin sighed, “I’m doing my best, but my intelligence stat isn’t as high as that bastard’s over there. It’s like he knows exactly what to do all the time.”

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Ben nodded, “It seems like it's easier to pick up experience with mental tasks such as leadership and strategy when your int stat is higher. Never played a day of chess in my life and Devin said he used to be a chess champion back in middle school, but after about five games I mopped the floor with him.”

Devin grumbled, “It’s not fair, I thought I knew enough openers, but it doesn’t matter when this fucker uses witchcraft to beat my ass.” Devin lifted his head up high, trying to hide his disappointment, “Well after doing tasks such as leading teams and strategizing, I’ve noticed my int stat going up, so it seems just like our workouts.”

Ben nodded, “We need our magicians to study to boost their int stat maybe. Studying what, is the question though.” Bradley looked over his shoulder, “We can probably have a few of them study a bit of how spell crystals work, and definitely they need to work on their mana manipulation skill, I unlocked a new sub-ability on it and my int stat jumped five points.” Bradley continued trudging, scanning the area, “And after using it for a month, I’ve gained another 7.”

Ben looked a bit shocked, “What the hell is your int stat now?” Bradley checked quickly, “Looks like I just hit 50 recently.” Bradley smirked, “Guess I’m doing better than you guys?” Kathy grumbled, “I only have 30 even though I was spell spamming to be a healer in the beginning.” Bradley laughed, “Sorry about that, my recklessness definitely didn’t help.” Kathy smirked, “Actually it did, my mana pool is way bigger after constantly running out and refilling it.”

Bradley thought for a moment, “You know I guess I noticed that too, but I wasn’t sure since I was also leveling up during that time.” Ben put his hand up, “It’s about time, I can’t believe we had to wait this long for something to show up.” Bradley turned, “How many and where?” Ben smiled, “Looks like we are surrounded by 50 goblins, 2 orcs, and an ogre. And by surrounded I mean completely. You got a plan for this, you didn’t even bring all of Squad 0.”

Bradley chuckled, “Well I just wanted to test stuff out, and you all have grinded levels pretty well so let’s just leave it as I trust you guys the most.” Slowly the goblins began peaking around the trees, smiling their disgusting smiles, confident in their numbers, until suddenly a head popped off of one, and another, and another, and another.

Devin, Bradley, and Kathy were all loaded down with massive light machine guns loaded up with bone bullets. They maintained a square formation, giving each other enough space to fire without hitting each other. They fired, and fired, and fired. Tearing the monsters and trees to shreds, not even the Orcs could handle the barrage and went down in just a few bullets. The Ogre on the other hand managed to tank the bullets quite well, his body being injured, but not penetrated due to his thick fat.

Bradley raised his hand, “I wanna try one more thing on him, then you guys can handle him how you want.” Bradley took a deep breath and jumped up and towards the beast. He pressed his right hand over his left gauntlet in a swift motion and filled the center crystal with mana. “Let’s see what this does!”

Suddenly a bright white beam fired out of the gauntlet, flickering against the darkly lit forest, directed at the agitated beast. The beam sliced through the tree it was standing behind and slammed against its blubber with force. A hole was slowly bore into the monster’s gut, then just as quickly as it started, the beam stopped. There was a gaping hole in the beast, but it didn’t fully penetrate. Bradley landed a few feet back from where he had jumped, being pushed back by the force.

“Whew, that was fun, you guys can finish him off now.” Everyone was shocked, and Kathy was the first one to speak up, “Is that what you’ve been working on recently?” Bradley laughed, “This and so much more. If I want to boost my magic damage, I need to keep tinkering. Seems like that’s just how it’ll go.”

Bradley nodded to himself, “Well if this worked, time to get a bit crazier with it I guess.” He smirked, “Devin, go stab that fucker and collect his corpse. It’s valuable material. I sent some samples to the lab and its bone density is way higher than the other two.” Devin nodded and quickly dealt the finishing blow to the severely wounded monster.

Devin grinned, “Level 13 baby, and my int stat is now…” Devin paused for a moment, “No different than before. Damnit.” Ben laughed, “Of course it stayed the same, level-ups only boost the stat points of your class. Everything else is up to you.” Devin sighed, “I was hoping that it was based on stat proportions or something. Guess not.”

“Devin, you’re one of the main components of this team, but you didn’t even know that, no wonder your int stat is so low,” Bradley smirked as Devin got flustered, “Come on man, it’s not fair to deal with someone who gains stat points from just doing their role.” Bradley patted Devin on the back, “Come on man, let’s head back to base. I just wanted to collect a bit more material to mess around with, and to test out a few of my gadgets.”

They began to trudge out of the forest and Bradley sighed, “There seems to be way less mobs than I expected, I guess we’re slowly clearing out this area.” Bradley looked around, “Yea, I noticed. It’s a bit odd we only ran into one group. Maybe the government has been testing out my supplies or-” They emerged at the forest edge and then a shot rang out.