After their discussion with Talla and having set an appointment to talk with Mob Inc., the group headed back to the main building to figure out what they were doing next. Along the way they were joined by Dax and his mate Volka, Carl and his wife Marge, and Dave, the shifty eyed scout spy. The entirety of their little counsel. They had a lot to discuss and not much time to do it, as it seemed any goal they set took forever to achieve. Two months may seem like a long time, but with the setbacks from the last major fight, there was a lot to do.

The last wave had damaged a significant portion of their defenses, used a large quantity of their ammunition stores, and killed more than a few fighters. Frankly, they were running low on just about everything with no signs of replenishment. After all, even if you had the weapons you needed the hands to wield them.

Once they got settled in, Ray began by asking a question that had been plaguing him since the fight with the {FOREST LORD}. “So, a bit of an outside-the-topic question, but has anyone been able to use the System screens for anything other than information or prompts?”

The group looked at one another in confusion before Volks spoke up, Ray hearing her say something for the first time. Compared to her husband, she was surprisingly articulate. “No. Only read System. Not use outside that.” Everyone else in the room confirmed those words through various affirmations.

Derrick was the first to ask, “Why Ray? Did something weird happen? It must have if you are asking that, silly question.”

“No such thing as a silly or stupid question Derrick, but yeah. Something weird happened,” Ray confirmed. “When I was fighting that armored nut job I stabbed the fucker with a System message.”

The room went quiet for a moment before Dave broke the silence. “Now what in sam-hill does that mean Boss man? You got a notification you done cut that furry bastard or somewhat?” he drawled out, curious.

“No. I mean I literally grabbed the System message and stabbed that thing with it. Then it exploded. Or something like that anyway. The long and short of it is that I used the actually windowed prompt as a weapon,” he explained. “Well, kind of. To be honest I don’t remember a lot outside of it seriously hurting a Legendary monster.”

That sent the group into silent contemplation again. Not wanting to waste any more time Ray said, “Anyway, if no one has any experience with that it must be a Class perk for me. I will experiment more on my own. In the meantime, however, I need to know how bad the damage is and what we need to accomplish in order to not die to the next wave. Derrick, tell us more about your predictions for wave eight.”

The engineer cleared his throat. “Right. Wave eight is supposed to have roughly ten thousand Basic enemies, a hundred or more Uncommon, and one more rare or Legendary enemies over what wave seven had. We have no idea what kind of enemy or monster they might be made out of, but based on what we have faced so far we are… um…” he looked down as his face reddened a bit.

“Come on man, spit it out,” growled Carl.

Nodding quickly Derrick laid out his suspicions, “I think it's either going to be something entirely alien or… or… demons.”

Ray was wrong. That hadn’t been a blush, that had been a fear response. A fear of the demons that had so easily infiltrated them and come so close to killing them all. It wasn’t something that he was bout to forget. He had spent almost a full quarter of their NEX on detecting and breaking any kind of demon that entered his territory.

“Demons?” Josephine asked, a look of confusion on her face. “That isn’t something that we have encountered before, My Lord.”

Ray waved the question off for now. “I will tell you more later. Back to Derrick though, his guesses have been on the mark so far, seriously on the mark. From number to creature types, we have only been able to survive this long thanks to his highly educated guesses. But I have to ask, why the alien creatures?”

“There isn’t a whole lot here anymore that may be able to take us on outside of sheer numbers,” the man began to explain. “There seems to be a correlation between the Uncommon, Rare, and Legendaries and the creature types they lead. Honestly, I don’t think that {FOREST LORD} was from our world. My suspicion is that the System is pulling threat appropriate monsters from other worlds that it presides over in order to fulfill the terms of the event. Seeing as there are only three things we haven’t seen here yet, that Lich, the Daemon, and the Alien bird bastards that revived us, the options are either slim or completely outside our expectations.”

Ray stared at Derrick in shock. “That… makes way too much fucking sense.” The others agreed with that assessment. “So you think it's most likely going to be either more undead, fucking demons, or something that we couldn’t have possibly guessed at ahead of time?”

“Yup,” confirmed Derrick.

“Well, shit. Okay,” Sighed Ray. He focused his attention on the group. “We need people, people. Anyone who can fight. Bodies. I have an appointment to speak with the CEO of Mob Inc tomorrow. They, apparently, sell plenty of custom creatures called Lizard-Kin. With our remaining NEX I plan on purchasing as many as I can and modifying them. They are not expensive. I just don’t know how many they have on hand, their Shop listing has a warning that huge orders won’t be fulfilled due to limited demand. But we can start there and look at other places as we go along.”

Dax grunted, “Dere’s lots of merc on da shop Boss,” he grunted out. “I checked.”

Carl and Marge also stepped up. “I done some lookin through that shop myself. There are lots of old pieces of junk we can fix up. Weapons of all sorts. I know we need hands, but even if those little lizard fellas ain’t the strongest they should be able-bodied enough to pull a trigger or push a button. Rig them weapons on the well and let them have at it.”

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“And don’t forget dear, our first harvest is in before the next wave. All that NEX you save on food should be put towards the defenses,” Marge said, patting the old farmer on the back.

Ray blinked, “Harvest?”

“Yeah… oh shit, I didn’t explain that to you!” said Derrick excitedly. “We ran into that demon issue and it kind of took precedent over everything else. Then I kind of… forgot.”

“I thought Carl and Marge had left or were dead. I haven’t seen them forever,” Ray said with a small laugh. “But they were doing something farmy instead, and its enough to get us through the next few months apparently?”

“You bet,” said Carl with an infectious grin. “I’m thinkin' with double our number we get enough grub for about four months or so. Seven to eight on the outside with our current numbers.”

Ray nodded back, excited. “That’s awesome news. That saves us a ton of resources and time. Resources out of the way, what does our spy operations look like Dave? What new and exciting things can you tell us.”

“Well Boss man, we are completely up a brown river with paddles that want to eat our faces,” he drawled. “It's worse than a peach storm out there. We are surrounded by legions of the undead, there isn’t getting in or out until we get through these waves I think.”

Ray glanced quickly at Josephine; a look Dave didn’t miss. “Oh yeah, Boss. I thought about how and the only answer is divine intervention. Who, exactly, I couldn’t warrant a guess. But it may have been our Dog pal or some other equally magnanimous divine friend,” he drawled.

“I doubt that. The one God that we have met so far hasn’t exactly been friendly,” Ray quipped. “On the other hand, he didn’t obliterate us at the snap of his fingers either. I’m not sure what teleported you over here, and no I don’t have a better term for what happened, but I am thankful it happened.”

Dave nodded, “Right, right. Like you said Boss, thankful. Them Myrmidons are nasty customers, they carved through the undead like you would not believe. But I digress here, yes I do,” he continued. “Now we have some minor issues around, mostly the damage to the base and lack of resources. We can use the Shop, sell what we picked up from those nasty buggers, but our consumables are down to about a quarter of what we did have ready. Derrick here can give you a better inventory, but what I’m getting at Boss is that we are strapped. We need more, and we ain’t got anywhere to get more.”

“You said the Shop was still working, so Talla is still there. Can’t we buy what we need?” Ray asked, confused.

The spy shook his head, “Nah Boss, it’s way too spendy. We got a million odd NEX left, but that won’t get us what we need. The Shop is expensive. Even if you made more of them batteries we wouldn’t have the resources needed,” he explained with frustration evident in his voice. “No, what we need is ta expand our recycling efforts and maybe take a new territory or two. Then recycle those places too. It’s the materials we need Boss man, and in quantity.”

“Okay, so we need materials. Everything apparently?” Ray summarized. Getting a nod in confirmation from Dave he continued, “And what we can find in our Hex wont cut it. But we are totally surrounded by the hordes from this event. Let’s table this and hear out the other issues for just a moment. So far we have food, lack fighters, and are running dry on physical materials for crafting and building. Anything else?”

Rivea snorted, “Yeah. I have a solution to all of that,” she said with an annoyed look on her face. Before anyone could ask what it was she said, “I fly you to a neighboring Hex, like that dungeon one. We kill everything in it, you claim it, then we stuff your fucking extra-dimensional space full of everything we need and I carry you back. Same with any survivors we find. That fixes everything. Questions?”

The room was silent as everyone stared at the Drake. Then Nyx started chuffing in laughter. “She has several very good points. I believe that up to this point we have not explored your storage ability very much. You could very well contain an entire territories worth of physical goods within it for all we know. Not to mention there may be mechanics to transfer materials between territories,” she said.

“Right. That makes too much sense. Lets… let's build out a plan on that. Taking the dungeon territory would probably be the easiest Hex to start with,” Ray said tentatively. “And we could begin feeding it goods and materials. That would probably help with our shortage.

Turning to Derrick he asked, “You had something a while back you wanted to talk with me about. Something transportation-related? We got distracted by, well, everything trying to kill us. Again. What did you want to bring up?”

“Oh yeah! The airship!” Derrick said excitedly, causing Ray to facepalm and everyone else to stare at the eclectic engineer in exasperation. Nyx just started chuffing again.

“I got a prototype built. It can’t carry a ton yet, but it’s definitely big enough for a dozen or so people or some light cargo,” Derrick explained happily. “I know your storage space can’t carry people so I built it out more for passengers for now. But if the concept proves to be sound, I can upscale them pretty quickly. The size is only really constrained by having a place to land it, but since most of the buildings around here have flat roofs… well we aren’t really limited at all. Don’t land it in a forest though, or water. That would destroy or sink it pretty quickly.”

Ray held up a hand, stopping his friend from rambling even more. “We have an airship?” Derrick nodded. “A working airship?” Another nod. “And yet we walked through that mess of a nightmare, took a boat that nearly ended up getting us all eaten, and had to dodge Bandits the entire way back?” More nods, a bit more hesitant this time.

“You can’t blame Derrick, Ray. You didn’t follow through on asking, and a lot has happened since then,” Nyx chided him.

Breathing deeply, Ray let the air escape in a long slow breath. “Yeah. That’s on me. Rivea, we are going to take the airship to the dungeon’s Hex. Josephine, you and your squad are coming with. Everyone else needs to stay here, defend, and rebuild. We are going to claim the shit out of that territory, bring back everything that we can, get the outpost up and going per our agreement with the Dungeon Fairy, and hope we have enough time left to actually build enough shit to not die.”

Everyone around him nodded their agreement.

“Alright then, let's get to it,” he said, clapping his hands in a dramatic gesture. Dave was the first one to leave, as the creepy southern spy simply vanished from the room. Dax and Volka headed off to organize what troops they had left. Carl and Marge went back to the hydroponic farms that Ray hadn’t even known had existed, and Josephine, Rivea, and the Myrmidon squad left with him and Nyx. Derrick tagged along with him as well, leading them to a part of the arcology fortress that he hadn’t been to yet.

The group traveled in relative quiet as Derrick led them further and further up in to the tallest parts of the structure. Eventually, they exited out into a large, partially open-air room with three sides. The fourth led onto a massive open-air segment of the roof where their aerial vehicle sat.

Ray stumbled to a halt. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. The so called airship was in front of him and it was nothing like what he had imagined. In fact, he didn’t have a reference for what he was looking at outside of the fact that it should have been in a museum exhibit somewhere. Or maybe a scrapyard.

Tentatively, he turned to a proudly smiling Derrick and asked, “So… is it supposed to look like that? Or are we still working on it? I thought you said it was done?”

Derrick turned to him with a frown. “It is done, Ray. Behold!” he exclaimed, gesturing wildly, “I give you the Zeppelin Mark One! First ariel scout and reconnaissance craft of its kind, even in the System!”

Ray nodded in agreement. “Yeah, I would definitely call it one of a kind.”