After our date we returned to the town. Since the attack much of our city’s building industry had went to expanding the town. The first thing I did was relocate Gary and Bob thirty meters underground, then have Tony build a building on top of it. The storage building, RVs and trailers were moved, as everyone in them now lived in the apartments in town or Sanctuary, and the area was flattened out so a large city hall could be built there. The building had three above ground stories and two underground stories.
The first underground level was a police station, which was mostly used as a place to let brawlers cool off and a place for serious suspects to wait while the investigation was under way, which usually only took hours at most. Simon had four deputies now, and at least one of them sat in the jail at all times, in case someone was brought in or a civilian needed to contact them.
The second underground level was where Gary and Bob lived, and where we moved much of the city’s storage, having dug out room for a Food Warehouse 3, Warehouse 3, Bulk Warehouse 3, and Chemical Warehouse 3 using two of the autominers. The above ground buildings that we used before that were then repurposed into either stores or housing, with all of the goods transferring to the new warehouses. It also housed all of the Nanite Forges.
The first above ground level was a lobby and a set of offices for the various departments. First was the Department of Education, Di’s office. Second was the Department of System Affairs, Olivia’s office, where she controlled the nanite forges, including the Nanite Forge 2 that I had bought from the System, and the trade terminals that were spread throughout the city. Third was the Department of Leasing, where we hired someone to oversee the leasing of equipment to the people, as that was my duty until then. On the opposite side of the hall was the Department of the Militia, Paul’s office, though he usually had one of his lieutenants manning it, as it was basically serving as a recruitment office and Paul preferred being a drill Sargent rather than working a desk. Beside that was the Department of Construction, Where Tony and Tom worked when they actually decided to do desk work, and beside that was the Department of Agriculture, that basically oversaw Bob and made sure that he matched demands for our people and the people who bought our food. Unlike most town governments we didn’t have a tax or tag office, nor any kind of licensing bureau. Some people joked that, as we had a government we should change the name to “Minarchist’s Redoubt”, but the fact that we made all of our money by selling or renting things made it little more than a joke.
The second above ground level was mostly school rooms and a nursery, as some of the recent people brought in children they had adopted or, occasionally, their own children. Di had hired people to watch children under five and create and oversee education plans for anyone from five to sixteen, as, with the system, everyone had a computer in their head that they could use to learn. Various groups also borrowed these rooms to practice certain skills, mostly the safe-to-use-inside System skills like Inventory and Market Screen.
The third level was my office and a city council chambers where we could hold meetings once a month to hear from the people. So far I had missed the first meeting, but I might be there for the second. I also hadn’t been to my office, there, but my secretary had overseen the move.
The rest of the construction was split pretty evenly between Tony’s group, that was making the wall taller and thicker to deal with the Jotun, and Tom’s group, that was building a wall near St. Nicholas’s and the hotel in case they were attacked. The city’s main teleporter had been moved to the hotel and replaced with a Teleporter 2, which could move one hundred people at a time, though it was rarely used for that. We did encourage this use, though, by setting daily half-price teleports to other cities where we knew they had a Teleporter 2.
I hadn’t really done any of the work myself, just sent out orders and answered a few questions. Tony and Tom handled most of it. I concentrated on Sanctuary.
With this new wave of expansion we were gathering a lot of international interest, partially because we had handled the invasion the best out of everyone. We even expanded Bob’s cloning tanks to make sure that he could make replacement limbs for everyone that lost them in the invasion. When Di and I went to Rome, I mentioned who we were and we were offered VIP service at the restaurant. The Mayor of Rome was at the restaurant, so we briefly talked with him. He promised to have his people arrange a formal meeting between the two of us. They had mostly survived the attack with the help of Vatican City.
With the world rebuilding after the attack, I had focused on strengthening our militaries, as a second invasion was inevitable. Several cities had sent troops to counterattack the GCA bases near them, and almost all the forces were wiped out. I bought an extra Nanite Forge 2 and used all of Sanctuary’s excess production capability to start making entry level System weapons and armor. The armor mostly went to Paul to test out, including a few different types of shield generator, some hardened armor, and some ablative armor. As we already had rail guns and melee weapons, however, most of the weapons were sold on the market for half the System cost, so that the various cities could have better weapons. I also bought over a million rail pistols, as no one could figure out how to hack them, and hacked them the hard way by having the five nanite forge ones I made for this purpose spend three minutes each replacing every part that was locked out with new parts, then sold them back to the market for an extra five zerka over the buy price each. I could only hack 14400 pistols every 30 days per nanite forge, or seventy two thousand per month, but that earned me an extra three hundred and sixty thousand per month and put many low cost System weapons on the market.
While I refused to give the Angel of Death power to anyone, I put my Warrior’s Armor and Virtual Armor skills on the market for free, in case anyone wanted them. My other defensive powers were already available through the System and I didn’t want to give out mana bullet yet.
All of that, other than the date, happened in the background before the big Sanctuary reveal, with me focusing on Sanctuary. Now that we had the infrastructure, I decided to start training. First things first, I actually did my daily quest. Surprisingly, it actually gave me some dexterity, though only one point. I considered trying to solo the dungeon for practice, but it was extremely busy as it had just opened today. I could swing by Tim’s and get some boosters to improve my stats, but as I didn’t have any stats that were below ten that seemed like a waste. I did send in an order for the good quality gene serum, with the recommended one hundred passes to iron out any problems, in case I had some bad genes, but that would probably take a few days.
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Unsure what to do now, I went back home and started watching lectures on physics, including alien lecturers. Apparently, while the humanoid body type was common it was far from universal. I binge watched, or should I say intensely studied, science for the next few days. Despite the fact that I hadn’t been seen for days I had done so much work around Sanctuary that no one cared that I took a break to grind my skills. I maxed out my physics and got my quantum physics to eight, my cosmic physics to six, and even got a point of universal physics.
After that I was able to rebuild some of my powers to make them work better, including my teleport power and making it work without a nearby teleporter. I also realized that the different Inventory powers didn’t supercede each other, as I maxed out Inventory, got Inventory 2 to level 6, and made Inventory 3 at level 1. That meant I had one cubic meter of normal storage space, two hundred and sixteen cubic meters of airtight storage space, and one thousand cubic meters of space where time was all but stopped. You would think I would just use the best one, but the higher level powers used exponentially more power. My own energy generation was barely able to keep up with the power draw from just having them, and if I went much further I would need to install cybernetic power sources just to keep up.
There were several forcefield like powers that I could try, and I could try to learn to make portals, but I felt like that was enough upgrading of the skills for now.
I teleported back to the surface to go see how Samantha was doing. I found her at the mines, running around the wall. “Come on, Summers, you’re holding everyone up. Pick up the pace.” She was about thirty meters behind the others and they were still pulling away.
“Is she that bad?” I asked Paul as I walked up.
“Only her dexterity. Pretty sure the training got her Strength and Endurance to max out at thirty. A bit weird that she kind of hit a wall there. Most guys are still able to push through and get a bit more performance, but she just can’t do it. Her dexterity though is only an eight, and it’s barely rising. I asked Tim about it and he said she probably has poor genes in that area, and recommended that she get them fixed. I don’t know, though. The human average pre-system was ten, so even if she’ll never get past that point she won’t be clumsy any more. She just won’t be fast or able to dodge that well. I’m thinking of making her one of the team’s heavies, one of the guys that carry the big guns. That is, if she sticks with it.” I climbed up on the wall and joined them for their last loop, running just ahead of her to encourage her to give just a little more.
As they were mostly done when I got there they stopped after a few loops to catch their breath, while I was just starting to breath heavy. Sam was only breathing heavy as well. High endurance would do that, I guess.
I hopped off the wall in one of the sections that was still only three meters tall and ran over to talk to Paul. Other parts of the wall were being expanded to ten meters tall and a meter thick, with a low friction coating and full sensor package on the outside, but here it was still the default half by three meters. “Hey, Paul, you mind if I join your training for now? At least the physical stuff. I was hoping to get in better shape.”
Paul shrugged. “Sure, on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“I want five dungeon spots a day for my men. The teleporter only lets a team enter every thirty minutes so that it doesn’t get overcrowded, but because of that I can’t ever get a team in without having them stand in line for an hour.”
“Let me check.” I sent a message to the Sanctuary Outpost Core asking for the data about the Dungeon Teleporter use and about a minute later I was able to look through today’s data. I had installed a quantum link in my head, which was surprisingly not painful, so that I could connect to it from anywhere. “Are you willing to do night raids?” I asked him, seeing that most of the unused spots were for between eight pm and six am.
“I guess so. Would do the troops some good. So, when should we go there?”
I reserved five spots for them. “How does three am to five thirty sound? That will get you there before the teams start showing up at six or six thirty.”
Paul nodded. “Looks like the men are going to be losing some sleep.” As it was already six PM, he walked over to the troops. “Listen up, recruits. Your exercise is done for the day. Get something to eat, then get some rest. You’ll all be meeting me at the base teleporter at two forty five in full combat loadout. We’re going on a little dungeon dive.” Some of the men cheered. “Don’t be late. If I have to come and get you you’ll be carrying the loot out in a backpack, not your inventory. Got it?” There was a chorus of “yes, sirs”. “Good, dismissed.”
The men stood up and I walked over. “Mind if I join you? I’ll stick to the rear if you want, I’ve just never been through the dungeon except in VR while I was building it.”
Paull nodded. “Fair enough. Meet us there with your gear. Including any food you’ll need. The men usually carry three days on them at any time, just in case, and I want to see how deep they can push. In fact.” Paul motioned to Sam, and she came over. “Greg’s going with us into the dungeon, hopefully just as an observer like me, as you people are the fighters. I want you to help him get his gear together.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“In that case, see you in the morning.” With that, Paul walked off.
“I actually needed to talk to you. Let’s head back and you can help me get ready, then I’ll see if Di wants to go to that steakhouse in the city with us.”
An hour later all of Greg’s combat gear was sitting in his inventory under a special loadout. He had bought a staff from Tarn’s cousin, and it was fully charged and in there. He also had enough food and water for a week and cooking supplies in his Inventory 2. Other than that, he had his rail pistol, a mono-sword, underarmor, and a full body suit of a type of titanium/aluminum/carbon alloy, a type of lightweight body armor that, at only ten kilos of mass, could stop a few rail pistol rounds. This was the standard light armor the militia gave its soldiers.
Sam’s loadout was similar, though her inventory was only the first variety so she only carried three days of field rations. Her armor’s alloy also included a good bit of osmium. While it added five kilos to the mass, it made the armor capable of taking a full hit from a Rail Sniper or particle beam rifle, the second one of which she had an example of slung over her shoulder. It weighed around thirty kilos on its own, but was one of the best types of weapons you could get for armor penetration.
After they were done with their loadouts she unequipped her clothes, as they could interfere with some of the scans, and laid down on a Diagnostic table. Greg turned away from her and brought up a set of holographic scans. A few minutes later, he shook his head. “Nothing wrong with the hardware that I can see. It’s probably just because you’ve never walked before.”
“But I’ve watched over a hundred hours of people jogging, walking, running, even doing gymnastics. The System should have given me enough XP to level up those skills. Why am I still tripping over my own feet and unable to run properly?”
Greg shook his head, spinning his chair around. “No idea. Though we do know that skills soft cap at the level of their controlling skill, or in the case of level zero skills like walking, their dominant stat. With your DEX at eight, you may just be at your limit.”
Sam sighed and reequipped her clothes. “In that case, how can I level up my DEX quickly? I don’t want to be a burden on the team.”
Greg thought again, then smiled. “Well if the hardware’s fine, aka, your body is flexible enough and there isn’t a nerve problem, maybe it’s a software issue. You want to try a gymnastics program? There’s one in the System you can try.”
Samantha nodded. “Fine. I’ll do it tonight instead of sleeping. Send me the file. For now, though, let’s go eat. Di will get mad if we’re late.” She pointed to a clock on the wall that said ‘7:55’. We had eight o’clock reservations.