Chapter 417: The System’s Construction Crew

By sunrise the next morning, the Old Western Garrison no longer looked abandoned.

Sage heard the work before his carriage reached the entrance: hammers striking timber, wheels grinding over damaged stone, men shouting measurements, and the heavy crack of masonry being pulled apart somewhere behind the ruined wall.

Yesterday, the first crews had arrived while he was still trying to understand what the Kingdom Construction interface had done. Overnight, apparently, the System had decided that was merely the beginning. Wagons occupied one side of Western Crownway in an organized line, each carrying materials or equipment according to a delivery schedule Sage could see floating beside the construction interface.

Inside the gate, hundreds of people were already moving between marked work zones. Masons examined surviving foundations. Carpenters assembled temporary sheds. Surveyors planted stakes across the old training grounds.

Engineers argued over drainage gradients while road crews broke apart cracked paving stones. Blacksmiths had established temporary forges near the southern yard, and mana architects walked alongside formation specialists carrying crystal instruments Sage didn’t recognize.

There were plumbers, wagon drivers, demolition crews, ordinary laborers and clerks recording everything entering the site. Nothing glowed. Nobody appeared from thin air.

They were simply people working.

That was what bothered Sage most. He had expected System construction to be strange, but not this convincingly ordinary.

The supervisor from yesterday, a broad-shouldered man named Torren, met him near the entrance with three assistants and immediately began discussing the day’s demolition schedule as though they had signed a contract weeks ago.

When Sage asked where his company had received the job, Torren named a Capital construction office Sage had never visited. The masons came through subcontractors.

The drainage workers belonged to another firm. Several engineers had accepted short-term contracts after receiving unusually generous offers, while independent craftsmen had been hired through ordinary labor registries.

Everyone had paperwork. Everyone knew their wages. Everyone could explain who contacted them, where they were supposed to work and what their responsibilities were.

Sage quietly questioned several workers at different parts of the property and received similarly mundane answers.

These weren’t summons pretending to be human, and nothing suggested their thoughts had been altered. The System had somehow reached into the Capital’s existing labor market and assembled a legitimate workforce without Sage personally arranging a single meeting.

When he opened Kingdom Construction, the answer became clearer without becoming less unsettling. Every crew appeared beneath a massive project structure divided by task, schedule, cost and dependency. Demolition Team Seven couldn’t begin on the western barracks until surveyors confirmed the underground foundations.

Drainage Crew Three would enter immediately afterward. Recovered stone suitable for reuse was automatically assigned to storage rather than discarded, while damaged timber was separated for disposal.

Material deliveries arrived only when storage capacity existed. If one crew finished early, the interface shifted another task forward instead of allowing workers to sit idle.

Payments were recorded against completed work, supply prices were compared automatically, and transportation routes changed according to traffic conditions around the Capital.

The System wasn’t constructing the Headquarters by magic. It was doing something Sage suspected might be more frightening: managing an enormous real construction project with almost perfect efficiency.

Pax understood the implication almost immediately when Sage explained what he could without mentioning the System. He stood beside the old command building watching two demolition crews work on opposite wings without interfering with each other.

"Do you know how many people it normally takes just to coordinate this?" he asked.

Sage admitted he didn’t.

Pax gestured toward the site. "Someone has to hire every contractor, verify materials, schedule deliveries, inspect work, prevent crews from blocking each other, approve changes and track payments. Projects this large develop delays because one supplier arrives late, another crew can’t start, then three schedules collapse behind it. Here, people who have never worked together are behaving like they’ve been planning this for months."

Sage watched a loaded wagon enter precisely as an empty one departed through the wider lane. "I noticed."

Pax looked at him. "And you don’t find that strange?"

Sage kept his expression neutral.

"I find many things about the Guild strange." Pax stared for a moment, then wisely stopped asking.

The first week was devoted almost entirely to making the old garrison disappear. Demolition began with structures the engineers classified as immediate hazards. Barracks with collapsed roofs were stripped of reusable materials before being pulled down section by section.

Warehouses damaged by the old magical accident followed, along with unstable workshops and the leaning administrative building near the entrance.

Nothing was simply smashed into rubble and forgotten. Stone was sorted, metals recovered, timber separated, and debris removed continuously so the site never became buried beneath its own demolition.

The old internal roads were ripped apart wherever their foundations had failed, revealing drainage channels beneath them that hadn’t been properly cleared in decades.

Crews descended into those channels, removed blockages and replaced broken sections while engineers mapped how the new Headquarters drainage system would eventually connect to the Capital network.

The northern accident zone required more care. Formation specialists surrounded the old crater with measuring devices before excavation began, checking for residual mana trapped beneath collapsed foundations.

Most dangerous contamination had been removed decades earlier, exactly as Crown records claimed, but several pockets of unstable mana remained inside buried materials.

Those were isolated, extracted and transported away in reinforced containers. Mana architects then stabilized the ground with temporary formations while engineers tested the soil beneath the destroyed workshops.

Sage had expected this section alone to delay construction. Instead, the Kingdom Construction interface had scheduled every specialist before excavation even exposed the problems they were needed to solve.

Crown inspectors arrived on the fourth day expecting to find shortcuts being taken, spent hours examining the stabilization work and left with nothing to complain about.

The squatters were the only issue Sage refused to leave entirely to the construction schedule.

There were more than Pax initially estimated: homeless families occupying intact barracks, elderly people who had lived inside the abandoned district for years, temporary laborers unable to afford Capital rents, and several groups Sage suspected were involved in petty crime.

The easiest solution would have been to give everyone a deadline and have the guards remove whoever remained. Sage rejected it. Throwing desperate families into the streets while building a headquarters worth tens of millions was an excellent way to make the Guild hated before its doors opened.

He ordered Pax to separate genuine residents from criminals using the district as cover, then authorized relocation payments for those who actually lived there.

Families received enough for temporary accommodation and moving expenses, while several workers accepted paid positions helping with clearance.

The criminals were offered no such generosity.

Once Pax identified the worst groups, Capital guards handled them through ordinary law.

Boren discovered the relocation budget that afternoon and looked personally betrayed. "We’re paying people to leave property we already paid seventy-two million gold coins to own?"

Sage continued reviewing construction figures. "We’re paying residents to relocate without creating unnecessary enemies."

Boren pointed toward the treasury report. "And the demolition crews. And engineers. And materials. And apparently someone purchased enough drainage pipe to reach Evergreen."

Sage turned another page. "The Guild can afford it."

Boren pressed a hand to his chest. "That sentence has become dangerous since we entered the Capital."

Mina, sitting nearby with a construction helmet she’d somehow acquired, told him he worried too much about money.

Boren stared at her. "Money is what prevents us from becoming squatters in our own seventy-two-million-gold district."

Mina considered that argument for several seconds, then offered him part of the sweet bun she was eating. Boren accepted it with the solemnity of a man receiving emergency medical treatment.

Despite Boren’s suffering, Sage noticed something surprising when he compared actual spending against Pax’s earlier redevelopment estimates.

The project was expensive, but nowhere near as expensive as conventional construction should have been. Materials were purchased at competitive rates without brokers quietly inflating prices.

Deliveries arrived in quantities that matched actual need, leaving almost no waste. Reusable stone and metal from demolished structures reduced new purchases. Workers weren’t being paid to stand around waiting for another crew to finish.

There were no duplicate orders, mysterious missing shipments or contractors charging for work nobody had requested. Even the inevitable small problems were identified before they spread into expensive delays.

The System wasn’t making materials free or forcing people to work without wages. It simply removed nearly every inefficiency that normally consumed money, while still allowing every craftsman and laborer to receive proper payment for his work.

By the sixth day, even Pax had stopped pretending the schedule was merely impressive.

He stood with Sage on what remained of the central training ground while demolition continued around them and compared the original redevelopment documents against the work already completed.

"The Crown estimated years before this district could support a project of the scale you’re planning," he said. "Not construction. Just clearing, surveys, infrastructure and redevelopment."

Sage glanced toward the Kingdom Construction interface. Twenty-four days remained.

"Their estimate didn’t account for our methods."

Pax gave him a long look. "Nobody’s estimate accounts for your methods."

Nearby, Torren was already redirecting a crew whose demolition work had finished ahead of schedule, and before the workers had even packed their equipment, the wagons assigned to remove the recovered stone were arriving.

Pax watched them for a while longer before shaking his head. "If you can repeat this elsewhere, people are going to start asking uncomfortable questions."

Sage knew that. For now, however, the project still looked possible, merely extraordinary. That mattered.

At the end of the seventh day, Sage returned near sunset and almost failed to recognize the place. Most barracks were gone. The collapsed warehouses had vanished.

The old workshops had been cleared, damaged roads stripped away, drainage restored, and mountains of debris removed as quickly as demolition produced them.

Only a handful of structures remained where engineers intended to reuse foundations or where Crown access restrictions required careful work. With the ruins gone, the true size of the property became startling.

Open ground stretched across the former garrison in every direction, divided by survey markers, temporary roads and neatly organized material yards.

Even Boren went silent when he saw it.

For the first time, there was nothing obstructing their view from one end of the future Headquarters to the other.

For the first time, the Old Western Garrison looked almost empty.

Then Sage noticed what the workers had begun preparing across that emptiness. Deep trenches crossed the cleared ground in precise lines, some carrying new drainage systems while others marked the bases of structures whose dimensions were difficult to appreciate from ground level.

Hundreds of workers moved between them under the direction of engineers and surveyors. Stone, reinforced metal and formation materials arrived behind them in steady lines of wagons, and temporary cranes had already been erected around several of the largest marked sites.

Across the former district, rectangular outlines were taking shape where buildings would stand, some modest, others enormous enough that Sage had to walk closer before understanding their scale.

Demolition week was finished, and everywhere Sage looked, the foundations of the new Adventurer Guild were beginning to rise.