Chapter 231: Go Get Them

Seeing an enemy that wasn’t coming at them like an incoming tide in numbers that that dwarfed their own, the heroes were headed out of the city in droves.

Every group that had a personnel carrier and an escort of assault speeders was already headed into the fields, while the runners were taking over the guns on the walls, which were mostly silent now, except for picking off targets in the far distance.

If the heroes weren’t going to get to them any time soon, there was no good reason to let the groups spread out, so the artillery began to clear the area.

Briefly, Kalli bemoaned the fact that they only had large energy weapons, with no indirect fire projectile artillery that could fire past the horizon. But the cost that it would take to continually use such a thing in battle would be even more horrific than the rocket pods of the assault speeders.

The city’s heroes spread out through the battlefield, wiping out the monsters as they found them.

The hapless creatures were incredibly outmatched, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t at least try to fight back. It was just that there wasn’t much that they could do. Even the weakest of their warriors, other than the newbies who were still in the base, were getting close to level fifteen now, and their [Guard] skill, which simply put a barrier over their shield, was enough to make them virtually impervious to Goblin and Hobgoblin attacks.

The Flatfoot Hunters had it even worse, as they were even less durable than the Goblins.

[Chain Lightning] killed a dozen of them every second, and a single mage could take out an entire attack force of them while they couldn’t break his [Mage Armour] spell with their spears.

Kalli watched the situation with pleasure, and mentally began to calculate how she was going to allocate points if they kept getting waves like this.

There were more things that the city needed, and if they didn’t get half a million monsters a wave, she was not going to get enough points from the kill quest completions to buy it on the schedule that she had planned.

Sure, it was good for the city not to be suffering.

But her planned upgrades...

Kalli was settling in for lunch when the System gave them another announcement.

{Wave 9 80 Percent Depleted}

{Wave 10 80 Percent Completed}

{Power Balancing in effect.} No suitable targets found in range.

{The City of Marimgar now controls the First Coastal Zone}

Kalli wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it was still far from noon, and there were virtually no more enemies to be found. The heroes were still hunting, getting the gains that they could. But without a fresh spawn, there wasn’t much to fight.

However, the realization was sinking in that if there had been a wave that started right at the walls, they would have been caught out in the wilderness.

Then, they would have had to fight their way back, and the majority of the wall would have been left undefended, or defended by level 1 and 2 heroes who had been runners a day ago. That could be catastrophic, if they hadn’t gotten fully geared by Kalli yet.

Many hadn’t, as they were still working as runners.

With the enemy basically gone, the heroes began to return to town, ready to sleep. If the remaining goblins wanted to attack the city, the lower level heroes could deal with them from the walls.

They were a bit more rested than the front-line heroes, who were rightly exhausted after half a day of fighting again.

They had done extra waves today, so there was a chance that they might have tomorrow off. There were two more waves left in the third trial from what they knew. But if it kept to the one a day schedule, they should have time to rest.

If it consolidated the last two into tomorrow morning, they would be ready for them.

With everyone back in the city, and mostly asleep, Marimgar fell into a sort of quiet lull, with some people going about their daily lives, but very few moving around the city streets. Which was actually normal now, as most of the movement could be done in the walkways between buildings.

But it gave Marimgar a restful feeling, Kalli thought.

With the easier fights in the second half of the morning, the heroes were up earlier than expected, and the cafeteria was packed when Kalli walked in to get breakfast at ten in the evening.

The Academy was beginning to look like a science fiction military compound, with everyone in composite battle suits, and rifles leaning against tables, or slung over shoulders.

Not everyone had a large enough backpack for their rifles and everything else they wanted to carry, so they preferred to simply keep them slung at all times. They were more likely to need their rifle on short notice than the food and other supplies in their backpack anyhow.

"Good morning, Coordinator. Would you like to get in on the betting pool for this morning’s wave?" Sanchez asked cheerfully.

"You’re in a good mood. Is the pool doing that well, or did you win yesterday’s?"

The Sergeant laughed and shook his head. "It rolled over after the first wave yesterday. Nobody bet on the outcome that we got. But that’s not the reason I’m in a good mood today. I just hit a hundred agility. It’s a huge step up, and my attack speed increased by forty percent."

Kalli patted him on the shoulder with a smile, and wisely didn’t mention that she had received a huge number of extra stat points when she overflowed her points cap earlier in the third trial.

"Forty percent higher attack speed for a rifleman is a crazy bonus. How are you skills coming along?"

"I’ve got most of the single target damage bonuses now, and I’m moving into the generalized buffs. The Rifleman Class isn’t like the mages, which have a huge kill skill at the top. But we get a lot of stacking bonuses, as well as a [Preferred Enemy] bonus that we can set for as long as we like.

So, if the wave is mostly one species, we can pick one and get a thirty percent damage bonus to them all morning.

All the insect monsters counted as one species, so everyone who had the skill made out like bandits yesterday. I’ve got a bet in that the Epic Grade Trials are over, and we’re back to regular difficulty for the last two waves."

Kalli nodded. "Because of the message last night, saying that it couldn’t balance to us because there wasn’t a suitable enemy nearby. That makes sense. I just hope that it’s something that we know so that we don’t have to guess what works."