Chapter 232: Regular Difficulty?

The mood was light in the dining hall as the heroes finished breakfast, then Kalli went to feed her chickens and collect the eggs for the morning meals.

That coop really was getting crowded, she decided.

250 Points would make her a wonderful addition to the chicken coop, with what the System called "Advanced Features", so an upgrade was purchased, and the simple chicken coop began to transform.

It was fundamentally the same, Kalli decided.

The real difference was the size, and the design of the indoor portion of the coop. There were rows of nests along the walls, with walkways to get to them. The chickens seemed quite enthusiastic about exploring the new space, which Kalli noticed was made for a very large bird.

At first, it almost looked like it had been made for large breed dogs, but it was actually filled with chickens the size of turkeys if turkeys were less fat.

These didn’t look much like the flightless domesticated birds that she was used to, they were becoming more monstrous, and Kalli strongly suspected that they could actually fly if they got out of the cage.

A few flapping metres was no problem for a regular chicken, but these had larger wings and more proportionate bodies. Given that they were monsters, she also wouldn’t put it past them to have some sort of magical assistance.

Strangely, the eggs didn’t seem to be getting much larger.

They were on the large size for chicken eggs, but they would fit in a regular egg tray. The difference seemed to be in the quantity, and there were more eggs for her to collect every day.

Kalli picked them up into a basket, then sorted a third of them into an incubator for one of the hens to take charge of.

She had completely lost track of how many chickens were in here now, but it had to be well over a hundred, counting the smaller ones from the recent hatchings. They were growing suspiciously fast, but she decided to blame that on the tuber peels that she fed them along with the other grains.

Otherwise, she would have to start thinking about how soon they were going to have an entire army of monster chickens in the coop.

Full-grown ones.

Before midnight, she was back in the hall of heroes, waiting with a number of the team leaders so that they could coordinate the response.

Their teams were already in place along the wall, but having one member in the room with the other leaders made it easier to plan their tactics for dealing with whatever came. They would also be able to bring the first shipment of any specialty goods that Kalli had for them directly to the team instead of waiting for a runner.

{Welcome back to the Third Trial

Waves 11 and 12 will both spawn at the same time today. Both waves are considered to be an Easy Mode Quest Challenge, with commensurate difficulty applied to ongoing quests.}

Kalli smiled at the Group Leaders, who were silently celebrating.

Easy Mode instead of Epic? They would take it. That should put today’s trials on the same level as yesterday’s. If they could complete them quickly, then they would have an excellent mark on the Third Trial.

Perhaps not as good as they could have gotten if they did all Epic Grade waves, but the rewards that they got at the end should still be spectacular.

They had made even better gains in the Third Trial than they had in the second, and Marimgar was starting to look like a real city again. A much smaller city than it had been, perhaps. But if they could get enough points they could start building more of the skyscrapers and allowing residents of the Arks to come to the surface.

The Arks were fine as far as a living space went, they provided all the basics that humans needed. The only issue was that they were severely overcrowded for comfortable living, and the food was awful.

The city was working on that, but now that the Arks were underground, people would start wanting to see the sun again.

More often than their rotation to visit the city, that was.

The monsters had appeared outside the city, Ogres and bugbears. The number of monsters wasn’t high, but they were individually fairly powerful. They were also in much higher numbers than yesterday’s final waves.

Or, it looked that way because of their size and the darkness.

So, the heroes didn’t go out right away, they began to target the monsters that came within rifle range of the city, then let the heavy weapons pick off ones at longer range.

Ideally, they wanted to herd them to the city if they weren’t going to charge.

Attacking the back lines was the best way to drive cowardly monsters forward, as they would think that the city was the safer option, while still being able to see that the city was the source of the danger.

At least that was the logic.

However, it didn’t take Kalli long to realize that the reason they weren’t charging was because it was a new moon.

The Ogres couldn’t see a thing in the dark.

The heroes weren’t going to wait for dawn to get the fight started properly. So, they came back to Kalli for supplemental supplies.

"Coordinator, do you have some daylight flares? The ones that float in the air for like fifteen minutes?"

Kalli nodded. "Yeah, I have flares. Send them up all over the city and the monsters might finally start to attack. Who would have thought that decreasing the difficulty reintroduced an issue as simple as the enemy not being able to find us?"

That made the heroes laugh.

"Well, it’s good to know that the System isn’t favouring them too strongly. Half the heroes can’t see much either, now that we don’t have the big guns lighting up the sky. They can see a little, even without a skill for it.

But that doesn’t mean they can see far enough to see more than the closest groups."

Kalli sighed. "Fine, we might have to do this one slowly. Send up the flares and do your best, but don’t overwork yourselves. These are the last waves of the Third Trial, and we don’t need any mistakes."