Chapter 265: Balancing Interests

With the craftsmen now busy repairing everything so that they could get to the fun part of actually trying to make new things with the workshop, Kalli turned her attention to the progress of the rest of the residents.

The whole city got up early every day, doing their best to find ways to get the things that they needed, or wanted.

The most important of them was naturally getting more food to the processing facilities in the city, where the basic ingredients for the restaurants were prepared. But that also included getting supplies down in to the lower city, which was going more smoothly than before, but still required armed guards.

There were simply too many people who had next to nothing.

Until they could get them to a level where the desperation of their flight on the Arks faded from their minds, they would continue to try to steal and hoard, thinking that they would need it again soon.

The situation in the hive city was an ongoing headache for Kalli, and the largest part of her morning briefing, simply because there were a hundred times more people down there than there were on the surface.

Most of it was summaries from the Ark Commanders, who were in charge of making sure that everything ran smoothly in their district, but she knew that she couldn’t leave them to deal with the fallout of the end of the world alone forever.

If they were still stuck on the Arks, floating or flying away from danger, it would be one thing, but here in Marimgar, things kept getting better, which only bred frustration that it wasn’t getting better fast enough.

For the rest of the morning, Kalli toured the city, looking for pending issues that hadn’t been brought to her attention.

She walked through the city streets, through the walkway system inside the buildings, checked out the shops and restaurants like she was a health inspector, and just generally made sure that nobody was doing anything too outrageous.

Well, anything outrageous to others.

Plenty of the people of Marimgar were more than a little eccentric these days, but as long as it wasn’t bothering anyone, Kalli just let the small things slide.

One thing that she did notice was that the stronger residents tended to do things in teams.

Five-person groups moving together to do anything and everything.

They lived together, worked together, fought together.

And drank together, as Kalli soon realized.

She was touring the area near the wall, and saw quite a few people headed for one of the units at the base of the wall, which officially should have been empty. The building had a patio set up on the grass, and the conversation was lively.

Though it was very early in the morning, Kalli could smell something that was either industrial cleaner, or cheap vodka made with tubers.

Then she realized what it was.

This was the tavern for the night shift wall guards.

Their day ended as everyone else’s started, and they would have just finished eating. So, they were having a drink before heading home to bed, and had chosen to set up along the wall, where they wouldn’t disturb those on a daytime schedule.

The risk of attacks during this trial was lower, but not zero.

The System had opened the world, and there were monsters moving around in the distance, just not in high enough numbers that they were concerning to the city. Just high enough that hunting teams went out to keep their population under control.

Kalli thought about the situation, and decided it needed its own quest. ℯ

{Quest Issued} [Assert Dominance] eliminate one roaming monster pack. Maximum 10-person group. Variable difficulty

That would work. She hadn’t expected it to be variable, but with the different monsters in the area, it made some sense that there would be groups that qualified as a hard level challenge to eliminate.

Kalli hadn’t seen any on the feeds yet, but that didn’t mean much.

Now that she thought about it, the Satellite feeds weren’t as comprehensive as they used to be. Without ground control, some of them must have gone offline. Or, something had happened in space, and a number of them had been eliminated.

Either option seemed possible.

The guards waved to Kalli in greeting as she passed, but none called her over. They were all either ready for bed or half drunk and not too eager to talk to the boss. There wasn’t anything in particular that they needed, other than a lot of sleep, so Kalli’s presence was no more interesting than the day shift that had replaced them.

The only truly interesting part of the day came when she passed by the Rat Demon Dungeon, which she had placed near the entrance of the Academy Grounds, within sight of her Hall of Heroes.

It was far busier than she had expected, with hundreds of people gathered outside.

"Are we having a special event?" She asked curiously.

"Nope, Just trying to arrange groups. We all gained our Class recently, and we don’t have dedicated groups yet. In fact, some of them are so new that they haven’t even come to you to beg for starter gear yet."

Kalli chuckled. "Well, we can fix that while I’m here. A common grade set of gear to get you started makes everyone’s life easier. I wonder if I should go check on the Goblin dungeon as well."

It was only level three, so it would also have a lot of the people who were runners during the last trial.

Getting from level one to level three didn’t take all that long when there were multiple quests to do every day. If they could do harder ones, it would go even more quickly, but those who had gotten their Class and immediately went to work one of the guns would most likely be level three or four by now.

Even if they hadn’t been doing dungeon runs since the trial ended.