Chapter 268: No New Enemies

Or perhaps the word should be mermen? Most of them appeared to be male, and all were clearly warriors. They were attacking the sea monsters, and throwing the corpses into storage bags as they leapt out of the water to avoid attacks.

"What do we do, coordinator?" Bert asked.

"You’re doing it. Nobody shoot at the mermen. They’re not bothering the city, they’re hunting monsters on their own. If they don’t attack us, we don’t attack them. There is no kill quest for them active, and this is a quality of life trial.

If we make new enemies, they might start swimming up the river and causing troubles for us."

The wall guards listened to Kalli’s explanation, and then passed the word by radio to the whole city so that nobody made any mistakes. It didn’t seem likely that the fish-tailed mermen would be able to get into the city at all, but with magic involved, there were no guarantees.

And the mermen definitely had magic.

"It’s almost like watching a pod of dolphins, isn’t it?" Bert asked as he watched the fight.

"It really is. They’re quite agile. And they’re definitely using water magic both for movement and for attack. They’re doing at least as good as we were against the octopus monsters. It looks like those have some sort of resistance skill because they’re way more difficult to kill than anything else seems to be, but they’re not slaughtering the mermen."

Then Kalli paused as she saw a large shark headed for a group of mermen who were fighting a group of octopus monsters.

She quickly swapped to her Flight Suit, which alarmed everyone on the walls, then raced out over the water.

Once she was close enough that there would be no mistaking her intent, she unleashed a steady stream of firepower from the Pulse Cannon into the shark, tearing deep holes in the massive body.

The creature leapt out of the water at her, and Kalli dodged, twisting the flight suit in the air to avoid the jaws of the beast, and grab it by the gills.

She landed on its back, straddling the shark in front of the dorsal fin, and awkwardly put a final burst into its skull before rocketing into the air to avoid the attack of a large octopus. It was a close call, but she escaped unharmed, though she lost her prize.

At least, for a moment, before the mermen swarmed the eight-armed thief.

"I see how it is. She tells us not to shoot anything, and then goes to invent a new sport," Bert complained.

"How is that a sport?"

"Ocean Rodeo, Shark riding."

The guards laughed at the big warrior’s complaints. It was clear that Bert was jealous that he didn’t think of it first, but he didn’t have a flight suit.

Jumping into the water to try it in regular power armour was suicide.

As Kalli circled above the battlefield, she saw the leader of the Mermen that she had rescued by intercepting the shark give her on odd wave, where he circled his hand in front of him, before he swam away.

The shark didn’t come back to the surface.

That was fine, they had more than enough seafood inside the city, they didn’t need a giant shark right now. What they needed was for the rain to let up so that the city didn’t flood any worse than it already had.

The storm clouds were still black overhead, turning the twin suns to little more than a memory as the city descended into twilight in the middle of the day.

It was an odd feeling to have a storm turn day to night, but it was almost as if the clouds had gotten so much thicker that not even two suns were enough to pass through. The darkness consumed the area as Kalli landed on the wall again, and gestured for everyone to turn their spotlights off.

"If the monsters are attracted to the light, we’ll just cause ourselves more problems with the lights.

It’s better to rely on whatever skills we have, and the enhanced optics in your helmets, to see what’s going on," she instructed.

The city fell silent, other than that constant drone of the rain, but as the clouds got thicker and the winds picked up, the rain began to slow.

"That’s probably not a good sign," Bert noted.

"Probably not. I should fly over and go check the satellite feeds. If we’re getting tornados or something, it would be good to have some warning. I didn’t see any signs of rotation in the clouds when I came over here, but that can change."

"Go, we’ve got things here. We won’t attack the fish men, and we’re not fishing anymore, but we’ll call on the radio if there is something attacking us or trying to climb the walls."

Bert could think of a dozen other things that could go wrong while the Coordinator was flying back to her office, but decided to keep them all to himself, in case speaking them out loud made them more likely to happen.

Nothing good ever came of running your mouth.

The regret was instant when Kalli returned to the Hall of Heroes. The water was up over the front steps, which meant that only the questionable barrier of the sliding doors was keeping the water out of the building, and the cleanup process would have to start immediately.

Fortunately, the building came with a convenient way of fixing the situation.

The storm shutter for the front door was waterproof, and she really should have shut it when she left. She did that as soon as she got back, and then purchased a case of small water pumps, along with a few large ones.

The larger buildings were likely to need those to clear them efficiently if the rain kept up. However, most of the city was actually higher than the Academy, except for the quarter behind her, facing the river and the main gates.

The buildings there would definitely have flooding on the main floor, despite every attempt to seal them.

Nobody was moving about the city at this point. Not even the ones who had come up from the hive city. They were all busy moving everything off the main floor, where possible, so that they could keep it safe from the floodwaters.

They were going to have to do a huge amount of cleaning tomorrow.

And then, they could determine how much damage had been done to the city, and how they were going to prevent it from happening again. Better drainage wouldn’t cover this, the water was coming up to the walls on the south, east and west sides of the city, while it ran down the slopes to the north, creating a waterfall around the city.

Perhaps an improved drainage system might work if they just dumped a huge amount of water out of the city to the north, and had it run off into the open fields between them and the ocean. If she created massive storm drains and cisterns, they could store the storm surge, and then she would just have to figure out how to keep monsters out of the exits.

No need to create a monster den in the basement.