Chapter 274: Chicken Conundrum

Unfortunately for Kalli’s mental health, the clean state of the city was only a teaser of good days to come. What she actually found was something entirely different.

Satellite feeds from the northwest showed that there was a mass migration of monsters coming their way, coming down the coastline from the direction that the Giant monsters had fled during the early days of the trials.

That probably wasn’t a good sign, and there were far more of them than Kalli would have expected.

The trials had been brutal to that area, slamming it with every force of nature possible.

So, if there were so many monsters still roaming the area, there was a real chance that they were either going to be extremely powerful, or they would have powerful leaders, that may have enough intelligence to form a plan.

It wasn’t possible to tell yet, but if the monster horde turned toward the city, instead of following its inland track, they would have pretty solid confirmation that they were facing an enemy with a plan.

But they were also tracking the spread of the undead from the south.

They weren’t spreading in any sort of targeted manner, only expanding away from the city where they had been clustered now that they didn’t have the same limitations on them. But they were worth keeping track of.

That was enough to keep Kalli occupied, along with the daily reports of the random wandering monsters that the outside teams were finding.

There was always something out there, and the goal was to keep anything from settling too close to the city. If they could keep it all at least five or ten kilometres away, they had a decent safety buffer before anything could attack, and some advanced warning if monsters were after the fields.

That was the best that they could ask for, and it was quickly becoming the new normal for Marimgar.

There were monsters.

That was just a fact of life now, and there were daily teams that went out to deal with them if they got too close to the city. It wasn’t even a cause for concern.

Or, it wouldn’t be soon.

{Kill Quest Confirmed} Easy Difficulty. Eliminate 1 roaming group of monsters. Maximum 10 members.

Updating the kill quests to something generic gave the heroes a good reason to go out looking for them, as it would add one more point to their daily totals. Many were already trying to stack them up, as the upper level skills often got expensive, though only at the very top of a tier were they truly outrageous.

That was leading most of the higher level members to diversify their skills, starting on the other branches, where the skills only cost a few points each, and they could get a new one nearly every day.

Defence focused warriors were getting attack skills beyond the basics.

Snipers were getting additional stealth skills.

Mages were either adding utility magic or alternate elements to their repertoire.

At the rate that they were going, by the end of the fourth trial, they should all be fairly well-rounded members of society, and some even had survival skills in their skill trees.

Perhaps not the most impressive ones, but sometimes it was the simple things that really made the difference. For example, many had learned that the torches in the Rat Demon dungeon were functional. They didn’t look like it, they appeared to be scorched stumps of wood, but they were actually soaked in resin, and would burn for the entire duration of the dungeon.

So, they could be lit and tossed into rooms that were known to contain Rat Demons, lighting up the area to allow for easier ranged attacks.

It saved on needing a night sight spell, or waiting for the Rat Demons to come out near the main hallway.

On the other hand, the Swineherd Demon dungeon was basically mastered at this point. The groups were making strategy guides about how to maximize the meat gains, how to improve the chances of Rare gear, and the optimal routes to harvest everything as fast as possible so that you could keep a schedule to do the day’s dungeon runs.

Because that was becoming a thing now.

If you could do them all, you did at least three of the four. Usually, the Ogres, Swineherd, and then the Rat Demons.

Not because the last one was worth the effort, but because the last one was the group charity effort, and it kept the city supplied with basic ingredients. The dungeon was the easiest way to get some of them, despite the best efforts of the crews aboard the Arks, who were working frantically to use the massive vessels production facilities to create more than just algae for nutrient paste.

Not that they were going to stop growing the algae, that stuff was essential to survival still.

But it didn’t have to be the only thing that they grew.

Kalli sighed as she stared at the stack of reports on her desk, waiting for her to review and approve them, or take action on the issues they identified. Sometimes it was as easy as requesting more people for a task that nobody was volunteering for, other times, it was an issue that had no real issue.

Like the chicken conundrum.

There were three warehouses in the city that had been raising chickens for eggs, not counting Kalli’s coop, as that all went to one place. However, the chickens were getting larger, and stronger, and the level 0 workers who had been collecting the eggs were sustaining major injuries from attack.

Kalli’s first suggestion was to simply cull the egg laying chickens when they got large enough to be dangerous.

But they had nurtured too many eggs at the same time, and that would cripple their output for weeks. Nobody wanted to do that, even if it was the most practical option. So, they had sent the request to her, and decided that it would be best to have Kalli make the decision for them.

That way, none of the workers in the egg farms would have to bear the blame.