Chapter 275: Losing To Chickens

Solving the issue with the chickens was not as easy as Kalli had expected. The plan was simply to take the largest ones out one at a time, slaughter them, and incubate a new batch every week to replace the ones that were butchered for meat.

Unfortunately, the plan hit a snag on the very first chicken. ℴ

The winged beast chased the worker out of the room, as expected, along with a few more birds. But that was still manageable.

The problem was what happened after.

The moment that they tried to slaughter the birds for meat, they realized that the chickens were a truly magical beast, and their feathers turned as hard as steel, blocking the blades, while the chickens counterattacked.

The scene was pandemonium, and they ended up calling in higher level warriors to deal with the chickens.

It was all that Kalli could do to avoid laughing.

That brutal lesson in shame was enough that the chicken farms put procedures in action for when they needed to remove some of the older chickens.

Nobody went in alone, warriors were kept on hand, and a double gate was used so that the rest couldn’t charge out after the first one. All of those should have been in place for the first attempt, but nobody had suspected that the creatures could use magic.

Neither had Kalli.

She had never seen them get all worked up like that, but she had also never tried to kill one of her chickens.

She was letting them grow.

Once they stopped growing, and she knew just how large the species was capable of getting to, then she would decide what to do with the ones that were getting old, or that had stopped laying eggs.

However, that wasn’t happening.

Unlike regular chickens, which laid one egg at a time, these ones were laying more as they grew, and some were laying a half dozen a day. That was great for Kalli’s egg supply, but perhaps not as great for the rest of the city if her chickens got loose.

They were getting increasingly territorial and aggressive towards everyone else, but remained just as passive as ever when Kalli entered, so she didn’t bother changing from her usual light composite battle armour outfit.

Since everyone else was having so much fun with their chickens, Kalli decided to give hers a little treat, and crumbled an entire case of nutrient bars into their feed for the day.

The chickens loved it.

Kalli strongly suspected that was because they lacked taste buds, or they would have known better. But if they were willing to eat them, when people kept donating them to the store when they got them as a mystery box prize, she would put them to good use.

A whole case was clearly overkill, but the chickens would peck at that pile of feed for a couple of days before she had to top it off again.

And then she would stir the remainder, so they didn’t scatter it all looking for their favourite parts.

After that, it was just a waiting game, as Kalli tracked the movement of monsters in the area via satellite feeds, and noted that the ones coming south didn’t appear to be following the coast toward Marimgar, they were headed straight south.

Whether that was a good thing or not remained to be seen.

But it did mean that they weren’t likely to be directly attacking Marimgar.

However, that led to what Kalli was calling "The Doldrums". Everyone was settling into a rhythm, where the city was operating at what it would consider normal operating capacity, slowly stockpiling everything and sharing around what they could.

The excessive number of dungeon runs led to a lot of scrap gear that nobody wanted, which got processed into raw materials for System Points, but nobody was in a hurry to spend on anything but skills right now.

So, Kalli sat and chatted, and filled out paperwork, and waited.

It was slowly driving her crazy, wondering what was going to go wrong next.

Perhaps that was the trial?

If she just had to stay sane while things were going well, then this trial was going to be . . . a dismal failure, to be honest. There had to be something that she could do, other than searching the continent for more signs of survivors, and any threats that might be moving their way.

There hadn’t even been any sea monster attacks on the fishermen.

So, it should have been no shock that when Yara and Vinnie came to invite Kalli for dinner, the Coordinator was half asleep behind her desk, a pile of completed reports set to one side, and an empty coffee cup on the other.

"Coordinator, wake up. It’s time for dinner. We have things to discuss," Yara announced.

"Put them on the stack," Kalli mumbled, clearly not paying attention.

Vinnie laughed, and reached over the desk to poke her shoulder and wake the Coordinator up.

"Ah, good morning, welcome heroes. What can I get for you today?"

That made the former mob boss laugh.

"You can get up and join us for dinner. We wanted to talk about some plans for the city with you, and we’re hungry. There are others meeting us there, so it’s time to get moving."

Kalli reluctantly got up out of her chair.

If she was going to cut a nap short, going for dinner was a good enough reason.

"This had better be a good idea, not another ’We should send people without a class through the dungeon as filler members for the group’ type idea."

"Trust me, you don’t want to miss out on this one. I think that you’ll have some important input, but we’ve got nearly everyone in the planning committee on board."

Planning committee? Since when did they have one of those?

Well, now she really needed to go to this dinner, just so that she could find out what was actually going on in the city that didn’t involve her. It seemed that they were forming structure of their own to make things work.

She was a little proud of them.

As long as this wasn’t turning into an organized crime syndicate on a city wide level.