Chapter 283: Sun Reset

The next morning, once they had determined that the sun had returned to normal, and the city barrier wasn’t taking damage anymore, Kalli began making plans to send teams out.

The system wouldn’t update the quest to scout the area, it would only reward them for new areas searched, or substantial changes to a known area, but that should be good enough, she hoped.

{Quest Updated} Easy Difficulty [Update The Map] scout for changes to the topography and threats surrounding the city of Marimgar.

That was good enough for everyone who had speeders for their entire group.

One heavy and three light speeders could go as a patrol group with relative confidence, but they also took a Utility Speeder carrying a full ten-person team. Just in case they ran into trouble, or edible monsters.

What they found was not encouraging.

There were monster corpses scattered through the forested areas, where they had taken shelter from the solar storm, but the forest itself was burnt clean. There were no leaves left, but from what the more knowledgeable could tell, the forests would recover from the fire, just like any other forest fire.

Some stands of trees were completely burnt, but most of them only had their bark scorched off, and their roots intact.

With a good rain, they would begin to recover.

However, there had been nowhere for the limited amount of wildlife to go, and going into the open to escape the fire only made the problem worse, as the heat of the ash plains would scorch their feet to the point of crippling them.

So, what they were finding was nothing but devastation.

Even speeding along at over two hundred kilometres an hour, it was still easy enough to see that there was nothing to see. The flight suits had it even easier. They had all sorts of sensors on the suit itself, and with a max speed well over four hundred kilometres an hour, they could cover a massive amount of ground, flying five kilometres apart in a wide sweep pattern.

Their report confirmed what Kalli had expected.

[ The river route still appears to be the same, and we’re seeing signs of fish in the water. It looks like they managed to protect themselves in the deeper areas, and by stirring up sediment. The water temperatures are pretty high, but the fish appear to be alright.

Water plants are the same, they’re scorched at the top, but green beneath the water line, so they should grow back without any issues.

It’s the ground cover that took it hardest. ]

Then, the team which had headed northwest to check the last known site of the wandering monster pack reported back in.

[ There are still signs of surviving monsters. They appear to have dug shelters to hide from the worst of the sun, and this area took very little fire damage. It’s not as heavily covered with the volcanic ash, and we’re seeing more greenery. ]

That was almost excellent news. It meant that there were definitely survivors.

Hopefully, human ones.

It was too far to the nearest areas that they had seen human settlements, but the scouts were covering ground fast, giving them a good idea of the state of the peninsula. They had scouted all the way to the former site of Gomand, which was barely recognizable as having been a city at this point.

It had survived the first trial’s elimination by merger, for the most part. But the weather and flooding had wiped most of it away.

Then, the scouts were flying a grid pattern, while the flight suits flew south out of Gomand, following the river, looking for signs of survivors. They had nearly missed Yara’s people on the move, and only found them by chance.

So, there might be another group that was likewise moving when things went wrong, and they might have sheltered near the river.

Of course, seeing a bunch of black flying armour suits might not be the sort of comforting sight that would cause them to come out of hiding. Who knew what they had experienced along the way, and these suits weren’t something that they would recognize, so they might assume that it was another invading force.

There were plenty of living things here along the river, as the volcanic ash had all been blown away from it, towards Marimgar, and they would have called it Steppes or Savanna going by its current condition, though they knew that it actually received much more rainfall than that.

Then, off to the west of the river, they found something that they had not expected, and had no idea how to process.

There was a crude stone walled city near the river, clearly battle damaged and left unrepaired. As Alexei circled the area, he saw row upon row of burial mounds, and one large green skinned humanoid with a long tail wearing ceremonial armour, holding a spear.

The flight suit was high overhead, but the creature turned to look at the rows of graves and stopped at the long end of one before pausing as he noticed the flight suit overhead.

The creature roared at him, and the sensors of the flight suit caught the placid expression on the creature’s face as it hurled its spear skyward, using some sort of skill or magic to actually get the spear close to the fast-moving suit.

The creature was clearly dying already, heavily radiation burned, and missing large patches of flesh.

So, Alexei did the only humane thing, and put a Pulse Cannon round in its forehead.

The lizardman toppled backward into the grave it had dug for itself, and the ruined city simply faded out of existence. One moment it was there, and then it became translucent, before vanishing and leaving behind nothing but open grassland.

"We definitely need to report this in person," he decided.

"No kidding boss. So, that’s what happens when the last member of a faction dies. Their fortress is simply eliminated from the world by the System," Amber noted as she flew up beside him.

She was holding the obsidian spear that had been hurled at Alexei, having plucked it out of the air as she flew by.

"Well, at least their last warrior got to go as a warrior. Let’s keep going, the report can wait until we finish our loop."