Chapter 284: The Land Endures

Unbeknownst to them, they didn’t need to report anything. Their earlier messages had made Kalli bring up the digital communications feed from their suits. It was spotty and sporadic, but a few of the members were at high enough altitude that she was getting data from them.

It was enough that she could see the city vanish firsthand.

And that changed everything that she had thought about this trial. Sure, the world was falling apart, but as the factions fell, they were simply vanishing. So, the goal might not be to retake the world and make a productive society.

It might be to prove that you were capable of it, before the System rewarded the ones who survived the trials with a second chance.

That gave her some hope that this wasn’t the end for them, and that there might be somewhere that they could go, and keep progressing. They were currently the number one faction on the planet, and they were doing pretty well, all things considered.

They were expanding the food supply inside the greenhouses to replace what was lost outside the city, but there were others ready to start replanting the fields as soon as they could.

Or, at least checking to see if the tubers survived.

They were likely baked potatoes at this point, but the plants were notoriously resilient, and nobody was willing to accept that they might have all perished.

The ones inside the city were fine. But they had the shelter of the balsa trees planted near them for building materials, and the city shield.

The teams began to return to the base, ready to give Kalli the flight reports.

Not that there was much.

However, it was a quest, and they had all continued until they found something that qualified so that they could at least get their Common Grade mystery box.

The common grade boxes were a bit of a joke at this point. They got a few every day, and they were pretty predictably useless, except as stockpile for the ones who were coming up after them.

There was a whole armoury full of common grade armour and weapons already.

They could have begun distributing them, but that would likely just lead to violence in the city, and everyone who actually needed a weapon on a daily basis had something better.

If they got a mass awakening, and whole teams wanted to do the dungeon runs who had never gone into one before, they could give them out at that point.

But even the level 0 residents in the upper city all carried Uncommon Grade weapons now.

They had been doing the rat demon dungeon every day, and though the drop rate was dismal, the stronger members would give out spare gear to reduce their own burden of excess gear.

They got multiple pieces of uncommon loot every day doing the other dungeons, and turning things into the recycling station was somewhat wasteful when they didn’t have the craftsmen to make good use of most of it.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to keep up with the demands of a half dozen equipment craftsmen when most of what they were doing was repairing the gear that everyone else was damaging.

Group by group, the squad leaders gathered in the Hall of Heroes, and waited for Kalli to finish reading their reports.

They were simple, but each brought a bit of good and a bit of bad news.

Mostly it was about the loss of plant life, but there were a few other issues as well.

Volcanic venting to the southeast, just offshore.

What appeared to be a massive tar pit that had replaced a small lake to the southwest.

Forests gone everywhere within fifty kilometres.

The entire trial area around Marimgar was going to be nothing but volcanic rocks and ash waste for the next trial, even though Kalli had the [Terraforming] skill from the Skill Selection Coupon granted during the Third Trial.

There simply wasn’t time for her to do much of anything when the land was so badly damaged.

She was trying, though.

Kalli spread her mana through the area as she read the reports, helping revitalize the city and everything near it. She couldn’t see any real difference, the area inside the city wasn’t in bad shape.

But the river’s ecosystem was actually improving at an impressive rate, out of sight of the residents of Marimgar.

The ash of the river bottom gave way to soft silt, new plants grew. Grass Carp hatchlings grew far faster than nature should have allowed, and the river near the city slowly regained its peak state.

The issue was that beyond that, the volcanic debris made any gains that her skill managed completely pointless, as the fertile land was buried and blocked from the sun.

Perhaps one day, she could completely transform the land in a day, but for now, she was only giving it back its fertility, and she lacked the ability to remove the after effects of a System Trial.

Sanchez pointed north at the shore. "The only true oddity that we’ve seen so far is that black stone temple at the shore. It’s exactly the same temperature as it’s always been. Whatever barrier it has, we can’t detect it, and it has proven completely immune to the trials.

We also noticed that if you fly too close, the speeders begin to malfunction, so we avoided approaching. There is something ominous about that place, but none of us dare to test it, when we’ve seen what happens to the monsters who do."

"I don’t blame you. We don’t have anyone in such dire condition that we need to be sacrificing them to sate our curiosity," Kalli agreed.

A few of the heroes frowned at her, while Vinnie gave her a concerned look.

The Coordinator had definitely at least considered using the temple as a form of capital punishment, just to see what happened when a human approached. If they lived, they lived, if not, they had their answer.

That was a little scary when she had that innocent face.