Chapter 104: Rush To Prep
Chapter 104: Rush To Prep
Kalli watched the sky grow dark, and the residents of the two buildings rush to drag firewood into the buildings, in preparation for the power to go out once the solar array was no longer outputting enough.
That was a good sign. They understood that the power was limited, but Kalli was fully intending on finding a way for them to keep things operating until the skies were clear again.
They still had a bit of time before the ash began to fall, but Kalli was worried that if she put out a quest now, it would lead to disaster when people got trapped outside. The first wave of falling ash was going to be extremely hot, and might contain enough embers to light the grasslands on fire.
There was enough open ground around the buildings that she wasn’t too worried about the grass fires spreading to the concrete apartment blocks, but they could lose people who were out scavenging.
Still, some would find it worth the risk.
{Time Limited Hard Mode Quest Activated} [Firewood] Collect at least 25kg of dead fall or freshly cut firewood and return it to one of the residential areas of Marimgar Township. Maximum 5 persons per group. One reward per group.
That was different. But also much worse than usual. 25 kilos of wood, but only one reward box per group?
That didn’t mean that nobody was going, only that the reward was mostly going to be "you have firewood to keep your building warm tonight".
Or later this week because Kalli could already feel the warm winds coming their way.
Though, they could treat it as a solo gathering mission, and simply collect 25 kilos of firewood per person. That sounded like a lot, but if they were going to gather enough to last a winter, they’d need thousands of kilos just for the two buildings to keep the heat on.
"I give it two hours before the first ash fall gets here on the wind. Look at the speed they’re moving. My guess is about sixty kilometres an hour, so the north and the southeast will get here at nearly the same time, but the eruption to the west is further off.
We can still see it, because of the altitude, but it’s likely somewhere near the west coast of the peninsula," Sanchez noted as he made additions to his tactical map.
"Well, that should be enough for them to come back with some firewood. Whatever they can gather and store will be fine, I think.
The real question is how much ash we’re going to get here."
Sanchez shook his head. "Enough that we’ll be shovelling it like snow just to get around the Academy. Three eruptions, all within a few hundred kilometres of each other? But worse, two of them look to be within a little over a hundred kilometres of us.
That’s well within the heavy ash fall range for an eruption, and it’s going to choke out every living thing around Marimgar."
Kalli sighed as she realized the dire situation. "Is there any chance that we’ll be able to keep growing plants in the ash?"
Sanchez shrugged. "These ones? Maybe. Normally, everything dies as the ash chokes all the oxygen out of the soil."
"And that brings the most important question. Should we relocate after the ash begins to settle?"
Sanchez shook his head. "No, we find a way to cover some land to keep bare soil for tubers, then we dig out more once the ash settles a bit, and we start fortifying the area.
If there are survivors among the native monsters, they’re going to be starving within a few months.
If we don’t have something to block their advance, we’re not going to last long."
"Well, in that case I hope that we have some fans of medieval earthworks because that’s the closest that we’re going to get to real fortifications for the area."
"It will mostly have to be the heroes as well, I’m afraid. Once that ash starts to settle, it will turn into something between heavy sand and pumice rock. The bits kind of fuse together.
Not something easy to shovel, especially if we’re going to make a trench wall around the town."
"I’ll check my store to see what we can get, but I didn’t see anything resembling industrial equipment, so I might either be too low of a level, or simply unqualified to sell it."
Sanchez laughed. "Don’t worry too much about it. We have the tinkers to upgrade common shovels, and with even a hundred men, I can dig a fortification in a week. It’s one of the many less than pleasant tasks that you learn to do in the army.
But if we start early, it will be easier.
It’s all down to what the ash fall looks like when it gets here. If we’re going to get a metre or more over the next few weeks, then we need to get ahead of it and build the fortifications as it falls, as well as clearing out the Academy grounds and keeping the roofs swept so that they don’t get overloaded with the weight and collapse."
"I’ll put it on the list. Anything else?"
"Yeah, tell Bert that there are clothing options other than the armoured bodysuit. He loves that thing too much, and I’m not sure that he even takes it off to sleep at this point."
Kalli laughed. "I have it on good authority that he does. But I’m sure that he can at least be convinced to take it off to shower. The big man does still hope to have luck with the ladies."
Out at the edge of the forest, dragging a tree that he had just chopped down with the [Cleave] skill, Bert rubbed his ear.
Someone was definitely talking trash about him right now.
Fine, he would just have to show them up. If one tree wasn’t enough to impress them, he would get another this size and drag them both back to the Academy. That would definitely be enough to silence whoever was gossiping about him.
He might be large, but he wasn’t lazy. That had to be what they thought of him.
Not far from his position, a dozen of the newly arrived survivors from Gomand stared in shock as a massive man dragged two trees as thick as their legs and ten metres tall across the grasslands.
That would cover at least a few days of cooking without electricity.