Chapter 106: Tubers Don’t Like Ash
Chapter 106: Tubers Don’t Like Ash
Kalli sighed as she finished filling the generator’s storage later that evening. Alternating between filling the generator and sweeping off the roof was wearing her out, and the ash was only getting worse.
With a moment to spare, Kalli headed for the wall to see the situation outside.
The forest looked normal enough, though there was ash on all the leaves, they hadn’t scorched or discoloured. But the real difference was in the areas where the tubers were living.
The plants were actually monsters, and were not happy about the ash.
So, they had been sweeping it away.
That had cleared a rather large garden of ash, and the whole edge of the tree line was now protected by a wall of volcanic ash pushed out of reach by the tubers.
If they had more time to plant them they would have had an even larger area cleared by the tubers, and that was giving not only Kalli, but many of the heroes ideas about transplanting the crops to serve not only as a defensive line, but as property maintenance.
It might be too late to move plants before the ash fell. But if they dug small holes, the plants would naturally clear the area on their own as they grew.
Then, they just needed to make a ring of tuber plants around the academy, and they would have a double wall of volcanic ash around them. They could upgrade the outside of the ring with a thicker trench line and some spiked posts. That would slow enemies from attacking, and the defensive plants were also their primary food supply.
It was a win, no matter how they looked at it.
They would just have to get someone on it before the first rainfall.
Once the rain hit that ash, even the tuber plants would likely fail to shift it.
Kalli decided to sleep in the office that night, with a blanket on the sofa in the front room. It would let her hear if something went wrong while she was out, but when she woke everything still sounded fine.
But quiet. Perhaps, too quiet.
Kalli stepped to the front doors, and saw that they were halfway buried in ash, insulating the building from outside noise.
There was a full metre of ash collected in the courtyard of the Academy, and everything seemed muffled by the continued influx.
"Ah, Coordinator, can you let us in? The door won’t open from the outside," someone called.
Kalli sighed, and moved to the automatic door to open it.
The doors slid smoothly apart, and Yara ducked her head through the top of the opening.
"Good morning! We cleared your roof for you, but we’ve run into a small issue. There is already too much ash. The others are thinking of changing how the Academy operates. We can’t remove all this ash from the compound, so we were thinking of building tunnels, and letting the ash pile over them, while we make the first level into the basement.
That will give us a defensible area underground if we’re attacked again.
We’ve also sent people out to clear holes and plant tubers. They’re hauling buckets of water with them, so the fresh tubers sprout faster. Keeping them clear for a day until the ash slows down might not be easy, but Sanchez is on it.
They’re going to make them part of our defensive ring. That was Sanchez, too. He said that you would agree, so we’ve been on it all night long.
Other than that, we don’t know how much more ash we’re going to get, only that it’s going to compact the first time that it rains. I’m sure that there was something else, I just don’t know what.
Oh, right. We kept the roofs clean all night, which kept all the buildings intact. The only one that we forgot was the water well. But it’s still solid for some reason. That tin shed is tough. We dug out a path to it earlier so that it’s still accessible.
"Alright, we can work on something resembling pathways if we can’t find a way to relocate all the ash. I think that there was actually a tractor with a bucket, but moving that much ash might be too much to ask for a small lawn tractor."
Yara laughed. "It would be funny to watch. But it would struggle just to make the pathways, there’s already too much for it to handle.
Once you come out, you’ll understand. But we have another small issue.
The old monsters left, but there are new ones in the distance."
"Of course there are," Kalli replied sarcastically. "There are always more monsters. What did we get this time?"
"Well, either we’ve got a minor undead issue, or Esmeralda suddenly got much more powerful."
Kalli sighed and purchased a shovel to dig out her own front door. She would dig a ramp or steps so that she could walk out, and then got to work.
She was not letting that ash pile up inside her office.
Only, when she started, she realized that with so much strength, it wasn’t actually a hardship to dig through the ash.
"You know what? If we got everyone large shovels, and a wagon of some sort, we could clear all this out of the compound. We’ve got three hundred people with superhuman strength. We can clear a lot of ash snow.
Just give the warriors a plow and drag it out the door and down the hill."
Yara blinked slowly. "That’s actually brilliant. I don’t think that anyone considered the fact that they’re so much stronger now, and that they could substitute themselves for the heavy equipment.
Alright, I will see what we can arrange."
She ran off, while Kalli went to the wall to see the morning’s situation. This was going to be a very long day, she could tell already.
She should have gone to sleep in her own bed.
Outside the wall, Kalli could see that the group hadn’t been slacking. They were planting and watering the tubers in a ring one hundred metres from the buildings, far enough away that they could open more fields soon. And the tubers appeared to be helping them.
The vines were smashing the ash away as far as they could reach from mature plants, but even the heroes near the tubers weren’t being actively attacked.
So, either the tubers understood planting, or the ash was viewed as the larger threat.
However, beyond that ring, to the northwest and past the beach, the situation became much more concerning.
Shambling forms of all sorts were gathering.
Some possibly human, but mostly the forms of monsters, including crabs. They shambled like the undead, but their eyes glowed red, and the cracks in their hides glowed like fire.
Kalli was fairly certain that those weren’t just ordinary undead. They were some sort of Fire Elemental, raised by the volcanic eruptions.