Chapter 115: Perimeter Security Situation
Chapter 115: Perimeter Security Situation
The heroes all headed out for their morning missions, while Kalli headed for the outer perimeter wall to check on the tubers and the security situation.
The plants that they had put in during the eruption were already sprouted, and nearly knee-high. They didn’t seem to care at all that the growing situation was not what anyone would consider to be a good one for plant life.
They were simply growing.
Kalli leapt over the line of plants so that she didn’t have to fight them to get to the wall, and walked up the slope to the outer perimeter wall.
The defensive fortification was an impressive one, and she could see it would take a very large or exceptionally agile monster to make it over the wall. The gap for the bridge over the moat was also vertical walled on the sides, so the area could be easily defended, and the warriors had nearly finished the door already.
The thought calmed her nerves a bit, and Kalli saw that her hands were steady again as she calculated her options.
"Miss Kalli, what are you doing up on the wall?" Reggie shouted as she approached the gap.
"Checking out the situation. If I’m going to be recording all the plans to defend the keep, I need to know what we’ve actually got for defences. The walls look good to me, and the gate is going to be solid, I can see that already.
What I’m thinking is that I should save some points to purchase defensive turrets for the outer wall. They would help keep the area safe and clear, and we wouldn’t need an extra patrol at night."
"Oh, that would be great. How much are the turrets? Are they affordable?"
Kalli laughed. "No, not even close to it. Especially if I pick Laser turrets instead of shotgun shell firing ones. But a pair near the gates, and then more spread around the perimeter of the wall, would be enough to let us respond to the threats before they got inside the perimeter.
It will take a while before I can afford that many turrets. But I can get at least a couple of them set up early. Likely near the gate and then opposite sides of the perimeter.
That’s not enough for overlapping fire, but it is the best place to start.
The turrets say that they’re Medium Range, and I can afford five of them now, after saving up since the end of the last Trial. So, if we can keep the quests up, I think we can fortify properly soon."
Really, most of her saved points had gone to gearing the new arrivals, and she hadn’t recovered those points yet.
[Oh well, a bit of softness won’t ruin their respect for me. I can forgive the debts for the first set of gear I gave them, and who volunteers to repay it anyhow will tell me a lot about their personalities.]
If it wasn’t for that expenditure, and the expansions of the store to offer Uncommon Grade items, she would have plenty for turrets.
Given another day, she might actually be able to purchase eight of them, at the rate that they were going. That should be enough that they could at least reach each other’s firing range. However, Kalli didn’t actually know what "Medium Range" implied.
There was no frame of reference.
In her world, a laser turret on a fortification would be effective for close to two kilometres, and a large laser battery on a military building would reach the horizon.
But the other option was a short range shotgun, a weapon which was only fully effective at distances under fifty metres, and preferably under 30.
Of course, the shotguns were actually firing further than that, but monsters were durable, and with the lost velocity of buckshot at longer ranges it wasn’t nearly as effective.
Kalli winced at the loss of 300 System Points as she purchased and placed two {Automated Sentry Turrets} equipped with defensive lasers at the top of the wall by the gate. They were initially inactive, but easy to program, only requesting specific targets.
The program was an advanced one, similar to the AI sentry turrets of her world, so Kalli set all humans and tuber plants as excluded, the targets to anything else that was actively attacking humans, and the arc of fire to only pick targets outside the walls, just in case there was a fight or sparring session inside that might set them off.
Like the generator, they also had a large mana storage pool, and Kalli knew that she was going to have to get the mages out here to charge them properly, as she only had enough to charge it to ten percent before she was out of mana.
Then, she had to wait to charge the other as she updated the defensive settings.
"Oh, those are fancy. Are they powerful?" Reggie asked.
"As strong as a Lasrifle. I don’t have the mana to fully charge them right away, but I will give them a bit more charge, just in case someone comes running back this way with monsters behind them."
"We will charge them more on the way back in. But I don’t want to exhaust the mages before we’ve done our mission."
"That works for me," Kalli agreed. "Go and do your thing, I will place the other turrets and then come back to start adding more charge to the ones by the gates, since that’s where everyone will be headed, even if they don’t know that the turrets exist."
"Good thinking. Let us know if you find out how far those things can shoot. And do make sure that they’re not shooting at us, will you? I know the System favours the heroes, but I’m not one hundred percent sure that the targeting system on a turret is going to know the difference between me covered in monster blood and an actual monster."
Kalli laughed. "I have it set to exclude all humans and tuber plants from its threat assessment. So, while that leaves us open to human attacks, we should be pretty safe from accidental misfires."
Reggie’s group left the keep, and another team came to finish the gate, carrying freshly made metal brackets and a bag full of large bolts to anchor the mechanism into the concrete.
The doors would open inward, with the hinges on the inside of the door, and a concrete lip around the outsides, with a bracket to drop a large wooden beam into, for the purposes of securing the door completely.
Once it was complete, they would have no problems keeping threats out.