Chapter 120: Turret Overlap
Chapter 120: Turret Overlap
With a small excess of points after the day’s missions, Kalli went out after dinner to place the remaining four laser sentry turrets. The mages came out to help her charge them, and to refill the others, which had fired a few shots during the day, mostly as teams were returning.
"You know, we’re starting to look like a proper fortress city now. We’ve got these laser turrets all around the outer wall, we’ve got snipers at the inner walls to stop anything that tries to get over, and we’ve even got these fancy armour suits.
It almost feels like we’re doing better than the average person was before. At the very least, we’re not one week away from starving."
"Well, there is that. Plus, you’ve got magic. Even if things get really bad, you’re still a mage."
"True. Even if things start to fall apart, I’ve got lightning on my side. I’ve also picked up a few more skills, like Mage Armour and meditation."
"I take it that the last one is a mana regeneration skill?"
"It is. It doesn’t work in combat, obviously. But if we take a break, I can activate it and be back at full mana in under two minutes, even with added mana on some of my gear."
The other mages who had come with them nodded. "There are a few different versions of it, depending on what spells you went for. But they’re all essentially the same. The only one that is really odd is the one for the people who took [Magic Missile] as their first spell. They get a little floating purple orb that constantly regenerates mana."
"You know, I think that we have a building solution for the farm area. There are extremely fast-growing trees in the forest.
They seem to be similar to a balsa tree. They grow back in only a few days, and the wood is too light and weak for most purposes. But if we bend and weave them as they grow, we can build animal shelters, or equipment sheds, with them.
Or, we can weave a frame, then cut all the branches and coat the outside with rolls of poly from the Academy’s storage to make greenhouses.
That will help with the lingering ash in the air, and if it starts to get too cold at night.
I don’t know what all we have for crops anymore, but there should still be the garden, right?"
Kalli checked her store, then nodded. "There are clear poly tarp rolls in the store as well. They’re in the camping supplies section. I think that we can make some very capable greenhouses. We did save the gardens, but they’re also in a greenhouse, so we didn’t accidentally plow them when removing the ash.
Adding a few more wouldn’t be a bad idea. There might also be proper construction materials in the Academy, if the lightweight trees don’t work out."
"Got it. We will collect some cuttings tomorrow to start transplanting them.
It occurred to us when the new missions came up that building new shelters and buildings was precisely the sort of thing that the System would be happy with us for doing. We can put in the time tending them as they grow, we will get the points.
It takes training to know how to do it, after all.
Well, not a lot, as you could likely just guess your way through it if you wanted to. But we’ve all got architectural courses completed, as well as botany. So, I think that it counts.
Even if we don’t get the points, a few more buildings, like the workshops that you made, would be a nice addition to the compound. Especially a couple of shelters by the gates. Somewhere to get out of the weather if we get a dust storm, acid rain, or hail."
"That’s actually a great idea. If we put one near the tree line as an emergency shelter for teams caught away from the walls, they would appreciate it.
The better that we do on this trial, the better the odds that we get something to give us an advantage on the next one. I got that generator and the workshops last time, and we didn’t do well.
So, if we crush this one, I think we can actually get something that will put us way ahead."
One of the mages, a woman from the Navy group, patted Kalli on the shoulder. "We’ve got this one. I think that it’s an everyday hero sort of event. We are supposed to make life tolerable for the rest of humanity as the seasons change.
See?
We’ve been doing great at that, both because of the Academy, and because of your store.
With both of those things on our side, we’re practically back to sustainable living. All we need is a bit of livestock, chickens or something, and we will have everything that we need to sustain this town for as long as you’re alive, and your store is available.
I know it’s a lot to rely on one person with one unique class.
But that’s where we are, and until things are settled, and the trials are over, we really don’t have the luxury to start branching out and starting to explore for mines.
We can start building looms, though. The tuber plant material is remarkably similar to hemp, and I heard that someone knows how to make cloth out of it."
Kalli’s eyes lit up with excitement. "Now that is perfect news. I have one more workshop left, and if it’s a cloth factory with tuber plant mass? That’s the definition of a sustainable resource."
The mages chuckled at the comment. The tubers grew so fast that they wouldn’t have any use for the vast majority of the plant matter. In fact, just harvesting them with the usual "leave one tuber for the plant to regrow" method would give them more biomass than they could possibly need.
Compost, heating, clothing. All of it could be covered by the tuber plants. They just needed to find the right ways to process them.