Chapter 285: Free Showers

The team leaders all realized that their reports hadn’t found anything groundbreaking, except the one report of the vanishing city. That was the thing that caught everyone’s attention, and even more so because when they had flown over the city of Gomand it was ruined, but not gone.

There were only a handful of people from Gomand still alive, the ones who had been resurrected here in Marimgar.

But apparently that was enough that their hometown continued to exist.

However, that gave them much more information to go on by using the historical records. There were many parts of the world that had been completely remade, and the people of Marimgar had assumed that whoever was still there was working on a whole new home.

But now they knew that it was possible the cities had vanished because there were no more survivors.

There wasn’t much of Marimgar, but there wasn’t much of Marimgar’s population left at the time that the first merge happened. After that, it was safe to assume that something would be left of the city, as long as there were still some survivors from it.

That was both highly encouraging, and incredibly depressing.

Encouraging because they knew there were still many areas with survivors that were enduring even to the start of the solar storm. Depressing, because they knew how many were gone.

"Well, there’s nothing that we can do about it, unless we’re going to fly over to one of the locations that we still see buildings, and hope that we can find survivors.

We did check when we flew over Gomand," Reggie noted.

Alexei nodded. "As did we, and we didn’t find anything on thermals. There weren’t any other major towns in our sweep area to the west, but everything that was near the river that ran to it has completely vanished.

There are no signs of surviving populations, human or otherwise. We saw plenty of bones, but no cities, and that led us to think that the monsters were nomadic.

But now that I think about it, the cities might have simply vanished."

His flight suit team had covered a huge amount of ground, and they had flown over at least three other areas where there should have been cities. They hadn’t gone as far as Hamin, but they could assume that it was still there, as Marimgar had taken in refugees from the city.

That wasn’t much, but it was still a sign of survival.

It also meant that even if they searched a city, the survivors might not be there anymore.

The ones that had run off to the space stations likely didn’t count, and honestly, not many of them expected that the space stations were still functional after a solar storm. They might have radiation shielding, but they were outside the planet’s primary magnetic field.

So, they would have taken much more of the damage than the cities on the surface did.

That wasn’t the only thing that was bothering the team leaders, but it was one more to add to the list. The tension in the room was palpable, but nobody wanted to put their real concerns into words and risk jinxing their own survival.

Kalli broke the silence, "Well, we can only do so much. Keep up the dungeon runs, and we will get through the trial. We’ve almost certainly got another top finishing spot, given how well we did.

We’re still running a surplus on basic survival, and the dungeons are making things better by the day.

Just keep it up, and we should be on the right path.

If you see any other issues, bring them to me, and I will make sure that we take care of them before they become serious enough to become an emergency."

The team leaders split off, and Kalli went to her room upstairs in the Hall of Heroes for an early night.

As if the System were balancing out the difficulty of the trial after going overboard with the solar storm, Kalli woke up to a perfectly normal day of teams turning in quests, scouts searching for survivors, to little avail, and the tubers in the scorched fields being confirmed as partially surviving.

The very deepest of roots hadn’t gotten hot enough to kill them, and the plants that had a forming tuber at that root branch were beginning to recover.

Then, the scouts brought them a new danger report.

There was a major storm beginning off the eastern coast, and high altitude verification by the flight suits said that there was rotation to the clouds. A proper Typhoon was forming, and it didn’t appear to be a System mechanic, but a natural storm.

They should have a day before it made landfall, perhaps part of a second, if it wandered.

Then, they would have all the rain that they could hope for, and their upgraded storm drains would be put to the test. Hopefully, they would keep the city mostly dry this time.

Having gone through this once before, the residents of Marimgar began to blockade lower levels and seal openings, leaving little to nothing that could breach their buildings other than the main doors, which would be waterproofed the moment that flooding started.

If there was no flooding, they weren’t going to go into full lockdown for what was still reported as a category 1 storm.

They had survived dozens of those in the past, and that level of wind wouldn’t damage the buildings, even without the barrier up. That was a relief, as they weren’t sure how much mana it would have taken to protect against the last major storm that had come through.

Plus, a storm like this usually didn’t come with hail.

Kalli was preparing to head out for dinner when Vinnie and a bunch of his men came in together.

"What’s up, gentlemen? I believe you already turned in all your quests."

Vinnie nodded. "Indeed we did. But we were hoping that your store could sell us a case of Kalkan Springs soap. It’s a storm tradition in Datia."

Kalli laughed at the thought.

"You’re all intending to strip down to your underwear and go shower in the storm, aren’t you?"

"As long as it’s not acid rain or something," Vinnie confirmed.

Kalli searched her store and shook her head. "I don’t have the brand. But I do have a case of what it calls [Body Soap, Masculine Scent], if you want to try that instead."

"We will take it."