Chapter 91: Inform The Sailors
Chapter 91: Inform The Sailors
The officer stared at Kalli, wondering if she was serious, and then Sergeant Sanchez joined the conversation.
"If you want to leave, go southeast down the coast. That will mostly avoid the Swineherd Demons, and we killed off all the Flatfoot Hunters we saw from that direction. I don’t know how far you’ll get, but it’s the closest thing to an option that you have.
North will bring you into a horde of Ogres and nuclear fallout. And every other direction has Swineherd Demons and their Armoured Boars on the other side of the trees.
Plus what’s in the trees."
"Wasn’t this a capital city? How can there be nothing left?"
"At the end of the first trial, anywhere that wasn’t protected by a hero or group of heroes was simply reclaimed by the other world. I don’t know what happened to the survivors, if there were any.
And presumably there were some, it’s not difficult to hide for a few weeks.
But at this point, even the basements of the old buildings are gone. There is nothing left of the city but a few scattered ruins and the area immediately next to the Academy."
The sailor didn’t look convinced, so Kalli gestured at the wall. "Go up and take a look. You’ll see that we’re not messing with you. You’ll also see our groups out harvesting food, killing crabs and fighting off the Swineherd Demons and their boars before they can ravage our root crop supply."
She took Kalli up on the offer, and it was clear to everyone that her physical skills were vastly inferior to what any of the residents of the Academy could boast.
Even the soldiers, who were not heroes, were on her level.
Once she was at the top, she instinctively reached for something that should have been on her belt, but the heroes were reborn with just what was in their storage, and whatever it was hadn’t come with her.
Then, she turned north, to where the battle had taken place.
The circular blast pattern in the clouds was clear, as was the lingering mushroom cloud in the middle, which was only now starting to be shifted by the prevailing winds.
Fortunately for them, that was to the Northwest, away from the city.
"Damn. There’s nothing left out there," a young man in school uniform pants sighed as he held a metal box in his hands.
"What are you measuring?"
"Radio and standard communication frequency transmissions. I was hoping to find something from the fleets. We should get some background radio energy as they communicate. But there is nothing. I’m picking up the energy from the blast, and from the power grid in the Academy.
But there is nothing from anywhere else.
It’s like none of it exists at all. This gear is sensitive enough that it should be able to pick up the satellite signals between the ships and the military hardware in space.
But there’s nothing. It’s like nobody has sent a single ping anywhere within the celestial horizon."
The man continued to scan, then shook his head.
"I am getting sporadic signals, but they’re all originating or terminating here in the Academy. Not even the bunker is sending out anything, and it should be hardened against external blasts."
"You came from the navy ship, right?"
The man nodded, and Kalli continued.
"All fifty heroes who were in the bunker are here now, resurrected. Whatever that bunker was supposed to hold against, it’s almost certainly gone now."
Some of the heroes had come outside now, and they were clearly waiting for Kalli’s attention.
"That’s right, we’re all here. Though, I didn’t realize we’d all lived to the last minutes of our so-called ’safe zone’. We thought some of the guys were lost days ago, but it turns out that they were just trapped when the green skins took a portion of the bunker offline.
The problem is that a lot of us are back down to level one, and honestly, we look like a joke compared to even the regular soldiers on your teams."
Kalli nodded. "You’re not wrong. But they’ve been training with a quest for extra gains. You’ll be able to do that too, now that you’re here. But we’re going to have to work you back up to at least level three.
Especially the warriors.
The others might get away with being slightly shitty at their jobs. However, if your job is to be in the front and not die, you have to be good at it."
A few of the heroes who were not warriors laughed.
"The lady has a point. They said her class is Coordinator, right? Does that mean she knows what is going on?"
Kalli laughed. "Only about a third of it. But I collect the notes from everyone else and try to make sense of them. Hopefully, the Academy taught you good handwriting. If not, you can send it through the student portal app if you still have your phone."
A few of the new arrivals took phones out of storage and powered them on for the first time in weeks.
"Hey, there’s signal here. Actual signal! How? There is no city left, right?"
"We brought a tower into the Academy. Think of it more like a Wi-Fi signal than cell service because you’re not going to connect to anyone who isn’t here. But you can reach the base when you’re out on missions.
Now that there are no tall buildings in the way, it should reach a solid thirty or forty kilometres."
"That’s as good as a handheld radio. Do you have any of those? It would be good to keep the teams in contact all the time, and a two-way radio is better than an app because you’ll be able to hear calls for help immediately," one of the newly arrived heroes suggested.
Kalli nodded. "There is an entire shelf full of them in the storage room. We can have at least the team leaders start carrying them at all times."
Sergeant Sanchez nodded. "I will have them distributed. Did your groups already have assigned five and ten-person teams with a healer?"
The sailors all looked at him like he was crazy.
"Why would we have healers on duty with us? We’ve got a ship to run, so they stay in the med bay."
The Sergeant sighed and Kalli patted him on the back.
"You get to do the crash course in reality 101 this time. I’m not great at it."
"I don’t know, your style has its own merits. By the time that I’m done explaining the process to a bunch of squids, I might be tempted to do the same."