Monroe

Chapter One Hundred and Eighty-Four. Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Mike ejected his magazine with one hand while summoning a fresh one into his other.

The wave had been everything Bob had promised. For the past twenty minutes, he'd been dropping monsters in batches. He'd quickly learned that using the Barrage skill was better than using the burst setting on his rifle, offering the same effect with a single round. Or near enough as to make no difference; either way, a single well-placed shot dropped the awful lizard monsters that continued to rush the encampment.

Target, fire, repeat. The entire process was smooth and familiar, with his new and improved system enhanced body performing those actions better than he ever had before. There were slight differences in the monster types that rushed into his lane of fire, but they were largely irrelevant. There had been one massive insect, the size of a bulldozer, but it had fallen to concentrated fire without reaching the berm.

As he serviced target after target, he couldn't help but worry. This was a wave, and while they were handling it well, the wall was lined with trained Marines. While these monsters were only level three or four, there were enough of them that if they broke through into an actual town or village, they'd wreak havoc.

Bob had said that the Tide would last for ten days, not an hour, and that the monsters would be level thirty to sixty, with some a bit higher, and a few truly epic ones at level ninety or even one hundred. He couldn't see a way for any city on Earth to survive that. You'd run out of ordinance.

Mike wasn't sure how the hell the cities on Thayland managed it.

Target, fire, repeat.

Secretary of Defence Edward Heller was standing on top of the Adventurers Guild in Glacier Valley, watching the seemingly endless carpet of monsters surge against the wall surrounding the encampment. He hadn't expected there to be that many monsters. It was one of those terrible instances where the human mind can accept something logically but has trouble visualizing it. This wasn't his first time witnessing a firefight at a forward operating base, but the scale in terms of enemy combatants was unreal.

Two thousand marines had effectively been firing nonstop for half an hour. He'd been told in advance that the teams operating the SAWs would have one man keeping a repair spell on the barrel at all times, allowing them to go rock and roll the entire time.

Ed had never seen this much firepower concentrated over such a short period of time. And still, the monsters came. He'd been initially dismissive of Whitman's claims that Earth couldn't hope to survive what was coming. He was quickly changing his mind for a couple of reasons. First, Whitman not only couldn't lie, but he genuinely had no interest in Earth beyond grabbing copies of every book he could download. It hadn't been difficult to gather a bit of intelligence on the man, and it was clear that he was much happier on this new world than he'd ever been on Earth. The second was that when he took what he was seeing now and applied Whitman's description of the apocalypse that was approaching, he was no longer certain that the United States Military could successfully defend even a single large city.

This placed him in an uncomfortable situation. He'd always been politically adroit, however in this situation, he'd misjudged badly. While Whitman was an unimportant little man back on Earth, he was an absolute treasure trove of information about the new reality that was about to come crashing down on them. Further, he'd marshaled the aid of a foreign nation and selflessly devoted himself to ensuring that Earth had a refuge where they could work to secure their future.

He had already made his excuses. He was tired, the Middle East continued to be a shit show, midterms had gone badly for the party who'd confirmed him, his wife had given him the ultimatum of couples therapy or divorce. The truth was he'd made a bad call, and he was afraid he'd poisoned the well when it came to Whitman. The man had little trust for others, and his past interactions indicated that he wasn't the forgiving type. He'd spoken to the President, and admitted his failings. He wouldn't be replaced; that would require making the information public far too soon, but he might not be part of the process on Thayland, which would eventually amount to the same thing.

Ed had also advised the President that there were English and Australian civilians delving the Dungeon, part of Whitman's other initiative to bring like-minded civilians into the loop. He expected that there would be a quiet meeting between the President and the Prime Ministers of those two allies, likely with the Canadians attending as well.

He shook his head, clearing his thoughts. Hanson had proven to be a blessing, and as badly as things had gone, without that man, they would have likely gone far worse. After the man had thanked him for rescuing him from the most beautiful woman Ed had ever seen, he'd advised that if Bob were pulled from actively digging the Dungeon deeper, he'd most likely start digging one for the Australians the next day. Given that the engineers who were going to learn that particular skillset weren't due to arrive until tomorrow and would take a few weeks to get up to speed, it would be prudent to leave things as they were until they were ready to take over.

Watching the Marines mow down twisted monsters under an alien sky, Ed wondered for the first time if he was the right man for this job.

Amber hurled herself into her mother's arms, bursting into tears.

Her father came around the car to add his presence to a three-way hug.

"I'm so glad you're ok," he murmured.

She'd been waiting for two days and was a little nervous as the time had stretched. There was a wave due to arrive tonight, which meant that at the moment, she was on Earth with no way to get back to Thayland.

It had been strange to consider how frightening that was. She wasn't at all interested in going back to jail, and despite having made quite a few friends on Thayland, she didn't think she had anyone who would come to Earth and break her out. Although Bob hadn't reincarnated yet, so technically, he still had the spell to summon her.

"Let me look at you," her mother said, pulling out of the hug and holding her at arm's length. "You've certainly been getting a lot of exercise and even some sun."

"I've been spending a lot of time in a greenhouse," Amber sniffled, "why don't you come sit down under the Pavillion, I have a lot to tell you."

They sat down together in the magically cool air, and she told them everything.

She finished her story by casting a ritual on a tiny sprout of sage, growing it to full size in the hundred seconds it took to complete.

"Well, isn't that something to see," her father muttered as he knelt down and inspected the plant.

"So I was hoping that you'd be willing to come back with me, at least for a visit," Amber said hopefully. "I can't really stick around Earth, it's unlikely, but if I ended up in a situation where I needed to provide ID, things could go wrong quickly."

"We have all summer, although we'll need to go back home to properly pack," her mother assured her.

"I can't thank you enough," Alrick said again, wiping the sweat off his brow. "The last time we had three big ones come at once, we lost half our people."

Anni smiled gently. "The Endless are here to ensure that no more lives are lost during wave or tide, as commanded by He Who Walks Before," she said softly. "He has shown us the path, and we merely follow in his footsteps."

"Ma'am," Anni felt a tug at her cloak, and she turned and looked down to find a young boy, perhaps eight years old, looking up at her in wonder. "Who is He Who Walks Before?"

"Gary!" A woman who had to be his mother hissed as she picked him up, "Don't bother the nice lady!"

"It's no bother," Anni assured her. "Your name is Gary?"

The little boy nodded.

"Let me tell you a story about a man named Robert Whitman, Bob to his many friends, The Reef to those whose lives he has saved, and He Who Walks Before to those of us who seek to follow after him," Anni began. She looked around at the people of Cresent Lake. "Let me tell everyone."

Eddi looked up from his desk to see Wayna smiling as she dropped another piece of stone's cursed paper on it.

"Why?" He asked sadly. "Why do you hate me when I give you nothing but love?"

Wayna laughed as she walked around the desk and leaned down to wrap her arms around his shoulders, planting a kiss on his cheek.

"That's the last one, you drama queen."

"Thank the stars," Eddi muttered. Defending Quartz Falls hadn't been difficult; Rexy and the rexxettes had made short work of the monsters. He'd spent most of the wave chatting with the local curator. It was when he'd arrived back at the Endless Tower and had begun to gather all the reports, collating them into a single document that despair had washed over him

He skimmed the final report, a grin breaking out across his face as he leaned back and reached up to hug Wayna. "We did it," he whispered, "not a single casualty."

He reread the report in front of him and frowned. "Anni was at Cresent Lake; what took her so long to get this in?"

Bob looked around the sixteenth floor. The problem with excavating the lower floors was that you couldn't lay out an actual ritual and spend a few hours and several thousand mana crystals to clear it all at once. No, you had to clear it out segment by segment, as there was no way to lay the ritual through solid stone. Or mostly solid rock.

He'd decided to drive this Dungeon down to level twenty and stop. He wasn't sure that giving people the option to tier up was the best of ideas. They'd have to do so eventually, but that decision was one he'd struggled with, and he was self-aware enough to know that his relationship with his humanity was rather more tenuous than most.

Nine thousand Marines were expected to arrive tomorrow, nearly a thousand of them engineers, and Bob had every intention of having them take the curator path. It was clear that while there was an ebb and flow in regards to the ability to efficiently utilize the Dungeon, the overall capacity was the limiting factor. While they wouldn't be able to cast five-fold rituals like he could, and their Dungeons would need constant maintenance, quantity had a quality all its own. A thousand level fifteen curators would be able to drive Dungeons down quickly, if not efficiently.

It wasn't as if they didn't have mana crystals to spare. The Dungeon in Glacier Valley, when fully staffed, was delivering right around three hundred thousand mana crystals a day. He'd been forced to consider the Dungeon in Harbordeep with a fresh perspective. It was entirely possible that the ridiculous prices they charged for admission there might have some slight justification. From what he'd seen, the Dungeon there was incredibly underutilized, with most of the Adventurers delving it doing so right at or after the tier cap. It made sense, in a way. The massive number of mana crystals required to tier up was a wall, and once you'd climbed it, the natural inclination was to rush across the next plateau until you found the next wall.

The only group he'd ever seen hold back from pushing to the tier cap were the Endless, and that was only because the Summoning Affinity Crystals which they craved couldn't be gathered at level twenty-five. His plan, utilizing every floor of the Dungeon, required a massive number of people who were content with advancing to a certain point and then stalling.

Bob knew that reincarnation would help to ensure that the early floors of a Dungeon wouldn't go completely unused, but eventually, once things had settled down...

While he wasn't sold on Jason's idea of using sapient creatures in his Dungeon, Jason might not be wrong when it came to his idea of creating floors that mimicked an RPG storyline. Bob could see a future where wealthy parents, or people reincarnating, made a circuit of dozens of those types of Dungeons, advancing their skills back up by playing their way through the Dungeons, rather than just grinding away at them. It wouldn't generate nearly the same number of mana crystals, but when you had hundreds of years ahead of you, having fun while you leveled back up from a reincarnation held a value unto itself.

That might be something he'd experiment with. He was certainly tired of building identical floor after identical floor.

Bob shook his head. It was far too easy to get lost in his thoughts down here. He opened a portal to the first floor of the Dungeon and calmly walked up the stairs.