Chapter 248: Twenty More Minutes
The Blue World rippled once more, and this time no isolated battlefield rose around them.
An entire city rose instead. Stone streets stretched in every direction. The Hunter Association stood exactly where it always did. The Academy. The Mayor’s Office. Residential blocks, market squares, all of it laid out precisely the way Mythal actually looked.
Lily turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. "...You recreated all of it."
The Candidate nodded. "You wished to know whether your city could survive."
Kai looked toward the distant walls, already imagining the crimson gate that would eventually open somewhere beyond them. "...Then we’ll defend it."
Sera smiled slightly. "This feels different."
"It is," Kai said.
He looked around at everyone gathered with him. "This isn’t a relic test anymore." He gestured at the streets stretching out around them. "It’s our city."
Silence settled over the group for a moment.
Then the simulation began.
...
The familiar crimson gate appeared beyond the walls, cracks already spreading across its surface. The sky darkened overhead, and mana pressure rolled across the city in a slow, heavy wave that everyone felt without needing to be told to.
Even knowing exactly what was coming, Lily’s hands tightened at her sides.
The gate exploded open. Shadow monsters poured out in a black tide, and the evacuation began immediately.
Unlike every previous run, nobody hesitated. District captains already knew their routes by heart. Hunters moved toward prepared positions without waiting for instructions. Support teams split off exactly where the plan called for them to split, no confusion, no wasted seconds.
Sera smiled. "...They’re already faster."
Kai nodded. "They’re prepared."
...
Kai raised one hand. "...Activate."
The city answered instantly. Not one relic. Not two.
Hundreds.
Mana Relay Towers lit up one after another across the skyline. Barrier Relics bloomed at every major intersection. Healing Arrays activated beneath the evacuation routes, glowing faintly through the stone. Gravity Nodes hummed quietly beneath the main thoroughfares.
Nobody issued a second command. The network simply took over from there.
Lily stared, wide-eyed. "...Look at that."
Elden watched the light spreading district by district. "The chain reaction reached everywhere at once."
Even the Candidate seemed genuinely caught off guard. "...Interesting."
...
A veteran hunter got surrounded near the market district, three shadow monsters closing in from different angles at once.
Kai recognized him instantly. "He always dies here."
Everyone watched, tense.
One monster lunged. Before it landed the strike, a nearby Shield Relic flared to life on its own, a barrier snapping into place a half-second before impact.
CLANG!
The hunter stumbled backward, staring at the barrier that had just saved his life. "...What?"
Healing Arrays bloomed beneath his feet a moment later, closing the shallow cuts he’d already taken. Earth Relics reshaped the street itself, raising stone walls between him and the two remaining monsters. Wind Relics redirected a volley of arrows that had been arcing toward his exposed side.
Nobody gave a single order the entire time.
The city simply saved him.
Silence held for a beat.
Sera smiled. "...That would’ve never happened in any earlier version of this plan."
Kai nodded quietly. "...Exactly."
...
The network kept expanding on itself as the fight spread through the city. A bridge began collapsing under the weight of fleeing civilians, and Earth Relics reinforced it before anyone reached the failing section. Poisonous smoke drifted toward an evacuation corridor, and Wind Relics redirected the entire cloud away from the fleeing crowd before it reached them. A collapsed building trapped several hunters beneath rubble, and Gravity Relics shifted the debris just enough for rescue teams to pull them free without further injury. Teleport Relays automatically extracted wounded squads the instant they dropped below a certain threshold. Healing Networks triaged automatically, prioritizing the most critical injuries first without anyone directing traffic.
Mana rerouted itself around damaged relay towers without a single manual adjustment.
Everything supported everything else, exactly the way the Living Canyon had, exactly the way Elden had first sketched it out on a research table days earlier.
Lily laughed, delighted. "...It’s working."
Kai smiled. "No."
"...We’re working."
Elden added quietly, "The city is."
...
Then Tiamat paused.
For the first time in any simulation any of them had run, she actually studied the battlefield instead of simply walking through it. One of her dragons abruptly changed direction, diving straight for the relay towers instead of the fleeing hunters.
Several towers went down in quick succession, explosions rolling through the skyline. The mana network flickered hard, lights dimming across three separate districts at once.
Before anyone could react, the chain rerouted itself automatically. Reserve Relays kicked in. Secondary mana lines woke up along backup routes nobody had actively been watching.
The network stabilized.
Lily nearly jumped out of her seat. "It recovered!"
Kai nodded, watching the lights steady across the skyline. "We finally built in redundancy that actually works under pressure."
The Candidate said quietly, "...Adaptation."
One word. Everyone understood exactly how much weight it carried.
...
The battle rolled on, minute after minute, and slowly everyone noticed something strange.
The point where every previous simulation had always collapsed simply never arrived.
Hunters kept fighting. Support kept flowing in exactly where it was needed. Barriers reformed as fast as they broke. Healing never stopped moving through the network.
The city refused to break.
Finally a simulation clock flickered into view above the skyline.
+20 Minutes
Nobody spoke for a moment.
Lily whispered, "...Twenty minutes."
Kai nodded slowly. "Twenty more than we’ve ever managed before."
Sera said quietly, "That’s twenty minutes for another district to finish evacuating."
"Twenty minutes for reinforcements to actually arrive," Elden added.
"Twenty minutes for hospitals to prepare," Lily said.
Kai finished it. "...Twenty minutes for hope."
Silence held over the group, that last word settling into the room heavier than anything else that had been said.
...
Eventually the pressure became too much even for the improved network to absorb. Relay towers started failing faster than the redundancy system could recover them. Reserve mana ran thin across the western districts. One section of the city fell, and then another, the chain reaction slowly unraveling under sustained assault.
Not because the design was flawed.
Because Tiamat was simply, overwhelmingly more than any single system could hold back indefinitely.
She walked forward through the collapsing defenses, and the simulation ended there, the Blue World returning around them.
...
Nobody lowered their head. Nobody sighed.
Lily laughed instead, practically bouncing. "...Did you see the western district hold as long as it did?"
Kai smiled. "The teleport relay saved at least a dozen people on its own."
Sera nodded enthusiastically. "And the shield chain around the market square, that thing didn’t drop once."
Elden was already writing notes down as fast as he could form the thoughts. "If we increase relay density along the outer ring specifically..."
Kai chuckled. "We’re doing it again."
Lily grinned. "We’re improving it."
Nobody in the room was talking about failure. They were only talking about what came next.
The Candidate watched all of it quietly. "...You’ve changed."
Kai looked over at him. "We’re finally solving problems instead of just watching them happen."
...
Eventually Kai raised a hand, and the room quieted.
He looked out at the fading city one last time. "The plan is finally becoming something real."
A pause.
"But eventually, we still have to stand in front of Tiamat ourselves."
Silence.
Kai turned toward the Candidate. "...How strong should we become?"
The Candidate didn’t answer right away. He folded his arms, thinking longer than he usually did before finally speaking.
"...Exact numbers are impossible to give you." A pause. "But if I were preparing for that battle myself, I would aim for Level sixty-eight."
He considered it further. "...Level seventy would be even better."
Silence filled the Blue World.
Lily repeated it slowly. "...Seventy."
Sera smiled. "...That’s our next goal, then."
Elden nodded. "It gives us something concrete to work toward."
Kai’s eyes brightened, not with fear this time, but with purpose.
He looked around at everyone gathered with him. "We’ve spent all this time making the battlefield stronger."
He smiled. "...Now let’s make ourselves strong enough to actually deserve it."
Everyone nodded together, no hesitation anywhere in the room.
The Candidate watched them quietly, and for the first time since he’d started guiding civilizations through this exact process, he wasn’t looking at another city simply preparing for Disaster the way all the others had.
He was looking at a group of people who genuinely refused to believe history had to repeat itself just because it always had before.
The Blue World slowly dissolved around them.
By the time they made it back to the research center, nobody was talking about relics anymore.
They were already deep into dungeon routes, training schedules, and exactly how fast six people could realistically climb from where they stood now all the way to Level 70.