Chapter 154: Overloaded
Kalli watched the sensors on the ship begin to stabilize, and realized that it would be many hours before the Arks could do much more than defend themselves from attack.
The shields and the thrusters ran on the same power grid, which was currently in thermal overload mode.
So, they couldn’t raise the shields, and they couldn’t move the ships.
But the reactor wasn’t totally offline.
They still had basic power for ship functions, and they could use the defensive laser arrays. That would have to be enough.
A rush of heroes came running into the hall, where Kalli met them with a smile.
"Welcome, heroes! And congratulations on making it past the halfway point of the attack."
Niall laughed as Kalli played the shopkeeper, and then stepped to the statue to collect his reward for over a thousand kills.
He was still just short of two thousand kills, but he had to be careful about leaving the walls to attack, and he didn’t have much for ranged attack capability. He had pistols, which were his primary weapon for this fight, but their damage was low, and he couldn’t count on a clean kill with them from even fifty metres.
His aim wasn’t perfect against moving targets in the dark, no matter how much his eyesight had improved.
Hero after hero rushed inside to turn in their quests. Some of them had more than one completion, especially the Air Defence battery teams, who had been clearing enemies at ground level before the Kalkan Fleet had come ashore.
"Do we have wiring run to the entire perimeter?" Kalli asked as she continued to hand out the rewards and snacks to the heroes.
"We do. The Earth Mages used their magic to increase the size of it as well, just in case that made a difference to what is most likely a magically assisted process. So, we’ve got all nine turrets wired.
How is our power supply doing?"
Kalli laughed. "Even if I had a hundred turrets out there, it would barely match the power usage of one of the {Air Defence Batteries} on the roof of the dorms.
The power draw of those things is absolutely insane, but they were never meant to hit fleshy targets, and the enemy hasn’t shown any signs of advanced technology."
A few of the mages laughed. "If you always had this kind of magic, would you bother to develop advanced technology? More likely they’ve got advanced magic for domestic uses that we haven’t seen yet."
That was an excellent point. Technology was secondary, when all the early stages of it would be lesser versions of what you could do with magic. So, they would never get past the starting phases to try to develop more advanced ones.
"What’s up with the Kalkans? Why did they come ashore and land next to us? Are they planning to move in?" Reggie asked, excitement building in his voice.
"I don’t know what their future plans are, but they were attacked by a group of high levelled sea monsters, and it overloaded their power grid. Their ships need time to cool off and check for damages before they go anywhere.
They may choose to remain ashore, but there is no guarantee.
If they do, I hope that everyone can get along. It would definitely help us to expand the amount of territory that we can hold if their civilian population could start reaching level 1 and becoming heroes."
The heroes of Marimgar hadn’t thought about that.
There were so few heroes in each group, so shouldn’t it be difficult to advance? They had managed to get twenty from their thousand, though. With quick math, there should be a chance for close to sixteen thousand more heroes to advance out of the Arks.
That sounded insane to them, but if they had that many heroes, wouldn’t they be nearly unstoppable?
Even if they had that many level 0 commoners, who could do quests and collect points, they would be off to a great start. Once you reached level 0, you could do the workout quest, and start building up your body.
That would be the great limiting factor, Kalli realized.
Most of the residents of the apartments were working hard to try to get to the level that would denote them as heroes. They should have the work experience, and the training. But they didn’t meet the statistical requirements.
The problem was that while the System told them when they gained a point, nobody had found a way to get the detailed breakdown.
Status, stats, character sheet, info. They had tried all the keywords that they could think of, pressed every button on the mental interface, and none of it showed them their exact physical stats.
However, there was one thing that the heroes had noticed.
Not everyone who reached level 0 was able to grow at the same rate. Even if they were putting in the work, they just weren’t gaining the strength and agility that others did with the same quest.
So, there was some level of genetic predisposition involved as well.
There were also some very strong and fast men who had not managed to get the hero status. And while everyone tried not to mention it, their situation seemed to be proof that there was a mental aspect to the calculation as well.
If you were going to be dumb, you had to be extra tough.
There might also be a cap on the abilities of some people with level 0 status, where it was simply impossible for them to improve beyond a certain point, so they would be at that level for the rest of their lives.
That was normal for humans.
But when the heroes were introduced, everyone forgot about biology and began to focus on how to do things that a regular human could not. Even now, seeing someone rowing a 100 kg dumbbell to build their arm strength for easily drawing a magical bow was becoming common.