Chapter 123: Summer Storms
By the end of the day, the heroes were exhausted. But the town of Marimgar was beginning to look like a proper town.
Someone had gone to fetch saplings from the forest to start building wooden shelters, there was a new workshop in the yard, the gardens were nearly back to full strength after the ash and rock storms.
Inside the walls, everything was beginning to return to normal, even as outside the world felt like it was waiting for something awful to happen.
The Trial granted them four more days of normalcy, four days of Heroes building up points, hunting the Magma Corrupted monsters, and tending to the crops. Then, the true terror of a coastal summer began.
A Typhoon had formed offshore, and the wind was beginning to pick up.
Within minutes, heroes were rushing back toward the walls, searching for shelter from the ash, which tore at their skin and abraded their armour. The common folk huddled inside, and the tuber plants pulled the flexible balsa trees down over themselves to save their leaves.
That was actually a brilliant survival instinct, Kalli decided. Once this storm had passed, she would plant a shelter belt of trees around the Academy, to supplement the outer wall in slowing the winds and saving their crops.
The buildings themselves had been built to survive such weather, they hit every year.
But normally, they didn’t have piles of volcanic ash to whip ahead of the rains like a desert sandstorm.
The winds came in hard from the north, easily over a hundred kilometres an hour, and then they steadily increased to well over two hundred kilometres an hour as the moist air preceding the typhoon rains drove the ash from the plains south of Marimgar.
"Coordinator, we’ve tracked the likely movement of the Cyclone. In one hour, the eye will pass directly over Marimgar. According to our records, the last time that happened was over a century ago, they normally hit much further south.
However, the structural analysis says that we should be alright.
We may have to start over with some of the plants, but the tubers are hardy, and the greenhouse should only take minimal damage, as it is sheltered by the Academy walls.
Is there anything else that we can do?"
Kalli considered their options. "I don’t think that we have any mages with large enough barrier spells to protect the whole town, and the only defensive item I have is a single use barrier that only covers one building.
That would be great if we were worried about the buildings collapsing, but it’s more important that we save the crops.
I doubt that there is actually much we can do in a few hours before the typhoon arrives, but if anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears."
Nobody came forward with anything, though everyone had plans for what came after the storm. The cleanup phase, removing blown ash from the compound, checking on their saplings. There would be a lot to do in a day or two, but nothing they could do now would stop a force of nature.
"Boss, we have an issue. The solar panels were added after the storm assessment was done. They’re not rated to hold up to this kind of wind," Reggie gasped as he ran in out of the storm.
Those panels were essential to their survival, or at least to their comfort.
But was she going to have to use a defensive barrier on them when there weren’t any monsters around? That felt like a horrible waste.
Kalli clenched her fists to stop her hands from trembling, and tried to put everything but the present out of her mind.
[ No, this is no time to be thinking of ’what if’ or future dangers. We save what we can now, and then we find a way to save it again later. ]
"I will use the barrier that I have to protect the main Academy building with the solar panels on it. The barrier will last for seventy-two hours. Hopefully, that is enough time that the storm will be fully passed, and the panels will be safe."
Reggie nodded. "I recommend that you do it fast because the panels are already scratched from the blowing ash, and throwing blankets over them won’t save them this time like it did for the stone hail."
Kalli hadn’t even known that they had gone to such lengths, but it made sense. The panels were good, but they were not designed to be pelted with rocks from the sky.
{Barrier Activated} protected building confirmed, Marimgar Academy, Education Building.
{Time Remaining} 71 hours 59 minutes
The winds continued to pick up, an unnerving roar that seemed to echo through the buildings, and Kalli could see that the blowing ash was acting like a sandblaster on any surface that was subjected to the full force of its fury.
The ash storm didn’t last long with the driving storm coming their way.
The rain rolled in, and the wet ash no longer flew about the city. Instead, a deluge of rainfall poured over the buildings, with driving rains pushing it through every crack, crevasse and forgotten gap in the structures.
Only the buildings that Kalli had erected didn’t leak at all. But with the storm shutters closed, everything else was at least doing decently.
All day long, the storm raged, getting stronger as the storm approached, until nobody was comfortable trying to sleep, and even the watch towers had given up on remaining in position.
They didn’t dare leave the tower, but they had retreated to the lower level, away from the fury of the storm.
Then, everything suddenly stopped as the eye of the storm passed directly over them.
Kalli took the chance to look outside, and saw clear sky, with a wall of clouds in every direction. It was still oddly red, not the blue sky that she longed for. But this brief reprieve gave her time to run up on the wall and inspect the damages.
If the apartment buildings were in trouble, she could relocate everyone into the Academy building, or if one of the buildings had lost a roof, they could try to patch it quickly.
But everything seemed to be holding up.
Not well, the apartments were both sanded to bare concrete and raw wood on the north side.
But they were intact.