Chương 74: Chapter 71: The Settlement Ascends

The next couple of hours blurred into a rhythmic, grueling grind. Kill zombies, rotate out, rinse, and repeat. The only folks who didn't rotate onto the front lines were Isadora, the grandmas, and a few of the elderly members of the community. They situated themselves in the cafeteria, working tirelessly to keep a steady supply of hot food ready for the combatants taking their rest periods.

Midway through the night, we finally remembered something we should have utilized right from the first drop of blood: Isadora's warding songs. Once we realized our oversight, she began singing her protective verses over the exhausted fighters just before they stepped back out into the dark to face the iron gates. Travis and Jace established a highly efficient rotation of their own. One would actively fly a drone to monitor the battlefield from above while the other went out to fight on the ground.

Before it was time to swap places, the brother on foot would grab a quick bite to eat from the cafeteria, bring a portion back to the office for his brother, and then take over the controller. Because of the tag-team setup, neither boy missed out on a single drop of incoming experience. Up on the roofs, we began rotating the lookouts with the ground troops.

There wasn't much left for the roof guards to do except keep a passive eye out for distant threats and guide the ground teams toward whichever side of the campus the horde was bunching up against the most. Eventually, the lookouts realized they could draw the mindless dead to completely different areas simply by banging on the metal flashing and shouting down into the dark. It became easier than herding cattle. Mike drifted in and out of the courtyard whenever his reserves ran dry.

His specialized rogue abilities burned through both his mana and stamina bars at an alarming rate, but he was clearly having a blast out there on his own, systematically dropping zombies at a terrifyingly steady pace. His skills and class abilities were seeing the most explosive amount of growth among anyone in the entire settlement. In fact, the only person on the entire property who wasn't seeing any growth at all was me.

Even the noncombatants working the kitchen line were receiving notifications for level-ups and cooking skill increases, clearly gaining a passive trickle of environmental experience for providing logistics during a settlement siege. The moment a fighter stepped into the cafeteria to sit down and relax, the System officially registered them as "out of combat," allowing them to safely allocate their points and level up at will. The tactical gains for our little population were immense.

The only ones entirely locked out of the leveling process besides me were the handful of small children sleeping deep inside the buildings. At one point, frustrated by my frozen progress bar, I jogged all the way over to the eastern fields on the far side of the property to see if killing a few stragglers there would register. Nothing.

When I pushed my luck and tried to physically step through one of the eastern perimeter gates to leave the school property entirely, a massive system warning flashed across my vision, demanding to know if I wished to officially Abandon the Siege. I slammed the No option and retreated. Denise brought me a steaming bowl of stew halfway through the night. She didn't say much—she could read the mounting frustration written all over my face.

I just told her I was fine for now, quickly ate the meal, and got right back to the mindless grind of hacking down the dead. From the very beginning of the night, the horde had numbered well over a couple thousand shamblers. By the time the total count dwindled to just a few hundred remaining stragglers, I decided it was time to end the grind and break the lockdown. I ordered the kill teams to take a break to recover every scrap of mana and stamina they could manage.

We had the boys launch both drones simultaneously to map out the entire parking lot, and I pulled all the roof guards down to stack up behind the heavy gates. The moment the kill teams were fully recovered, we split into two heavy assault elements. The main dungeon team—minus Mike, who had already slipped through the shadows directly into the parking lot—and two kill teams stacked up at the gate just past the main office.

The remaining kill teams, including Frank and his reinforced foyer squad, locked and loaded at the gate on the far side of the big gym. Once both elements radioed their readiness, we threw the gates wide and went on a mass killing spree. With swords, spears, axes, and heavy blunt weapons, the teams carved a brutal, unyielding path straight through the remaining mass of the dead. I was completely in the zone.

I had long since emptied my quivers, so I relied entirely on the weighted edge of my sword, cutting down any rotting shape that drifted into my reach. After about fifteen minutes of pure, coordinated violence, the deed was done. The teams stood panting in the center of the dark parking lot, looking around at the absolute, ringing quiet, not quite sure what to do with the sudden silence. Then, a massive, golden prompt shattered the dark: Congratulations, citizens of Novus.

You have successfully defeated the zombie horde besieging your settlement with zero casualties. Siege Rewards Allocated: You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. EXP greatly increased. All current citizens: +10 to all attributes. All current citizens: +10% experience bonus to all spells, skills, and abilities. A massive, deafening cheer erupted from the parking lot and echoed right back from the people waiting behind the fence line.

Even the grandmas and the kitchen staff poured out of the cafeteria doors, waving their aprons and cheering to revel in the fact that the ordeal was finally over. I joined in the shouting, forcing a smile for the crowd, but deep down, I knew this nightmare was far from over. For starters, we had a logistical horror show of a cleanup waiting for us. More importantly, Joe's blood trail proved that TJ was still breathing out there somewhere in the dark—which meant the real war hadn't even started yet.

As the rewards washed over me, I felt a familiar, heavy cascade of personal level-up notifications pop in the corner of my vision, but I promptly swiped them away without reading them. There were far more pressing matters to attend to before I could look at my stats. Walking back toward the perimeter fences, I couldn't help but wince at the absolute ruin of the courtyard. The pavement directly in front of the double gates was a nightmare—a thick, soggy, purulent mire of crushed bone, black fluid, and pulped limbs.

An untold number of ordinary zombies had been hacked down and subsequently trampled into a thick swamp of rot. I was dead certain the concrete walkway would be forever stained by the black blood of the dead, and grass would never grow along that stretch of earth again. As the exhausted teams filed back inside the perimeter, I pulled the team leaders aside.

"Get everyone out of the buildings," I ordered.

"Every single soul. Get them out into the center of the quad." I wasn't exactly sure what would happen the moment I officially activated the core, and I didn't want a single person caught inside if the System decided to radically alter the structural layouts or foundations of the school. Once the buildings were confirmed entirely clear, I closed my eyes, took a breath, and accessed Novus' main settlement interface. Would you like to officially activate the Crystal Core and claim the domain? YES/NO I selected Yes.

I held my breath, my hand resting on my sword hilt as I waited for the sky to fall. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long. A deep, metallic grinding noise echoed from the bedrock, accompanied by a rhythmic, heavy rumbling beneath our boots. It didn't feel like a standard earthquake; the vibration was perfectly vertical, and no one lost their balance or got thrown to the asphalt.

I spun around toward the double gates and watched in absolute awe as a massive, solid stone wall rose smoothly out of what used to be the public sidewalk just past the edge of the parking lot. The stone was dark, seamless, and ancient. The wall rapidly shot up to an impressive fifteen feet in height, topped with a thick, crenelated defensive parapet and a heavy, fortified gatehouse complete with an iron-reinforced portcullis.

Open stone staircases were spaced every forty to fifty feet along the interior face, granting our defenders immediate access to the high ground. I quickly pulled up my mini-map overlay. The clean blue outline of the new defensive wall encircled the entire school property, completely enveloping the outer training fields and the football stadium. A second identical gatehouse and portcullis had anchored itself on the north side of the lot.

While the stone boundary didn't explicitly cross the canal along the back edge of the property, the gatehouse was positioned close enough that our people could still safely fish the waters without leaving the protection of our sight. Back on the control panel interface, a list of defense upgrades unlocked. The System offered a choice between heavy-duty ballistas, massive trebuchets, or a hybrid configuration of both.

I opted entirely for the ballistas; the interface indicated we could field a much higher volume of them compared to the siege engines. Fascinatingly, because the underlying crystal core was inherently magical, the weapons required zero crew. The ballistas automatically generated their own heavy wooden bolts from mana and targeted any entity deemed an enemy of the settlement. They fired roughly once every ten seconds—not an overwhelming rate of fire on their own, but an absolute game-changer for our security.

Better yet, I could physically click and drag the ballistas to any position along the battlements at a moment's notice using the map interface. I immediately dragged one to either side of both portcullises, placed two more directly along the corner intersection where TJ's behemoth had entered, and spread the remainder evenly along the standard stretches of the stone. All in all, we had thirty automated ballistas at our permanent discretion.

But the biggest surprise came in the form of a minor, blinking prompt at the bottom of the interface: Would you like to expend Core Energy to repair and clean the designated property? I should have expected it. The initial notification I've received when claiming the dungeon core had explicitly warned me that the instance would never repopulate its monsters once claimed. It made perfect sense that a functional core could manipulate, repair, and clean its own physical space.

With an absolutely massive smile breaking across my face, I tapped Yes. This time, there were no loud grinds or rumbling earth. The only real structural damage we had sustained was the cracked glass doors in the big gym foyer, which seamlessly mended themselves back into smooth, flawless panes. What happened next was pure magic. The gut-wrenching, horribly disgusting mire of blood, bone, and flesh in the parking lot simply sank into the ground, vanishing entirely as if the earth itself had swallowed the filth.

The ruined grass out past the double gates instantly regrew into a lush, vibrant green. The small, raised garden plots in the center of the quad didn't automatically regrow the crops we had trampled, but the soil was instantly transformed into a rich, dark, perfectly aerated loam, completely clear of debris and ready for immediate seeding. An even bigger, wilder cheer rose from the crowd as the lights of our new, clean sanctuary reflected off the pristine stone walls.