Chapter 244: For The Fourth Trial

At the stroke of midnight, Kalli got right to work, adding a huge amount of underground housing around the Ark hangars, and then upgrading the dorm buildings in the old Academy, as they had the highest level heroes in them.

Because she had it all mapped out in advance, the process took under five minutes to be fully completed, and she was free to test out the other new toys.

The {Standard Output Material Converter} was surprisingly large, requiring an entire warehouse of its own. That was surprising, but they had plenty of warehouse space, so Kalli headed for an empty one near the gates and placed the converter inside.

The machinery was massive, but the focal point appeared to be a round platform five metres across, placed somewhat near the bay doors.

"Alright, now, let’s see what you do."

{Standard Output Material Converter} Reconstructs molecular bonds to transform raw materials into alternate raw materials with the same elemental composition.

Kalli stared at it for a moment, trying to understand what exactly that was supposed to mean. Then it clicked in her mind.

It was a better processing facility.

Kalli removed a pile of monster bones from her storage space, as they were not using them at the same rate that they were collecting them, and then went to the control panel and had it convert the pile into armour plating made of carbon nanotubes, in a metallic graphene spiral configuration.

The combination was incredibly durable, and insanely heat-resistant. It was superior to the armour on the composite battle armour, and very much on par with the armour of the power armour suits.

That could be sent to the tinkers to upgrade and repair all sorts of equipment, even swords.

Perhaps especially swords, given how strong it was.

Then, she realized that they had a huge amount of insectoid monster chitin in the storage areas, and it was high in boron, silicon and carbon. Between the three, they could make nearly any sort of advanced composite ceramic armour.

It was beautiful, and they could use something as simple as the scraps from monster corpses and volcanic rock to make even more.

And they were not short on either.

This device was an absolute godsend for their production capacity, as they could use it to make all sorts of resources that they didn’t have, and all it took was mana.

Lots and lots of mana.

Kalli realized when she finished that she had only created a ten kilogram plate of armour, but she had burned through nearly her entire mana pool doing it.

Well, they had repair materials now.

It would let them fix everything that they had, and they could tweak the lower grade item drops from the Goblin and Rat dungeons into raw materials that they could use to make and repair higher grade items.

It wasn’t a mass scale project, it would take days or weeks to make all the raw materials to completely upgrade a personnel carrier to heavy armour.

But it was enough that they could use what they were getting to fix what they had.

Now, she had a bit of free time until the sun came up when she would prepare the next step of her plans, with the memorial wall and the funeral rites for the fallen.

She wasn’t looking forward to it, but that was hours away. She could sit in her office and watch the heroes do their best to implement whatever plans they had for the first day of the fourth trial.

"Maybe I can use [Terraforming] to make the land around the city better while I wait?" she pondered, while sitting behind her desk, watching the city’s security feeds.

The skill seemed to have some sort of passive effect, as plants were growing in the craters around the city already, when she knew that was not at all how botany worked. But there was an active component, and she could use a portion of her mana to actively change things.

Or not so much.

When Kalli tried to use it to fix some of the trampled grass in the courtyard, which was now basically just packed dirt, she found that the effects were dismal.

It did work, but the active effect that she could manage was less effective than if she had been planting a garden.

Best saved for situations where she needed something specific.

That took a lot of stress off her shoulders. If there was no practical point in actively trying to change the landscape, she could relax and let the residents of Marimgar do it for her, while her skill helped it along in subtle, and not so subtle, ways.

The work that everyone else was doing was actually going quite well, Kalli decided. They were mostly just setting up shops to try to use the skills that they had before the end of the world, but that was the first step on the road to getting Marimgar on track to success.

The Arks were arranging the same thing.

Teachers, clinics, instructors for all sorts of hobbies. Now that Kalli had created so much more housing, and allowed the Ark Commanders to allocate it within their own residential populations, they had a huge amount of space about to become available, and that would allow them to finally stop living life on autopilot.

There weren’t a lot of amenities in the underground buildings. But they had the basics that Kalli had given every other building.

Commercial space, a gym, the occasional pool and recreation centre in the lower levels. The difference was that these were designed as a solid grid of housing, and weren’t open to the sky.

The announcements of the first rounds of housing assignments had just gone out, and the whole underground complex was a huge stampede of bodies, half of them going in the wrong direction, as the housing wrapped all the way around the hangar, and extended hundreds of metres back from the walls.

There were a few units with windows overlooking the hangar itself, but Kalli had earmarked them for maintenance and officers, the people who might actually need to see what was going on with the Arks.

And who would coincidentally get the very best views.

They would all eventually find their new homes, though. The walkways and hab-blocks were clearly labelled, and there were maps every few blocks in the common areas.

It just might be a very long walk.