Chapter 295: Just Pick The Closest Ones

It didn’t take long for everyone to decide where to stay.

Mostly, they just picked a building near where they had arrived, letting the random chance of the System pick their new home, as it had picked their new home city.

Whatever was open was good enough, and they would just take the units mixed in with the people who already lived in Marimgar, so they could learn the ways of this place, and have someone with knowledge around to answer questions.

The general assumption was that the Coordinator was a form of politician, and not really accessible to the people.

At least, for the first ten minutes, until someone came in to get a giant case of instant noodles for a System Point. Then, they realized that she was actually more of a general purpose shopkeeper, who happened to be in charge of everything.

That actually made sense to them, since this shop would have been the primary reason that Marimgar had done so well.

Everyone knew that it had been first on the board after the last trial, and fell to second this time, so the city of Marimgar was incredibly well provisioned. But they hadn’t known how it had happened, and thought that it might have been a lucky draw on geography.

That was not the case at all.

But seeing it now, you would never know how close the city had come to being eliminated entirely after they misunderstood the terms of the first trial. But all was well that ended well, and the new arrivals were very pleased with what they found in the city of Marimgar.

"Hey, what are those things on the roof? Some sort of antenna system?" One of the new faction leaders asked.

"Oh, those are Anti Aircraft batteries. Plasma based cannons that serve the purpose of flak cannons. They’re quite the destructive force against flying monsters.

They cost the city a fortune to install, and you need a whole team to feed them enough energy, but they kept us intact through an Epic Grade trial with monsters stacked to the horizon for days at a time."

The new arrival gave the rooftops across the street a very different look.

Knowing that those were some sort of advanced gun, and not an antenna array, made the whole city seem different. It looked futuristic and comfortable at first glance. But when you looked deeper, it was heavily armed, with high walls and guards stationed evenly around the perimeter even when they weren’t expecting trouble.

That told everyone that Marimgar wasn’t just doing well, they were organized, and they had plans for nearly anything that they might come up against.

Ground forces, air forces, apparently the weather too, because their buildings looked far better than they had any right to after what the continent had just gone through. While they missed their homes, nobody was too upset to have ended up somewhere like Marimgar.

"Did anyone need anything urgent? There is a map here that shows where all the healing pods are, but I think all the groups had healers with them except John.

Either way, go make use of them if you need, there’s no charge, because we can’t afford to be losing people or letting illness fester. There is food basically everywhere. Every building has at least one or two restaurants on the mezzanine levels, and then you can go for groceries if you prefer to cook for yourselves later.

Many of us don’t, we just eat at one of the shops and let the professionals do it in bulk, so there is no food waste. Or, very little.

Any questions?"

The group shook their heads, and began to filter out to inform their members of the situation. The real shock would start in a few minutes, when they saw what Marimgar considered a proper apartment for the Heroes at the end of the world.

They were nicer than what most of the others had come from before everything went wrong.

With the buildings upgraded to what the System called a "Level 1 Society", even the basics were far beyond the living conditions of most nations in this world.

As the new arrivals were finding out.

"Mave, look at this. There’s an ice dispenser in the fridge, an automatic sweeping robot, and look how fancy that electric cooktop is. We should ask someone what hours there is power. We managed to get two hours a day back home, but Marimgar looks like they have power for their defences all the time.

Or maybe it’s all mana?" One of the men asked his wife, who had also awakened, but as a healer.

"I’ll ask the neighbours. Just try not to burn the place down while I’m gone."

She stepped outside, and found that the neighbours were waiting to see her response to the new place.

"What hours is the power on?" She asked eagerly.

"All the time. We won an antimatter power plant in one of the trials, so as long as we don’t go overboard with the power use, we can keep the lights on and cook whenever we want. It’s a pretty sweet setup.

However, your stove also runs on mana.

You can power it yourself, and it works far better than it does off the power grid, which is cutting down on the amount that most people actually use."

The woman looked shocked, then rushed back inside and turned the knob as she pushed a bit of mana at the stove.

It lit right up, and the mana brought the element to instant heat, just as good as a gas stove.

"We should let everyone know about this, It’s amazing. Thank you for the heads up, we’re going to head down to find something to eat."

The neighbour smiled. "Why not come over? I’ve got a pot of tuber soup and a fresh loaf of bread. Not fancy, but I think you’ll like it. I’ve seasoned it with cinnamon and nutmeg."

That sounded strange, but if it was the local specialty, it couldn’t be terrible.