Chapter 340: Born On The Bayou

One week after the council’s first message to the city, a morning message from the scouts drew every ranking hero in the city to their feet.

[ Dungeon located and reclaimed from a hostile Ogre tribe. The Ogres built a shrine around it and were guarding it when we arrived. The monsters attacked on sight, and our scans confirm that they are both carnivorous and cannibalistic.

We have identified what we believe to be the remains of a swineherd demon being roasted as food in their camp.

A second team has gone to attempt to locate the Swineherd village, or any wild Armoured Boars that might have escaped. ]

That was double good news to the people of Marimgar. Not only had a second dungeon been found and secured, but they might have more boars.

The ones that they had were problematic, to say the least, but when they were fed, they became surprisingly docile, and the farmers were learning to deal with their idiosyncrasies.

It helped that they weren’t getting stronger with the world, and were still level three to five awakened beasts.

As durable and aggressive as they were, a monster that size at level ten or fifteen would be completely impossible to raise in or around the city. They had set up pens outside the walls for the piglets, and Kalli was reinforcing them as she built the farm houses, but as the pigs grew, they got meaner.

And territorial.

Once they were settled into pens, they actually became every bit as good as guard dogs. Nothing could come in there except the ones who fed them. It told the farmers all they needed to know about how the Swineherd Demons had domesticated the animals, but it didn’t make things easy on them.

One who fed them every day could approach the pen and check on them.

But anyone else who came near the walls risked being charged unless they came bearing food. There were no other viable ways to calm the animals down.

Fortunately, the pigs were overjoyed to eat table scraps and all sorts of other organic matter that was normally bound for the compost heap. So, not only were they cheap to keep around, they also helped with the waste disposal issues inside the city.

Not everything could be recycled for fertilizer, after all.

While the teams scrambled for the new dungeon, Kalli prepared for what came after.

They would have to rework the schedules again, build another bunk house, possibly rework the Ogre Altar, depending on what it actually looked like, and ensure that the area could be fortified in case another Ogre tribe came looking.

It wouldn’t take too long, but if she didn’t make a plan, there was a chance that she could overlook things, and those sorts of lapses could lead to security risks.

The Ogres hadn’t been found before, but they were within the standard hundred-kilometre range of the scouting patrols. So, that meant they were missing things as large as an Ogre village, or the Ogres had travelled there between scouting patrols.

You couldn’t grid search everything every day, but they did keep a fairly regular patrol of the outer regions, so it shouldn’t have been more than a day or two since the last time that a flight passed by.

She would have to check and see who it was.

Ironically, it was likely to be the same people on that route today, the ones who had found the dungeon. So, that left the question of how long it had been there, when the Ogres had arrived, and why nobody noticed them moving closer to Marimgar.

The flight suit brought her to the scene in less than half an hour, even without pushing herself for high speeds.

As she was thinking about the chances that they were missing things, Kalli was hyper aware of how much land she was passing over, and how much of it simply couldn’t be easily scanned if you were flying closer to maximum speed.

You could see what was under you, but at an angle, the trees would block most of the actual surface in the distance, and the forests were growing in fast.

Especially in this northwestern region, where the ground had become swampy, turning the whole region into a bayou once the trees started to regrow. The water wasn’t stagnant, like a swamp. It was technically part of the river. But slow moving, with trees and heavy plant cover growing in it.

Perhaps that’s why they missed it?

With the shape of the coast, they didn’t cover as much to the north as they did to the south and west, and there was nothing east of them but ocean.

It made the scouting patterns irregular, and Kalli suspected that they were all following the same basic route, instead of staggering their flight paths, which left a gap in the pattern.

Not that you could see much.

She was almost over the location now, and the dense foliage blocked nearly everything from sight. If she didn’t know to look for the others and a dungeon, she might very well have missed them.

Which explained how the Ogres had gone undetected.

If they heard the humans coming and moved under the trees, nobody would ever find them. And that was going to make it incredibly difficult to defend this place.

Plus, the fact that they were in a river, with a muddy silt bottom of unknown depth.

Logic said that it should have a solid volcanic stone bottom not far under the surface, but that was no longer guaranteed. Kalli put it down to the world changing, but a portion of it was actually her fault.

{Terraforming} was a passive skill, and it was naturalizing the world around her for better regrowth. So, even this far from the city, they were still in Marimgar’s influence range, and there was a chance that Kalli’s skill was helping the process along.

"Coordinator, we have the first team inside now. We will know what we’re looking at soon, but the Ogres left us hints. It looks like this place is a snake demon dungeon. The drawings suggest Naga, two armed and snake-headed serpent monsters.

We don’t know the strength, but the Ogres were around level twelve, so it might not be stronger than the Ogre dungeon that we have."

Kalli nodded. "Or, they might have put up a shrine because they couldn’t clear it."