The first thing that Michael noticed was that people have more carts. The second thing that he noticed was killing Ex mobs gave people 10 credits.

This sped up his acquisition timeline.

If nothing else, having humans around to kill monsters and then give him the spoils of that thing meant that he was making money by selling cards and making money through their investments.

"Boss, we've made about 2,000 credits today. That is a record except for the days that we've gotten a haul from the city. And we haven't gotten our precinct seventeen haul." Janet was trying to show him some sort of presentation holograms. "Perhaps it's time to think about how this going to look at the other end."

Bagel's whiskers twitched. "You're assuming a future in which we actually survive past this. Then we have something going on where we have to control all the land mass in the world. You think that the humans are going to be that put together that we can finally do this?"

Gladys stirred from her custom beanbag chair. It was of course, cat shaped. "It'll be easier if we plan for that. And take that into account."

Bagel had needed to stop himself several times from pouncing on the beanbag cat.

It was almost a law of the world that humans would make things in the image of their supreme beings. Bagel appreciated such praise, as indirectly as it came.

"I expect that means you have a plan that you want to present to me then."

Gladys shrugged, an action that made the cats whiskers move. "I have the idea of a plan. I know if we're going to follow through with anything I do. But we got to have places where people can come to fight and gain experience right?"

Bagel purred.

"So all we have to do is set up a way for people to gain experience. So what I'm thinking is the system allows people to duel right? They can get experience from dueling."

Bagel's hackles rose. "Dueling? That sounds so barbaric. What do you mean the system allows that?"

Gladys looked to Janet. "Janet explained it to me. Basically deck bearers can challenge each other under certain circumstances to a match. She thinks that the way that it used to be that the powers that be thought that we would fight each other. To be honest it doesn't sound that far-fetched. We all thought this was going to devolve into Anarchy, but I'm personally surprised with how human everyone's been."

"There's been widespread Anarchy and hundreds of thousands have died. But yes, it could be a lot worse," Janet said. "It sounds like there is a mantle card that allows you to create an arena. If you can think of a day that would actually happen where we would be done with random mob spawns and imagine that? Then people had to get experience some way."

"What better way than to have our own arena right here in Turtle Bay, next to Tudor City."

"This sounds like a sales pitch. Are you trying to sell me a bridge or something? Because I don't buy Bridges. Not after the last one."

Gladys eyes widened. "Which one was it? Brooklyn? Verrazano? George Washington?"

"Funny. But I don't understand this concept. Or rather I understand what you mean. I just don't know how it's going to work in practice. There is a way for people to duel and this is clear? This won't result in them being killed accidentally?"

"Boss, the system lets you have a special shield card you can put on your deck that will when you put inside your deck. It acts as a buffer equivalent to your hit points. They've been spotted in places but they're always done in rewards. Both people have to have them so we would have to swap them into people's decks. It sounds like we could make a item with a forge that would do the same thing or we could have somebody create a field with a different card. Again this is a dungeon reward and..."

Janet chimed once. "There aren't many of these cards."

"So what you're saying was we need to find somebody with the card and offer them a very secure position at a moderately mature organization dedicated to the advancement of humans living past this century. What?"

Bagel narrowed his eyes. "An organization dedicated to the advancement of humans living past this century? That is a very specific mouthful. Are you calling out little business here as such?"

It was Gladys time to blush. She pulled out a pamphlet from her pocket. Slowly and carefully, she unfolded it.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Bagel could barely make out any words before she tossed it unceremoniously. She took the time to crumple it up and it sailed into his garbage. He wasn't familiar with a particular piece of paper, but it looked like it was one of those pamphlets of the churches have been handing out. Or at least the new church.

"Was that from the?"

Gladys brightened. "I keep finding them all over the place. I haven't been able to talk to any of the leadership of the people that go there. I've only had good things to say. These are really strange trying times and far be it for me to tell people that they don't need to listen to an apocalypse standard soothsayer."

"Okay... er... you know how I feel about them."

Gladys nodded. "So boss, I want to put out a call for this arena thing. I think it'll be real popular once we ended up and running. Just got to find somebody with the right card. I'm sure that it's out there. I just don't think that anyone has admitted to getting it."

It was unlikely that nobody got in the right card. Someone had taken the time to input its data into the deck builder website. It was all fleshed out and it was of course something that had not really been seen. But anybody with that specific card probably had no cause to use it. The same thing went for The shield cards. Why would humans fight all the humans when there were so many mobs trying to kill them? It didn't make any sense. And that was the large part of the problem. None of this made any sense intuitively to Bagel. He had to spend a lot of time thinking through his model of the world and how he wanted to change it and comparison with what actually was happening.

---

Fired until her teeth hurt. She shattered. Still shaking as she got up. But she had done enough. For the first time, their volleys of fire had cleared up almost the entirety of the area around the ferry.

They've made the tough decision that they might need to start moving to a more defensible position. They had decided on a small military base to be their acquisition. It was one of those things you didn't notice unless you were local, but it was a tiny Coast guard base on the water. To scare them access and let them establish a foothold. And also had large walls that they could fortify and only a few ways in and out. That made this entire endeavor ideal.

Once they bought enough of that land, they could actually defend if they kept enough ammunition on hand. And despite the fact that it had been fully evacuated, it was very defensible. If they retook it. It. Actually was betting that they would not have a problem with taking it over time as they hollowed out the amount of mobs that were just trying to find humans to kill.

The mobs themselves were relatively mindless but they were drawn to noise and they were also drawn to humans if they were close enough. So part of that was that the Verrazano bridge crew had working hard to regain ground.

The job of the Turtle Bay adventures guild was to get as much on land back as they could so the city could take over. But unfortunately, the city kept pushing back their part of the contribution so Ashley had seen fit to rotate people in to level them. As it turned out if you had unlocked the system, all you had to do was kill a few moths with a machine gun and those counted. That meant that while they were doing as much as they could to get in, they were also farming the heck out of Staten Island.

"Did you get the level 75 yet?" Kate said, pulling her up.

"Finally, yeah."

Actually I put a lot of thought into what she was going to get next. But she still wasn't sure. They already even been YouTube videos about doing this that she'd ignored. She was going to start digging through them but it's just felt like so wrong to have to go research things in the Apocalypse. Did she really have to go and figure out what to do? Or could she come and muddle her way through and be okay enough.

It still was not clear.

It was not clear because there were so many choices and the synergies between some of the choices were utterly opaque. How was she supposed to choose between Cadillac reflexes and birds like reflexes? She didn't have wings or a tail.

She briefly considered what it had been like to be. A dressed up Fox girl katsune but that wasn't going to happen. She was going to have to get her own wings some way. But first she was going to have to farm as much experience out of Staten Island as you could before it went under for the second time. The fact that the ground was so thick with summons. Mere minutes after she finished shooting a machine gun into the center of it gave her pause. Todd had said that his building had been repeatedly swarm with zombies but she never really understood what that meant until now.

It was true that she understood what he meant in the sense that those were all words that she ain't got. But in the real sense, the swarm showed up and it stayed there. Not only that, he clocked at their works and gave them all the target practice that they loved. There wasn't a person in the adventurers girl that had gone on the ferry trip that had been less than level 50 by the end of it. And now on their fourth trip, they were beginning to to see more and more ground as they arrived. The first time? It was Danny remotely. The second time. It was a slightly better but this time? There were enough holes in it that they didn't all look unified.

Ashley started to think of what it would be like if they had all more human-like intellect. She couldn't reason with them. She couldn't even talk to them. They didn't listen. The only thing they expected was being killed and they were so freaking close.

They were so close that they could taste it. They would eat a lot of ammunition and a lot of dedicated people to maintain a presence on the island, but they were so close. She could touch it. If they had enough walls? She might park the ferry there with 10 teams and have them all be well on their way to level 75 if not a hundred.

The only problem she had was that nobody wanted to spend an overnight there yet without enough lights on and that too many people were signing out for this mission and avoiding stuff back home. Just his stuff at home was becoming easier, this mission was going far more complex due to the amount of people that had gotten tracked up in this.

She had plans for the island. Plans beyond just sitting there and getting levels. She want to get her own level 100 but she even hampered by so much bureaucratic red tape within her own organization that these trips had become most mandatory escapes for her.

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