Monroe
Chapter Three Hundred and Thirty-Three. The gathering storm.

"We were starting to get worried about you, yeah?" Jessica said as Bob emerged from the Hidden Dungeon.

"I'm fine," Bob replied, reaching over to rub Monroe's cheek. The super sized floofer was so tall that there wasn't much reaching down involved.

"I knew it would take longer because of the reduced killing speed, but what I didn't anticipate was how much slower I was moving, both because of my attributes, and because I kept having to rest to let my mana regenerate." he explained.

"I'm guessing the reward didn't reset?" Amanda asked.

"I'm afraid not, although six hundred crystals is a pretty solid reward, even though it took twelve hours," Bob said as he guided Monroe over to the table.

Jessica walked over to the entrance to the Hidden Dungeon and tapped it. "Still ninety-nine percent," she reported.

"I don't think we'll have to worry about depleting it too quickly, at least not when we're low level," Amanda mused.

"Everyone else still off visiting?" Bob asked.

They'd decided that while Bob knocked out his first delve, everyone else would take the time to go visit friends and family while they were still high enough level to make getting around easy.

"They're holding a get together at Glacier Valley, but the visit with my parents didn't go as well as I'd hoped, so I begged off," Amanda replied.

"New Ausland is doing great," Jessica reported happily, "there ended up being a touch over a hundred thousand folks who decided to stay over here, mostly to flip off the pillocks back in Canberra." She shook her head. "Bloody wankers made the mistake of announcing their plans to register and restrict powers before going back to Earth."

"I don't think they'll actually be able to do that," Bob replied.

"Apparently they're going to try," Jessica retorted.

"Any word from Earth?" Bob asked.

"No," Amanda shook her head with a sigh. "It takes a tier seven dimensional specialist to punch through from Thayland to Earth, or vice versa, and we suspect that Earth doesn't have any of those quite yet."

"That's good news, I suppose," Bob muttered as he leaned back into his chair. "At least the government agencies don't have an easy pipeline to keep sending people after me."

President Elania Hartford sat in the oval office, reviewing the reports on the Dungeons under the control of the government.

It had come as a bit of surprise to find the White House still standing, but apparently some of the Old Guard had snuck in during the last few hours before the System integration, and had warded the living hell out of it. The Capitol Building, as well as the Tomb, had received the same treatment. With no matrices present for the monsters to chase, most of the damage to the countries buildings and infrastructure had been incidental, however a giant guinea pig/cock roach hybrid topping a hundred feet in length and twenty-five tons tended to level buildings and knock down transmission lines without even noticing.

The larger surprise, beyond her office still standing was that she was still in it. Elania had been certain that she was presiding over the last days of, if not the union, then certainly her presidency. While the opposition party had a lot of nasty things to say about how she'd handled the System integration, some of which were true, the American people had taken a look at the damage, and it seemed the majority agreed that she'd made the decision, despite the difficulties they now faced.

Her public and frequent display of her achievement had no doubt helped.

Savior.

Upon discovering that billions of potentially efficient circulators of energy would be rendered inert, you devoted yourself entirely to leading them to shelter within the System. You were engaged from the beginning, developing an operation to rescue these valuable resources, recruiting other users to aid you. Your efforts have acted as an argument for the expenditure of the System's resources to preserve the lives of sapient beings during the process of integrating their universes under the System. You have indirectly saved the lives of eight billion sapient beings. You have directly saved the lives of over three hundred and fifty million lives, acting as the leader of your nation.

Reward: The many languages spoken by the beings you saved did not deter you. Upon request, the System will translate any spoken language you hear, and translate your words to those you choose to hear you.

Reward: Enduring Skill, Social, Leadership. The System will provide an accurate assessment of what an individual wants or needs, differentiating between the two, during discussions or negotiations.

It was becoming a custom to display the title before meetings. She'd initially done so to highlight her Leadership skill, explaining that it did nothing to influence those around her, instead giving her a better understanding of how they could find common ground.

Humanity was nothing if not adaptable and they'd rapidly become accustomed to taking the System at its word, displaying titles and achievements whenever they felt that it would speed things up. Sᴇaʀᴄh the NʘvᴇlFire.nᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of nøvels early and in the highest quality.

This was not to say that things were all sunshine and roses.

Her plan to bring over the military, then police, then emergency services personnel, ensuring that they would have the levels necessary to keep anyone who decided that the apocalypse was the perfect time to turn to a life of crime, from doing exactly that, had not gone over well with certain segments of the populace. No small part of the dissent was the realization that first clear rewards were quite valuable, and they had all been taken. This had resulted in more than a few amateur Curators building their own Dungeons, and naturalizing them, allowing them to claim the first clear reward. The problem was that the less responsible then moved on to do it again, neglecting the Dungeon, allowing it to overflow.

There had been just over eight hundred Dungeons in the United States when they'd returned. That had been the very first action they'd taken, mapping and ensuring the Dungeons weren't going to overflow. Now, to the best of her knowledge, there were over twelve hundred, most of the new ones pulling mana from an area that already had a Dungeon doing so, which caused trouble with recharge and capacity for both.

She'd spoken with Queen Elizabeth, who'd directed her to the High Priest Huron, and the King of Greenwold, both of whom had confirmed that there were more people on Earth than could sustainably delve the Dungeons.

With mana crystals having become the default currency, the inability to delve for them was a serious problem.

The country was rapidly becoming even more divided, with those willing to risk life and limb fighting monsters looking down on those who weren't. This was compounded by the fact that the lines being drawn rather closely aligned with the former political map.

It turned out that people who had previously held blue-collar jobs were used to getting their hands dirty. A report drafted two weeks earlier had indicated that the dirtier their hands had been, the more readily they adapted, with mechanics, construction workers, and tradesmen transitioning easily, while traditional farmers moved so smoothly into the role of monster hunting that it was easy to believe they'd all snuck over to Thayland for a bit of practice. The report had noted that non-traditional farmers were not making the adjustment as easily. On the other side, lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, brokers, professors, and agents of all flavors were not adjusting well. Doctors were oddly a mixed bag, with some leaning in hard, while others weren't willing or able to overcome their abhorrence of violence.

The real problem was that the vast majority of wealth was, or had been, concentrated in less than a dozen cities, which had given those cities a degree of importance, politically, far beyond what they should have had, proportionally, to the rest of the country. That wealth was now gone, with the dollar no longer holding any value. There had been arguments from a number of lobbyists to keep the currency alive, but she'd listened to the advice of her cabinet and allowed the mighty dollar to rest in peace.

New York City had held a population of eight million people, give or take. When they'd returned from Thayland, they'd found four Dungeons across the five boroughs, which was nowhere near enough for even a tenth that number to delve.

Billings, Montana, boasted only two Dungeons, but with a population of just over a hundred thousand, the residents were delving happily, with few real complaints. Billings came to mind in particular because the city had effectively told the personnel she'd stationed at each Dungeon to fuck off, they'd handle the scheduling themselves, thank you very much. In a rather poignant illustration of local government seeing to local needs, they'd instituted a new schedule with almost no slots after eight pm, and none before five am. They'd invited the soldiers stationed there to feel free to delve during those hours, but the residents had children to attend to and a city to rebuild.

That trend held true from coast to coast, with the 'fly over' states rallying quickly, while the coastal cities suffered from not only too many people for too few Dungeons, but a veritable horde of formerly wealthy and powerful people suddenly faced with a reality where they now held neither. Oddly, the problem wasn't the people who weren't willing to delve, but rather those who were. It turned out that when you looked at the hierarchy of a corporation, once you started hitting the boardroom, the reluctance to kill monsters disappeared, replaced by an eagerness to seize wealth and power under the System, which meant killing monsters. If they'd just been arrogant blowhards, that would have been fine, but they were charismatic, manipulative assholes all riding the line on full-blown sociopathy. They seduced, sweet-talked, and bullied, all according to their target, each one of them jockeying for a slot in the Dungeon, looking for an angle to cut the line. One particular senior VP at Bank of America had managed to arrange for slots in all four Dungeons, delving in rotation.

The working class had not been pleased to discover that particular bit of news, and the senior VP had paid an exorbitant fee to relocate to Vail.

All this was made worse by the simple fact that those massive metropolises had never been self sufficient in any meaningful way. There could, theoretically, be a day when NYC hosted thousands of high level Druids, and was able to supply it's own food, but that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Part of the structure she'd imposed on the Dungeons was prioritizing those who were willing to choose a path that allowed them to grow food, or to harvest the monsters in the Dungeon. But there weren't enough of them. There were quite a few people who took the harvest skill, as it made delving more profitable, and increased their priority in the queue, but even then, there weren't enough.

Elania knew that America wasn't alone, as most of the first world had developed a distant relationship with food. Second and third world countries had adapted much more easily, as they had not developed the infrastructure that allowed the population to concentrate in a single city. The middle east in particular had shifted gears rather quickly, and were, from all reports, performing more in line with the American midwest.

She shook herself out of her thoughts. Governing the country had never been an easy task, but System integration had changed the landscape completely, and she was still struggling to understand how the new pieces fit together. One thing she knew for certain was that the previous and, sadly, current demographics would have to change. People would need to move from the coasts to the center middle of the country, and even then there wouldn't be enough capacity in the Dungeons to allow everyone who wanted to delve to do so.

In other places around the globe, the populations were dispersing naturally, with locales that ordinarily wouldn't boast any population at all experiencing a boom as people flocked to the Dungeons found there. There were half a dozen cities in parts of the Sahara that had previously been considered uninhabitable.

America, and the Earth as a whole, needed more room. There was a working prototype of a colony ship in orbit, undergoing testing for it's planned journey to Mars. Two hundred thousand brave men and women would spend six months in stasis before the ship arrived at the red planet, where they would then build a structure capable of holding an atmosphere on top of a Dungeon, and establish a colony. The ship would then return for another group.

It was a wildly ambitious project, which wouldn't have been possible without the System.

Her country was not the only one planning to expand into the solar system, and Mars was not the only destination. Venus, Ganymede, and Titan were all targets for Earth's burgeoning colony fleet.

Even with mankind spreading out across the solar system, the numbers didn't work.

She could see the future. Delvers would become the societal elite, the ruling class. They would be powerful enough, in a real, palpable way, that they would control access to the Dungeon, which would ensure that only those they approved entered. People would get by, using a single mana crystal to contain their mana, pumping it full, then spending it over and over again to support a ritual to grow food, or to summon materials, but the vast majority of the population would effectively live in poverty.

She was determined to prevent that from happening, but beyond sending a massive colony ship to Alpha Centauri, she didn't have anywhere to send her people.

Yorrick scrolled through the report with a smile.

The reason for his good mood was two-fold. First and foremost, the waves on Earth were much less intense than they were on Thayland, even if they were monthly rather than biannual occurrences. The second reason was that computers made everything so much easier.

The current report also included confirmation that System sanctions could be lifted.

When they'd arrived on Earth, they'd discovered five Dungeons in their new nation. They'd been spaced out awkwardly, in terms of the cities they'd built, so Yorrick had asked Harper Kol'Geith to shoulder the burden of being the first to close a Dungeon, risking the sanctions mentioned in the System update. She'd closed one, then another, at which point the System had sanctioned her, imposing a nine percent penalty to all of her skills. She'd closed another three, and each time the sanction had increased by nine percent. It was only once she'd taken the Dungeon seeds and opened five new natural Dungeons with them that the sanctions had been lifted. In combination with the creation and then naturalization of three more Dungeons, they'd ensured that each city had a Dungeon beneath it, and that the mana pulled into them was balanced, with the seven outer cities pulling in slightly less than what they would have had they been System created, and the capitol pulling slightly more.

The project was an unmitigated success, as far as Yorrick was concerned. His little country was thriving, so much so that the government of Botswana had approached them. In keeping with the Empire's policies, there were no secrets when it came to the actions of the government. The nature of the Dark Pantheon made transparency paramount, so the details regarding the Empire's acquisition of their neighbor had been easy to discover and confirm. Botswana was currently negotiating, but would ultimately accept the same arrangement. They lacked people with high enough levels on the correct paths to construct the infrastructure they needed, and they'd already lost a significant number of their citizens to the waves.

As low level as they were, without a few levels and a path, the level three and four monsters could, and demonstrably would, overwhelm them.

He was also considering Angola. They hadn't approached yet, but the information he'd gathered indicated they were struggling just as badly, if not worse. Coastal cities had been the key to building nations, he'd learned from reading Earth's history. Trade had been conducted across the oceans, which meant that an open port was a mecca for all manner of goods and services, enriching not only those who braved the sea, but those who hosted them. It was a foreign concept that he'd needed time to wrap his mind around, as ocean travel was considered incredibly dangerous on Thayland. Under the System, those important coastal cities meant more Dungeons, which, for a country who hadn't had all the opportunities the major players had, was more hindrance than benefit.

If both those countries agreed, which he expected they would, there would be enough space in the country for not only the citizens of those former nations, but for the rest of the Karcerian Empire as well. More importantly, there would be enough capacity in the Dungeons for their country to function.

One of the reasons he'd chosen Africa was the population density, or lack thereof. He was aware of the difficulties the more populous nations were facing. He had a few ideas that might help them, but there were a few minor issues. The first was that no one had asked him to help, although an ambassador from the United Kingdom was due to arrive soon, as well as one from the United States, and Japan. The second was that Bob had disappeared.

Knowing Bob, he'd show up sooner rather than later, and Yorrick suspected that he might just have the answer to their problem.

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