Matthews set the stat-enhancing strap back into the drawer beside the others. "How many of these loadouts are there?"
"Enough to arm five million people, though they'd need to be level 500 or so to bind a whole set."
Matthews paused, his eyes widening a little. "Five million sets of items that cover 500 levels of binding strength? That's an absurd amount of equipnt."
She'd warped him to the bottom of the central stairwell of the equipnt cache in the middle of the Core, then promptly shown him the goods.
"We plundered a few of these for the stat items, but it's mostly intact. It's enough to outfit a standing army comparable to what Hell has defending its most important realms—with the exception of the Circles." She paused, then added, "You will want to find so cobblers, though."
"Cobblers?"
"I'm not joking—you see that rod there? It works better when its enchantnt is transferred to footwear. It's a teleportation item." She shrugged. "Now, actually getting the gear into the hands of your fighter is going to a be a bit of a logistical nightmare, as this place only has one door and we're currently buried under a lake. But I'm sure you'll figure sothing out."
"Apparently we'll have to," Matthews said, his brows furrowed in thought.
"There's also two other big rooms down here," said Ashtoreth, gesturing back to the door. "But the others aren't nearly as interesting as this one. They've just got gold and jewels and stuff in them."
"I see," said Matthews. "Gold and the other noble tals are highly valuable as enchanting supplies, but I don't think we have any idea what we'd do with them, not yet. We're a long ways off from having anything that resembles an economy that functions on the level we'd want it to."
"But you've got the plastic! That's still nice."
"So I'm told," said Matthews. "In any case, we're going to need to explore this new realm. Thoroughly."
"Yeah, I figured. We did a quick look around the planet with ghosts, but didn't find anything else—though there's a lot of ruins under the soil. Probably ancient cities. There's also so bison—I hear you guys almost ran out of those? So that's nice."
Matthews gave her a wry smile. "I imagine that depends on who you ask."
"Anyway, this whole cache pairs pretty nicely with the entire planet of segregated leveling zones linked by teleportation infrastructure."
"Orchard."
Ashtoreth grinned. "Yep! We thought we'd hit the jackpot when Hunter found this place, but it turned out it was only the start of the starter pack."
"All right, since we're on the topic now,the most pertinent question I can ask about Orchard is whether you've got numbers for ," said Matthews. "How many people could we theoretically raise up, and to what levels? In terms of results, are we talking about a level pyramid, or a column?"
"I wish I could tell you!" she said. "The creatures in question tend to be pretty weak, so they're probably low-grade in class and race, which is reflected in how little advancent we get from the cores they grant. But even if we knew exactly what those grades were, we'd still need to know how many of them there were in each segnt—and that's basically impossible. It seems like the Five Realms ought to have a way of accounting for those things, but if they do, they're safety tucked away in Pinnacle."
Matthews listened to this, then nodded. "It would be nice if I could take an estimate back to high command, though."
Ashtoreth gave him an exaggerated shrug. "Sorry," she said. "Estimating how many cores there are overall is pretty much impossible. Though I can say that it's a lot. Like, a lot a lot. We've found forests where every tree is a leveled enemy. Big forests. And while it's really hard to guess at how many trees a given forest has inside it, Earth has trillions of trees. So of the higher level zones have magical infrastructure that dispenses elentals like vending machines, and we don't know how long it will be until they run out."
Matthews nodded again. "That's good news," he said. "Entire forests…"
"Basically, cores don't grow on trees—except if the trees are trying to kill you. Cores grow on those trees."
"And I take it the trees were too low-level to be worth your while?"
"Yeah, actually," she said. "How'd you guess?"
He gave her a curious look. "Trees are made of wood."
"Oh, right. I guess you made a reasonable assumption, there."
"All right," Matthews said. "I doubt that I need to tell you that high command is vehently against your plan to start passing out access to Orchard."
"We figured."
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
"And I take it that you're not interested in following their lead on this one."
"Nope!"
"We figured. All right—at the very least, give us a week ahead of everyone so that we can profile the world and have publicly available assessnts of the creatures that people will be fighting for levels. We could greatly reduce death rates by doing that."
"That sounds perfectly reasonable," said Ashtoreth. "Though the place was clearly designed with safety in mind—the monsters are all pretty simple. Get so healers in there, I'm sure people will be fine."
Matthews let out a humorless laugh. "I can appreciate what you're trying to tell , Ashtoreth. But you might be overestimating people. To put it bluntly, 'you'll get stronger if you fight a lot of deadly monsters' is going to result in a lot of stupid people dying."
"I an, maybe so stupid people," Ashtoreth said. "But like I said, those monsters are pretty weak and dumb. I think ancient humanity selected for monsters that are as unthreatening as possible."
"Hmm," Matthews said. "All right, we may have a real problem here."
Ashtoreth blinked. "And that is…?"
"You're overestimating humanity, Ashtoreth. Look: if the monsters in question were regular trees—just ordinary, immobile oak and maple trees—you'd still have people dying of exposure after getting lost in the woods."
Ashtoreth laughed, but her laughter faded as she saw the seriousness in Matthews's expression. "Sure, maybe a few…"
"We definitely have a problem here," he said. "Ashtoreth, you've got a lifeti of training that a lot of ambitious humans don't have. More to the point, I think you never got to socialize with the incompetent adults of your species back in Hell because none of them actually lived to adulthood."
"Okay, true."
"Humans are capable of extraordinary things," he said. "And that includes extraordinary acts of incompetence. To this day, I am still sotis astounded by the level of uselessness that so people in positions of power and importance can have."
"Well, we sort of have that in Hell," she said. "Maybe it's not as bad…"
"When we're talking about Orchard… things only need to go wrong once to kill soone. And people die… Ashtoreth, people die for the stupidest reasons imaginable. People literally die every day because they ignore glaring safety warnings on deadly industrial equipnt. Why? Because they're in a bit of a hurry."
"Okay..."
"People die because they play in gravel quarries, Ashtoreth. People die to stored grain—often, actually."
"Okay."
"People die because they drove their jeeps into flooded rivers without checking how deep the water was. People die to vending machines."
"Heh," Ashtoreth said, thinking of Hunter.
"The list goes on and on, Ashtoreth. You might think that because guns were literally designed to kill people, none of the deaths they cause were on account of human stupidity—"
"—I don't. I don't think that."
"Good."
"Honestly, even infernals aren't supposed to be dumb about gun safety!" she said, smiling. "My sisters and I were usually all pretty good because our weaponmasters were always watching, but one ti we left Paradise to visit with so demon kids for a contest and—huh…" Her smile faded as she really thought about the rest of the story. "Well, long story short, a kid shot himself and died. Uh… anyway, go on?"
"...Right," said Matthews. "Look, what I'm getting at here is this: I want you to let us establish so set of restrictions—a licensing system, an age or level boundary, I don't know, just sothing—on this Orchard place. If you want so kind of assurance that we're not just going to abuse that power to keep humanity weak so that we can stay in control, fine. We'll work with you. But there's a lot of people who are desperate right now. And there's always been people whose ambition was only outpaced by their stupidity. If we make Orchard public access, let anyone with the rune sequence to warp there, a lot of people are going to die."
Ashtoreth considered all this, frowning as she realized that he was probably right. "Can't you just… I don't know, tell all them to wear helts, seatbelts, and water wings? Figuratively speaking, that is."
"We tell them all the speed limit," he said. "What do you think people do when they get in their cars—large hunks of steel and glass that go dozens of miles an hour—and get on the road?"
She sucked in a breath. "They… drive the speed limit?"
"No, Ashtoreth. No they do not. I could have ntioned idiots and cars earlier… but it's so bad a problem that it would have felt like cheating."
"All right, fine," she said. "I'll run it by the rest of the group and we'll talk about… I don't know, Orchard licensing or sothing like that."
"We'll put together so proposals for what that might look like," said Matthews.
"Okay."
Matthews eyed her quietly for a mont. Then, almost seeming to brace himself, he said, "In the anti… there's Diadem and Pinnacle."
"Yeah, about that…"
"What is it?"
"Well, we cleared the eldritch horror infestation pretty handily."
"I guessed as much from the fact that we're talking about this at all," he said. Fixing her with a significant look, he added, "Just like I guessed you hit a snag. Well?"
"Okay, it's not really a snag," she said. "That's, you know, that's a pretty negative characterization right out the gate."
Matthews just gave her a flat look. "What is it, Ashtoreth?"
"I may—stress on that may—want your help with sothing," she said. "Nothing huge, of course…"
"You're going to have to just spit it out eventually."
"All right, fine." She sighed. "There's this spirit, you see?"
"All right. What about them?"
"Well, you see, she'd sort of like to do a little bit of tourism on Earth…"
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