Chapter 534: Day 4,935 (3) – Talking With Michelle

Chapter 534: Day 4,935 (3) – Talking With Michelle

A chair had been brought up to the second deck. I had a plate with three mystery burgers on it. One thing that I loved about fighting crazy monsters, was that it kept me in shape. As long as I kept up the grind, I wouldn’t get fat. I had a rule, that while I was grinding or fighting, I could eat whatever I wanted. While back in the city I would watch out for how much I ate.

The long break from all the curse damage had been annoying but necessary. In truth I didn’t need to eat that much anymore. But it gave me joy, when so few things actually did. “Mind if I join you?” Michelle asked me and I nodded at her.

The Infinite Block formed a chair for her to sit and made a table between us. Using a level 5 monster for furniture, it made me smile since it was so stupid. This was a monster that would make people scream and run away, and here we were using it to eat. I let my plate down on the make shift table, with only two burgers left on it.

The ketchup still wasn’t right and getting pickles made was a massive headache. But things were getting there. Food research was one of the biggest avenues of research out there. Everyone and their pet monster were working on food developments. One you had a process down, you could make money exporting out said food.

I picked up a fry and munched it while I watched the explosions of the moltenlands in the distance. The food holding up was always the biggest surprise. There had been attempts to enchant food, but that didn’t work. One could not eat energy like that unless they had a meta-point.

“A point for your thoughts?” I asked Michelle.

“Just wanted to sit up here with you. We haven’t spoken in a while, and it appears we will be changing things up?” Michelle asked me. It was a good question since she was in charge of tactics while I was in charge of providing direction.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

“Just a lot of grinding? No trouble?” I asked her and she shook her head.

“No trouble grinding. Its just boring,” she replied.

“We put it off for a long time, since the passive income was enough, but it just isn’t anymore. The goal now is to massively increase our stats and stockpile up resources,” I told her.

“War. Several of the soldiers mentioned it,” she said and I nodded at that. My team was different from the Imperial Government, but there was overlap with several of the members in various aspects of the government except for Michelle.

“The population crisis, which is really a job crisis, but it is the same thing. Even with Doctor Katz’s development into food production using energy to stimulate growth, it won’t offset the issue enough,” I said and picked up another fry, popping it in my mouth. The crunch just wasn’t there, and they had a bit too much salt.

“Will we be fighting?” Michelle asked.

“I might be fighting. Do you want to fight?” I asked her.

Except the goal wasn’t to colonize or get resources, but to force people out. The constant chaos would weaken whatever other nations were out there, and they would struggle to fight back. The hordes of grinders, we would unleash would create a blood bath wherever they were directed. If they killed the hordes, then that was fine. If the other nations tried to talk things out, we would delay and nor promise anything. If the other nations attacked us back, I would kill the strong people and let chaos settle in.

The goal was chaos, so if any one person appeared, then I would have to cut them down, if my elite soldiers couldn’t handle it. This was a war whose purpose was to kill people. I don’t think there had ever been a war fought for that purpose. Normally people were a resource and one side would give up when they ran out of people.

Here in the Systemic Lands, that thinking had been reversed. We had too many people and needed a way to remove them that wouldn’t incite a rebellion. While I knew the Divine Empress didn’t turn people into furniture for this reason and had an Evil Empire. I couldn’t help but feel that she was visionary in some ways.

Her mass executions were what kept her Empire stable, as surprising as it was. At the same time it had limited her force projection. She hadn’t sent in constant invasions into the old UCS territories, which I was grateful for. If she was better organized, then there would have been wave after human wave.

If her administration wasn’t filled by people more concerned with screaming, suffering, and all around misery, she could have used human wave tactics to put a lot of pressure on other cities and the Astrologer’s Homunculus that had been running around.

Her sheer incompetency was what saved me. It felt weird knowing I would have died if she had been with it just a bit more and not completely insane. But her insanity was where she got her combat ability from, so it was hard to say how much of tradeoff things were.

“Will summons be used?” Michelle asked.

“Summoners will be sent. But reverse engineering everything would take too long. Like the summoning sphere, for a level 7. That took years of development and isn’t simple to make. Even if the minor stuff is figured out, it isn’t a huge deal,” I replied. Even if consumption was discovered, it still wouldn’t matter.

We had a large head start and trying to figure out everything we had already figured out would take way too long. You can’t do research when you are being overrun. And even if things were discovered, then it had to be implemented on a large scale as well.

It was impossible. Clarissa was god tier or organization management. They would have to have someone with a meta-point asking for managerial powers to be as good as her in my opinion. And then you needed whatever idiot who was in charge, the Michael, to allow them to have control over the entire operation.

That level of trust wouldn’t happen easily. That was why I treasured Clarissa. We had an understanding of each other and our bottom lines. I wasn’t to meddle too much in the day to day stuff, and had to pay attention when she complained. In turn, she rarely complained or brought me into discussions unless they directly involved me, like planning for this war.

I had no doubt that her massive number of stats came from a lot of shady things happening. But it was fine. Since I got enough passive income to offset her and this grinding would put me further ahead. She might get two or three people at a combat level below me, but it wouldn’t be enough with my combat skill.

Even if I was all attack, I had come to realize offense was the best defense. If I wanted defense, I would have Michelle use a monster, or dodge. Once I got a higher Spirit stat and checked out my new skill, then I might consider dropping my two other beam skills. Maybe. A big issue was what skill I would get level 7 skill points for. There were only so many level 6 zones, which was another problem. There weren’t 60 level 6 zones out there, at least in the part of the Systemic Lands I controlled.

That was another issue I had to consider. Optimizing my skills for the next level and being able to kill the level 7 boss monsters if I was down a skill. For that to happen, I needed a lot more stats.