Extra's Sign In System: The Hero's an Idiot!

Chapter 216: Chapter 216: Groundbreaking (2)

Chapter 216: Groundbreaking (2)

It was the afternoon and it was the time when the first attack bagan.

SKREEE!

Six of the Ash-Crawlers came out of the fog on the eastern side, where ground fell away. They had high waist and six legs.

Due to their wet gray hide, which was the same as everything else out here, it was hard to locate them through the fog as they had become the masters of the hide and seek.

Petta saw them first. She was looking around all day.

She screamed.

The site went to pieces in about two seconds.

Two hundred people, being spent their entire lives behind a wall, now knew how fast a human being can move when their life is on the line.

Natalie shot four of them before anyone else had turned around.

THWIP. THWIP. THWIP. THWIP.

The fifth got eleven meters closer and then a shadow came up out of the ground underneath it and folded it in half.

The sixth made it almost to the scaffold line.

Aegon did not stand up off his crate. He backhanded it with a bucket of rivets and it came apart against the transport wheel.

Silence.

The whole thing had lasted four seconds.

Nyx pulled her hood back down over her eyes and lay back in the shade.

"Didn’t even need to stand up for it," she said.

Nobody on the crew laughed.

Petta was on the ground with her back against a mortar barrel and both hands pressed flat over her mouth.

Odran helped her get up. Sella came over and gave a warm drink to Petta to help her recover.

Four minutes to handle the little bit of chaos and everyone was back to work.

But something had changed, and every foreman on the site felt it.

The pace picked up.

The riggers, the masons, everyone on the site started working faster. A common sense of fear made them work harder.

Odran said it out loud that evening while they were lashing the upper lattice.

"Four seconds," he said.

"That is what it took them. Four seconds and it was over, and I have never been so scared in my life."

He pulled the lashing tight.

"Because they were here. All ten of them, standing right here, and it still got within thirty meters of my apprentice."

He looked out at the fog.

"What happens on the day they are not standing here?"

Nobody answered him.

They just worked faster.

Two more probes came before dark. A pair of Rot-Hounds at sunset, and something with wings that Natalie dropped so far out that most of the crew never saw it at all.

Neither took longer than the first.

At sunset, Draven’s Nexus-Band chimed.

He stood at the edge of the site and looked at it.

It was finally Day three.

The window Isolde Renwick had bought him had just run out.

He turned south and looked at the horizon, searching for something.

There was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

No horns from the wall. No transports on the road.

Just the gray, and the dark coming down over it, and eleven kilometers of empty ground between him and everything he had left to lose.

’That means nothing,’ Draven thought.

’Either she held them, or they left three days ago and they are simply not here yet. She had brought enough time to finish this secret mission.’

"You have been watching that horizon for an hour. Are we expecting someone?"

Estella had come up on his left. She had her staff in bracelet form and her hands in her pockets and she was not looking at the horizon at all.

She was looking at him.

"The window has closed," Draven said.

"I know."

She stood there a moment.

"You keep checking the south," she said, "and you have not once checked the north, where the actual monsters are. Well, humans are much scarier than the monsters. I know that very well."

Then she walked back toward the lamps.

She did not wait for him to answer and she did not look back. There was no need to exchange words as they understood each other.

Draven stayed where he was.

The night was upon them.

Halvers ordered the workers to put on the arc lamps and continued to work through the night. The site transformed into an island of white light in an ocean of black fog.

It felt like a lure for the Monsters in the dark. But that was not enough to stop them from working. each and every one of them kept working. Not because they were going to be rewarded by thousands of credits. But they are playing a great bit in changing the history for Humanity.

A place they can reclaim and claim the freedom they had desired. To remove their shackles, it was an important step. Not just for themselves but for the future generations that are about to inherit their legacy.

A meager legacy, where they reclaimed the land and passed it onto the next generation. This project meant something to each of them, but this collective might has kept the humanity alive!

---

Sella fed two hundred and six people at midnight.

The rigger’s boy had also come along with the convoy. He was nine years old, who had climbed into the back of a supply transport in the city. He was found forty miles too late to send home.

He was also assigned chores. He was carrying water up and down the scaffold lines all night.

At three in the morning, Dorn Halvers walked the frame one last time with a lamp in his hand. Cole was beside him.

They went pylon to pylon. Joint to joint. Halvers checking his instruments, Cole checking with his palm.

At the twelfth anchor Halvers straightened up and stood looking at three thousand tons of Star-Iron lattice standing dead true on a raft of frozen ash in the middle of nowhere.

"That is a frame," he said.

His voice cracked in the middle of it, and he pretended it had not.

"Seat the cradle at first light."

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