By nine in the morning, the insects had stopped mindlessly charging at the walls, and were beginning to hold back, grouping up in the fields as if that would provide them some sort of safety.

It did not.

All that it did was make them better targets for the artillery, and relieve the pressure on the walls.

That gave Kalli time to slow down on the deliveries, and to start making plans for a much improved outer wall. They needed something taller, more durable, and designed for enemy repulsion as well as hero stations.

That meant that they would have to give up their sloped wall strategy, where the heroes would be at the top of a ramp, with the outer wall being a cliff.

But if Kalli built a new wall outside that, with a collection of collapsible ramps, enemies that breached the first wall would still have a defensible secondary wall to deal with. Perhaps not perfect, but good enough that she would spend the points to build it.

She could also put heavy weapons on the new wall, though they would have to be the sort of permanent emplacements that the anti-air defences were.

Nothing smaller was designed to use the power grid instead of mana.

Again, she brought up the store, hoping for something that would work on the walls, and not blast a massive crater in the ground. So far, they had done a wonderful job of obliterating the scenery around the city, but that was not their actual goal.

The question was whether she should wait for the wave to be cleared, or start on the upgrades now.

If she started on the upgrades, the insects would definitely charge to attempt to stop them, and the heroes would not know what was happening, or have time to adapt strategies.

But on the other hand, they would also have better defences.

No, it was better to wait for the end of the wave and to upgrade all the outer walls after noon, when there was little to no threat, and they could take the time for the heroes to learn the new setup before midnight.

Most of the fighting was being done by the heavy guns at this point anyhow.

So, Kalli went searching through the store, through the ridiculously overpriced items and the ones with no clear description, hunting for something that she either recognized, or the System identified as what she would need.

What did frontier world bases use on the walls?

They had to have something, and it should be on the same level as the other weapons that they had here. Surely, the System wouldn’t just give them defence against flying targets, and skip over the hard mounted defence against ground targets.

Sure, the point of the trials was to prove that the heroes were heroic, but there had to be limits to just how outlandish the challenges would be before the heroes could never be expected to overcome them.

There was nothing. No weapons designed to be mounted on walls, and manned by regular people to defend a position.

It was like the entire category had been deliberately omitted.

However, what Kalli did find was that there were many weapons that could be mounted to an assault speeder or an armoured personnel carrier. Those would all benefit from being manned by heroes, as well as having the mobility to scout the areas outside the city.

"Fine, if the System doesn’t want to fill the gaps, we will work with what we have.

Power armoured warriors leading groups of mages and riflemen, rogues on fast attack vehicles, using their superhuman agility to target enemies, and one big wall around the whole city to keep everything out while we fight.

If the System wants to play hardball, we can do that."

The runners waiting to pick up supplies smiled to themselves as Kalli ranted behind the desk, her hands gesturing wildly as she failed to find what she was looking for.

If it wasn’t such a serious situation, it would actually be quite comical.

"How are the teams doing? Anyone still fighting behind the wall?" Kalli asked as she realized that she had company.

"No, Coordinator. All heroes have pushed the enemy back off the wall. The fighting is taking place at the wall now."

That was excellent news. The cameras couldn’t see the area clearly, there were too many bodies in the way, both living and dead. But if all the fighting was now against insects who hadn’t breached the wall, the battle was going their way again.

The monsters in the distance had already begun to thin to the point that they were barely a threat, less dense than the magma corrupted monsters that had roamed the area between trials.

Now, they just had to finish them off so that they could start bringing in corpses for processing into materials. Before the wave ended at noon because Kalli strongly suspected that the corpses would vanish.

They had a habit of doing that after the battles had ended during the trials, and that would be a major issue for them today, as that hard chitin was almost certainly going to be an excellent material for shields, weapons and tools.

The flat plates from the larger monsters might even make good tabletops.

Of course, it depended on what they could process the materials into, but Kalli definitely saw potential in the hard plates.

There would also be a lot of other material from them, but she was not sold on insects as a food source. Especially ones that bled green and spit acid. She wasn’t close enough to the walls to know for sure what the majority of them smelled like, but the ones in the inner city did not smell at all appetizing.

"Ask anyone who was on inner-city defence, and isn’t currently fighting, to start grabbing the small bugs and bringing them to process. Get as many of them done as you can before the heroes can clear the lines and start bringing in the big ones," she instructed the next runner through the door.

"Got it. Most of the remaining bugs are out of rifle range anyhow. I will send out word to start the city cleanup, and to sweep the buildings for wounded or surviving attackers."

"In teams." Kalli reminded him.

"Got it, Boss Lady."

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