After Surviving the Apocalypse, I Built a City in Another World

Alterra.

Two weeks had passed since the Flaret-Voumi war, and there were quite a lot of things that had happened since then. As usual, much of their news came in the form of reports from the intelligence team, and some of what they brought was a little disconcerting.

”Would this be alright?” Ansel couldn’t help but ask the rest of them as they hung around the villa. He was holding a baby milk bottle for his son, and the others were also eating a meal or whatever.

According to their intelligence network, people had slowly realized that Alterra was the one behind the scenes of the Voumi and Flaret war, where ultimately both Lords were taken down, one dead, and both tokens were taken and given to others.

Once this connection was established, it didn’t take long for people with a bit of brains to study the events before the war. After about a week of that, people started seeing the oddities and the patterns leading up to these events.

They naturally couldn’t determine exactly what happened, nor could they tell exactly what or who was involved, but anomalies were noticed, and Alterra was equated with them, too, just because they had the most to gain.

Besides, since the Lord Token had changed hands, ending up with individuals who were NOT in the site of war when it happened, curious forces just had to investigate for a few days to see where the tokens came from.

After all, Flaret Town was not close to Twinwave Town at all. What happened there?

To be fair, although not all anomalies were their fault, a fair bit certainly were.

And now..., they were starting to get visitors from far away, many of whom were asking about the war.

They asked a lot from people, some subtle and some were not, but how much could normal citizens know about their operations?

Still, it happened often enough that the guard team received a lot of reports of people asking suspicious questions. Some had taken the honesty oath that served as a visa of sorts, while others did not.

There were a lot of them, too, and eventually, their resources and the number of guards under the Security team might not be enough to monitor all of the suspicious individuals.

It was natural that Ansel, along with many others, would get worried. The rest of them just shrugged, however, deciding to go with the flow.

”It’s inevitable,” Mathilda said, sipping her tea. She was a frequent visitor as a neighbor, and she’d usually bring her baby grandchild to bond with the twins and the other kids.

”And I don’t think we have to worry too much,” she said, proceeding to explain.

”Rather, while some greedy people would be enticed, like they always did, with our current reputation, they would definitely think twice—no, ten times—before even considering getting on our bad side.”

Indeed. Even if their name had become known and exposed, it would also become a deterrent because of what was associated with it.

Now, people knew that Alterra could not only defend itself against enemies and fight directly, but they could also attack indirectly, and in ways some of them wouldn’t imagine could be done at all.

As such, even slightly more powerful territories at different ranks would have to act carefully. If they fell for schemes and actually lost due to carelessness, who would hear their cries?!

Even if these territories didn’t believe they’d lose, they definitely wouldn’t want to get damaged from the inside.

The disadvantage of this was that it might be more difficult to figure spies out. The potential enemies would know better how to hide and know to invest more in investigations rather than looking down on them. Rather, they might even overinvest, just to be careful.

At the same time, it would also be more difficult for Alterra to plant spies from here on out, at least when it came to sharper territories that’d tighten their security and become more doubtful about unfamiliar faces.

They would have to invest more in the spies too, and start planting identity tags early on—or have full backgrounds built up—so that even if the territories investigated them, they wouldn’t find them suspicious, at least not suspicious enough to warrant arrests.

Fortunately, Lords didn’t have a ’history’ function wherein they could see where the citizens had been or where they lived before, so they wouldn’t be able to see whether the spy was an Alterran.

The intelligence team would still have to adjust its methodologies, though. If they get stronger and more intimidating, some territories might be especially wary of anyone with Terran appearances (which weren’t too different from aborigines) and elementalists in general, which would have a lot of unintended consequences even for the innocents who just happened to share their features.

They might also ask them to make Honesty Oaths to tell whether they had anything to do with Alterra specifically. It’d cost those territories a lot of money to do this, since there’d be a lot of people suspected before they could zone in on the actual spy, but Alterra wouldn’t put it beyond them.

An entirely new and long meeting would have to be held for this, but that would be something for later.

That said, during the past week, it seemed that Alterra’s name had really spread far and wide, even to those far from their areas of influence.

According to Jonathan, the missions in their Mercenary Hall were all taken as well, even the useless missions. The Ferrol Mercenary Hall was, after all, the closest Mercenary Hall to Alterra.

Sometimes the takers were from places more than ten thousand kilometers away, coming from high-level mercenary teams!

Regardless of where they were from, the purpose was obvious!

To go to Alterra!

As such, there was an influx of new people when the new population from the region was still coming in.

As for whether this was more of a good thing than a bad thing, however, only time would tell.