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

They found the Minister’s location and mentioned their acquaintances with Althea and Garan. Like this, they secured a meeting with the ’big shots’ currently in the territory, and they were escorted straight to the Town meeting room.

And so was the current scene.

Ansel, along with Mathilda and some pertinent deputies and staff, arrived shortly after. Most of the other Ministers were too busy and were not needed there, so they didn’t come. After some basic greetings, Mathilda let the guests speak their purpose.

Erol stood with an uncharacteristic tension, but his occupation allowed him to retain his eloquence.

”My name is Erol from Metteo Town. Lady Althea and Sir Garan have hired us back when they were investigating the place, including the Undead territory.”

”We were the ones who escorted them there and have become friends.”

Maika nodded. ”Our team met them even earlier and has been part of the same escort mission. In that region, my team is very well informed and connected.”

Well, not that many of those connections were useful to their current predicament.

Ansel nodded. Althea did mention them during her storytelling session.

”So what is it that you want from us?”

Obviously, if they just wanted to see Alterra, there was no need to call for a minister.

”Can we meet the Lord?”

”We have no Lord,” Ansel said. This lie had been told thousands of times and it had practically become a fact. ”But us Ministers have certain decision-making capabilities, so please speak your mind.”

”We’d like to request for your assistance—any assistance—in our upcoming battles.”

”A war?”

”An internal one.”

”...”

”Metteo Town has three factions,” Erol explained. ”We have always been at each other’s throats for generations. However, for the sake of peace and the endless amount of dangers outside, no one dared take things so far...until recently.”

They had the perpetual monster mobs and looming wars to worry about, after all. The one time someone allied with an outsider to deal with the enemy factions, the entire territory almost fell.

In the end, every top member of each faction was required to make an oath, one that promised that they would not betray the Town for outsiders.

The Lords wanted to make them all swear oaths of nonbetrayal too but they refused, claiming that they didn’t trust him enough to do so.

After all, if they made an oath, if the Lord decided to thrash them, their moves to defend themselves would be limited. The other two factions were also powerful in their own right, so they couldn’t accept excessively unfair treaties.

In the end, the oath of mutually protecting their home was done under everyone’s witness. Further, anyone who wished to lead their families and clans had to do the same oath under the witness of elders. This was probably three generations ago.

Since then, there was a shallow peace and reluctant cooperation between the factions. It was never completely smooth, but it worked somehow and the town finally made progress. It was during this period that the Town upgraded to Level 2 as well, reinforcing the advantages of peaceful coexistence.

There would always be arguments, some bullying, taking other people’s businesses or, well, other people’s wives, but nothing too intense and certainly nothing that would cause a civil war.

Even if some people wanted to kill each other, they would always be stopped for the ’good of the town’. Anyone who did anything excessively would be universally reprimanded.

It was just that this generation’s Lord and his children were dissatisfied with the status quo. The Lord was very young when the original oaths were made, so the impact on him was far lower than his predecessors.

Men inherently loved to conquer, after all.

If they had the title of the Town Lord, how could they truly be fine with not holding absolute power?

Erol and the others had felt the subtle changes for a while now, and it was one of the reasons why he had been looking for connections, as backup, but their town was so far away from most resource points, so no one cared to ally with them or make proper deals.

They could only quietly earn money, hiding much of it in various hiding places, so they didn’t have to register in their wallets and make their wealth visible to the Lord.

The Lord made a move after their mission with Althea, him taking advantage of their tiredness to deal with them.

When they were heading back to the Town, they were suddenly attacked by a group of people around their level. There were even traitors among them.

Combined with their tiredness from the mission, they lost a handful of people within a few minutes.

The group of them ran fast, but they struggled, but fortunately, they remembered the potion Miss Althea sold them.

She sold them a few beast-repelling stickers as well as a bottle of beast-attracting potions. She said it was an experimental mixture that would spread well in dry atmospheres. She wanted him to try it out since they were heading away from the desert and there was little time to experiment and gather enough data.

They found out that it worked too well.

Using the new beast-attracting potion, hundreds of scorpions and sandworms appeared, catching all of them—especially the enemies—off guard.

They escaped because they knew the terrain well and managed to hide in one of the caves, with their archer taking down whoever managed to escape the sudden mob.

Their archer was Paz, who awakened extreme eyesight. It was actually a destined ability for a gossip like him, allowing him to see more news than others.

They snuck near the walls and checked the status of the place before proceeding to send a few bits of misinformation.

”Using the traitor’s aether letter, we led our attackers to believe that we died one by one while on the run and that he (the spy) would be returning soon, just that they encountered beast mobs, so they might be unable to respond for a while.”

The beast mob caught everyone, including the spies, off guard. One even had his aether letter out, and they just grabbed it from him before pushing him to the mobs.

They made it look like they were dead. For now, it cut off the hunt.