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

A/N: Finally leaving the orc region! lollll. Sorry it wasn’t as creative as I would’ve wanted. I just hope it was still entertaining to read, regardless.

...

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Althea curiously used the improved [Eye] skill to check the other orcs, confirming that she could indeed see people’s stats and skills!

How...interesting.

She always knew that the orcs’ base stats were much higher than those of humans of the same level. However, it was the first time she saw how exactly it differed.

For example, now she knew that an orc’s experience point requirements were twice those of hers back when she was at that level.

The difference in stats varied from orc to orc, but they were definitely far stronger than humans of the same level; some had stats even twice or more. It was a bit new to see it with her own eyes.

She could see Fufi’s, but Fufi was her battle pet and was part of her own force. Seeing others’ stats was a bit subtle.

It inexplicably felt like she was seeing other people half-naked.

Anyway, she didn’t have much use for this now and using it once consumed some mana, so she definitely wasn’t idle enough to check everyone’s stats out of curiosity, especially since she was about to venture to the walls again.

One had to remember there were plenty of strong monsters along that wall. She and her husband, despite their levels spiking over the past month, would still find it troublesome if they got mobbed over there.

But she did decide to do some ’random sampling’ when using the new skill, just because she was curious about the stats of orcs and their averages.

She chose at random and chose different sample types. For example, there were meat lovers and vegetable lovers, there were level 15s and level 25s, and there was also the factor of age.

To summarize, their base physique and agility were truly superior to that of humans. She looked at the animals with similar ’species’ as the half-orcs, like bears, foxes, and birds, and knew that the stats of half-orcs were literally around the median between humans and orcs. This was by prorata approximate since their levels were different.

The innate ability was indeed only one per orc or half-orc, though the orcs also had passive manifestations of their skills. The half-orcs did not have this. Even Maomao, whose ability was her strong penetrative kicks, did not have this set as default, and she had to consume energy to use it. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

In contrast, orcs had active and passive manifestations of their abilities. For example, Ohara’s passive was plant-sensitive by default, but it was more like instinct and an alert. It was her active skill that allowed her to focus on a plant and know more details about it.

Another interesting contrast was a comparison between two bunnies. The Half-orc Maomao’s ability was [Penetrative Kick], and the orc bunny from Feyun Tribe also had a skill that roughly translated to [Penetrative Kick] as well, except the characters used were different.

The full-blooded orc bunny’s skill worked best for digging soil and rocks rather than flesh. Of course, it could also cause a lot of damage to monsters, and this one was far stronger than Maomao’s despite having the same level.

The other fox had a different skill tree from Gochi, though. This one actually had something like a charm skill, which would confuse whatever he faced as long as its level wasn’t too high.

She had witnessed this before, during the tunnel defense when the camp was mobbed, though she didn’t know it was a skill. At the time, she just thought the monster tripped and bumped its head on the wall, but now she realized it had been ’charmed’.

Then she caught sight of an interesting ability: Honing. There were no descriptions in the stats, but the universal language of this world was quite rich, so Althea could actually infer the description of the skill because of the word itself.

The language was so rich, likely because the elves consolidated most spoken languages that were still being used in the world back when they were alive.

Further, it seemed to update itself too, absorbing the new words and idioms used by the people, and perhaps even creating its own based on the established etymology rules.

Perhaps the system also had a little AI feel, which could be shown with the various judgements like in oaths, so it wouldn’t be too out of the world for it to create its own terminologies.

The honing skill implied a sort of ability to attach to a target of choice, and the ability to track them to the ends of the land. As for how it could compare to the special abilities gained by humans, for example, Wolfe’s (Terran Survivor #48) ability [Colorful Traces], they had no idea yet.

This honing skill would be quite useful in Alterra. Here, they don’t really go out of their way to hunt specific creatures or orcs. Even if they did, it was very rare, and many other orcs had skills like scent detectors to do the same functions.

In Alterra, however, it could be a counter against those superspeed bastards. They might even encounter those with invisibility skills and so on.

She also found an orc with camouflage skills (a lizard-like orc, with an appearance similar to a bipedal chameleon). She asked him to hide for fifteen minutes without getting detected and he would receive a whole tomato plant, complete with pottery.

They then got the orc with the honing skill, Buggy the Dog, to look for him, receiving the same reward if he found the chameleon within a quarter of an hour.

Althea also tested her own [Woodland Camouflage] skill, and while it took a while, the dog lingered in the area almost immediately. She reckoned that had they played this hide-and-seek game before she entered the thorn forest, he’d have found her easily.

Seeing all these skills that could be useful in Alterra, she weighed her concerns about the orcs so far and ultimately decided on some sort of middle ground.

She looked at Buggy, as well as a few other orcs. ”Would you like to come with us as a pioneer for your tribe?”

...

Althea did not want to recruit too many orcs too quickly, but there could at least be a few pioneers to see how the situation could be. The best case would be if the results were positive on both sides.

However, if it was one-sided, then she’d have to reconsider. At the very least, they would have to fix the problem before continuing the integration between races.

Althea asked a couple of questions to the orcs and zeroed in on a few options as pioneers. One was, of course, Buggy the dog.

She found out that Buggy was an orphan who had lost his mother during a monster mob a few years back. He had no attachments other than his friends, but he was one of the very curious youths about what was on the other side of the wall.

She also chose those who would be fine even if they would not be able to get back at all, or at least would take several years or decades before they could.

She didn’t want to take too many orcs on the first try because she feared a lot of violence, maybe even small-scale wars, could happen.

The local humans were just that violent, and many were not willing to talk it out; this would be exacerbated by the horrid bias that spread out in the human territories.

While this wasn’t entirely false—for example, hadn’t Tambay and Tanod been assigned to a territory that fell because of orcs? However, those were isolated cases.

The intelligence team searched and did their best and saw that the case of that territory was an isolated case because the resources in that area had been consumed. It was actually part of the rain shadow created by the tall wall of a mountain, blocking the rain, creating dry lands beneath it. Combined with recent extreme weather at the time, the orcs weren’t crazy for food.

For the most part, orcs on this side were like those in Quo Town—no more harmful to humans than actual fellow humans.

Regardless, the bad reputation had spread out so far and wide, even all the way to the west and north where there wouldn’t be orcs unless someone traded them.

Orcs weren’t even common in those areas, and maybe they had never even appeared. How could their reputation be so spread out? They did not have the internet in this place, but the news reached that side as they had. It really felt intentional in Althea’s opinion.

Someone was definitely out there—at least some time during the previous generation—that wanted humans to hate orcs.

She didn’t want to blindly try to integrate the two places without figuring out more.

...

In the end, other than Buggy, Bable also came along. He was really attached not just to Althea, but also Sol. He seemed to have a masochistic streak since no matter how much Sol slapped him away, he’d run over with a smile on his face.

Althea wondered if his head was shaken so much that his brain turned to mush.

Their group left, and after a bit of fighting mobs, they soon arrived in the vicinity of the mountainous wall. Althea used a high-end beast repelling potion this time because there were a lot of monsters there and it was practical to use.

Just as they were about to climb up, however—

BOOM!!