Reincarnated As The Heroes Guide

Not many went to inspect the wall right away.

Now that they knew it existed, most of the heroes simply passed out from exhaustion, and the rooms in the Hall of Heroes were quickly full, with many of the rooms double bunked by heroes who simply didn’t want to walk all the way home.

Marimgar might not be a large city, and the majority of heroes lived in the Academy Dorm buildings, under three minutes walk from the front gates where the Hall of Heroes was placed.

But that was still too far.

They also knew that Kalli would wake everyone up before midnight, even if they forgot to set alarms, which many of them had. Fortunately, their teammates knew where they were, so people weren’t pounding on the door to empty rooms ten minutes to midnight.

Or maybe not.

Kalli still heard plenty of pounding on doors twenty minutes to midnight, but that was because the heroes were exhausted and simply didn’t wake up.

The sound made her chuckle as she looked up the stairs, then sent an extra message to the kitchen, requesting another set of breakfast special trays be sent to the Hall of Heroes. There were already kitchen staff here with a basic buffet set up, both for the heroes who had slept in the hall’s bunk rooms, and the runners who had slept in and didn’t eat before coming for their first assignment.

Right on time, the System Message came through.

{ Welcome back, Heroes.

I totally forgot to come up with something new for you, so we’re going to just do yesterday over.

⸂⸂⸜(രᴗര๑)⸝⸃⸃

Just Kidding! Today’s wave will be a real challenge, since you did so well yesterday.

Good Luck! }

Kalli sighed and turned to check the cameras on the new outer wall to tell them what was coming. The System was never going to give them more than a basic notice that they were under attack, but she would have really preferred that it skipped the personal notes.

The first report came over the radio from the Flight Suit team.

”{ Coordinator, I don’t think that the system was actually joking. It’s insectoids again, but different ones than yesterday. The inner city is clear, according to my scans. However, we’ve got nothing but larger bugs in the distance.

Ten kilometres and closing fast. }”

Then:

”{ Airborne bugs coming fast from the upper atmosphere. Fifteen thousand metres above sea level and dropping fast. }”

The {Air Defence Batteries} spun upward, and the sky over the city lit up with plasma fire, highlighting a black streak of insects diving toward them at hundreds of kilometres an hour. How they got that high was a thought Kalli didn’t want to linger on, as that altitude was normally reserved for airliners and military aircraft.

Humans couldn’t fly that high without supplemental oxygen or pressurized cabins.

Then, the cannons mounted along the wall began to fire, targeting the monsters in the distance. The insect hordes were larger than the average from the day before, but they still wouldn’t have an easy time breaching the new wall.

Most of the warriors were three to five metres tall, with waves of ten metre tall leaders behind them, and a few beetle shaped behemoths in the back.

Those were definitely going to be trouble.

Either they had something in their body, or they had some sort of special attack. Nothing in the insect world would get that large if it didn’t have a purpose.

The Assault Speeders left the city in waves of three, flying above the line of fire from the wall cannons, over a battlefield lit to nearly daylight bright by the sheer amount of air defence fire that Marimgar was putting out.

Rockets targeted the beetles, short bursts testing their defences.

The chitin proved mostly ineffective against the rockets, and a grouping of four was enough to punch through. But then the beetle simply exploded.

Bright blue fire spread over the battlefield near the giant insect, and the speeders retreated to a safe distance.

”{ Kill confirmed. Nature of the creature is undecided, however, it appears to contain a massive amount of flammable liquid. }”

The answer came seconds later, when one of the beetles spouted flames like a three hundred metre flamethrower, aiming at the Flight Suits, which had targeted it with Pulse Cannons.

A targeted shot at the top of its head put an end to the fire, and the beetle collapsed.

That brought a round of cheering from the flight suits. Until they realized that the body was being swarmed by tiny bugs, all seeming to scoop up and ingest some of the flammable liquid from a leaking wound in the body.

”{ ROCKETS! Make sure that the corpses explode. }”

A single rocket was enough to detonate the corpse once it was already torn open by its allies, and the bloom of fire put an end to the harvest.

”{ Marimgar base, be aware that there is a carpet layer of small bugs under the horde. They’re absorbing weaponized ichor from the dead. Expect incoming firebugs with the front wave. }”

The flying units circled as close as they could get to five hundred metres from the enemy, and high enough that they were not at risk of being hit by their own incoming fire.

Any closer and the insects could attack them back.

Overhead, the horde began to spread, avoiding the explosive rounds, and the bloom of plasma fire spread over the sky.

They were not going to be short of light with so much of it over the city today, but the eight cannons on the platforms over the points of the fortress walls were also putting in major work on the horde before it could get in range of small arms fire.

”How are we doing for supplies?” Kalli asked.

”The first five hundred cases of ammunition are on top of the wall already, staged near the cannons, but under the wall’s surface, so they’re not damaged by enemy attacks.

That should last most of the first hour, at the usual usage rates.

We do have requests for more Pulse Cannons. The bugs today are larger, and the teams without mages are all looking to change to a heavy weapon instead.”

Kalli nodded. ”I will send them out with tripods. Stabilized fire will reduce mana usage.”