As soon as the Flatfoot Hunters got to within two hundred metres, the Special Forces team opened fire, splitting apart the fish scaled heads and shark toothed maws of the amphibians.

Up close, they looked a lot like a mutated fish with arms and legs, but very short legs and arms so long they nearly dragged the ground.

Their mouths were the typically large ones of fish or sharks, with their eyes on the side of their head, so they were always looking back and forth to not miss things that were directly in front of them.

Dozens, then hundreds of the creatures died as the mages joined in as the creatures closed, and then they were in range of [Cleave] and the warriors cut down entire waves of them with every attack.

And still, they charged.

Just before they could reach the defensive lines of the heroes, Esmeralda’s undead charged past the special forces team, engaging the Flatfoot Hunters in melee combat. They were significantly more powerful than their opponents, despite being nearly the same size, and the makeshift clubs in their hands were ruthlessly clubbing the creatures into submission.

Then, her handful of Swineherd Demon undead joined them in combat, while the Necromancer herself remained behind the lines with her Crocolisk, just in case something got past the rest.

She was at the limit of what she could control right now, using the three Necromantic spells that she knew. The only options she had were replacement, so if some of her rat demon skeletons were destroyed by the Flatfoot Warriors, she could repair them or raise new ones from the pile of corpses that littered the battlefield.

And there were more than enough of those.

In unison, the warriors released another wave of [Cleave] attacks into the weakened hunters, and an entire wave was cut in half, while the rank behind them was killed.

The skill lost energy as it travelled, and now that the enemies were so close, the kill rate had doubled.

It had reduced the force of hunters to nearly nothing, but for some reason, they showed no sign of retreat or even slowing the charge. Instead, they began to seem more frenzied as they got closer to the beach.

Then, the crabs saw them coming, and began to charge at the back of the student ranks.

Kalli was too far to give proper orders, but she let out a high, sharp whistle that got the Sergeant’s attention, and brought the crabs into his line of sight.

Fortunately, they were on the same page with the best response, and Sanchez began shouting orders for the students to move and let the crabs pass. If the crabs were going to defend their beaches against the Flatfoot Hunters, the Heroes wouldn’t stop them.

The residents of the Academy also weren’t interested in the hatching grounds, as the small crabs would presumably head for the ocean until they were grown.

And the full-sized version was two days worth of meals for the entire Academy.

Gerry wasn’t just feeding them crab, though. They were still using large amounts of the flour that came from nearly every dungeon run, and the orange tubers had become a crowd favourite for more than the soup.

Popular enough that the kitchen had even started baking pies to serve slices with lunch and dinner.

That was the big mage’s greatest concern right now. It looked like the heroes were winning, as the crabs charged right past them to face their ancestral enemy. The lines were withdrawing, as the crabs were winning the fight, and they only had to keep the Flatfoot Warriors away from the hatching grounds on the beach.

The Swineherd Demons had retreated back into the woods with their armoured boars, leaving the tuber fields safe for the time being, and both quests temporarily in no danger of failing.

"Do you think that we should send someone out to see where those Swineherd Demons are retreating to? If there is a whole village of those, we should probably find out before they come at us in a group again, right?" Gerry asked.

"Good point. The quest is to keep the tubers safe, and if there is a whole village of them, that’s not going to help.

They looked like they were nomadic, but the world is still changing, so perhaps their village appeared at the same time that the forests did? I think it has to do with the fact that we didn’t do particularly well on the first trial, so our world was mostly consumed by theirs.

But if we do well on this one, we might get a bit more civilization back.

I’ve got water wells to place, and one more shop, plus a power generator.

If we have someone with the skills, we can route it to bring the apartment’s power back online, so they can use electric stoves. We can’t have them running out of gas to cook on.

Not if we’re going to call this a proper town."

"Right. I think I get what the point of this is. We were supposed to save some semblance of civilization. Not just ourselves. That probably should have been obvious from the Hero titles, but there’s no turning back time."

"I’ve checked from the towers with a scope, there is no sign of humans anywhere in what used to be the city. All that we can do is hope that other areas did better than we did. If the thousand that went with the army have set up a base somewhere, they might have far more people than we did.

That should count for something with the System, even if they don’t have someone like me to complete quests at."

From what she had heard from Sanchez and the Commander, there were over a dozen cities in the nation that had received a large number of heroes, so there might actually be more Coordinators or equivalents out there.

If even one of them had received proper support, they could have kept half a city alive and intact.

Kalli stopped thinking of that. It would only make her bitter to think of all their potential heroes being taken away.