Grill Smith son of Krewton Crunchmaster descendant and paladin of the warrior God Slag was reading a script from his heads up display. “... and that is why according to article 62 C of the Hives Ownership and Monster Invasion Property Rights Bill, By not defending your Ownership of the Orphanage previously on this 250-meter property Hex when the Zombie Invasion came you ceded the rights to the property to the horde and whoever could destroy the horde or it’s leader. My new boss did both. Plus as the only currently living adult staff member of the Orphanage I have the right to cede control of the orphanage to a capable governing body in an emergency, as my new boss saved the only surviving Orphans, she owns the Orphanage as far as I am concerned. So you have neither the right to be on this land nor the right to be within this building. Leave now or I will have the right to begin treating you as a hostile invader.” Speech over the prompt in his vision now just said -Intimidate-.

Grill Sighed inwardly before spawning as many Butchering tools as he could behind himself and set them on simple swirling paths.

The Complex Legal defence coupled with the swirling maelstrom of Cleavers, Knives, and meat hooks seemed to break the spell of duty and curiosity had kept the men here. They went pale as ghosts, nodded their understanding and each scooped up an arm of their trainee, before dragging his sorry ass out of the ruined building as fast as possible.

Grill started helping move rubble and used his spectral hooks to move bodies or parts of bodies.

A few hours later they had the corpses of 67 children, 5 nuns, the holy mother and 7 other volunteer staff members from the city laid out in front of them. A dense grey cloud of dust deposited some gore in several piles that had supposedly been children at one point. Then the cloud dove back into the rubble, collecting blood and other small bits too small for a person to collect. The collected parts bar above one pile of limbs and gore had just reached 100% so, in theory, they could start reviving the lost children.

Grill watched in awe as Billy and Tiffany started pouring dark energy into the pile. The Mass of flesh, wiggled and warped, sliding back together into a little zombie girl with a glowing orange sac of explosive death. Tiffany used a pulse of energy to take command of the explosive child and made her kneel before her. Then Tiffany made a horrible gagging noise before shining silvery grey goo rained down on the girl’s head, beginning the change to create the second Aetherial child like Billy.

On the next child, they had Billy use his goo to do the change, it worked, and this new Aetherial was loyal to Billy instead of Tiffany, or maybe it would be better to say the boy saw Billy as a noble between himself and the Princess. The new Aetherial children seemed content to let Billy and Tiffany do all the changes, so they took turns until 33 of the children were under Billy and 34 were under Tiffany.

Billy used his zombie finger and some dark energy to revive a nun as a zombie, but nothing happened to her in the change, the goo seemed to empower the undead, and tie it to Billy’s control, but it stayed a mindless minion. The same thing happened when Tiffany tried to revive the Holy mother and several of the other Nuns, In the end, only 2 Nuns came back as Aetherials.

The staff resurrections seemed to go much better, only 2 stayed zombies, the most devout worshipers of the Volunteers. Which ended up being the final clue for Grill, The devout people’s souls went away, Grill knew that the two Aetherial Nuns had fallen in love with each other, and their religion did not approve of lesbians or nuns having sex, so he could understand why they might have been wary of whatever afterlife their church offered.

Grill wondered if missing souls might explain the failure to resurrect all of the Zombies from the horde as well. He sent a report on his theory about souls to Omega Core on the group’s trip back to the dungeon/bunker.

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The Next few weeks started a routine for Omega Core; She would check reports from scouts, researchers and other personnel. Update the system nanites with the new data. Check the feeds coming from her other selves, then make updates. Check the report, update some data. It sounds more boring and repetitive than it really was, as she loved new data, she needed to know as much as possible as fast as possible.

The new Aetherial adults from the orphanage knew much more about the local area and politics then most of the ones from the horde had. She had also hacked many systems of the local bureaucracy to research the rules and find useful loopholes.

At first, she had just wanted to help Grill get rid of the guards without violence, but now that they owned the ruins of the Orphanage, she had decided to build a school. Being outside the wall of the city gave them many freedoms from the cities rules, but still allowed easy access to their markets and peoples.

So they were building a school, not just for the 72 children in her care, but also for the kids of the huge slum district known as the Hive. She both wanted them as a control group to see how much faster or slower the Aetherial children progress compared to normal children when given access to the same learning resources. However, this was also a part of a longer-term plan to give the people of the city more power to choose their destiny. Making sure their children have access to a good education and the means to defend themselves would go a long way towards that goal.

She was also buying up land within the city, wherever she could; Doctor Omega would have a free clinic near the center of the hive slums, Omega scout Bought a potion store for adventurers. Nanites in the potions and medicines would both make them more effective, and allow the Omegas to use these nanite infected people to transmit data on new abilities and places they travelled to.

These places included several low-level Dungeons in the area, monster nests, including a hive of giant mutant naked mole rats that were undermining the control of one of the city’s hexes.

Professor Omega gave the kids a Quest to evacuate people from the affected area, and use their pets to fight off any of the large hairless rats. The ‘battle’ was very low risk, plus the kids were gaining Xp both from the monster fights and from each person evacuated safely. The “old man” Buddy was still following Junior around, seemingly obsessed with her music device, but the rats would not go near him or Mr. Thing, so Junior would have Mr. Thing guard one location while her and Buddy hung out at another location, creating a pair of mobile safe houses that civilians could be taken to. This usually meant that they only had to get people through a few blocks of dangerous territory to one of these places before going back for another group or house, then they could evacuate these large groups under the protection of one horror or the other. Tiffany’s princess charm seemed to work if she thought about the people as being under her care and needing to be persuaded of the dangers.

Under the streets, an exponentially more brutal battle was being waged by Aetherial soldiers in their black power armour and some of their giant ant allies, against hordes of the rats trying to take over the sewers and devour the goblins, gremlins, kobolds and small lizardfolk that occupied them. These people were being evacuated to new tunnels under the School being constructed outside the city that are not part of the school’s sewer system. Teleporter pods deployed by the Aetherials took people to their new homes one at a time while the Soldiers made sure no more than 5% of the rats made it to the surface for the kids to deal with.

Hypothetically: If all the city hexes residents leave, and the city lord does not hire a lot of adventurers to clear the hex within a day, then they could retake the Hex from the rats and have 1 whole Hex of the city under their factions control with the whole of the hive slums between their Hex and the rest of the city. Perfect for creating goodwill with the poor people most likely to eventually want to join their faction, but also creating an underground system for freeing the races enslaved by the city to keep the sewers running.

The rats themselves were fascinating, they were nearly blind and had huge teeth to burrow through rock and soil, and the pre-apocalypse ability of the species to survive in very low oxygen environments was amplified to allow them to breathe several normally toxic gasses. The deeper sections of their nest were toxic to most other creatures. This made clearing them out hard for the city guard or armed forces. But Omega had adapted the ability and added it to some of her ants, as well as creating bio-filters to the power armour of her men to allow them to breathe in the toxic environment as well, so taking down the colony’s queen was already in planning. She just wanted to use the same loophole that gained her the property of her school to gain her the City Hex.

Back at home, they decided to limit the surface footprint of their faction. Only taking the surface Hex above the base, and planning to rebuild a few buildings to create a small outpost. Instead, they had expanded the tunnels of the nest into the 6 underground hexes surrounding their underground base, clearing out tunnels for what would eventually be an underground city that used ants in place of vehicles.

Professor Omega was shopping in the city for supplies they needed to make sure the school had a robust curriculum.

Omega Magic floated around the battle as an invisible cloud, performing minor miracles to try and prevent casualties among both the subterranean people as well as anyone that the kids may not have gotten to yet in the chaotic mess of stacked homes on the surface. A piece of debris falling on a rat here, a teen boy getting a small infusion of Xp to help him finish learning a firebolt spell a few weeks early and save his little sister over there, A flood gate closing and ‘accidentally’ drowning an amphibious assault on an unaware Goblin tribe down below. Nothing big, just little nudges on the world. With Omega Core giving her ideas of where otherwise unpreventable deaths were about to occur, she was able to save a lot of lives as subtly as possible.

Processing the data from everything going on was not enough to slow down Omega Core, but she knew that if their faction kept growing at this pace, then she would reach those limits soon. One conclusion she could draw from the current data trend was that the city was purposefully losing this hex to the rats. Normally the sewer tribes would be able to prevent the incursion from getting this bad, however, rather than help, as usual, the city guard was nowhere in sight. Even worse, a few days earlier the city lords Private Military police forces arrested the 5 closest local clan leaders and killed many of their best warriors and mages in the process of these “arrests”. The charges are mostly bogus, but the arrests were clearly timed to crippled the local subterranean populations and let the rest get slaughtered by the rats. Nor were they going to be subjected to a trial of their peers, so much as a trail by underground arena deathmatch.

Omega Core added a few more stops to Professor Omegas Shopping trip

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Professor Omega was being tailed, by some kind of paladin no less. The tail was a blond blue-eyed beauty in a magnificent set of full plate armour. She was not very subtle, nor did she seem to care that the Professor, clearly, knew she had been stalking her for the last 45 minutes and three magic item stores.

The Professor had however just been informed of the increased urgency of today's task by Omega Core, so she no longer had time to figure out her shadows interest in her.

She stalked up to the woman, Grey lab coat rippling in the wind of the market’s Open street. “Why are you following me, and what do you want?”

It was obvious that the cocky stalker did not expect to be so blatantly called out, as her knowing grin faltered a bit, and a bit of confusion entered her features. “My boss sent me, his last agent has not checked in, so I'm here to figure out what you are like, and what happened to the Old Man.”

“And by Old Man you mean Buddy?”

“Uh, yeah”

“He is in the southernmost Hex of the city discussing music with my daughter, the hex is being taken over by giant rats, so the kids are using Buddy’s fuck off aura to create a mobile safe zone for evacuation, he seems oddly proud of the kids using his oppressive aura to save people.”

“So basically he found something interesting and did not bother going to report on his task...You didn’t even bother to lie a little bit” The Paladin sighed in an exasperated manner. “Well, I guess I have to keep following you around and observing your actions a bit longer, sorry if I don't then our boss is gonna keep sending folks. And no I can’t tell you why, that's up to the boss man, err maybe boss thing?” she sighed again and shrugged as if to say ‘oh well, what can you do?’

Professor Omega seemed surprisingly pleased by the development though “Oh that is great, you’re basically an unbiased 3rd party lie detector, that will save me so much time today.” She took the paladin by the crook of her arm and led her away, come come, we have souls to save, educational tools to acquire and trial by combat to un-rig. It is gonna be a busy day.”