The suggestion of luring more mobmu to our neighborhood was divisive, to say the least.

The Points had been incredible, but the fight had left many of our defenders exhausted or injured. The stone wall where we’d fought was literally painted with our blood. Beyond the wall, the corpse of the woman who’d died was stomach-churningly evident now that the monsters had disappeared. The people from Combat Group H were incensed at the suggestion of intentionally repeating the incident, and a few were furious that we’d decided to raise a defense at all.

“These monsters are ignoring buildings. We would have been fine letting them be.”

Colonel Zwerinski shook his head. “If they didn’t move on from our area, we’d have been in bad shape. They were an active threat, both to us and to visitors, and needed to be eliminated quickly. There was no better place to muster a defense. I deeply regret the casualty, but I maintain that waiting to engage would have led to more deaths.”

People didn’t like hearing that, but no one was able to propose a clearly-superior plan. Yeah, people could have ground away at them from a distance, but it would have been hard to take down that many monsters with ranged abilities alone, especially with more mobmu joining the pack as they spawned. We'd have had to keep everyone off the streets until the pack left the area, which would have left us in bad shape when the day's Deadline hit and rams spawned and started smashing into houses.

The idea of luring more mobmu in was tempting. Colonel Zwerinski gave it his enthusiastic blessing. “A group like this is going to be too much for most people, but it’s a valuable resource for us. We just need to finish setting up our defenses first.”

Some people didn't like the decision, but their anger petered out when the colonel calmly invited them to leave the neighborhood if they felt we were running things poorly here. The mobmu pack's arrival was clear evidence that things were going worse elsewhere.

Helen took a few hours to recover; understandable, given that she'd worked all night, then pulled that stunt to make the bars across the gap. After she was on her feet, she cut the stone to build a little gatehouse into the wall. Tori grumblingly reworked a wrought-iron fence into a portcullis. It was tiny, but we turned the area around the Shop into our own little proto-castle.

It took some experimentation to figure out how to lure the packs safely - experimentation which I wasn’t a part of - but we did figure it out without any deaths. I don't know the details, but I know it involved people with speed-focused abilities like Ava (though the preteen herself wasn't involved) as well as our transport specialists. The second pack of mobmu was drawn in just after lunchtime that day, and we took it down with only minor injuries among our defenders. No one exhausted themselves except one panicked healer.

Trucks leading large packs of mobmu toward the budding fort became a frequent sight. We had to pause work anytime the colonel Announced a pack incoming, but the bounty of points kept grumbling to a minimum.

After we’d completed a rough wall around the shop, the next order of business was to make that wall thicker and stronger, with an interior layer shorter than the one on the outside. That inner layer gave our ranged damage-dealers someplace to stand and fire down at monsters besides rooftops.

Even with the work continuing nearly around the clock, the combination of food, shelter, and Points enticed many people to bring sleeping bags down to the rough floor of the quarry. Helen assured us the area wouldn’t flood again at the next rain.

There was a break late in the afternoon to hold a simple burial for those who had died to the Dragon’s attack. After some debate, we’d buried the Dragon’s unwilling soldiers with our own defenders, but inscribed their names in a separate section of the memorial as “victims,” a compromise between grieving relatives of both groups that didn’t leave anyone quite upset enough to lash out about it.

I made sure that there was a line there memorializing the unnamed hero we’d found dead.

As the first wall neared completion, people began asking about expanding the fort, making another wall in a ring outside the first, and trying to claim the land in the area to prevent internal spawns.

In spite of the burials, the problems… I felt safe. Successful.

Points were being dragged to my doorstep. As long as I dropped what I was doing to help take them down several times a day, I had plenty of time to help with the growing fort or administration or just play with my kids. Cassie even got her fourth ability in near complete safety, sitting under an umbrella with a coloring book as her Automated Defensive Assistant circled overhead, taking potshots at the herd of mobmu on the other side of the wall.

Leveling up while coloring unicorns! I couldn’t help but feel smug. This was so much better than brawling with monsters on the streets. With luck, the most dangerous period for my kids might be over.

Pointy had raised the idea of getting Cassie more calculation-focused powers in the future. She’d been persuasive, but neither of us had truly been comfortable with leaving my three-year-old with only the pathetic plinking of her Automated Assistant as her sole source of damage, so we’d put that off until next level, instead choosing for Cassie an ability called “Summon Seeker” that was described as a “fragile summoned attacker that will chase down enemies.” Her automated defender was excellent at helping her tag mobs and earn Points, but as a passive ability it was pathetically weak in actual damage. Since this was active, she should be able to put out some hurt with it if necessary, even if she tired herself out doing it. The “seeking” aspect also made it a good option for a toddler; panic wouldn't cause her accuracy and damage to suffer.

It had surprisingly good synergy with Pointy, likely due to the intelligent “Seeking” component. The little AI got a pleasant boost in processing power and her first synergy bonus, which came in the form of projector/laser pointer functionality. Pointy already had scans of several children’s books, and the projector ability let her put large-scale images of the pages up on the wall as she read them aloud, zooming and panning across the images like the old Reading Rainbow television show used to do.

It immediately drew a huge crowd, even of children nominally “too old” for the works she was reading. Even adults gathered nearby. Maybe such a simple entertainment would have been eyeroll-worthy a few weeks before, but none of us had seen a TV or held a tablet in weeks, and I knew I wasn’t the only one who still absent-mindedly reached for a cell phone from time to time.

Privately, I had a suspicion that Pointy could do much better than the simple presentation she was providing. She could probably re-animate some popular children’s characters fairly accurately. I kept those thoughts to myself. If Cassie actually asked her to do something, Pointy had to use 10% of her power on it… but absent explicit commands, I was more than happy for the turtle to keep all the children occupied with a minimum of resources so she could devote the majority of her attention to more survival-oriented efforts.

Everyone was disappointed when Pointy announced she was done.

"I don't have enough capacity left to complete another story. It will return over time."

She and Cassie joined me in the Shop as I tried to make some purchases.

Our budding government had gathered a fair amount of money. Some of it was nominally mine, gathered from taxes on sales from the Shop, but far from all. Helen had started charging “hotel fees.” Too many people had wanted to come stay in our budding fort, and we’d started charging rent of one Money per night for a sleeping spot. It was something we’d hoped to do anyway, although I’d sort of expected that we’d need rooms and privacy and so forth before people were willing to pay. Nope: an opportunity to be part of any midnight mobmu slaughters was persuasion enough.

I wanted to purchase all the land inside our current walls and within our planned expanded walls. Our defenses would be far more useful if we could turn off monsters inside of them.

I soon got an unpleasant surprise. One hexagon of land was 144 Money. A second, adjacent hexagon was 144 Money, as was a third, but the trend didn’t continue forever. After purchasing three adjacent plots, I was shocked to see my next purchase cost three times as much.

“Can I only purchase a certain number at a cheap cost?”

But no, when I instead looked at the cost for a far-off plot of land, it was still cheap.

Having George attempt to purchase the fourth plot resulted in the same price.

“I know this one cost 144 before…”

Pointy glanced up at the map from Cassie's arms.

“You can disallow monster spawns on land you purchase, yes?”

“Yeah. I haven’t done that yet.”

“But you could. Purchasing that hexagon will make parts of these others you previously purchased safer. They could become farther from the places monsters can appear.”

I frowned, tapping the screen. “This is on the edge. There’s no difference between how this new one touches the others and how the old ones touch each other.”

Pointy gave a dismissive squeak. “Hmf! Allow me to illustrate.”

“Observe the hexagons here. The circles have a radius equal to the diagonal distance between the center and a vertice. They illustrate how when you put two hexagons together, no point in either hexagon is farther than one radius' distance from what I will call the danger zone.”

“The points on the shared edge get farther. They were like... feet from danger. Now they're not.”

"I suspect the initial purchase fee for the area is based on the maximum distance from the danger zone rather than the average, which is identical for one or two hexagons."

The turtle popped up another diagram.

“Even when you purchase a third adjacent hexagon, this remains true. However, when you purchase a fourth adjacent hexagon…”

“You see that two hexagons will gain a small area that is farther from the danger zone. I suspect that this is the factor that amplified the cost.”

I stared at the diagram for a while, trying to envision the circles that would have swept out the dark area, looking for a way to argue with Pointy’s assessment.

I couldn’t.

We played around with the purchasing interface a little more, unwilling to spend money recklessly, but wanting to test Pointy’s theory. While we’d need to make more purchases to say for certain that she was correct, we couldn’t disprove her theory.

“Ugh… This sucks.”

“It’s okay, Meghan!” George said. “If we just purchase alternate rows, we can easily purchase enough land to ‘win’ this stupid game and pay only 144 for each plot! That’ll let us get 50% of the available land at base cost. We only need 30% to win their game.”

“There are more optimal purchasing patterns. If our understanding is sound and we make all purchases in a strategic manner, we can claim three-quarters of the land at the lowest possible cost by alternating purchased spaces in the empty rows,” Pointy corrected.

“Great!” I couldn’t hold back my sarcasm. “We can claim land we need to win the game cheaply, as long as we do it in a way that doesn’t benefit us at all.”

“What do you mean?” George asked.

I waved a hand. “These hexagons are like, what, 50 feet across? A little less? I know we haven’t really taken advantage of being able to turn off monster spawns yet, but if we could have gotten a big area and made it safe… it could have been huge. We could have guarded it from attacks from outside. I’d been really hoping we’d be able to do that inside the larger set of Fort Autumn walls. I’d wanted to try to move the playground.”

George’s face fell. “That would have been great. The kids would love that. Hell, I’d love that. It would be amazing to let them stretch their legs without worrying so much.”

I sighed. “Well, I’ll overpay for this one area anyway. It’ll let me turn off monsters inside the interior wall of the Fort. There won’t really be space for the kids to run around, but it’ll make the people working safer. Leafenrats aren’t too dangerous by themselves, but it’s hard to fight anything off when you’re carrying a 100-pound stone. They’ll still be in danger when they’re carrying stuff to the outer wall, but…”

George put a hand on my shoulder. “We can’t fix everything, Meghan.”

He was, sadly, completely correct.