“Why are you giving them our food?” Mark asked, his brows furrowed. “You said you could wipe them out, so do that instead of giving away the biggest source of food for a city that is, by the way, STARVING!”

The mop-headed young man’s voice rose as he continued, glaring at Perry, along with the rest of his captains.

“I hear you,” Perry said, holding up a hand. “But I have a good reason. And that reason is because they are a small army of sixteen foot tall, infinitely regenerating, human-level intelligence shock troops with absolutely no fear of death and the ability to seamlessly incorporate high-tech armaments. They are far more valuable to Chicago alive than dead. With unknown enemies to the west and no wall of our own, we might need an army. Plus Chicago can rent them out to Franklin City during High tide. An army of mid-level Bruisers is nothing to sneeze at, and we’ll be able to pay them in Prawn meat.”

Mark’s expression didn’t soften.

“What. About. Our. Food?” He asked.

“That’s an easy fix,” Perry said. “I’m going to make another four capturing and butchering facilities for the Lake Michigan pike. One of them will be outside of town and troll-sized. I’m not going to let them keep the one in the center of town.”

Hmm. I could build an entire district around the troll-sized butchering plant. How much meat can a troll eat per day?

Perry did some mental math before a thought occurred to him.

Shit.

Do trolls have an off switch? I need to talk to Karth about this. I bet If I give them access to industrially harvested meat, they’ll eat until they’re full and eat some more and they won’t stop until they die or it’s taken away from them.

So…we’ll need some kind of societal limiters on the amount of meat a troll can have in one day.

Like if they had to fight for it, or something.

Well, no, they’re not totally unable to self-regulate. After all, an un-initiated troll adolescent was able to farm those giant snails and the army was planning on taking human prisoners to eat later, so they can eat their fill. So…hmm. Note: talk to Karth about this.

In the meantime, when Mark heard about more fishing facilities, he seemed to relax a bit.

“When?” he asked, the other captains leaning forward on their toes to hear Perry’s response.

Perry scanned the crowd of armored soldiers and cocked a brow.

“Right now.”

Since the immediate threat of getting eaten by trolls had been avoided, Perry no longer had to save Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation for an emergency or trump card, and was able to get back to building out his city, one megastructure at a time.

In this case, more fish meat.

Thankfully, the Lake Michigan pike had both gigantism and efficient digestion mutations, which meant the lake would never be safe for swimming, boating, or fishing ever again.

On the flip side, near-infinite food from the lake.

Of course a diet only in white fish meat has got to be missing some basic vitamins and nutrients. Gotta get these people some fruit and nut trees…Assuming androids can get scurvy.

Musing over the logistics of the situation, Perry and his captains flew north of the other processing plant by about fifteen miles, near the edge of the city and set down another fish processing plant.

Perry didn’t want to cluster them too close to each other. Given the sheer size of the pike, a big one’s territory could be absolutely huge, and he might’ve even underestimated them.

Tiger ranges can be in the dozens of miles, Perry’s random factoid for the day popped up in his head.

Tomorrow I’ll build another pike butchering plant on the south side of the city, then a fourth and final one in what we’re going to call ‘Troll Place’. Uncreative, I know, but it beats Funkytown.

Then we need to start preparing for war.

Someone had gone through a ton of effort to create Karth, and Perry was pretty sure he knew exactly why:

Land clearing.

Karth’s tribes had been steadily heading from the west to the east for the last year, clearing out megafauna, machines, and even the occasional human settlement.

Chicago was another such ‘human settlement’

It was the biggest city between Franklin and the west coast that Perry knew of.

Perry wasn’t going to assign a moral value to trolls being trolls. They ate people. It was what they did. Didn’t mean they were evil, but it did mean you had to treat them with a healthy amount of caution and make sure you had a plan to keep them fed.

I would not be surprised if there are settlements controlled by the one who enslaved Karth and Gna’kis dotting the plains behind the troll tribes, settling the relatively safe areas that are now up for grabs, what with all the occupying colonies of giant ants eaten by trolls.

So, if someone was using the trolls to clear land for eastward expansion, they would eventually come into contact with Perry’s forces.

Perry consulted a map.

They would probably go north through the greener parts of North America during the summer. The rocky mountains would be a bitch, but the southwest is one big desert, and practically a death sentence for settlers.

Well, they did it before…but not while also fighting off megafauna.

…I can’t rule it out.

Tell you what I need: Some surveillance.

Perry couldn’t just ‘go to war’ based on guesswork. He needed to know if he was right, and there were people pushing east from the west, and he needed to know if those people were hostile or not.

Although: Using a troll horde to wipe out populated areas (potential resistance) spoke poorly of their intentions.

So he also needed to know, where they were, what kind of forces they had, whether or not their supply lines could be destroyed, etc, etc.

The usual.

Perry added ‘build a surveilance drone production facility’ to his list, right under ‘consult with Karth about Troll eating habits and potential overpopulation issues.’

Busy busy!

Perry got where he was going, summoning the new fish processing plants, including the upgrades they’d figured out through trial and error.

A slight rearranging of the facilities to be more ergonomic, multiple shrines to various gods, better safety measure to make sure nobody got splashed over the railing again, etc.

In the meantime, he was designing a couple more factories, and prioritizing which construction projects had priority.

I can’t build every little thing. Sure, over the course of a year I can make three hundred and sixty five megastructures, but even that isn’t a whole heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things, and there’s still more to be done.

Tomorrow, I’ll get the drones pumping out and teach some kids how to fly ‘em. Gotta get eyes n the east as soon as possible.

The day after, we’ll make a weapons facility.

Then maybe some defences…

Perry would love it if he could turn the army of giants back on the person who sent them, like the good old ‘reverse’ uno card, but while that was an incredibly slick and appealing idea, it was also an incredibly bad idea.

Whoever had made them had definitely made a countermeasure to trolls in order to wipe them out once they’d served their purpose.

Any leader with two brain cells to rub together or with an advisor with any level of competence would have a leash for the trolls.

‘Return to sender’ would just be a waste of trolls and Perry’s effort bringing them to heel.

Nah, best to apply them against megafauna for now, sparing human lives and tightening security and stability around the city.

With the trolls clearing the outskirts, they could start getting farmers out there.

Thankfully, since everyone in the city was born in the forties through the sixties, plenty of them had experience working on a farm, and Perry was able to convince a few of the ballsier androids to move out into the fields which had been lying fallow for six.

He also made sure to give them altars to Pela along with pamphlets on exactly what kind of sacrifice she wanted and what kind of blessing they could expect in exchange…For the most part.

In the ye olde days, giving deities a sacrifice was something like a lottery ticket, where you give your daily devotion and prayer and small sacrifices day in and day out…

And your neighbor Richard wins the lottery with a magical orchard while your crops die on the vine.

This was because a deity won’t give out more essence than they receive. They need to earn a net positive for themselves to continue existing, so the lottery system works well for that purpose.

Rather than encouraging a few leaves to grow or diminishing pests an imperceptible amount in exchange for a few bean sprouts on an altar, they save up a glut of essence and give it all to one lucky contestant. News of that major miracle spreads far and wide among farmers and enhances belief in the deity, netting them more sacrifices and belief from suckers hoping that next time it will be them.

Subscription-based deity worship simply wasn’t sexy enough.

Not in my city, though, Perry thought.

The altars that he’d made were enhanced with his Spendthrift perk, extracting a little over seventeen times the essence out of any sacrifice dedicated to the god in question.

In exchange, Perry had brokered a deal through Astra and Gintax that the deity’s help had to go to the one who gave up the sacrifice, and that the deity only got to keep a small fraction of the essence dedicated to them.

It was a net positive for everyone, since the amount of divine assistance obtained by the mortal was roughly 15x the value of the sacrifice, and the deity still got to skim 2x off the top to make a tidy profit for themselves.

This would encourage economies of scale, whereby a single farmer could sacrifice the contents of a single field in order to make the other fifteen fields magically enhanced by the deity in question, removing the need for pesticides and careful control over variables for all but a single field.

Of course, Astra’s sister didn’t think like a cold-blooded industrialist, and Perry had to wade through an absolute avalanche of dogmatic versions of ‘I’ve never done it that way before’.

Still, Pela came around when Perry laid out the absolute beast of a profit margin to be had if she did things ‘his way’.

The old way, the deities made roughly five percent of each sacrifice, with the rest of the power going into miracles to prove they existed and gather more sacrifices.

Perry’s way, they got to keep a hair over 200%

Or roughly forty times more than before.

Perry made and distributed altars for every deity in the Manitian Pantheon, and put a sticker on each of them with a ‘Miracle Guaranteed’ logo with a miniature black armored figure giving a thumbs up sign underneath.

There was an absolutely mind-bogglingly extensive amount of rules and arbitration underlying their use to prevent total anarchy and monopolization to the detriment of others, but the cogs of that particular machine were handled by the gods themselves.

For example, if someone gave a sacrifice and wished for the death of their enemies, to control the will of a pretty girl, or the power to rule over the entire city, they usually wound up finding a loose 100$ bill or a pretty rock.

Which Perry found hilarious.

Even with his streamlining of the process, it was still way more complex than the simple transactional nature of a vending machine, and the gods were excellent omnipresent arbitrators.

If you wished for love, the god of love might tweak you or your schedule such that you stumble across a good match. A process you had no control over, which violated no one’s free will nor harmed anyone.

If you wished to have sex with a specific person: $100 bill and a ‘thank you, come again’. The god’s version of the middle finger.

People got wise to it quick enough, and the amount of people making selfish or unreasonable requests dropped drastically a few days after their introduction.

After a week, Perry was surprised to see that Franca, the God Of Travel had become frighteningly popular, even after usage for all the other deity’s altars had diminished to a reasonable amount.

The reason for this was because people could sacrifice a bit of cash to ensure that their trip went in a timely manner, and that the traffic was low.

It was a low-effort sacrifice, but with everyone doing it, the roads of Chicago had magically widened, adding an extradimensional lane without most people noticing it, and sidewalks also widened and began pushing people along at a near-sprint, eliminating the need for cars for many people.

All told, it was a net positive.

Life was beginning to be breathed back into the city of Chicago. People were beginning to go outside without guns strapped to their waists. They held their head up high and focused on their destination rather than glancing around nervously, expecting a mugging.

Sure, the city was beginning to get…a little weird…but Perry wouldn’t have it any other way.