The event market was unofficially divided into 2 different parts. Firstly there were the rewards. Trading whatever you gain in the event for something that can help you become stronger, such as a settlement token, a weapon, or health potions. Each of these would directly increase a person’s/faction’s strength.
The other part was the items that could help you get through the current event. These differed every time. For the zombie event, he had once participated in this group consisted of things such as holy water and medicine that could stop a fever.
When Jay opened the event market he got momentarily overwhelmed. There were a great number of items on sale right now. Most of the items even had 2 separate listings. One cheaply but with limited stock and another one with unlimited stock that was a lot more expensive.
What truly surprised Jay was the insane cost of the goods on sale. Even just an F grade weapon cost 40 life crystals.
The white crystals the betas dropped were counted as a single life crystal while the red crystals from the alphas were worth 10 a piece. Right now Jay only had 30 life crystals in total, since he wasn’t able to extract many of the white ones safely.
When he skimmed through the list once more he confirmed that the list indeed had items to increase overall might as well as items that would help with this specific event.
Right now there were only a few items he could buy. The cheapest one available was an ‘Event Timer’. This was an item that would appear every event, it simply showed how long the event lasted. The problem was that sometimes it would only be able to give a general estimate or it could even come out inconclusive if certain conditions had to be met.
Looking up a bit more he saw something that did seem interesting. For 30 life force crystals, one could buy a package of 10 seeds of tracking.
A seed of tracking was a useful item for hunting. Let's say you were hunting deer in the forest and you had this package of seeds. If you managed to find a single deer and hit it with one of these seeds, the remaining 9 would instantly fly towards other deer.
The condition was that the animal it was initially used on had to be in good vitality. Hence if it was seriously wounded it wouldn’t work. The other downside was that the seeds would only fly for 10 seconds before running out of energy and disintegrating.
Jay was obviously elated when he saw this item. If he managed to find out where the alphas were hiding they could direct attacks on them. And even if they only managed to find 2 of them after that, it should be more than worth it.
After this item was bought, Jay looked through the item list once more. He noticed many of the items had light properties pointing out its weakness. But right now that information wasn’t worth much to him. Right now they were unable to utilize light magic anyway and he wouldn't spend large amounts of life crystals on consumables like that.
When he got back to the walls Jay looked at the situation before him. Betas kept crawling up without rest and kept increasing in numbers. The problem was that even when Jay looked around carefully he couldn't stop any alphas.
Just as he was about to call on Geralt to descend a bit in order to find one, a soldier ran up to him.
The soldier was a rather young girl that wasn’t very experienced yet. She looked at him nervously, bowing, before speaking out.
“My Lord, the army to the north wishes to enter the city. They were warned and we were about to commence hostilities when they revealed their experts. They seem to have 2 Tier 1 experts.”
Jay cursed inwardly. Even though he knew the weak point of these creatures now, it didn’t mean he could easily deal with them. Even if the crack stopped spitting out creatures now they would still have to deal with thousands of alphas hidden within a large pack of durable betas.
This was already close to an impossible feat, yet what he dreaded most happened, an enemy from within.
Earlier when he talked with their leader he already felt something was wrong. After thinking about it he guessed that either the man was insane or he could see the future. The first was a lot more likely as seeing the future wasn’t something people from earth could do just like that.
But now that it looked like there would be a conflict he obviously had to think in the worst-case scenario. He had 2 choices. The first was to let them in. If they did this then their powers would obviously become greater and united it would be easier to take on the enemies.
There were 2 problems with this however. Firstly they would surely want a large share of life force crystals, this alone was already a huge deterrent. Secondly, they would try to minimize their own casualties and make Pangea’s troops do most of the fighting, then there was a possibility that once this was over they would directly attack them.
His second option was to keep them out and attack them if they decided to attempt to force their way in. This negated the problems of the previous option, creating new ones in its stead. Not only would their defense be momentarily weakened, possibly allowing the betas to make their way into the new settlement. But it would take up a great amount of energy from his own experts, wounding them in the progress.
Jay cursed once more. In this situation there really weren’t any good options. After considering everything carefully he threw the bag of seeds over to Geralt. He caught it skillfully with one hand while simultaneously killing a beta. Jay trusted that Geralt was competent enough to take care of the situation for at least a little bit.
Then Jay made his way to the northern wall. He had already decided he would take care of this situation on his own. If any of his core personnel was missing the defense would crumble hence he had to settle this. If it came down to a fight he would have to take them on by himself.
