"So what you telling me is that the situation hasn't taken care of and we don't have to worry about sitting out anymore?"

The tall Brazilian girl with the long curly black hair nodded reverently. "I gave them your idea to float it up to sea and let us never speak of it or see it again, but they decided that it was still worth it to keep it around."

"Curses," Bagel, the awakened bodega cat, said. "And you used the cute face?"

"Unfortunately that didn't work. I don't know that government bureaucrats are susceptible to that kind of influence. As I said, I was willing to try."

Bagel peered over his counter. He was inclined to believe her claims. If only because they'd work together for so long. The two months since the system would come in and upended their lives had felt like an eternity. That bread familiarity and a tiny bit of contempt.

Khaleesi, being the sister of one of the men who worked at his Bodega had come over in the early days post system integration. Her brother had brought their parents who now lived upstairs in one of his apartments. They were his because of a quirk in the system that had given him both sapience and a card that allowed him to run his bodega like he wanted it to run. It. Also let him buy up building this adjacent to the bodega and charge credits for things that people would buy from him.

"And what did adventure skills say about this?"

"Well Ashley's more than pleased. Mostly because Todd is going to have to spend a lot of time there. In fact, he probably won't leave much except to go on a resupply run whenever the ferry goes there. Which it looks like it's going to be running daily back and forth."

The Turtle Bay adventurers guild had commandeered one of the ferries that used to run from Staten Island to the sons of Manhattan. Now it ran attempting to quell the population of mobs wherever it went. Losing Staten Island, the most isolated of the five New York City buroughs has been the largest calamity that had befallen the greater tristate area.

"It sounds like you're going to be volunteering to do some trips on the ferry? Are you going to make your mom sad by heading out that far?"

"I am sixteen years old. Let me do what I'm going to do I need the levels and I also want the experience. So don't make me have an argument with you too."

Bagel was well aware that Paolo, her father, would be attending any trips that she went on. It was one of those things that the adventurous guild just arranged because it had the control over people's schedules or at least the ones that volunteered gave them control. The ferry job was a six to ten hour gig that paid twenty credits, on top of whatever you got for sniping kills from afar.

"I would never argue against the block's handsomest way. I just would let the record to state that I'm doing this with my own free will and I'm not going to let you guys coddle me."

Bagel had no intention to coddle her. But that was not something shared by her family members. More importantly, above the adventurers guild which had popped up next to his Bodega, she ran the drone unit. Or at least you'd spent the time to set it up. There was a line of computer monitors showing various drones that were monitoring key locations in their neighborhood and beyond. It was tied into the NYPD's 17th precinct which had dropped a command unit in in bus lane in front of his Bodega.

A lot had happened in two months.

"All right so let's just say I agree with you but I just need to understand that whatever happens on your little ventures I know part of."

Khaleesi groaned. "Did my mom say she was coming with us? Is that what's going on?"

Bagel rolled his eyes. "I can neither confirm nor deny any of your accusations."

"That's Gladys speak what the heck is going on."

"Do not take Gladys name in vain," Janet said. The sleek silver artificial drone, a part of the Bodega was Bagels constant companion. A quirk of his mantle card enabled Janet to integrate with his shop and attend to his business so he could step away.

"I would never say anything that she might potentially overhear. I have a healthy respect for the woman that arranges Bagel's goons."

Bagel didn't even like the term goon for them. He far preferred the term subcontractor. As these men and women all worked through an intermediary that worked for him. I just had a better ring to it.

That was good enough for him. "It would be better if we called them by their proper titles."

"You know I'm not going to do that. Goons is a much better word. It's got the rhyming thing to it. I can't rhyme anything with subcontractor. And you know that I've tried."

Bagel shrugged. "Have you seen these new electric bird cards? They are selling only hotcakes."

The mobs that had spawned across the river that had given them these flying birds with area of effect damage had come and clutch on their mission in Staten Island. Now virtually every team that the adventures guild sent out had one person with a starter deck based off of those cards.

Stolen novel; please report.

It was just good business to keep selling starter decks to people so that they could come back and pay them off and then try to upgrade their decks with better cards after a good long time. The only thing that he really didn't have is pause and was the the clothing store inside of the adventures guild that was run by Khaleesi's mother. That was all on her. But the building? He owned. The entire block was under his control. They block immediately to the East. Southeast of him were under control. The sections themselves-Tudor City for the southeastern block- represented a lot of credits that had been won. Killing enemies.

Not only did he get money from people who wanted to buy and sell cards from him, he also sold food. He didn't make it cost much because he could refresh the food with a card, but there were not that many places that still had food that would sell to people.

Out on 2nd avenue. Several taxi cabs honked as they passed by. Three lanes had been fully opened up as Bagel had overtime bought up every single Road within three blocks. Any mobs that would have spawn in those roads for now, not spawning. The problem with the system was that it spawned mobs or monsters with regularity every 30 minutes or so during the day and every hour at night.

The places that they spawned were predictable.

So predictable that the adventurous guild had basically drawn chalk outlines for each spawn noting what they were underneath it. The amount of spawns, according to some humans that had crunched the numbers were now related to the amount of humans that were alive in an area. So in essence. Essence. Because there was so many people living in Manhattan, they had started off with four or five mobs on every block.

At the beginning of the system, 1 on 100 New Yorkers got a a special deck bestowed upon them. Pretty quickly, people realize that killing mobs would give them cards and they could become deck bearers after they only got 10 cards. Of various types depending on what they got. Each neighborhood in the city had its own flavor of mob which gave its own related card. And in some small circumstances they would be able to get a item card or a utility card.

This usually happened every ten or twenty kills.

The end result was that the people that started getting more kills would sell him the cars that they got or buy cards from him and then he would sell starter decks. That was the Genesis of the adventurers guild and once he was able to purchase a building next door so that mobs or dungeons wouldn't swim inside of it, it was an easy thing to convince them to come over and sell their excess cards so that he could create starter decks or sell individual cards to other people. Because at the end of the day, the way that he got to buy up more land was through the money that the city gave him as part of the transitional system authority or TSA.

Beg on you to do something important. He had been putting it off for a while. He stared Khaleesi directly in the eyes. "Unfortunately, I think it's time again for us to call a meeting."

"Do you want to do it in the new building?"

"We might as well, right? The third floor is done now?"

"You can even use the stairs now if you want to."

One of his earlier acquisitions, The Chinese food restaurant that was directly behind his Bodega had been a purchase. Behind that moving West and down forty fifth street, there was a single story underground parking garage.

Above them was a brand new building that they had made in the last two months using construction mobs and doing their best to skirt around the building code. The floor directly above where the negative space had been was now the office of their Chief civil engineer, Vince. The floor above that was the meeting room for all of bagel's various factions that he was a part of. It was a multi-purpose room even though it had been outfitted to do many things.

"We can hold it there. Do you think the Copernicus is going to want to have jelly-side layers next meeting there as well?"

Bagel sighed. "They should. They have to make a lot of decisions."

Jelly side layer, the cat only private equity firm that he was a nominal partner in had been under the management of another cat called Copernicus. In the last couple of weeks. Copernicus had left the safety of his initial safe House and the financial district district and moved up to be with Bagel due to the fact that he controlled more of the space.

The cats took money and invested it in in the TSA through bagel as he was able to buy up land and eventually the idea was that he would return the money given to him as a bond based off of the productivity of humans and awakened animals actually living past a year. By all accounts, the system had invaded their lives with the intention of killing them off for someone else's viewing pleasure.

Bagel didn't take too lightly to people trying to kill his customers for profit. He was there to make fun of them, no so that other people would be able to get their very specific needs met.

He was safe. I'm actually having tracked out the rest of the cats in the board of directors by the very fact that they had all decided to use this feature of the artificial intelligence system that used electronic mail. There was even a newsletter that the jelly side layer private equity group sent out every week with their projected yields of how much bonds would give within 3 years. Predicting if someone would survive 3 years through a system. Apocalypse was impossible but if they could just hold on, whoever was left we get all the credits they wanted. Even if that didn't mean that they would have anything else. You could need credits and the system hadn't yet established a way for them to buy food with credits even though it desperately needed to be an option.

But with the new changes where there were ex-level monsters and upgraded monsters from the base, bagel was hoping that they wouldn't see too many more changes as the system settled. It was what he was really hoping for was that he would be able to get time to level up just by taking out random spawns. The rewards were going through a a unfinished dungeon. We're great and after they were done, they closed up shop. But if you couldn't get dungeons then killing random mobs was good. It just was tedious and took a while. In the early days, he had had padded over to the underground garage and just slaughtered whatever was there at night because they kept building up.

Bale didn't like it when enemies tried to super sneaky and not just attack you straightforwardly but those pizza rats, the indigenous mobs of Turtle Bay had appeared so many times that he could fight them in his sleep. It was impossible to summon anything while you were asleep unless it was already out like Janet, the shop assistant, but he was willing to give it a shot.

Now he just needs somebody else to figure out how that he could just make a little arena where enemies would spawn and he thought that he'd found the right person to run that for him. Unfortunately, it wasn't Khaleesi.

But he really wished that it could be.

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