Chapter 72 - Hunting People Operation
“Time to move them,” when I conquered my tenth castle, I didn’t hurry to leave as usual. Right now I was inside the Harlem neighbourhood, already having total control over Manhattan.
[How are things at your part?] I sent it to Angelica while thinking about my next move. This was the location where my jumper should be, but he went already east and crossed the east river to the other side of the city.
[We already took control of two castles here] Angelica sent back, [Do you want us to move now?]
[How many people do you have in total?] I didn’t hurry to give her my orders. After all, it was nice to take control over new emblems. But if we didn’t secure what we got, our enemies wouldn’t show us any mercy.
[Around five hundred] she sent, [all are eager to fight]
Five hundred seemed a good number to cover all the castles in Manhattan, but it wasn’t enough for the entire New York city. Taking over Manhattan took almost three hours total, and I was rushing over from one place to another.
[You’ll move like this…]
After thinking about it for a few minutes, I started to send my orders back to her. I ordered her to leave around twenty people at each castle, with one leading them belonging to our elite forces.
The number of elites I had for now was limited, not even reaching twenty. That meant I could only control twenty castles, which wasn’t logical at all.
[I need your elite forces to be ready to move] as I finished telling her what to do and where to go, I sent a message to my spearhead before summoning my other three dragons as well.
The sight of dragons made Alex speechless and a little scared. It seemed to miscalculate my strength before.
But girl, this was the total power I currently had. “Go towards the central park in that direction,” I pointed out towards the central park, “and help people there move from one castle to another. Also bring back all the warriors stationed in each castle. We are going to meet at this place where a big bridge is made out of red metal and looks like a big toy.”
I was trying to describe the Ed Koch Queensboro bridge to them. I selected that after speaking a little with Alex about New York city’s general layout as it linked Manhattan with Queens districts.
Queens was considered the central place of New York city. From there I could span my forces and reach everywhere inside the city.
“We’ll do it, my lord,” the three dragons bowed in respect before flying high in the sky. I left my grand dragon behind, the strongest of them all, for my personal protection.
“Will you move to Queens now?” Alex noticed what I did and couldn’t help but ask.
“Do you want to tag along?” I evilly smirked, knowing that she wouldn’t dare to.
“Of course not!” as expected, “I’ll just remain here.”
[I have around twenty elites with full armour and good fighting skills] As I laughed at her appearance, the spearhead sent me his response.
[Send them all to Harlem] I said before giving him the instructions.
[The road is long and risky]
[I’ll send a dragon to help clear the path for them]
I had no other choice but to do so. The dragon was peerless in the sky at this stage. Not a single monster would endanger him, and he would be a god of death to any kind of monster on the ground.
As I sent my last dragon over to bring the twenty guys along, I started to consider something else.
Near this place, I knew of a location that held many people inside. I didn’t forget the people staying under the spearhead control, but they were far from enough.
To control such a large city like New York, having a couple of thousand people wasn’t enough at all. Not to mention the number of elites required. Not to mention I also had another city to conquer in the next hours.
At such a point, I saw the greatest weakness that I didn’t consider before. I needed to start taking care of this point; recruiting people and gathering humans around.
But I couldn’t move at the moment. All I could do was to send a message to notify the jumper to also look for places with human survivors. If he met a small group, he should recruit them directly. If he found a large group, then he shouldn’t touch them and only share their location with me.
Considering everything, this was the only way I could handle things for now. In all my few numbered forces, the jumper and that spearhead might be the only two able to handle any group of survivors and force them to join my side.
I was always looking for elites and good people to recruit. But at this point I realised the importance of having normal people as cannon fodders.
Any army wouldn’t become one without a large number of weak soldiers. Even stating that the most majority of any army were weak and normal soldiers without outstanding talents or abilities might not be an exaggeration.
So I leisurely waited for an hour. During which I did nothing but to first eat some cooked meat, drank water, closed my eyes and got a bit of deserved rest.
I decided that after finishing all this today, I needed to sleep for a long time. The upcoming quest wasn’t going to work anyway, and so I didn’t need to worry about anything else.
“Wake up,” I felt like I closed my eyes for one second before I felt the strong shaking and the clear voice of Alex. I opened my eyes, jumped to my feet, grabbed my swords, and took the stance of a tiger waiting for a fight.
“Wow! You are really on the edge,” but I saw nothing but familiar faces coming from far. The street was still filled with monsters but with the help of my dragons and warriors, not a single one managed to stop the few people coming my way.
“They are already here?” I felt it was weird, “how long did I sleep?”
“For one hour, lazy big boy,” Alex seemed to return to her usual self and even winked at me. “They are the first group to arrive. Didn’t you say there are two groups coming here?” ρꪖꪕᦔꪖꪕꪫꪣꫀꪶ
“They must be the ones from the spearhead location,” I yawned and stretched my arms in laziness, “Damn! I would pay anything just to have more hours of such nice sleep.”
“You can rest here, y’know that,” Alex hinted again at my mission, but I only rolled up my eyes and said nothing.
The group that came were from the hospital as I expected. But they also had a group of people from the central park as well. It seemed both groups met halfway and came together.
“Finally managed to see you,” the one leading them was the four eyed Isabella. She adjusted her glasses, gave Alex next to me a side glance before adding, “I brought the rest of the people who had no castle to defend.”
She led five elites and almost three hundred people. As for the group from the hospital, spearhead sent his twenty elites leading a group of five hundred people as well.
In just this place, a group of eight hundred people led by twenty-seven elites were gathered. My warriors were partially gathered here as well.
“Go back and call everyone here,” I said to the strongest dragon I had, “make sure they waste no more time in coming here.”
“Right away, my liege,” the dragon said in usual respect before soaring fast in the air and vanishing in a few breaths.
“Are you not going to Queens side now?” Alex, who was aware of my plans, seemed a bit puzzled.
“There is something I needed to do first here,” I said and Isabella seemed to cheer up when she heard about that.
“I was dead bored in that rotten park until I got out,” she stretched her arms and added, “it’s time to have more fun. Where is the target? Are we going to kill traitors or monsters?”
“Neither,” I smiled in return for her unexpected enthusiasm, “we’ll go to hunt people down.”
“Hunt?” she wasn’t the only one surprised by the word I chose to describe my next move.
“There will be many chances to kill monsters and traitors as well,” I gave her what she wanted to hear, “so if you want, you can come with me.”
“Can we also come?” another elite called Markos from the spearhead group said.
“What about us?” a few of the normal people here also asked.
“Whoever wants to come is welcomed,” I didn’t find any wrong in bringing them along. After all they weren’t that weak after surviving the first quest already.
Also I needed to train them and make them see the harshness of the apocalypse. A sharp blade left to rust wasn’t a good thing after all. Even dust wasn’t good for any good gem.
“What about here?” Alex seemed to get panicked when she heard many whispers of people around. It seemed the thought of coming with me appealed to most of them.
“This place can be defended by one elite and twenty humans,” I said while giving her a meaningful glance, “you can be this elite…”
For a second there a flash of fright appeared on her face before it vanished when I added, “and I’ll leave fifty humans with you, enough?”
Having the strong defences of the castle was enough to make her pleased and feel more secure. She nodded in satisfaction while jumping around selecting the people to join.
It was expected that any strong looking human didn’t want to stay behind. Apocalypse might have aroused the deep sense of danger in anyone’s soul, but it also stirred the hidden potential and the fighting spirit of many.
Helplessly resigning to the weak looking ones, she couldn’t help but give me a side gaze from time to time. I only shrugged as if I was telling her: What can I do? You shall convince them yourself!
“Ready?” I stood in front of the large group of people behind me. Out of all the forces that came here, almost seven hundred and sixty people were marching after my warriors.
Just looking at them made me realise the importance of establishing a force of my own. How could I possibly dream about having a kingdom in times of chaos like these without having a strong army?
“Where are we going?” Isabella was the only one walking by my side up front. We were already exiting the empty and devastated blocks, heading to a street filled with wolves.
“We are going to a city college in Harlem,” I said, “there we will find a great number of people ready to be recruited.”
“City college?” she seemed to frown, “shouldn’t we go and seek other colleges? Shouldn’t we hit Columbia University instead?”
She had a point here. After all Columbia university was the most famous university in New York and even in the entire US. But she missed a simple point here.
“Most of the students there went home a week ago thanks to the limited vacation for the world forum of students,” I slowly said before adding, “and that makes the city college we are heading to important.”
“In which way?” she asked.
“One second,” I didn’t hurry to answer her as I arranged my forces. The warriors were asked to deal with the wolves, while the large army behind had the liberty to join the attack, or keep along my pace to not fall behind and die.
“I heard over twenty thousand students came from across the globe, right?” I said after arranging everything. The fight started in an immense way all around, but I didn’t care about that.
I only cared about keeping the fast pace and reaching that side of the city fast without wasting time.
“That’s correct,” Isabella nodded, “but why is that related to the college?”
“Because the dorms of that college were given to those students to live in,” I finally gave her the reason, “so in that place, we can find many suitable people to recruit.”
I didn’t tell her that I already know of the sheer size of the surviving students in that college.. In fact the twenty thousand student number wasn’t correct.