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  We decided not to worry too much more about the situation, figuring that I would end up talking with other Samurai about it tomorrow. We finished our food while chatting. Roger and the others talked about how different their new bodies felt, as well as how surprised they were that they ate so much and didn't feel bloated.

  Eventually, we moved to the lounge area and the couches there, which were spacious enough to accommodate all of us, excluding the two in power armor.

  Roger and Cody sat with Baba Yaga, while Jill and I sat with Outsider, and Morrigan plopped herself in Jill’s lap. Jill looked at her, eyebrow raised, but didn't try to push her off.

  “So! Do you have any questions or comments about the design of your new home? I think I did my best, but I didn't know you guys when I made this design, only how you guys fought, which was pretty amateurish, but understandably so.”

  “The rooms were labeled as fully customizable, and they are huge, so no complaints here. My question is actually something else entirely.” Roger said, leaning back, slightly distracted by the couch. “Okay, two questions now. Anything you make will be better than what's found in this room, right?”

  Morrigan nods her head, “Oh, yes! While the furniture here is of a very high quality, it is still only Class 0 goods. Once we get the fabricators up and running, you will never desire to leave the folds of a Class II bed ever again!”

  “Stop messing with the child, Morrigan. Their senses, even enhanced as they are, will not be able to tell the difference between Class I and Class II comforts like that.” Baba Yaga chided. “It will still be comfortable, mind you, and you may, indeed feel tempted to fall to sloth, I will make sure you do not.” She smiles

  “Right…” Roger dragged that word out, but Cody and Buddy blanched a bit. “Anyways, second question. Why are you trying to force Victor to start an army?”

  Cody, Buddy, Jill and I paused, confusion spread amongst us as we stared at Roger, then at Morrigan, then our confusion turned to shock as Morigan was pouting.

  “Why do you have to ruin my fun, Roger? You could have asked me in private, or even presented to ignore it I'd you saw it. You will be forever single with that mind of yours and lack of tact.”

  Roger laughed hard at that comment, and Baba Yaga cackled. Rogal just shook his head, and Outsider passed out drinks to everyone. When had she made drinks?

  “Wait, what do you mean? Roger, no, Morrigan, explain,” I eventually say.

  She sighs, then leans back into Jill. “Do you have any idea how much room is in this tower once I have spatially expanded it? To support just you five, you would only need maybe half a floor, and that would leave six and a half floors empty. You would never be able to use all that space in your life, so I build under the assumption of maximizing space. However, you said that you had no real intention to arm humans to wage holy war to wipe out the xenos scum, so I had to adjust. But the idea never really left me. The sheer scale of space available to me meant we could easily create, outfit, and train our own PMC. In fact, I was going to work to get you to create three more Hero Units eventually.”

  The Building blueprint shifts, and the once fourteen floors turned into twenty one. Rooms for hundreds of people, training facilities, armories, vehicle bays, troop transports.

  “How long were you going to keep this from me?” I whispered.

  “Only until we got a stable supply of materials.” She said, then she sighed once more. “You really don't know how precarious a position New Phoenix is in, let alone Arizona, or even North America as a whole.”

  “Morrigan. I thought we agreed to wait until he figured out the situation himself before we said anything.” Rogal growled.

  Before you get angry at them, Victor, I was the one who told them to keep it a secret, as it was something you would learn in the meeting tomorrow. You were already unstable with the material acquisition problem, and while you have a solution for it, I felt that you didn't need more on your plate when you felt so isolated at that time. Now that your family is awake and you have had a good meal, I believe, if you so desire, that your mental state will be sufficiently supported to learn this information.

  I leaned back into the couch and stared at the ceiling, simply processing. Synaptic knew something dangerous. To be fair, that was a given, considering the universe at large, but more specifically, she knew something about a dangerous situation here, on Earth, in Arizona.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  I took a breath

  And she believed it would have been in my best interest to learn it tomorrow in a meeting with a bunch of veteran Samurai and after my family has awakened.

  I released my breath

  Morrigan and the others knew what this threat was, or at least knew there was a threat. And they were taking steps to guarantee my, and my families, safety.

  I took a breath.

  And the best way to do that was not just by building thousands of nanite swarms, but also by building our own private military company hundreds of people strong, if not thousands considering how modular the design was.

  I released my breath. Then focus my eyes.

  “Outsider, please explain to the best of your ability what this situation that you all have discovered is, and why it requires more strength than what The Family can provide.”

  Morrigan pouted again, since I didn't call for her to explain, yet Outsider simply picked up her tea cup and took a drink.

  “There are two main threats that we have inferred, and one of those is further divided into three. I use the word inferred because in order to confirm the full extent of the threats, that would require equipment and software we do not currently possess. I shall start with the most obvious threat, the antithesis.

  As shown in the Tonto State Reserve hunting ground, the antithesis are extremely adept at digging holes to hide from observation, and they are more than capable of using advanced tactics such as Defence in Depth and utilizing ever shifting labyrinthine nests. Even though Shrew counted the second, the first fooled every Samurai who hunted in the forest for years, even Samurai Senestero, who only had a hunch something was wrong.”

  “This has led us to speculate that perhaps there are more such hives spread throughout the area, if not the world. When Rogal, Morrigan, and Baba Yaga set out to obtain materials and tokens, as well as to grow Leman and myself, I discovered more tunnels underneath the exposed hive structures. While I was unable to enter the tunnels to map them, we do indeed know that the south of New Phoenix has, at least, two potentially separate nest-like structures beneath the desert floor, not even six miles outside of the city. From there, extrapolating an approximate hive density in the surrounding area was not difficult. Combing public Incursion records showed that a majority of the fives in the area could range from two months old to nine years old. Thankfully, there have been no records of towns disappearing in the area, and a lack of available natural biomass means that the hives would have to slowly create their own over the years. This has led us to believe that, should something cause the stealth hives in the area to awaken, there is a high chance that New Phoenix would be invaded. And while, with the currently available Samurai, the chances of the city being lost are nonexistent, loss of human lives was calculated to be at around fifty five percent, an unacceptable number per Rogal and Morrigan. As such, we decided that it would be for the best to bolster our forces as high as we could get them, while also increasing our own intelligence gathering and surveillance capabilities. This lends us to the second threat, both being three distinct threats, while all sharing the same root. Human corporations and their greed.”

  “In order of least problematic to most threatening, there is the threat of a corporate war, where an outside company capitalizes on either a perceived weakness or a created weakness to invade a city and remove their ruling corporate council or other governing body and take over. This leads to chaos on the streets, destruction of buildings, and the mass loss of human life. Projections show a loss of life ranging from six percent to twenty percent, mostly from various PMCs, local militias, or civilian casualties. While more acceptable, the disruption such a war caused on the defence against the antithesis is more problematic. The second problem is, of course, the Bestlé situation, of which you all know very well, and of which there is a solution being implemented. The third, and most pressing, is the fact that the city had been skimping on standing forces, exterior defences, and anti-siege supplies. This is something Baba Yaga discovered by accident on your return from the late night mining trip you took, and something I confirmed when we went out this morning. The exterior walls have forty percent less ammunition than they should, the gear the standing forces have is substandard, and the amount of actual forces are thirty five percent lower than even their minimum strength recommendations state. As is, in order to protect the city properly, we need one thousand four hundred and forty people, and that is simply to man the exterior defences. Over the last few years, more and more incursions have been contained by senior Samurai rather than PMC or police forces, with newer Samurai being pushed to fight the incursions themselves with little backup, such as what happened to you, even with the peculiarities of your awakening.”

  “Thus, while Morrigan’s personal project started as a way to ease you and your family into commanding your own force as a way to amuse herself and test new weapons, armor, and utility designs, it has rapidly shifted into an emergency patch for the survival of this city and the people within it, and possibly the entirely of Arizona, depending on how bad the situation beyond here is.”

  “But what about The Family? They have so many Samurai, and things are this bad?” Cody asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Twenty three percent of known Samurai in New Phoenix are inactive, low profile, or more smaller community minded. Fourth two percent of known Samurai are cleaners, with the most well known being Rocker Boy and his Groupies, comprising mostly of civilians and other, more timid Samurai, and Mad Pack, who traverses the space between cities with his fleet of vehicles. Twenty percent of Samurai are more comfortable with close range encounters, those within reach or sight, like Heracles, Weapons Locker, and High Noon. The remaining ten percent of Samurai are capable of mass destruction. Doma, Gunny, Fleming, Blizzard, Apollo, and Mirror Match are, in fact, the only ones capable of mass destruction, and only Mirror Match, Apollo, and Doma are the only ones capable of mitigating collateral damage. And of them, no one has a personal force necessary to cover for how decrepit the cities defences are currently.”

  She finishes her tea. We all stare in silence. She tilts her head slightly and smiles softly. “Borrowing Baba Yaga's words for a moment, ‘We are well and truly fucked. Now, let's figure out how to unfuck ourselves.’”