Kalli let the armour display vanish, and then focused on creating a new [Rescue] type mission.

{Quest Issued} Easy Difficulty. Repeatable Quest. Maximum 5 members. Find an Awakened Hero Class Student of Marimgar Academy and convince them to come willingly back to the Academy. [Extra Points for Healing Class Heroes]

{Cost} 1 System Point

The students cheered, and the warrior raised his fist in victory.

"I knew it, the plot is scripted! Let’s go rescue our classmates. We get bonuses for the healers. Does anyone have home addresses for them? Or any idea where they’re hiding?"

Yara held up her phone. "If you’ve got a satellite phone that isn’t dead yet, check the group chat. There are still a few posting. We can start with them, and then look for everyone else.

It sounds like not all of them made it through the first day."

A hush fell over the crowd. They had all been trying not to think about that. Many of the students would have tried to go to their family compounds in the city, but the chaos had already started, and there was a chance that some of them had never even made it that far.

Even if they had enhanced physical abilities, with no weapons, no training, and no idea what they were doing, they were easy targets in the chaos.

Especially when they were wearing uniforms and likely carrying expensive electronics.

It never failed that the majority of items looted during a disaster were not immediate needs, but items that could be sold later, after the disaster ended.

Most believed that it was the responsibility of those with power to keep them alive. So, they focused on what came after, with the assumption that the disaster would be handled by someone else.

This time, that was not going to work out well for them.

There was no way to tell how many of the students were already lost, but there were only fifty in the immediate area around the Academy to see and take on the quests for rat demons.

Out of the thousands of students, that didn’t bode well.

The only consolation for Kalli was that the luxury residential area was further from them than any of these other students had been, so they might have been out of range of the quest.

"Alright, I have the map and the student home addresses," one of the girls shouted.

"Mark them all on the map, and we can see who we can likely get to," Kalli instructed.

The first thing that they did was to check off everyone who didn’t have a home address in the city. Though they were nearly all local to the nation of Irashia, not all of them were from families in the capital city of Marimgar.

Though it was a small country, there were millions of people in some of the other cities, and Marimgar Academy was the exclusive playground of the ultra-wealthy or incredibly talented.

And, as Kalli was quickly learning, some of their families were very, very influential.

The student council president’s family contained a former vice president, two cabinet ministers, and they owned nearly a tenth of the total downtown towers in the entire nation.

That level of wealth alone would normally be enough to shelter them from anything.

But now, it was more about the level of competence that allowed them to build such a massive empire in only three generations. Two, if you counted the fact that the Student Council President hadn’t officially taken over his father’s businesses yet.

Apparently, he did own some real estate in town, but how much was unclear.

With Niall gone on the mission to find the Rat King, the gossip flowed freely, moving between students, but carefully avoiding a few. Kalli noticed that while people joked about how wealthy Yara was, they never once mentioned her family, as if it was a taboo to speak it.

Yara went by the "De Marimgar" at the Academy, but clearly at least a few of these people knew her true identity, and they were terrified of her family.

It just made Kalli feel even more out of place in the group, but at least her persona here, as a transfer student of unknown origin, fit her experience and she didn’t have to pretend to understand the political connections between all these families.

Or the consequences for everyone around them when these families fell.

Kalli was waiting for the teams to form when a commotion outside caught her attention.

Dozens of armed men were charging at the academy, running silently.

One of the soldiers moved to lock the gate, but was hit in the chest with the blast of a shotgun, alerting everyone else to the danger as the men charged into the school.

"There she is! The System says that she is the one with the survival gear, grab her. Don’t leave them with anything, clear out all the supplies!" The man with the shotgun shouted.

"Everyone calm down. I don’t think you understand the situation."

The man laughed. "Little girl, I understand very well. The gods have made me the chosen one, and granted you to me to provide resources for my army."

Kalli sighed. "I take it that you finished the quest to kill rat demons? Everyone here has done that quest. It’s not an exclusive benefit."

That just made the man more excited. "What are you guys waiting for? Grab her and let’s go. She can reward us all. We’ll never run out of ammunition again."

Kalli pinched the bridge of her nose. "How about I give you your first reward before we do anything?"

The man nodded eagerly, and lowered his shotgun.

Kalli reached into her robes, pulled out her pistol, and put a single round into his forehead.

Blood sprayed, and everyone froze.

Including Kalli.

She had just shot someone. A person. Not a demon, not some weird monster. A man. A human man.

As her mind spiralled, the two groups struggled to process what had just happened. Then, the special forces team opened fire, and all hell broke loose.