Inheritor Of Magic: The Magi King

"Is there some issue with the radios? Why did you come running and not one of the operators here in town when they heard the message?" Wolfe asked.

"We reported it, but I don't know why they didn't send anyone. When I didn't get a response back, I was sent over to come talk to you, as I was headed back to town anyhow. We thought it might just be that you used the communication magic to tell people directly, and we weren't informed."

But she still hadn't slacked off on her duty at all, even though she knew that it might not be necessary and that the situation might already be handled.

Alice was standing nearby, and gestured that she would go down to the communications room to see what was going on. There should be people on duty there at all times, in case of emergency. With so many foreign guests here in town, all emergencies were important, and they should all have been relayed to someone in charge.

She marched down the stairs to the communications room, which was in the secure level just a few flights of stairs away from the dining hall, and straight into the office.

"Why didn't the emergency broadcast get relayed to the leadership just now? It should have been repeated multiple times in the last few hours, and the airbase sent a runner when they got no response." She demanded.

The witch on duty was shocked bolt upright and began frantically adjusting dials on the radio as soon as Alice started to yell at her.

"What are you adjusting?" Alice asked.

"Volume, Gain, sensitivity and broadcast power. They were all turned to the very minimum, while squelch, the feature that cuts out background noise, is at the maximum." She replied, then twisted a dial to the left.

Bursts of white noise and faint conversations filled the room from the speakers, and overlapping reports made it challenging to understand what was going on.

But even Alice, who was not a trained radio operator, could tell that Myrrh Coven was reacting to news of large movements of the undead coming out of the mountains, along with large numbers of more powerful monsters.

"Check with the border villages and everyone in the more rural areas of the Frozen Wastes. If the winter Monster Tide has started in the west, it has likely started here as well. I also need to know who was on duty for the last three shifts.

The first reports were made half a day ago, by our own Pilots, no less, and we didn't hear a single word about it from the radio room."

The radio operator went deathly pale and nodded rapidly.

In the best-case scenario, someone was going to get fired over this, and it very well might be everyone who had been on shift for the last day. Nobody had noticed that the radios had all been essentially muted to only hear local radio broadcasts, and they hadn't even heard the messages from the airbase, which was considered part of Forest Grove's facilities.

That was unforgivable, and on her part it had been pure laziness to just sit down, look at the notes and wait for something to come in. She hadn't even checked the equipment when she started her shift an hour ago.

Alice glared at the radio operator as the witch began to send frantic messages to the other towns, hoping that they were alright.

After a few minutes of rapid and overlapping reports, five more operators ran into the room and sat down to put on headphones and begin recording messages. That was at least according to protocol, and Alice began to relax a bit.

These operators might have been slacking, but it looked like not all of them were truly useless. What she really needed to do was to discover when the settings were adjusted, and then start working from there to find out who did it and why.

It might be something as idiotic as a worker wanting to sleep on shift so they turned down the radios and then forgot to turn them back, which must have been followed by the others not noticing.

The messages were clear once the mess was sorted out. The Monster Tide had gone west, from central Myrrh Coven and into the Free Covens territories, a once in a decade event, but not entirely unexpected. There was some increased activity around the villages in the Frozen Wastes, but nothing nearly as bad, and there were some reports that the Demons and Fae who had come to see Wolfe's advancement had taken out a few more powerful groups of monsters along the way.

That might explain why there were so few in the Frozen Wastes. Most of the visitors to the Volcano had either passed through them or arrived from the East, so those directions would have fewer monsters for the next week or two.

While Alice dove into the message logs to look for the point when the message rate should have suddenly dropped, Wolfe was already assembling an away team made up of some rather formidable fighters.

All three bodyguards were coming, along with Ella, Mio and Nia, plus ten of the Fae and Demons who served the leaders stationed in the attack zone.

The leaders had gone on ahead on their own, so their subordinates took the chance to find out what it would be like to ride in an airplane.

"I will make construction Inscriptions once we get to the airbase, so it should only take a few minutes to get the weapons created and loaded up. I don't think that most of you have seen that done yet, as it's a secure area of the underground facilities, so you will have some insider knowledge to pass on to your bosses." Wolfe explained to their new assistants.

The group turned to look at each other in shock. The creation of the limited edition special weapons was considered a closely guarded secret, but what they did know was that while others could do the work, it took a Magi to actually create the Inscription for them to work from.

There were rumours that he had made some directly for the Royal Families in the Demon Realm, but nobody could confirm that bit of news, and they didn't fully trust the reports from the Fallen Crusaders.

"We will do our best, Saint Wolfe. Just ask for anything that you need."