Gawain had barely approached the Giant Pit when he saw four or five people walking toward him.
Each wore a gas mask, wrapped in several layers of plastic sheeting, and carried a rifle. They looked a little like biochemical soldiers from a movie.
Looking at the dust and smoke filling the air and the dim sun, he finally realized that the times had truly changed.
As for himself, with the ants acting as filters and a Protective Shield, he had no need for such additional equipment.
"Hey, where did you come from? What do you want here?" the leader shouted gruffly.
The muzzles of their guns were all faintly trained on him.
"Hello, friends. I came to help you," he said sincerely.
"Help?"
"Us?"
The few of them exchanged glances, then suddenly burst out laughing together.
"Have scammers' standards gotten this low now?" one of them said.
"No, this is a clever screening strategy. They use such low-grade rhetoric to immediately pick out the people most likely to be fooled, eliminate everyone else, and then target them specifically," another said.
"Shouldn't this be the sort of thing they only do on the internet and over the phone? I can't believe they dare pull this with guns pointed at them!" the third person said angrily, as though Gawain had insulted their intelligence.
Gawain was not angry. He had seen this sort of thing many times.
At some point, people's attitudes toward strangers had changed from friendliness to vigilance. They could not be blamed for it, because those who did not act this way had either died or been cheated half to death.
"Are you currently worried about finding clean food? Not far north of here, there is an Underground Grain Depot. The food there has not yet been contaminated. Its location