Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

Makary's mercenaries imposed strict time discipline over the entire camp.

But while it meant that everyone worked long hours, the same applied to the breaks.

The schedule was extremely tight but allowed for a fair amount of good rest. Starting with a dinner and then extending for quite a bit into the evening, the mid-day break allowed everyone to hide away from the sun when it shone the brightest.

And right as I was about to leave the temporary headquarters to look into the matters of the proper headquarters, the time for the dinner came… And a whole load of shocked faces for me to snack with my eyes on.

And with no surprise, this was when the imperials motivated by the early display of food discrepancy came to learn a harsh lesson.

"The food allowance is decided in the morning, so you will have to stick with the cans. I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do about it, orders straight from the headquarters."

The same message rang throughout the camp, where the quart leaders repeated it after the brigade officers who followed Makary's orders. And following the same pattern as with the breakfast, everyone got their fair share of food.

A share that differed only in taste, with everyone getting quite a lot more calories than they could ever get on the standard rations of the imperial army.

Some surely were dissatisfied. And I could imagine them thinking that they've worked hard the entire morning only to learn the reward isn't as easy to come by.

In truth, spreading the better rations more evenly would allow us to cut the costs, given how the modern ones were far easier to obtain than the canned goods. In the fractured world, there was simply no business producing the canned food in the city. And any sort of trade with the neighboring towns would come at a steep cost of traversing the abandoned wilds.

It would be much cheaper for us to just feed the tastier, modern rations to everyone…

But even with the both short and long-term increase of the standard of living to the point those imperials never witnessed, there was one crucial aspect, a mindset that we had to plant in them. Stay tuned to empire

Those benefits, as common as they were soon to become, were something they had to earn with hard work. Otherwise, they could never come to respect what they came to have with little to no effort.

In the long term, then, the series of protests that followed the announcement was the first part of that lesson. And it was likely to repeat for the third time when the last meal time would come.

In the end, though, even the canned rations… were far above any sort of food those imperials could get back within the ranks of the imperial army. And after some initial whining and complaints, people generally got back to eating.

For me, the dinner turned out to be pretty uneventful. Between the meal itself, some small talk with Fay as we discussed our daily tasks, and then a short review of what we still have to do, the break pretty much ended for me.

On my way back to the last point on my to-do list for before Leon's visit, with still more than an hour of the mid-day break left, I took a momentary delay at the type of infrastructure that continued to pop out all over the camp, in just the most convenient spots.

The reloading and fueling stations, where one or two machines would haul around crates of goods from the modern world and maintain the improvised fueling equipment.

In a sense, it was a miracle of a field engineering… But one that held together on ducktape and zip ties. It was of no importance that the massive fuel tank stood out in the field, shielded by the sun by some improvised tarp-based tent.

As long as the trucks could leave their load in those convenient spots and leave with their tanks full, those stations filled an important niche within the local chain of logistics.

"Interesting," I muttered, tapping the end of my pen against my lips before bringing it down and jotting a few points to remember later. Then, around the time the camp-wide break was coming to an end, I moved down the road, to the new headquarters project.

"Woah," I uttered a small shout when I turned the corner of an overfilled field stockpile and looked down a small depression, at a two-story construction of a level that greatly exceeded any other structure in anywhere in the camp.

The entire thing looked like three sizeable squares connected in a line by short wings only a bit narrower than the sides of the squares themselves. And by now, a single brigade in yellow shirts sat all over the second story's frame, bolting the bottoms of the prefabricated walls to the special slots within the frame.

"Oh, Peter, hi," A young woman with her military jacket wrapped around her waist and nothing more but her green, sleeveless shirt to cover her top, approached from the side before I could draw my eyes away from the project.

'I thought nothing would surprise me after the progress at the housing in the morning,' I thought, blinking my eyes twice before nodding my head back.

"Hi. And you are?" I raised my face, somehow finding it strangely easy to act… just the same way I always did.

Strange.

Surely, ever since my life turned on its head, I hardly had any chance to interact with just a random woman… But even back when I was with my ex, I still couldn't really handle interacting with a random woman.

But now?

I couldn't even be bothered to look at her fairly visible charms.

"Kash," the girl smiled and saluted. "The head of the high-priority development, chief architect of the force!"

The energy beamed out from the girl's introduction and washed all over my face, nearly making me stumble back a step.

"Is that why…" I looked over to the side, to where a whole hundred imperials wore distinctive, yellow suits that put them out of the rest of the crowd.

In fact, those were the very first imperials that I saw sporting anything but white! And what was even more interesting, I didn't hear anything about something like this.

Rather than being mad about Makary and his goons keeping me out of the loop, I kept my curious eyes on the yellow-dressed workers before looking back to the girl.

"Ah, those." The whites of Kash's teeth showed through her smile. "It was my idea and I got the uniforms from my private stock. And this brigade had the had not only one of the highest reward achievers in their rank but also received a shower of praises from their supervisor."

Just this short explanation made it pretty clear why this girl went as far as to use her own, private resources to invest in something as simple as their uniforms.

This seemingly small change made them a rarity among the crowd. And by extension, made them all the more likely to be the prime candidates for all the novel conveniences and luxuries we would gradually introduce.

In this way, something as simple as the color of a uniform would turn into an object of great desire… and healthy competition that men who served in war often needed to exhaust their natural energy.

With clear rewards behind the goal of getting a special shirt, there was no doubt all those war captives would rush head-first into the rat's race, focusing all of their attention on shiny garbage and ignoring the level of benefit their work would actually bring.

"That's quite the genius idea," I commended the girl while allowing a small smirk on my lips. "It seems Makary has quite the extraordinary officers," I added, more than happy to praise this random soldier.

This kind of lip service cost me nothing but spit and could actually go a long way in improving this girl's morale. And as talented for corporate exploitation of the imperials as she was, Kash surely was a good person to keep happy.

"Thank you for the good word," Kash grinned before calming her cheeky expression a little and looking over to the project.

During our short exchange, the most recently added part of the wall ended up fully nailed to its sibling below and to one of its sides through special slots in the frame. And by now, there was a huge group of imperials operating a hand lift to bring a huge pot with what looked like liquid concrete to where the two walls of the same level met.

"Looking at how things go, we should be done with the whole layout in a few hours. We have," Kash turned her head over to a huge pile of resources sitting nearby, "more than enough materials to finish it. And if you don't mind bare walls and holes for windows, you might actually start moving in today."