Nate spent the night going through the second dungeon, just watching what the blighted elves were up to. He discovered that the subtitle function didn’t work there. However, he wouldn’t need to upgrade the Dungeon Core to Level 3 to get it working either. It was a simple matter of researching it now.

  Once a function had been unlocked in one dungeon, that was apparently how it transferred over to the others.

  That would need to wait until his current project was finished. It was nice to know that soon he would be able to understand what the blighted elves were saying as he watched them.

  They had continued to map out the dungeon, but interestingly enough left the area with the core alone. It was almost as though they could sense that something was there. The map they had drawn in the portal room was fairly detailed everywhere else, only to abruptly fall off when it got too close to the room with the Dungeon Core.

  More than any of that though, he found his interest being held by the tactics they devised to get through the traps. The lasers were all being diverted now by pieces of armor that had been buffed to a shine. The enhanced gravity they worked around by stripping everything off and going through with only the bare essentials on. They would hold a rope attached to the rest of their equipment that they would pull through when they made it.

  The railgun spike launchers they had mapped the locations of, so those were no longer a problem for them either. Really, the only trap they hadn’t found a way around was the deconstructing sound frequency. Which was rarely deadly to the enhanced beings. It messed them up for sure. They all left smears of blood and other bodily fluids in their wake, but it didn’t quite have enough power to finish the job most of the time.

  Nate could have increased the power, easily in fact, but then it would have started damaging the dungeon as well. He was trying to save energy, not create another draw point.

  It was a process that was going rather well, exceedingly so, in fact.

  The traps might not be as useful as he had originally hoped they would be, but they were managing to do one thing right. The ones near the exit kept the blighted elves inside the dungeon for a reasonably long period of time.

  The dungeon gained the most energy and other resources when a being died inside it. However, it still gained energy just from them being inside its walls. Without the shared pool, it would be suffering from a lack of resources, but that wasn’t an issue.

  No, he was eyeing the counter for energy. The one that had been empty only a while before and forced the dungeon to shut down. What he saw brought a smile to his face. It wasn’t quite there yet, but in a few more days, he would be able to increase the level of the Dungeon Core. Or put more traps back in place.

  He hadn’t quite decided yet which…

  No, that was a lie. He had. The Level 2 upgrade should unlock a new dungeon for him. He would be placing it in against something a tad lower in difficulty as well. Though, hopefully, still intelligent.

  It seemed to him that the blighted elves generated more energy for the dungeon than the beasts did on average. In part because their cultivation realms were higher, but he was pretty sure that the fact that they were intelligent beings had an effect on it as well. How much, he had no way of knowing, just that it was probably there in some way.

  Either way, for the moment, he didn’t want to mess with things too much and was just looking for a lazy night. All the excitement lately had started to wear on his mind. He wasn’t used to firing on all cylinders constantly, and that was exactly what he had been doing for a while now.

  So, he found a quiet corner in the dungeon with Aura and worked on his meditation art for a while. Then he cultivated, and finally, he simply took a nap while still in his avatar form, something that he had never done before.

  The stress had started to get to him in more ways than he wanted to admit. Taking this break, as small as it was, helped. It might not have lasting effects, but it would help him keep going for now.

  When he woke the next morning, everything had changed.

  Everyone had known it was coming. It was simply a matter of how long it was going to take, and now the time had run out. The wall around the city had completely fallen during the night. The small breaches of before had turned into something that they had absolutely no hope of even possibly keeping under control.

  It took him a few minutes to find everyone, as they had gathered outside on the wall built around the estate. They were all watching the beast-core-enhanced beasts tear through the city.

  Buildings were being torn apart, as the stronger, more durable beasts simply ran through them like mobile wrecking machines. The tallest buildings in the city had already been destroyed, not that they were skyscrapers or anything. Nate didn’t think they had been taller than fifteen stories, max.

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  However, the damage caused when they had fallen…

  The dust was still hanging in the air, concealing blocks from view.

  Each of the adults standing on the wall gripped their weapons tight, their faces set in a rictus of fury. Setting aside the destruction of the city that they had made their home. Countless people were dying every moment that those beasts rampaged and there was nothing they could do to save them. These beasts had all grown too powerful for anyone gathered there to damage.

  If they all worked together, they would likely be able to take one down. But that was assuming that none of the other beasts interfered with their fight.

  A worn-looking George was the first to see Nate come up the stairs and join everyone else on the top of the wall.

  “Hey, when did you get here?” Nate asked him, his wide eyes taking in the utter destruction of the city he had known for the last first months.

  “About three o’clock this morning. I waited for as long as I could before leaving the guild building.” His eyes were a mix of sad, and supremely angry as he glared out over the destruction. “I won’t forget who caused this all to happen, and I won’t rest until those people are brought to justice.”

  “How likely is that to happen?” Lindsay asked, walking up to them in time to hear the tail end of the conversation.

  The older gentleman deflated some. “I don’t know. The public outcry might be enough to make them lose their positions, but little more than that. The damage has been done, the city has been lost and nothing will bring it back. There is no recourse for that.”

  Nate felt his shoulders slump in defeat. “That’s not exactly what I was hoping to hear.”

  “That’s it then?” Lindsay wondered, her eyes wandering across the ever-growing devastation. “Humanity has lost another city, and no one is even going to care?”

  George shrugged sadly. “Who can say? We don’t lose cities that often, and the factories here didn’t produce anything that essential.”

  “Still, it just doesn’t seem right.” Nate could see a few groups fighting beasts as they came a little close to where they had holed up.

  “It’s not, but it is life.”

  Their little group was quiet for a few minutes as they listened to the roars and sound of buildings crashing to the ground.

  “I guess we could leave now if we really wanted to,” Nate muttered. “Assuming we could make it to the truck and trailer, of course. All the beasts are inside the wall now instead of surrounding the city, keeping people trapped. Hopefully, that means that some people are taking the chance to escape. Those that weren’t able to find safe places to hide at least.”

  Back inside the house, they found themselves in Aden’s office, which felt small for once with all of them in it.

  The chunky table with the display embedded in it was showing a map of the city and wall. Sections of the wall had been highlighted in red and then crossed out.

  “We need to decide if we are going to help the people out there, or simply hole up and look after ourselves. One of those choices is obviously smarter than the other.” Aden began, as he laid out what the options were and how much food the estate had managed to stock.

  Niall and Nina backed up at the same time. “We appreciate you inviting us to be part of this discussion, but we are already guests and interlopers here. It wouldn’t be right for us to help you make this decision.”

  Aden chuckled. “You’re no more an interloper than James and Lisa here. So, stay and offer your opinion.”

  Anna and Landon were actively marking parts of the map with George’s input. He had the most up-to-date information among those in the group about what had been going on throughout the city.

  When Nate’s attention came back to the main conversation, it had been decided that they would be accepting people into the walls of the estate. Along with that, groups would be heading out to start finding and bringing people back with them.

  Instead of doing the safe thing and turtling up, they would be doing what they could for the people of the city. It might have been better to have done that from the beginning, but they had never been under any obligation to do anything for them to begin with.

  The people that came in wouldn’t be exactly comfortable, but they would be safe.

  With that decided, it was just a matter of deciding on the composition of the teams. Which didn’t take that long either. Everyone was going out except for George and the guards. So, the kids would be accompanying their parents to create teams of three, while Anna and Landon would form their own team as well.

  As soon as the decision was made, they all split and went their different ways.

  Nate and his parents headed to their wrecked SUV and headed out first. Unlike the others, they had no need to gather their equipment. Nina and Nate were already carrying everything they needed.

  The point of what they were doing was to rescue people. However, if they happened to be able to take out a beast, then so much the better. No one was too hopeful about the odds of that happening. The beasts had grown too strong, and them attacking one would be foolish beyond measure.

  The idea was to save people, not throw away their own lives.

  “Did you find anything when you went to the McFadden’s last night?” Nate asked as they left the estate behind them.

  “Oh, right here you go,” His mother passed back a new box of upgrade ingredients for his core. “Needless to say, this will be the last one you’ll be getting from them. They are still here for now, doing their duty, but they have plans to leave as soon as the matter has been resolved. The McFaddens have no interest in helping to rebuild the city, and I can’t exactly blame them for that one.”

  “What about us? What are we going to do?” Nate asked his parents. It was a question that had been bothering him ever since the wall was first breached. “Are we sticking around or going somewhere else?”

  Niall and Nina shared a look. “That is something we need to discuss as a family. However, the Chrightons and Travers did offer us a position if and when they left. Neither has made a firm decision of their own on the matter just yet. Despite the differences between the parents, they understand how close the girls are and don’t want to destroy a friendship like that by separating them.”

  Nate looked out the car window at the city. “What are the odds that people will stick around to rebuild this place?”

  “Oh, it’s guaranteed. People will always stick around to rebuild the places they call home. The real question is how many of them that will be, and if it will be enough, even to keep those that remain safe.” Nina said, her own eyes skipping from destroyed building to destroyed building.

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