Nate found his parents and pulled them into a side room. “What is everyone thinking so far?”

  Niall ran a hand through his unkempt hair and yawned. “Both the Chrightons and Travers seem to be of the opinion that it might be better to abandon this place. There has been too much damage done to the city, and we’re inclined to agree.”

  Nina nodded, her own tired yawn pulling at her mouth.

  Nate bit at his lower lip and looked down at Aura. Leaving the area wouldn’t affect them, but it would leave potential options on the table for someone else to collect. It would be better for everyone if the people of this city were the ones who made first contact with the new community.

  “If that is what you all want to do, then there is something we need to show you all first. And we need to hurry,” He told them with a wry grin.

  His parents kept any mention of his dreams to themselves, and instead simply threw Aura under the bus by revealing that she could speak. As soon as they did that, everything began to happen quickly and only a short time later, they were speeding through the city in a luxurious but capable expedition RV toward the dungeon.

  He had decided not to wait until the next time he fell asleep. There were still foreign cultivators somewhere in the area. This was something important enough that it needed to be seen to be believed and handled in person. Which is exactly what they were going to do.

  Angie and Lindsay had been pestering Aura with question after question ever since they learned she could communicate. In their opinion, they had just gained another girl in the group, one that happened to be extremely fluffy, which was even better. This also had the side-effect of making Nate even more outnumbered than before.

  Something that the two human girls were happy to promptly abuse.

  They were not exactly happy with him at the moment that he had been keeping the secret that Aura could talk to himself. A problem that became even worse when Lindsay accidentally touched one of her hidden tails.

  Due to the size of the RV, they were able to keep the reveal from the adults, though only barely.

  “What the-” Lindsay shoved her fist into her mouth and bit down on it as she glared at Nate.

  “I honestly think that might be the closest I have ever seen her come to cursing at someone,” Angie told him, mildly impressed. “She had to physically stop herself. Seriously though, the fact she could talk was one thing, but this is something else entirely.”

  He sighed and shrugged, looking at Aura. “It’s up to you. What do you want to do?”

  “It’s a little late to be thinking about that, isn’t it?” She asked with a matching sigh. “Oh well, I always figured that something like this would happen, eventually.”

  Aura canceled the illusion that had kept her looking somewhat like a normal fox and finally revealed her actual form to the girls.

  “Oh, you are gorgeous,” Lindsay whispered, running her hand down one of her colored tails. “And they’re so fluffy, I just want to cuddle up next to you.”

  “She really likes soft things, doesn’t she?” Nate asked Angie in a whisper. “I remember you mentioning before that foxes were her favorite animal.”

  “Oh, you have no idea. Her room might not be pink, but there are enough stuffed animals in there to create a zoo.”

  Nate looked at the halberd-wielding girl with doubtful eyes. There was no doubt that Lindsay was a pretty girl, but the fact that she had such a soft side to herself was surprising.

  ***

  Nate left Aura to her fate with Angie and Lindsay while he pulled out a map, his notebook, and laptop. Now that he had a new dungeon slot open, he needed to figure out where to put it. Thankfully, he had already gathered much of the information he needed when he created the last one.

  It was just a matter of sorting through the appropriate options.

  Something that took longer than he liked, though he also took the chance to transfer all the information to an Excel spreadsheet and organize it. Despite how many dimensional zones there were, the amount of information he had been able to gather on them was limited. The internet in this world was functional, but it had more in common with the early days of the internet than anything modern.

  The search engines were clunky and hard to use, the webpages, while not quite at Geopages level of monstrosity, weren’t far off either. The internet was available and useful, but they just weren’t able to devote the resources to truly make it shine. As a result, they were left with this basic level of usefulness that was barely more than a glimmer of what he knew it could be.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Still, it had been enough for him to gather a few details on a few dozen.

  The Excel spreadsheet was rough, but it was better than nothing. The problem was still a lack of information. He had created a separate page for each strength tier, with ones like the beast dimensional zone in the lowest tier.

  The blighted elves were in tier 3 and tier 4. They showed up multiple times and displayed greater strength at some of the other zones. That was actually true for most of the species. They all appeared more than once, with portals that let the stronger ones through at more limited intervals.

  The tiers were his own creation, as he had no better way of keeping track of everything other than the unreliable word of people on the internet.

  It was hard to properly gauge what was fact versus rumor, and the true strength of the entities at a particular dimensional zone without actually going there himself. However, that was not an option in this world for him, at least not yet. Maybe at some point in the distant future it would be. For now, all he could do was depend on the information he gathered from the forums on the internet.

  By the time the group was forced to leave the RV, Nate had narrowed his possible selections to a few locations. None of them were ones he was particularly excited about, but they needed to be conquered regardless.

  Aura placed the illusion back on herself before the adults could see her normal form as they prepared to leave the vehicle behind.

  Everyone strapped on their armor and weapons, and then they were on their way.

  The hike through the forest began without any fanfare, and they set off at a rapid pace. The trees were silent, as though everything that normally lived in the area had utterly vanished. There was no sign of any animals, beasts, or even so much as the annoying chirp of an insect.

  The only sound was what they were making.

  It was unnerving, but also a sign that they were on the right mark in heading to where ‘Aura’ had instructed them to go. Due to the lack of beasts and other interference, they were able to pick up their speed even more.

  This was already farther than Nate, or Lindsay and Angie had ever been in the dimensional zone before. They still had hours to go before reaching the center of the zone at their current pace. Normally, this sort of trip would have taken far longer, as they would have needed to move slower and with far more caution.

  ***

  They were still around an hour away from the dungeon when they finally began encountering animals and beasts again. Some of them looked hurt, as though they had gotten in the way of a much larger unaware being. However, they were all standing in place, slowly shuffling about as they tried to creep a little closer.

  Nate used basic healing on the closest animals as they passed them. They were docile at the moment, and these were all weaker beings anyway, so there was no reason not to get some quick practice in. He wasn’t sticking around to heal any of them, so it wasn’t really doing anything more than giving them a quick burst of energy and little more.

  The group pushed through the mass of bodies and eventually found themselves standing just outside the walls of the community.

  Nearby, they could see the remaining foreign cultivators who had started the attack on the city. There were more than Nate had expected still around, or more likely, he supposed, these were the ones not stupid enough to enter the dungeon.

  Lindsay’s parents snarled at them and made sure they had their faces memorized.

  Ignoring the others, Nate and Aura walked through the opening in the walls and into what would eventually become a new community. At the moment, it was a large open space, with the sole new building standing to the side of the dungeon structure.

  It was the first time Nate was seeing it in person and after everything he had done with it; he felt a sense of déjà vu.

  The two led the rest of the group toward the meeting house and the beasts that had taken up position within the building.

  Inside the building, they found many different beasts, including the stronger ones that had been attacking the city. They were all gathered around the edges, and many had climbed up onto the rafters wherever possible. The space directly in front of the doors was the only spot left open for the group.

  Aura looked back at the adults that had accompanied them and shook her head. The illusion had been a waste of time. What she needed to do next meant dispelling it anyway. Really, this entire meeting hinged on her.

  There was no one else among the humans that could talk to the beasts after all.

  Not only that, as a member of their ruling family, even if they had been deposed, this was something that she needed to do. She just wished that it didn’t involve revealing her secret to yet more people. Judging by the looks she had been getting from Lindsay’s mother, she had a feeling that her little obsession had been come by honestly, as it were.

  With a shake of her head, Aura dispelled the illusion revealing her tails and natural kitsune heritage to all gathered in the meeting house.

  Discreetly, Nate manipulated the menus on his wrist computer and pulled up the cameras for where they were located. He also pulled up a couple for just outside the building in an effort to check on the foreign cultivators.

  The girl’s parents gasped in surprise at Aura’s change. They had already known she was different; she had been able to talk, after all, in a fashion. However, this was a clear use of a complicated energy skill being used to hide what she was. It turned what they thought they knew about the beast race on its head.

  The beasts gathered in the building all fell to their knees in a show of deference to their ruler. Now that they were inside the walls of the dungeon community, it was actively working to enhance their minds and make them more than they once were. There was only so much it could do, and it would take time for the effects to become permanent.

  However, even in the short time they had been there, they had gone from beasts that were little better than animals to beings with the capacity to hold a conversation.

  It was a severe drain on the dungeon’s resources at the moment, but the ones in this building had needed to be raised faster than the rest. The downside of performing the work on them so quickly is that it would take them far longer to stabilize than normal. If they wanted to keep their newly gained intelligence, then they couldn’t leave the community for several months.

  A cacophony of barks, howls, yips, screeches, and all other manner of noises filled the space as the beasts greeted Aura.

  “We welcome her highness to our newly established community.” Streamed across the screen in the subtitles area. “We are ecstatic to see that you survived what our elders did to your family. What would you have us do with the humans behind you?”

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