Okay, this was just embarrassing. And I wasn’t even directly involved.

  Gae Bolg was still stuck in the ground, and everyone’s attempts at getting it out weren’t exactly what I’d call “dignified.” Which made this the absolute last circumstance under which I’d want the press showing up. My [Sensitive Discussions] was preventing cell phone videos and the like, but once the actual news crews showed up, keeping that up would become politically dicey. Not impossible, just something people could and would give me shit over and have at least some influence to back it up.

  “Alright, I’ll desiccate the ground, Arthur and Dietrich, you pull when I say so, Ogier, you prevent it from backsliding, Mia, does your multi-strike sword artwork on the ground …”

  Yeah, Fionn’s plans were always intelligent and well thought-out, but that damn spear was apparently rather stubborn. In fact, it seemed to be actively preventing itself from being retrieved.

  The ground was also not helping, being soft, wet, and muddy all the while containing more than enough large bits of debris, courtesy of Fionn’s pouring in of concrete, and based on what I’d heard, Gae Bolg was, in fact, anchored in the bedrock beneath that. And everyone was attempting to hold back as much as possible, not unleashing tremendous explosions or mountain-breaking melee abilities.

  They were changing these issues bit by bit, removing the moisture, hiking up the spear bit by bit while filling in the void left behind, continuing to advance bit by bit … but it was still a bit of a clown show.

  Again, the fact that this was still a complete and utter disaster zone was limiting the exposure, but that artifact was being a real son of a bitch. Or just a bitch. I wasn’t too sure what applied, and was too nervous to focus on it either way.

  I glanced off to the right, where the Washington Monument stood tall and proud amidst a circle of pristine lawngrass. I’d repaired it earlier so that it could serve as a backdrop for the eventual press conference … if we were ready when the camera crew actually showed up.

  I mean, it wasn’t like the whole affair wouldn’t have been entertaining under other circumstances, it was just that, well, the current situation was the current situation. And it did not afford me the privilege of amusement.

  Once again, I looked around worriedly. Drake was still standing next to me in his full dress uniform, just like he had been since this whole thing had started, watching.

  As far as clothing went, I’d gone with normal formal clothing, though I’d gone with a black outer jacket, deep blue shirt, and as for the tie, it was in a nice shade of violet. I’d recently gone down quite the rabbit hole on the meaning of certain colors and made aesthetic choices based on that. An outfit that, at least in theory, represented wisdom, intelligence, and spirituality.

  There was also the usual array of cleanup teams and soldiers guarding said teams, which had been roaming the disaster area since yesterday.

  The only thing that had changed was the constant array of people taking out their phones, pointing them at Gae Bolg, looking puzzled, then frustrated, then finally angry before putting their phones back into their pockets.

  I mean, I couldn’t blame them, I’d have done the exact same thing in their positions, but my position made it so that I had to spoil their fun.

  It was strangely mesmerizing, in a way. The same people who’d fought off a monster that had flattened an area ten kilometers across in a mere hour through raw strength alone and without ever moving more than a couple of hundred meters from its original spawning site struggling so much with a damn bit of bone stuck in the ground … and all the magic I intellectually knew to be involved did not make it overly less funny to watch.

  Yet even with that, I noticed when a group approached from the direction of where the White House would once again stand in an hour or so. So it was not a surprise when a man in his late fifties stepped up next to me. No, the surprise was just who the man was.

  “Mr. President,” I greeted him. Once I’d managed to get my mouth working again, that was. I really should have been used to meeting powerful people by now, but I usually had a little time to psych myself up before first-time encounters.

  “Ambassador Vogt,” President Lane replied, then continued with a question. “I take it you wouldn’t be standing so close if what they’re doing were dangerous?”

  “Just a first-century artifact forged from the bones of a primordial sea beast being a tad stroppy,” I replied. “Shouldn’t be much longer.”

  “That thing withstood the full force of a Nation Boss, didn’t it?” Lane mused. “Would anything speak against just evacuating the area and using explosives?”

  I grimaced. “We might have to take you up on that offer if this carries on much longer.”

  “Let me know when we reach that point.”

  “That’s really not my call to make,” I said as I watched Mia seemingly duplicate as she slashed into the ground in countless places. Woof, that wasn’t good. After all, the activation requirements for that Skill were that not only did she have to have an opponent, but that that opponent be significantly stronger than her.

  Drake, myself, Lane, and the entirety of Lane’s security detail continued to watch as the mystical spear was removed from the ground, every inch brought in blood, sweat, and tears of frustrations and annoyance.

  A couple of minutes in, one of the secret servicemen leaned over and whispered something in Lane’s ear, who promptly turned to me and asked “There seems to be an effect interfering with cameras around here. Is that …”

  He trailed off, I sighed.

  “I’ll turn it off in a few minutes. But I really don’t want that to wind up on YouTube. Most of the videos wouldn’t have the context in the description, and most people wouldn’t read it anyway.”

  Lane nodded slowly. “I wish I could afford to just shut off the cameras when I’m in public, but I doubted I could get away with it.”

  There were dozens, if not hundreds, of sayings about the trustworthiness, or rather, lack of it, in all politicians in the world, all that had ever existed, and would ever exist. But right at that moment, there was not a single doubt in my mind that he was being a hundred percent honest.

  Finally, I turned to face him fully.

  “We might be standing in the open, but I can assure you, we are harder to overhear than in your most secure meeting room.”

  “Alright,” Lane replied. “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem, just a concern,” I said, in a perfectly even tone. “Considering that this will likely only get worse, everyone will need to do their parts. ‘Hang together or hang separately,’ and all the other quotes that talk about the value of cooperation. Therefore, I was hoping that the treaty is going to be ratified sooner, rather than later. Political backing, financial support, the kind of military actions that require modern weaponry rather than magic.

  “In exchange for magical support, of course, including the rebuilding of the entire National Mall over the next couple of days.”

  “It’ll be the first thing on the docket, first session once the Capitol is rebuilt,” Lane promised, then sighed.

  “I’m going to say again it later, in front of the cameras, but I’ll say it now anyway. Thank you, all of you. I know you did not have to come, but you did it anyway. And I plan to do my best that this will all be amiable. Like you said, we all need allies, and it’s better if things go well.”

  I shrugged, then replied with another quote, Churchill, this time. “Better fight with your allies than without them.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t get quite that bad,” Lane said and went right back to staring at the chaos still unfolding on the lawn. “If you already know about something specific you need, feel free to pass it along.”

  “I have a list.”

  And just as I said that, Gae Bold popped free from the ground, and went flying. Aw … shit. If that thing started falling back to the ground, I was opening a portal, walking through, and staying there until the damn thing got collected. I braced myself. It wasn’t flying in our general direction, but that weapon was as nasty as could be.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried, Fionn leaped, grabbed the shaft, and the weapon vanished in a crimson flash. But damn, if that hadn’t been scary.

  ***

  An hour later, everything was finally ready. The stage, lectern included, had been built, news crews had set up, and I’d retreated to the furthest end of the area that would be captured by the camera.

  [Sensitive Discussions] was, of course, off, it would have been seriously embarrassing for this historic meeting to occur, only for absolutely no record of it to exist … obviously, someone would have noticed that, it would have been obvious to anyone currently using a camera, and I’d have been told to knock it off, but the mere thought made me cringe.

  My job wasn’t even to stand there and look pretty, at least the “look pretty” part wasn’t a part of my task, I just needed to be present and use [Restoration of the Old] to fix as big of an area as I could, with two targets, one centered on the Capitol, one centered on the White House.

  I hadn’t used the Skill like this before, not at full blast since the upgrade, at least, but it should be fine. I knew I could fix the Capitol, the White House was smaller, and anything that got fixed in addition to those two was just a bonus, wasn’t it?

  It had been decided that Fionn would be the one standing the closest to President Lane, followed by Arthur, Dietrich, Drake, and then the rest of us were clustered in a group on the far right of the stage.

  On the other side of Lane stood several Ministers, military delegates including General Collins, and a few more people whose exact position I was unaware of but had to be important since they were here.

  The overall choreography was pretty, well, pretty. Fionn and Lane in the center, directly in front of the Washington Monument, important people on either side of them at a respectful distance, and slightly less important people such as myself clustered on the far end, leaving those in the center free and standing out in the “crowd” while also making sure everyone wound up in the footage or photos. At least those that weren’t zoomed in.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  “Yesterday, this nation faced a threat of cataclysmic proportions. Yesterday, the United States of America preserved. Through the valor of our brave men and women in uniform, as well as our allies abroad, the world’s second Nation Boss was felled within two hours of its creation, and rebuilding has already begun.”

  Well, technically, we weren’t allies yet, and even if we had been, the ancients had done most of the work, between the limitations of handheld armament and issues of using most heavy weapons in the city the army really hadn’t been able to do very much, but no one was going to complain.

  As long as they didn’t get shafted, everyone involved had agreed to let the US save some face. After all, the appearance of something often mattered more than hard facts when it came to politics. The fact that the entire situation had been the exact opposite of “conducive to military operations” would be ignored, as would the fact that no one could predict or prevent monster spawning, while political pundits and commentators dragged the administration through the mud over the fact that a bunch of foreigners had needed to intervene.

  Instead, by letting Lane come of this with his head held high, a powerful ally would be made. And he was more than aware of the fact that it was a matter of “let.” We had the power, the footage, the proof to show what had really happened.

  The speech continued, but it was a mercifully short one. I’d never been particularly opposed to speeches, but they had to be interesting. Unlike, say, my principal’s speech at my graduation, which had dragged on for over an hour, said nothing important … and nearly been a one-to-one repeat of her speech the evening before, at the graduation dinner. It had been a legal issue of when we could get the venues and when the graduation certificates could actually be issued … just as much of a mess as most of mine and Mia’s school time had been.

  Lane wrapped it up, turned to Fionn, and the two shook hands amidst a shower of camera flashes. They really did make quite the pair.

  One, a man in his fifties, hair rapidly greying from the stress, dressed in a white shirt, blue jacket, and red tie.

  The other of seemingly indeterminate age, timeless, with pale, nearly white, hair and piercing eyes, wearing a completely black and white three-piece suit, reinforced with dark leather and metal plates.

  Oh, that picture was going to wind up in a history book, I could just tell … assuming there were any humans left to write it, that was. #

  It was also the signal for me to do my thing, aka, activate the Skill with a single thought and then become useless in that particular respect for the next ten hours.

  The effect was immediate and pronounced, chunks of rubble either lifting themselves out of the ground or putting themselves back together from dust before stacking together and melding together. Though, unlike the first time, many chunks had flown very far, making me very glad the area had been evacuated as a precaution. Things were safe, normally, but normally, the bits and pieces were concentrated in one spot.

  And for thirty seconds, most people seemed very unsure where they were supposed to be looking, heads jerking from side to side, looking alternatively at the hill or the smaller house at the opposite end of the former park, with very few having the stoicism to stay focussed.

  Except the camera operators, that was, if they took their eyes off the proverbial ball, there’d be hell to pay.

  Then, the two buildings were standing there, good as new, alongside several of their neighbors, clean and solid, as though nothing had ever happened.

  Oh … this was going to spark all sorts of conspiracy theories, wasn’t it? I mean, right now, it was still pretty obvious that something terrible had occurred, you just had to look literally anywhere else, but in general … it was either going to be highly entertaining or frustratingly rage-inducing to see how that would develop.

  Things wrapped up soon afterwards and I opened three portals, one to London, one to Dublin, and the final one to the Untersberg.

  Though I did promise to come back every time the cooldown on [Restoration of the Old] was up. In exchange for one of the Americans’ experimental railguns as soon as it could be packaged up, which should be in a few days. They were incredibly power-hungry and could only fire a few shots before they straight-up broke, but I figured it’d be interesting to play around with. In the scientific sense.

  Power it with magic, use the “less wear and tear” Skill I was near certain Charlemagne had … I was sure we could do something impressive with it.

  And the munition should be easier to source than that for most other artillery, anything made from conductive metal in the correct shape would theoretically do, though obviously, some would be better than others. Instead, the largest issue would be powering the gun and keeping it intact for more than a couple of minutes. Difficult, but theoretically doable.

  Besides, making an experimental and heretofore unusable high-tech weapon would be quite the propaganda coup, also showing that we were not a bunch of fossils, well, they, weren’t, at any rate.

  As for the constant portalling across the Atlantic, that would be perfectly doable now that I was above Level 40. I had 8 daily portals, and could target them via [Ambassador’s Instinct] at a range of 800 km.

  Now, testing had revealed said that targetting worked only for diplomat reasons, such as dropping off or picking up allies and foreign dignitaries, no amount of self-deception had been able to convince me that teleporting to a Malorcan beach was a diplomatic action, but it was still a lot more flexible than my initial assumption of “emergencies only.”

  I eventually made my way to a newly excavated and reinforced magic training room, while Dietrich and Ogier went to talk to Charlemagne and Mia went for a walk outside. Straight up the rock wall, if her previous recreational activities were anything to go by.

  Also …

  [Courtmage of Neutrality Lv. 41 -> Courtmage of Neutrality 42]

  [Skill boost gained]

  ***

  President Lane

  So, that was over and done with. For once, without issues.

  Buildings repaired, confidence in the government as repaired as it could be, ancients not offended.

  Which he was extra glad of, considering just how powerful they’d proven themselves to be, even the non-combat powers were impressive beyond belief.

  The White House had been repaired so thoroughly that Lane and his people had returned to the very coffee cups they’d abandoned when they’d evacuated. The coffee was cold now, granted, but it had been there.

  They could just go right back to the way they were. Endless meetings, briefings, and strategy discussions.

  This, in particular, was a briefing.

  “As we all know, two days ago, a Nation Boss spawned in the National Mall, forming from the dirt in the parkland, this time. It held six ‘cores,’ reinforced objects that act as a combination of both the creature’s heart and brain, while all need to be destroyed to achieve victory, each destroyed core will reduce the monster’s physical abilities.

  “The ‘Rebellion’s Legacy’ was approximately …”

  “We know what happened,” Lane interrupted. “Some kind of supernatural force has decided to hand out superpowers while generating monsters, there are going to be more Nation Bosses in the next wave in a week, might be three, might be four, depending on if the pattern is doubling the previous number or increasing it by one, we don’t have enough information on it. And unless something major has changed in the last five minutes, we can’t predict where the next set of Nation Bosses will show up.”

  Lane paused to look around.

  “Is that an accurate summation of what you think the future holds?”

  He was greeted by several seconds of silence.

  “We might have to face World Bosses down the line, maybe one or two stages in between,” a younger analyst finally spoke up, then added “But we can’t predict how strong those are going to be either.”

  Lane grimaced and nodded. So there was that.

  “What I need from you right now is not a complete analysis of what happened. I need to know what could have happened. How could we have defeated that Nation Boss without help, what could we have changed in the situation that occurred, and what could we have changed at the start of this to change what we ended up with? So, how long do you need?”

  What he needed was a plan, or plans, that could be put into action, not an incredibly broad knowledgebase that nevertheless paled in comparison to the experts.

  Besides, he’d read the reports already, weight, weaknesses, mass, size, reach … unfortunately, he simply did not have the luxury of unlimited time to have the exact same information relayed verbally, only in a slightly more detailed fashion. There was simply too much to do … as was promptly proven, when it took a mere five seconds for yet another issue that required his attention to be revealed.

  For the President of the United States, cutting a meeting short rarely resulted in free time.

  ***

  The next day, for once, Lane wasn’t the most exhausted person in the situation room. Granted, most people around him rarely got much sleep either, but it was still more than him.

  Today, however, he was the only one who’d gotten more than four hours of sleep, excluding perhaps the secret service agents guarding the door. They had enough colleagues to cycle through, which allowed individual members to get their rest.

  Oh, two presidents in times of crisis, wouldn’t that be nice? One to always get a full night’s sleep while the other could deal with the crisis, and when one got too tired to make rational decisions, the other could take over.

  You know what? That was actually a good idea … it was only when Lane had already opened his mouth to make the suggestion that he realized that was the sleep deprivation talking.

  Instead, he simply spoke a single word.

  “Coffee.”

  Though he’d nearly asked if anyone could find the recipe for and make some original Coca-Cola instead. You know, when the lemonade had still contained cocaine. He’d never done any, but right now, in his still sleep-addled mind, that also sounded like a good idea.

  He sighed.

  “After this meeting, I’m going to take a nap,” Lane finally declared, then turned to the cadre of analysts, the closest thing to System “experts” the world had, to report their findings. He wasn’t going to be any less useless for being asleep, rather than present and dead tired, emphasis on “dead.”

  The new report wound up not being substantially more interesting than the previous one, still rehashing the same points of “Nation Bosses are strong,” “cores are weak points,” and “we couldn’t do much,” but there was one thing that really drew his attention.

  “Are you saying that our standard tactics are actually hurting the leveling process?” Lane asked, just to reassure himself that he’d heard correctly.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” the analyst confirmed. “Everyone eighteen years of age or older has access to the System, and gained at least some Levels. Nationally, we have an average Level of 13, and not counting those who only just became adults, a minimum Level of 4.

  “However, based on the information that Level 35 is a Class Evolution threshold, at least one ancient has reached it. However, based on the number of suspected and confirmed Skills, we believe them to be substantially higher than that.

  “The thing that separates them from others is the fact that they stood out in history, their stories resonating across centuries or millennia. The things that made them impressive weren’t being a part of a group of people which achieved something grand, but doing something grand. Either by themselves, or as leaders.

  “In addition, we have data on who we believe to be the most powerful present-day humans. Tristan and Mia Vogt. They have been very much in the center of the action since day one, and reached a considerable degree of power. We have much more data on her combat power than her brother’s, but is, at the bare minimum, capable of reshaping several city blocks worth of buildings in less than a second.

  “Conversely, our soldiers fight as units, engaging with sufficient force to bring down a foe without risk whenever possible, using heavy or guided weaponry. In addition, it is always the closest sufficiently equipped unit that engages, which spreads out the victories and therefore Levels even further.

  “This minimizes the risk of injury or death, but also …”

  Basically, by playing it safe, they’d sacrificed power gains. Well, that was unfortunate.

  “And your suggestion is to send people to, what, fight monsters with their bare hands so that the survivors can gain their superpowers?” General Collins asked, rather acerbically.

  “I believe we could create special units, drawing from existing special forces, and attempt to have them engage as many foes as possible without risking burnout. Perhaps withdrawing and leaving enemies for them in areas clear of civilians and important infrastructure could aid that?” Lane suggested after a long moment.

  If the people could bear it, sending them into the proverbial crucible until they came out as diamonds wasn’t quite as inhumane as it sounded … yeah he was mixing his metaphors. It seemed the coffee had stopped working.

  “We know for a fact that there is a teachable component to magic …” another analyst suggested.

  “I’ll ask our ambassador in Berlin to ask about that,” Lane announced after stifling a yawn. Once this entire affair was done, he might wind up owing the Europeans his firstborn, but the United States would still be here. That was what mattered.

  He yawned again, this time utterly failing to cover it. He did move his hand to cover his mouth … a full five seconds after he’d already closed his mouth again.

  Yes, bed, important, go to it … urgh, still another twenty minutes of meeting to go, based on glancing at the clock on the wall. Oh, balls …