Aura’s help was integral in finding people amongst the collapsed buildings. Her sensitive ears and nose mixed with her ability to communicate made it relatively easy for them to find people who needed help.

  Each one they saved, they sent on their way, either walking or in whichever car they could find nearby with keys.

  In that fashion, they continued to press on for several hours before deciding it was time to turn around and head back. They had encountered a few weaker beasts, but thankfully nothing that they couldn’t handle.

  “How many people do you think their estate can actually hold?” Nate asked, as they were heading back hours later.

  “It depends on how comfortable people want to be,” His dad replied grimly.

  If they went with standing room only, then a lot of people could be stuffed inside the estate walls. They wouldn’t be comfortable, but they would be safe, at least for a while longer. On the other hand, if they went for something that used a little bit more room… The number of people they could fit inside would be a quarter they would have otherwise been able to.

  It was an interesting problem, comfort, versus helping others. Of course, in the end, it was still up to the Chrightons and no one else.

  At the estate, the gates were up, and the guards were welcoming a stream of people inside and showing them where to go. The maids, gardeners, and various other people who worked about the estate had momentarily abandoned their other duties in order to curb the madness.

  The Holmes pulled off to the side near the gate and offered their help to the guards there. They were initially hesitant when they saw the SUV pulling over, only to be relieved when Nina and Niall stepped out. Nate slipped into the driver’s seat and drove the rest of the way up to the house.

  Once there, he found that they were the first back, and quickly followed his parent’s example by making himself useful. Joining up with a few maids who had seen him with Angie and Lindsay the night before, he and Aura helped corral the incoming people.

  It was madness, and they all knew that the only reason this might work was because the beasts were ignoring them. Hopefully, that was something that would continue.

  Nate wasn’t sure how many people there were inside the walls of the Chrighton estate as dusk began to fall. However, he knew it numbered well into the thousands. Countless cars lined the road leading up to their driveway, and people had needed to be assigned to move them farther down. Too many people had parked them haphazardly and abandoned the vehicles in their rush to safety.

  Aura was asleep on Nate’s feet as he relaxed on a couch. His feet were aching from the constant standing and back and forth. It was different from the exercise he had grown used to in the dungeon or on expeditions. Simply standing, with short bursts of motion, somehow took a lot more energy out of you.

  “How do you think we did?” He asked Angie, who had collapsed into a nearby chair with a groan.

  After returning to the house, both Angie and Lindsay had set about helping in the same manner he had been. Nate and Angie had already finished their showers while Lindsay was still in hers.

  Wet, semi-curled ringlets clung to Angie’s face. It was something that he hadn’t really noticed about her hair before that moment. In its dry state, there was only a slight curl to her hair, one that apparently became far more pronounced when it was wet.

  “I don’t know about how you or Lindsay did, but I doubt my parents and I covered more than a few square miles total.” She brushed the wet hair off her cheek and stared up at the ceiling. “People are still trickling in even now, but there is only so much room available. Not to mention resources.”

  He nodded. “If this continues for more than a couple of days, we’re going to be in trouble.”

  Silence took over the room as they were both lost in their own thoughts for several minutes.

  “Hey, have your parents decided what they are going to do yet?” Nate asked her.

  “Not that I know of. I think they’re waiting to see just how bad the damage here really is before deciding. There are certain advantages to being part of a city’s rebuilding efforts. That is only if they decide it is worth it for them. My family is made up of merchants, not politicians. We’ve never really had the desire to enter that particular space, either.”

  “Practical. Can’t fault them for that. Family comes first. Helping others is all well and good, but if it starts to affect your own family, then there is a problem.”

  “Some would call that a selfish way of thinking,” She pointed out.

  He shrugged. “I’m fine with that label. It is an inherently selfish way of thinking. However, it’s also just the way I am. My family and friends come first always. I’ll help others, but once that help starts to become detrimental to those who I actually care about, it’s gone. I’m not some paragon of virtue who believes the world should conform to my own view of righteousness. Those sorts of people are simply na?ve and are in for a very rude awakening at some point in their lives.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Nate shook his head and looked at her. “Sorry, for whatever reason, that’s a subject that always seems to annoy me when people bring it up.”

  “It’s fine. I can’t say that I am as passionate on the subject as you are, but I have similar feelings on the matter.” She stood and walked over to the window. Her eyes taking in the masses of people lying in the grass outside her house. “Then again, seeing them suffering in person is different from what I had always imagined it to be. So, now I have no actual idea how I would react.”

  Lindsay walked in as they were talking, a towel wrapped around her head. “What are we talking about?”

  “The futility of acting like a hero, and what we think our families plan to do in the future,” Angie told her, glancing away from the window.

  “That sounds like a heavy topic for a nighttime discussion, but okay.” She plopped down on the nearby couch. “I think my parents are hoping yours will want to stay. The rest of my brothers and sisters have all been called home. Landon being here was a nice coincidence, but it set certain ideas in motion in my parent’s minds. The rest of my siblings aren’t going to be so quick to forgive him for it.”

  “Ugh, can this city even really be fixed?” Nate asked. “Those beasts are still out there rampaging through the place. Just thinking of all the work involved is making me dizzy, and the cost…”

  “Luckily, that is something we don’t need to worry about. We’re still in school…” Angie trailed off, as she transitioned to biting her lower lip. “Hmm, you remember how we were talking about graduating early before? This might be one of those times where the school could conceivably toss us the remaining energy skills we need to graduate.”

  They each let that thought sink in for several moments. There was nothing they could do either way, but having the choice taken from them didn’t sit right with the group.

  “Sounds to me like we should get to work on evolving our skills, and doing everything we can with our meditation arts.”

  “If only it was that easy,” Lindsay muttered as they all settled around the table to pick up where they had left off the night before.

  Nate had learned that their version of basic ties differed from his own, which wasn’t too much of a surprise. The one that Brick Jones was using had been evolved multiple times by his own admission before he noticed it having an effect like the one Nate had pointed out to him.

  It was hard to say for sure, but he believed that his dimensional affinity or the wrist computer was having an effect on the energy skill. More than likely his affinity than the computer in this case, at least to his own thinking. Regardless, there was no way to know for sure.

  What that meant for the girls, is that they needed to evolve the basic ties skills at least once. If they focused on the direction they wanted it to go, then that one time might even be enough.

  However, that didn’t mean that they were left hanging in the dark during this time. When Brick Jones had given them the energy skills for basic ties, he had also presented them both with revised versions of their meditation arts. Well, calling them ‘revised’ was being generous. All they were was the original meditation arts they had learned, with the red and yellow words marked in each stanza.

  They had to work everything out from there on their own. Unfortunately, without his help, neither girl was able to tell if the words they were choosing were worse or better than the originals. Nate’s version of basic ties only gave him information as if the meditation art was for him, not someone else. Which meant his help was useless as well. All they could do was work their way through the red words and hope they didn’t make anything worse.

  There was a certain amount of intuition and feeling involved with the process they had found. It kept them from making too egregious of mistakes.

  As they were close to shutting down for the night, the wall around the estate shuddered.

  One of the beasts had found them at last.

  The people outside screamed, and more than a few began to cry. There were also many who grabbed their nearby weapons and hurried to the wall. They might not be the strongest cultivators in the area, but they were smart enough to understand that this was their last stand.

  The proverbial Alamo.

  Aura ran alongside the cart that took the group to the wall where the attack originated. It wasn’t near the wall, but off to the side, closer to the main wall of the city. It was a beast that had wandered in recently instead of one that had spent the entire day tearing through buildings.

  That was both good and bad news. That meant it was fresh, and not tired from the effort it had been expending all day. It also meant it was probably not as powerful as the rest of the beasts in the city.

  If they were right, then this was the best-case scenario for the estate. A beast corpse would discourage the others from attacking them, while they would get away with only light damage.

  Standing atop the wall, they found their parents already looking down at the beast attacking the wall.

  “Is that a goat?” Nate wondered, sure that his eyes were playing a trick on him.

  Everyone nodded, as the beast backed up to take another ramming pass at the wall. It lowered its horned head and charged, only to bounce away when it connected a second later. The section of wall they were standing on trembled, but the impact was noticeably weaker than the hits from before.

  The large goat shook its head, bleated in frustration, and backed up even further than before.

  “I think it has already given itself some brain damage,” Niall said blandly. “I don’t think it was expecting the wall to be this hard.”

  Aden scoffed. “It had better be. I paid for it to be packed down, even more than the wall around the city. At this point, concrete can’t compare to it. Imagine this entire wall is a block of solid steel, and you’re somewhere on the right track.”

  Lindsay’s mother glared at him. “Great, we have you to blame for the fall of the city, then. If the people who worked on your wall had been where they were supposed to be on the city wall, then none of this might have happened.”

  James put a hand on his wife’s shoulder and shook his head. “That’s not being fair, and you know it.”

  She ground her teeth together and turned away from them.

  “The wall around the city had already been compromised when we started on ours,” Trissa told them quietly, still watching the goat torment itself. “And while you’re not wrong, you’re also not entirely correct, either. We did keep them from working on the wall around the city, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The city never had enough earth compactors to begin with. They had maybe a thousand people doing a job that required well over a five-thousand minimum during normal operations. The force was beyond barebones, in other words.”

  “It was almost always destined to fall if anything ever cracked it,” Aden told them as the goat shook its head again, a glow beginning to encompass its horns.

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