“So what else do I have to do today?” Nick asked Darleen, who was sitting up front with the driver, while texting roughly the same question to Seo-ah as he leaned back in the car seat. Even if it was technically his ride, his driver, and not even the first fancy vehicle he’d been in, he still wasn’t comfortable with the “I’m a rich kid” feel of the situation as they drove down the highway.
In his other life, he remembered having the money conversation more than once with his girlfriend, Isabelle, when she started to get paid more since she actually was a pretty solid dungeon diver. Once she got to the point of being able to cover their rent on her own, and Allen had started making enough money that Nick’s own paycheck had increased to a decent level, he had started to spend most if not all of his paychecks only on her. He’d buy her flowers, take her on dates, get her nice dungeon diving gear, and she’d started to get upset by it.
“Live within our means,” she had said. “Save money so we can retire one day with a family.” He had agreed with her, of course, but it wasn’t an easy thing to do. A few hours of overtime with mad scientist Allen just to see her smile had always felt like the right call.
“If only I had had one more day with you,” he muttered, a sense of nostalgia creeping up in his mind and leaving just as quickly. His Isabelle had died, and he wondered if he’d have spent far more nights thinking about and missing her if he hadn’t met someone amazing like Seo-ah in this life. However, there was nothing that could be done. His version of Isabelle was dead, and just like he’d learned with this timeline’s Maria, the people in the past timeline and the people in this one were two very separate entities.
His thoughts were interrupted by Darleen getting a call and then Nick’s phone blowing up a second later as several different people began to text him. Still on the phone, Darleen turned to him, eyes wide, nodding to whoever she was talking to as she addressed Nick, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but there seems to be an issue.”
“What’s going on?” Nick asked Darleen as he opened up his phone and began to scroll through the texts. There were a dozen of them between Seo-ah, Spencer, Reginald, and the others as they were all texting him roughly the same thing: “Get back to the rift. Now.”
“It seems the agency is going to try to seize the new dungeon early,” Darleen explained. “It looks like we don’t have a lot of time before they hire a larger guild from upstate to come handle and secure the portal. They’re going to quarantine it, no one in or out.”
This is so dumb and frustrating! Nick thought. Didn’t we already deal with this? Didn’t we stall it out? Weren’t we going to seize the place and then use a sort of squatter’s rights to handle it?!
Nick wanted to vent, but the only people in the car weren’t at fault, so he kept his anger in check as he looked down at his phone, reading roughly the same information from the others. Except, among all the messages, there was one from someone he wouldn’t expect to text him: Kaylee.
He opened it up and was greeted with a message that didn’t look like the others: “Malcolm says the DOA is going to try to seize the portal because they need to restore public opinion. That if you’re really Daedelus, then you need to figure a way to help them save face, or no matter how many people we send through and tie together with us in this venture, they’ll still take the portal.”
Nick frowned for a moment. He didn’t understand how Malcolm, whom he’d only met today, knew what he knew, but the man was right. The DOA had one mission: stop people, the regular civilians, from getting hurt. They had failed that mission, horribly, and now they were going to crucify Nick’s organization on the cross of bureaucracy, flexing their authority in order to compensate for their inadequacy.
Alright, their idea is not wrong. Hopping through then, we need to put pressure on them, Nick thought, messaging Seo-ah to bust out the “apocalypse notes” he’d written down with her the moment he’d had her trust. He then went over all the important happenings from the future just in case they might have forgotten something and screenshotted the next events in the Apocalypse.
“What are you doing, sir?” Darleen asked, watching him hard at work on his phone.
“I’m going to make an announcement as Daedalus. If everyone knows I’m Daedalus, I might as well start flexing my name and my powers,” Nick told her as he read through the items listed in the folder.
There were two sets of events that were supposed to occur next. One, if he went chronologically and just based things off the date, was that there were two dungeon breaks that were going to occur this week in Canada. The second, if he went based on the order of events in his original life, was that after the rift opened up in Houston, where it had occurred in his first timeline, several of the dungeons around it would grow a lot stronger. What was once an easy walk in the park for lower-level guilds would become unmanageable.
To make matters worse, the four dungeons closest to the rift in his last life exploded in horrible breaks, shattering and flooding the city with hundreds of monsters, as if adding insult to injury following the already devastating rift break.
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At that point, it had been too late to do anything. Houston had already fallen, and those breaks were basically nails in the city’s coffin . . . but now, there was a chance. Not only had the cultists created the rift years earlier, they’d moved the location of the rift to his city. If he pulled out a map and drew a circle around the rift, he would be able to guess which dungeons would explode, and he would be able to use that prediction to pull the DOA off of his back, focusing them on another issue instead.
Drawing out a circle with his finger on the phone, he noted the dungeon closest to this timeline’s rift: the mechrophage dungeon. It was a low-level dungeon that was considered among the easier ones simply because the monsters got stronger the more they killed, but there was never anything for them to kill. They never got a chance to scale up and grow powerful. But if there was a dungeon break, there would be plenty of living creatures for the mechrophages to feast on.
“Alright, this is the one,” Nick muttered to himself as he pointed at the dungeon. The guild guarding it was incredibly small, so they wouldn’t be able to handle it on their own. If the dungeon broke just like Nick said it was going to, then when he picked two or three more, it’d force the DOA to divert its resources, focus attention to those dungeons, and give him the breathing space he desperately needed to operate on the other side of the rift.
The only thing was that he wasn’t positive it would explode. He could only make an educated guess based on how the system worked in his last life, with the difference in this timeline, he was in new territory.
“What’s ‘the one’?” Darleen asked, looking back to Nick, who was still on his phone, screenshotting the map and moving to the website he ran as Daedalus.
“The dungeon that’s going to break next. It’s going to be the mechrophage one,” Nick told her, trying to be confident about it. If it wasn’t the mechrophage dungeon, he was going to be in a lot of trouble.
What if the cultists were the reason the other dungeons broke near the rift in the last life, like with the Red Death? Nick’s eyes opened wide. That would put a stick in his spokes. Well, it’s not like they wouldn’t try again in this timeline, right?
He finished typing up the warning. If he let those cultist bastards know that he was going to be there to defend the dungeon break, there was a good chance they might not even set that one off. They might move to a different one if they were the actual cause.
It was a tough call, and everything he was doing was a gamble, but as he hit the send button, he assured himself it was the right one. This would either be the first time Daedalus was wrong, or the DOA would be forced to buckle as the dungeon calamities spread outward, cracking and shattering the portals across the city in succession.
“Alright, Darleen, swing by the volunteer site. We need to pick up Seo-ah and the others and head to the mechrophage dungeon,” Nick told his driver. “We have robots to kill and people to save.”
“Yes, sir,” Darleen said with a smile as she looked over at the driver, who could obviously hear Nick. The two nodded. “And might I add, I think your grandfather would be very proud of you. He would always brag when you were younger that you were a talented knight. That one day, if you didn’t get caught up in the succession war, you’d become one of the best in the city.”
“When I was younger?” Nick blinked. “You can’t be that much older than I am.”
“Not that much older, sir,” Darleen said. “But I have been working for the family since I was first brought back from the orphanage. I was even allowed to finally meet and directly work with your grandfather when I graduated summa cum laude.”
“Woah, really? The orphanage? I always thought you fought it out with a dozen other secretaries to get the position,” Nick replied, a little shocked Darleen was a handpicked company protegee.
“Both can be true. In order to get the opportunity to join your grandfather’s business at a young age, I did indeed have to prove myself against a thousand other candidates,” she said, her voice a little flat, but her face not able to fully hide the small pride she had as she spoke. “After that, of course, your grandfather gave me the education, resources, and training I needed.”
“I . . . I see . . .” Nick leaned back in his chair. “That’s really impressive of you,” he quickly added, not wanting to denigrate her actually incredible accomplishments.
“Thank you for saying that,” Darleen replied, silence filling the car afterward as they drove to pick Seo-ah and the others up for the mechrophage dungeon.
The revelation only left a slightly sour taste in his mouth as he thought about how his grandfather barely even talked to him, treated him like he was invisible half the time, and all the while he was dedicating so much of his time and energy to someone else.
No, he was a monster. I shouldn’t be jealous of his time, Nick told himself as he took a deep breath and tried to relax for a second.
He didn’t even have to wait long before his thread about the mechrophage dungeon blew up. While most people seemed to be saying things like “The Great DAEDALUS HAS SPOKEN!” or “ANOTHER PREDICTION FROM GOD!” there was more than one detractor. People posted things such as “What, failed to predict the rift, so now you’re trying to make up for it?” and “If you really know what’s going to happen, why didn’t you say something about the break last night?”
It was clear that people were furious he hadn’t given them warning about the catastrophe that was the rift break, but in his defense, he had no idea it would occur. It was even the first time he wasn’t right there when something broke to prevent it from spiraling out of control.
He couldn’t blame them either. While the city had stood firm, resilient against the onslaught, he knew a lot of people would be haunted for years to come, having had to hide in the subway, praying for their lives, fleeing burning and destroyed buildings, running from young vulpes that were leaving icy destruction in their wake while at the same time trying to avoid being caught by the flying brigades of dragonborn hunting them across their own city. Watching their family and loved ones die in the tragedy.
Even if Nick and the mercs and everyone had done their best to control the situation, the damage had been far greater than anything any city had gone through before. It was enough to leave a scar across humanity, so Nick didn’t blame the people for being this angry with him.
He thought for a minute about replying to all the hate but decided instead to just do nothing. His actions and his actions alone would clear his name. This was a gamble he couldn’t lose, as the fate of the entire realm depended on him securing the world beyond the rift, and that first step started with this.