Nate made a couple of pizzas for dinner and cooked a few steaks for Aura. While they waited for his parents to get back, he read the paper his mother had given him about beast companions. There were indeed a few different ways touched upon briefly in the paper. One method saw the cultivator using energy skills to better communicate with animals, and therefore beasts. Another was the use of collars and bracelets, which accomplished something similar, except through a slightly more forced connection.

Most of the methods the paper touched on were ones that didn’t force the beast companion into servitude.

Since he didn’t have the bracelet and collar, items that were fairly costly as they were runed, nor did he posses the energy skill to talk with animals. He had to go with an option that was, in his opinion, a little more out there on the believability scale. He had heard plenty of stories of animals on OE that adopted people and followed them for hours, sometimes even home, but those were usually semi-domesticated cats and dogs.

People were supposed to believe that Aura had more or less adopted him during their last expedition. That he and her had bonded as a result.

It seemed unbelievable to him, but apparently, it was one of the more common ways to get a beast companion. Not that they were common by any means.

It was good information to have, and he put it in his storage to review again later.

With that completed, he pulled up the screens for the first dungeon and began working on his meditation art. After everything that had happened that day, he was feeling a definite pressure to integrate the meditation art into his meditation model.

There were simply a lot of steps involved in the process if he wanted to do it right. Which he did, doing it wrong, would only lead to complications down the road.

At least he was still able to cultivate without it, just at a much slower pace and without all the benefits it would bring.

For the moment, at least he was done working on the first stanza. It still had a couple of words that were in yellow, indicating that they weren’t quite right. However, he wasn’t sure what to replace them with, and was eager to move on to the second stanza. So, that is exactly what he did. The first stanza, he would leave the way it was for now. Hopefully, he would get some insight into it in the future. But he wasn’t going to stress about it when there was so much more that needed to be fixed.

There were many more stanzas that he needed to work through before he could even think of fully integrating it. That didn’t mean it wasn’t affecting his meditation model though. It was, and his cultivating speed saw a resulting increase.

Nate had been keeping an eye on the cultivators inside the dungeon while he’d been working on everything. To say he was impressed with them would be giving them far too much credit. At some point in the last few hours, hundreds of cultivators had begun arriving in waves. Groups of three and five had been trickling in. Then it would slow down for a period and begin to pick up again.

At least that was the impression Nate was getting. The amount he was able to see outside the dungeon was still limited, after all.

He was interested in where they were all coming from, but he also knew he wouldn’t be getting any answers. It just seemed ridiculous to think that all these cultivators had come from one city. However, if they were coming from multiple cities, and not just one, then that meant something else entirely.

Nate was under the impression that the higher-ups of the city believed this attack, if you would, on their city was the result of a single other close city. If you combined what he was seeing with his own thoughts, then that seemed highly unlikely.

He still didn’t understand why the other cities had done this, but he was more concerned with how quickly they had acted. The dungeon hadn’t been around for that long, and yet a concerted effort had already been made to attack another city over it.

That was going to be annoying in the future. He just knew it.

The front door finally opened a little past eight in the evening to reveal both of his parents. His mom simply looked exhausted, with both of her arm’s trembling. The fingers on her dominant hand were twitching spastically with every beat of her heart.

Next to her, his father was covered in cuts and mud that had been mixed together with blood.

Nate pointed to the garage. “Go in there and wash off with the hose. Leave your equipment on the floor. I’ll go get you some clean clothes to change into.”

Nina shook her head tiredly and held up the bracelet. “There’s no need. We were prepared to go on our expedition, remember? We have everything we need in here.”

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Nate pulled out a healing pill for his father and handed it to him. “Alright, well, pizza is in the kitchen. I’ll clean up the equipment while you both are eating.”

***

“How was it looking when you left?” He asked after he had cleaned their weapons and other equipment. His father’s armor and the rest of their clothes were now going through the wash.

“Endless,” His mother replied, around a mouthful of reheated pizza. “The night is only going to make things worse. They were saving all the cultivators with skills and abilities that help them see or operate in the night for when it got dark.” She shook her head. “But there just aren’t enough of them. The rest will just be firing their arrows blindly into the darkness.”

“Do you think the city is going to fall or be overrun?” Nate wondered softly.

“We’ll see in the morning,” Niall replied, barely eating. Unlike his wife, he had barely touched his food. “It will all depend on how the wall looks in the morning.”

“So, should I start packing everything in the house into my storage then, or wait until morning?”

His mom flicked a limp onion at him but seemed intrigued by the idea none-the-less.

“Let’s hold off on doing that for now, but be prepared to shove all the more valuable and useful items in that you can.”

He nodded and hesitated before glancing at Aura and then at his parents. “About how many cultivators would you say each city can typically spare from their defenses?”

Niall scratched his arm, where the pink of new skin could still be seen. “It’s hard to say. Most cities have similar setups to our own, but not all of them, wherein cultivators without other prospects or desires can enroll in the military or city-guard. For the most part, they are responsible for the safety of the city. It is only when disasters like this happen that the rest of us get called up. So really, as long as their military/city-guard are still in place, they would be fine. Why?”

In other words, it wasn’t completely out of the realm of possibly that all those cultivators he had seen were from one city then.

“Aura saw hundreds of cultivators at the structure in the dimensional zone.” He said, putting the source of the information at her paws.

Both of his parents cursed at that revelation.

“You had already thought what that might mean before you told us,” Nina said confidently, the pizza crust dangling from her fingers.

Nate nodded. “I’d had a few thoughts on the matter, but I wasn’t sure how accurate my information was. I was originally thinking that there were multiple cities involved in this attack because of how many cultivators there were. Now, I’m not so sure,”

His father groaned and rubbed at his tired face. “It’s above our ability to influence, regardless. We can’t exactly tell anyone this information, or act on it in any way.”

“True, but I thought it was relevant to us possibly needing to pack up the house,” Nate told them after a moment. “When is the next time we will all get called up again?”

“You will likely get called up in the morning. Your mother and I, on the other hand, will probably be left alone until the afternoon.”

Nate stood with a glance at the clock. “In that case, I think I am going to head up to bed now.”

It was far earlier than he normally went to sleep, but the day had been far more tiring than most as well.

They spent a few moments wishing each other good night, and then he and Aura went upstairs.

With a yawn, he fell onto his bed and pulled up the information for the second dungeon. He was too tired to actively work on it at the moment, however, he still wanted to see how things were going over there.

The amount of energy gathered had finally started to climb again after the first round of beginning laser technology had finished being researched. There was still more to be researched on that front, but this was enough for the moment. The red lasers were no longer sending him into the negative with their use. If he wanted to use the more powerful diodes, which he did, then he would undoubtedly need to go further down that particular research tree for them to become efficient.

Not all of the blighted elves were dying in the exit room, but the few that were escaping were looking ragged and close to death. The increased gravity combined with the frequency attack that had, by that point, gotten dialed into the most effective sound ranges was a debilitating combo.

The sound destroyed their equilibrium and then went to work on the rest of their bodies. All the while leaving them to crawl through a minefield of railgun spike launchers.

Honestly, the exit trap room had been a desperate move on his part, but it was also quite nearly the perfect trap.

That was all he wanted to see, and Nate closed the screens. For the moment, he wasn’t going to do anything with the second dungeon. Not until either something changed or a few research items had been completed. It was simply too strong for his current strength, and while his traps seemed to be managing, they were still letting roughly one in four through.

He turned his attention back to the first dungeon as Aura entered his chest. The camera screens revealed a mess of a dungeon to him, that had him shaking with rage.

The cultivators were destroying the inside of the dungeon. It was the first group that had gone through all over again. Except these cultivators had no reason for the destruction they were causing. He had removed the treasure chests earlier. That meant they weren’t getting anything from their efforts, but the pleasure one got from the act of destruction.

Plenty of the cultivators showed injuries, and a few had been killed, but they were clearly stronger than the past cultivators he had dealt with. Not to mention, there were so many of them!

They were slowly, but steadily, pushing their way through the rooms of the dungeon, and he had no idea on how to stop them.

He didn’t want to simply let them keep destroying his dungeon, but they weren’t playing fair either!

The cultivators would stay in the corridors he had designated as safe zones to launch energy skills into the rooms. Only after the inside of the rooms were in rubble, would they enter. They had been caught off guard a few times by traps that hadn’t been destroyed or that were placed in the archway. However, by and large, they were learning from their mistakes.

That was not why he had left the corridors as not trap areas, and it was really beginning to irk him.

Nate took a moment to study their energy skills and then slowly grinned as an idea came to him.