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In the late morning of the Second Sunday of January, a week and a half after the New Year, Rowan and Cora were having breakfast. For no good reason, Papa Allinder, the only other person around, was offering his unrequited advice on every occasion.
“Those mysterious Neeks, the ones eluding you, are MIT, right? I know a guy or two in—"
"A guy or two in what?" Rowan sighed, as he wanted mainly to enjoy his omelet undisturbed.
"In MIT, son, MIT. I can call them to point us in the right direction.”
“Viscardi’s already on it,” Rowan said.
“The name sounds familiar…”
“The mobster I asked to watch for your safety. Runs Vegas.”
“Ah, that's why. So, are you questing or something today?"
"We'll scout some areas," Cora said.
"Can I join?” Papa Allinder asked immediately. “I’m level twenty now.”
"How on Earth did you get to twenty so fast?" Rowan asked.
"Snemc made be spar in the Arena a lot, against their children, and clear their sewers from rats. Got seven free APs from that."
“How high are you on Constitution?”
“Twenty-five, son. For the rest, I put four points in Intelligence to reach fifty, and three in Strength. I want to be able to fight if it comes to that.”
“I don’t want you to fight, Papa. Remember when that junkie tried to mug us, and you tried to fight back, tripped, and broke your nose on the wall? And in the end, I had to stab that guy in the thigh with his own knife because he tried to take your shoes while you were down?”
“Yeah… you were a tough kid. You were what, twelve?”
“Thirteen. Happy memories.”
“So, can I come?”
"Show me your stats first. Think: share my stats with Rowan."
"Err… if you insist…"
Papa Allinder, age: 78, class Sage (Epic): Level 20
2 free APs in INT, WILL, and CHA every ten levels
STR: 15 / CON: 25 / DEX: 12 / INT: 50 / WIL: 30 / CHA: 24
Constitution Perk, Threshold 1: Tough Cookie. +25% all physical resistances, +25% to Natural Regeneration (HP)
Intelligence Perk: Threshold 1: Sage Means Mage. Your encyclopedic knowledge helps you understand the nature of Magic. Enhanced Mana Manipulation unlocked. Both INT and CHA contribute to your Mana Pool (Stat Value x10). You can learn and use a large variety of spells.
Intelligence Perk: Threshold 2: Ancestral Wisdom. Somewhere down the line, one of your ancestors might have been an Elf or a Witch. Strong affinity to Elemental Magic.
Oh, so that's why I have Elemental Magic, because of my ancestors? I bet it was that old hag, back in Sweden, Aunt Martha or something. Definitely a witch, Rowan thought before reading the last Perk.
Will Perk, Threshold 1: Parenthood's Lessons. Your last two decades have been an uphill battle to properly educate your most stubborn son. But educating someone is educating yourself. Your Will is strong enough to use Raw Mana without fully processing it into your Mana Pool first. You can cast spells almost instantly and for a fraction of the cost, but their power is half of that of a normal spell.
I'm NOT stubborn, Papa is. Pestering me with all that shit about going to College and stuff… Never mind…
“It looks OK. You promise to behave, and stay back if I say so?” Rowan sighed and said.
“Cross my heart.”
“Fine. Who’s free today, Cora?”
“Grace is busy, I know that much. And I just remembered, Isla’s working too. I can be the ranged DPS, you can be the melee, Papa can heal… you can heal, right?”
“Sure.”
“So we need only a tank… moment, checking on the LFG app…" Cora said, taking out her smartphone. "There’s a Paladin free. I like Paladins.”
“It’s a good class?” Rowan asked.
“Wonderful tank, can sustain themselves, and also be a secondary Healer.”
“Perfect. Papa’s inexperienced for now. OK, then, send an invite to that guy, or girl, and meet in the Town Square. Take a look at the grid and tell me what we have left.”
“Mercer County is virgin ground, we can poke around there. If not, maybe west of Goblin town. The portals for both locations can get us close enough.”
“Sorry, but… have you searched near the County?” Papa Allinder looked at Cora's phone, over his glasses. “There are a few areas marked unexplored.”
Rowan scratched his head. “I forgot about those… I thought the secondary teams covered those.”
Cora half-shrugged. “Obviously, they didn’t. Maybe they thought it was less likely to find cores so close to home. Why don’t we search the area around the battlefield first?”
“OK. I’ll drive.”
"Our Town Core can teleport us there from the portal hub now. The Butler and I agreed to upgrade the portal perk a bit,” Cora said.
“OK, baby. Text the Paladin to meet us in the Town Square.”
----------------------------------------
Thirty minutes later, after they changed into hiking clothes, they arrived at the Portal Hub. A broad-shouldered man in his early forties was waiting for them, dressed in full armor, a mixture of tactical body armor and medieval plate, with the visor of his helmet raised. A tower shield and a spear completed the attire.
“I’m Hubert,” the man nodded a short salute. “Let’s go, I'm in a little hurry. I’m booked for Bounty Hunting in the afternoon.”
"Bounty hunting?" Papa Allinder asked. His eyes were inspecting the buildings around with lively interest. "I could move my shop here… this looks nice."
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"C'mon, Papa! I told you like a dozen times you can move your shop here," Rowan erupted, facepalming. "We even visited this place before."
"At night," his father replied curtly. "What can you see at night, I ask you? Now—"
"To reply to your question," Cora interjected, stepping in between the two to break the quarrel in its crib, "Rowan has invented a lot of quirky… and funny PR moves. It increased his popularity immensely, in or out of the County. For a moderate fee, we're offering, Bounty Hunting services for the adjacent counties and states, to preserve peace and order. We also gain a lot of money from the Reality TV show following our teams, and from betting, on who will live or die. Our teams are not soft-handed."
"Of course, we aren't," Paladin Hubert nodded. "Sending a criminal to the maker is mercy and justice."
"But this is like the inquisition," Papa Allinder protested, waving his hands.
Rowan put a hand on his shoulder, in a calming gesture. "It's just the new ways of the world. We won't pamper criminals, and that's that. It helps everybody. Now, the question is where to open the fucking portal. Butler, what was the place where the battle took place?
[The Butler to Team Allinder]: Opening a preset gate for Parsons, Tucker County, You’ll exit on the side of the road, please take care before crossing the street.
The difference in light, the snow around amplifying it, dazed them for a second. A car swerved to avoid them, even if they were well clear of the road. Rowan could see in the driver’s eyes the swear the man didn’t dare to say aloud.
“Papa, you’re a genius,” Cora exclaimed. “I have a signal, just a couple of miles from here.”
“OK, let’s run,” Rowan said.
“Err… son? I’m almost eighty, remember?”
“Yes, but your new stats will make you as good as new, as long you train. Have you trained, at all?”
“Does bicycle rides with Lizzie count?”
“I’ll fly with him. Follow me, and use the mini-map,” Cora said. She activated her suit, picked Rowan’s father in a princess carry, and jumped up. Rowan and the Paladin started to run directly west. After passing some fields, they entered the forest and the hills.
“For the record, there is only one leader in the party when we fight, and that's me,” the Paladin said once they were alone. “Do what I say, when I say, or you can tank and heal yourself. My liege,” the man added in an obvious sarcastic tone.
“Let me guess: you didn’t vote for me and wish Randolph County become a Republic.”
“No, I did vote for you and wish you act like proper nobility. Not going for a shamanistic wedding, spitting on the ground, and smoking weed, for instance.”
“Oh, I remember you now. You’re one of the priests in town… Which one?”
“The one who took a vow of celibacy.”
“Buddhist?”
“Catholic,” the man hissed.
There was no friendship lost there, that much was clear. “I see… I bet you're upset I exiled your boss to Avignon again."
"That asshole is not my boss," Hubert snorted, skipping a step and almost falling. "I'm Old Church. You should redo your ceremonies with us."
"So you condone polyamory now?”
“It’s the lesser evil… I take confessions before every mass, by the way. About following my lead, I was serious. We, the peasants, do thrice the work you do. I’m level eighty and good at my job.”
“Whatever…”
But as they approached the coordinates, the situation was different than what they expected. At the closest end of a small clearing, Cora and Papa Allinder were examining a piece of paper, duck-taped on a wooden pole. When they approached, the Nekojin forwarded it to Rowan. It had a few words on it: We, the Noerks, have bin hier and biet u 2 ze core. As a signature, there was a drawn hand showing the pinkie finger.
“You have Norvegians Awakened around here?” Papa Allinder asked. “Or Dutch? This sounds like Dutch.”
“Somebody tries to frame the Neeks, but this is not written by them,” the Paladin said. “They’re college students, they can’t write this bad. It’s the Russians.”
“Could be,” Papa Allinder said. “The spelling points to someone used to a phonetic alphabet."
Rowan snorted. “Any Human knows it’s the middle finger, not the pinkie. This was written by an alien. I bet on the Mercs. They did it to get revenge for Goblin Town. How old is it, Cora?”
“The paper is protected by a spell, so I can’t tell… but the core residual signal is strong. A couple of days?”
“They profited we were having a holiday, and got cores while we were partying,” Rowan’s father said.
“Fuck… OK, lesson learned. Someone has to work during the holidays too.”
The priest rolled his eyes. “Only if not against their religion. It’s in the law.”
“Of course, your sanctimoniousity. So, we call it quits for the day?”
“C’mon, son, give your Papa a few levels. What if we search in that radioactive area? We’re immune, right?”
“Cora?”
“We two certainly are, and I’d bet for Mister Paladin too, but Papa is only first threshold in Constitution… Let’s teleport back to town, run to the border, and I’ll scan the levels of radiation first. Calling for an extraction.”
Dialing something on a pad attached to her left arm made a portal appear in front of them.
“It’s certainly sweet to be a VIP,” the Paladin said, going through first and pointing to a parking area. “We’ll take my car, I won’t run around just to please nobility.”
“Nice car, dude,” Rowan approached the vehicle, turning around it, caressing the hood. “Didn’t though you were the type to own a muscle car. I saw EV written all over your forehead. You know what? If you let me drive, I’ll give you a confession.”
“Don’t let him drive!” Papa Allinder rushed to say.
“Be my guest,” the Paladin gestured toward the front door. “If I can save a lost soul, I’ll take the risk.”
Five minutes and eight miles later, the car stopped near the border. Behind it, a cloud of dust was still floating in the air, hundreds of feet long. The Paladin opened his eyes and crossed himself. “Thank you, God, for sparing my life.”
“For the record, this is nothing, compared to how a rally looks,” Rowan insisted.
“About that, son, some of your race-driving friends confessed to me you’re not the best driver around.”
“I know, Papa, that’s why I’m going at half their speed. Cora?”
With a nod, the Nekojin summoned her costume and took flight. The barrier opened an aperture a second before she passed on. They waited for five minutes, before starting to fret.
“I’ll call her,” Rowan said.
Just after he finished his words, Cora erupted through the barrier and landed ten feet away. Dismissing her suit, she ran forward, all excited, grabbing Rowan’s lapels and screaming in his face with a high and squeaky voice.
“There’s a dungeon outside!”
“Easy, easy,” he patted her head. “Touching a Nekojin between the ears calms them,” he explained to the others as Cora started purring. “What kind of a dungeon, and where, baby?”
“Just outside, can’t be more than a mile away. Guys, this is the real deal. A true dungeon.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty much. I spent time taking radiation measurements. They are much lower than they should be. This means there was a core in the vicinity, it absorbed the radiation and activated. I say go for it. This is too important to miss.”
Papa Allinder nodded with enthusiasm. “Absolutely. Let’s go and conquer that dungeon before the Mercs do.”
“Papa,” Rowan rested his hands on his father's shoulders, looking into the older man’s eyes. “You have a common condition called Class Fever. You think yourself invulnerable. Bad news: you're not. Cora, how safe is out there?”
“Now? I’d say only vulnerable people get sick, and that after lots of exposure.”
“Great.”
“We’ll need two teams of six people, to be on the safer side,” the Paladin said. “If you let me call my friends, I can gather the raid in an hour, maybe two.”
“OK. You call your friends, I’ll call mine.”
“A dungeon won’t accept more than two teams inside at the same time, and it’s better to have people that had worked together. We could use a sniper and a melee DPS, but not more.”
“You call your buddies and don’t worry about the rest. We’ll select the best teams once everyone is here, and the rest will guard the exterior. Cora, is your armored unit ready for combat?”
“I suppose so… We’re approaching a battalion size now, and we have Italian instructors, with a few vehicles of their own.”
“How far are they?”
“Err… a couple hundred yards?” she pointed in his back, where a tall Medieval castle rose over the trees. “That’s the Armory and the West Border’s Citadel. We have four of those now.”
“You’re a genius. Call them and tell every single available unit to join us. Take them outside and find the dungeon’s limits. If anything engages you, terminate with extreme prejudice.”
“I’ll go speak with them myself, it’s easier,” she said, summoning the suit and taking off.
“Good… Butler, call Isla on our private Core line… Honey? Sorry to call, but it’s easier for me than using the friend group chat. Stop what you’re doing and head to the Border, due west of Elkins, near the bridge on the highway… ah, you can see my location on your mini-map. Good. Call all available police units here, it’s an emergency… Bye. Love you too. Butler, can you patch me through to Viscardi?... Wake him up, what do I care he’s sleeping? Tell him to get out of his coffin and answer… Hello, Blackswarm. You told me you have bought some army units. Do you have special forces, SWAT teams, and stuff?... Great, man. Send them here, and coordinate with Isla. We found a real dungeon, active. Can you join the team?... Ah, you’ll send Victoria. Sure, if she’s a better fighter… I’m a little busy, can you call Rome for me, and ask them to keep some Carabinieri on the ready?… I don’t know how many, a couple hundred? You know, they can have a pizza but hang around… Thanks, I owe you one.”
With a smug expression on his face, he turned toward the two men, crossing his arms, his head leaning a little.
“Time to explain, I guess. New strategy. We have to dominate the terrain, and not only claim dungeons but also kill or chase away the competition. We’ll put patrols and garrisons around points of interest, and as soon we see Neeks or Mercs, bang. Butler, message to whoever is in charge of the US, military, local rogue factions, etcetera. Randolph County is executing a limited military intervention outside its borders, for the welfare of humankind. Don’t get too much into details. Just tell them to keep out of our way. If they don’t behave, tell them I’ll activate a core in their cities and take over.”
“That’s vicious,” Papa Allinder said.
“Yeah, I know. The Butler says my rate of approval in the low-mana zones is seventy percent and growing.”
“It's under sixty in the County, though,” the Paladin pointed.
“Yeah, because they know better. I’m new at the job… Nevertheless, I’m willing to learn. Hey, look, Cora’s back, and bearing gifts.”