“What’s that over there?” said Astrid, pointing.
I looked and saw, to my dismay, a group of helicopters bearing down on the mansion.
“Not more enemies?” I groaned. “I think even I’ve had enough fighting for one day.”
“No,” said Amanda, suddenly. She was shading her eyes and looking toward the approaching choppers. Suddenly, she gave a disbelieving laugh. “It’s not more enemies, it’s the fucking feds!”
Sure enough, Amanda’s agency, the ones with government responsibility for the dungeons, had showed up in force. The Extra-Dimensional Intelligence agency were late to the party, and they seemed pretty pissed off to have come all this way for nothing.
We put them to work, however. Soon, teams of armed EDI agents watched the perimeter of the mansion, while others helped the people whose homes had been destroyed outside.
Kyrine and I walked through one of the breaches in the wall and through the suburb, and Kyrine looked at the burned houses. She raised a hand toward the inferno, and it went out. Then she closed her eyes for a moment, and the damage was fixed. It was as if it had never happened.
I looked around and saw a TV crew filming the whole thing.
“Well,” I said to Kyrine, “that’s blown the secret!” It was only as I said it that I realized that she was outside the mansion grounds without any problems!
“So I am,” she said when I pointed it out to her. She smiled and began to systematically fix the houses one by one, the TV crew following her the whole way.
The dungeon adventurers stayed with us for the rest of the week and into the next. The mansion was in a total mess, and there was a lot of work to do in the cleanup. The gates were smashed, and the walls broken down, and a sea of dead cyborgs covered the grounds and filled the mansion itself.
Amanda Fallon’s boss showed up, a big Satyr called Ramu Hornwell. I took a dislike to him straight away, but Kyrine went out and charmed him with her smiles and soft words, and before he knew what was happening, he’d agreed that his people would stay onsite to help clear the debris and guard the breaches in the wall until we told them we didn’t need them anymore.
Kyrine wanted nothing more to do with the cyborgs. She could have absorbed them all, but the thought disgusted her, and so we left the EDI to handle the cleanup. Amanda, Astrid, Kyrine, Belinda, Selena, and I all retreated to the mansion to take a well-earned rest.
The cleanup took weeks. During that time, we restored the portal dungeons to their former glory, and even created a new one. Sarah Windvane and her buddies stayed on too, and they became firm friends with Amanda.
Amanda started running my portal dungeons with Sarah and her team, and after a week she had decided that she was not going back to the EDI.
“I’m going to be a dungeon adventurer,” she announced. “I’ve got a talent for spell casting and light-armored melee work, and Sarah has agreed to take me on as an apprentice.”
She went out and told Ramu Hornwell on the spot that she was quitting. He looked neither very surprised nor very unhappy about it.
During the weeks after the battle, I also found time to follow up on the kiss that Selena and I had shared. She invited me to her room one evening, and that night we satisfied all the desires that had hung unresolved between us for all the years we’d known each other.
I spent the next night in her room too, and neither Astrid or Kyrine was jealous.
Word of the events at the mansion spread far and wide after the battle. The cat was well and truly out of the bag, and Hornwell came up to the mansion one evening to let us know that we should turn on the TV and have a look at the news. There was going to be an announcement that we wouldn’t want to miss.
We all piled upstairs to Selena’s room—it contained the only TV in the mansion.
The room was crowded, with the agents, the adventurers, and even big Ramu and a couple of his more senior agents all crowded in.
On the TV, the president was standing at his lectern and making the announcement. He was an outworlder, a Satyr like Ramu, with horns twirling from his head and a long red beard under his quick, yellow eyes; the world’s first Outworlder president.
“As most of us now know,” he said, “the dungeons have awoken again. This is a great day for America! We now know that some of the legendary Eosorean dungeons escaped the fall and honored us by coming through to settle here on Gateway Day! To honor this great day, the government has decided to lift the imposed level cap on American cultivators, and to lift the statutory level cap on magical goods! A new era is dawning on the world, a new era of promise, of power, and most of all of magic! I’m proud to be the one who has the honor of welcoming it in. Happy cultivating, everyone!”
He stood down from the lectern hurriedly, to a scattering of shocked applause. The feed switched back to the news anchor and Selena switched it off.
Ramu Hornwell leaned close to me. “He knows that the Fateweaver is coming, and he’s been convinced by recent events that we need to embrace the dungeons and level up as many cultivators as possible. We’re keeping the news about the Fateweaver quiet for the moment, to avoid a panic. But you,” he added with a wry smile, “you lot are now officially celebrities!”
I sat
