“And that is basically the situation,” Jenna said as she finished her story.

  Bob, Billy, and Pob listened avidly.

  Bob was drinking from that bloody cup again. He felt the need to explain himself: “I have improvised a rank 3 Truthfinding perk that increases my chances of finding relevant facts when listening to a story…”

  Jenna saw through his bullshit right away. He just needed to flaunt his bloody arcane tool once again. He was so proud of it that Jenna thought that he might marry it.

  “Bob, if you drink from that cup once again, I swear to God I am going to pee in it. You know I could probably do it from here. I just need to find the right stats—” She stopped, horrified.

  “Did I really say that aloud? Oh, God, I need a vacation right now. I am so tired,” she put her head between her hands.

  “We are all tired, Jenna,” Billy tried to comfort her as he put his arm over her shoulders.

  “You may have otherworldly stats, but you are also a human being. Just out of curiosity, though, that pee-aiming thing, would it be a secondary or tertiary stat? A tertiary one, I guess. It is too focused. If it were secondary, it would probably affect all human waste.”

  Pob intervened quickly—before Billy could comfort his girlfriend any further, Bob could drink from his cup again, or Jenna killed anyone.

  “Belona is currently out of danger. The dungeons the invaders took have been turned into symbiotic ones, and they have no way of making more. We have started the process of turning the rest into symbiotic dungeons. Before the week is over, all Belona dungeons will be symbiotic ones. We no longer have anything that interests them, and we were never the real target, just a tool to strike at Earth.” He did not look relaxed as he said this. “This does not mean the war has ended. As long as Boral and Andara are out there, the fight continues.”

  “They will target Babylon next. At least Boral will,” mused Bob. “He is trying to make more Postulants. It is the only reason he was so interested in those Cores. He is going to create a small army of Omegas to claim the Icosahedron.”

  “But what about Andara?” continued Billy. “If she has the power to change history, she is much more dangerous than Boral.”

  “Pob, your people are out of danger,” Jenna began, but he did not let her continue.

  “Jenna, don’t you dare insult me by telling me we are out of the fight,” he said, deadly serious. “You three basically saved our world. We have a Player army in training. We have Alchemy. You are going to need all that and more to face Andara and Boral. We are in this together. Belona has symbiotic dungeons now; anything the Coven tries on Earth, they will later use on us. They are just not going to let the current status quo stand.”

  “I have analyzed all the possible variants, enhancing my Mind with the right stats,” Jenna began.

  “Billy is right. Andara is the greatest danger. We should head to the Black Tower and study it. If we want to beat her, we need to understand what she is doing.”

  “However,” she continued, “there are some basic measures that would not take much time and would considerably enhance the chances of Babylon surviving an attack. We should...”

  “You are going to propose that we create some manner of permanent gate system linking Madison and Babylon, just as we did with the dungeons, aren’t you?” Bob interrupted, a happy expression on his face.

  Jenna sighed. “You drank from the cup again, didn't you?”

  One hour later, they were inside the Secret Mountain, thanks to Bob and Jenna’s joint efforts.

  They were planning how best to handle the problem.

  “I think a permanent gate between Babylon and the Secret Mountain is a must. The Beli can keep training inside the mountain, and the Alchemy team from Babylon is now experienced enough to create everything they need,” Bob explained. “I have left them some alchemical supplies, but the idea is for them to train facing the beasts guarding the alchemical ingredients, and use the contribution points system from the dungeon.”

  “That is probably a good plan,” Billy said. “They are far too polite to complain about it, but I don’t think they appreciated the way we ran off with all their supplies. Doing things their way will help both the Beli and the Sect.”

  The Sect students they met along the way reacted to Bob and Jenna with cold indifference, seeing them as cheap scammers.

  They all saluted Billy with respect; they still identified him as the Sect master. The most daring of them even approached to offer him a carrot.

  Jenna could see the merit in the idea. The Sect could also be used as an evacuation center for the wounded and civilians. The Sect students and Masters would fight fiercely to protect them from any invader.

  “This will only work if we are discreet. The moment the enemy discovers we have a teleport system, they will make it a first-priority target. We could end up with half our army entrenched hundreds of miles away from Babylon.”

  “That is the idea. We could keep the Beli entrenched here and deploy them only as a last resort. The end of the gate at Babylon should also be located at a hidden, easily defensible place.”

  “The Brotonville Train Station,” suggested Billy.

  Both looked at him. “We place it inside one of the trains. Melanie has a power that drives the train away for a set period. She can decide how long the trip lasts till the train returns to the station. The train travels between dimensions.”

  “If the enemy approaches the gate, she drives the train away for a couple of hours. That way, we can protect the gate from enemies, and reinforcements can still fill the train through the gate in the mountain. When it returns to Babylon, the reinforcements will come with it.”

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  “I knew I married you for a reason,” Jenna said, looking fondly at him.

  “Are we married?” Billy asked, confused.

  “Of course we are. Half of your landmines are mine,” Jenna teased him.

  Bob summoned his skill screen so that the rest of the Losers could see it.

  Celestial Door (Waycraft 4): Makes permanent the duration of any teleporting perk rank three or lower. Must be carved from a rank four ingredient attuned to spatial or dimensional magic.

  The door must be physically installed to work. Once the magic is activated, it becomes forever set.

  Physically moving the door once it has been activated will destroy its power.

  This is a crafting perk.

  “That is as low as I can bring the rank to create a permanent teleport,” Bob explained. “The good news is that by working inside a dungeon and using Sleepwalk, I can probably finish it in around 36 hours, but we need the ingredient.”

  “There is a magical tree on the eastern side of the mountain with an affinity for spatial magic,” Billy added. “Some type of dimensional beast guards it. The Sect has agreed to let us take enough wood from the tree to carve a door if we bring them the corpse of the beast.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon crossing the heavy forest that covered the eastern side of the mountain. They were attacked several times by lesser beasts during their travels. Symbiotic does not necessarily mean harmless, Billy reminded them.

  The Dimensional Beast turned out to be a teleporting tiger the size of a minivan. It attacked, blinked out of existence to avoid the counterstrike, teleported back into an advantageous position, and attacked again. It took Jenna three tries to calculate where the beast would appear.

  On its fourth jump, it found itself impaled on the tip of Jenna’s spear. It growled softly, as if demanding an explanation, and died.

  Two months ago, it would have been a fight of legend. Now it was just a normal Tuesday evening.

  They brought the beast back, along with enough wood for Bob to carve the frames of the door, using his woodcraft skill.

  He helped them teleport back to Babylon; Dignity would handle the trip back.

  Billy and Jenna enjoyed some quiet time together for the first time in ages.

  They took a walk around Babylon, appreciating the changes the joint work of Citizens and Avatars had achieved.

  Gone were the shoddy ramparts that had taken so much punishment during the battles against the Black Calendar and the Chicago Tribulation.

  The defenses looked solid and well-built, capable of withstanding any kind of attack.

  “We will see,” Jenna thought glumly. “We are going to be facing Omegas. Each one is the equivalent of an army.”

  The town itself was much changed. Electric power, or its magical equivalent, and water were back everywhere. The streets looked clean and well-maintained.

  Jenna saw a young man sweeping the street with a broom. A small army of animated brooms followed him, mimicking his actions. She briefly wondered if he was an Avatar or a Citizen. Who cared, as long as it worked?

  A mother berated a fourteen-year-old carrying a load of books. “You are going to be late again for school, Samantha. You are grounded if Mrs Melanie gives you another warning.”

  Jenna smiled; some things never changed, and that was good. They gave you a sense of belonging.

  Then Sammy transformed into a murder of ravens and flew away.

  Jenna’s smile froze. She wondered briefly what her class was, and what Mrs Melanie was teaching her.

  They spent much of the afternoon with some of their Babylon friends. Much to Jenna’s disappointment, her mother and sister were no longer around. They had to attend to some business at Valdar.

  They are the royals there. They have a whole world to oversee, Jenna mused. If I want to keep in contact with them, it is I who should make the effort. She resolved to travel to Valdar with Billy when they had more time. They never seemed to have any. Or not.

  Time travel was now theoretically possible. Jenna felt dizzy thinking about the implications. They were trying to hasten as much as possible to look for Andara before she had time to achieve her plans. But it no longer worked like that.

  They could travel to a point in the past where they could plan slowly and methodically, then return. On the other hand, Andara could do the same.

  They needed to understand how this worked, all its ins and outs, before they made a move, which meant travelling to the Tower and having a chat with that keeper.

  And if it all depended on understanding, Andara was going to give them a sound thrashing. She could not be beaten at that.

  Dignity had both of them for dinner. She listened gravely as they gave her the complete account of how the war was going.

  “Six Cores. We must assume he will use one for himself and another for each of his sycophants. That makes a total of six Omegas, attacking Babylon at the same time,” Dignity mused.

  “It is going to be tough; each Omega is the equivalent of an army. What kind of Committed will he choose as the other members of his group?”

  “We assume he will want Postulants powerful enough to take the Icosahedron from you, but who will not be able to challenge him personally. Only one of the Postulants becomes an Immortal-the rest go to hell. All of them know that,” Jenna explained.

  “Nothing that could take him out of the way before he reaches his objectives,” continued Dignity. “That rules out assassins, planners, and leaders.”

  “Every one of those Postulants will try to betray him and claim the Icosahedron, given half a chance,” Jenna answered. “He must know that. He is keeping an ace in the hole, something only he knows.”

  They went back home after that. Dignity’s house seemed awfully lonely without Stompy and Penny around. Jenna wondered how she kept up. She felt a new surge of respect for her, realizing that her sense of duty was the only thing keeping her functional.

  Dignity appointed them an avatar with teleporting powers to help them reach the Secret Mountain again. Bob had already finished the wooden door, an exquisitely carved work of art, with the lintel carved in the shape of ivy leaves.

  They had already placed a dimensional beacon inside the Brotonville Train. Mel and Morton were supervising the process from the other side.

  Jenna fused his mind with Bob, giving him the dimensional coordinates and enhancing his mental prowess. She felt him activating the gate.

  When he opened the door, Mel and Morton saluted them happily.

  The train was already moving. Mel had scheduled a short, ten-minute trip to test it.

  The gate kept working without any problems, even though it led into an extradimensional moving object.

  “And here we have it. All our logistics problems were solved in one go,” Jenna smiled. “Babylon is much safer now.”

  “And now?” asked Billy.

  “And now we go for Andara,” Jenna answered.