I had nightmares that night as I slept. The abyssal orc shaman and a group of orcs were all mounted on the giant wolves and chasing me around. I died over and over again. I watched every single one of my friends get run down and become a wolf’s chew toy. Worst of all, Natalie was sitting there like some sort of NFL color commentator, narrating the whole thing. Nightmares suck, and I think I can live without sleep for a while.

  Very Early in the morning, as evidenced by my clock showing only 5am, I heard the shower running in my bathroom. It wasn’t a shared bathroom with another room, so it begged the question: who the fuck was in my shower?

  I walked across the bedroom in my boxers, avoiding my pile of dirty clothes. Steam was slowly funneling out of the top of the slightly open door. I grabbed the handle, pulled the door open, and stepped through. I looked at the shower to find a very wet and naked Natalie soaping up. She looked at me nonchalantly as I stared at her curves. “Your bathroom was available, and this girl needs to get ready early for a full day of being this awesome.” She literally cupped her breasts to emphasize the point. I rolled my eyes and walked out of the bathroom. I was not engaging her while only partially awake. I knew the whole scene was to tease me, but responding to her only gave her satisfaction.

  Instead, I put on some clean clothes, though I didn’t have a whole lot left of those. I was overdue for a laundry day. I avoided the bathroom and headed downstairs to the kitchen. Surprisingly, I was the first one down here. Brittney was not in sight. I started cooking some eggs and putting toast in the toaster. I was famished this morning, almost like I didn’t eat at all yesterday. I guess running around all day in 95 degree heat with near 100% humidity will do that to you. As soon as I finished cooking and sat down to eat, Brittney and Brett popped into the room. Brett wandered over to the pantry and found some cereal while Brittney started making herself busy in the kitchen. That made me really curious, “Brittney, why is it you are always trying to cook everyone breakfast?”

  “Its what my mom would always do when we had people over. This is sort of like me honoring her memory. Cooking breakfast for all of you makes me feel more a part of things.” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail before she got deep into cooking. I wasn’t going to stop her from cooking for everyone. It was really touching how she just did it automatically every day.

  “Brett, help her clean up the kitchen after breakfast. I know you're learning a lot over with Smitty, but helping out with family matters, too.” Brett looked like he was going to respond with something teenager-like, but at the last second decided not to and simply nodded his head in agreement. It felt weird for me to take on a parental role in any form, but I guess we adapt to our circumstances.

  Everyone else slowly started showing up in the kitchen over the next 30 minutes, including a radiant-looking Natalie. We all settled in to enjoy the morning together. As I had already finished eating before most of them got here I took the opportunity to check my phone to see if my dad ever got back to me from yesterday. I was happy to see he messaged me back.

  “Son, you should trust Natalie. I had a conversation with her father. Keep her close to you. Her father will feel better with you than with her being with most of the military groups in the area.”

  I instinctively looked over to Natalie, “Nat, did your dad send you any text or anything?”

  “Yeah, he just wanted me to trust you and stick close to you.” She replied offhandedly like it was a gee-whiz response. Yet, she said, her dad wanted her to trust me. No pressure with such a statement at all.

  Billy interrupted my train of thought with, “We need to decide on how to divide up any of the ability tokens we have. We made multiple copies of a passive ability for heightened initiative. It helped people react quickly in combat. Fortunately, unlike most abilities, it has affinities for all, so I guess anyone can use it. I have a few others: Extra health and extra mana. Those two require Constitution affinity and Intelligence. I have others, but let’s start with those.”

  We had enough for anyone who wanted a heightened initiative, with everyone except Billy taking one. Natalie even took one. I didn’t want to take any others, as that left me with only two open slots. There were very few abilities that I would use one of those two final slots for. So I quickly added heightened initiative to my abilities by concentrating on the token in my hand.

  Heightened Initiative-Tier 1(Passive)-Any

  Users who have this have a higher reaction time when first reacting to dangerous situations. This is not limited to combat, but includes social situations, traps, and any other situation where a quick reaction is necessary.

  This would be useful in all situations. Even if it made me jump the gun in some situations, I would rather act fast and wrong, rather than not at all. Granted, I could see some social situation complications from jumping the gun, but better safe than sorry.

  Billy continued, “For Neal and Brittney, I have detect mana, since Nora went and figured it out on her own.”

  Natalie turned to Nora, “Figured out detect mana on your own? Damn. That’s pretty amazing. Would you allow me to interview you to document how you did it?”

  Nora looked at Natalie, “I wrote the whole thing down step by step, of the things I did. Fortunately, I have Arcane as an affinity, which helped, as well as an 11 intelligence, which was also a factor. I don’t think anyone below a 5 or 7 intelligence could even do what I did without assistance. So I would probably say no to that.”

  Natalie had a look of being chastised for a moment before recovering, “Oh. Okay, so it won’t be so easy to duplicate the results, is what you are saying?”

  “Absolutely. I guess I’m not ruling it out, and maybe somewhere down the line I would do an interview for that, but not right now.” So even Nora would succumb to her charms eventually. Very interesting how Nora went from a no to a maybe very quickly.

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  Billy and Frank also caught on to that exchange and looked at me with a raised eyebrow each as if to say, ‘What is this girl’s charisma?’

  My response of a shrug hopefully conveyed to them, ‘Fuck if I know. And I’m not going to ask.’ I just took the offered detect mana as well and used it.

  “Hey folks, that puts me at 6 of 7 ability slots, so I really don’t need anything else for now. We need to start distributing stuff to the first squad to get them up to where they need to be. They all need extra health or heightened initiative for the moment. Do we have enough to help them with that?”

  Billy grinned at me, “Already ahead of you, Neal. Ye of little faith. We have heightened initiative, increased health, and a thick skin ability for those with a really high constitution. It gives them a tiny passive damage resistance against almost all sources. Don’t worry, Frank, I set one aside for you as well.”

  “Damn, Billy, you have been working a bit at this.”

  “It wasn’t difficult. I focused on a few abilities that would be almost universally useful. I grabbed a few camouflage abilities for Joe and any scouts in the first squad. We lucked out that some of our ability copiers gained a level during the day yesterday with all the abilities they were learning about. Turns out having intelligence as an affinity is great for gaining xp just by learning things. I don’t think we can get them to level 3 that way, but man, did it help get them all to level 2.”

  Natalie had this big grin on her face, so I asked, “What’s with the giant grin?”

  “You guys took care of yourselves because you all spend time in the field, but your very next thought is to equip the soldiers with stuff that would be useful for them. I have this feeling that other commanders aren’t putting abilities in the hands of their front line units immediately. They are probably hoarding them amongst officers and special elite units, that may not see as much regular action.”

  “I always figured once we had the basics to survive, that we needed to get abilities in the hands of as many people as possible. I put priority on front-line soldiers as that might mean the difference between them coming home to their families alive or in a body bag. Some abilities don’t help our front line as much as crafters and admin, so those go out on an as-needed basis. We’re partway done with the census, so we know what kinds of abilities and affinities people have. This will hopefully put the right abilities with the right people who will help the community the most. I don’t particularly care about playing favorites. I care about increasing survival odds.”

  “I am totally going to ask you that same question again when we go do the interview on the Hound News set.” I started to nod my confirmation to her.

  Just then, we all started getting alerts on our phones, and the radios started chirping. I looked at my phone and saw texts coming in from the national guard, “Emergency: Sunset Hills portal under attack. All spare national guardsmen in the area are to make their way there immediately.”

  “Fuck! Looks like fun time is over. Frank, Billy, and Nora, let's activate half the Sunset Hills squads, the first 3 Fenton squads, and half of the Oakland squads. That should give us several hundred troops. I know many of the Sunset Hills folks are still in Sunset Hills, so if they could group up south of the portal, because it will take a little longer for us to get there.”

  “Brett, go with Joe and run over to Smitty’s workshop to get any completed weapons, ammo, and anything else he wants to hand out. Then make your way in via I-44.”

  Natalie was looking at her phone with a look of horror on her face. She just looked at all of us, “20 more portals nationwide were compromised between last night and early this morning. That puts the total to 84 portals out of 417 known portals nationwide. Just over 20% of all portals are now depositing thousands of enemy troops in the last several hours. This is horrible!”

  I looked at her with as much sympathy as I could show, “Natalie, I feel for those people, but right now we are going to do our best to not let Sunset Hills get added to that list.” She just nodded as she scrolled through the lists of portals that were lost by city and state.

  “Springfield and Cape Girardeau are both having portal containment problems. Just so you know.”

  I nodded in acknowledgement to her last statement, and everyone jumped into a flurry of activity to get us out the door in a timely fashion. It was a bit of a mad dash to get my gear on. I needed my vest to go on under any camo I had. I grabbed the pouch, but checked that I had the staff in there. I am happy it fits. It’s a shame I can’t put my assault rifle in there, but I have multiple clips of ammo, orc healing potions, healing cookies, and tons of snacks in case I can get a new class to level into. My pistol was holstered and ready. Soon enough, I was running out the door with all my gear. I really needed the portal defenses to hold for two more days. After that, we would have everyone evacuated and be layering additional defenses for our area. So I genuinely hoped that this wasn’t the event that I feared it could be.

  We got into vehicles quickly and started making our way to Sunset Hills. Nora was taking one of the SUVs to pick up Will and Vern, while Joe took the other with Brett to get any additional enhanced supplies we had ready. Frank was driving the Humvee that held Natalie, Brittney, and me. We drove down to arrive from the south, as that was where our 200-plus soldiers would be organizing. I spent the entire drive making sure that everyone I needed was on their way. We didn’t have people in barracks, and we desperately needed that at some point. This whole rousing citizen militia pre-6 am was not exactly efficient. If these men and women were any less patriotic and dedicated, then we’d be screwed on most occasions.

  After being in the car for ten minutes and most of the way there, my radio started sounding off. I listened to Colonel Smolders ask, “Where are you, Captain. I see some of your guys assembling in a parking lot southeast of the portal, but I don’t yet see you.”

  “Sorry, Colonel, coming from Fenton, our ETA is less than 5 minutes. I am marshalling over 200 troops, but these are volunteers that were at home, so I know that it's going to be a few minutes until I have the vast majority ready to go.”

  “Just get your ass here, Captain. We will need the extra bodies just to keep this contained. On the double.”

  “Yes, sir.” I stopped pressing the talk button and spoke to Frank, “Step on it, buddy, we got a breakout to stop.” I silently urged the engine to go faster, not that it worked. Frank was quick on the uptake, though, and we made it there in just under the 5 minutes I had said. By the portal, I saw some giant horned demons slamming metallic maces the size of 10-foot-tall trees into soldiers and vehicles. Bodies and metal flew away from the demons at every impact. These guys were huge, red, and a bit ugly if I was being honest with myself. They absorbed gunfire like they were being hit by tiny Legos tossed by toddlers; it looked annoying to them, but hardly dangerous.

  I tried to ignore them whenever they bellowed some war cry in a language I didn’t know. The Sunset Hills squads were already here, and it looked like we had more than 10 squads. Somehow we ended up with 13 squads by my estimation just from Sunset Hills. We got some of our 60 Oakland folks, as I recognized many of them from the airstrike aftermath. You tend to remember faces better when you have to help them toss dead orcs into bonfires. Right now, I really wish we had Nora and her force bolt wand here. That would be awfully handy in this situation.

  Most of my three Fenton squads were here, but I was still waiting on a handful. My eyes landed on Katnessa and Rick. “Kat, I’m going to need your 50 caliber to start aiming at the big guys.”

  We got all the folks together very quickly, and I started, “Here’s the plan.”