“Welcome to Solace and Earth,” Kat said, extending a hand to Sunie.

  They shook hands with Kat returning to her seat at the head of the table. We were in one of the second floor conference rooms. Just the three of us with some light snacks and refreshments. Sunie was eyeing the food.

  “Thank you Lady Anderson,” he said to Kat as he settled in his chair.

  “Just Kat,” she said, smiling and glaring at me. “He has manners. You could learn a thing or two from him.”

  “Hi Kat,” I said, since we hadn’t done that yet.

  We’d known each other so long, and saw each other so often, we kind of forgot the formalities. She wasn’t blood, but she was my sister. Kat and Jack were my family now.

  “As you can tell from Nick, we don’t really stand on formality around here,” she said.

  “That’s a welcome change,” Sunie replied. “In most of the Multiverse, everything is extremely formal. Nick is…,” he paused, searching for the right word. I gave him the ‘choose a good one’ look. Which of course he ignored. “Nick is a breath of fresh air.”

  Kat laughed.

  “That’s not something I’ve ever heard describing Nick.”

  “I like it,” I said. “Shaking things up in the Multiverse.”

  “You are doing that,” Sunie said, grabbing a plate and putting some cheese and crackers on it.

  I did the same. The cheese was sharp and delicious. It wasn’t one of the old styles. I’d always been a cheddar fan. But it was something new. The highland cows in Solace had changed due to the System Integration and the introduction of arcanum. It changed their milk. Made the cheese better in my opinion and if I’d been asked twenty-five years ago if there was anything better than cheddar, I would have said no.

  The Celestial Challenge System brought some benefits. Still rather have my mother around.

  “So what’s this about a monster surge?” I asked Kat.

  She pointed to the maps spread out before us. It was a relatively new one of the Solace Territory, showing the area that we’d gained when we’d brought the Gray Wolf Clan into the mix. That was the area she was pointing to.

  It was to the far north edge of the territory, the region was tundra and steppes, like old Mongolia. Few forests, lots of open areas, no real mountains but lots of rocky hills. At the edge of the old Gray Wolf territory was where the frozen lands started. Alaska, the Yukon, Siberia. That kind of land.

  There were a lot of Resources up in that area. Not many people at all. But very dangerous. Lots of Dungeons that never got run regularly to clear them out. Wild arcanebeasts that did nothing but grow in strength and some random arcanetribes.

  Those were an odd thing. Whole tribes of humanoids that just sprang up in the wilder regions of the world. They were kind of like localized Dungeons. If left alone, they evolved just like a real tribe would. I didn’t really understand it all, and there were some people around the world that studied them like they did dungeons and arcanebeasts, but all I knew were that the tribes were just another challenge for us.

  The System loved its challenges. It was in the name after all.

  We had some camps and forts up in the Northerlands, I’d gotten that name from some books I’d read and it had stuck. But nothing major. There was talk of turning one of the forts into a real town. It already had a portal. Wasn’t that far from the official border of our territory. Once it was established, the border would move and we’d be a little bit larger.

  But so far, there wasn’t a need. No one else was challenging us for control of the lands so there wasn’t an urgent need to expand or use the resources needed to build a real town.

  Like everything, the System controlled borders, towns, and all that. Like how a Dungeon had a Core, towns had their own Cores that controlled many of their functions. Faction Territory had official borders that the System recognized. It was a whole big thing and one that I let others deal with, like Kat, and only stepped in when needed.

  Sometimes I wondered if that part of the System would have made life better, or worse, in pre-Integration Earth.

  Considering how petty humans were then, and to an extent still were, Subudai as an example, having Cores and established boundaries would have made things far worse.

  People generally sucked. That didn’t change just because we had a System now.

  “There’s three Dungeons just outside what had been Gray Wolf territory, and is now Solace Fellowship territory, that are on the verge of breaking,” Kat explained.

  “They haven’t yet?” I asked, wondering why the urgency then.

  If the Dungeons hadn’t broken yet, it should be easy enough to get the right amount of forces set up just outside the Dungeon entrances and deal with the monsters as they erupted. That was the standard procedure to deal with Dungeon surges.

  Sadly, they were a somewhat regular occurrence. If you called two or three a year regular. There were a lot of Dungeons in the world and only so many people to deal with them. For a lot of Adventurers, delving Dungeons was a full time job. With lots and lots of overtime. Solace had about a dozen teams that did nothing but delve Dungeons.

  We rotated the folks out as they Leveled, moving them to different ranks of Dungeons, giving them vacations. All that fun stuff. We worked with the neighboring Factions to help out if they were getting overwhelmed.

  Early in the Integration, probably year five I think it was, a Dungeon had broken near a growing Faction. It had been a slaughter. They hadn’t been prepared, wiped out the entire group. Probably two thousand people, and there had been some strong folks in that Faction. The rest of us had to band together and work to keep the surging monsters from spreading out to the rest of the land. That was when I’d met Fred and his growing group.

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  I’d been pretty solo at that time, moving from Faction to Faction, hadn’t met Jack yet. I knew Kat, she was with a small group that I spent some time with. Seeing Fred and what he was growing, that’s when I kind of somewhat settled down with Kat’s Faction and eventually became the leader and it grew into the Solace Fellowship.

  Now I didn’t set out to become the leader. I was content with being the muscle. But the former leader, a guy named Steve, was killed and everyone pretty much forced me to become the leader. They’d even renamed the original Faction name, which regretfully I forgot what it was, to Clan Howell. Against my very vehement protests.

  But that one surge had been horrible. It had taken a lot of lives to eventually stop the waves of monsters.

  I’d been one of the ones that had to enter the Dungeon, by fighting our way through the monsters to get to the portal, then go inside the overcrowded Dungeon, find the Core and claim it so no more monsters would spawn. Then we had to go and clear the Dungeon. Once we did that, it was fighting the waves of monsters from the back as others did from the front. Running that Dungeon had been awful. Twenty of us had gone in, the one benefit of a broken Dungeon was the lifting of the restriction on how many can enter, but only eight of us had walked out.

  Since then, everyone worked hard to make sure Dungeons didn’t surge. It still happened. There were just too many Dungeons to handle. But we had better ways of dealing with the surges now.

  Now we had guards and militia, standing armies, things like that.

  All designed to deal with Dungeon breaks, the random arcanebeast spawn, arcanetribes and all the rest of the fun stuff the Challenge System kept throwing at us.

  Life was not boring post-Integration.

  “Kat,” I said, serious for a bit, it wouldn’t last. “Why am I here? Three potential breaks is a lot at once, but we have the forces and means to handle that.”

  “There’s an arcanetribe in the area,” she said.

  “Okay…,” I prompted.

  Again, that was something that should have been relatively easy to deal with.

  “And an incursion,” she added.

  I sighed.

  Of course.

  I really had hoped it would be far longer before we had to deal with one of those.

  I got up, heading for the fridge. Opening it up, I was happy to see it had been fully stocked with a variety of beer. As much as I loved Sean’s stuff at Northtown, and it was usually my go-to, I did like trying a bit of everything and switching it up. Pre-Integration, I used to make it a day to hit four or six craft breweries in an area, trying all their different beers, and bringing some home with me. Packed a cooler in the truck. Sometimes I did an overnight trip. Was always a fun time when went with a handful of friends.

  I grabbed three beers and brought them to the table, popping the tops and handing them out before I sat down.

  “How much do you want to bet this is why the Gray Wolf’s decided to join up with us?” I said.

  “That’s our theory,” Kat said. “We thought we’d have more time before having to deal with the first incursion.”

  I looked over at Sunie, who was busy studying the map of the Solace Fellowship territory.

  “Does Cerim still have to deal with Incursions?” I asked.

  “Not on Cerim but on some of the outlying worlds the Sunrise Formation claims. Cerim is too strong now, so anyone wanting to take territory from the Formation tries it on one of the newer worlds. But our histories do say once we were newly integrated, we had to deal with them.”

  “How bad were those first incursions?” Kat asked.

  Incursions had been a side note to the Notifications with the countdown to Earth opening up to the multiverse. We got the countdown updates pretty regularly. It had started once a year, then increased as time got closer. Once a month when we were five years out and that continued until two years out when the update was once a week. Two months before the countdown reached zero, the updates became daily.

  But once a year, no more, we got the reminder of Incursions with the update.

  ONCE YOUR WORLD HAS BEEN OPENED TO THE MULTIVERSE, OTHER FACTIONS WILL EVENTUALLY BE ABLE TO ENTER EARTH UNDER STRICT RESTRICTIONS. YOU MUST DEFEND YOUR PLANET FROM THOSE INCURSIONS IN ORDER TO MAINTAIN YOUR SPACE IN THE MULTIVERSE OR BECOME CONTROLLED BY OTHERS.

  Honestly, most people had forgotten it was even a thing by the time the countdown updates rolled around. Only those Adventurers striving to hit Level 100 in time, like myself, really paid attention to the full Notifications. Most just ignored it. It didn’t really affect them.

  But it did.

  The wording of the Notification led everyone to believe we’d have some time between being opened to the Multiversal Nexus and when the first incursions would occur. Tammy had run the question past Stylo and he had agreed, giving a rough decade estimate. There typically was time between the two, giving the newly opened world some time to make allies, broker deals and just get stronger.

  “I did not study incursions much,” Sunie admitted. “But the little I know, this is not supposed to have happened this quickly. Earth has only been opened to the Nexus for a couple of weeks.”

  I sighed.

  “Yeah, something changed.”

  “We have some advance forces on their way there, including a couple of scouts,” Kat said. “Donovan is among them.”

  “Awesome.”

  Donovan was our military guy. In charge of the guards and the militia. Solace had no standing army, just the guards and a bunch of folks that were backups. In some circumstances, such as this one, he could take control of the various adventuring teams and pull them into strike bands.

  Adventuring teams were used to working together. They weren’t good when thrown into an army. A lot of their efficiency and skill were lost.

  “Okay, let’s order some food,” I said. “And get Nathan, Ben, Donovan, Trevor and whoever else in here. It’s planning time.”