"Your retainer cannot go into the shelter," Mayleefa said. "Find another place for him. We can't hold civilians in the castle."

Nero could understand where Mayleefa was coming from. But he already had a plan for Rodther's lodging.

"I'll send him away in the morning. Is there a place where I can give him detailed instructions on his assignment before that?"

Mayleefa got out of the room and pointed to the right. "Use the room three doors down the corridor. It is a meeting room we use sometimes."

Nero nodded. "Kay. Are we expanding the shelter tomorrow? His Highness asked for at least thirty yards, I can do forty."

The buffalo-kin nodded. "In the morning. I'll find you in your tent."

They went separate ways, Mayleefa back to his quarters, and Nero ushered Rodther into the meeting room.

"Time to send you to your lodgings, Rodther. I'll try to come and keep you supplied but I don't know if I'm going to obtain food. Here are two stacks of provisions, they should last for at least a few months. Enjoy your vacation," Nero said and opened a portal to the shelter.

The portal to the prince's savanna was created with [Autonomous Spell], cost 2,500 Essence, and lasted for a bit over a day now that Nero's Attributes increased a bit. He could still use the portal spell normally because the Skill he bought in madam Hye-Sung's shop detached the spell from his control. He could probably make a shelter with [Autonomous Spell] as well. The Essence costs would be astronomical and the upkeep should be paid ahead of time. Even then the portals would too need to be fixed and everything inside would still be dumped on Nero's head when it ended. Not a choice he would make.

On the other side of the portal, the badgers were happy he showed up. Differently from the swirling Dungeon portal, the portal to the shelter was like a window, allowing unimpeded sight through it.

"Let's go inside. Welcome to my home," Nero said and extended a hand pointing at the shelter.

Rodther walked inside, keeping an eye on the badgers. "The surprises never end, do they?"

"I think this is pretty much the last surprise," Nero replied and closed the portal behind him. "Oww, it is good to be home!"

He could almost see Altia coming in from the house-tree and Crystal from the beach. Nero picked up Maria and stroke her fur. Rodther looked around bewildered. He even choked once and then noticed that he could breathe normally.

"Where are we?" Rodther asked with a trembling voice.

"In my shelter. It is a Skill to create a sub-dimension. Like a Dungeon but without monsters. Well, if you don't count my tame pets. The prince is renting the place, that's why I'm here. He and his Knights are upstairs," Nero pointed up. "A few hundred feet above us."

"Is this an ocean?" He pointed at the coral reef wall.

"The walls and roof are illusions. They can be anything I want. Rod, it's late and I have to sleep. You'll be safe here, all my pets are in non-combat mode."

"I think I can handle some time off," the former prisoner chuckled.

"Whenever I can, I'll come back to spend some time with you," Nero waves.

He opened a portal and left. He needed to go through the other one to get to his tent. Even though he could just connect to the savanna level, it would be a breach of security. He also wanted to keep the fact he could open more than one portal a secret.

Back at his tent, Nero tried to sleep but it was impossible. The racket coming from Tyre's tent was too loud and too tantalizing. Adding the time spent inside the warg Dungeon and in the real world, Nero was more than a month alone. Even though the purple cards were very nice and stuff, he wanted nothing more than the sweet embrace of his wife. He'd never slept with anyone else before getting married, the times baby Nero slept with his parents notwithstanding. Now that he got used to the warmth of another person next to him, he missed even Altia's death grip.

He thought about quitting. Take Rodther and go back home. He noticed for the first time that his employment had no termination date. As Adventurer's Guild regulations went, it meant either party could terminate the job, but if he angered the prince the least could happen was to get a bad review.

Exhaustion took over and he slept even under the raucous moaning coming from a few tents over.

Mayleefa came to wake him up the next morning. Nero slept too little. He should've spent a night in the Dungeon to come out fresh but he just forgot.

"His Highness wants to expand the shelter now. What were the stat bonuses on your gear?"

Nero groaned then stood up, checking he had some underwear on as he did. "Forty. I can expand the shelter by forty yards."

Mayleefa shook his head. "His Highness wants you to double the shelter's size."

Nero reached out and donned his undershirt, then the jacket of his clothing. Biding his time, he slung the bandolier over the jacket and then looked at Mayleefa. "I hate loaded statements. The prince doesn't want it to double, he wants to know if I can double."

"Can you?" Mayleefa asked with a hint of veiled threat.

Nero set the shelter to six hundred feet on a whim. While they didn't know his full status, they could guess that forty points of increase to his Reason would not equate to just forty yards over the two hundred yards it is now. Nero took a pencil and did some math.

"Three hundred and sixty yards, that's as big as it will get. I'll require a strong mana potion every day to pay for the increased upkeep. I'll use my seedpod to increase my Willpower."

"We assumed you reduced the size to lower the upkeep costs," Mayleefa mumbled. "How large will the upkeep be?"

"Forty-two mana per day. I'll have to watch my pool. There's the cost of the portals as well."

"Fine. We'll deliver five standard first-tier mana potions every day with your dinner. You'll enlarge the shelter's radius to three hundred and sixty yards."

"And when you report to His Highness, tell him the shelter's surface is tripling. Three-point twenty-five times the previous size, to be precise. I need everyone to leave the shelter while I change it. Including the prince's... maids."

Mayleefa chuckled. "You can call them whores."

"I wouldn't dare to assume His Highness requests the services of whores much less say it out loud. It is beneath his grandeur," Nero said with a straight face.

"We'll do it. Wait by the portal, we'll evacuate everyone. We'll need some discretion to move His Highness... escorts out unseen."

"Yeah, do that. I'll catch up with my homework meanwhile," Nero pulled a book out of his dimensional pouch and leaned on his bed to read.

After the shelter expanded, with the lake now taking a sizeable chunk of the new land and going around most of the shelter like a crescent moon, things cooled down. Nero moved his tent further away now that more knights came to live in the prince's paradise. it did wonders for his mental health, to be able to stop hearing the women pleasing the prince. He could sneak to visit Rodther at least once every other day, as he developed the habit of reading on one of the castle's towers that didn't face the directions the army from Coriander could come. Nobody came to bother him while he was there so he could make a portal and hop into the original shelter. He would leave it open and hidden from the entrance to the room so he could leave if he heard anyone coming.

It also gave him time to complete the seven weekly hours he needed to impart his Attribute bonus to his pets. The Charisma he had with the [Monster Tamer] build he could have five of them in combat mode at the same time.

Two weeks after meeting Rodther, Nero had finished reading all the books. They went deep into theories that he skilled or just assumed when he embraced [Gadgeteering] from the practical side first. His first designs for the rifle upgrade, for example, where Glom would just point out some mistake and tell him to fix it, had their reasons rooted in the theory presented in the books. Even the placement of the conduits and their alignment mattered as the resonance could either amplify or dampen an effect.

Another thing he learned was that Essence flows had to be measured, predicted, and completely used up. A common mistake was to allow Essence residue to clog the conduits as the controller would pour more Essence than the amount the converters on the other side would take. That could damage the conduits over time. That was why his two-converter idea for an Essence lamp was so dangerous. The first converter would soak up the Essence from the crystal without anything to limit it, pump it up the conduit to the second crystal converter that would transform everything into energy. But the conversion of Essence to energy in such an arrangement would be massive, uncontrollable, and fast. He could make a bomb with that. One that would explode the moment the crystal touched the converter. Glom told him that much, but now he understood the reasons behind it.

He was eager to start making contraptions and gadgets.

Nero set his badgers watching the tower room outside the open portal and went to his workshop. The familiar environment at first reinforced his longing for his home and family. After that passed, he started to service his rifle. He opened it and checked every converter and conduit for damage using [Essence Analysis] and his googles' sensitive lens. He found some spots where the crystal converters had hairline fractures. That was one point where his versatility shone. He had a utility [Mage] build with the [Repair] spell. All he needed to do was to swap Classes and cast it, while other [Gadgeteers] would need to either find someone with that Skill, an item that mimicked its properties or just replace the components.

Back to [Gadgeteer], he set to adjust the frost emitters that kept his weapon from overheating. While they allowed him to pump an absurd twenty-five adds of [Empower Attack], they froze the weapon. He had no idea where the ideal balance between heating the components with the lightning and cooling with ice was. But honestly, if he could fire the same shot he used on his first fight against the dire warg, that was enough for him. Erring on the side of caution, he just dialed the controller for the cooling section a bit.

There was also the problem of not having a place to test his weapon. The destructive power was too much. If he had the shelter to himself, he could shoot at the boundary. Since there was nothing past the boundary, the worst could happen would be a ricochet. Then he had an idea. Nero cast the shelter spell again and created a chamber of solid rock with walls a dozen yards thick and a hole in the middle leading deep into the chamber into an angled surface to receive and redirect the shot. It would ricochet inside. The odds of coming back straight at him were minimal.

He would have to recast the shelter every time he had to repair the testing chamber, but now he could tune his weapon. Nero shook his head. The costs of this test were astronomical. Twenty-five mana for every shot, more than thirty Essence, and the mana to repair the shelter.

Two dozen tests and a thousand points of mana later, He found the right spot. The rifle could shoot from one to thirty stages of [Empower Attack] without heating up. Nero noticed one fun fact. The rifle now got slightly warm or cold depending on the parity of the number of enhancements to the shot, cold on the even, warm on the odd. When he checked the weapon Attributes, he noticed that the cooling circuit only drew one extra Essence for every two enhancements.

The badgers squealed. Someone was approaching. Nero stowed his rifle and walked out into the tower. As he approached, horns blew a warning sign. A soldier found him looking out of a window at the troops preparing for combat.

"Mr. Nero. Captain Mayleefa requests your presence. We will engage the enemy in a few hours."

The time for leisure had ended.

Coriander's troops were at their doorstep.

The war started.