"Children! Who wants to feed the baby dragons with me?"

Screams of joy and a forest of raised hands. She smiled. "Then we'll go now to that big heap of purple scrap metal and each of you may take a tiny piece. Baby dragons love it. Then we'll all line up and march on to feed Draky and Craky."

I couldn't take it much longer. "Lena! Stop wasting mithril. Can't they just eat some normal metal, there's plenty lying around?"

She shook her head sternly. "Steel gives them colic. What difference does it make, anyway? It's either us or Vertebra brings them a whole tank turret again."

I clutched at my heart. "Which Vertebra? Which tank?"

"The big dragon, I mean. She's a Bone Dragon, isn't she? So I called her Vertebra. The tank—well, I don't know much about them. She brought them this turret with two really delicate guns. It's really nice... was. Vertebra says mithril is very good for them. They're at that age when their bones and scales are forming. They grow them out of whatever they eat. Vertebra said they're going to be the first mithril dragons in the world, imagine!"

Oh, no. Some people had rats in their grain barns. I had dragons. What the hell was going on?

Lena clapped her hands again, "Attention, everybody! In a moment, you will see a small square window right in front of your eyes. In it, you'll see two buttons. You must will yourself really hard to press the one that's on the left. Everyone remember where your left hand is? That's right! Are you ready? Press it!"

I was watching, slightly dumbfounded, as system messages flashed before my eyes,

Alexandra Kovaleva, Level 1 Druid, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Jana Novac, level 1 Cleric, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Sergey Tischenko, level 1 Warrior, has accepted your invitation to join the clan!

Chapter Twenty-Three

Their heartrending voices had long died away but my lips were still moving as I repeated Doc's last phrase,

"Who if not us?"

 A very uncomfortable question, once again raising the subject of responsibility. Instead of playing and having fun, I kept sinking deeper into local problems, lugging the load of other people's hopes and struggling in a net of responsibilities that hadn't been mine to accept.

Of course I understood Doc, at his wits' end with frustration, overwhelmed by the never-ending chain of deaths. He was like a cat saving her kittens out of a burning house: her hair smoldering, her eyes swollen with blisters, diving back into the flames time and time again to pull out her wailing babies one at a time. Doc, too: once he'd seen a ray of hope in the dark, he followed it, throwing caution to the wind, selling his apartment, exposing himself to blows from all quarters, all to pull his babies out: not so much where to, but more importantly, where from.

How could I not understand him? How could I have said no? True, he hadn't warned me; he hadn't asked for my advice. Probably, in the light of his objective it all seemed petty and irrelevant. Like a lip-biting kamikaze pilot pointing his plane at the deck of an enemy aircraft carrier, he saw no problems, only his goal and his duty. In his mind he was already there, burning alive on the mangled deck amid crumpled metal, taking hundreds of enemies and their powerful machine with him.

I had no idea how it was going to work out with the children. In case of war, we could always move them somewhere safe—say, to the Vets to begin with. No human being would object to offering shelter to a child in danger. Besides, they wouldn't have to walk the war's endless roads as refugees. Here, reaching safe areas was as easy as activating a teleport. Wish we had this skill back in 1941 when millions of people had perished in blockades and ambushes. The siege of Leningrad alone had cost us way too dearly...

In principle, given another ten to fifteen years, these kids who knew no other home but the world of sword and sorcery could become its strongest warriors. They would have no inkling that it was all a game. They'd have no doubt that magic is real, invisibility is normal and healing someone is as easy as waving your hand over them. They would be the ones to invent new spells and bring magic under control. There had to be a difference, making knights and wizards out of thirty-year-old office rats and housewives or raising them from two-year-old toddlers. Which of them would I bet on in the long run? Quite possibly, he with enough intuition to foresee this trend now and take the young wolf cubs under his wing could be looking at a considerable jackpot sometime in the future.

Still, I had to do something about Lena. This was a classic case of cognitive dissonance causing me to expect more from her: more responsibility, more help and more maturity. I kept forgetting about the barely teenage girl locked inside that voluptuous adult body, her hormones raging (if that were at all possible here). So I really had to put my foot down before she derailed us all. And seeing as we had a kindergarten in the making, it would be a good idea to introduce a similar hierarchy in the clan itself: we'd have a junior group, a senior group, pre-school, primary school and so on.

I spent a few more minutes distributing some basic rights between the groups, making sure that senior clan members had a few more options than the younger ones. With a vindictive grin, I removed Lena from the clan officers' list and moved her to a new group, Junior High. After a moment's thought, I added one final touch. Poking out the tip of my tongue with zeal and satisfaction, I wrote: Valley of Fear Junior High. Now, baby, you'd have to prove to me you merited a promotion! Best regards.

Excellent. I slapped my knees and jumped to my feet, scaring a butterfly and earning a disapproving glance from the Hound pup busy hunting it.

Enough digressing. I reminded myself of a steam engine pulling an enormous freight train packed with goods and people clinging to car roofs as I dragged it directly into the financial abyss. I had to force myself out of it. Actually, that was exactly what I'd been doing those last few days. The cigarette business wasn't bringing in any profits yet: all the proceeds were immediately invested into its development, building premises, buying supplies and hiring more staff. Judging by what my analysts had gleaned from my business plan, in just one year we were looking at five hundred grand gold a month to each alliance member. Nice as it was, I needed money now—preferably fifty times that.

I started by creating a new High Spell scroll, put it up at a private auction, then sent an invitation to the Minediggers impatiently waiting for it. In less than ten minutes, they bought the precious parchment. True to their word, they transferred the million into my account adding a polite letter where their ill-concealed impatience and hopes for quick revenge shone through their words of gratitude. I had a funny feeling they weren't going to stop at that. They would keep going, destroying the greedy offenders' castles one after another. They were yet to learn that sooner or later—sooner rather than later—their happy bubble would burst. Everybody in the square had witnessed the scroll in action. All the interested parties had gleaned everything they needed from that demonstration and were probably busy working on countermeasures. Which were quite simple and obvious. It was enough to break the dome down into a few smaller segments or levels. Then the scroll would only be able to remove the first layer, presenting the attackers with an unpleasant surprise: a second protective sphere.