NOVEL NEXT Fortifications
(Normal POV)
Nick Immediately started to move things away from his island in secret after Hestia appeared in America. The place he moved it to was a bit cheeky on his part as he directly had Hephaestus teleport him to the moon where he dug deep into the celestial object and created a huge set of caves that he reinforced and isolated from the vacuum space outside of it. He then started introducing an atmosphere like that of earth into the cave system alongside plants and magical fans to keep the air breathable and circulating.-
Beyond that Nick had Hephaestus help him cover every inch of the place with wards to prevent even a god from finding the place without exact coordinates. She was especially skilled at this as she had spent a large amount of time keeping her work away from the other gods who were either curious about what she did or were Zeus making sure she wasn't planning to rebel again and ruin another gods plans. More than a few times Hera learned of his indiscretions because Hephaestus told her mother knowing it would get him in trouble. -
Needless to say the relationship between father and daughter was very love hate as the father loved the skill of the daughter but hated her as an individual. This secret moon base was going to be Nicks escape place should Zeus come looking for him once Nick set up a teleportation method back to the island. The method he chose was something he had to buy from the system for a good two hundred thousand points , portal gates. Portal gates were basically a set of doorways that connected two points in space so that you could walk through one gate and walk out the other regardless of how far away the other gate was.-
In a manner of speaking this was actually just an advanced usage of spatial magic that had been set in the form of an enchantment that needed a password to use. Creating the gates themselves was the only part Hephaestus was interested in as she didn't care about the spatial magics at all. Still the gates needed to be made in a specific manner that interested her and so the work on them was split between her and Nick. The final product was a set of two circular archways with twelve symbols on their faces and a slider that moved to select the symbols that made up the password.-
Once selected the archways were glow for a moment as a silver mirror looking plane of energy covered the entire inside of them before showing what was on the other side of the opposite archway. Satisfied with this Nick placed one of these gates in his moon base and started moving his stuff there while leaving the stuff he was willing to lose behind. It made no difference to Hephaestus whether she was on the island or on the moon crafting stuff so Nick basically cleaned out the whole manor minus some decoy equipment of far lesser quality than his real stuff.-
Dotty and Lucas were confused about this but didn't raise a fuss about it since it didn't really affect them very much. Sirius and the other governmental people were the same as they noticed it and after getting assurances that Nick wasn't about to abandon everyone at the city chose to ignore it. Nick made sure to step up the defenses and preparations of the city as far as he could in the meanwhile which everyone was completely okay with as it made them feel safer.-
It also lightened the load on the patrols so that they could relax as the defenses would hold against even the strongest beast , for a while anyways. It was still too soon for tier five beasts to start showing up en mass so tier four was the strongest any normal beast got at the moment. A few talented dragons or other powerful creatures had of course reached tier five but they were barely more than a handful across the globe. This whole process took another three months and as if perfectly on time when Beltane arrived the mana spiked again before settling back to the new normal and loud thunder was heard all over the world , Zeus was back.-
Hephaestus had grown more powerful after learning all she could of Nick's crafting styles but even still she appeared nervous at the sound. Like the tyrannical person he is Zeus made sure that the whole world knew of his return and for a brief moment Nick felt a few of his own domains resonate with the skyfathers before the god stopped showing off. He wasn't sure if the god had felt them himself but wasn't willing to risk it as he went to the moon immediately.