Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

But what exactly would happen after those six minutes?

The only way to find out was to simply wait.

"I’m leaving my men to watch over this place, just in case," Makary announced, approaching the gate after giving some final orders to his unit. "And hopefully, we will get this over with quick."

I turned my eyes away from the portal and looked up at the man’s serious face.

Now that the time we’d been waiting for was just a few minutes away, the tension continued to grow not only in the air but also in everyone’s eyes.

For better or for worse, the bet that I forced the survival of the forest folk on was about to be unveiled.

Just a few minutes longer.

"Five minutes!" I called out, announcing the time out loud for the very first time.

There was no need for the common celestials or divines to know what was going on, nor to understand the importance of the timing. All they needed to know was that if they held the perimeter long enough, the war would be won.

And so, with only a selected few having the knowledge necessary to understand my warning, everyone else busied themselves with doing absolutely nothing but observing their surroundings.

With Madam playing my small trick out by the edge of the forest, it would still take at least half an hour if not more for the humans to reach this place.

’Even if they dropped everything and rushed over here… It would still take them a considerable amount of time.’

As the tension in the air grew, so did the pace of my thoughts.

"Peter," Fay called me out… from merely a single step away.

’Not hon?’ I thought… only for the corners of my mouth to twitch into a small smile. ’Are we at the point where Fay referring to me by my name is a bad sign?’

"Yes, dear?" Taking it for a point to refer to Fay in the sweetest way possible, I turned my eyes away from Makary’s face and looked back to where my eyes should be focusing.

"Stop worrying."

Just that.

Now that she wrestled my attention away from my dark thoughts and low expectations, Fay didn’t really need to say anything.

Just the onslaught of all sorts of feelings, from her own anxiety through the anticipation of the change and at her worry over me worrying… All of them brushed past my soul, giving me a much greater, deeper understanding of what Fay could only try to put into words.

"Thinking about it, now that our perception of our bond grew, we can’t really hold it back, can we?" I pointed out, more than happy to kill those last, unbearable minutes with small talk.

"I don’t think we can," Fay shrugged her shoulders, "but as long as the inherence won’t act up, it shouldn’t be a problem, don’t you think?"

Taking a step and crossing the distance that separated us, I wrapped my hands around Fay, sinking into the warm softness of her embrace.

And as I closed my eyes…

Four minutes remained. And at the same time, I noticed an extremely tiny disturbance.

No, it wasn’t that.

The flow of the world’s aura all around us was already strangely affected by the influence of Madam actually pushing her own aura around. But now, at some level, I couldn’t even understand or put my finger on… There was something wrong.

The flow of the world’s aura around… was just so ever slightly altered.

"Can you sense it too?"

As much as I wanted to just enjoy my hug to regain mental strength for facing whatever issues might arise next…

This feeling of wrongness, as small and tiny as it was, continued to rub my mind the wrong way.

"Actually…" Fay blinked her eyes a few times, her face showing a few wrinkles as she squinted her eyes and focused.

A moment later, she raised her now widened eyes, giving me a slightly startled look.

"I can’t feel anything strange, hon…" she muttered, biting down on her lower lip. "I can feel that you feel something… But I can’t…"

As if on the clock, the moment only three minutes remained on the clock of my portal, the world’s aura all around explo…

No?

It suddenly grew chaotic. The flows of the world’s aura mixed together and scattered in every way, just like small drops of rain forming a stream on a glass would be swept away if someone poured a bucket of water on the same glass.

*Thud*

A dull, strangely muted sound of something falling reached my ears a mere moment later. And as I turned my eyes…

’Ma…’

"BRACE!"

Screaming from the bottom of her lungs, Madam fell down on her knees and then heavily leaned forward, striking the ground with her fists so hard, that her hands dug a few inches into the ground.

Enjoy new adventures at NovelBin.Côm

The world flipped…

No, it was just an endless ocean of aura that suddenly started to radiate from Madam as she hurriedly gathered more and more of it around her body.

’Fay!’

With one thought in my mind, I tightened my embrace over the girl before throwing both of us down on the ground, pinning Fay below my own body.

We fell down, instantly scrambling to find even the slightest unevenness in the terrain to hide from what was coming.

And with the fresh look of distraught written all over Madam’s face…

It couldn’t be anything good.

"It’s the imperials. They had to figure something out, for that damned princess is…"

A murmur rose up from several meters away, only for Makary’s men to all fall down to the ground and take aim.

"One click and closing! Eight hundred! Six hundred…" Chris ignored whatever Madam wanted to tell me, fully focused on the display before his eyes…

"Sending vector!" Chris gave a command I heard not before.

And before anything that he tracked could reach the line of celestials and divines ahead, Makary’s men opened fire.

The fire that, through the few tracer rounds some of their guns included, all concentrated on a single point in space. Judging by how the lines of fire continued to converge closer and closer, even the hail of bullets wasn’t enough to stop whoever or whatever was coming.

"Two hundred!" Chris screamed out.

Following that, the fire… changed.

Some of the guns raised their fire rate. Others, quite the opposite, stopped the spray-and-pray and opted for more precise, slower shots.

Pac!

A bloodied body wearing scraps of what had to be a uniform just a few moments before slammed into an invisible barrier just a few steps ahead of the front of the celestial line.

The body was covered with bullet wounds all over. The poor target of Makary’s men missed the lower half of his left arm and a huge chunk of muscle low on his right shoulder. One of the man’s ears was blown away, its ugly remains giving testimony to the force that struck it off the man’s head.

And yet, with more than just a few bullet holes in his chest… the man raised his remaining hand and struck down his fist at Madam’s barrier in an expression of silent, exhausted, spent fury.

"BRACE!"

Madam shouted again as if she couldn’t see the state this man was in.

’Two minutes,’ I gritted my teeth, angry… no, furious at how my plans appeared to all collapse right at the very last moment.

Still.

’This guy is as good as dead, so why…’

A single thought passed through my head.

"Makary!" Suddenly under much greater pressure of time than I anticipated, I only managed to turn my head halfway to look at the man. "Smoke the shit out of this…"

BOOM!

This time, it wasn’t a body falling down on Madam’s barrier. This time, it was the sun itself that struck the supreme’s defense before shattering and exploding, covering the entire world with a glorious, golden shine.

For a second, Madam’s barrier held. Then, it cracked, especially right at the point where the sun suddenly appeared uninvited.

Next, a single part of Madam’s barrier shattered, allowing the figure as golden as the light surrounding it to pass through, land down on the ground, and…

A cloud of dense smoke suddenly exploded right in my face, covering both me and Fay but also our immediate surroundings in a screen of impenetrable smoke that even this magical, golden shine couldn’t pierce through.

This was a disaster. My worst fears coming true.

A situation deteriorated to the point that at the back of my head, the thought of just giving up and escaping through the portal just with Fay… The thought of leaving this world behind appeared.

And as vexing as it was, my lips ignored the circumstances and twitched up into a smile.

Because as far as I was concerned, this was one to zero in favor of a modern world.

’A single smoke grenade and it can block this overwhelming, magical light, huh?’

With the smoke surrounding me and only continuing to expand with the sizzling sound as its source was far from exhausting its load, I couldn’t really tell what happened next. It was thanks to this smoke that I could see the shockwaves of the exchange between Etaria and Madam shake the air around.

’We need to go!’ Thinking with all my might, I pulled Fay over to where the frame of the gate was bristling to finally serve its purpose.

Just a minute away.

And then, as suddenly as it all started, the suffocating presence of the supremes vanished, as their violent clash brought them away, somewhere else.

Was it a random occurrence? Was it Madam buying me time? Or simply a shared wish of the supremes not to involve mere mortals with their overwhelming power?

Regardless of what it was, though, I had my job to do.

By the time I’ve crawled up to the gate-to-be with Fay, only less than a minute remained before my portal would reactivate. Ten seconds prior to that happening, Makary came out from the smoke and stood by my side.

A few more seconds passed. And the portal that I’ve continued to call forth since three days ago finally responded to my voice… Turning from a point to an orb and then its usual shape… only to continue to expand, all the way to the point when it settled itself into the weave of the trees themselves.

[Stable Portal ready to deploy]

[Please use your portal to confirm the location of the stable gate’s exit]