Twenty-seven portals was a good number. Helios was certain he was ahead or at least catching up; there was no way his challenger could be keeping up that kind of pace. Most of the ones he’d taken care of were in the southern hemisphere, since that was where the Sun saw the most at this time of year, but there were a few more northerly ones he’d noticed.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any portals under the light of the Sun right now. They’d been getting harder and harder to find. It was slowing down as he needed to search; looking for where people were behaving differently led to a lot of things that weren’t portals.

Still, it wasn’t like the “leader in closing portals” could possibly be doing better. There wasn’t anything that saw more than the Sun; that was why he’d chosen it in the first place, all secrets were eventually revealed in the light of the Sun. He had to be catching up.

Hmm, what was going on here? Why were there so many people in Antarctica? It might be summer, but he’d only seen relatively small groups before.

Oh, those weren’t people, they were bears, or at least something that looked a lot like bears. But bears don’t build things.

Helios knew what that meant: a portal was nearby. Now where might they have hidden it?

It was another day before the lawyer finally sent the edited agreement back to Serenity. As he read through it, he could see several of the things the lawyer had objected to, but some of them seemed like minor wording changes - in one case, it was simply moving a comma. Serenity shrugged; that was what he paid a lawyer for, after all.

Unfortunately, the provision Serenity liked the least had survived. There were a number of additional provisions about how the “observer” was to behave and how Serenity was not responsible for them or for making certain they could travel where he did, but the basic agreement that Serenity would allow someone to travel with him survived.

There was a specific provision that the observer would have to arrange their own lodging, and that transportation would be provided on only a “space available” basis. Unfortunately, the lawyer included a note to Serenity that said he should err on the side of making space available where possible; it was a strange situation, but cooperation and actually having someone present might actually be useful if they ever ended up in court.

The lawyer also told him to have recordings running whenever possible if the observer was present. That way, it wouldn’t devolve into an argument if the observer claimed to see something that didn’t happen; they could prove it. He didn’t say that Serenity needed to be certain to not do anything illegal (or at least turn the recordings off if he did); that was pretty obvious.

Not that Serenity planned to do anything illegal.

Once the modified agreement was accepted, it was yet another day until the now thoroughly messed up schedule could be rearranged. Serenity was “treated” to a rundown of the complaining by Janice, and was grateful that he wasn’t the one having to deal with multiple countries arguing over where he should go first.

He did tell her to give extra weight to countries requested by his own and to any spots that seemed urgent while she was trying to figure out a new plan. From her reaction, Serenity was pretty sure she’d already intended to do both.

They finally left the country after another day of scheduling; Janice had managed to get a starting point identified. They were on their way to Singapore, following reports of a sea serpent. Serenity wasn’t looking forward to it, and he was even less happy when the “observer” that met them at the airport was Agent Price.

At least they were going to have a translator provided; Serenity didn’t speak the local language, and while Raz could probably manage it with his bracelet, it would be better to have a guide and translator.

There was no portal. Helios had spent almost a week searching the strange village, and there was definitely not a portal there. The bears had to be coming from somewhere!

Worse, even though it looked superficially like a village and even had some of the trappings of one, it definitely wasn’t a complete village. There was no food storage, no cooking facilities other than two buildings with a hearth, and the closest it came to a village hall was the slightly larger building in the center with one of the two hearths (the other was out in the open of all crazy things).

Where were they getting the wood, anyway? There were no trees to be found, but there was wood stacked up next to both hearths. The more he looked, the more oddities he found. It was a false front of a village, not an actual village. There still had to be a portal somewhere, but he couldn’t find where.

The oddest thing he found was a pedestal with a white stone fixed to it; it looked like cloudy quartz. It wasn’t a portal, so Helios searched around it, then moved on.

Eventually, he had to give up. Maybe someone else had already closed the portal and these were refugees? Well, a week ago they might have been refugees; they were frozen meat now.

Helios moved on, leaving a very confused young Area Core behind in its destroyed “polar bear village”. It had a lot to learn, even before its initial efforts were blocked.

The sea serpents turned out to be intelligent and already avoiding anything they realized was a crewed boat. Getting to where they could talk was a bumpy process, but once they did the serpents were happy to make a deal. When Serenity mentioned closing the portal, they asked him to do so immediately; they didn’t say why they were there, but Serenity got the feeling they were running from something worse. Serenity was grateful that Agent Price didn’t feel the need to insert himself in it; instead, he stayed off to the side. He was always there but never obtrusive.

The dungeons in the area were cooperative, other than one that didn’t even make monsters. It made volcanoes of all sorts instead. The hazards were things like lava flows and ash explosions, horribly dangerous to anyone who needed to breathe and couldn’t stand that kind of heat. Serenity ended up sending his party back out of the dungeon while he finished it alone.

No matter what he did, he wasn’t able to convince it that it shouldn’t affect the outside world; it wanted to share the wonders of magma with everything. Even offering to bring in people who studied volcanoes to talk to it didn’t help; it sounded happy to talk to them and observe how they handled being in an eruption. Serenity ended up conquering the core and setting up a replacement. The new dungeon was also very dangerous and volcano-themed but far more standard. It was owned by the government, so as usual Serenity turned the Authorized Alteration Token over to his liaison.

His next stop was in South America, followed by Africa and eastern Europe. Many countries were happily taking care of their own problems, so Serenity didn’t stop anywhere he wasn’t invited. Quite a few of the trips were kept secret, to allow the countries to preserve their image; Serenity didn’t care. All that mattered was that the portals were being closed.

Serenity and his team weren’t the only people closing portals; they weren’t even the only high-profile group being paid to close portals others were having trouble with. Some of them were wiped out when they underestimated a threat, but most of them were having more success than not. None of the other mages was precise enough to replicate Serenity’s trick of fooling the portal into thinking it had been told to close, but it was simple enough to teach them to overload it and force it closed.

Serenity just wanted the portals closed; he didn’t have to be the person doing it. Yes, he wanted to win the bet with Helios, but he figured that teaching others how to do it more easily counted as the sort of indirect help that gave partial credit. Even if it hadn’t, he’d still have shared the information; Earth was more important than winning a bet. If he had to, he could find another way to force Helios to remove the curse. He didn’t care about whether or not he kept the items he’d promised to give up if he lost.

Serenity lost count of the number of dungeons he convinced to help Gaia, one way or another, but he knew that she was happy with his progress. There were large parts of the globe he couldn’t get to, but when he asked, she told him she’d handle them another way.

Serenity’s free time was spent either with Rissa or working on things he needed to work on, sometimes both at the same time. She started joining him for some of his runs and flying practice, and he worked with her on both melee combat and magic. Rissa made better strides than Serenity did, in general, but she had several advantages such as the help of an experienced instructor.

Serenity was still quite happy with his progress. Increasing his SpaceTime concept through study by a couple percent in only a handful of weeks was impressive without an instructor, and he felt far more comfortable using his wings. There was no easy place to look up his Unarmed Combat comprehension, but he knew it had improved as well, largely with help from Kerr and Sillon.

January 20, 2037 came and went. It was a day like any other. By then, Serenity had finished the last of the Tutorials he’d agreed to and 463 of the 512 portals were closed. Serenity spent the day closing a portal. He wasn’t certain why no one else had already taken care of it, since the people around it were not that strong, but a lot of the portals seemed to be like that; strong enough to deter a full assault without being strong enough to actually stop one.

January 21st was not like the previous day. It was supposed to be a day of dungeons and travel, but that was all interrupted at breakfast when the news arrived that the new President had pardoned Lex Rothmer for his actions taken against the invasions.

The immediate news articles were pretty amusing; the fact that some which had been calling for the new President to do something approved wasn’t surprising, but the ones that had been calling for a witchhunt and were now calling it a ‘great act of statesmanship, meant to bring unity to our shattered political system’ were hilarious. There was even a rumor that the new President had offered him his former position and been turned down. Serenity wasn’t certain what to think about that one.

Agent Price was the last person to join them at breakfast. He seemed distracted, and Serenity couldn’t resist tweaking him a bit. “So, do you think I’ll be able to return home soon?”

Agent Price cleared his throat, blatantly stalling for time. “Ah, it seems likely but I will have to check on that.”

Serenity grinned, but let him down easy. “You’ve got some time. It’s going to take at least another week to get all of this cleared up. No point in heading home while there are still portals to close; I think we can get them all taken care of well before the deadline.”

“There’s a deadline?” Agent Price actually sounded startled by that. “Other than the damage they do, I mean.”

Serenity frowned. Hadn’t he mentioned it? He was pretty sure he’d told at least his parents, but it was entirely possible it hadn’t made its way to Agent Price. “Yeah. It’s a little flexible, but there are a couple of deadlines. The portals all have time limits; anyone who stays here too long risks being stranded here. There’s also a time where the Voice considers people to have become locals. I know that’s related to a failure condition for the Global Quest, but I’m not entirely certain what the requirements are. It’s time-based, but I think there may be something else.”

All the abandoned portals bothered Serenity. All of the ones he’d heard about had counted towards the Global Quest as soon as they were closed, even though the quest required both closing the portal and removing the invaders’ threat. So either those invaders were already dead or the Voice had decided they either weren’t threatening or weren’t invaders. It was enough to make Serenity concerned about just how flexible the rules were. Intent mattered, after all.

“Completing the Quest is very important. It’s the key to being able to trade with the rest of the universe. I’m hoping that we’re smart enough to not trade away Manhattan for some beads. Actually, I think there are a lot of things that will be very well received offplanet. It’s just a matter of getting to where we can do it. There’s also some offplanet things that should be very useful here.” Serenity’s mind drifted to weapons, mostly. Earth had some very nice nonmagical weaponry, but it didn’t have any way to add magic. Utility items were mostly handled other ways, and at low Tier guns would be enough, but he badly wanted to start pushing more people up the Tier ladder.