There was a chorus of agreement at the man’s words. It was understandable; the gem was hard to miss, almost the same size and shape as a football. It was dark in color, a deep midnight purple, but it was cut into facets that caught and bounced light in a way that put glitter to shame.

When anyone touched it, they received the following message:

Congratulations! You have acquired an Initiate Titan’s Heart. You may focus on this gem to consume it and boost a Specialty. Rulers may instead meld the gem with their crown to provide an increase in capability to themselves and their subjects. You may meld this Heart with a Points Siphon to increase Siphon strength. Finally, you may make your way to a Shop where this Titan’s Heart may be traded in for a variety of exclusive prizes.

We took it upstairs to the Shop, where we received a lengthy list of trade-in options. Some were purely luxury items, like a few devices labeled expressly as being for entertainment. Other things had utility, but not at the scale that would matter to Fort Autumn, like a Portable Shelter or Personal Transport. The same held true for the selection of weapons on offer, although there was a possibility that a Titan-granted weapon might be ideal for, you know, killing a Titan. If there had been any ranged weapons available we might have gone that route, but the aliens seemed to want us to get up close and personal with our enemies. There wasn’t any armor available, which I found a little odd. A single piece - or even a single suit - of armor wouldn’t be too helpful to a fort that had come to shelter thousands. I didn’t think armor was what we wanted at the moment, but it struck me as weird that it wasn’t available.

The most tempting item was the Minor Matter Replicator. From a practical viewpoint, we might be able to replicate our best armor, or even key items like the repaired bullets. From an impractical standpoint, I knew exactly how many squares of dark chocolate I had left and most people knew about Tori’s ongoing countdown until the “true” end of the world, i.e. when her coffee supply ran out.

After some debate, we’d grabbed one Matter Replicator to test on replicating bullets. It looked like it was working, but the replication input and output chambers were small, a little under a cubic foot, and the bar that appeared at the top seemed to indicate we’d need to wait around a day to be able to open it again and see results.

I’d admit I’d hoped that claiming the Matter Replicator would work like inputting a blueprint, and that we’d be able to buy more after claiming the first, but no such luck; it was a strict one-gem-for-one-replicator trade.

It was probably for the best, or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself. “Winning” this stupid excuse for a game had to be about spending our Money wisely, and after all my scorn for people wasting resources on the cardboard-esque Alternative Rations, I’d be a total hypocrite to waste hundreds or thousands of Money on buying a Matter Replicator to copy some junk food.

Shortly thereafter, we ended up fighting one more D-Rex. It hadn’t been attacking us, but we’d lured it in at the request of the Arsenal, to end its rampage through the neighborhoods to our south. It had supposedly taken out the Points Siphon that had previously been controlled by the Jackson family, crushing the gem at the base in its jaws and making the whole towering edifice crash down, smashing through the roofs of three nearby homes. After we’d lured the D-Rex away, the Jacksons had managed to contain the fires, but their neighborhood was in sorry shape: two blocks of homes had been reduced to ashes.

We’d had more time to prepare for this fight, using our hydromancers to turn a patch of ground into a mud slick and hitting the D-Rex with the battered minibus as it loped across the slippery ground.

It worked first try, which was incredibly fortunate. The minibus, already mangled, was completely immobile after its third impact with a giant carnivore. One front wheel had been bent like a taco shell, and the other snapped off completely, six inches of axle sticking out where it had been sheared apart.

The council decided to wait a few days to learn more about the other options before turning in the second Titan’s Heart. We had an information network; not putting it to use seemed silly.

More reports came in throughout the rest of the day, and we got a better picture. D-Rex had appeared throughout the city at the Deadline, but without a clear pattern. There was more than one for each Shop, but not enough to be one per Points Siphon. Micah came home about two hours after he’d left, but the rest of his group went back out again, working to solidify nearby firebreaks. There wasn’t a telephone pole still standing in Madison, or so I’d heard.

I saw Flip’s glider overhead more than once, but she couldn’t repeat her D-Rex tipping trick. Grabbing a D-Rex with her bare hands seemed overly risky, and living things couldn’t be lifted directly with Telekinesis. Instead, she’d used Telekinesis to maneuver thick iron chains around the D-Rex’s body, gotten a grip on them, and activated her Booster to lift the massive carnivore. She’d still been jetting back and forth to help, but with her Specialty on cooldown, she couldn’t take other Titans down alone.

We had people poised and ready to fight another Titan at the next Deadline, but none appeared in our neighborhood.

“Perhaps we will only need fight one every three days?” Alexandra suggested.

“Maybe. I’m concerned,” the major said. He and Alexandra seemed to have reached some kind of detente, and were working together without constantly being at each other’s throats. I still missed Colonel Zwerinski, but I was relieved to deal with less interpersonal drama. “Arsenal took down another last night and one earlier this morning. Those might have appeared when ours did. I’ve got my doubts.”

A few Fort Autumn residents ventured out to fight and farm, but most people sheltered within the overpacked walls as we waited to find out more.

The kids and I stuck close to home, enjoying our relatively-palatial quarters underground as deconstruction of our house continued above us. I was grateful I’d acted quickly on Helen’s relocation offer; the communal living space in the Quarry was getting more and more tightly-packed, and I had started subletting our outermost room to people I knew and trusted. I was feeling a little overwhelmed, and would have rather kept our private space, but I couldn’t do that in good conscience when the main room of the Quarry was wall-to-wall sleeping bags both night and day, with people shifting their sleep schedule rather than risk resting elsewhere.

Then there was a report that a man in Cozy Grove had witnessed a D-Rex spawn in the mid-afternoon, nowhere near the Deadline, and people really started getting nervous. No one liked the idea that Titans could spawn with no regard to timing or schedule. The Arsenal forces had fought off several more Titans, but no one had seen those appear and there was hope that they had spawned during yesterday’s Deadline. People wanted the report from Cozy Grove to be wrong. Some people suggested that the guy who’d seen one was making it up for attention, or, more kindly, that he was confused.

Personally, I thought it was unlikely that D-Rex had roamed the countryside for over a day before we noticed them.

We still fended off a few mobmu attacks, earning enough Points for each of the kids to gain another ability. I had Cassie take Analyze this time, for its synergy with both Overlay and Pointy. I still wanted her to take Life Sense, but with her so distraught over her friend’s ailment, I chickened out. Analyze would be good too, and couldn’t help but hope the additional computing power would help the little AI break out of whatever mental box she was trapped in, but no such luck; she still couldn’t see or hear Micah and myself, although her puzzled questions intensified.

Gavin took Biological Augment: Natural Weapons, giving him a blade on the tip of his tail and a claw on each digit.

Micah took an ability called Sonic Blast, diversifying his damage types.

I had enough Points for another ability too, but I dithered. I was still considering Defensive Surge, which would make me temporarily much more difficult to harm… but I had Parry for self-defense, and I hadn’t seen any sign that it was too weak to protect me from attacks from your run-of-the-mill monster.

Maybe if I used both together, I could block an attack from a Titan, I thought. But was I really going to test that? Not if I had any choice.

I sighed, chasing the issue around in circles.

The gamer in me wanted to narrow my focus, to pick a role and become the best at it, and rely on my teammates to cover my back. Unfortunately, my closest teammates were my kids. I could count on them for a lot of things, but relying on them to have my back in a fight wasn’t fair to them or safe for me. They were getting better and better at combat, but they still had kids’ propensity toward tunnel-vision and distraction.

I would never be perfectly specialized anyway; my early choices had seen to that. But… I could still pick my focus. I could even pick something entirely new, and just enhance it at each additional threshold, and eventually I’d be only a bit behind someone who’d focused perfectly on it from the start.

If I did that, though, I shouldn’t ignore my generalist kit. My abilities were all over the place in terms of alien synergy, but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t have a focus: I was built to notice, recognize, and respond to threats. All my abilities - Assisted Strike, Parry, Paralyze, Analyze, Life Sense, and even Draw Attention - were chosen with that in mind. And I was pretty good at that role, but I had one glaring weakness: if something wasn’t in front of me, and wasn’t alive, I’d probably never notice it.

Humans are very reliant on vision. I’d been working on my Life Sense, trying to rely on it more, practicing by blindfolding myself and making myself rely on it, and I was getting better. However, no matter how good I got, Life Sense would never pick up on a Fire Bolt or an arrow or a fired quill from behind me. Those things weren’t alive.

Did I want this role? This threat-responding role?

I thought about that for a minute.

When I was out with my kids? Yes. Definitely. That was what I needed to keep them alive, more than anything else. I could entrust them with the damage and the healing, but not with this.

It was a good role to have as part of the Fort Autumn defense force as well. I didn’t have to be a damage specialist; we had dozens of those. One more or less wouldn’t make a huge difference. I didn’t really want to specialize to be a tank either, someone who’d draw the Titan’s attention and take hits. Seeing me in that kind of role would stress my children out constantly. Worse, if I was responsible for keeping a giant monster’s attention, I might be too distracted to realize my children needed help. Even if I noticed, I might be unable to go help them without drawing more danger down on top of them.

Being someone who could find a monster’s weakness or might notice an attack from an unexpected direction? That could help keep our defenders alive and would help us take down big new foes like the D-Rex.

I dithered a little more. I knew what I had to do; I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t like the idea. It scared me. I worried about what Vince would think, when I saw him again.

But it made sense.

Tomorrow morning, I’d get a haircut.