Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!-Chapter 274: Turning point (5!!)

[Stable Portal ready to deploy]

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

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The purple hue of the portal shone over the frame made from the unnaturally weaved branches of the trees at the very edge of the clearing. And spreading out from those shiny edges towards the center, an endless swarm of vectors bent the space within, creating a visual glitch that my human eyes perceived as a blanket of slightly less intense purple.

But now, after all the advances and after learning how to notice the extremely fine, dark aura…

I simply stood in place, wasting precious seconds of time, something I should pay dearly for.

I had no excuse… but I did.

All of my growth only made it possible for me to learn just how incomprehensibly advanced this portal was. All of my newfound power was lowkey satisfied with… to realize the endless chasm that separated me from the true masters of manipulating aura.

For if I were to compare my skills to merely repeated sounds made by some monkey, the portal that I've used so thoughtlessly…

It was a state-of-the-art, quantum computation of a triple encoded universal language, all performed from beyond the edge of the observable universe via quantum entanglement.

'The tiniest building block of it… is on par with my most complex spell…'

Stunned beyond any reason, I had no mental capacity to process the events around me.

"Grab him!" Makary hissed, moving erratically as the smoke of his grenades quickly grew so dense, that it covered even the shine of the bristling portal.

"Move!" Recognizing the urgency of the moment, Fay restrained our bond as hard as she could before shouting as she lunged forth, through the purple portal.

Fay jumped, easily lifting the two of us with a single kick of her legs.

I came back to my senses only when we scored a pretty tough landing on the concrete of Makary's hangar, axing the knees of several soldiers busying themselves with moving cargo around.

A moment later, Makary appeared along with the smoke spewing out from the can he held in his hand.

For a single instant, the world came to a standstill.

The soldiers nearby turned their eyes towards a group of three appearing right at the foothold of a freshly constructed, tightly sealed wall. Those further into the hangar were only starting to turn their eyes towards the commotion.

And just like when I witnessed the true insanity of my father's gift, I found myself unable to move air through my throat.

'I've gotta do something! Every moment counts!'

I've already wasted enough time idling around before the portal. Those precious seconds couldn't be regained… And now more of them were bound to vanish in the commotion that was sure to follow.

I tried, I pushed myself to my absolute limits…

But my throat failed to produce a single sound.

"All hands!" Makary dropped the dying can of smoke to the ground and waved the residual smoke away. "Go green."

The time picked up its pace when Makary spoke, only to freeze again after his words sounded out.

And then, all hell broke loose.

"All hands!" some ex-officer picked up the call and passed it along. "Go green!"

The insides of the hangar stirred up.

People dropped whatever they were doing as they stood, rushing about to gather and form up.

'Shit!'

Finally, the gears of my mind and my body synchronized again.

"Stop it!" I rudely shouted, struggling for a second to get myself off the floor. "Keep it silent!"

By the time I hissed, Makary already moved past where Fay landed, approaching one of the men we stumbled into when we fell down.

Paying little to no mind to my warning, Makary lowered his hand and helped the man to stand up.

"What's the situation outside?"

Looking up at the very leader of the entire division in the past… the soldier relaxed.

"There are some pests bothering us at the gate, but nothing too hard to handle. About a fifth of the original headcount gathered, seventy percent combat ready."

There was no war that particular soldier could participate in. The dissolution of the old order went surprisingly peacefully, leaving no real wars for someone his age to take part in.

And yet, years after his last day in service, the relatively young soldier snapped into his trained mindset in a mere instant.

It didn't matter where Makary came from, why was he holding a smoke and who were the two that tripped him.

The colonel asked for a report, so a report was what he would get.

"Keep the go green silent," Makary ordered while sparring me a glance as I finished gathering myself up. "Any ideas about what should we push first?"

Despite the rather poor first impression I made on the soldiers gathered in the hangar, Makary still turned to me for advice.

"Against those…" I squinted my eyes, putting aside all my doubts, all my worries and questions, and focusing all of the resources of my brain to process this one, crucial question.

And so, I raised my eyes and gave Makary a calm look.

"Do you have a Maglev, by any chance?"

An idiotic thing to ask from a mere gang leader. A tall order even for seasoned mercenaries.

But Makary…

He was the full-blown colonel, the highest authority of the local garrison before the fall!

Makary squinted his eyes only to turn his head and look at the soldier from before.

"We have three ready to go." Not asking any questions back, the soldier dutifully replied.

"We need to send them in. Raise them up," Makary ordered, wasting no time on idle chatter. "Everyone, vacate the hangar! And…"

For the first time since his strong entrance, Makary hesitated and looked over.

"Any ideas for some good bullshit to throw the prying eyes off?"

I squinted my eyes as I fully committed my brain to the single task of solving this particular puzzle.

What we needed was a perfect brew of half-truths and outright lies, so that our excuse would make sense in both the short but also long term. And while all secrets were bound to see the light of the day, regardless of how well we would try to keep them…

There was nothing wrong with trying to push this particular issue as late as possible.

"We caught news of the escalation of a conflict that can turn nuclear. Just in case, we are moving our assets to an underground safehouse so as not to lose everything in the chaos if the conflict actually starts."

We were about to bring out quite the hammer of the modern military down on the other world. But that also meant tons upon tons of equipment and supplies constantly moving through Makary's lands and vanishing without a trace, along with an equally huge number of men coming in but never coming out.

It wasn't something that the city government could let slide without a proper explanation… In fact, it would be stupid not for the neighbors to investigate this kind of obvious build-up of military force right across their lawn!

And thus, a proper excuse for why tons upon tons of resources vanish and where all those people are needed.

Maintaining a bunker of a scale capable of holding a division worth of vehicles, guns, and supplies obviously required a fitting number of hands to move things around.

"Good idea," Makary nodded his head with gratitude before turning his head back to his men.

By now, every single soul within the hangar had their attention fully focused on the man while the half-open gate invited more and more former soldiers to come and check the commotion out.

"I need three Maglevs in the air right now. Everyone else, stand by for deployment!"

Makary's orders were short, and his men were equally as quick to follow them. In merely a minute, the crowded hangar with all sorts of cargo, weapons, and supplies scattered all over it turned into a perfectly organized, empty space with several rows of armed soldiers standing by along the hangar's sides.

"I've sent people to put smoke in the governor's eyes, everyone else should be ready in five to ten minutes," another officer grew up from out of nowhere, right by Makary's side… And obviously, he was already filling the former colonel in on the details of the situation.

"And the Maglevs?" Following through with my suggestion, Makary pressed his subordinate.

"They are coming in right now," the officer replied while passing the commander a bare headset ripped away from some sort of helmet.

Right as the man spoke, the gate of the hangar swung fully to the side, creating enough room for a magnificent vehicle to reveal itself in its terrifying glory.

An elongated flying saucer, using some esoteric principles of electromagnetism to freely move through the air, with the one limitation of rapidly losing power the further away from the ground it would get.

Yet, up to about a hundred meters into the sky, it was the ultimate war machine, easily capable of executing maneuvers that seemed to defy basic laws of physics and momentum… All the while carrying an arsenal matching several aerial gunships of the old at once.

With the low, unnerving hum of its powerful electromagnets, the wondrous vehicle flew through the open space and stopped right by the sealed back wall…

And the purple haze of my portal, perfectly fitting the frame Makary ordered built before we went to Fay's world.

"Help the white, ward off the golden, kill anyone else who seeks to harm the white," Makary spoke in some esoteric language that even I took a second to make a sense of. He then lowered the headset down to his hips as he turned towards the rest of his men.

"There's a ring of allies surrounding the landing zone. Our enemies are more or less uniformly dressed and can exhibit powers beyond our understanding!"

It was at this point when I felt the first hint of confusion grow within the crowd.

What landing zone? What enemies?

A quick glance was all it took to confirm they were now starting to question just where their leader actually came from.

Makary's men sure were obedient and followed the orders with an enviable hurry… But it was impossible to stop them from thinking. In fact, the warrant officers and above were expected to actively process and react to the situation they faced!

Sensing the exact same thing that I did, Makary turned his head and looked over at the two of us.

"I can see it, so why they can't?" he asked calmly, yet failed to hide the hint of tension in his voice.

What if the gate wouldn't open? What if we couldn't pass through it? What if there was some sort of limitations I didn't predict? What if…

I turned around and faced the purple haze locked within the frame at the hangar's wall. And for the first time since we fell through, I took a look at the system notifications.

[Stable Gate Established]

[Charge it up to establish a temporary connection]

[Current charge: 0%]

I resisted the desire to sigh.

At this point, my mind was too dulled to have the energy to feel shocked, disappointed, or defeated.

'It was never going to be that easy, huh?' I thought, giving up on whining as I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, summoning all the mental strength and aura I could muster.

'Let's see how hard this is going to be!'