Chapter 203 - The Calm Before The Storm (Patreon)

Note : Chapter 208 has been written and added to the queue !

Chapter 203

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Workshop

Alexandra hummed as she checked the progress reports, her hands going through the motion of assembling the prototype before her. One of the definite perks of working with high technology is that much of it was almost muscle memory by that point. Especially for, say, railguns. Her development speed was just skyrocketing the higher tech she went, ironically, as she was back on familiar ground, dealing with usual problems, at last.

Seraph and the apparition had gone through all the Sagitarius target recognition systems, and patched all vulnerabilities they could find, then implemented a bunch of failsafes. It wasn't perfect, but it would do. They'd also copied all the code from the systems still in the bunker, and then purged the devices themselves to replace the programs with their own. Coding all of that would take a bit, but at least the defense systems could be completely trusted now.

Still, they were still doing some work towards their own combat programs. Just in case.

Her other self had some requests for fabricator time again, and Alexandra made a note to look up quite what she was building with it as she approved it.

Emilia had some notes on what to do to keep CQ busy, and Alexandra quickly approved a few suggestions, while rejecting others. She briefly toyed with the idea of opening the fourth floor to adventurers, before rejecting it.

Right now she was too busy separating the floors into their own 'steps', to optimize adventurer throughput, and trying to organize the security systems and protocols to go along with it. It would be a significant departure from traditional dungeon design, but at this point she couldn't care less. The 'main' dungeon was the most consuming part of it, and the least profitable, especially the first floor. She was eager to make it a genuine challenge were low level adventurers went to get rich or get whacked, not just free money higher ranks gathered on their way to real danger.

Plus, she wanted to get a feel for Oromar before she unveiled the loot of the fourth floor, with its artillery and rifles. She knew very little of the new guildmaster, especially as he seemed to have been laser focused on internal reforms so far. Although he had made some clear signals that he wasn't going to interfere in her and Allya's alliance, she'd rather make sure.

Plus, although she wouldn't admit it to anyone, she was starting to seriously like her dungeon core job, and she was starting to have some professional pride in her work. And it wouldn't do to release a half baked main dungeon floor to the adventurers.

She mad a mental note to have the apparition check again if there was maybe a control program making her like her job. Just in case.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

The more things change…

Alexandra smiled as she finished assembling the prototype, and blinked the notification away. She pressed a button, and the machine hummed, before starting to float in the air, before wincing as it emitted a high pitched wine, and fell back down with a crack of failing power systems.

Well, so much for having figured out everything about magitech flight.

She sighed, and looked to the side at some of the more prototypes, some of which were…almost esotheric.

After how quickly and -relatively- easily she'd figured out the airship tech, Alexandra had even considered building a landship, before shelving the idea. For the same reasons she suspected they were seldom used on Alcheryos now. As the Old World fleet had so handily demonstrated, they were far too vulnerable to being swarmed and boarded by ground troops. If she was going to build full scale ships, she might as well go the extra mile and enable them to soar through the skies. She had a suspicion that the reason why the Sagitarius Empire hadn't was that anything getting too high would have been smacked by a variety of surface to void weaponry, but she didn't have to worry about that.

Yet, at least.

She'd also been going over her repulsor generators. The technology fascinated her, it was unfamiliar, sure, but it reminded her of normal gravity generators in the same a coal fired steam boiler could remind one of a pressurized fission reactor. Same principles in many ways: heat water, get steam and turn an alternator, but there were so many different limitations in power and capabilities, not to mention dangers. The repulsors were strange in that they weren't actually repulsing off of matter like she had expected. They seemed to be pushing against the gravity well itself, in a way that reminded her of a hyperdrive preventing you from trying to materialize into solid matter or too deep into a large gravity well. Seemed the Empire, or, more probably, the terran scientists they'd gathered, had found a way to reproduce and harness the effect as a cheap way to achieve 'flight'.

Which reminded her of the ships. She hadn't taken any samples of the old world landships she'd swarmed to rescue Allya, but she had saved every single bit of data her golems had gathered in there. And thanks to that she'd gotten a fairly accurate picture of their insides and, at least in the broad strokes, how they were designed. And the first thing that had shocked her were the so called 'cruisers', the ones with the tracks.

They weren't repulsor vessels at all. The small ships, which Seraph had more accurately labelled as corvettes, same as she had corrected the 'cruisers' as frigates, were clearly built from the ground up to be hovering, they weapons built to fire down and sweep the sides, but the frigates? They were spaceships. Actual, genuine starship hulls, built to have point defence, sensor clusters and heavy weapons facing in every possible direction. And unless she was seriously mistaken, they hadn't even had repulsor systems. Instead they had stripped down gravity generators, the same kind that would have been used to keep the crew's feet on the ground, instead rigged to lighten the ship's weight. It was a jury rigged design, which spoke volume to how badly the war must have been going by that point. And it explained the relative high tech in some of the units. Those weren't 'regulars', they were repurposed naval units, possibly from a shipyard or crashed starships the Empire had recovered. Maybe even spaceships that they simply dared not launch into orbit, for fear of surface to void batteries.

She shivered, and shook her head. Regardless, she had her airships, and enough design data to refine her designs in the future. She wasn't going to be able to build anything even as remotely tough as those Old World landships -which had take a point blank nuke to the face before their own reactors overloaded, and yet were still mostly structurally sound-, at least not if she wanted it to be cost effective, but her next generation of warships were going to be tough as nails…and thanks to all the info gained, she'd be able to give them some genuine artillery, not just the pop guns her raiders had.

It was time to break out the old Bertha schematics, and figure how to cram that abomination into a turret.

The Republic wasn't even going to know what hit them.

*****

Allya sighed as she looked at the paperwork. For once, she was glad for the distraction. They gave her something to do, outside of brooding on the news.

Things were going from bad to worse. Sunrise's northern army was still pushing on, despite the royal relief force lead by the Queen bleeding them every step of the way. They would be around the capital before long, and once they were….

Of course, of more immediate worry was the southern army. The forts around Darthar were still holding, but the rebel artillery was pounding them into rubble. Still, the supply and trade routes were still open, allowing more desperately needed cargoes to make their way to Rebirth or Asaria, hell, even Sarth, but each was bought with blood, and it was becoming increasingly clear that it wasn't going to last much longer.

Once the fortress fell, Darthar would be encircled. And Rebirth would be cut off, with enemies on all sides. Most merchant ships or ground caravans needed Rebirth or Erakis as a stopover point, and that meant that they would be effectively alone. Oh, there'd still be trade with the Republic, thank the Gods for the greed of the senators, but it didn't take a genius to realize that as soon as they became the only suppliers, the senate would start tightening the screws, trying to starve the town out.

At least there was silver lining to that. Thanks to the effort of the druid, whose farm she'd approved what felt like a lifetime ago, they would have a surprisingly robust supply of vegetables, and efforts -generously subsidized from the town's coffers- were underway to expand that into fields of cereals. Even private citizens were starting to make their own gardens, and there was a thriving market for fresh homegrown fruits and vegetables, enabled by the absurd growth boost from the dungeon's presence. Of course Alexandra could just feed the entire damned town via her own agriculture, if she repurposed her 'hydroponics bays' on the third floor, but that was very much a last resort measure. Not just because it would raise some eyebrows, but because she'd gathered the plants currently being harvested were critical to the dungeon's ammunition production pipeline in some ways, and right now they needed guns and the means to fire them more than food.

The guild had also gotten off of her back, which was a welcome change. She wasn't quite sure how to feel about the new guildmaster, but there was no denying that he meant to carry on differently than Starvak. As soon as the dwarf had been off on a trade ship back to Darthar, Oromar had instituted sweeping reforms. The process for choosing adventuring parties to delve into the dungeon was overhauled, guild taxes were changed, and more importantly all of the attendants had been ordered to back the hell off from the dungeon and Allya. No one was monitoring the military entrance anymore, and now the attendants made little more than a token effort to check adventurers bringing stuff into the dungeon. It had done a great deal to stabilize the situation, but Allya had her finger tight enough on the adventurers' pulse, thanks in great part to Trira, to know that it was mostly a lot of plaster on the yawning chasms of distrust towards the guild. Most adventurers would never forgive the organizations for having left them to die during the battle, and Oromar seemed to know that. Still, his reforms and sheer reputation had at least stopped the bloodshed, and the more unruly elements were willing to keep their peace as long as the guildmaster left them alone, and an uneasy truce and new status quo was starting to emerge, where the guild kept to its own affairs, and stayed far out of the way of the dungeon or the town.

It wasn't the most optimal outcome, but you couldn't have everything, and honestly Allya was willing to take it. So was Alexandra, although she was still far from sanguine about the fact. The dungeon core was still worried as all hell about the guild, and Allya could see why. But at this point, establishing a status quo actually only weakened them in the long term. By letting bygones be bygones, they were cementing the dungeon and town's independence from meddling in the local adventurers' minds, and making a new normal. If, or let's face it, when the guild came swooping back at last to drop fury and brimstone over the duo carving up the continent, they would be unable to enlist the local adventurers. That meant an outside invasion, which the guild could do, but it would be one final hurrah if they were stupid enough to try. A full scale attack like that, rather than inciting unrest and deposing her with her own citizens couldn't be passed off, and the guild would go from a necessary evil to a genuine, palpable threat to every nation around the world.

Once that happened, it would only be a question of time before their monopoly was broken up, and their operations partitioned into local guilds, or even government agencies.

That…almost terrified Allya. The guild had come to be soon after the horrors of the Great Night, when the Dawn of Flames was still within living memory. They were a brotherhood of explorers, those that would brave the wastelands and protect the scientists and mages trying to piece together the mysteries of the Old Ones, the pioneers that had forged out to find the gifts of the God of Fire, and settle upon the dungeons. They were older than any nation still standing bar the Western Marches, and had been a constant on Alcheryos for so long she wasn't sure what the world would look like without them.

But they were after her. And it was her or them. That, combined with their hubris, well…she was almost sure the world would be better without them, at least in the long term.

Besides. Thanks to her new alliance, and Alexandra's honesty, she knew she had something far older, and far more dangerous, to worry about.