Chapter 211 - The Church (Patreon)

Note : Chapters 213 and 214 have been written and added to the queue !

Chapter 211

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Workshop

Alexandra sighed as she gazed at the holographic whiteboard.

She'd started sending stealth golems out to grab a few bits and pieces of salvage from the wreckage of the Old World constructs. Now that she had some to spare, and the guild had dialed down the paranoia, it had seemed like a fairly safe thing to do. Most of what she got back was disappointing. A lot of the materials were low grade mundane stuff, to the point that she'd seriously wondered just how screwed the Sagitarius Empire had been by that point. There had been more interesting samples, mainly from the higher tech vehicles, especially the strike crafts and the ships, but most of it she'd already gotten from Seraph's bunker.

But a few…a few hadn't been from there. And while some were metamaterials, which she didn't have a hope in hell of replicating without a molecular assembler, several appeared to have been alloys. Including a mythril one she was very interested in.

Unfortunately, it was prohibitively expensive. And since she didn't even know how to even process mythril ore, let alone combine it with other materials outside of making composite layering…

So she'd started a project. Allya was doing her own part by luring metallurgists here and giving her access to some processes, but most of it was for simple stuff. Copper, different types of steel, as well as gold and silver, plus a bunch of stuff mainly meant for jewelmakers. She'd started drafting plans to put some mythril ore in the labyrinth to get someone to build a smelter for it here, but to make it worthwhile to process it here instead of exporting it to an already existing smelter would require a decent quantity, which would be prohibitively expensive.

Instead, she'd pulled everyone together and they'd pored through Emilia's tomes. She could have just have had the vampire and herself alone, but the first phase was mainly noting down every book and page with a reference to mythril, and that could be done by everyone. Once that was done, she'd sat down with Emilia and started pulling together every nugget of information into a cohesive whole.

It had taken a while, had been fairly frustrating, given the number of contradictory information, plus of course having two frustrated lovers in a room usually ended with something entirely different from work, but they'd managed to do it.

The result was interesting. It was amazing the amount of information one could collate from encyclopedia, treaties, and such, even those that had been carefully pruned of anything approaching direct instructions. She now knew that she'd gone about it entirely the wrong way. She'd assumed she was dealing with some kind of weird, but essentially normal metal, but it wasn't the case. The thing was magical through and through. Mythril required heat to melt, yes, but it also required some kind of magical injection, usually delivered through mana crystals in the same way one might add carbon to steel, and in some ways more importantly, electric current.

A mythril foundry was effectively a magical variant of an arc smelter. Now in which proportions the ingredients were supposed to be added in, not to mention the temperature involved or the myriad of parameters for the current were a mystery, but those were variables that could be narrowed down through experimentation, now that she wasn't just stumbling about in the dark.

The problem with her whiteboard, was that she'd decided to see if that could be applied to other materials as well, like electrum. It would have to be done eventually, but truth be told she'd pushed for it to be done now in order to distract Emilia, and herself, from the preparations to launch the ships, and for their daughter's departure. The vampire's coddling of the boss had gone from protective to overbearing, and Alexandra knew that she had to step in before her girlfriend started suffocating CQ.

And they'd immediately started running into problems. Turns out Emilia's stash of book was just too good. Because it included material written by extradimensionals. And for someone from Earth, malachite and electrum meant very different things from what was actually on Alcheryos. So there was some confusion. The problem was finding which ones referred to which. When someone spoke about electrum, they didn't necessarily say 'an alloy of gold and silver' or 'a room temperature supra-conductor', they mostly assumed the people reading knew whatever the hell they were talking about and got on with it. Well, they wouldn't have in proper scientific papers, but those hadn't been given to Emilia on fucking purpose. Damn it!

And as much as she'd love to discard the material of her fellow terrans, not only were they generally easier to read, but they were also a lot better than the rest. Most of the metric system had made the transition to Alcheryos, but even then there were still a ton of weird quirks evolved by millennia of doing things their own way with magic involved. The terran writings were more comprehensible, relied on mundane technology and analogies whenever possible, when they didn't they went to great pain to describe exactly what the spells did and thus what needed to replicated if you didn't have the spell itself. And last but not the least, most of them had been written by spacers, since apparently getting eaten by hyperspace was the only way to end up on this Gods forsaken rock. That might not sound like much but even in the interstellar age less than a single percent of the population had worked in space in any capacity. Not counting the large belt habitats as 'working in space', since they were effectively miniature planets. And if you did work in the void, you were put through a meatgrinder of training. She had it easy, comparatively, as the navy had been going crazy with expansion when she'd enlisted, as the discovery of hyperspace was about to be made public, and a lot of standards were relaxed to accommodate. Still, even for the tighter regimen you didn't have to be bright to make the cut, just be thorough as hell. And that meant that almost all of the terran writings were as well.

So now she had a ton of information, probably more than she needed, that she had to separate and process.

She was starting to see why Allya was always complaining about paperwork.

Alexandra sighed. Well, better get to it then. She'd grab Emilia as soon as she was done assisting Seraph with the ships' runes, and ask her to give a hand. And buy CQ some more breathing room, both to avoid being coddled to death, and get in more training with her marines.

The Earth-born sighed again as she received a ping.

"What the hell is it this ti-" Her breath caught in her throat as she saw the image.

An airship had just arrived.

And it bore the heraldry of the Church of the God of Fire.

*****

"Holy one, you honor us with your presence." Said Allya as she bowed before the priest, the rest of her council following suit in the docking tower's, well….docking space.

"The honor is all mine, baroness." Said the priest as he bowed back, to everyone's evident surprise, not least of which was Allya's own.

He was a priest of the God of Fire. Giving respects to nobles as a cleric was usually a good idea, but an Adjudicator had been through here mere months ago!

A simple look at the priest's jovial -too jovial- face convinced Allya that it was precisely the point. She liked straightforward people, that didn't throw their weight around for nothing. And if there was one group that would exploit that, it would be the clergy.

Stars damn it. That conspiracy now had her looking for plots behind everyone!

Then again, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. And in this case, they most definitely were.

Still. If the adjudicator hadn't been comfortable with what Alexandra was doing, and who she was, the dungeon core would be very, very dead. So that meant she should have the church on her side.

For now.

"I disagree, but I doubt we need to argue back and forth about who is truly honored." Allya smiled. "So, what can I do for the Church of the God of Fire?"

The priest straightened.

"Actually baroness, I am here to see what the Church can do for you."

The room fell silent. The Church was, well, the fucking Church.

"I'm…not sure I follow." Said Allya, keeping her voice from being strangled with a supreme effort of will.

"I mean that I come here to assist you in whatever ways I am able to. Of course I have some instructions from my superiors for suggested ways to assist." Allya nodded, those 'ways' were most likely the kind of 'suggestions' that would be an extremely bad idea to ignore or reject. "But my orders are to work out ways to assist you and your endeavors."

"That is a…broad mandate."

"Indeed it is. The primary way for that help that my superiors have suggested is that, in their opinion, it is past time a temple is constructed in Rebirth, and made into a place of healing and teaching. Even with the dungeon's generosity in resurrections, adventurers can still be wounded or need to recuperate after their return to the lands of the living, not to mention the many ailments that stalk those in such remote towns amongst the wastes."

"Oh."

"Indeed. It is also the holy duty of the Church to reclaim the land left destroyed by the wars of the apostates of the Old World, and I have brought with me many druids and priests, eager to begin spreading life anew, now that the dungeon has grown powerful and vital enough to sustain it."

"Of course. That would be most welcome. We may have a…dire need of farmland soon."

"Quite." The priest nodded, and Allya had to suppress a shiver. The offer, and the acknowledgement of the fact that this would directly ease the strain of the blockade Sunrise would soon impose upon the town wasn't going to be missed by anyone.

The news would be around the town by the next day. If it wasn't, she'd have Trira spread it around. They'd already broken the back of the insurrection, but with this? No one in town would dare to help Sunrise again. Not when the Church, who had so recently an Adjudicator pass through in a most spectacular fashion, was implicitly helping fight them.

Of course, that was going to come with a price.

"I assume you would like a place on my council, to assist in the roll out of these initiatives?"

"Indeed, though please, only an honorary seat. I have no need of worldly power, and furthermore I doubt I will be able to attend often. There is much to do, and so little time."

The way he said time rang alarm bells in Allya's mind. There was something else there. Something like…sadness?

"Very well. Then, if you will accompany me to the council room, we can hammer out the basics. You will also want to talk to my knight, Pyn." Allya gestured at the elf. "She is in charge of city planning, and will no doubt be of considerable help when choosing the site for the temple, and any other facilities you may feel are needed."

"Thank you, I will make sure to avail myself of that assistance. Before we go however, I feel like I should warn you. Due to the troubled times, and the fact that monsters are very much a threat in these locales, my superiors saw fit to send a detachment of temple guards to accompany me and my people. Not many, of course, but still a squad."

Allya barely managed to hide a full body shiver. Temple guards? He'd brought temple guards? Those guys were rare, very rare, since few were insane enough to attack the God of Fire's temples, but they were to city guards what Alexandra's "Bertha" was to a field gun. Each was roughly the equivalent of an Erisian Imperial Guard soldier, though not an Imperial Guardian, thank the Gods. It was hard to compare them to adventurers, but alone they came roughly to the level of an Silvarium rank, one step below Mythril, but fighting together they were reputed to be even more powerful still, with a level of training and coordination even veteran adventurers couldn't even dream of.

"Ah. I will instruct my guard commander to appoint a liaison to avoid any potential friction."

"Thank you, that is much appreciated. Now, I believed you wished us to move to the council room?"

"Quite. Let us get under way."