Chapter 225 - The Third Way (Patreon)

Note : Chapters 227 and 228 have been written and added to the queue, completing Book 6 of The Fallen World !

Chapter 225

Red Sands Desert, Elkis Republic

City of Erakis

Orzal sat in his office, gazing at the hastily repaired door.

His men. The people he'd trained, molded for years…the men who trusted him…

He took a deep, shuddering breath.

It would be so easy. They were deniable assets, and he had multiple plans just in case some of them were to turn traitor.

But he hadn't ever expected to use them.

Besides…what good would their deaths do? The senate was panicking, with the dungeon in possession of the influence disruptors and some of his soldiers alive -he assumed she had resurrected some-, then killing the rest would change nothing. This was simply to make the senators feel better internally, senator Charles, his nominal master, throwing his men to the wolves to satisfy his colleagues and calm them down.

His hands balled into fists.

He couldn't just throw his men, people he'd curated and trusted with his life, away like this. He couldn't just betray them, not when they'd gone on this suicide mission, trusting in him to make it right. To make their sacrifice mean something.

Here it would mean nothing. Nothing at all but a few grains of comfort for inbred bastards that had drained his country and rotted it to the core.

But what choice did he have? If he didn't obey, the senate guard would turn against him and do it themselves. The only thing he'd accomplish is get killed with them. They could disappear, but what then? They'd be found eventually, and with the senate guard in control of the town's fortress there was no way to dislodge them.

That wasn't even taking into account the disaster he saw coming. Coledar now had two choices, either attack the dungeon core and go out in a blaze of futility…or turn back, and at least try to hurt the real foe in his eyes. His men would die either way, they simply wouldn't be able to take out the Erakis fortress before running out of supplies, but…they couldn't take out Rebirth either.

If both choices were going to kill him and his men anyway, Orzal knew exactly which one Coledar would make.

And even if he took out his men…what then? The UDC wouldn't be swayed by some missing spec ops. Nor would Rebirth, and the dungeon core was coming for them, for that he was grimly certain. He'd been killing people who trusted him, who depended on him, to buy himself a few months of life before the senate finally used him as another scapegoat, or he was killed in battle.

…Or.

Or.

There was the recording. Of Amelia and Malcom discussing the handoff of her rebellion. Turning it in would buy him a little more time, at least prevent him from being used as a scapegoat.

Or he could go to the other side. But they wouldn't trust him. Not out of the blue. And they'd be back to square one anyway. He didn't have enough men to take out the fortress. Crap, Marie might not even let them inside, and that place was locked down tight.

And even if Malcom had all of Amelia's contacts, he'd met the man. He didn't have the personality of the general, or the admiration of the troops. Both of which he'd need if he wanted to succeed.

…He had the route. The one for the caravan carrying Amelia. Marie had given it to him as a courtesy, so he could advise some measures to draw attention away from it.

He didn't have enough men, or firepower to take that caravan on. And Malcom, even if by some miracle the man trusted him, wouldn't be able to move out enough soldiers without the senate guard becoming aware of it, and he was grimly certain that if the Republic's army came in, the guards would slit Amelia's throat and seal her soul, regardless of the senate's desire for a show trial in the capital, long before the soldiers were able to liberate her.

He simply didn't have the troops or the guns.

…But he knew someone who did.

He reached for the communication crystal on his desk.

*****

Alexandra frowned as she looked at the recon drone, idly touching it's propeller to make it spin. It would make a good replacement for the blackbird recon craft, at least for short range stuff around the town, but it was still expensive to make. And the cost to run it was nothing to scoff at either, especially since she couldn't afford to use a balloon to defray them like with the airships, without practically holding up a sign saying 'come and get me' for wasteland monsters, given how slow it would be.

She'd actually considered trying to make some kind of mundane engine to power it, but had immediately run into a rather simple problem: what the hell was she going to fuel it with? She'd grown up with electric and nuclear powered vehicles, from super-conductor batteries and the Federation's miniaturized fusion reactors respectively, but neither was an option for her, unless she cared to reveal to everyone her true level of technology. And without superconductors, batteries weren't a good option in terms of autonomy, not for the kind of distances and flight times she needed the drones to do.

So, the staggering multiplicity of fuels drawn from oil had been her next option.

And there she'd hit a wall. A massive, sturdy, brick wall.

Because Alcheryos didn't use oil. At all. There were no oil wells, no derricks, no offshore platforms, nor refineries of any kind. She hadn't expected the Guyanian petroleum supercomplex, the seaborne monstrosity that the Brazilian Conglomerate had built after the Terran Hegemony War to supply the planet's oil needs, since the middle east was a series of radioactive craters and Venezuela wasn't much better, but damn it she'd expected something. Hell, the texan oil boom had happened in the early twentieth century, when machineguns were still a novelty and tanks nothing but a distant dream. Crap, the Wright brothers were tinkering with their first prototypes back then. The Eris Empire had airships, stratospheric recon jets and freaking supercarriers.

So she'd asked some questions. And the answers…

Well, Emilia had pointed out, quite reasonably, that a collection of bits of deceased animals and plants under intense pressure and varying levels of heat, which was basically how crude oil was formed, was basically the very definition of a potion. Which meant that, effectively, oil deposits were the mother of all potion vats.

Except…except that oil took millions of years to form. And the Gods had only come relatively recently, bringing magic with them. Now, 'recently' was relative, it was still millennias, but it wasn't anything close to the geological timescale these kinds of resource deposits operated under.

And then she'd asked Seraph, who had been thoroughly confused, because oil had been absolutely mundane and thoroughly unremarkable during the time of the Gods.

Which meant that either there was a massive coverup, lying about the oil being magical, which she couldn't see holding up for several millenia, even with the Custodians watching overhead, or…

Or the oil deposits had been changed between Seraph's time and now.

And if she was looking for a way to slow down technological development and keep a planet in the dirt, neutralizing the oil deposits would be a good place to start. It had served as Earth's stepping stone between coal and nuclear power, both fission and fusion, after all, and still been used en masse afterwards for plastics and other synthetic products.

The apparition was beating herself up about having missed it, despite having remarked on the lack of nuclear power on the planet, but to be fair they had experience with fission and fusion powering civilization, not chemical engines.

There was still some use of oil based products on Alcheryos, but it was mostly for plastics and such, most of them bioplastics drawn directly from various plants.

She'd wondered why, if they'd been willing to use what had to be a considerable amount of resources to make the oil unusable, they hadn't done the same to coal. But that was probably because it was used in steel and even low tech heating. Which meant the Custodians didn't want people to be completely without technology, just below a certain threshold for some reason.

And not, well, dead, because at this point just finishing the job and killing everyone would have been a lot cheaper. Assuming cost meant anything to the 'Gods', though it probably did to some extent, otherwise there'd be an entire swarm of orbital fortresses around the planet, not the single one.

Which also begged the question of why in the hell the God of Fire had left a single fortress when he had otherwise gone through all of that trouble.

It also made her wonder how much of what the world appeared to be was natural. After all…if the God of Fire had been willing to change the oil reserves, why not add a bit more craters and a few more rounds of orbital bombardment than necessary to make the surface less habitable, more apocalyptic to the grateful primitives you came to 'rescue', to showcase how bad the war they were rescued from had been. The Custodians were content to do it with 'berserk' dungeons after all!

That discovery had opened a rabbit hole, one she was more than happy to hand over to her other self and Seraph to worry and obsess over. Right now she couldn't afford the distraction.

She checked her timer, which was slowly counting down until contact with the enemy. They'd be in range soon.

Time to nab herself a teleporter. Or, failing that, give the Republic a foretaste of what was to come, since they apparently hadn't gotten the memo last time.

She froze as an alert popped up in her interface.

ALERT: TELEPORT REDIRECT SYSTEM REPORTS INCOMING

A new teleport?!?

She hopped into one of the golems guarding the room, just in time to feel the unmistakable tingle of an hyperspace shield, and see the teleport redirector pulse with power.

Then there was a flash of energy.

Every gun in the room pivoted to aim at…a single soldier. In mage's robes, but with the rank tabs of a lieutenant.

The mage was on her -looked like a her anyway, though with the armored robes it was hard to tell for sure- knees, holding her hands up in the air.

And…was that a paper in her hands? It almost looked like a letter.

"Don't shoot! I have a message for the dungeon core!" Yelled out the mage, and Alexandra tilted her head.

Well well well. This looks to be getting interesting.

*****

"It's a trap, it has to be." Said Alexandra as she paced back and forth.

"A trap for what? A single squadron?" Said Allya, gazing at the note on the table of the conference room.

"They did send a battlecruiser after them."

"Still seems a bit too convoluted. Especially for the Republic."

"Not compared to some of the crap they tried to pull early on. Remember the Scarlet Swords?"

"Right. But…what if it's real?"

"If it's real, then I'd say we let them kill each other. But…this is weird. We talked about this, their special forces are under different command from their regular troops, to maintain deniability. Why would a senate loyalist give a shit about the general?"

"They're still drawn from the army, to some extent."

"And categorically separated from it."

"Yet, the detachment with the teleporter came under army escort."

Alexandra waved, and Allya pressed her advantage.

"Moreover, if it's real…You know what we could do with that kind of leverage. Are you truly ready to let that opportunity slip away? Especially when what you're risking is a damaged set of airships?"

"I'd have to risk way more than that. If the senate truly is ready to kill Amelia rather than free her, we need to get to her before they can find their footing. That means total surprise." The dungeon core was still protesting, but Allya could see she was starting to think about the problem.

The baroness didn't say anything, she just watched the dungeon core come to the logical conclusion, now that she had gotten through the Earth-born's wall of paranoia.

"But…you're right." Continued the dungeon core with a sigh. "We simply can't afford not to take it." She sighed again, though it was closer to a groan this time. "And that means we have to throw everything at it. And for an operation like this…Emilia is going to fucking kill me."

"Why?"

"Because the maids aren't going to sit this one out."