Chapter 16

Red Sands Desert, Contested Border Region

Expeditionary Camp

Allya took a deep breath of the blisteringly hot desert air, and smiled. To most people it would have seemed madness to go outside to 'get a breath of fresh air' in the middle of a scorching wasteland, but if she stayed one more minute inside of the expedition's administrative tent she was going to use the bureaucrats there as practice dummies. Or stab herself in the heart. Actually, probably both now that she thought about it.

She started walking down the small elevation on which the tent had been erected, straight towards the camp's main body of tents, with Éclair in tow. The guard had looked as stoic as ever (and worn her seemingly perpetual frown all that time), but she'd relaxed noticeably when Allya had announced that she was going to take a pause and go on a walk. The bodyguard must be as tired of paperwork and bureaucrats as Allya herself was.

The baroness looked unobtrusively to her side at her guard's weapon. She'd been surprised when Éclair had come in this morning, not sporting the trident she had first seen her with, but a weapon that was most definitely of Erisian manufacture. High quality and high tech Erisian manufacture, either of which was rare to find outside the Empire itself.

She'd seen a few gunblades back when she had been still welcome in the empire, but this one looked much more lethal than the overdecorated showpieces high ranking bureaucrats sported around. In fact, it looked distinctly like Imperial Army-issue...and the army didn't distribute gunblades to it's standard forces. Only highly skilled individuals or high ranking (or politically connected, which all too often amounted to the same thing anyway) officers had access to them. That was mainly due to the insane overengineering these things required. A gunblade was a simple concept, take a sword, strap a gun to it, voilà! Except that true Erisian gunblades were mechanical ones. Instead of the 'barbarian imitations' places like Tark had, the Eris Empire had swords that could literally transform into rifles. She'd seen one taken apart once, and she hadn't even managed to count the number of gears and moving parts in the thing.

Needless to say, for the concept to even be viable, the thing was packed to the brim with enchantments, and even then it required regular, extensive maintenance. Still, it was a potent weapon, and one which very few opponents were trained to fight. Especially since you could pull some interesting tricks if you truly mastered the weapon.

And given the corporal's assurance and ease with which she'd handled it...A bureaucrat had made the mistake to think that since Allya was young, she must be easy to intimidate, and had started leaning over and yelling at her to get his own way. He'd realized his mistake when Éclair's blade had lightly pressed against his throat and she'd ordered him to back off or she'd have to regrettably call the staff to change the carpet, because her lady didn't like them tainted red.

Allya idly wondered if either the bureaucrat or Éclair had realized quite how close the former had come to dying. She might have relaxed a bit since they had left Darthar, but she still had the reflexes of an assassin, and she'd been about to introduce several centimeters of steel into the idiot's head before her guard intervened.

The baroness shook herself. There was little point to speculate about this kind of things. She refocused on the camp as she passed the first few tents.

It was...much better than she expected really. She'd known that the depiction in illustrations and fiction of wasteland expeditions being wretched camps of half thorn tents with some halfway buried under the sand was false, but she'd been an adventurer and done her fair share of wasteland crossings. She hadn't expected it to be this clean or crisp. Neat, nearly brand new circus style tents aligned on a precise spacing alongside large paths.

Then again, that's what they had an expedition director for to begin with. Elkaryos' backing for gathering the supplies (as well as the contents of Alberta's standard issue stuff as an heavy expeditionary cruiser) hadn't hurt either.

She was slowly walking past the different tents, with most of the camp plunged into silence, as virtually everyone had been drafted to complete a massive well and a makeshift aqueduct back to the camp (with the help of a geomancer mage, of course, since water was so deep there). It should be the last 'mandatory' infrastructure project, after which the assault guild would do their dungeon delve, and the rest of the adventurers would be free to go in as well. At that point the camp should truly begin looking more like an inhabited area than a convenient sleeping spot.

She stopped as she heard noises from a nearby tent, not far along her path in fact. It sounded like...glass clinking, and wood being moved around. That was...odd, because she was fairly sure she was in the residential/service part of the camp, not the artisan chunk. She wasn't absolutely positive, because quite frankly her eyes had glazed over after the 5th minute of explanation of the camp's layout and future plans by Pyn, and after a full quarter of an hour she'd just thrown her back at a haunted looking Myskaros. It said something that she'd almost been glad she had paperwork to use as an excuse to dodge the overexcited elf for the rest of the morning. Then she'd gone off to the aqueduct, and Allya had started getting seriously impatient with signing papers and reading reports.

In any case, that sound shouldn't be there. She made a beeline for the tent's entrance, and politely knocked on the pole at the entrance.

"What? Oh, come in!" Answered a raspy, gruff male voice. Allya's ears pricked at the sound, and she popped into the tent.

And stopped.

In front of her was... what looked like a makeshift bar. Barrels and a plank made a basic counter, with the same contraptions, except over several layers serving as drink storage areas behind it. More barrels were dispersed throughout the room, usually clustered around bigger barrels that probably served as tables.

And behind that counter stood a tall, scarred lizardman. Who was currently busy moving a small barrel with a tap, thus probably filled with a drink, with absurd ease.

"Take a seat, I'll be with you in a second." Said the lizardman, not even looking over his shoulder.

Allya felt Éclair tensing up behind her at how cavalierly the saurian was addressing her, but she gestured for the outraged guard to relax, and then took a seat on one of the barrels on the other side of the counter, gesturing at Éclair to imitate her. The pink haired bodyguard hesitated for a second, then nodded, and sat down to Allya's left, keeping her hands on her lap, right next to her gunblade.

The baroness hid a sigh, and looked back to the lizardman as he turned around.

"Hello there! What can I do for you?" He said in the same gruff, raspy voice.

"Well, I suppose some information is in order first. Is this...a bar?"

"Yep. This is Firegecko's Bar." He said proudly, before chuckling. "The name is derived from a nickname given to me."

Allya's eyebrows rose.

"Fire mage?"

"Me? Nah." He turned around and gestured at a frame, awkwardly propped up by a few bottles on the shelves. "It's because of this."

Allya looked at the frame, and her eyes widened. Was that...

"That's...a shotgun."

A flicker of respect entered the lizardman's eyes.

"Yep! Damn, you have an eye for these kind of weapons young lady. Most lads out there call it a 'musket' or a 'rifle'. You from the Hegemony?"

"No, from the Eris Empire."

He nodded, smiling, which was distinctly disturbing to the uninitiated on a lizardman's face, especially since it involved poking out their lizard tongue and hissing slightly.

"Aaaahhh, I see. You're far from home. What brought you here miss?"

"A mixture of luck, unluck, stupidity and chutzpah."

The tall lizardman laughed.

"Isn't that the same for all of us?"

Allya laughed back.

"Fair enough. Although I do hope you'll excuse me if I hope the proportions of luck and chutzpah were higher than for most people."

The bartender's laughter redoubled.

"I see! Well, pleasantries aside misses, would you like something to drink?" He said, looking at Allya, then Éclair, who simply shook her head.

"Of course! What do you have?" Answered the baroness.

She knew it probably wasn't the greatest idea ever, but she really needed a drink. Besides, the day was coming to an end soon, although the sun hadn't yet truly started to set.

"Right now? Dwarven Stervir beer, Ostrarchian frontier brandy, Tarkian lavafire whiskey, Asarian rolling plains wine, Far Reaches mead..."

Allya's eyebrows rose as the list went on and on. The drinks themselves didn't seem to be the highest quality, but the sheer diversity was stunning...which rather implied some contacts with traders, and given the far ranging nature of some of his beverages, most probably one in the merchants guild. Which would handily explain how he had ended up part of the expedition.

"Ostrarchian frontier brandy please."

"Right away."

As the bartender began quickly going through his shelf in search of a drink, Allya gave the shotgun another look.

"So, the shotgun. Where did you get it?"

The lizardman looked up at the weapon.

"Oh, that?" He sighed as he turned around, setting a glass down, and quickly pouring a golden liquid from a bottle he had taken from the shelf. "Old souvenir really. I used to be part of the Tark Hegemony Army. Assault batallions." He looked up at Allya, who nodded back, her eyes slightly wider. "Yeah, you know what I'm talking about. Fought in the last war between the Hegemony and the Republic, 25 years ago. I left a few years after that, when the Republic started moving against the Far Reach." He chuckled at Allya's expression. "No, I actually was part of the true volunteers, not the entire division that left the army to 'spontaneously' fight the Republic's invasion. Doesn't mean the Army wasn't thankful though." He gestured at the weapon. "My old CO gave me this before I went. Not as good as what I used during the war, but it did it's job well enough. Distinguished myself there, enough to attract some attention. When the dragons moved in and started turning the Repies into cinders, I was approached by one of the clan leaders. Me and my lads had fought like hell defending them when everything looked lost. He figured that was worth rewarding. Turns out, a lot of people agreed with that. So he decided that some presents were in order. Enough mana each to start up in whatever trade we god damned chose, and some serious gear from the dungeon. Since I wouldn't part with my good old gun, they decided to give it an upgrade instead."

He shook his head as Allya cautiously grabbed the glass, and took a sip. Her eyes widened slightly. Never mind about it being low quality, that was damned good for something sold by a bartender.

"Don't know where they found a gun artificer and enchanter skilled enough, and I didn't ask. But they gave my good old shotgun a flame enchantment. Powerful one too. Called it the Dragon-Fire, for obvious reasons." He chuckled. "When I told them I was going to open a bar, the chief directed me to a friend of his. His name was Akasor, a merchant from the merchants guild. He helped me set myself up in the Bazaar at Darthar. Made a name for myself there, as a matter of fact."

Allya slowly nodded, taking another sip of the quite frankly good brandy. She knew what assault batallions were, although she'd never seen them outside of a military parade, let alone in action. Troops armed with shotguns, flamethrowers and revolvers, whose sole goal was to storm fortifications or break up the enemy lines. They were some of the toughest bastards in a truly modern army's line of battle, and with good reason. You didn't live long in them if you couldn't chew armor plating and spit out the rivets. Figuratively of course, people that were actually able to do that tended to have more prestigious assignments.

"Why did you leave? Darthar, I mean."

He shrugged.

"Sense of adventure? All of my fellows that accompanied me to the Far Reach and lived to tell about it became adventurers. Still exchange letters and messages with them, actually. I was the only one that decided to retire for good. Then again I'd been in the army longer than most of them to begin with. So when I heard that a new dungeon had been discovered right next to the city, I decided 'why the hell not?'. Figured adventurers would be as thirsty here as Darthar, and aside from the obvious advantages from being in a dungeon town, from a business or health perspective, I thought that having the opportunity to do a few delves from time to time wouldn't hurt. Especially when I heard the dungeon had one of them 'insurance policies'." He shrugged. "As for your next question, I got onboard the expedition through favors, yes. Akasor wasn't exactly thrilled to see me leave -he liked my choice of liquors too much, I'm afraid-, but he put in a good word in for me, and I called in a few markers some of the adventurers on the expedition owed me." He shrugged. "And a few the guildmaster owed me. Don't ask, it's a very long story. So I ended up here."

Allya nodded, smiling as the bartender anticipated her next question. She then froze, and hit her front.

"Oh! I'm an idiot! I forgot to ask your name."

"Ah!" He chuckled. "I'm Stor Everfarther. A pleasure to meet you, miss...?" He trailed off as he held out his hand.

"Allya. Allya Aubétoile." She answered as she shook his hand.

The lizardman's eyes widened.

"Aubétoile? Wait, isn't that the lady-" He looked at her, then chuckled. "So that's why you were there despite everyone building the aqueduct! Still, sneaky, taking off the medallion."

Allya hid a frown, before looking down, and her face going studiously neutral. Indeed, her medallion was missing...Most probably because she'd taken it off at the office, and forgot to put it back on. That was a bit awkward.

"You weren't there during the announcement?"

"Nope. I was too busy getting all of this unloaded, personally, you understand." He gestured at the contents of his shelves, before chuckling. "I have no doubt that if adventurers had been given the job, the bottles would have been considerably lighter -by virtue of being more empty- by the end of the 'unloading process'."

Allya laughed.

"That's very true! Well, it wasn't my intention to deceive you, Stor. I can call you Stor, right?"

"Of course!"

"Good, then call me Allya." She winced. "I've got enough of 'mylady' here and 'baroness' there, honestly."

Stor nodded.

"I would imagine. And-" He stopped, and looked at the tent's entrance, where a sudden hubub of voices was now percolating through. "Ah, looks like the aqueduct is complete."

Éclair calmly sat up, and positioned herself between the entrance and Allya. The baroness gave her bodyguard a look, then decided to let it go. She was only doing her job after all, even if she seemed to be a bit...overbearing from time to time.

"Alright! Bartender, we've finished this gods damned aqueduct, drinks are-" Pyn froze as she went through the door and saw Allya, her sentence coming to a strangled stop. "U-Uuuhhh..."

That would have been the moment Allya would have poked fun at her friend, if she wasn't too busy staring at her. It looked like the construction of the aqueduct had been...lively, given how wet her hair looked. Thankfully, her clothes were dry, or she might have just dragged the elf to their sleeping tents and damn the consequences. Or possibly assassinated anyone who even looked at the knight. Allya shook herself internally.

No, no, no, bad hormones. I need to focus, she thought.

"Well, Pyn! Nice of you to join us." She raised her glass. "Care for a drink?"

Pyn relaxed, and smiled, although Allya wasn't exactly sure what she was afraid of. Sure, she'd said she would come straight back to the office after building the aqueduct, but the baroness had been adventuring/travelling with her for over a month now. Plus, she wasn't above taking some...pauses of her own, hence her very presence there.

"Of course! Come on everyone!"

She went straight for Allya as adventurers and skyers began pouring into the bar. The baroness smiled, and gesture for Stor to pour another glass as she started chatting with her friend.

The paperwork could wait until tomorrow.

*****

"Are you sure that's safe?"

Alexandra looked at Emilia, then back at the contraption her golems were busy putting on her brand new, full scale spider-golem. She would have rather put it on herself, but Emilia had flatly refused. At least she had managed to negotiate hard enough to be able to watch the process with her own eyes.

"Honestly? No. But that's when it'll be active. Right now it's just an inert piece of metal you know."

"I suppose, still..."

Alexandra moved her hand to pat her advisor on the head, then thought better of it and decided to grip her shoulder instead.

"It's fine. I know, we didn't make the runes, or half the mechanisms in this, but quite frankly we won't be able to for a while. And we need this kind of stuff for the dungeon...and our own protection."

Emilia slowly nodded, and Alexandra smiled softly.

Truth was, she was more nervous than she would care to admit as well. The golems were currently mounting a homebrewed version of the pulser that she had acquired from the turrets on top of the spider golem. Overall, it had taken surprisingly little time and resources to make the weapon work again, albeit in a limited capacity. The grav generator was beyond fucked, and there was no way she could get the materials to build a replacement anytime soon, especially since the ones she knew how to make, from Earth, required advanced meta-materials, like room temperature supra-conductors, to function.

So she had focused on the barrel and it's runes, made a trigger for it (and learned from Emilia how to make runes that would draw mana from a mana stone and feed it to interconnected runes without having to go through her core), and then a reloading mechanism. Overall, it looked more or less like an old WW2 era 20mm anti-tank rifle. It was basically a bolt action light cannon, which had to be reloaded between each shot, since she was still working on trying to get a spring to make magazines. It was weird how much a simple thing like this would turned out to be essential for so many things once you realized you didn't have them.

Nevertheless, from what her early tests with the barrel had shown, it would more or less equate to a good old chemically propelled autocannon round in terms of muzzle velocity, although it paled in comparison to what a fully functional pulser or a gauss cannon could achieve. Unfortunately she couldn't make explosive shells for it, so it just fired a solid slug, but it was more than good enough for her purposes. Which was that of a general purpose 'kill-this-right-now' cannon.

Of course, it was expensive as all hell...which partially explained Emilia's reluctance to agree to help build it in the first place. Originally, Alexandra had thought about emplacing comparable guns in several fortified emplacements in sensitive 'no-adventurers-allowed' parts of the dungeon, but had relented due to the insane cost of the weapon. Instead, she'd settled for two (including the prototype, who would obviously go through thorough testing before she greenlit the second one), mounted on her tank sized spider golems. It would give her a degree of flexibility and allow her to reposition them more easily that having to tear down a turret and emplace the gun somewhere else. Plus, if push came to shove she would be able to pull them back to another defensive position if they were getting overrun. If there was an advantage to having an army of golems it was that she could just treat them as expendable cannon fodder if necessary, and sacrifice however many of them it took to delay the enemy while a VIP or critical weapon got the hell out of dodge.

It also meant that she could make kamikaze golems, but she'd shelved the idea for now. She wasn't quite at the point to consider using suicide bombers, especially with all the baggage that brought back from Earth's past. Sure, it wasn't a tactic that was commonly used during her life time, but she was European and the videos of childrens drugged to the eyeballs charging tanks with mag mines strapped to their backs had made for a chilling watch in classes on the Terran Hegemony wars.

She shook her head, and refocused her attention on the present.

"In any case, it should be fairly safe. Plus, we've test fired the barrel, how bad could it go?"

Emilia slowly nodded, but still took a step back behind the Earth-born.

Alexandra sighed, and then signaled the golems, who had just finished strapping the pulser cannon to the spider golem. They nodded (something she had programmed them to do. No practical use of course, but it was strangely reassuring), and two of them hopped onto the back of the spider tank, and settled in the chairs. The first, most forward one, gripped the hand cranks to change the barrel's elevation as needed. She'd tried to make a platform that could turn like a turret, but didn't have something precise enough to do the job just yet, nor did she have the ball bearings necessary to make it fast enough to have any real use outside of an artillery platform. The second grabbed the bolt, and a bag of slugs to feed to the gun.

"Alright! Starting bolt action pulser cannon, 20mm solid shot, test firing number 1...now!"

The golems leapt into action, quickly loading a shot, and depressing the barel of the gun to aim at the armor plate that had been emplaced as a target, and-

WHAM

Alexandra's conscious mind hadn't even begun to process the sound that she'd already instinctively tackled Emilia to the ground, protecting her advisor with her body. Fortunately, she only felt a few, minor impacts on her back, so things couldn't have gone that catastrophically wrong, she thought with a corner of her mind as the rest was too busy cursing profusely.

After a few seconds, she slowly got back up, still keeping her body between Emilia and the prototype, and turned around.

Well. Good news was, she knew the spider tank's armor worked.

Bad news was, she really should have remembered that pulsers had been one of the most complex infantry weapons known to humanity for a reason.

The gun at the top of the spider tank had been obliterated. Or rather, no, shredded would be a more accurate description. It was like it had been ripped apart, and scattered all over the room, along it's own weapon servants. Fortunately, the spider tank's armor, although several dents on the top, seemed to have stood up to the task.

"How bad could it go, uh?" Said Emilia as she went back up, and reajusted her sleeves.

Alexandra sighed.

"Someday I'll learn to shut my stupid mouth...Alright, let's clean this up. Guess I'll just use the spider tanks weaponless then..."

Emilia winced as she heard Alexandra's dejected tone, and saw her slumped shoulders. Her heart melted at seeing the dungeon -her dungeon- look so distraught.

She laid her hand on her friend's shoulder.

"Hey, look, it's not all bad. The mounting seems to have worked, and you don't have to use your pulser cannon. You could mount your scorpio on it, right?"

Alexandra froze.

The vampire girl was right. Alexandra hadn't thought about it because she was too fixated on using a 'modern' weapon, but Emilia was absolutely right. There was no reason she couldn't use the scorpio on it. Heck, in fact it could turn out even better than a pulser cannon if she could make the bolt into a runed projectile, with magic effects of it's own!

She turned around, and before she could think, she lifted the vampire girl into a hug, kissing her forehead, before putting her back down.

"Thank you Emilia! Thank you thank you thank you! I'll be right back!"

And she went dashing off into the hall as the vampire girl touched her forehead, slightly stunned at the Earth-born's rather...exuberant reaction.

"I...Uh....You're welcome?" She called after the dungeon, who had, of course, already ran out of earshot.

The vampire girl sighed, and exchanged a glance with Jared, who simply looked resigned, before moving to follow his mistress, albeit at a more sedate pace.