Chapter 24

Red Sands Desert, Contested Border Region.

Dungeon Factory, 1st Floor.

"See? Wasn't so hard, was it?"

Alexandra looked at the massive pile of papers, schematics and even the one hologram projector Emilia had pulled out of Gods-know-where.

"Define 'easy' then." She asked, contemplating the fact that at least in Fleet Logistics she didn't have to deal with how her ships looked. No one, except the UIS, cared if their warships looked nice for photo-ops. They were just giant masses of steel surrounded with a shell of armor with guns slapped on them. They weren't made to look pretty for politicians to justify the fat bribes the corporations they had diverted the contracts to had 'donated' to their 'campaign funds', which they more or less pocketed anyway. They were warships, meant to destroy other warships or bomb enemies from orbit. Oh, and catch pirates, but that had taken a backseat when everyone started fighting over extraterrestrial territorial rights.

Emilia crossed her arms, and Alexandra had to refrain from patting her head. For now at least. The vampire girl just looked too adorable when she took that slightly exasperated stance.

"I didn't say it was easy, just that it wasn't hard. Besides, it sure was more pleasant than designing the scorpio, wasn't it?"

Alexandra winced.

"Point taken."

She had, at long last, devised a scorpio, essentially a mini ballista, that wasn't a prototype, and could be considered reliable and ready for deployment.

Emphasis on 'could be considered'.

"Well, alright. So, ready to start building?" Asked the Earth-born.

"Of course!" Exclaimed Emilia. "Oh, and don't forget the pillars!"

"Sure! Alright, let's move then."

She quickly absorbed all the documents, and exited the workshop, Emilia and Jared close on her heels. They made their way through the densely trapped hallway, and arrived into the boss room.

The golems saluted and Alexandra returned the gesture. She wasn't into all the bowing and scraping some people insisted upon in formal affairs, but she could make some exceptions. Military courtesy was one of them. After all those golems would die for her in a heartbeat. If they had hearts, that was.

She turned towards the massive, recently emplaced door on the side of the room, and gestured. The door ponderously ground open at her command, filling the room with a massive grinding noise.

She winced. Big, stone doors were nice and all, but smoothly opening metal ones had their advantages. Namely they didn't hurt your ears when you opened them.

The door slid up into the ceiling, revealing a ramp that went straight down. Well, not really, a 30° angle, but still angled downwards.

She walked in, and after a single turn, stopped in front of a wall. A big, rocky, wall. Which was currently the lowest point in her dungeon, and would quickly become the entrance to her second floor. Well, if she managed not to bungle it up and have it collapse.

"Well, let's do this."

She closed her eyes, and plunged into dungeon mode.

Alexandra took a deep breath, which she didn't need or knew if her body actually did while in here, and looked around.

Thankfully, there wasn't much. And thanks to the ramp they were far enough down that she shouldn't have to worry about accidentally hitting the first floor.

She began by absorbing the material in front of her, digging a 6 meters by 6 meters room. She then started lining the walls with pillars, and dug a door opposite of the ramp. The pillars were fairly simple, circular ones, whose sole decoration was a light crystal scone.

Then she truly got to work.

It took her several hours, but she dug a massive room, one kilometer on each side, perfectly centered around the miniature temple the ramp ended in, with a height of 150 meters. She was careful to fill it with oversized support pillars, to avoid a cave-in. Technically, she could have gone for a bunch of arches, and much less intrusive measures, but she wanted to go for a particular feel...and the current design let her simulate 'broken' pillars. They were shattered, their pieces scattered around, and some even had parts of the ceiling collapsed on top of them, revealing rooms above.

The main design philosophy, at least for the first part of the second floor, was to have a single, massive open space, that looked nothing like a giant, underground city, or at least town. The area was meant to have scattered points of interests and landmarks, like a ruined temple, it's partially broken spire soaring over the rest of the buildings. The rooms revealed by destroyed pillars were meant to be challenge areas, which had a much higher difficulty, but greater rewards. Lastly, most of the opposition on the floor would come from roving golems and some static outposts, as well as a single stronghold, meant as the floor's formal challenge room.

She stepped back into her body, and stretched.

"Well, that's good enough for today, I think." She looked at the result through the door. "Wow, shit, this looks impressive."

Emilia nodded empathetically.

"Indeed." She giggled. "You should have seen it from this end though! Watching the wall just...disintegrate, and a forest of pillars appear is quite fascinating."

Alexandra smiled.

"Hey, who knows, maybe someday I will. There are joint projects between dungeons right?"

Emilia nodded again.

"Indeed. It's not the norm, but a lot of dungeons swap some concepts, and even do common projects by shipping a secondary core over." She winced. "Although the most famous ones tend to be from the UDC and, well..."

"Military in nature?"

"Yes...That's not a problem on it's own, but they have acquired quite the...grim reputation."

Alexandra slowly nodded. Given what she'd heard about the UDC...That was rather unsurprising. Their first United Dungeon War had wiped three different nations off the map, and turned an entire Erisian sky armada to ashes. That wasn't even counting all of the other countries that had survived but taken a pasting. Few nations didn't suffer one way or another from the war, especially as international commerce ground to a halt when the UDC somehow hijacked the teleporter network, and it was temporarily shut down.

Finally, after a bit of purging in their own ranks, and some salutary realpolitik, the Eris Empire had more or less gotten it's act together and signed the Responsible Dungeon Exploitation Aggreement or RDEA, ending the war, and paving the way for the formal creation of the UDC.

The following United Dungeon Wars had been...smaller. Not less destructive, just on a smaller scale. So it was rather unsurprising that the UDC and its projects had quite the reputation. She'd be terrified as well if Arcadia on Earth had started building battle fleets for her own and ransacked cities and beat entire nations into submission.

Coming to think of it, wasn't it precisely what Ciel had done? The AI had more or less taken over the UIS after the absolute disaster that had been the Alpha Centauri Campaign, and kicked out the permanent, unelected Washington bureaucrats that had taken over the government.

Alexandra internally shook herself, and refocused on the matter at hand.

"Yeah, I can imagine why. Well, that aside, what else is on the list? I'd rather take pause."

Emilia pulled out her notebook out of her spatial pouches and opened it.

"The next item is....bouncing betties?" She looked up from her notebook. "What's a 'bouncing betty'?"

Alexandra grinned. Oh this was going to be fun.

She ignored Emilia's suddenly slightly worried expression, and gestured for her to follow as she walked back up the ramp.

*****

"I don't like this..." Someone whispered.

Ruby froze, and looked at Firatite, who looked back levelly.

"It's just too easy. After the assassinations..." He continued.

Ruby slowly nodded.

"I know. I'm waiting for the other boot to drop as well." She whispered back.

They were currently at the base of one of the aqueduct's pillars, and Firatite was covering her while she emplaced the seismic charges. She didn't understand the magic contained in them, but according to Onyx, they would rip the pillar apart, and create a shock wave that would help collapse the entire edifice.

And her subordinate was right. It was too easy. The assassination had very nearly turned into a debacle, and this was going so smoothly it was almost textbook. There weren't even any guards!

Firatite nodded, and went back to watching for enemies.

*****

Allya blinked, and sat up. She always slept lightly, but this was...different. She couldn't quite point what had woken her up, it had felt like...tremors?

Then, her bedroll shook again, and she heard a massive crash in the distance.

Less than a minute later she emerged from her bedroom, fully geared up, just in time to see a sleepy and topless Pyn emerge from hers. Their quarters had been set up in the administration tent, for added protection.

"What was that?" Asked the sleepy elf.

She looked at Pyn, blushed, and firmly settled on looking at her friend's face. She swore she could have seen a spark of amusement in her friend's eyes, but she quashed the thought immediately. She didn't have time for this.

"Sounded like a structure being demolished." Allya frowned. "No detonations, that's good at least...Get geared up, I'll wait for you."

Pyn nodded and went back into her room. Allya watched her, making sure she was indeed going back in, there was no way she was going to let her prance around half-naked like that. If only to avoid having to execute the first person that made a comment about it. Purely to preserve her friend's dignity of course. And she totally wasn't watching her because the elf had a fantastic ass.

Absolutely not.

Allya shook her head, and walked to the entrance to the tent, where Rogard, her elven bodyguard, was alertly watching out for threats, with half a dozen soldiers deployed around him.

"Status report."

Rogard looked briefly over his shoulder.

"Unknown sounds. Like a building crashing down. It came from the aqueduct." He nodded towards the edge of the camp, where lights were rushing towards. "Uh, milady, sorry."

The camp looked...odd in the darkness. There were some tents where light was pouring from, usually FireGecko's and the guild hall, plus her administration building, but there were also adventurers and their personal lights moving around from time to time. Not all of them were using them, since some, especially rangers, could see in the dark just fine. Now there were lights activating everywhere as the camp woke up, and a lot of people with light crystals were rushing towards the aqueduct.

"It's fine. Courtesy is the least of our problems right now. Have you sent for Anders?"

"Yes milady. But I suspect that was superfluous." Allya gave him a sideways look, and Rogard shrugged. "I suspect half the security teams in the camp sent people to rouse him, and even if they didn't I'm fairly sure everyone here has been woken up by this."

Allya nodded.

"Fair enough." She sighed. "Well, there's no use in rushing there as well." Not mentioning that Anders had made it quite clear he'd rather have her come in after he'd properly secured any accident site. With the clear undertone that he didn't need to have his soldiers distracted worrying about her on top of everything else. Fortunately, Allya was well aware she would only get in the way. She had, after all, been a knight-valiant, and assigned to a princess of the Empire. A very, very stubborn princess. "Just keep me updated. I'm going to have breakfast prepared."

"Of course milady."

Allya ducked back into the tent, and made a beeline for the kitchen. At least one of the advantages of having limited personnel in the expeditionary camp was that they didn't have to get servants. She could make her own breakfast just fine, thank you very much. Besides, no servant or maid in the Asarian Kingdom would do crêpes like she liked them. Which was literally submerged in honey. She'd tasted that recipe in the Eastern Provinces of the Dahalaka desert in the Eris Empire, and she could never go back to anything else when she needed comfort food.

A few minutes later, and after having directed a very sleepy, but fully clothed (damn it) and geared up Pyn towards her coffee and plate, which she attacked enthusiastically. The elf hadn't even blinked at the honey crêpe, mostly because she had one huge sweet tooth. Plus, she didn't have to worry about gaining weight, what with her rigorous exercise routine and...top heavy weight storage system.

Allya shook her head, and looked to the side of the room as Anders stepped into the kitchen. She'd long ago learned the quality of staying calm and collected in those kind of situations, and it was fascinating how reassured subordinates could get if you paid them the proper attention, but didn't panic and threw off your meal unless it was an absolute emergency. They thought that if their CO was still eating, then everything was under control.

Allya saw Pyn prepare to rise in the corner of her vision, and firmly stepped on the elf's foot under the table, making the knight wince and slightly hiss in pain.

"Captain Anders. It's good to see you. Do you have a report to make?"

The captain faced her, and she had to suppress a wince. He was covered in dust, and looked about as happy as Éclair ever did. Which was to say not very happy at all.

"Yes ma'am. The aqueduct has been destroyed. I've had some of my mages over it, and they're positive that magic has been used in large quantities." His frown deepened. "I'm leaning towards sabotage. I think the same people that assassinated the director, and attempted to assassinate you, did this."

Allya slowly nodded. She'd hoped that the aqueduct had survived, but given the captain's tone, that was unlikely.

"Is the aqueduct salvageable?"

"No ma'am. Total loss, according to one of the architects."

Allya hid a wince as a storm of vicious, but whispered insults escaped from Pyn's mouth. As her friend continued, she started to feel admiration. She hadn't known the elf had such an...expansive vocabulary. There were even a few that even she didn't know. She cleared her throat to recenter Anders on her, who was looking at Pyn with some admiration as well.

"Ahem. Well, at least no lives were lost, correct?" The captain nodded, and she smiled, coldly. "Well, in that case it is to our benefit then."

Pyn and Anders looked at her in disbelief, and she chuckled.

"Think about it. Now we know that they are here to sabotage the expedition, not just kill Pyn, Myskaros or me. And they wasted their first surprise attack on something we can entirely rebuild out of our own resources, and don't technically need." She shrugged. "Oh, running water is nice, and getting over to the well is going to be a pain in the ass." Especially since the damned thing had to be placed outside of the ruins areas, and thus the mesas, to avoid breaching the edicts of the God of Fire by accidentally hitting an underground tunnel or something. "But it's not vital, we can still ship water manually just fine. It'll be more manpower intensive, but we aren't going to die of dehydration." She looked at Anders. "The well is defended, correct?"

The captain nodded.

"Yes milady. It was one of the vital points we talked about, so I made it a priority. We have guards stationed at the well, the warehouses, the ship landing area and the administration tent. And I have setup a quick reaction force as you ordered."

Allya nodded in satisfaction. She knew they couldn't put enough guards in any one place to stop an enemy attack, so she hadn't even tried. She had more or less setup the guards as lookout posts, and ordered a mobile response team to be assembled in the camp's barracks. That way, if one of those critical targets were under attack, they could at least push them back, and not just get killed piecemeal.

"Excellent. In that case, I suppose we'll have to schedule an official announcement about it. And recommend that people look out for adventurers that weren't there when we were setting up the aqueduct. Since more or less everyone was there, that would let us root out spies." She met Anders' gaze. "I don't believe they got the intel of who to attack by just observing us, otherwise they'd have hit you as well, given your own protection detail."

Anders nodded.

"Fair enough milady. So, no further instructions?"

Allya took a bite of her crêpe.

"Install an alarm. Loud, strident, and give the authorization to sound it if gunshots or explosions are heard, or one of the lookout posts signals a problem. That will make our reaction times better. And these guys looked to be better geared than we are, so have some of our men pack flares, since the other side will probably have night vision. There isn't much we can do besides that. We need at least an engagement with them to lay a proper trap."

The captain nodded.

"Of course. With your permission?"

"Dismissed captain."

Anders nodded, and left, leaving Allya and Pyn alone.

"So, the-"

Allya's cut off as Pyn slapped her, hard.

"That was for my foot! What the fuck?!?"

Allya blinked, then looked at her friend, who was now bent over the table glaring at her. Problem was, she looked absolutely beautiful when angry, and her armor showed ample amounts of her cleavage. Those factors combined to severely distracting the poor baroness, whose tort reply died in her mind.

"U-Uh, I'm sorry?"

"You better be sorry! Honestly! Not cool!" Said the elf as she sat back down, to Allya's relief and disappointment.

Damn it, bad Allya. I need to get myself under control, she's my ally, not my...my...she thought, before firmly stopping herself before even thinking of the word 'girlfriend'. Not the time. Really not the time. Especially just after they had nearly been killed and the assassins were off destroying their soon-to-be dungeon town.

"Right, my apologies." She said as she massaged her cheek. Damn, she could hit hard.

Pyn 'hmpfed', and went back to her meal, followed by Allya after a few seconds.

*****

"You know, I'm very tempted to send my golems to give these idiots on the surface a hand, just so they stop giving me cold sweat." Said Alexandra as she contemplated the second floor. She had rushed down as soon as she felt the ground shake and the rumble of something collapsing. She hadn't needed to, of course, she could have just popped into her dungeon view, but she'd been too panicked by her second floor potentially caving in to think of it.

Emilia shrugged.

"It's your choice. But I wouldn't recommend it."

Alexandra nodded unhappily. Emilia had made it quite clear that picking sides in human affairs, or that of any race for that matter, was usually a bad idea for a dungeon. The UDC didn't protect those that did this nearly as much as neutral dungeons, and sometimes didn't even lift a finger at all. Alexandra had a heavy suspicion that it was more to make an example, and encourage dungeons to support the UDC instead of local nations, rather than a true belief that dungeons should stay out of the politics of other races. Besides, the Eternia Crystallis dungeon clearly meddled in local and international politics, but she hadn't heard about anyone in the UDC raising an issue with one of their founding members doing so.

Guess politics are the same everywhere, thought Alexandra.

Still, she would have loved to at least give the clueless idiots above a hand, if only to prevent giving her panic attacks whenever they started running around like ants. Gods, she hadn't realized how much she hated not knowing what was going on. Even during her...partial retirement in the EFSN, she still had contacts that gave her an overview of the situation. Here she just had to watch and from time to time they would send someone to explain the mess, like when they'd asked her to resurrect that dark elf. Unfortunately, she hadn't been able to resurrect him, even with Emilia's help, and the dark elf had obviously been stripped of any objects but his clothes, probably to avoid feeding her stuff. That, or he wasn't carrying much around.

"Yeah, I know....I know....Well!" She clapped her hands together. "At least we were ready to begin testing on the prototype, correct? Might as well do it here. Plus, this is where I was planning to deploy them anyway."

"As you wish. Just give me a second..."

Emilia pulled out her grimoire, and after a few seconds a barrier of energy materialized around them, and Alexandra nodded in approval. She might not like the fact that her prototypes had a tendency to explode, but she was realistic enough to admit that they were prone to detonating, and take appropriate precautions. And she really, really didn't want Emilia to get hurt.

She plunged into dungeon mode, and carefully created their mine prototype, before digging into the ground, and covering it with sand, simulating the buried look it would have once she got around to digging a bit more and setting a sand floor for the chamber. Then, she went over the mine one more time before arming it and preparing it to detonate.

"Alright then, starting 'bouncing betty' Mk1 mine test detonation number 1, now."

She triggered the mine.

THUNK.

And watched some dust and bits of rock fall from the ceiling.

"Okay, note: dial the power of the initial launcher down. Waaaayyy down."

NOTES UPDATED

Emilia dutifully wrote down the note in her notebook as well, and Alexandra stroked her chin.

"Wait, I could make an RPG with this-Ow!"

She looked at Emilia in surprise, rubbing the back of her head. The vampire girl had gotten on her tip-toes and smacked her with her notebook! Well, gently smacked her really.

"Focus!"

Alexandra giggled, and shook her head.

"Yes ma'am! Alright, so as I said, we need to dial down the power of the initial launcher. And proof the charge so it detonates even if it hits something. Maybe a percussion detonator? Wait, no, a hit sensor would be better. Mmmhhh..."

Emilia nodded in satisfaction as her friend started pacing back and forth. She'd gotten her back on track. She liked Alexandra, but she could be...exasperating. Especially when it came to this kind of things. Whenever she thought of something, it was a chore to keep her on track, otherwise she fluttered into other things, and ended up with half a dozen unfinished projects strewn about the workshop. That was usually fine, having more ideas, traps and golems is useful, but not when they're not getting fully completed. At least not in a timely manner.

She looked at the notebook and the list of things to do, and winced.

Next up was 'resurrect CQ, and ask her how she can cast spells.' That one they had both been putting off for a while, since no adventurers had shown up to do a delve after the assault guild. The discussion promised to be...awkward, to say the least.