Chapter 25

Red Sands Desert, Contested Border Zone.

Dungeon Factory, 1st Floor.

CQ opened her eyes.

It took her a second to realize that she wasn't dreaming any more, before she lifted herself up.

Uh, that was weird. Usually mom brought her back standing.

Then, she froze as she saw mom and mommy sitting on chairs, right next to the altar she was laying on. The altar of the boss room. There were things that were universal, and that all beings could understand, even mana constructs. The inquisitive look of parents at their children when asking what happened to the missing cookies was one of those.

CQ gulped, and smiled hesitantly.

Her attempt to cute out of her parent's questions failed.

*****

Alexandra had to suppress a smile as CQ smiled at them. The boss had clearly sensed at least the basis of their intention...and was attempting to wriggle out of her predicament. That, however, wasn't going to happen. Not in a million years.

"Alright, so, CQ." The boss turned towards Alexandra, obviously recognizing her name. "We need to ask you a few questions." CQ tilted her head, and Alexandra sighed. This might get a bit...annoying, since the boss didn't seem to understand sentences. Still, she clearly was sapient, if nothing else.

Alexandra nodded towards Emilia, and gestured for her to take over.

The vampire girl nodded, and got up, pulling out a scroll of power beam, and showing it to CQ. The boss' eyes lit up in recognition as she saw the rune, but she just smiled innocently and tilted her head, feigning incomprehension so obviously Alexandra almost burst into laughter. Emilia sighed, lifted her hand...and used the scroll.

Alexandra almost recoiled as the beam of energy passed in front of her, and hit the wall, leaving a half melted, half vaporized spot on it.

Then Emilia simply pointed at the mark in the wall (while shaking off the ashes of the scroll in her hand), and tapped her foot. The...practical demonstration seemed to get the point across, and CQ nodded energetically. Then, Emilia tapped her head, and then pointed at CQ. The boss seemed to get the meaning of the 'how did you learn this' gesture, and hopped off the altar, before grabbing Alexandra's hand, dragging her up, and leading her down the core hallway.

Emilia and Jared quickly followed, and Alexandra had to suppress another smile. Clearly CQ had realized which one was going to go the easiest on her.

Before long they arrived in the workshop, and CQ let go of Alexandra's hand, and gestured at one of the benches.

Alexandra frowned, and stepped forward. There were parts of the mini spider bots, as well as a leap bracelet, but she didn't see how...

Then her eyes lit up as she realized one of the racked, finished projects was the power beam bracelet for the Royal Guardians.

"Well...Now we know." She said as she grabbed the bracelet, and showed it to Emilia. "She learned the spell the same time I did." She giggled. "Guess that you're such a good teacher you didn't even need to be understood for your lesson to go through."

Emilia seemed to bristle as she saw the bracelet, then mellowed at Alexandra's compliment.

"I guess so..." She said, a bit dubiously, looking at CQ, who was shifting from one foot to the other.

Alexandra gave the vampire girl a nice, long look, and firmly nodded. Her exasperation was gone, what was left was more of a....professional outrage at having the boss learn so easily, and probably some personal sadness at not being able to teach CQ her first spell.

The Earth-born patted Emilia's head, and smiled as the vampire girl bristled again. Alexandra laughed as Emilia shot her an exasperated look.

"Alright, alright! Still, mystery solved." She said as withdrew her hand from her advisor's head, and put the bracelet back on it's rack.

And mission accomplished, she thought. The boss could definitely sense Emilia's emotions, and the advisor's anger had very clearly been bothering the poor girl. She looked sad and somewhat terrified. Directing it towards her, and making sure it dissolved in Emilia's usual exasperation at her antics had worked flawlessly. Jeez, I feel like I'm managing a family or something.

"Well, now that that's dealt with." She said as she moved to pat CQ's head, who smiled happily, clearly relieved. "What's next on the list?"

Emilia quickly fetched and opened her notebook, a move she had done so much lately it was practically automatic at this point.

"Hum....Ah, there. Digging down the floor on the 2nd floor, and emplacing structure ruins."

Alexandra nodded.

"Ah, excellent! Well, let's be about it then!" She chuckled at her own choice of words.

The Earth-born met her advisor's gaze, and just shook her head.

"Nothing, just an old novel I remembered where the heroine said that a lot...anyway, let's get moving." She smiled. "I have a ton of ideas for emplacing the betties in this place!"

*****

"Are you sure sarge?"

Diamond looked up from the basic map he had drawn in the sand, and raised an eyebrow at Ruby, who shrugged.

"I mean no offense sir, but we already took out the aqueduct, why would we need to eliminate the well as well?" She froze for a second, then shook her head. "No pun intended sir."

Diamond smiled.

"I know. And the reason is simple. The aqueduct wasn't a really valuable target." Both of his corporal looked at him in confusion, and he sighed. "It was never the source of the water, just an easy way to move it around. They are perfectly capable of moving it manually if need be. No, what I wanted to see was their reaction and response time." He shrugged. "It's not the best, nor the worst. But it does mean that if we're quick enough, we can hit one of their main facilities and fall back before whatever reaction forces they have can engage us." He smiled. "Which means that they'll be expecting us to have fallen back...and not prepared an ambush for them."

Both of his corporal nodded, but Ruby still seemed reluctant.

"Look, Ruby. I know you want to hit the dungeon. And failing that, the warehouses. But we just can't. Not yet. It's too deep within their camp, until we have diminished their quick reaction forces the risk would be unacceptable."

The corporal nodded, more firmly this time, and Diamond went back to the crude map.

"Alright, here's what we're going to do. Ruby, I need at least one sniper team on the outermost mesa. Give them wards of protection talismans and some dash or windstep talismans as well. They are going to take some fire, and I'd rather have them back in one piece." He looked up at his corporal, who nodded. "Good, next, I need a proper ambush team. 6 should be able to do it. Just pepper them with a few volleys of bolts to get them under cover, then have the snipers take out high value targets. The ambush team should get the hell out of dodge as soon as the enemy takes cover. As for the initial assault, I think your boys and girls can handle it just fine Sapphire."

Sapphire smiled.

"Oh, don't worry about that. Sneaking around and slitting throats is a specialty of mine. I'll see to it personally."

"And I'll lead the ambush team." She chuckled. "Not that I have enough personnel to spare to avoid taking to the battlefield myself anyway."

Diamond's eyebrow rose.

"Are you sure you don't want to be in the sniper team?" She had been, after all, the only one to score a kill during the assassination.

She shook her head.

"Nah, I'm not that good with moving fast under fire. Better leave that to Firatite." She snickered. "If nothing else, his horrendous puns have made him learn to run fast from his own comrades."

They laughed, before Diamond shook his head.

"Alright, I'll give you that one. Well then, better get prepared." He got up, and dusted off his pants. "Because we're starting the operation at dawn."

"Yes sir!"

They both saluted, and left to go and prepare their teams.

*****

"You know, I think we could do some basements as well."

Emilia looked up from her book.

"What do you mean?"

Alexandra shrugged, controlling her body remotely as she was in the dungeon mode.

"For the ruins, I mean." She finished creating a crumbling building that looked like a villa with a patio, but so old that an entire side had collapsed. "We could put some basements. Expand the verticality a bit more."

"But the pillars, tall buildings, and especially the ceiling rooms already do that." Pointed out the vampire girl.

"I know, I know, but...I don't know, it feels weird not to have an 'underground' part." She smirked. "This is a dungeon after all!"

Emilia thought for a second, then snapped her fingers.

"Then what about the final rooms and the boss room! I mean, we already agreed to make it a separate building. Why not make it an underground one? Oh! We could even make it more of the third floor's theme than the second one! Sort of a blend, serving as a transition between them."

Alexandra froze, then smiled, and hugged Emilia.

"Thanks vampy! That's genius! Yes, I'll get to designing it right away!"

Emilia smiled, and after a bit of hesitation, hugged her friend back, before letting her go as she pulled back, and started pacing back and forth. She watched in fascination, it was hard to get Alexandra interested in anything remotely concerning aesthetic design. But she looked like she was hooked. Probably because given the theme of the third floor, it would have combat consequences. Rather large combat consequences actually. And her friend, when she actually did work rather than messing around with stuff, was quite brilliant. She was just a bit too...dispersed from time to time.

After a few minutes, Alexandra stopped pacing, and made a beeline for Emilia.

"Alright, I've got the basis of an idea." She pointed at the wall opposite of the door to the floor entrance. "I want to put it there." Emilia opened her mouth, but closed it as the Earth-born held up her hand. "Wait, let me finish. I know, it wouldn't be hidden, but I have an idea. We could gave it a puzzle lock, just like we did for the puzzle room. BUT, we get more possibilities, and change the combination everyday." She smiled. "It'll give that 'assault guild' some work to do, and hopefully net us some friends. The way I want to handle it is to have the combination scattered around the entire area." She gestured at the ruins, who looked a bit odd, since the sand that was supposed to have them half-buried hadn't yet been added. "To make it low cost, we could just have it be a series of panels that we can flip, with a different symbol on each side."

Emilia frowned.

"Wouldn't that make the combination too easy to guess?"

Alexandra shrugged.

"If you know all the possibilites and have collected most of them? Yeah. It'd still be dangerous to play with the traps like that, but you could do it. In absolute terms? Hell no. Let's say we make it 8 runes long. Since there's two possibilities, it's like bits. So an octet really. 2 to the power of 8 is..."She blinked as the number instantly came to mind. Her adaptative-intuitive interface was behaving more and more like her implants, it was kind of terrifying to some level. "256 possibilities. That's good enough to make it impossible to just have pre-baked answer for everyone, like the first puzzle room."

The vampire girl nodded, pulling her notebook to make a small note as she spoke.

"Okay, I see...That sounds good honestly." She chuckled. "Just don't forget to adjust the actual puzzle as well, otherwise adventurers might get killed because of a dumb error."

Alexandra chuckled, shaking her head.

"That's a fair point I guess. I think I'll write an algorithm, and have it select a random number of panels to flip, and adjust the combination to unlock the final area accordingly." She stroked her chin. "As for the final area itself, I had a few ideas, see..."

*****

Sergeant Sarkov Illisiev panted as he climbed the mesa. The damned things weren't that hard to get on top of, especially for someone of his level, but climbing a dozen of them in a single evening got a bit wearing. At least the inner ones had ladders.

Still, his surprise 'inspection tour' had worked fantastically well. He knew his boys wouldn't be slacking off, especially not after they'd lost Myskaros, so he wasn't so concerned about inspecting them. What he was doing however was asking how they were doing, and made sure they understood their superiors cared about them, and that freezing their asses off watching the darkness was important. And if they just happened to have a few pastries and hot beverages fresh from the camp kitchen right after he passed, well, that was just an added bonus.

He frowned as he heard a gurgle as he neared top of the mesa. What could possibly-

His mind stopped as he saw the dark figure withdraw it's dagger, and let the limp body of one of his men fall down to the ground. For a second, nothing seemed to happen...Then another figure pointed at him, and Sarkov instantly came back to his sense, and let go of the edge, almost letting himself fall down the mesa.

"ALERT! ALERT! WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! LIEUTENANT OF THE GUARD! WE ARE UNDER ATTACK!"

He made it to the bottom of the mesa, and started running towards the camp, yelling as loudly as he could. He stumbled when something hit him in the back, but kept running, a hot liquid coursing down his back. Unknown to him, his self-imposed mission to bring warm coffee to his soldiers had just saved his life, as the crossbow bolt headed straight for his heart was intercepted by the heavy, thermal proofed can he used to carry it, breaching it and causing the coffee spill.

Ruby swore, and reloaded her crossbow as the soldier that came out of nowhere continued running unimpeded, and aimed for the head.

This time the annoying bastard fell down.

But it was too late.

*****

"What the-" Said lieutenant Estar, as sergeant Sarkov came into view, yelling like a madman. Then, the sergeant stumbled, and fell, a crossbow bolt appearing between his eyes, protuding straight out of his helmet. "SHIT!" He turned towards one of his privates. "SOUND THE ALARM! Everyone else, with me! Go go go!"

The soldiers around him tossed down their early breakfast, and grabbed their weapons, following hot on his heels as he rushed forward.

He wasn't a ballistic specialist, but he had a rough idea of where the shot had come from...and he knew the sergeant had intended to 'inspect' the lookout posts this morning. He unholstered his pistol, a weapon he'd gained some...time ago, in a previous career, and aimed straight at the mesa where the lookout post was.

A silhouette appeared against the sky on top of it, and he squeezed the trigger.

*****

"Clear."

Sapphire let out a sigh of relief, and slowly rose up from the corpse of the guard whose throat he had just slit.

"Alright." He whispered to the rest of his team, that had just risen as well. "Set the charges. Those that are part of the ambush, take positions, the rest, pull back. Come on, get moving!"

His men nodded, and went to work. Sapphire looked with a critical eye to make sure no one was slacking off -there was a low chance of that, but old habits died hard-, and then looked up at the mesas. They had to wait for Ruby and her team to clean out a lookout post before moving in, which meant that the ambush might be slightly delayed, and-

A shot rang out, and a scant few seconds later, an alarm started blaring in the distance.

"FUCK! Forget the charges! Combat teams, in position! The rest just run!" He yelled out as he hit the deck. The last thing he needed was to have his saboteurs caught in the cross fire. This was far too soon, what the hell had just happened?!?

His saboteurs dropped the charges (well, set them down carefully, they were hurried, not insane), and ran, while his soldiers hit the deck, and tried to hide as best they could, which lead to Sapphire cursing again. They were supposed to hide and take cover in the debris created by the destruction of the well, and now they were forced to either use the massive, stone well it self, or hide in the, admittedly rocky, but suboptimal terrain.

What can go wrong, will go wrong. Fuck, why couldn't this fucking maxim be wrong itself for once? He thought to himself as he brought up his crossbow, and carefully reloaded it. He barely had the time to do so before a group of soldiers came into view. The lead one appeared to be doing something as he ran, but Sapphire didn't bother with it. He knew the rank tabs of an officer when he saw one, and he smoothly squeezed the trigger.

*****

"Come on! We have to cut them o-" The lieutenant's shout died in a 'hmpf' as the crossbow bolt impacted him, and he went down.

"Sniper! Get down!" Yelled his sergeant, before hitting the deck, followed by most of her squad.

Thankfully, whoever had shot down the lieutenant hadn't coordinated with their own soldiers, as he gave the guards enough warning to avoid most of the incoming fire. The sergeant crawled to the lieutenant, and flipped Estar on his back as her men returned fire.

Her eyes widened as she saw his breastplate. The crossbow bolt, which she assumed to be the same enchanted, armor piercing type that seemingly went through steel like butter, and that had taken out Myskaros and wounded his escort, had simply broken up upon Estar's breastplate. It had, however, stripped away the outer layer of the lieutenant's armour, and revealed the gleam of mythril under the dull of a thin layer of steel.

She shook her head. There was a time for questions, and this wasn't it. She slapped the lieutenant's face, hard.

"Ow! What?" Said Estar as he blinked awake.

"We're under attack, you got knocked out by a hit!"

"Oh, right. Shit." He looked around, and saw briefly where his men were aiming. "Shit, they took the well." He upped his voice. "We need to prevent them from destroying the well! Advance by fire and movement! Fire team one moves, two covers. Prepare to move out on my mark!"

*****

Sapphire swore viciously as the enemy squad split up. Half fired, and the other half rushed forward while his men took cover. This wasn't his fucking specialty, he was an assassin and intelligence specialist, not a gods damned infantryman!

Where the hell is Ruby?!? He thought to himself as he kneeled to get a better shot, and fired, nailing one of the advancing soldiers, but taking a crossbow bolt to the chest, which thankfully bounced off of his ward...but instantly painted him as a target. He barely hit the deck fast enough to avoid the rain of crossbow bolts aimed at him.

A few hundred meters away, on top of the mesa, Firatite dragged Ruby to the edge of the mesa, and passed her limp body off to Ludlamite.

"Get her out of there. She's still breathing but...She got hit pretty hard." He had no idea what kind of gun had hit her, but it hadn't given a single shit about her wards of protection. The bullet had simply breezed through her defenses like they weren't even there, and went straight out of her back breastplate. Fortunately the shooter hadn't been able to hit any immediately lethal spots, but Ruby was coughing up blood, and she wasn't going to make it if she wasn't brought back to their camp, fast.

Ludlamite nodded, and set his superior on his shoulders, before carefully climbing down the mesa. Firatite gave him a worried look, before shaking his head, and going back to business.

Ruby might have been the one to recruit him, and thus had gotten him into this mess, but she'd saved his little sister. That was worth a lot in his book. And he'd be damned if he let her get killed by some stupid, corporate mercenary bastard with a gun gained at cards and a lucky rabbit's foot.

"Laz, with me. Let's get some payback."

His spotter, who still hadn't fully recovered from her wounds, but had insisted with accompanying him, nodded, and crawled to the edge of the mesa, quickly followed by him. He carefully sighted his crossbow, and started hunting for the targets Lazulite called out to him.

*****

"Status report." Said Allya as she ran by Anders' side.

The captain gave her a sideway looked, clearly weighted whether to tell her to get back to camp, and ultimately decided against it.

"The alarm was rung after the gunshot milady. But a runner from Estar's outpost arrived shortly afterwards. Said they saw sergeant Sarkov get killed as he tried to warn them. He said Estar moved in to engage. According to the Alberta's, there's fighting down at the well. They're moving into range, but they don't know who they would be firing at, even if they made it in time. They could only use their signal lamps to pass down whatever they could make out."

"Right." Said Allya. She thought for a second, then turned towards Pyn. "Pyn. Can you take Éclair and get up on the mesa? The one opposite the lookout post. You two are the best climbers I know, and we need the overview." Pyn nodded, and Allya sighed as Éclair's perpetual scowl deepened. "Relax, I'll be with Anders, and I'll keep the fire team with me." She locked her eyes with the bodyguard's. "But you better bring her back to me in one piece, got it?"

The guard met her gaze...and firmly nodded. Just as Allya had thought, reminding her of her job and emphasizing that her lady counted on her had done the trick.

"Alright then, get going. We'll attack from the front." She turned towards Anders. "Have you sent flanking forces?"

He nodded.

"Yes milady. Only one though, I don't have that many soldiers at hand. They'll try to circumvent the lookout post, and trap whoever is attacking us."

There was no question that the lookout post was no longer in their hands. Otherwise they would have signaled that the well was under attack.

Allya nodded.

"Excellent then!" She unsheathed her daggers. "I think it's time we get going then. I'm itching to give those bastards a taste of their own medicine."