Chapter 39

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

City of Rebirth.

“Ah! Lady Aubétoile and lady Windwrath, I presume?”

“You presume well, sir. You insisted to meet with us?” Said Allya politely. She hadn’t intended on being this….delicate originally, but one of the thing that Anders had failed to mention about those merchants was quite how well dressed they were.

To be fair to the captain, he was a soldier –well, a paramilitary law enforcement agent really-, not a noble or a merchant, so it would be hardly surprising that he would leave these kinds of details out. However to Allya they were crucial, as she had been very much reared as a noble…And understood that generally well dressed people were either important, wanted to become important, or were sycophants to important people. All of which combined to mean that politeness, however frustrating it might be to her, might prove invaluable, as long as she didn’t show weakness in doing so.

“Yes milady, my deepest apologies for disturbing you and your knight.” The merchant actually bowed, which produced the interesting effect of having all the gold and jewels he was covered in glitter like those mad ‘disco balls’ in vogue in Empire when she’d left. “However, I feared that only your presence could unblock the situation….and that you were the person necessary to appraise the situation and weigh in all of its particular problems.”

“I see.” Simply said Allya, raising an eyebrow just enough to show curiosity, but not surprise or contempt. “Very well, I am here my good sir, and I am listening.”

“Thank you milady. Well, first things first I suppose. I am Willard Estogan, and this is my sister, Virtis Estogan. You have surely heard of our uncle, Duke Manson Estogan, of Sarth?” Allya politely nodded –how could she have failed to know his name, when she had been supposed to swear fealty to him before their majesties’ offer?-, and gestured for him to continue. “Well, our uncle sent us to ascertain the commercial opportunities of the new dungeon, as well as be his personal representatives in your court and council.”

Allya smiled, and Willard tensed slightly. It was a nice smile…the sort of calculated, cold hearted ‘nice’ smile a noblewoman made to someone she was about to tear a new one.

“Ah, I see sir Willard. Well, there is a slight problem with that. As you have no doubt been appraised of, Rebirth is now a Principality of the realm…which also means that I no longer owe fealty to the Duke. Now do not take this wrongly, I am more than happy to have him as my friend and ally, but representatives of his in my court and council would be….superfluous, don’t you think?”

She could almost feel the man’s internal wince. Whoever he was, he was pretty well trained in obfuscating his emotions and preventing people from reading him too openly….Unfortunately for him ‘pretty well’ wasn’t going to cut it with Allya.

“I had heard …rumors to that effect indeed, but thought them unfounded. Apparently they were not, you have my deepest apologies milady.” He bowed again, and Allya had to stop herself from frowning. She knew she was the baroness, but the fact that he was practically ignoring Pyn’s very presence here was starting to annoy her. “In any case, I believe it would still be beneficial for me and my sister to establish a form of…an embassy wouldn’t be precise, but a presence for the House of Estogan. Of course, our purpose would primarily be commercial –regardless of Rebirth’s status, your natural resources in the form of the dungeon are considerable, and so are the opportunities associated with them-, but we would also be available, if need be, as a point of contact with our uncle the Duke, should contact with him be required.” He looked up. “After all, my uncle has assumed the responsibility for the defense of the kingdom’s southern border for decades now, and he has always discharged his obligations of protecting the realms from invading…wasteland creatures with alacrity.”

Allya didn’t quite blink…but she started listening even more carefully. His pause before precising what was invading was extremely telling. What he meant was probably that the Republic had never quite stopped making moves towards Darthar….and that he would be willing to lend military assistance, should it prove necessary. No doubt in exchange of suitable compensation, like treaties and generous ‘gifts’, but still.

“I see…And you would like to establish this…presence here, on this Mesa?”

Allya gestured around them, as they were currently on top of one of the mesas surrounding the camp, the ones she had specifically asked Pyn to make sure no one could buy or rent land on top of unless they had her direct permission. Suddenly the merchants’ demands didn’t seem quite that unreasonable now that she thought about it. Arrogant, yes…but as nephews and nieces of a powerful duke in the Asarian Kingdom, that was inevitable. They had undeniably been haughty in their original formulation, at least according to Anders, but they had been talking to a commoner, not a fellow noble. They might as well been talking to a sheep or a golem for all they cared.

“Very much so. There are multiple reasons for this, the first one, I’m sure you’ll have deduced, is that the view is pretty fantastic.” He waved his hand around. “Oh, I’m not talking about the camp, but having a direct line of sight upon the dungeon’s entrance itself, and all of its grandeur is quite the spectacle. The next reason of course is status. Having our…property down with the populace would hardly represent properly the importance of our House after all, and would probably quite offend our uncle. And lastly, and to be extremely candid, the high ground is much more defensible from…wasteland monsters, should they, of course, choose the extremely unlikely option to attack, and we were to…require the help of our uncle so he could come and relieve us of these horrid creatures.”

Allya slowly nodded. So they essentially wanted to build a fortress as much as anything. That…wasn’t that surprising, and quite frankly she could get behind the idea to some extent. If nothing else they would help draw off attacks and serve as another layer of defenses, if, like he was implying, the Republic was going to attack. And she did understand the point about status –there was a reason the Imperial Palace in Starcore was built on top of an artificial mountain the heart of the city after all-, although she disagreed about the need of setting themselves apart from the ‘populace’. From her experience –and education- the moment nobles forgot that they were there and living their lives of luxuries only because the commoners below them provided for it was the moment revolutions started happening.

“Those are some very good point sir Willard…Very well, I think I will acquiesce you and your uncle’s…request.” Her eyes hardened, making it abundantly clear that they might want to be a bit more…subtle next time. Given the slight change of expression in Willard’s face, her message got across just fine. “I will talk personally with my city planners about setting this area aside for you. I will not cede it in perpetuity, but I am more than willing to sign a long term lease. Understand, this is not meant as any form of slight against you or your house, it just means that we are very early in the planning of the city, and that unanticipated needs might arise which would require us to abruptly change it on the fly. Like say an attack from…those wasteland creatures you mentioned.”

The noble/merchant nodded vigorously.

“Of course milady, I understand. Very well, I will inform my uncle with all due haste of your acceptance, and the change of status of your domain as a Principality. I will also be in contact with your advisors regarding matter of trade.” He smiled, and seemingly genuinely at that. “I’m sure that these matters alone will keep me occupied quite nicely! My sister will handle the more…defensive aspects, and she will try to keep in touch with your knight for the security implications.”

Allya nodded, and noted that he had automatically assumed that Pyn was in charge of security and their military forces, while a civilian advisor would handle trade and such. Which was fair, since the primary role of knights was military –hence the name-, and if they had any information about her they would know that she was a knight-valiant as well, and thus unlikely to keep someone by her side who wasn’t a fighter. Of course, Pyn was a much better city planner than she was a combatant, and security, despite her own personal combat prowess, wasn’t exactly what she was trained in. Hence why she completely relied on Anders for that.

“Very well. In that case sir Willard, I will depart, I am afraid that there are many matters that require my attention, most of them quite pressing. Have a good day!”

“And a good day to you too, milady!” He said, bowing once more as Allya nodded back, turned around, and left, Pyn in tow.

*****

“So, what do you think?” Said Alexandra as she gestured at the new boss room.

“I think some of them look ridiculous. But…as far as combat power goes, they seem pretty good.”

Alexandra had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. In front of her were assembled CQ’s new team and guards. There were 4 of the newly upgraded Royal Guardians Mk2s, with better armor thickness, two power beam bracelets instead of one, and a runed spear of flame. Overall, their lethality had skyrocketed, and they no longer were the one trick pony they used to be, which was good because their previous version had proven very…lackluster for its cost.

Next were the 6 brand new Palace Marksmen. Armed with the crossbows –unenchanted, sadly- she had recovered from the core thieves, with their bag of standard bolts, and a short sword for self defense, just in case. She’d run them through extensive tests, and although their accuracy at longer ranges left much to be desired, they were more than deadly medium to short range shooters, especially when paired with their newly upgraded 16 Palace Guards Mk3s comrades.

The Mk3s still relied on the core principle of the Mk2s, heavy armor, toughness and staying power, but thanks to some of the materials she had recovered over time, she had been able to give them some degree of thermal and electric insulation as well, making them less prone to just getting their circuits fried by heat or electricity with a single spell taking out an entire squad. That doesn’t mean it was particularly good insulation, but it should prove a nasty surprise to unprepared adventurers nonetheless. Besides that she had generally upgraded the quality of their armor and weapons, as well as proving them with a handful of javelins to throw if need be.

Last, and very much not the least however, were the golems she had dubbed the Royal Archmages. She had been working on their concept ever since they had gotten the spell scrolls off of that steel ranked mage during the assault guild’s delve. She knew she couldn’t truly make a magic casting golem in the sense most people would think, but she was pretty sure she would be able to make some form of sorcerer golem instead.

She was right, she had been able to make a sorcerer golem…sort of. The one problem she had run into however is that she had no idea how to have them use scrolls, or a grimoire for that matter. As such she had to resort to a…somewhat weird alternative. She had made them ‘grimoires’ which were just very large tomes made out of steel, with pages of very, very expensive silver inside them –that thankfully she was able to fabricate in sheets in limited amounts through the forges, so it hadn’t been prohibitively expensive-. They weren’t so much grimoires as runed objects mascarading as grimoires, but it did get the job done, especially thanks to the mana crystals she had embedded directly in the books, so the golems didn’t have to draw from their own internal power systems –or her own core- to use them. Now she wouldn’t have been obligated to do that, but she wanted ‘mages’ capable of fighting regardless of what happened to her influence –or if they were fighting outside of it for that matter-, and be able to reload their ‘weapons’ out in the field, without the danger of shutting themselves down in the middle of a fight by accident.

Besides, the silver grimoires, as she’d come to call them, would probably be very valuable loot for adventurers as well. Three asteroids with a single missile indeed. Or three birds with one spell, if she wanted to use the probable equivalent idiom on this world. And it let her handily hand wave some of their more peculiar design features as well. After all, wouldn’t its ability to be used by anyone, regardless of if they knew how to channel mana properly not make them even more valuable, and thus draw even more adventurers in?

In any case, Emilia’s main problem with the new golems is that they were…utilitarian. No gilding, no flourish, no nothing. Even the mages basically just had a royal crimson robe, and that was as far as Alexandra had been willing to go in cosmetics. As such while they were definitely lethal, they indeed might look a bit…peculiar to the undiscerning eye. To be fair, so did CQ, although in her case Alexandra had decided to take a bit more time doing the upgrades, and was still working on some of the essential components for the boss’ new loadout. Not that she seemed to mind the delay, as she was happily walking around her new guards, poking them and inspecting their weapons. It was kind of cute, in a way, if you ignored the fact that the boss was gauging their capacity for killing people.

“They look utilitarian, vampy. I agree, it’s not the best, but it could be worse…and we have other things to worry about right now.”

Alexandra could feel her advisor’s eye roll at her nickname, but once again she chose not to comment on it, and the Earth-born hid a smile. Maybe someday she wouldn’t even blink when she called her that. Or maybe she never would and continue eye rolling at every mention of it. Frankly, Alexandra was fine with either. She’d missed having byplay like that with someone close to her.

“Utilitarian is no justification for this atrocity upon the eyes and dungeon norms. Professionals have to have standards you know.” She shook her head. “But I agree, there are more important things to do right now…but that doesn’t mean I’ll forget about it!”

Alexandra laughed as her advisor wiggled her index under her nose.

“Why not use your 6 hours of design then?” She said hopefully. If she could get the vampire girl to throw away her bet winning in something she was quite sure the vampire girl would drag her kicking and screaming into doing anyway…

“No…I already have something in mind, it should prove…interesting.”

Emilia giggled at Alexandra’s suddenly worried expression, and then waved.

“Come on, I already checked on the list. Next is testing the alchemical compositions we have collected so far. Since apparently some of them your interface can’t make heads or tails of.”

*****

WHAM

Well, that answers that at least, thought Alexandra, slightly shocked as she saw the bits of golems rising gracefully into the air…then finishing their arcs and hitting the ground like so much scrap metal. The sound…wasn’t exactly pretty. Or enjoyable.

They’d been testing the various alchemical compositions for almost an hour now, safely behind a ward of protection while groups of golems on the second floor were busy pouring them on things and even outright setting fire to them to see what they did. It was a…crude way of testing, but at least thanks to some chunks of flesh –thankfully animal based, although she had no idea why that rogue had been carrying red beef meat around in a dungeon- they knew roughly what was poisonous and such.

In any case she had been idly wondering where the explosives the core thieves had mentioned had gone while starting to design a set of proper chemical testing tool when a golem, after having shaken, punched, and poured the weird gel she had found in one of the satchels, had lit it on fire.

The results were extremely conclusive, as illustrated by the new, small, but undeniably present crater in the middle of the floor.

“I think we found the explosives the core thieves were talking about.” Said Alexandra mildly, as she watched in amusement Emilia trying to erase the line she had accidentally drawn across her notebook when the explosion had made her jump.

“That’s…probably the case. Weird, why didn’t your interface register them as such?”

“Because it didn’t know? I mean even on Earth we had a hard time cataloguing every explosive composition properly. On your world, where explosives aren’t purely chemical reactions but can also be magic driven, partially or totally, even in purely alchemical bombs? It’s hardly surprising it wouldn’t know them all.”

That, or it refused to tell me, she unhappily noted in her mind, just like it had tried to hide from her what her crimson haze ability would do exactly, for whatever reason.

“Fair enough, I suppose.” She shrugged. “Well, now that you have them, what do you intend to do with them? Don’t tell me you need to think about it, you’ve been practically raving about how ‘inadequate’ the bouncing betties were as explosives for a while now.”

Alexandra opened her mouth, and closed it. She didn’t think she had been quite that candid about how annoying she found the mine warheads…but apparently she had been. She reminded herself that however inexperienced her advisor was in certain matters, she was anything but stupid.

“Right. Sorry. Well…I do have a few ideas.”

“Might as well tell me now.” Emilia nodded towards the entrance to the floor, as dungeon delves had stopped for the night, and there was thus no risk of adventurers wandering down there to discover them.

“Right. Well, you see…”

*****

“A lack of warehouse space?”

Melia nodded.

“Yes milady. I’ve been talking around to the merchants, and they are all in agreement that the loot from the dungeon is very valuable indeed. The weapons aren’t worth that much, with the notable exception of the runed bracelets, but the golems themselves, and especially their core components….They are almost universally valuable, at least in any nation with a modicum of technical capabilities, and the golems themselves pretty much transport themselves. Hell, even aboard ship, with a skilled artificers you could have them take on menial jobs and outright pay for their cargo space!” The merchant shook her head. “So it’s hardly surprising that every merchant worth their salt are trying to invest in and claim as much warehouse space and transport as they can. I’ve even talked to the ship captains, and one of the fastest one is already making ready to depart with as much loot as they could pack into his cargo holds, for it to be sent to potential buyers for assessment, and carry dispatches urging various merchant houses to pounce while there is still time.”

Allya nodded slowly.

“I see…That does make sense.” She frowned. “Aren’t we constructing a communication relay however? I was told that only the adventurers guild’s private network reached this far into the wasteland-“ And probably some Erisian military relays as well, although she was fairly sure that sort of information was hardly common knowledge. “hence why we are having to wait for the relay to be operational for us to be able to contact Darthar –or the rest of the world for that matter- without having to go through guildmaster Starvak or physical couriers. Shouldn’t said relay be operational before the ship arrives and sends its dispatches to their recipients?”

Melia shrugged.

“Maybe. But merchants like to hedge their bets. Plus, honestly…well, these kind of projects always run into delays at some point, and given the incidents that happened…”

“They’re afraid of someone blowing up the relay.” Said Pyn, grimly.

Melia nodded, and Allya winced. Pyn…wasn’t especially happy about having to have to rebuild the aqueduct, and the delay it had caused in her carefully laid out infrastructure expansion plans hadn’t helped either. Still, she had been more cheerful than usual thanks to the new influx of adventurers. Since parties on the list for dungeon delves were now decided for the day rather than on the spot –mainly to avoid the sort of concentration of people that had almost started the riot the day before-, there were now a lot of daily bored, and usually effectively unemployed healthy, strong adventurers. And while most of them spent their times training or studying, a lot weren’t adverse at all to the sweet sound of mana crystals falling into their purses either, and a fair amount of them turned up to help construction in exchange for a decent compensation. It wasn’t a necessarily reliable source of manpower, but it had more than proven it’s worth in both helping construction and keeping said adventurers occupied and not doing stupid things like a group of idiots that had tried to dig a tunnel to the dungeon to bypass guild taxes and entrance limits. These ones had also been promptly sentenced to exile, but even with their example it was inevitable that some idiots would do something equally stupid unless they were safely busy doing something else.

“Hopefully that won’t happen this time.” Simply said Allya. “Very well, I’ll see what I can do to expand the warehouses. For that matter, if you could float some information their way –unofficially, mind you- that the city’s nobles might be interested in some commercial partnerships and investments in infrastructure, in exchange for some generous land loans for say, the construction of said warehouses, that would be very helpful.”

“Of course milady, it will be my pleasure. And I am sure there will be some who will prove very interested in such a deal.”

Allya smiled.

“Excellent then!” She looked briefly at the clock in the corner of the room, and winced. “And now I’m afraid that it’s all the time we have for today. It’s getting fairly late, and tomorrow promises to be as busy. I’m going to retire to my room and go to bed.” And the fact that Pyn got grumpy and less cuddly –or enthusiastic in their bedtime activities- when they went to bed had definitely nothing to do with it. “Good night, merchant Melia.”

“Good night milady!” Said the merchant, before bowing and leaving.

“Right, now that this is done wi-mmmhhhh!” Allya’s sentence ground to a muffled halt as Pyn very thoroughly kissed her, before wordlessly grabbing her by the arm and practically dragging her towards the bedroom. Looks like she had some stress to work off for the day as well.

Rogard and Éclair exchanged a knowing glance, before the pink haired bodyguard nodded, and left the tent. After all, there would only be a single bedroom to guard tonight…and she had been more or less designated by her fellows as the one that would have to wake up their ladies if an emergency came up in the morning, or they overslept, mainly because she’d had the unfortunate occasion of practically walking up on them, as they said.

Éclair sighed, and closed the tent flap behind her, nodding at the regular soldier guarding it, before making her way towards her own quarters. Hopefully they would remember to wake up on time in the morning. Hopefully.