Chapter 45

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, 2nd Floor.

"Isn't that a bit...lazy?"

Alexandra sighed.

"In a way, I suppose so. But I wanted to try out how they would fare without CQ."

Emilia shrugged as she looked at the group of Palace Guard Mk3s in the entrance to the water temple. Alexandra had decided to simply populate the entire water temple with CQ's various bodyguards, which struck the vampire girl as a bit...economic, to put it in better terms than 'lazy'.

"Fair enough." She turned around and waggled her finger under the Earth-born's nose. "But don't think for a second that I'm going to let you get away with it for everything! I know what you're trying to do! And that's freeing up time for your other projects instead of building a proper dungeon!"

Alexandra chuckled and rubbed her neck. The vampire girl...wasn't wrong. Oh, she wasn't completely right either -the golems were there to test combined armed tactics as well, especially with the pseudo magic casters-, but she was essentially correct. Now that she finally had a good source of mana income, and didn't have to worry about drawing adventurers in and getting as many of them through her as possible, she'd started to...lapse. She was spending more and more time on other projects, from building a basic internal railway (surprisingly difficult, especially with junctions) for the logistic network, to creating new and better weaponry.

"Well....Okay." She held up her hands as Emilia frowned. "Okay, okay! I get the point, I'll be a good girl."

"You better." Emilia smiled fondly. "Now, to the next item?"

"Actually, no. I wanted to show you something."

Emilia's eyebrows rose. It was rather rare for Alexandra to break their TO-DO list like that, but usually whatever it was about was worth it. Like making the flamethrower trap. Or baking a chocolate cake using the various ingredients they had acquired from adventurers (some people carried around the weirdest snacks), and the forges.

"Okay, go ahead."

"Excellent, to the workshop then!"

A few minutes later, spent mostly chatting as they made their way to the elevator and went straight back to the workshop, Alexandra stepped into her 'special projects' area of the workshop, and pulled up one of the innumerable prototypes littering the work surfaces. Honestly Emilia didn't even have an inkling what half of them were even supposed to be, but they certainly sounded impressive for the most part. And some of them just sounded silly.

The vampire girl looked over the prototype, it looked...weird. Sort of like taking the stock of a crossbow, then sticking...was that a bouncing betty? On it.

"Is that...?"

"An RPG. Well, technically not, since it's an acronym. More accurately it should be a Kinesys Propelled Grenade. Although right now it's more of just a giant, low velocity pulser however."

Emilia's head came up sharply.

"A pulser?"

"Yeah, since it's powered by kinesys runes, and thus gravity as far as I'm aware. I'm still working on the version with a barrel, but I'm starting to understand what the issue was. Thing is, the bouncing betty worked just fine, so I decided to ditch the barrel altogether. It's simple in concept: stick one of the original, very powerful bouncing betties on a brace, point and shoot, done."

"I'm sensing a 'but' coming." Said Emilia, sardonically. With Alexandra's prototypes, their always was one.

"Well...It's single use. The runes are beyond fucked after just one shot. In fact it's a freaking miracle the original bouncing betties even worked at all and launched. The next problem is that while it doesn't have recoil -thank the gods-, it emits more heat on the user than a fucking power armor mounted plasma gun. Even the Palatial Guards Mk3s are getting seriously cooked. And lastly...Well, like I said it's a low velocity pulser right now. The warhead just isn't reliable enough, my impact fuses just don't fucking work, and the golems aren't smart enough to accurately guess the timer length for the warhead to blow up reliably before hitting the target. I've also tried making a smart warhead, but...well, let's put it this way, making something capable of taking detonation decisions in a micro-second is very, very hard. I frankly think I'd have an easier time just making the golems smarter."

"I see...and why were you making this exactly?"

"To kill armored targets. Some of the coppers we're seeing, particularly the fighters and paladins, are sporting some really heavy duty armor. And, well...you remember the silver ranked ones yesterday."

Emilia winced, and nodded. They'd just breezed through the dungeon. Well, as a manner of speaking, they definitely had some close calls -a bouncing betty had almost killed their mage-, but overall no desperate fights. They'd even managed to be the first to claim the loot chest next to the river, thanks to their mage and sorcerer spamming lightning spells like crazy. And they had a paladin that looked more like a golem than a human in all that armor. He also kept cracking puns about everything they encountered. Alexandra had gotten so fed up Emilia had been convinced the Earth-born was about to collapse the ceiling on top of him.

"I see what you mean, yeah. You wanted something to be able to go through that armor?"

"Not necessarily. You don't have to go through personal armor to kill someone. Throw enough kinetic energy and the sheer impact will kill them on their own." She patted the prototype. "That is what this baby is supposed to do."

"So, what did you name it?"

"I call it the Thumper, Mark 1."

Emilia snickered.

"What?" Asked Alexandra.

"Nothing, nothing! Just...You have an interesting sense for naming stuff. Anyway. Is it powerful enough to kill a copper ranked in a single shot? And how much does it cost?"

"Well, if it doesn't kill them I don't see them coming back up quickly. It's not a catapult level of energy, but it's close. A normal human in plate armor would end up trying to breathe their own breastplate after it's been driven through their torso. Here? Not so sure. Even your steel is generally tougher than it was on Earth during the Middle-Ages. And don't even get me started on enchanted armor or materials! As for the cost, well...There's a reason I haven't bothered solving the heat issue. To put it simply: it's cheaper to sacrifice the golem."

Emilia winced. That was, indeed, pretty damned expensive.

"So, who are you thinking of giving these to?"

"For now? Praetorian Guard, and a few Palace Guards Mk3s."

"Okay." Emilia nodded. She used to be a bit skittish of Alexandra overarming the Praoterian Guard, but after the latest kidnapping attempt, she was firmly on the side of 'better safe than sorry', at least within reasonable measures. "Then, how about you show me how it works?"

"It'll be my pleasure. First though, let's go somewhere...safer, for testing. It isn't quite a new prototype, but..."

"Better safe than sorry?"

"Exactly."

No need to mention it had a 30% failure rate as well. A very heat intensive, and somewhat explosive failure. Turns out turning the warhead into a solid ball of wrought iron had some form of impact on the runes themselves. Which was fascinating, all on its own, it meant the runes were calibrated in the amount of velocity you wanted to impart what you were targeting them at, not a global amount of energy you just wanted them to add to the object. She carefully made a note of that, in her ever increasing database about how magic worked and behaved.

*****

"Milady. The representatives from the Greymane caravan are here."

Allya smoothed her expression into polite, but neutral interest -which was 'default politician pokerface' for everyone but the orcs, who instead just looked irritated-, and gestured for Valker to bring the representatives in.

Valker nodded, and retreated out of her office, before coming back a handful of seconds later with two persons, a man and a woman, who both looked pissed, stressed out, and would be hiding it decently well if Allya hadn't been trained to read people much better at this than they were.

"Representative Sorkas, and Elui, is that correct?" She said.

"Yes, milady." Said the man as he bowed down after a split second. Clearly he had been expecting to have to present himself and his colleague, and was already struggling to retake control of a conversation he'd probably practiced. "That is us. Ahem. We were coming in regards of your guards, or rather, lack thereof."

Allya rose her eyebrow politely, and the merchant flushed as she waited for him to continue. Clearly he'd expected her to raise to the bait.

"It seems that your guards have completely deserted our encampment, and left us defenceless against wasteland monster attacks."

He paused again, and once more Allya simply looked at him. He exchanged a look with his ally, confused. Clearly, news of her...temper must have made its way to them -what with the exiling of the adventurers-, probably grossly exagerated. They clearly had expected her to start yelling at the thinly veiled accusation, spitting fire and brimstone. Instead they got a very polite -and eerily silent- stare.

"W-We would like you to send troops to help us defend our encampment. Or at least have one of your ship help us when we are attacked."

"No."

Sorkas blinked.

"No?"

"No."

"Milady, I-" Said the merchant as he started leaning over her desk, clearly trying to use his height to tower over her...before his sentence ended in a surprised yelp as Valker simply grabbed him by the shoulder and slammed him back into his seat. He turned around to look at the bodyguard, surprised outrage clear on his face, before freezing as he encountered the sergeant's icy glare.

Sorkas swallowed, before turning back towards Allya.

"My apologies milady, I...lost control of myself for a second there."

"That's quite alright representative Sorkas. You were saying?" Asked Allya in an icy tone.

The merchant swallowed again.

"Milady, I...I implore you, we cannot hold them off on our own. Their numbers are increasing by the day, and if this continues on...we will be forced to leave."

Allya finally started to animate as the merchant put his caravan's main card -their only card really- on the table. She leaned forward, and set her elbows on the table and joined her hands. She was copying Elkaryos' stance, and she knew it, but, hey, there were worse people to imitate in those situations.

"Ah, I see. So, you are saying that without military assistance, you would have to leave before your trading ventures with my dungeon town are completed, correct?"

A shadow passed in his eyes when she emphasized the term 'dungeon', but he nodded.

"Yes, milady. That is the simple truth."

Allya had to stop herself from smiling as she heard the edge in his voice. Clearly something about the preparations Anders had been making had to have leaked out. The other members of the council had come to her in a panic in the last few days, concerned about 'strange rumors pertaining to troop movements'. Ellyana was the only one to actually just walk into her office and ask her straight up what the fuck she was doing with her soldiers. She liked that girl. For an alchemist she really had a hard time understanding the concept of subtelty or carefulness. Then again she had been the one hauling around cases of highly explosive chemicals in an airship to a newly created dungeon town.

"And I understand that, representative Sorkas. But it is the simple truth that I cannot afford to guard your encampment. You are simple too far away, and my soldiers too few, to make that feasible. As for the ships, they are not under my command, but under that of Rapier Enterprise's expedition leadership. And as far as I am aware, they are extremely busy defending the mesas from incursions as well."

A good part of what she'd just said was subtle exagerations, but to be fair not by much -not anymore-. The caravan parked outside the defensible mesas -and the ruins- had acted like a giant splash of blood in the water, and more and more wasteland monsters had begun showing up. And some of them had decided to attack the town itself. While it wasn't even remotely as grave as she was making it out to be, the lookouts in the outer mesas were no longer bored to death staring at an empty desert all day. Now they had mind-numbing terror that they might get eaten if they lapsed in their vigil to add to the menu. Eh. Add to the menu.

The representative eyed her intensely, and Allya snapped back out of her thoughts, returning his gaze steadily, but with just a touch of iciness to make him understand she hadn't forgiven his intimidation attempt earlier.

A few seconds passed, and Sorkas sighed.

"I...see milady. Very well, I will discuss the matter with my fellow caravan leaders."

"Of course. Have a good return trip, representative Sorkas."

"Thank you." Recognizing their leave, both representatives got up, bowed, and left.

Allya waited for a few seconds, and looked at Valker, raising an eyebrow.

"The woman didn't say a single word." Simply said the bodyguard.

Allya chuckled.

"Yeah, I realized. Don't play shy, you know as well as I do why she didn't."

Valker hesitated, clearly considering asking her why she was asking him to begin with then, before deciding that he probably wouldn't get an answer.

"She's someone higher in the hierarchy than they wanted us to think. That or she's a scribe, trained to memorize information quickly. She was probably here to tell the actual caravan's leadership, not their 'council of leaders' that barely owns 15% of it, what went down in the meeting."

"Yep. Although I'd bet more on the scribe myself. In any case, next time we probably won't get just these two. I have a feeling that this caravan just can't afford to leave without showing something valuable for their detour, and that would take longer than the attacks would give them. So it'll come down to what they are more scared of, potentially having their cargo searched and reported to the Kingdom, or their employers for doing some costly detour and getting themselves noticed like this without something to show for it."

"That's a bit..."

"Perverse? Yeah. But if they come back with a big enough pile of money, or loot in this case, their employers won't care. If they don't...Well, things probably won't be pretty, if my guess about them being smugglers is correct."

Once more, Valker wondered just why his lady could be so cold blooded about some things...or how she knew so much about the bloodier parts of the criminal underworld, and firmly suppressed the thought. It wasn't his place, and besides he was pretty sure he wouldn't like the answer.

*****

"You know I'm surprised none of them has tried to catapult themselves in or something yet."

Emilia chuckled, before grabbing a chip and popping it into her mouth. The snack tray had gotten bigger over time in the command center, as they felled more and more adventurers, but the chips were still her favourite. Along with the chocolate cake of course, but she wasn't feeling like getting more sugar right now.

"Well, you could argue that the elevator must have...emphasized how trying to break your mechanisms and go places they weren't supposed to wouldn't end well for them."

Alexandra nodded. It was true that after the rather...explosive demonstration of her security measures, no one had tried to force their way into the elevator corridor again. She was sure the exile of the adventurers had something to do with it as well of course, but deeper into her depths having an entire squad of guards rush you, and almost cause a riot wouldn't be that much of an issue.

Right now they were watching a group of adventurers, copper ranked ones, trying to figure out how to get the drawbridge down. They had obviously seen the keypad, and were now loudly arguing over it, while sneaking uneasy glances at the water from time to time. They'd decided against trying to take out the spider golems, and Alexandra had set the keypad far enough away as to be outside of their combat area. But they could still see ripples and agitation whenever the spider golems randomly moved to reposition. Actually, that was bullshit, they all had a preassigned area to be in, she was just shifting them around to fuck with the adventurers, while coding an algorithm to actually make them reposition randomly. It was just too funny watching the adventurers twitch each time. Kind of like the face they made the first time they saw the big 'NO SWIMMING' sign she'd put next to the treasure chest.

"Hey, should I just pop out one spider golem and see how they react?"

Emilia almost choked on her glass of orange juice, before bringing it down and swallowing hastily.

"Alex! Don't be mean! That wouldn't be nice. Besides, we need to stick to predictable stuff in those kind of areas, otherwise adventurers won't try the area near the water, and won't accidentally get agroed when trying to avoid a betty or something."

"Uh...Fair enough." Said Alexandra. At first she'd thought Emilia had been about to lecture her about not being nice to the adventurers, but as always the vampire girl had her eyes on the goal of getting her dungeon to grow. "What about blowing up every betty within a hundred meters then?"

She'd timed it perfectly, and this time the vampire girl did spit out her orange juice. And reached for her books. This time however, Alexandra couldn't dodge fast enough.

A few minutes, some cleaning spells and excuses later, Alexandra sat back on her seat in the command center, and looked as the adventurers started moving back to explore the ruins. Apparently their ranger -an orc, which was...odd to say the least. Also she looked ripped as hell- had managed to convince the rest of the party she had indeed seen a symbol like the one on the keypad, with the rogue's help.

It took them a good hour -fortunately the next few teams were iron and steel ranked respectively, and never made it to the 2nd floor-, but they finally found the particular ruins with all of the keypad symbols, and after assembling all of them (Alexandra had put a helpful number so they knew in what order to put in the symbols, but she'd counted up from zero in an old programmer reflex, and kept it to see if some would make the mistake), they made their way back to the keypads.

They typed in all the numbers, including the one marked with zero, and waited. For a second, nothing happened, then a loud grinding noise filled the floor, and the drawbridge started to lower. They took battle positions, and waited. Finally, after a few very loud seconds, the drawbridge settled down. And once again, they waited. Once sure that an army of golems wasn't going to come stampeding out of the water temple, they relaxed, and walked onto the drawbridge.

Where they suddenly realized that they hadn't seen the spider golems move in a while...and had completely forgotten about them.

They fared surprisingly well actually, their leader -an elven mage that looked like a younger, elfier gandalf- immediately ordering them to push forward instead of falling back, and they immediately took a combat formation, before pushing through the onslaught of spider golems. And suddenly, they were in.

They almost collapsed in shock as the spider golems relented, and the few that had pursued them immediately turned around, and jumped back into the water, their instructions very clear on the fact that entering the water temple was forbidden.

The adventurers stared at the drawbridge for a few seconds, before turning around, almost as one, towards the other end of the room they were in.

Currently, they were in a large, mostly unaddorned hall -which Emilia was very much intent on having very much addorned and decorated before long-, with, well...nothing really. Two large balconies were overlooking them on either side of the room, but it was about it. Except, of course, for the squad of Palatial Guard Mk3s at the end, waiting like statues.

For a few seconds the adventurers just stared, before the rogue offered the opinion that this might be like the entrance hall to the first floor, where the golem doesn't attack you until you cross a certain threshold. That seemed to convince some of his fellows, and the big 'Safe Zone' emblazoned into the floor convinced the rest, once they actually looked at what was under their feet.

They took the opportunity to rest for a bit, but it was more a reflex than anything else. They'd rested before using the keypad, so they didn't truly need it. After a few minutes of catching their breaths, they formed back up, and marched on the golems.

Apparently, they seemed to have recognized them as similar to the golems that guarded the 'old boss', and the mage started up the incantation of an area of effect lighting spell. They formed up, and the golems began marching on them as the spell crossed their threat threshold. Then, the mage released his spell, and the golems froze.

They relaxed for a split second, before the golems resumed their march. It was clear the ligthning had at least done something to some of them -a few, the closest ones to the epicenter, were moving jerkily-, and they had been stunned for a split second, but the insulation had clearly worked. The adventurers prepared in a hurry as the golems began to charge in earnest, clearly not having believed that the automata would survive the attack...and their fighter almost dropped as half a dozen javelins impacted him.

Alexandra cursed softly, and made a note to adjust the targeting software on the golems, they were supposed to attack casters and ranged hostiles if possible, when no marksmen were available to back them up.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Then the fight began. The ranger, clearly shaken out of her almost stupor, started firing arrow after arrow into the golems, while the rogue rolled, ducked and weaved, his daggers sneaking into every joint and crack he could get to. The fighter simply shield bashed the golems aside, trying to keep the attention of as many of them on him as he could, as the elven mage, clearly pissed off, started casting...something. Unfortunately, Alexandra never got to see what the 'something' was, because the mage's companions managed to take out the golems before he finished. Must have been a pretty powerful spell then.

They gathered up healed, and cautiously started moving forward again, before stopping as a long grinding noise echoed throughout the temple, and the drawbridge lifted, closing the way out. They looked at each other, and the mage shrugged. They had spotted the button by the door, with 'Lower' painted on it, so they weren't that worried. And raising the drawbridge behind them made sense, to avoid just having the water temple opened for the day.

A few minutes later, the adventurers finally entered the next room, and Alexandra leaned forward in her seat in anticipation. Normally Alexandra wouldn't have put the Palace Guard Mk3s piecemeal like that in the entrance hall, they weren't made to operate without the other golems of course, but she had wanted to leave some bait up, so people would feel like they were just some upgraded legionnaires, nothing more.

The party advanced through the room, slowly approaching the advancing group of Palace Guard Mk3s, 9 this time, before counter-charging as the golems began to charge themselves.

And right at that moment, the 3 Palace Marksmen stationed on the balcony behind them sent their spellcaster and ranger down. The ranger was very much dead -clean headshot-, but the elven mage was made of sterner stuff, and despite taking two bolts to the chest, managed to whirl around, point his staff, and fire a blinding ray of light from its tip.

Alexandra whistled softly as the power beam cut all three golems in half. No runes had lit up, so it had to be some form of enchantment. She made a slight note not to absorb the item, and physically bring it to the workshop for study.

Then the Palace Guards reached them. They might have made it. But they were too widely deployed for the fighter's shield to stop all the javelins, and he went down, gravely wounded. The rogue and the mage fought valiantly, but the staff appeared to be spent, or reloading, and they were overwhelmed.

"Well...New TPK it looks like." Alexandra smiled, looking at Emilia. "Let's go take a look at what we just gained."