Chapter 78

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, 2nd Floor.

Aubriana shook her head as she stumbled, before regaining her footing. She wasn't exactly sure what was different with these kinds of mass teleport, but they always roughed her up, with the vague impression she'd been somewhere...alien. Where nothing living was meant to be.

"Alright, move it! 1st squad, lightning grenades! 2nd squad, bring down the bridge! 3rd and 4th, establish a perimeter!" She yelled out, before turning towards her lieutenant. "LT, status on the disruptor?"

The lieutenant looked up from the machine in front of him, and nodded.

"Went through the transfer perfectly. It's online and functional. We're clear."

Aubriana smiled. So far so good.

Her smile faltered slightly as she heard the first sounds of bows and crossbows firing, as well as swords meeting metal. A simple glance was enough to tell her that the spider golems in the moat had immediately began attacking her men, and the water looked like it was erupting as the automata flung themselves at her troops.

Then a volley of silver spheres curved over her men's head, and the moat erupted in energy as the lightning grenades triggered. Water flashed into vapor and golems trashed as arcing energy destroyed their internal systems.

Second squad hadn't waited for their comrades to clear the way for them, and already explosive crossbow bolts went flying straight into the gatehouse. The stone structure disintegrated into a hail of shards, and the drawbridge shook, before slowly and almost majestically falling down, it's chains utterly shattered. The mages stepped forward, incanting as their magic reached out to slow the bridge's fall, and prevent it from being damaged.

The impact still made the ground shake throughout most of the floor, and Aubriana gestured her soldiers forward.

Time to get themselves a dungeon core.

*****

Alexandra erupted into the command center to the sound of alarms, and swore viciously as she saw a panel covered in warning messages.

In one of her more paranoid moments, she'd decided to wire a series of basic sensors directly to the command center, just in case. Notably, every blastdoor and main chokepoint, which was essentially the entrance, the fortress at the elevator to the ruins below, the drawbridge, and the entrances to the logistics network and the core corridor.

And the drawbridge appeared to have been destroyed. At least the gatehouse sensor was no longer responding, and it didn't take a genius to realize it probably had been destroyed alongside the windlasses. In hindsight she probably should have boobytrapped the damned thing.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Alexandra dismissed the update with a flick of her attention, before moving to the central command panel, unceremoniously ripped off the metal cover over one of the buttons, and smashed it.

Jared could trigger virtually every alarm in the command center, but this one button she reserved for her use and her use only.

Throughout the 'private' areas of the dungeon, new alarms began blaring, and every blast door came down. Thanks to Jared, golems in key locations had also begun moving, gathering the ones strewn throughout the rooms and coalescing them into cohesive units and marching them back to the core room. They'd have to detour through the supply network to avoid the blast doors, but it was a minor inconvenience. They would sweep the entire dungeon from the beginning to end, and report in at each blastdoor they crossed. The reports they could give where extremely simplistic, but it was better than nothing.

Then she felt the ground shake, and swore as she recognized the sequential detonations of explosive charges, as well as the secondary tremors of collapsing rubble.

There was only one reason this kind of thing would happen. And that meant that the would-be core thieves had collapsed the water temple's entrance behind them.

"Alex, what's going on?" Asked Emilia as she managed to get into the room, a few seconds behind the Earth-born.

"They're in the water temple. And they probably just blew the entrance behind them."

"That's...we have the supply network, right? We can still get reinforcements?"

"Yes, but I'm ready to bet they'll seal off entrances as they go, which means we won't be able to get reinforcements behind them." The screen updated and Alexandra smiled ferociously. "Or they'll run into the mines guarding the entrances. That works too."

*****

When they'd received the survey data, the presence of the secret tunnel network had been fairly obvious. Given the dungeon's own experiences with the previous unit, it wasn't exactly hard to guess what the purposes of those tunnels were. Since they weren't particularly well hidden if you had mages and knew roughly where to look, it had only taken them a few seconds after finishing off the first room's defenders to find the entrance.

Her men had stepped in, charges at the ready to collapse the reinforcements tunnels...and flown back screaming as the passage erupted in flames.

Survey data was nice. Unfortunately those survey scanners hadn't been calibrated to scan for fucking minefields.

"Gods damn it! LT, check on them!" The lieutenant nodded, and moved towards the two soldiers laying on the ground, and Aubriana turned towards one of her squad leaders, a graying NCO. "Sergeant? Assessment?"

"Appears the tunnel entrances are mined ma'am." The NCO looked at the mouth of the passage, now filled with rubble and irradiating heat, but otherwise mostly intact. "Don't appear to be designed to be destroyed though. That or we didn't trigger all the mines." He gazed back at the captain. "I recommend we just toss the charges in next time. Even if the mines activate, the charges are heat sensitive and will explode. It should even help collapsing the entrances even."

"Good." Aubriana nodded, and went towards the wounded. They had managed to get through the first group of golems more or less unharmed -the benefit of just bouncing grenades down the bend and turning anything that came after them into a pincushion while the golems were still trying to fight fair-, and their medics had clustered immediately around the two soldiers that had detonated the mines. "Status?"

The lieutenant looked up.

"Nothing too bad. Minor fractures, a few burns, some heavy bruising, nothing a few potions won't fix. Their wards of protection took the brunt of the hit. They're pretty much fucked though, so there's no way they'll survive another hit like that."

"Rotate them to the back of the formation then. And start tossing the explosives from as far away as possible, we don't really need to set the charges precisely as long as we put enough of them."

"Aye aye ma'am."

"Alright, let's move out!"

Her soldiers nodded, and in less than a minute they were back in motion, the wounded soldiers already on their feet thanks to a handful of healing potions. They stopped at the entrance of the next room, the point man leaning forward, before freezing.

"Uh, ma'am?" He called out. "I think we have a problem."

"How so soldier?"

"The golems...they're not here."

*****

"CQ, good to see you!"

"Good to see you too mom!" CQ jumped forward and Alexandra caught her, almost stumbling back as her daughter hit her like a small car. "Is someone trying to steal you again? I can hardly feel you or mommy!"

Alexandra nodded. It seemed that unlike Emilia, the link she had to CQ and her emotions was reciprocal in some way.

"Unfortunately it seems to be the case. Did you bring your royal guard?"

"Everyone except the first room. They were already fighting."

Alexandra winced. Some losses were inevitable of course, but she'd hoped the golems in the temple would have all pulled out in time. She had a feeling she was going to need every edge she could get for this fight. Even the manticore puppy might count, although right now it was busy running rings around her and CQ.

"Alright, join the praetorian guard, and prepare for battle. If there's nothing to stop them, it won't be long until those bastards make their way here." Alexandra smiled. It was not, by any means, a nice smile. "Let's make sure this will be their final stop, hmmm?"

"Yes mom!" CQ gave Alexandra a mock salute, before leaving with the guards in tow.

Alexandra looked to the side at Emilia.

"I hope it won't come to this, but we might have to step in as well. And this time there's no way in hell I'm sending you in without my avatar, got it?"

The vampire girl nodded, knowing full well that protesting would be pointless, as her dungeon core had gone into full command mode. It was almost scary in a way, like the cheerful, if scarred woman she knew was starting to...fade, replaced by a borderline psychotic military officer.

"Of course. I've also contacted my mother while you were occupied."

"I doubt the Far Reach is going to be able to do much."

"Them? No. But they contacted the UDC."

Alexandra froze. She'd almost forgotten about the dungeon organization. But wasn't preventing this basically their job description?

"That...might be useful. Did they return anything?"

"No, just 'Stay put, we're on our way!'."

"Well, I certainly don't intend to move!" The room shook faintly as another tunnel entrance was destroyed by satchel charges, and Alexandra wince. "The only question I suppose, is if they'll make it there in time."

*****

Gift turned off the communication crystal, and looked at it for a second, thinking his option through, before shaking his avatar's head, a tick he had picked up from his advisor.

He could argue for safety, and playing it by the book, which he was sure a large part of the council would approve. Especially the ones who had been pushing for the UDC to take a more passive, some might say decadent, role in the world.

But he had been created by the God of Fire. Unlike most of his fellow dungeons he had been made by Divine hands, and met the deity so many worshiped blindly. He had seen how humanity had twisted and corrupted the dungeons' original purpose, and how far astray they had gone. And he had joined the UDC at its inception. When a single dungeon had rejected the shackles of humanity and called upon their fellows to stand up, he had answered.

Mental orders flared out, and his fleet split in half. Battleships and corvettes alike scrambled out of the way as every ship got as far away from his flagship, a dreadnought, as possible.

Then another series of orders were sent, and the back of the dreadnought started opening, revealing a gigantic nozzle.

Gift moved his avatar to the command panel on the bridge, and formally flipped off the plastic cover protecting the big, red button at the center of the console. He contemplated it for a second...and pressed it.

The ship rumbled. He felt his secondary core and his mana reserves strain as technology older than he was began activating. Fuel lines, long dormant, sprang back to life. Electromagnets began activating, creating walls of energy, and finally, lasers of incredible power spun up.

And fired.

In orbit, dozens of satellites, some left by the God of Fire, others shattered remnants of the world's once mighty empires, activated. Alerts were sent and alarms blared as they detected the immense energy spike.

In the bowels of the ship, gases were hit by the lasers. First their electrons came off, and everything within the containment fields was turned into plasma. Then the heat and pressure reached a breaking point...and deuterium met tritium. And both isotopes fused.

The fusion reactor roared to life, and the nozzle, a component salvaged from a long dead construct, activated. For the first time in centuries, a fusion engine activated on Alcheryos, and the dreadnought leapt forward on a pillar of plasma, followed by the rest of the fleet, albeit at a far more sedate pace.

Gift looked at the bridge as the wards of protection flared, holding off the increasing air resistance as the ship broke the sound barrier, and just kept accelerating, before turning around, and checking on his ship's weapon systems. He might not make it in time, but he'd be damned if he wouldn't at least avenge the dungeon he had been there to meet.