Chapter 82

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, Entrance.

"Thank you, Gift, I deeply appreciate the help." Said Alexandra as she looked at the giant in golden armor. There was something maddeningly familiar about the dungeon avatar's armor, but she couldn't quite place it, and she internally shrugged and shelved it for later.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED.

"Think nothing of it. You are, after all, a fellow dungeon core."

Alexandra chuckled, and shook her head as she gazed at the town. Normally she'd have been absolutely terrified of standing here in her avatar, but thankfully Gift had set up a 'privacy field', a forcefield that was only see through one way, so that no one could spy on them, and, well…he'd been the one to dig out her panic room, so there hardly was any point to hiding her avatar from him. He had also been remarkably tactful when trying to raise the question as to where, exactly, she'd acquired it, and backed off after she'd deflected every inquiry.

It was weird, to say the least. The town was wrecked, as in, truly wrecked. The attack from the mercenaries had been so vicious the defensive line had broken, and the battle had devolved into vicious, urban close quarters fighting, which coupled with spells and artillery hadn't been very kind to the buildings they'd been fighting around, or sometimes in.

The airship that had crashed in the middle of it hadn't helped either. The Alberta had gone down while trying to cover the retreat of the defensive line, attempting to give them time to regroup and reorganize, and gotten shot down in the process. In the end the defensive line had reformed on top of the fallen cruiser, and the defenders had more or less made their last stand there. Which was where Gift had found them, and dropped something around a battalion of monsters on top of them.

That ship probably wouldn't get back into the air, well, ever. Apart from crashing from the sky, it had also been pounded by an entire artillery battery for the better part of half an hour, plus various spells and even been breached by satchel charges brought in by some of the mercenaries' engineers. Still, it was impressive that despite all that it wasn't just a pile of shattered planks, and she'd taken careful notes of how the careful enchantments and runes applied to its entire hull had made it more resilient than a 19th century ironclad dreadnought, without even counting its wards! This was the kind of stuff she'd need if -when- she built her own fleet.

Speaking of fleet…

She looked up in awe at the vessels floating above them. Gift had said that he was there to formally greet her in the name of the UDC but she wasn't sure she believed him. You didn't send a dreadnought, half a dozen battleship and the better part of a hundred warships all told to 'greet' someone. Not that she was about to complain, the dreadnought alone had gotten the mercenaries to surrender en masse -although over a quarter of their number had simply disappeared into the wasteland-, but when the rest of the fleet had arrived she saw some of the merc prisoners literally shit themselves. That was notably due to the fact that at the time, Gift basically held them responsible by default for what had happened to her, and simply explained to them that if no one came forward to explain this whole mess, he'd leave with them…or more accurately, their heads. Allya and the Asarian Kingdom would keep the rest of their bodies.

It had helped a lot with getting what had happened straight. And in Alexandra's mind there was little doubt that the two strike teams that had attempted to kidnap her were from the Republic. The timing, their objectives (especially for the first strike team, who really wouldn't have cared about attacking the town otherwise), all of it pointed to a single culprit. And Gift very much agreed, and relayed it to the UDC.

"So, what did the Council decide?" Said Alexandra with a relaxed, almost casual tone, although she was feeling like neither of those, far from that.

"They are still deliberating, but…." Gift frowned. "It doesn't look good."

"What? I got attacked! Twice! Almost kidnapped -or hell, killed for all we know!- both times! And we've got enough evidence and testimonies at this point to fill a fucking cart with! What more proof do they want? An order signed with the blood of the Republic's president? The entirety of the Senate testifying?"

She could almost physically feel the dungeon avatar's wince.

"To be fair to them, all of it is circumstancial evidence."

"Circumstancial my ass." Muttered Alexandra, before sighing and pinching the bridge of her nose. Gift declined to acknowledge her outburst, but he clearly was in silent agreement regardless.

The problem was that the UDC had a specific provision for military intervention, put in place after a series of, to be fair, probably avoidable and extremely devastating -not to mention costly- wars. It needed either a two-third majority of the dungeon council agreeing to a military intervention, or a dungeon core being destroyed for said intervention to be launched. And currently, it looked like they weren't going to get it.

Alexandra silently cursed politicians, and whatever scumbags were deciding to keep their hands clear of this -after all, it wasn't like her kidnappers had succeeded right? No need for alarm then!-, ignoring the fact that if it had happened twice, it sure as hell would happen a third time.

Well, this time she'd be ready. Emilia was too stunned after this whole mess to have truly processed what had happened, but this time she'd either agree to her self defense spending or Alexandra was going to politely tell her that her opinion was nice but irrelevant. The vampire girl wouldn't like it but there was no way Alexandra was going to have to watch her advisor almost die like this again!

Not that she didn't expect the discussion about her…failsafe to be a bit painful. She could always point out that it had saved their asses, but Emilia was going to seriously wonder how the hell she'd put enough resources aside to collapse the entire dungeon in the first place, once she'd recovered her wits. Which might take a while, as right now the vampire girl was busy watching over her slowly regenerating maids.

The sheer resilience of them had absolutely amazed Alexandra. They'd been torn to pieces -she'd SEEN them be ripped apart with her own fucking eyes!-, but they were still kicking. Apparently whatever modifications the Western Marches gave to their soldiers on top of the already legendary abilities of regular vampires made them basically unkillable by anything short of disintegration. Unfortunately those abilities were also ones that were sensitive to the 'neutralizers' the core thieves had used to take out the vampires, and without Jared's help they would have simply died, even without several million tons of rock coming down on top of them. Even then, while those abilities had kept them alive, they were still hurt as hell, and had basically been reduced to a handful of implants and, well goo. Alexandra had pulled all the stops and personally cast the single most powerful resurrection spell in Emilia's book -well, that she could handle anyway-, and still they were basically weak as kittens and barely able to move.

"Well, regardless of the council's decision, you have a great deal of rebuilding to do I'm afraid." Said Gift as he looked at the half collapsed entrance behind them. Miraculously the entrance hall was still intact…sort of. The hall of heroes had been consumed by the collapse, and ended abruptly in a wall of rubble, but other than that, some major cracks and a few collapsed pillars, the entrance was fairly intact. "I'm afraid that your dungeon won't be up and running for a while."

Now that was a massive understatement. It wasn't just the 'normal' dungeon parts she'd have rebuild, all of her industrial installations, warehouses, ect, had been obliterated as well! In fact, the only golems she had left were some guards left at the entrance. And the handful of newly created praetorian guards she had watching over Emilia like hawks, with CQ in tow.

"I do. And I'll live. If nothing else, at least the guild leader and the baroness understand. I will, however, try to have a small section up and running ASAP, if only so that adventurers have something to do, and bring in at least some mana."

"That is probably for the best." Gift looked at the sky, and blinked. "And I am afraid that my attention is needed elsewhere, I will send my avatar back to my flagship. It has been a pleasure talking with you, Crystal."

"The pleasure was all mine Gift. You did save my ass after all."

Gift chuckled and shook his head, before his expression went blank, and his body turned around like an automaton, and went to board the nearby flying sloop that served as his ship's shuttle.

Alexandra moved her avatar back into the entrance, and sighed as she pulled up her newly made 'Emergency to-do list', containing everything she needed to rebuild. This was going to be a long, very long day. And probably an even longer week, if not month!

*****

"Well, this was an eventful week." Said Allya with biting irony as she took her seat.

No one around the table appeared to want to dispute her point. In fact everyone seemed to be in grim agreement.

"At least it could have been worse, much worse." Said Anders.

"How so?" Said Starvak, his mustache practically quivering with suppressed rage. "The dungeon was almost killed!"

"Well, we could have all died for starters. It hasn't escaped you that in the confusion our friendly mercenary invaders started attacking everyone indiscriminently, combatant or not?"

Starvak nodded, conceding the point. In the complete clusterfuck the fighting had devolved into towards the end even neutral adventurers had been attacked, and a great deal many of their comrades had simply jumped into the fray to defend their brothers and sisters in arms. Part of the reason why Allya's forces hadn't been overrun was that this surge of adventurers entering the battle had titled the odds back towards them.

"Point taken, commander. Apologies if I seemed…dismissive of the losses. Believe me, I wasn't."

Allya nodded grimly as she heard the tiredness in that last statement. Almost half a thousand people laid dead at the end of the battle, and five times as many wounded. And of the dead, only a hundred or so were brought back. Part of that was the ferocity of the battle, but…much of it had to do with how overworked, and sometimes wounded, most of their healers had been. And Crystal hadn't been able to help either, as her insurance policy, and the artifact that had enabled her to resurrect adventurers, had been annihilated alongside her dungeon.

"At least we have gotten confirmation that Asaria is sending further reinforcements." Said Philia. The knight commander looked like she was a corpse somehow walking, and in fact she was. She'd somehow managed to stay up despite her numerous wounds until the very end of the fight, where she'd collapsed on the spot and died of her injuries before anyone could stabilize her. She'd been one of the first to be resurrected, by Allya's direct orders. The knight-commander had protested afterwards, insisting that her men should have gone first, but the baroness had shut her down, hard. The knight-commander's men would have never performed this well without her, and regardless she needed her expertise far more badly than one more grunt if it turned out another attack was coming. "Three full knight companies, not counting the units already on their way. The King has also openly accused the Republic of attacking the Kingdom, and demanded reparations."

"Which the Republic promptly denied, I presume?" Said the baroness.

"Of course they did." Said Willard, before laughing as everyone looked at him. "Don’t get me wrong, they're guilty as hell, and everyone knows it, but the only reason they used mercenaries is to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability. That's been stripped away, what with the mercenaries stumbling all over themselves to confess once the UDC got involved and threatened to execute them all, but the Republic will maintain that the confessions were falsified, or gotten under some kind of duress, no matter what happens."

Allya nodded unhappily.

"You're probably right." Continued the ex-assassin. "No, in fact you're almost certainly right. Still, no one except those in the Republic are going to have any doubt, and that helps us in more ways than one. Has the Hegemony responded to my message Melia?"

The merchant nodded. She too was wounded, albeit far more lightly than those around her. During the chaos some mercenaries had attacked her office, and quickly realized that assaulting a member of the merchants guild was a very bad idea. Her 'secretary' had decorated the walls with her attacker's entrails, and spirited her to a quieter side of town with what was almost certainly military efficiency.

"They have. They understood the delay in your response." They had, after all, gotten the preliminary offer for having an Hegemony delegation go to Rebirth weeks ago now. "And have agreed to pack a…large representative sample of military hardware that you might be interested in for the future defense of your lands in the face of Elkisian aggression. They have also noted that due to the region's instability and the risk of further attacks they would also send several airborne warships to escort the delegation."

"That's good." Allya smiled, the Tark airfleet was effectively the third most powerful airborne navy in the world, although most of that was thanks to their technological prowess rather than sheer numbers of hulls. "In fact that's very good! Did they precise the ships they intended to send?"

"No, but they did mention that the flagship would almost certainly be a cruiser of some sort."

Allya nodded. It made sense, cruisers were about the best ship classes for these kind of errands, and they packed enough of a punch to make most wasteland creatures think twice before attacking them, not to mention make the Republic think twice before assaulting such a large Tarkian warship, which was far from unwelcome.

"Good. Now, regarding our forces?"

Anders leaned forward.

"Right now we are, to put it simply, not combat effective. If another merc -or Republic- company shows up we are completely and utterly screwed. We have less than a hundred people that can actually bear arms and armor without collapsing in a few minutes, and I doubt many of them would survive long in active combat. Most of our forces, those that are still alive that is, are wounded and recovering. And given the number we have, even with miss Ellyana's help." He nodded in thanks at Eismi, who nodded back. Her twin was currently busy brewing as many health potions as she possibly could to supplement the failing healers. "It'll be weeks, at least, before our full force is back up and running."

"Right. The Royal reinforcements on route should compensate at least some of that. But they might get recalled elsewhere, and quite frankly even with them here I'm not comfortable that the Republic won't just attack again while we're still down." Allya turned towards Melia again. "How are we doing on the level of funds?"

"Well, our treasury wasn't looted, so pretty well, although with the dungeon destroyed our revenue stream has pretty much abruptly stopped."

"Crystal will rebuild soon enough. I need you to set aside a fund to hire and keep on the payroll mercenaries." Allya's smile wasn't particularly pleasant. "Ironic that we have to resort to that after what just happened, but truth is we don't have much of a choice."

"Are you sure that's a good idea milady?" Said Anders. "Men acquired through Elkaryos, or even people recruited the old fashioned way would be vastly more loyal."

"Yes, and I have the full intention to ask Elkaryos -and their majesties for that matter- for more men, but until they are here I'd rather have the mercs to fill the gap. Plus, push comes to shove we can always end the contract if we run out of resources or we acquire enough forces through other means."

"I suppose that's true enough milady."

"Right." Allya sighed. "Anyone else has anything to bring to the table?"

Everyone shook their head. This was, after all, the third meeting they'd had in as many days.

"Alright then. Back to work everyone. Let's get this town back up and running!"