Chapter 160

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, First Floor

Allya leapt back, before throwing a kunai, nailing the golem right in the center of its forehead, where the processors were, for some ungodly reason.

The automata shivered, and then fell, like a puppet with its strings cut. Which was a rather appropriate metaphor in this case.

She looked around, and saw that the last few golems were also collapsing.

"Well, this is a nice workout." She said as she recovered her kunai.

"Yeah. A bit too easy though." Said Dominique as she kicked one of the fallen automata. The mage hadn't even moved from her spot during the fight, she'd simply stood her ground and snapped her fingers, unleashing blades of winds that had shredded anything even coming close to her. Allya was kind of jealous, the guild representative had become immensely more skilled and powerful while she'd been busy trying to run that lash up of a town, not to mention defending it from apparently everyone on the damned continent! "I still say we should have accepted Crystal's offer to skip the first part of the dungeon. This is iron level, it's pathetic."

"We needed to make sure we could work together. Think of this as a shake-down cruise. Besides." Allya knelt by the golem, and used her phase daggers to quickly open it like a glorified tin can, extracting the electronics in a few quick gestures. "It gets us more loot."

"Right, and it has nothing to do with you and your girlfriend being so rusty you squeak?"

That got the other members of the group to freeze and listen intently. Pyn was smiling, but Allya could feel the tension in Raika and Alyssa.

"Well, I could mention that saying that to the face of one's baroness was a quick way to a pillory…"

Everyone laughed, and Allya could feel the tension oozing out of the two adventurers. Well, technically they were all adventurers, but that wasn't what anyone would use to describe Pyn, Dominique or her.

"Fair enough my lady." Said Dominique while giving her an elaborate courtly bow. "Will you forgive my faux pas?"

"Of course! Now, more seriously, shall we gather the materials and move on?"

"Sounds like a plan. Come on ladies, get your knives out! And no using a blade of fire Alyssa, we're here to extract the electronics, not melt them!"

Everyone nodded, with a few choice words under her breath in Alyssa's case, and Allya smiled. She'd missed this, the thrill of combat, the camaraderie…

Her smile vanished like it had never existed as she moved, and felt the heavy weight of the scanners in her pockets, reminding her of why she was truly here, and the risks if the extradimensional turned dungeon core found out about her little stunt.

*****

"Well, they look like they're having fun." Commented Alexandra as she gazed at the screen showing the party, sitting in her chair in the command center, before tilting her head to give her girlfriend better access as she nibbled on her neck.

"Agreed." Let out Emilia between two nibbles, practically draped on the Earth-born's lap.

Alexandra chuckled, before raising an eyebrow as Sarah stepped into the command center. The maid had Seraph's golem in tow, the two seemingly having developed something of a friendship in their little stunt running the workshop during Alexandra and Emilia's honey moon.

"Yes?" She called out, her gaze daring the maid to even chuckle at what Emilia was currently doing.

"My lady, the, ah, 'special' for the guests is ready."

"Good. I'll love to see their reaction to that." Said Alexandra with a wide grin.

"You're evil honey." Said Emilia.

"What? It won't harm them, it's just loot!" Said the Earth-born, innocently.

"You enjoy making that baroness freak out, admit it."

"Well…" Alexandra looked away.

"See? Evil."

"Hey! It could have been worse. I could have used the new grenade launchers."

Emilia grimaced, and Alexandra chuckled. Thanks to her host of new materials and technologies she'd been able to build a genuine grenade launcher, not the abomination that were her 'RPGs'. They were tripod mounted beasts, with little range and even less accuracy…but they were fully automatic, box fed monsters that could put twenty grenades downrange every minute in a sustained engagement, and thirty if you were going full rapid fire and were willing to risk a catastrophic overheat. With a variety of ammunition options, from magical fire -whose ancestry could be drawn directly to her betty mines- to shrapnel, passing by armor piercing and unwinder rounds, it was a weapon to be feared.

And her newest praetorian guards could use them as regular weaponry. At this point they were effectively powered armor infantry in terms of combat power and capabilities, only missing their own energy source. Well, at least for her standards. The UIS might have been content to use recharge vehicles for their heavy infantry, she wasn't. After all she had called in her fair share of orbital strikes on those vehicles, obliterating entire platoons in the process, during the Alpha Centauri Campaign.

But her other self was working on that power supply issue.

"True, I suppose. I think she'd have fainted if she'd gotten that!"

"Probably, yeah."

They watched the party finish looting the golems, and preparing to move out, Sarah and Seraph joining them in taking seats, before Alexandra spoke up again.

"So, I was meaning to ask…why didn't they heal her arm?"

"That would require a lot of powerful spells, plus a very good mage, preferably a specialized healer. It would be simpler to get a cybernetic in many ways, but that requires a lot of medical treatment as well."

"...What? Honey, I've resurrected people we almost reduced to smoldering ashes. How in all the hells is an arm tougher than that?"

"Healing spells are limited in time, honey. They cannot heal old injuries. Same for resurrection spells. Think about it, otherwise anyone with cybernetic implants would suffer a horrific fate when subjected to even simple healing spells. Potions have the same effect."

"That sounds…wrong. Artificial."

"Because it is, lady Alexandra. It is an integrated failsafe into divine-made healing systems outside of specialized protocols." Said Seraph.

Everyone turned to face the golem the AI was controlling.

"A…what?"

"A failsafe."

"Even…how the hell would that apply to potions?"

Seraph's head tilted.

"Why would it not? The Gods designed how they would affect people."

Having the AI say 'Gods' instead of 'false Gods' had been a considerable undertaking, but once she'd hammered into the AI the need to keep all this 'burn the divines' under the hood, they'd taken to it with surprising ease. The advantage of being able to remove all tone from your speech, making it as flat as possible, and thus gaining a poker voice, so to speak. And one hell of a poker face, what with the golem having just a slab of metal as one, although the AI's humor could often be guessed by the way the golems behaved and moved.

But that was hardly the issue at hand, as Alexandra internally shook herself, feeling a pang of amusement from her other self, who was clearly monitoring the conversation.

"But…how? I mean, you'd have to have designed every possible ingredient, and there's evolution…"

"No, they simply designed their magic effects."

"The magic…" Alexandra froze. "You're implying that the Gods made alchemical properties?"

"My lady…the Gods made it all. Magic itself is not a native feature of Alcheryos. It is not even a natural phenomenon to begin with."

Alexandra looked at the AI, horror slowly dawning on her.

"The Gods made magic. And brought it with them to Alcheryos."

*****

Alexandra stared at the screen in the now empty -and sealed- command center, processing what she had been told.

It…made sense. And fit into everything she'd seen. And had even more horrifying implications.

Because life couldn't survive without mana…mana that only the Gods knew how to create, how to provide.

"We need to check for failsafes." She called out to her other self, whose mental hologram flickered on, as if summoned from the depths. "Inside us. A killswitch of some kind."

"Agreed. I'd have already put one inside the dungeons if I had been the God of Fire. But now? If they created mana, if they created magic…"

"A tool of control, and if all else fail…they could just kill off all the dungeon cores with the push of a button, send the planet back to the stone age in an instant."

"There would still be mana oasis, NLR cores and the pillars of power."

"Yeah, and according to Emilia, less than fifteen percent of the planet's population lives near them. And do you want to bet that the people with literal teleporters wouldn't have the ability to set up some demolition charges for the pillars at the very least?"

"Yeah…This planet just keeps getting more and more fucked up."

"And that 'Great Night' weirder and weirder. One side clearly wanted to get rid of the Gods. So what was their solution to the mana issue afterwards? And if they had one…could we take it for ourselves?"

The apparition nodded, and Alexandra looked to the side at the paper list. Back when she'd recruited Seraph, one of the first things she'd done had been to get as much information out of the AI as she could. And not just schematics.

Facility locations, communication protocols, everything they could get out of the AI's damaged memory banks.

Most of that information was unreliable at best of course. Because of the damage, of course, but also because the Sagitarius Empire had clearly not trusted their AIs in the slightest, as evidenced in Seraph's limitations and constrained tactical databanks. So everything they had gotten out of her could be corrupted data, and even outright lies, hence why she was so reluctant to use it.

But if another mana source, one out of the Gods' hands was the prize…

Well, even a shot in the dark sometimes hit.

"I'll begin working on some expeditionary designs." Said her other self, almost litterally reading Alexandra's thoughts. "But no promises. Even if we do find the fusion reactors, there's no telling if I'll be able to get them back online, let alone mobile. And even then, well…most of our stuff is magitech, even with the dissected combat units."

Alexandra nodded. They had acquired everything necessary to make 'mundane' robots from Seraph's combat units, which had been made to work even without mana.

"It's a long term projects. Fold any prototypes into the army. We can field test them when we come after the Republic, label them as long range recon or raiding. Shit, we might actually produce them for that at first, if they do the job well enough!"

"Roger that. Afraid of someone being a bit too curious?"

"The maids aren't idiots, they figured out we were doing an offensive buildup after all. And now that they and Emilia know I'm willing to skirt around them, they'll be watching for more stuff like that. So we'll have to be extra careful. Thankfully, any raiding units we send to the Republic will have to cross the wastelands first, so it'll help."

"Similar design parameters make it easier to hide things-" Began the apparition.

"-just like the Dawnstars!" They finished in chorus, before chuckling. The Dawnstars had been the worst surprise the UIS had ever had, and that was because the entire project had been camouflaged behind a dozen other R&D initiatives for various fleet upgrades. The most challenging one had been the hull, which they had managed to masquerade as a mobile shipyard project.

Alexandra shook her head, feeling an echo of her concerns about interacting with what was, essentially, another version of herself. How had Arcadia -Arcadia named the phenomenon again? Ah, yes, 'narcissistic feedback loop', like someone surrounding themselves with yes men, but turbocharged. And that was without counting on the more esoteric problems her other self seemed to be persuaded were made up.

"Well, I suppose we'll worry about it when we get there. In the mean time, any progress on the other fronts?"

"Material acquisition is still something I'm working on. It is a lot harder than it looks, honestly. The teleporters however…I'm still stumped on the teleport redirect, there was a reason even Arcadia was breaking her teeth on that one, even if we can lock onto the teleport, but I did manage to make some headway onto our own 'unstoppable' teleport spell."

"That's excellent news!" It would make for a fantastic weapon. Why bother with missiles and bunker busters when you could just teleport the bombs inside the enemy's strongholds?

"Well…" Her other self sighed. "There are caveats. First and foremost, while the entry point can be damned near anywhere -their methods for generating entry points is bullshit, ignoring gravity like that-, the exit point will have to be anchored in your dungeon influence. I'm not going to go into the math as to why, but it allows it to be vastly more stable, and quite frankly cheap enough to be workable. Still any of those teleports will take a ton of mana, and while the compiler says they'll work, I haven't done a true test yet."

"I'll make you some testing areas and devices for it."

"Thank you."

"Don't mention it. This is excellent work. It might not serve as a weapon, but this would be a tremendous trump card for an escape. Being able to teleport Emilia or the maids out of harm's way without any chance of intercept is huge."

"Among other persons. As I said, the entry point can be anywhere on the planet."

"Why? Don't teleport have a variable cost based on distance?"

"No? Why would they? The amount spent in hyperspace is negligible. As long as you're not trying to teleport to the moon, or another world, any amount of energy to sustain yourself in hyperspace is a rounding error. Doesn't matter where you go on Alcheryos, cost will more or less be the same."

"That's…interesting." And explained why teleporters, which did have commercial uses according to Emilia, were pretty far apart. If the cost wasn't proportional to the distance, but just a huge up front one… "So you're suggesting I distribute them to other people?"

"Absolutely. The baroness, for example. Preserving her and her council would help keep some legitimacy on the world stage should the worse happen. 'No, this isn't a dungeon war, it's me helping my ally!' and all that."

"Right. And you said that the teleport becomes cheaper if we anchor some part of it in my influence?"

The apparition nodded.

"Exit or entrance. Both can be combined, hence why in-dungeon teleports are insanely cheap. But having the exit point in your influence enables greater stability. Not quite sure what extra benefits there might be to having only the entry point in it however."

"Mmmhhh…I'll have to think on that."

"Thinking on building something of a teleporter arsenal?"

"Yes. And when we finally get a secondary core, it could be an excellent way to get reinforcements across vast distances."

"If it works at all."

"If it works at all." Repeated Alexandra in acknowledgments, before shaking her head. "Well, this has been eventful."

"And it promises to be even more, once the delve resumes." The pretext Alexandra had used to get alone was that she needed some time to thing, and the party was taking a bit of a rest before heading to the first floor boss. Emilia definitely looked a bit uneasy, and so did the maids, but she was sure she could reassure them. Although she was definitely going to have some very pointed questions.

Because unless she was seriously mistaken, the vampires had known that magic was artificial. And never told her.

"Indeed. Well, in that case, I'll go back to the salt mines."

"And I will start shaking some vampire trees for information."

They exchanged nods, and the apparition vanished. Alexandra took a deep breath, before lifting the lockdown, and calling out to one of her guards.

"Could you ask Emilia and the maids to join me please? I have some…enquiries for them."