After half an hour of silence, Thralic reconfigured his rifle to shorten the barrel, and switched to an 8mm ammo with rapid fire bursts. He approached the closest set of bodies in the tunnel with his gun trained on them.

He lowered his gun when he got close enough to see them. The scale armor they wore was tough, but the bodies they protected were weak and fragile. Inspecting one of the bodies, he noted that the bullet hole through the armor was neat and clean, but the rest of the body inside the armor was a gory mess. The armor had partially done its job by dispersing the force and impact of the bullet, but there was just too much force behind the bullets. So instead of protecting them the armor had just increased the area of fatal damage.

He backed up a little ways and shot a three round burst into the dead body. And then got close to check the result. With direct hits the 8mm rounds penetrated the armor, but glancing shots could be stopped by the armor. They also wouldn’t penetrate multiple layers of armor.

He switched the rifle back to 12mm rounds, kept the shortened barrel, and went back to single shot. After inspecting the bodies he knew it was overkill, but their armor was just too good for the 8mm rounds. He would always prefer overkill to “barely kill”.

Continuing up the tunnel there were a few dozen dead and mangled kobold bodies before he found the first “survivor”. This kobold had likely been behind another one and received a pass through bullet. Bullet had hit the shoulder joint, nearly severing the limb. His medical was pretty straightforward: lots of blood loss, in shock, might live with treatment, left arm will likely need amputation.

Thralic spoke inside his helmet and his words were translated to a mental language for the kobold to understand: “You are dying, slowly. I can end your life quickly and painlessly, or I can try to treat your wounds. Choose.”

The kobold looked up at him, some of the confusion and shock on their face seemed to dissipate and was replaced with some level of awareness.

The kobold spoke in a quick language with lots of hissing sounds. It was similar enough to most kobold languages in the multiverse that his helmet was able to translate “My fate is yours [master/dragon]. You have spilled our [blood/essence] but have not shared any for us to [taste/smell]. You are [mighty/fertile]. This one would be your [servant/slave/wife].”

Thralic thought to himself. ‘Hmm, maybe not entirely kobold, sounds like there might be some crossover with the dragonborn. They might be a useful workforce, but if there are actual dragons around they usually don’t look kindly on others enslaving the dragonborn. But real dragons are all at least partially divine, and there is no divine magic on the planet. That makes things easy.”

He knelt down next to the kobold and began treating her wounds. “You will serve me. You owe debt to me. You will be freed when the debt is paid back, or in half your lifetime, whichever is first. You must never pass down my blood essence to your offspring, even after your debt to me is paid.”

The blood pact began taking effect. It would permanently tie this kobold/dragonborn to the agreement. They’d gain strength and some of the racial characteristics of whoever they made a pact with. Thralic had specifically forbidden passing down his blood essence, because it was the main thing that made dragonborn long term threats. The dragonborn would fight other races, and slowly copy those races’ best traits. They got the blood essence of other races during fights, or they’d turn themselves into slaves of anyone that beat them. This tactic worked really well against most races, except dragons. There were divine aspects of dragons that the dragonborn could never copy, so they just kept losing again and again to dragons, and passing down more and more dragon blood essence. For this reason, most dragonborn tended to have a lot of draconic traits, even if they could technically imitate any race. It is also why they were typically called “dragonborn”.

They were perfectly loyal slaves, as long as you didn’t completely prevent them from reproducing. But if they reproduced as slaves, they would always use the blood essence of their masters. And their offspring would not have any inherent loyalty to that master. So the master would have to fight the offspring and beat them into submission and being slaves again, or those offspring would have enough of the master’s traits that they’d win.

Either they won, or they copied you until they could win. It was safer to not take them as slaves, but he could use the labor, and the trick of only enslaving them for half their lives was usually successful.

Searching through the tunnel he was able to locate twenty six wounded kobold/dragonborn that would survive and have them swear the same servant oath. He had to mercy kill eleven more that would have died within minutes or hours, regardless of medical attention.

He reset the alarms at the front gate, and had his new group of slaves rebury the door, before taking them all back to his base.

Six of them had leg amputations, five were assigned to work within the base at the soon to be constructed facilities. The last one (the only unlucky double amputee) was assigned administrative duties, keeping track of debts (medical, food, lodging, and equipment) and payments for work.

Eleven had arm amputations, all of them would be assigned scouting and mapping duties for now. He’d find something else for them to do later, but only having one arm made them pretty useless to him. They’d be getting hazard pay on scouting duty, and if they ran into anything dangerous that hazard pay could skyrocket. For now, that group was the most likely to earn their way out of debt slavery. And it would be good if some of them did, he’d need proof for all the other slaves that this was just temporary slavery, or they might not be held to their oaths.

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The remaining nine, despite having all their limbs, were still far from healthy. Five of them had limb injuries that would heal, but they needed time. One had the left side of her jaw sliced off during the brief melee combat, she would be on liquid foods for the rest of her life. The last three were suffering from severe internal injuries, and he wasn’t sure if they’d all survive the week. Organ failure and deadly blood clots were a distinct possibility for them. If they did survive they’d be the healthiest slaves he’d picked up, and he would train them for combat. The training would be added to their total debt, and he’d have them renting any gear they used, so even with a hazard pay bump from combat they’d be in debt for a long time.

The addition of this new work force created two immediate problems for Thralic. The first was that his food stocks would not last long with an additional twenty six mouths to feed. The second problem was that his metal stocks would be running dangerously low.

His people were experts at working metals, and they’d been moving around to different universes often enough that anything remotely metallic was something they could work with. For ease of understanding they had long classified metals into three types:

Type

Description and usage

Energy Metals

Highly reactive, and often a good choice for storing mundane and magical energy

Runic Metals

Less reactive than the energy metals and thus more stable. Good for wiring and conducting runic scripts.

Hard Metals

Not necessarily hard, but the least reactive at room temperatures. Good for armor, weapons, tools, and ammunition.

Within each type of metal, any metal elements, mix alloys (smelted by simply melting and mixing elements), or constructed alloys (made by combining materials after smelting, usually by layering) were graded for usefulness into four tiers:

Tier 1 - Trash

Barely functional for the purposes needed. Usually unaltered elemental metals fall into this category, as well as all poorly made alloys. Usually these metals need to be upgraded by a tier before becoming useful. Examples: low energy density energy metals, not very conductive runic metals, soft hard metals, etc.

Tier 2 - Useful

Functional for the purposes needed. Perfect for mass manufacturing, disposable components, and early on in a rift jump expedition. Usually only a few elemental metals qualify. Mixed alloy metals can commonly reach this tier, and it is a good way to use up an otherwise Tier 1 junk metal. Constructed alloys at this tier are considered failures.

Tier 3 - Excellent

Among the best available options for the purposes needed. Clearly exceeds the performance of Tier 2 metals. Elemental metals almost never qualify, unless they are inherently magical. Good mixed alloys can qualify. Constructed alloys are often needed to reach Tier 3.

Tier 4 - The Best

The best possible metal for the purposes needed. Often made by magically enhancing Tier 3 metals.

Rift expeditions were typically sent out with all Tier 4 metals. But because of the differences of planets and universes, they were technically downgraded to Tier 3 metals. Only after an exhaustive search and testing of all the local metals and magic allowances could a new metal be selected as the “Tier 4” metal. There could be two Tier 4 metals if the metal brought on the rift expedition turned out to be better than any local variations. The best local variation would be given Tier 4 status, and the Tier 4 metal brought on the expedition would also retain its status.

Most of the T3 Energy metal had blown up on the side of the mountain when he had discarded the battery. He didn’t have or need a lot of Runic Metal. He could scrap existing components if he needed some T3 Runic Metal, but locally sourced T1 runic metal shouldn’t be hard to find and would serve his purposes for now.

The real problem would be hard metals. Nearly all of his hard metal reserves were tied up in his base. He needed a local T2 Hard Metal variant. Using T3 metals to make walls was just too wasteful.

His plan was to solve both the metal problem and the food problem with a surface scouting expedition. He began building six 8mm pistols that he could give to the one armed scouts.

The process of molding the different metals through magic into the shape of a pistol got him into a mental state of flow. It was the closest he ever got to meditation. The hours flew by, and he was almost sad when he set the last completed pistol down. This was the true calling of his people, to build beautiful functional things, made of metal, and given life by runes. He had once longed for a life of crafting, but it would never be. His people were hunted. Every moment they spent idle was another moment for the Creeping Dark to get closer.