Chapter 232

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

City of Rebirth

"There is, er, one additional problem, lady Crystal." Said the fox eared alchemist.

"Which is?" Answered Alexandra, as she leaned back into her seat.

"The slaves." The fox eared twin spread her hands. "They didn't ask for any of this, and are being used against their will. We can't-"

Alexandra held up her hand.

"Let me stop you right there. This is war. Not a fancy dinner with what ifs, or a bar brawl where you can politely ask the other to stop. This. Is. War. I can't afford not to fight the enemy soldiers. Furthermore, if I held back, the enemy would use it as leverage against us and zero in on our weakness."

"But-"

"What I can and will do however, is send some of my resurrection orbs alongside the raiding fleet. It won't be cheap, or even near perfect, but those that I can bring back home, I will." And they'll probably be an excellent source of intelligence. No one notices what the servants hear, and if she had to guess, Sunrise would care even less what their soon to be dead, expendable meat shields had fall into their ears. "However, if you want this to happen, you need to find me a way to get these brands off of them, because I doubt they'll come off if they're just brought back from the dead."

Ellyana opened her mouth, then closed it, before glaring at Alexandra, who simply glared back. The dungeon core had put the onus of this on the fox eared twin, and she knew it. Eismi was probably glaring at her as well, but she couldn't see the other twin, and she wasn't about to break eye contact.

"Very well." She ground out, finally lowering her gaze. "We will do our very best."

"Thank you. And for what it's worth, I am going to try my damnedest to keep as many of the slaves alive as possible."

If only because it would buy her a lot of good will. Plus, many would chose to come and stay in Rebirth, given how dangerous and devastated their old homes would be. And…well, she still had a heart, even if she'd steeled it more and more.

The fox eared twin nodded, if a bit begrudgingly.

"So…outside of that, some have noticed that the dungeon hasn't had any major changes in a while." Said Dominique, clearly having once again found the courage to speak up.

"I've been a bit busy." Said Alexandra, her voice dripping with irony. "Saving the town, building a skyfleet, all that."

"As well as starting a civil war in another nation, and saving their would be ruler, yes." Said Dominique, and Alexandra had to hold back a smile. It looked like the guild representative had gotten some of her spirit back at least. "That's not what I meant. There hasn't been any major evolution in the dungeon, just a new room added to the labyrinth from time to time."

"Is that a problem? All the rest works fine, and there are several clay and iron steps now."

"Well…yes, there is. First and foremost, everyone is going up in rank like crazy, and we're getting some restlessness upper rankers, who were expecting ah, er, challenge."

"You mean they expected to make out like bandits, since I promised artillery on the fourth floor, and we're in the middle of a war."

"Well…that too. But there are also more concerns. Many dungeons stop growing, past a certain point they just…turn inward. Instead of making new floors, or new rooms, they simply redesign the ones they had, tweaking them, which is all well and good, but…"

"It doesn't increase profits. But nothing can be based on infinite growth." Governments and corporations had to learn that the hard way in the early 21st century, notably related to demographics. Then the Terran Hegemony War had happened and things such as 'ethics' went out the window when it came to human reproduction and genetic engineering, after half of humanity bit the radioactive, tailored pathogen laced bullet. "You know that as well as I do."

"I know, I know. Still, some are getting worried and paranoid that you may be entering this stage. Especially given your otherwise explosive growth. The flame that burns twice as bright only lasts half as long and all that."

"The adventurers are worrying I'm burning myself out? How cute. But I can assure you, it's far from the case. My floors always took a long time to make, and I haven't made more, higher ranked steps simply because there aren't enough adventurers of that particular level to justify their existence. And I can assure you that I'm not going to revisit all my earlier floors and get stuck in a recursion loop." She'd have assumed it to be some quirk of the control program, or an embedded imperative to keep dungeons at a certain size from the God of Fire, but then again, plenty of human artists had gotten the same problem in history, constantly going over their old work and refining it, rarely creating something new again. "Besides, rebuilding my dungeon so many times had made me a bit sick of redoing my first floor over and over again." Everyone smiled at that. "I do get your point however, I will try to open up the fourth floor's in progress areas for, ah, field testing."

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"Thank you."

"No problem." Better not mention that she'd already said that to good old Starvak a while back. Or rather, had Allya tell him. "Now, I do believe there was a general report as to the status of the economy as well?" One she'd already gotten, courtesy of Allya, and was very much going to do something else while it was recited in its infinite dryness.

There were some advantages to being in a golem after all, notably since there were no facial expression to read like 'mind numbing boredom'.

*****

Alexandra frowned as she looked at the images.

If there was one thing that perfectly illustrated the limitations and yes, stupidity, of the Old World fleet's pathetic excuse for an AI, it would be this. Though she guess she couldn't blame the Sagitarius Empire, since Seraph had betrayed them remarkably quickly, and presumably it had happened enough during the Great Night to lead to what she had witnessed with the Hammer of Eternity and its escorts.

The image in front of her was from one the landbound "totally not a refitted starship" frigate's magazine. And it was filled with missiles. Surface to air ones, but missiles nonetheless.

Notably the fact that the enemy hadn't used them. Despite how formidable they'd proven against her fortress, they hadn't deployed them. Besides, the Dusk Blade had participated in the battle, and Starvak had spent most of it soaring through the skies. Which to her meant both that the AI wouldn't target ships that didn't directly attack its vessels if there was a more prominent threat…and that apparently, a single individual in power armor didn't seem to pass the threshold to be considered an aircraft worth firing missiles at, regardless of their personal power.

Maybe she could exploit that someday.

But regardless, it brought her to the current problem. In that Allya had just had a giant pile of Old World hardware dropped into her lap, had outright announced she was planning on requisitioning them all as part of her tithe, and many were wondering if a few of those weapons were going to end up in the local dungeon as well. Which was why she was only working with images currently.

Usually she wouldn't have cared all that much, she already had a ton of Old World technology, but she didn't have their missiles. Well, she wasn't that interested in the missiles as such, but in the components. Any missile worth its salt would have compact, advanced sensors, high efficiency thrusters, excellent acceleration resistant computers, and probably electronic warfare and evasion systems to penetrate point defence. She could do terrible, terrible things with that kind of technology. And would do equally terrible things to get her hands on it.

Had she suspected the enemy were holding their fire, and hadn't just run dry on missiles, she assuredly would have been scouring the ships for them. Unfortunately, she'd assumed the Old World AIs weren't that incompetent, and now it was no longer an option. Now that the guild had identified the missile magazines, Oromar, who despite his conciliatory attitude was no one's fool, had placed armed guards at every unopened one on the remaining ships. It was going to cost him a lot of resources, especially in medical treatment, but with the priest and his team of healers the town had the capacity of dealing with a bunch of extra adventurers suffering from radiation exposure.

Ostensibly the measure was to prevent the missiles falling into the hands of thieves or even Sunrise terrorists, but everyone knew the primary target was her. The guild had dialed back its restrictive policies, but that didn't mean they were willing to completely give up either.

That was fair, Alexandra could respect that. And while she'd seriously considered just killing a set of guard and looting one of the magazines, first the damned things were so well shielded there was no way of knowing if there was anything remaining in one before opening it, even with her current level of sensor technology, and then there was the very simple fact that she didn't want to kill them with her stealth golems, however easy it would be, as it would draw uncomfortable parallels to the unfortunate death of a certain mercenary second in command. And she really, really didn't want people digging that particular skeleton up, especially not wondering what had happened to a certain extradimensional adventurer named Alexandra…

So she'd suck it up. But she was definitely going to have to coach Allya on what to do with these things. That was going to be an interesting discussion. Especially since they were radioactive, but not nuclear, which begged a lot of questions as to why someone would put that many unstable isotopes in a missile to begin with if not to unleash the fury of the atom. Well, nucleus, but same thing.

But first, some dungeon design.

*****

Alexandra sighed as she looked at the schematics.

Okay, maybe mind numbing boredom would have been preferable.

"Relax Alex, it's not that bad." Said Emilia, as she hopped onto the workshop table.

"Yes it is. The fourth floor is…"

"Not very good? You intended it as a battlefield, commit to it."

"No. The fourth floor is not fair. I know how to make a gun line, and how to deal with it, but the adventurers don't. Furthermore, do we really want to train the thousands of highly dangerous, loyal to a semi-hostile organization, combatants in the town in how to fight my military?"

"Probably should have thought of that before you exposed them to musket golems."

"That was a calculated risk. Besides, we were well into making bolt action rifles and machine guns by then."

"Well, what's to stop you from using the old stuff in the trial area? You could always change it later."

"Mmmhhhh…true, but a field gun is a field gun."

"Maybe, but I bet there's a big difference between a cannonball and an aerodynamic artillery shell."

"Point taken." Alexandra sighed. "Thanks, Emi."

"That's what I'm here for. And did you just call me Emi? Not vampy?"

"Hey, you said you hated it."

"Well, it did have a certain ring to it."

"Alright then, 'vampy'."

"Ata girl. Besides, for the fourth floor, you could just relax your ironclad morals just a bit and make the adventurers work more for their payout."

"I'm not a gacha company vampy, I'm not here to drain the adventurers of everything of use for an illusory reward, then discard them once they've run out of funds."

"Gacha?"

"Like, paying for a random reward, like a figurine or some digital stuff. It used to be super popular on Earth."

"Sounds like a casino with extra steps. And no tangible reward."

"Hence the 'used to', once the governments woke up to that fact and regulated the sector into the ground." Literally, in the case of Japan, since they'd demolished many of the gacha centers and built brand new hab towers in their place. The damned thing took entire city blocks at that point!

"Well, if you insist on making it fair, how about using those 'video games' of yours? Still waiting on one I could play, by the way."

"I know. But as much inspiration as I can get from them, and how useful it's proven, it's not like I can apply everything. It's not like I can hide platters of cooked chicken in the walls in case the adventurers need some healing. Vampire maids or no, I'm not Dracula." Besides, the adventurers had a distinct lack of whips anyway. Thank the Gods for that. Not that she was about to say it out loud, last thing she wanted was to give Emilia the idea, and have her rewrite her shopping list for Sarah! "So, I still need some other sources."

"Your video games sound weirder every passing second. Seriously, chicken in the walls?"

"It's a running joke from a video game series. But yeah, it's…complicated."

"Tell me about it."

"Later, sure. But I need some ideas and I don't…know…" Alexandra facepalmed.

"What? Honey?"

"We're idiots love. Complete morons."

"What? Why?"

"We have all the ideas we could possibly need home." Alexandra threw her hands up. "For god's sake, we even asked her to design her part of the floor! Well, she demanded it, but same difference. So let's have her output about the rest. Let's go get CQ."