Chapter 281

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Conference Room

The intimidating blast doors closed behind them with a definitive clang, and the twins stared at the table.

It was ladden with various foods and drinks, hell, even what looked like a fully roasted duck. And behind it was the dungeon's boss. They had some experience with her, and they could tell she was possessed by the core.

"Please, do be seated." Said the dungeon core, affably, her friendliness belied by the ranks of golems lining the walls. "I'm afraid the baroness won't be joining us after all, she's had an...emergency in the meantime."

Damn. They thought the dungeon core had sent her entire army to Darthar, and yet there were enough golems in this room alone to give the entirety of Rebirth's guard force a run for their money. All standing at perfect, immobile attention, their guns glittering in the artificial light bathing the room.

Those, and the ones they'd seen while being escorted into the dungeon's depths...how many troops did the dungeon truly have, tucked away within her depths?

They took their seats with a bit of trepidation, and the dungeon core smiling at them only made it worse. It wasn't the core's signature wolfish smile, it was...odder. She looked almost amused.

"So, finally got busted, uh?"

"You ratted us out, didn't you?" Let out Ellyana, and Crystal laughed.

"Aahahahah! Kind of. Allya already knew what you were up to thanks to her own spies. But then, yeah, I confirmed our deal. Didn't mean she cared though." The dungeon core pulled up three glasses and filled them with an orange liquid, before sliding two to the twins. Ellyana took a deep sniff, raised her eyebrows, and then a swig. Eismi, figuring out that if her more alchemically trained sister was drinking it, was safe, did likewise. It tasted like...a mix of fruit juices? "What she did care about was you smuggling a bunch of alchemical components to Sunrise. That makes you traitors."

They both almost spat out their drinks.

"We'd never-" Started Ellyana, before being interrupted by the dungeon core's raised hand.

"Girl, if you're going to say 'we'd never do such a thing!' I'll save you the bother. We captured the smugglers, the ship they were using, and even if their crews weren't singing like birds, their charts speak very loudly indeed. Point is, you fucked up. Don't try to wiggle out of this, you'll only make a fool of yourselves."

"We would never help Sunrise and those slaver scum." Said Eismi between gritted teeth. She knew she should have tried another damned solution!

"I had guessed that. So did the baroness. I basically everyone involved for that matter." Except for Pyn, but that girl liked to reach for all the possibilities. She wasn't stupid, she just liked playing devil's advocate a lot. "The question is...why?"

Both twins closed their mouths.

"Nothing?" Crystal smiled. "Yeah, thought so. And that answers our next question, of who you guys work for. You're both New Raleigh intelligence."

The twins exchanged a tense look, but stayed silent.

"Relax, I'm not going to bite you. My girlfriend gets jealous when I do that to other girls." They both jumped up slightly. Girlfriend?!? "I mean you no harm."

"Girlfriend? Are you and the baroness..." Started Ellyana.

Crystal was halfway through taking a sip and almost spat out her drink laughing.

"Ahahahah! I meant my advisor. My vampire advisor." She didn't say no, noted Eismi, though she had bigger problems right now. "In any case, I won't bite. That's her speciality anyway. But the fact is, if you're New Raleigh intelligence, it means you're about to do something for the slaves there. As much as Allya and I try to abolish that practice however...we're not going to become pawns in anyone's game. So! We'll detain you. And your shipment. Make it loud enough your bosses will heard. I'm ready to bet that'll send some shockwaves through, and since a military solution would probably be unadvisable, they'll send someone to negotiate."

The twins exchanged another look.

"...That, or they have the capacity for a military solution, but might want diplomacy because of our past actions."

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The twins gave her a panicked look.

Alexandra simply smiled back. She was no mind reader.

But it had been a possibility she'd considered. Juuust in case. After all...New Raleigh was headed by the only permanent party of Archons on Alcheryos, the Seven.

"Well then, let's have you be my guests for next few days, and see if your bosses decide the pen is mightier than the sword."

She got up, and left. Seraph, through the golems, could take care of it from there.

In the meantime, she'd have to figure out if they'd poked the proverbial bear or not.

*****

"So, now we wait?" Said Allya as she sat in the Dusk Blade's secure cabin. Or rather sat on Pyn's lap, who just happened to be in the cabin.

"Now we wait." Alexandra shrugged. "Not really much else to do."

"Do we have any real clue of what the alchemical stuff could be used for, beyond 'ritual magic, probably'?" Asked the elf.

"Not really. Ingredients serve to simplify the spell." Well, replace parts of it by substituting their properties for chunks in the spell's program. Kind of like a function, effectively. "A wide combination of ingredients can give you a pretty good idea, but that's not what they were doing. They had a handful of ingredients they mass produced the ever living hell out of."

"Smoothing out the basic stuff, and having mages handle the rest?" Said Allya, and Alexandra nodded.

"Sure seems like it. That, or the more complicated ingredients are being sourced somewhere else, since they probably won't need them in such quantities as to require a dungeon."

"That also, I suppose. What about your army?"

"On its way. I'm also formulating multiple plans of attack. Speaking off, how did your emergency meeting with their majesties go?"

Allya grimaced.

"The duchess' army is pressing Asaria hard. They managed to hold the second layer of walls, but it was a near run thing. Several breaches are currently being reinforced, and there's still fighting in the streets with some shock troops that managed to push on through."

"Crap. Looks like we'll need to haul ass north."

"Looks like it."

"Alright then. I'll order the army to force march north, and recommend to the duke that he does the same. I'll see about expediting the shipping of the new missiles as well."

"What about Philia and her people?"

"The knight-commander is adorable, but her tattered remnants of an army couldn't even fight off a single one of my battalions, and I've brought forty of them." Or about fifty thousand troops, basically her entire supply of her modern Standard Combat Units, though she was starting on mass production again with her new mana surplus. That made four divisions of infantry with integrated support, and two battalions of specialists. "We'll bring her along eventually, but it'll be mostly for planning and support roles." Alexandra's voice suddenly got softer. "Her people have made it this far, they deserve to get back to their families in one piece."

"I understand." Allya's voice was equally soft now. "Still, I know soldiers, they won't stand back and have someone else save their homeland."

Pyn nodded emphatically, and Alexandra grimaced.

"Alright, point taken. I'll see what I can do. Get them all rearmed with some real weapons. Only Philia's knights have Tarkian gear." And damned little of it, they'd burned through most of their ammo during the siege. "It should boost their morale as well, and I've left enough behind to handle that."

One thing she'd been doing, similar with Erakis, was buying spare cargo space on airships to bring military supplies to Darthar. Unlike the former Republic city, she wasn't worried about an uprising or another attack, but it would serve as a handy depot to supply Sarth's army with and take the strain off of her own logistics. It also meant that she had a warehouse packed with gear.

"I'm sure they'll appreciate it very much."

"Let's hope so. No negative reactions to our little sting operation?"

"Not really!" Said Pyn. "We just told them it was against Sunrise operatives, and everyone bought it. You could argue it's true."

Alexandra chuckled.

"Alright, I'll leave you lovebirds alone." They both blushed, and Alexandra smiled. "Come now, blushing, really?" They'd already done a double date with the jaccuzi, among other things. "I'll be off. Have fun!"

She left before they could retort. Uh, she could see where Ghost got that trait from. And why she was getting a kick out of it.

Well, enough, time to head back to the salt mines.

Or rather, boomtown.

*****

"How's the testing going?" Asked Alexandra as she entered the heavily armored observation room.

CQ turned around, smiling brightly and looking utterly adorable in her labcoat and safety glasses. She kind of looked like Subtelty's lab assistant with that, the AI looking equally joyful, if a bit more restrained. Looked like unleashing her daughter upon the AI at her start had been a good idea after all. Maybe she should mandate that for all new AIs going forward.

"It's going awesome! Been trying lots of stuff, and we even came up with some good combinations!"

"Really?" Now that she had cheaper-ish mythril, a mana surplus, but more importantly the means to recycle any plating that got damaged, she had revived her systemic military experiment program, and tasked CQ and Subtlety with finding better armor, both low and high tech.

Which, effectively, meant trying whatever they could think of, and then trying to break the ever living crap out of it in the new testing room. Hence, boomtown.

And given the state of Sunrise's replicated fortifications, there had been a lot of booms.

"Yeah! Really! We have made a new spider-tank plating, as well as some improved SCU armor." CQ grabbed a pencil and a clipboard, and bit the end of the writing implement. "Two types of SCU armor, actually. One heavy, one light."

"We don't do heavy and light infantry with the SCUs."

"I know, I know! I mean, like, amounts of Mythril. The heavy one is more effective overall, but not in terms of cost. A little mythril is awesome for an armor, really good with helping to stop, deflect or break up projectiles, not to mention amazing for runes. But..."

"Once you increase the amount, to the point that the plating is all mythril, you quickly hit diminishing returns?"

"Right, yeah! We're proposing the heavy plating as well because yeah, it's less cost effective, but it has some advantages."

"Better for spec ops, when cost matters less, I assume?"

"Not just that!" CQ smiled. "Production time too!"

"Production time? Oh." Alexandra blinked. "Right, a little mythril means composite armor, and that takes a while."

"Exactly! The heavy armor is about five times as expensive for only two, two and a half time the survivability? Depends a lot on the weapon used, it's worse against small arms, but really good against heavy weapons."

"Right." That made sense. A little mythril would just shrug off a pistol shot or an arrow. But not a ballista bolt.

"But the heavy armor takes only half the time to make, and that's assuming we can't get it down further."

"Of course. A single process is always easier to rationalize and make faster than a series."

"Exactly! So we have the details for both."

"Thanks kiddo, fantastic work. You too, Subtlety." Alexandra meant it too. They had saved her up a ton of work. Look like her lessons had been taken to heart! "What about the spider tank armor?"

CQ started chewing pensively on the pen.

"It's composite. The plating was so huge...heavy mythril just wasn't worth it. It ended up more expensive than the tank itself by an order of magnitude. Would have actually been more worth it to just, well, make ten tanks."

"Right. Is it good?"

"Sort of? It's super though, but the main advantage is actually weight and speed. A little mythril can replace a lot of their previous steel plating. So they're not a lot more survivable, they're just way faster and more agile. Like, scarily so. They still have the souped up systems to handle the weight after all."

"Interesting. In that case...how about we trade in some of that agility for better weapons?"

CQ blinked.

"We...we could. Uh. What should we put in?"

Alexandra smiled.

"Artillery. Let's get some high mobility guns."

"Or a mobile rocket battery!"

"Atta girl! Alright, let's go to the workshop. We have big guns to use!"

Alexandra smiled as her daughter cheered.

Maybe today wouldn't prove to be a long one after all.