I placed my hand on the door and the imperial seal appeared on it. The door responded to magic and the same seal appeared larger, confirming its authenticity. Slowly, carefully, we entered the room that had been untouched for an eternity, back when dragons ruled the land. The room is filled with artifacts and books, a relentless quest for wisdom echoing through these walls. It was here that the curse originated, and it was to be the place of her salvation. Momo, the angel, walked cautiously behind me, looking around with a mixture of surprise and fear.

"So this is the place."

"Rose's laboratory during the war against the dragons."

"..."

"It has more technology than I expected for a castle built before humans."

"Rose brought most of the computers for better research, the others are obviously Atlantean, brought by researchers loyal to Nanami."

"She herself ordered that this place be used as her main laboratory for her ideas."

"And here I was hoping for a surprise date after you've neglected me lately."

"Although I understand with everything that has happened, is it okay for us to be here?"

"This place is full of dangerous things, powerful weapons like Helios Blaze were created here."

"I think I should leave."

"No, wait!"

"I need your help, please."

"Look, when I fought Xian Fang, I managed to retrieve this thing, they call it the Thalassian Enigma, she made several, I need them, but I accidentally destroyed two."

"After killing her, I checked her house, but I only found the outer part, but inside it needs a special gem to make it work."

"The problem is that I don't know what kind of jewel it is."

"And this place is where we might find one or two of the ones we're looking for."

"I'm sorry, but unless you're more specific about what you're looking for, I can't help you."

"Finding a specific colorful gem in Atlantis, the place of neon lights is almost impossible."

"Xian Fang could have been a magician for a long time, but she wasn't smart enough to stay out of trouble."

"She knew the typical myth of Atlantis as a powerful place that sank in a single night. Not the many years of war or the dragons that ruled it."

"..."

"Anyway, I need the right gem if I want to use the Thalassian Enigma and be able to free Luna from her Core Gem."

"The problem is, all I know is that the gem is blue."

"Elise, half the room is full of blue gems!"

"I know, there are a million of them, some of them are the cores of other dragons."

"We've been studying them here, trying to figure out their properties and how to use them."

"That machine over there manages to automate the process quite well."

"Until that dragon over there attacked it and destroyed it."

"Why is its skeleton still beside the machine?"

"We killed it right after, but on that day, Atlantis started falling towards Earth at high speed, so there was little time to clean up."

"What the hell happened?"

"That sounds heavy and tough."

"It was the last day of the war, though we didn't know it then."

"That day, the dragons attacked the capital harder than ever, and we suffered terrible losses."

"We managed to survive after the White Banisher alone killed the expedition's lead dragon at the base of the Imperial Palace stairs, but then he died of battle wounds."

"Shortly after that, there was an earthquake, which was quite rare for a floating island, and after a quick investigation, Rose realized that the continent was beginning to fall to the ground."

"We took a special transport that would take us to the last floor of Atlantis and sent almost all of the remaining soldiers, and still almost half of the seats were left, we weren't many to be honest."

"Rose stayed in the palace in the control room, trying to control the fall and buy us a little more time."

"After that we went down, shit hit the fan, we all split up, I was ambushed and almost captured."

"Then it was my turn to get out of where I was and kill Overlord in record time while speedrunning around cursing everyone in my way."

"..."

"But, well, that already happened."

"All I need now is that gem."

"Alright, I'll help you."

"If you're looking for a rather rare gem, it should be in the unclassified blue gem crates."

Momo and I started rummaging through the crates, trying to find something that would work, but no matter how hard we tried, it was an almost impossible task; the place was overflowing with damn gems of all colors and sizes. But after a while Momo took advantage of us being alone to bring up a delicate subject.

"Hey Elise, speaking of gems and trapped souls."

"...."

"Remember the Pandora boxes?"

"Both Charlotte and Kazumi have one as a central processor core."

"Ah, yes, I remember that."

"You said you sacrificed several girls to get them to work as AI."

"Well, I've been asking about the missing girls for a while."

"While you were in China, I got the information back."

"......"

"It's true."

"Currently, Kazumi and Charlotte each have about 2 thousand girls trapped in their Pandora's box."

"The C.S.S. is not at all happy with what they have found, and they are searching for and freeing each one they find."

"Ultimately, they want both dolls' Pandora boxes back."

"Although they are obviously working on a solution for them first."

"According to what I heard from Stella, THE BOSS himself is at the workbench working on some prototypes and testing them."

"So I imagine that in the near future they will be called to replace their cores and free the captured girls."

"......."

"......."

"Does anyone else know?"

"No, I haven't told anyone yet."

"All right, let it be."

"We're not going to do anything until there is a concrete solution."

"If CSS really cares about security, they'll be interested in not screwing this up."

"..."

"When the right solution comes along, just think of it like a hospital operation."

"I mean, something like surgery for an appendicitis problem."

"It's a little emergency, but not the end of the world."

"Although my brother Leon had the same thing happen to him once."

"..."

"Maybe both of them would be interested in the experience of being taken to a hospital like living creatures."

"Yeah, okay."

"I'll let Stella know so she can prepare it as a medical emergency when the time comes."

"..."

"Sometimes I wonder why we can't do the same for Luna."

"Even though she's a dragon, she's not bad at all."

"She deserves to be a living being, not just an object."

"Well, you know that dragons hated the heavens and the gods as much as the Atlanteans did."

"They based almost all of their technology and biology against ours."

"The fact that they created their own cores to contain them in case of death, so that they wouldn't go to heaven or the afterlife, is at least disturbing in itself."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Atlantean technology and dragons are as alien and overly complicated to us as ours would be to humans."

"..."

"And all because Emperor Orion never wanted to lose."

"Hey, you know what's funny?"

"That goblet over there is the same one that Orion drank the cursed potion that created the dragons."

image [https://i.imgur.com/6nt82Im.jpg]

"That one?"

"That's left here unprotected? Isn't that very dangerous?"

"Not really, it's just a cup."

"What was dangerous was its contents, which Orion drank to the last drop on his deathbed."

"Rose analyzed it tirelessly, but never found anything useful."

"Do you think I could ask you what made him decide to do such a thing?"

"I don't know everything that happened."

"Everything I know was told to me by Nanami over time and what she remembered from when she was younger."

"......"

"After Atlantis fought against Heaven and was defeated until they were forced to flee, they arrived somewhere far west of Mesopotamia."

"The idea was to get resources to rebuild Atlantis, improve it, and return to their campaign against Heaven."

"According to Nanami, when they arrived there, they tried to invade the new land, but a new civilization was already waiting for them."

"The war against the sky was followed by a war against the earth."

"The Lowland Civilization, as the Atlanteans called them, possessed tremendous strength, enough to at least stop the initial invasion and make them consider whether a long-term confrontation would be viable."

"But while that was going on, a civil war also broke out."

"Jezebel Amaranth, one of the leaders chosen to lead the campaign against Heaven, Emperor Orion's personal guard, and probably the only strong woman he wasn't sleeping with."

"She was fed up with Orion's way of ruling, which indicated that the Emperor's quest for greatness would only bring ruin to Atlantis and its people, so she organized a rebel group to defeat the monarch."

"They set out from the lowest part of Atlantis and made their way all the way to the top."

"It was Jezebel Amaranth herself who challenged Emperor Orion to a duel, a brutal duel that the girl is said to have narrowly won against Orion."

"However, due to the High Priest's interference, she was forced to flee due to her wounds, so she was unable to finish off the Emperor there."

"On his deathbed, the priests of the Atlantean High Church presented the Emperor with the cursed chalice, a new invention of their creation, promising him eternal life and unrivaled power to rule the heavens and the gods with a single drink."

"Filled with rage, revenge, selfishness, and jealousy, he drank the entire contents."

"It transformed him into a dragon, and through his strong will he became a true dragon."

"His closest followers were the next to receive the cup and drank from it, blindly following their leader."

"The dragons' first attack was fortunately against the rebels and their bases in the lower reaches of Atlantis."

"'For the sake of the kingdom of Atlantis they said."

"The Emperor's followers and loyalists went so far as to offer themselves as food to the dragons who proclaimed themselves his saviors.

"Feasting in the name of the dragons, allowing themselves to be eaten and digested by the creatures.

"The priestesses and bishops of the Atlantean Church disappeared, quickly digested in the stomachs of their divine messengers from the Olympus of their Emperor."

"With them was lost the original recipe that created the dragons in the first place.

"Thousands of innocent people were trapped in their words and promises, thousands of families gave away their children as food for the dragon that visited them in their homes."

"Then their numbers multiplied, and they attacked more places, devouring more people, and more people rejoicing as they were greeted as the saviors of the rebels."

"Soon after, the rest of the Atlanteans realized that the dragons were not coming to save them as Orion had promised.

"But to finish destroying what was left of the continent."

"As Nanami grew, it was Jezebel Amaranth who led the campaign against the dragons, a campaign that could only slow them down, but never stop them."

"Wow, that's dark and cruel."

"Why do you think there are only ruins now?"

"And like shit I would let this place be rebuilt."

"The place is cursed enough."

"Letting people live here is just a recipe for another problem."

"It's better to just let it be forgotten, like the grave it is."

"Hey, aren't you a True Dragon as well?"

"Don't you want a home for your dragons?"

"Maybe to eat humans again?"

"There are already a lot of strange things happening in my house."

"Besides, I'm a slime now, and even if I can digest almost anything I want inside me, that doesn't mean I won't get sick from what I consume."

"That plate of spaghetti that Lisa put in my body during the night while I was sleeping almost killed me because of the food poisoning it gave me."

"Although maybe I really don't and was just Lisa own weirdness what attacked me, I lost almost half of my water mass just by puking."

"And besides, you're made of glass, I prefer softer and tasty things."

"So am I not delicious in your eyes?"

"Is that why you left me alone?"

"Momo, please remember that we're looking for a gem to free Luna."

"Yeah, sorry."

"......"

"Though are you sure that freeing Luna won't be a problem?"

"She's a dragon too, won't she start eating people too?"

"I raised her myself, taught her what is good and what is bad."

"I trust her as much as I trust myself."

"The fact that she was such a deadly dragon hunter, but never thought to harm me for a single minute, despite the lack of food during the worst days of the eternal winter, is the greatest proof."

"She'll be much happier trying pizza or fast food for the first time instead."

Both Momo and I continued to search Rose's lab for something that might work, but it was filled with too many things. From the endless supply of vodka bottles that Rose had at her disposal, to thousands of parts and weapons that she was designing at breakneck speed, from simple firearms or cannons to some rare prototypes like the expired red mercury bomb, or the plans for the Shock Wave weapon that caused us so much trouble in Okinawa, or the HPM energy orb launcher capable of boiling the internal fluid of any living creature, truly cruel weapons, all designed to defeat vile creatures like dragons. But no matter how hard we searched, we couldn't find anything that resembled the gem that could power the Thalassian Enigma, the mysterious artifact of legend that the Atlanteans had hidden until the end of the journey to the Celestial Forge. Each time, I had more doubts about how such a thing could even exist and how someone as ignorant as Xian Fang could replicate it.

Before leaving, Momo managed to find the hangar where some other large machines created by Rose were stored, including Crimson Empress, my personal walker that Rose created for me during the war against the dragons. It was with this robot that my story as a pilot began, hundreds of hours of practice and study just to learn how to use that piece of junk.

image [https://i.imgur.com/ly9Kmmv.jpg]

The robot was based on the XW-2 series, the mass-produced walkers we had. The idea behind the Mechs was simple: to add more firepower to our common soldiers without special powers like the Dragon Hunters. Hopefully, better armor would also reduce the number of bloody deaths in our ranks. They were built to be fast, but unfortunately they may have entered the war against the dragons too late. They had an extremely powerful Atlantean fusion core, which allowed them to completely eliminate the need for fuel. It also used the excess energy to power the weapons it had, using energy weapons with theoretically unlimited ammunition as long as there was energy stored in the battery and the robot did not suffer a failure in the core, in which case the computer would prioritize the robot's mobility. The robot did not have to be good and durable, just do the immediate job of keeping the humans from losing in a single day in the final stages of the war.

When the other Atlanteans discovered the creation of the weapons, they demanded that Rose create one for the Empress, a better model that would surpass the human weapons in every way, which was impossible since we could barely produce the basic XW-2. So, in typical Rose fashion, she simply fooled them with something superficial. She took a standard model, added more armor, and decorated it a bit to show it off and appease them for the time being. However, the Crimson Empress also suffered from these changes; among other things, because of the extra weight of the armor, the energy core had less power for the weapons. But we hid this fact during the presentations; it was not something they needed to know.

Momo seemed excited to see that my walker had survived the conflict, although it had suffered serious damage, especially to its power source. She said she could easily repair and improve it if she worked on it. I told her it wasn't necessary, but she could try to take it to the Akasaka Press Center base so she could repair it as a hobby whenever she wanted. Now that the walkers had been reinvented by humans, there was no need to hide it.