Chapter 401 - Coronation

Notes :

And here we are ! The end of book 10 ! I hope you enjoyed it, it was one hell of a ride !

I'll probably end my break soon, and go write some Manaforged Robotics. It's been a while and the end push kind of burned me out on The Fallen World for the time being.

Except maybe for some specials, but that's another thing entirely.

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy the chapter !

Chapter 401

Red Sands Desert, Aurorean Empire

Capital City of Rebirth

A pall of shock and smoke still hung above the city as the procession moved down the streets.

Citizens watched the army line the boulevards. A day ago, it had been in gleaming armor, marching under thunderous applause.

Now their armor was dirty. Covered in soot, dirt and dust. Their once shining guns had blood splattered on them. Some bore damage, others were intact.

Now they were a grim honor guard.

Allya moved down the boulevard, and up the stairs to the dungeon's entrance, stopping on the very last step.

The massive doors were open, and besides them stood diplomats, representatives and observers. Merchants, industrialists and nobles. Officers, quartermasters and spies.

And in front of them all, a dungeon avatar.

She stopped, one step below Alexandra, as three people went to join her.

First was Malcom, who fastened a white, Imperial mantle around her neck.

Next was Nira, bringing in the heavy, adamantium mace, and putting it in her left hand.

And finally, the royal magistrate, giving her the scepter of state in her right.

She ascended the final step, and knelt.

Alexandra walked ceremoniously forward, towering over her.

"Allya Nouvelle-Aurore." She spoke, her voice effortlessly carrying over the entrance, though it had to be relayed deeper into the crowds. "Do you swear to uphold the constitution of the Aurorean Empire?"

"I do."

"Do you swear to protect its citizens, its territory, and its honor?"

"I do."

"And do you swear to serve its people, its nations and its ideals?"

"I do."

There was a slight shuffling, and Allya saw CQ's legs move into view.

She didn't see it, but she knew she was holding a gilded pillow.

Alexandra turned to face her daughter, and slowly turned back towards Allya.

She felt the soft touch of metal upon her head, as the crown was seated upon it.

"Then rise, Allya Nouvelle-Aurore, First Empress of the Aurorean Empire!"

She stood up.

And the crowd erupted into cheers.

*****

"That went well." Said Ghost as Alexandra winced, and delicately sat down.

For once they'd eschewed using the command center, instead going to the dungeon core's...apartment? Quarters?

Her little suite of room Emilia dragged her to when time permitted. With seats that wouldn't have looked out of place in a pre-industrial revolution French salon and an actual, crackling fireplace with real wood burning within. With many of the smithies done, the systems that had handled their exhaust was now more or less idle and sometimes you had to give yourself a treat.

"It did." The dungeon core grimaced. Fast healing or no, her avatar couldn't just recover from catastrophic damage in a single day. "Didn't expect the cheering."

"Well, we did lay on the propaganda a bit thick."

Alexandra nodded.

While they'd been duking it out with the guild's forces, Allya had been on every network, every transmission she could reach, declaring that the guild was attempting a coup, showing images of guild attendants firing railguns at Mackies and power armor squads gunning down golem platoons.

The guild had been caught flat footed. By the time they'd even realized it was going on, the narrative was firmly in her hands. Their treachery was in the news planetwide.

They attempted to put their own version out there of course, but Rebirth was at the center of attention. Everyone had reports coming in of the guild hall fighting with Old World weapons against the golems. Hard to explain that away.

The communication crystal network didn't go down as they'd expected, but that might be due to the surprise, and something so complex having to be scheduled well in advance. Something for Trira and her new Imperial Intelligence Service to dig into. They had found jammers in the wreckage, but in practice the few that the guild managed to bring online were overwhelmed by their countermeasures.

Regardless, they had news coming in from across the world. Many nations had been keeping a tight eye on the guild after the whole secret archons fiasco, and this had given them all the excuses they needed. A constant stream of arrests, police stings and other operations on the guild were flooding every network, and it wouldn't be long before most governments announced they were going to nationalize or otherwise take over local guild assets and affairs.

"I'm worried about the troops though." Alexandra grimaced. "How did they get them past us? What's the latest estimate?"

"Around half a battalion, so six hundred troops or so."

"That is a lot of people to sneak into the city."

"Glitch's on the case. They seemed to have melded into the general adventurer population, which is...fluid at the best of times and the one we bother the least, since, you know, they're our lifeblood."

"Mmmhhh. Speaking of, the new administration?"

Ghost smiled.

"Working without a hitch. We already have adventurers signing up onto the delve schedule, and people bother our new attendants even less, now that they have golem guards and, y'know, their booths are under the fortress' guns."

"We'll see how long that lasts." Alexandra sighed. "Dominique is going to be harder to explain however."

The problem was, their backup teleport intercept room was a 'fuck this shit, already too much on our plate' failsafe. If someone could force the first room to self destruct or wreck it themselves, they had bigger fish to fry.

That meant it was stocked wall to wall with railguns, plasma cannons and particle rifles, manned by the praetorian guards and had about the aggregate subtly of a bulldozer and a napalm bomb.

So now they had Dominique, who had seen that, sensed she was in the dungeon influence, and promptly got stunned.

"I'm sure you'll be able to convince her with your team."

"If we can trust her with that info."

"Well, we're digging into the documents, but whatever was happening, she doesn't seem to have been a part of it." Orromar definitely had been however. The centaur guildmaster had, interesting enough, refused to engage their troops until it was clear everything was lost.

He'd then rallied the few remaining troops in the guild hall, and made a last stand.

Unlike every single one of them, he clearly had a lot of experience using this stuff, and had done so in war, not just against stunted Old World automata piloted by limited AIs.

He couldn't wear power armor past his upper body, but his essence infused flesh had compensated greatly for that, and he'd managed to wreck a trio of Mackies and four tanks before Ghost had pinned him down and quite literally hammered him into the ground via the sheer weight of fire of the entire remaining armored force.

The rest had been easy to clean up afterwards. For what was left to begin with anyway.

"Good. Anything good in the paperwork?"

"Well, some proof of what was happening. Left some paper traces, and some of their self destructs didn't work on account of their offices getting blasted to hell. Of course, that didn't spare the documents either, but better half incinerated than fully. Lots and lots of financial stuff, which will help with confiscating guild assets within the Empire's core territories." Which, though it wasn't really something they were considering an objective, would be a considerable boon. The guild was, unsurprisingly, really freaking rich and had a lot of assets. Not that it would really matter right now, as the new dungeon department meant the cut the guild took was now Allya's, and the Empire's internal revenue, which so far was almost entirely made up of dungeon delve fees, had just doubled. "The rest is mostly administrative stuff, keeping track of ranks, monster concentrations, quests, that kind of stuff."

"Still useful. Our new administration has hit the ground running, let's keep it from slowing down."

"Agreed." Ghost looked at Alexandra. "So...now that we have the most critical business out of the way, mind telling me why you did it?"

"Why I did what?"

"Confronted Starvak you idiot." Hissed the apparition. "You almost got your avatar killed! For fuck's sake, you know these things don't return like a boss does!"

Alexandra winced.

"I do. But our solution for fighting an archon was 'drown them in railguns and hope it works'."

Which would have been...well, not as cripplingly expensive as it would have been before their whole fabricator buildup, but still insanely costly. And it would leave their defenses wide open for any follow up strikes, possibly for a while given how urgently they needed that production capacity for other projects.

"So you took a gamble with the spear."

"Hey, it worked. I had talismans to get myself and the weapon out at any point, which I could remotely activate with the press of a button. Errr, figuratively."

"And that little finish?"

Alexandra shrugged.

"Golems wouldn't have kept him in place for that little thing. Had he entered a room with a large pool of blood, he'd have left immediately. Had it arrived in a single batch, he would have done the same. But delivered slowly over time, through an environmental feature he 'knew' was harmless? That could be done, but I needed him in the same room, and be completely fixated on something. The golems would have forced him to constantly scan the environment, and he would have noticed. While the spear laser focused him on it."

"Right." Ghost sighed. They both knew these weren't the full reasons, but right now neither were willing to dig into them. "Well....it worked. You used blood magic to..." She shivered. "Eat him, I think?"

"Absorb him." She corrected. The foundation of blood magic was the manipulation of another being's mana. The foundation of necromancy was the manipulation of another being's essence. Combine both and you got something that could take down archons. "Which, lest you forget, we desperately needed. All those battles outside our influence nets us nothing in essence. Our policy of using branch offices to consolidate our core territories may have enabled the Empire but it doesn't allow us to use the secondary cores in battle and gain the essence from those fights. We were falling behind and you know it."

Ghost grimaced, but she nodded.

"I know, I know...and you got one hell of a payday."

"Yeah." Her interface, which was now happily quarantined and had been for a while, had cheerfully informed her that she could now make another secondary core...and an avatar.

The avatar part had a rather sizeable pile of error messages. Because she already had one, it seemed like making another wasn't an option just yet.

Oh well. At least now she could rebuild it if she lost it. Probably.

And, like she'd done with the coronation, make it public. She'd have needed to declare what had happened to Starvak anyway, well, at least that she'd killed the guy, and many people had felt the shocks coming from the mesa when she'd blown part of the second floor to fight him.

Declaring to the world that she'd slain an archon in her dungeon had more than covered why she would now have a dungeon avatar, and enabled her to finally use the damned thing. Ambassador golems weren't going away anytime soon but sweet stars she, at long fucking last, wasn't cooped up in her own damned dungeon!

Huh. She'd sworn by the stars. It was a while since she'd done that.

"So. What's next?" Asked the apparition.

"We salvage our army. Try to get as much as we can back online." The Mackies, especially, had taken a pasting. They were meant to be fire magnets, and worked magnificently in that role, but for the first time, they'd met technological superiority. Surprisingly, that had worked in their favor. The sheer shock that the guild had stockpiled things capable of felling the mighty Mackies had hammered in their treachery to everyone, because if they could do this...what could they do to less fortunate, and well armed nations? "Then we send it north."

"Still aiming to conquer the Sapphire Kingdom?"

"We've given them some openings for negotiations, but they've made it clear that while some are open to talk, they're going to stand with the UDC and will need to be brought to their knees before they all actually agree to listen. Besides, the entire east of the Kingdom, and our own territory with Kaidan and Lorenz, are clamoring for Sapphirian blood."

Plus, well...the pillar of power in Sapphire City was still their best bet to find out what the hell was up with Alcheryos. The digging next to the ley line was still ongoing, and honestly she wasn't sure how much it would uncover due to, you know, the place it led to being nuked out of existence. Repeatedly, too.

At least that hadn't happened to Rebirth. The guild hadn't been able to blow the power cores. She wasn't sure yet if that was because they weren't rigged up for remote detonation, if it hadn't worked thanks to the jamming and countermeasures clogging the air, or if they simply hadn't been able to.

It would make some good evidence...and one hell of a defusing job.

"Off to another war then."

"Not yet." The dungeon core stretched. "At least not today. I think we've more than earned some rest."

"That we have. That we have..."

They both looked into the fireplace, relaxing.

They could deal with the world and its many crisis tomorrow.

END OF BOOK 10