Chapter 157 - Material Science

Note : Chapters 158 and 159 have been written and added to the queue !

Also...first person to correctly guess what Alexandra's other self is planning to do with all of that, what her real purpose is, gets a cookie. I'm curious if someone can figure it out ^^ .

Chapter 157

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

Dungeon Factory, Workshop

"Every adjudicator is accompanied by inquisitors?" Asked Alexandra as she quickly checked the new shotgun prototype. She might be doing the fourth floor as an 'economy floor', to reuse all the stuff she'd created for her old army and CQ, but there was no reason she couldn't make a few new pieces of hardware along the way. Especially if they could prove incredibly useful like this one.

She'd focused on weapons that could be used during a field battle in her military buildup, and she was now working her way to more close quarters weapons. They could still be useful if the enemy reached the city's fortifications, although she still intended to stop them before it came to that, and if nothing else they'd be very useful inside the dungeon.

"Pretty much. They're a combination of bodyguards and enforcers, although they have some in more support oriented roles of course. They're their muscle, effectively."

"Uh. I guess they ascribe to the Damien Montgomery school of thought regarding bodyguards."

"Damien Montgomery?"

"He's a character from an old Terran novel series I used to read." Well, 'old', it was from the early 21st century. Not that there had been much mid-21st century literature. The Terran Hegemony war having pretty much put a stop to the cultural and artistic flourishing beforehand, putting all of humanity in a scramble to simply survive the apocalypse unleashed upon them. "In the novels, he was something akin to a combination of the adjudicators and the custodians, and he regularly used his bodyguards as a personal strike team."

"Uh. Well, as far as comparisons go, I suppose it is a pretty good one."

"Thank you. Now, you said Seraph was having difficulties?"

"Yes. Expanding the forges has proven fairly easy, and the upgrades with the assembly lines and the maintenance drones is going well, but they're running into issues with the materials refining."

"Well, that's always the issue isn't it?" After all she could produce raw whatever the hell she wanted. Processing it was a whole other story. She had electrum and mythril, but she could only use either at stupendous costs because she couldn't refine their ores. Not that their ore wasn't already expensive to begin with! "Alright, I'll meet with her later today. Now, I believe we've completed everything for the third floor. All the stress tests are done, and the cobra plate issue is sorted. I'll send a message to Allya and open the doors tomorrow. Any objections?"

"Don't you mean the flood gates? And no. It's about damn time."

"Would have been done weeks, hell, months ago if not for the Republic." First the self destruct had forced her to rebuild it from scratch, then the war had pretty much siphoned off all of her resources, both in terms of mana and brain power. "If you have any complaints, take it up with them."

"Oh, I intend to."

Alexandra winced internally. She hoped her advisor -and girlfriend- would never have to face the Republic's soldiers again, but she was also almost morbidly curious as to what she would pull out of her grimoire this time. Despite appearances she was an extremely powerful mage, and her nigh unlimited supply of mana, plus steady stream of essence from all the deaths happening around her, had made her even more so. Plus, she was regularly on the communication crystal with her family, and Alexandra had no doubt there was some magic knowledge transfer going on there as well.

"Well, I suppose we'll see once it happens. Regardless, let's get down to the excavation site, and continue on the fourth floor." Her other self's request that they test out manual excavation and build machinery capable of digging without relying on her dungeon powers had been genius, and she'd almost slapped herself for not thinking it sooner. If her influence was disrupted again -unlikely given her counter-measures, but still-, or more likely just packed with enough individuals to generate the interference to neuter her, she would definitely need more mundane means to dig tunnels, for surface assaults or maybe to counter enemy infiltration.

She wasn't so sure why her other self had requested the construction of a warehouse for the sandstone, as well as the building of centrifuges, some rock crushers, and the requisition of industrial quantities of sulfuric acid. Apparently it was for trying to find and separate ore the old fashion way rather than rely on outside supply, even if only to output trace amounts, as her powers apparently were not capable of doing it on their own, but there was probably more to it. She had a faint feeling about this particular combination of equipment, but she couldn't quite place it. Something about the Ottoman Directorate, she was fairly sure.

She shrugged internally. She would figure it out eventually. And her other self's projects had systematically proven to be worth their weight in antimatter so far, so she could suffer a little mystery on the apparition's part.

"Sure. I just hope you'll at least consider making the trenches a bit better."

"It's supposed to be a battlefield honey, not an art project."

"I beg to differ."

"Of course you do. Alright, let's get moving, we have work to do!"

*****

"We really need to raid a foundry. Or kidnap a forgemaster." Commented the Earth-born as she looked at the metallurgy laboratory.

"While that would be an expeditious course of action, logic dictates it would create consequences disproportionate to the gains." Answered Seraph.

Alexandra sighed.

"I know, I know." The AI still had no idea what 'rhetorical statement' meant. Or sarcasm, for that matter. But she was getting better. She was even being frustrated by this whole mess, if only a bit. "So, how did the last test run go?"

"Not…well. Electrum remains a highly anomalous material, that techniques which have been successful on other materials like copper and iron have failed on. Which is problematical."

Alexandra nodded. Electrum wasn't really useful except for one key property. It wasn't tough, couldn't really hold enchantments, and sucked as even thermal shielding. But it approached room temperature supra-conductivity, which was just insane. It had taken Earth something approaching three decades after inventing metamaterial manufacturing and molecular printers to create something akin to it, and decades more to manufacture it on any kind of scale!

But here they could just mine the stuff out of the damn ground. Of course, you had to process it into a useable form, which was proving a lot harder than she'd thought. Electrum clearly wasn't just a 'heat it, pour it/beat it into shape' kind of metal. Which begged the question of what it was, exactly.

"Well, I'll add it to the list of stuff to get from the surface." A list which, paradoxically, only ever got longer the more stuff they acquired. Kind of like her to-do list, every item done only spurred three more.

TO-DO LIST UPDATED

Speaking of which.

"Thank you milady. I can report success on the spring steel however."

"Really? That's awesome! How did you do it?"

"A combination of manganese, low carbon steel and sulfur appeared to work. It is not, perhaps, perfect, but it does narrow the search range for more useable materials. As it is it is satisfactory for the use in various purposes."

"Including crossbows?"

"Including crossbows."

Alexandra smiled. Finally. That would allow her to actually massively lower the cost of CQ's royal guard if she could manufacture the crossbows the old fashion way. And although a bit late to the party, given the fact that she had firearms, she was sure she could make a host of golem and machinery upgrade with that.

"Good job. It looks like this little metallurgy lab is paying off."

"Indeed." Seraph blinked, and tilted her head. "Milady, lady Allya is at the military entrance, and is requesting to speak with you?"

"Uh?" Alexandra quickly checked in dungeon mode, and indeed the baroness was there, waiting. After all this time doing everything herself, it felt a bit weird having stuff be routed through Seraph instead of the alarms disturbing her, but it did wonders to her concentration, letting the AI handle the myriad of minor emergencies and problems that always cropped up during day to day dungeon operations. "So she is. I'll go greet her. Do you have anything you want to talk about before I leave?"

"Outside of the fact that Mythril refining remains a lost cause, negative."

"We'll crack it. Eventually."

Golems didn't have emotions, or faces, but she could almost feel Seraph's dubiousness regardless. Wait, no, she could feel it. She was just so used to the AI being borderline emotionless she'd forgotten they had that emotional link.

"If you say so milady. Have a good meeting."

"Thank you Seraph. I hope your little experiments go well."

Then she hopped out of her avatar, setting it to return to the command center on autopilot, and went to meet her ally.

*****

"You want to do a dungeon delve?"

Allya nodded at the golem, willing herself to be as calm as humanely possible. The one person she did not want to even remotely guess her motivations was Alexandra. Crystal, damn it!

"Indeed. With a part of three to five total, depending on who my teammate can recruit."

"You have an army, you could head down with an infantry platoon."

"That would hardly be polite. Besides, I'd rather take trained and experienced adventurers with me." The baroness looked over her shoulder, smiling at Éclair. "Sorry sergeant." There had been a round of promotion after the Republic had been repulsed, which had extended to her bodyguards. It had made them a bit rank heavy, but it set the ground for a future expansion of her personal guard, and they weren't about the complain about the pay increase!

"No problem milady. I know my limitations." The bodyguard wasn't happy -not that she ever was, or at least not for long-, but she was a realist.

"I see." Said Crystal. "Who do you intend to bring with you then?"

"My knight, Pyn, as well as guild representative Dominique. She is also trying to convince two of the adventurers that were enslaved by the Void Blades to joins us, Alyssa and Raika."

Her tone was studiously neutral as she said those names. And while the golem didn't have facial expression, she saw it twitch ever so slightly at the mention of the two names.

It wasn't surprising, but the confirmation would stop her from thinking she was an insane paranoid reaching out to mad conclusions. Maybe.

"Of course. I will make accommodations, just in case."

"I do not require special treatment."

"You should." Bluntly said Crystal. "You are the leader of your people and my ally. Neither of us can afford to have you taken out of action if something happens. Besides which, most of one's power is the appearance of power. You getting special treatment, even if only because I insist on it, makes you look more powerful, and thus makes you a better ally."

"Smokes and mirrors make for frail shields."

"Everything is smokes and mirrors to some level, even militaries. Besides, if push comes to shove, I have the steel to back up the damn mirrors. I'd just rather have it hidden behind the smoke so our enemies don't see me coming."

Allya smiled at the tortuous metaphor. And the dungeon core was right, having their enemies focus on her, the junior partner, rather than the main threat was indeed valuable. As long as those idiots continued seeing the extradimensional as a sidekick, they would lose, no two ways about it.

"I see your point. Very well, it'll be my pleasure. What kind of special treatment where you thinking of?"

"My troops will cease attack as soon as you yield. There'll be better loot, direct access to the maintenance system if you need to leave quickly without going to the elevators, not to mention resupplies if you need them. I'll also give you privileged early access to the fourth floor."

"The fourth? Not the third?"

"Oh, right, sorry. I almost forgot to tell you, the third floor is complete. I intend to open it tomorrow to the public, so you probably should warn the guild."

"I will." An added perk of their deepening alliance was that the dungeon core went to her to relay news to the guild, instead of directly contacting them. This made Crystal's opinion on the guild's overreach quite clear…as well as whose side she would take in a conflict, if there was any doubt about her betraying her oaths and staying neutral. "And as much as I would love to explore the fourth floor, never explored before locations are incredibly lethal. Besides, we would have to make it through everything else first."

"Oh I'm sure you'll make quite a bit of headway. But, just in case, I have a VIP resurrection system set up." And that had taken a lot of haggling with Emilia. It wasn't a spell she was supposed to have, but with some pressure and arguments with her mother -where she had shamelessly used the possibility of having to resurrect Emilia-, she had prevailed. It was mana inefficient as hell (to the point of taking more mana than the adventurers would have given her during their delve by a significant margin) and slow, very slow, with a throughput so pathetic it would never be useable for main dungeon operations, but it worked. "I hope we won't need it, but still."

"Thank you, that's much appreciated. Well then, I'll return to my teammates with the confirmation. I will send a messenger once I settle for a time slot with the guild."

"Of course. I'll be delighted to have you over."

They exchanged a few pleasantries, before parting ways. Allya walking back up the ramp with a purposeful stride, wondering all the while if the dungeon core had spotted her stress and sweaty palms, just like she had noticed the extradimensional's reaction to the name of her old teammates.