Chapter 103 - Expanding Influence

Chapter 103

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, Core Room

"Alright…let's do this."

Alexandra sat in a lotus position in front of her core and closed her eyes, jumping her full consciousness into dungeon mode.

It had been…months since she'd done this. Hell, as far as she remembered she did this, what? Three times in all? And the last one was right at the end of team Crystalline's first visit.

She took her mana, took a deep breath, and began expanding her influence.

Her mana reserves dropped as she felt her influence grow. She felt the, well, bumps for the lack of a better word as she hit people. She pushed, pushed, and stopped suddenly.

Her influence now encompassed almost two third of her gigantic mesa and pierced through the roof (in places where there still was one), not to mention hitting the outer edge of the city.

She winced as she felt the interference. Emilia had been partially right, the entrance was just impossible to modify anymore, same for a good chunk of the first floor, although thankfully it looked like the steps, the labyrinth and -especially- the forges were far enough back to be editable. Mostly.

"Well, its done." Alexandra sighed, before looking over her shoulder at Emilia.

"On our end at least. Seems to have created quite the agitation on theirs." Answered the vampire girl as she nodded towards a screen.

Alexandra looked up, and chuckled.

"So it would seem. Well, I'm sure the baroness is up to the challenge. Plus, more mana for me!"

*****

Allya sighed as she looked at the crowd.

"You know, it could be worse." Said Pyn.

"I know. It doesn't mean that it's 'good' however."

"Right. I suppose that's fair enough…"

Pyn shifted from one foot to another as they gazed at the crowd. This time they had required the knights' riot control equipment, to avoid a rush. As the elf had said, it could have been much, much worse, but they still had had a forming riot on their hands.

Until, that was, her troops had waded in and, ah, convinced the ringleaders to calm down.

A few skulls had been cracked, and they'd probably racked up some resentment, but the adventurer's guild announcement that everyone would be allowed to cultivate if they could just calm the hell down and stay in an orderly queue had done a lot to quell that.

Still, the crowd was rowdy, and there were still a few who didn't seem to get the hint and had to be arrested.

The problem was that…it shouldn't have been this agitated. Yes, people, especially in large groups, were morons, but with the guild helping to organize things it shouldn't have been an issue. Someone was fanning the flames, she could feel it. And for one, she wasn't going to bet on it being Republic agent. Oh, they weren't above stirring up civil unrest, but so far they had appeared to be more focused on direct military operations, however covert, and it seemed a bit late to switch up their playbook.

Especially when she had gotten some fragmentary reports that the troops at Erakis were starting to gear up for a wasteland crossing, with troops and especially airships resupplying and preparing to move out. With the forces they're assembled there, and the lack of public knowledge about her alliance with the dungeon, the republic probably thought it would be enough to squash her.

After Crystal's little demonstration, she would delighted to see them try. Nothing better than a few thousand corpses to fertilize the wasteland and start up some agriculture, now that there was enough ambient mana for that. Not to mention the terror effect of sending back their 'liberators' or however they'd frame their invading army in tiny pieces.

Allya sighed as the crowd surged once again, shaking her head, and stepped forward to join the commander of the riot troops. Maybe she could adress these idiots and leverage some of her overinflated reputation to knock some sense into them.

*****

"Well, it looks like our baroness has hidden depths. Never would have taken her for a good orator. At least not against a hostile crowd." Said Alexandra as she popped a chip into her mouth. She'd hesitated to go and take care of some things on her even expanding TO-DO list, but decided she'd been due for a break, and the closest thing to entertainment she had was surface dweller shenanigans. And CQ induced shenanigans, but she'd rather not breathe over daughter's shoulder all the time. Besides, she was busy not taking notice of whatever surprise the boss was coming up with next, although a significant quantity of paint had disappeared from the workshop's storage, and Sarah's maid dress looked like it had been caught in a paint ball fight.

The vampire maid had stayed absolutely tight lipped about the state of her clothes of course. It amazed Alexandra just how quickly her daughter had gotten the maids wrapped around her little finger without even trying.

"Well, they are adventurers, and she mostly talked about how they would all profit, and trying to fight through the security cordon would only create a mess that would cut even more into their cultivation time than just waiting in line."

"True, true." Alexandra extended the bowl of chips to her advisor, who picked up a few. "For all of their professed differences from mercenaries, adventurers are little different, deep down."

"That would offend a lot of people up there."

"I know!" Alexandra chuckled, before her face became grim.

"What?"

"No, just…something I remembered. My old party leader, Raika. She used to hate mercenaries."

"Right. Still hoping to find her?"

"If she is still alive, but yes. If nothing else, finding her would get me one step closer to getting my hands on whoever turned me into a dungeon core. Irrespective of any more…personal motivation, which I have aplenty, as I'm sure you have realized."

"I know. What do you intend to do once you find them however? Do you intend on telling them what happened to you?"

Alexandra winced.

"Honestly I'm pretty tempted not to. I…I genuinely don't know. I think it'll have to be something that I decide on the moment, based on the circumstances."

"So cross that bridge when it comes to it."

"Yep."

Emilia looked at the screens for a few seconds, munching on the chips, before clearing her throat.

"So, how much further interference did you get from the people cultivating?"

"Well, not as much as I feared. My influence has to follow a rough sphere, which means that it becomes exponentially more costly to expand in terms of 'surface' bought, but the same goes for the interference. For every meter that it goes further 'in', it also goes a meter up in the air and underground. Still…" Alexandra sighed. "First floor is out. Same for some of the forges, although thankfully it appears that it only concerns some of the old iron forges, not the new assembly lines. The steps are still fine, they're buried deep enough. For now at least."

"It'll only get worse. Especially as people start developping that area. A lot of people are just going to buy a cheap cultivation technique and cultivate there whenever they can."

"I know, I know." Alexandra smiled. "Still, I guess it is a good trade for now. My mana production has gone through the roof. Not as much as for a non-extradimensional dungeon core I suppose, but with the expanded influence and all the people in it…wow. Just wow."

"Time to finish up the third floor?"

"Oh yeah. And build that military entrance. And so, so much more. I finally have the resources to start taking some serious projects while maintaining the defense spending."

"That's good. So where do you think of putting the military entrance?"

"Here." Alexandra gestured at a screen, whose image flickered and was replaced by a rough map of the area. A red cross appeared on the southern part of the mesa, almost at the new limit of her influence. "Far from the other entrances to reduce possible traffic jams -and to be honest, to justify a free fire zone to keep assholes from interfering-, plus it is directly towards the most likely approach vector from the Republic."

"Won't that make it vulnerable to attack?"

"There's going to be an entire defensive line between us and them, a fortress wall if they give Allya and her engineers enough time." Engineers she was starting to feel jealous of. She was good at her job, very good, but her knowledge about medieval siege warfare, especially magical siege warfare was limited, at best, even with Emilia's books. These guys clearly knew what they were doing, and she had 'arranging a conversation' with them on her TO-DO list. Right after the 'develop a tranquilizer dart'. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that, but you never knew. "And if they have indirect fire weapons with the kind of range to hit the entrance without being shredded by the defensive fire, then they sure as hell could hit the entrance -and probably spot it- wherever it is on the mesa. Besides, don't underestimate the potential psyschological effect, they don't seem to know that I have allied with the baroness yet -I'd have expected some angry messages from the UDC otherwise-, and if that stays up until they march their army here…Half of a battle is demoralizing the enemy, and marching an army of golems they didn't expect to fight out of the mesa right in front of them is as demoralizing as it can get."

"Do you really expect the alliance to remain a secret?"

"No. What I am expecting is for people to not believe it and think it a wild rumor or a bluff on Allya's part." Alexandra's smile was definitely wolfish. "The good thing with the UDC's unprecedented decision to leave me hanging in the wind is that it is exactly that, unprecedented. No one will expect me to outright shit on their rules and take up arms to defend surface dwellers. And the UDC's too proud, despite their cowardice, to outright announce they betrayed one of their fellows for political reasons."

"Right. That makes a frightening amount of sense."

" 'All warfare is based on deception'. Sun Tzu might have written this millenia ago, but that man was almost disturbingly smart when it came to the base principles underlying warfare. Still, the point stands. And as some say, there is no such thing as stealth, only realizing something you thought you knew all along was something else altogether. And in this case that's me being a good little dungeon turning out to be a full on bitch with a metal army and anger management issues to work out."

Emilia nodded. It wasn't the first time Alexandra had spoken about the 'Art of War'. For that matter, the Western Marches had a copy, transcribed by another extradimensional millenia ago. She tried not to chuckle at the dungeon core's little self portrait.

"Well, hopefully they will see reason and surrender when you, ah, reveal your lack of self control."

Alexandra laughed out loud.

"I'll give them a chance to do so anyway. But if they weren't completely corrupt or brain dead from the get go they wouldn't even march their army out here to begin with. I suppose we'll just have to see, won't we?"

"I suppose we wil, yes."

*****

The core was sorting through a bank of damaged fabricators through its repair drones when the mana wave hit.

It was…like nothing he'd ever experienced before. Not that he had much of any experience to begin with, but even his (admittedly lacking) database had nothing to compare this to. It was like some kind of mana tsunami.

And it didn't go down. Oh, yes, there was a significant spike, but the ambient mana levels went up by a factor of at least an order of magnitude, and capacitors, which had until then been slowly accumulating mana, suddenly almost went into overload, gorging themselves on the ambient energy.

The core had no real frame of referrence for what had just happened. There were possibilities, of course, but all of them were ridiculous. A lot of industrial systems could produce gigantic quantities of mana like that, enough to create a wave, but it would be incredibly primitive and wasteful to just…throw it out into the air like some kind of exhaust gas, instead of containing and carefully distributing it to the population or installations that needed it.

It looks at its estimates for its plans, and if it could have smiled it would have. However strange and inexplicable, the mana wave was more than welcome.

With that kind of energy, it could finally put some things into motion.

Security combat golems began to pull out of their cradles with jerky movements. Their millenia of sleep, and especially whatever had taken out the installations' occupants had taken a toll on them, but still they moved on. And in the command bunker, the core activated the startup sequence for the facility's emergency backup generator.

A slow, almost beyond human hearing hum began to fill the bunker as the NLR core's containment fields spun up.