Chapter 127

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth.

Dungeon Factory, Command Center.

"Are you sure focusing everything on this is a good idea?" Said Emilia, her worry clear in her tone.

Alexandra sighed as she worked on the damaged railgun.

"By this, I assume you mean the facility beneath us?" Emilia nodded, and the Earth-born sighed once more. "Yeah. I don't like it, but yeah. The Republic's army is huge and powerful, but right now I'm not worried about the mountain of bodies with arquebusiers and bombards. I'm terrified of the guys with the railguns and laser weaponry. Plus, it's what you don't know -and haven't planned for- that kills you, and we've planned extensively for the Republic."

"They destroyed the bertha." And killed Jared, but that wasn't worth mentionning, as the butler golem, boss and gunslinger was already slated to be brought back once the damned boss resurrection timer ran out.

"Which was always the goal. That gun was nothing more than a giant pot of honey on a bear trap. The only thing that surprises me is that they got caught. Twice."

"Twice? Their second attempt succeeded!"

"Yes. They destroyed a gun which had a dozen shells left, which I had intended as a sacrificial distraction anyway. And in doing so they completely wasted two full platoons of elite special forces soldiers, and outed the fact that they had glider infantry, which we'll be ready for now."

"I suppose that's fair…still, the town has to be growing suspicious. Your refusal to rebuild the gun was abrupt."

"I phrased it abruptly to Ella because I'm honest with her. On this matter, at least. She'll soften it up into more diplomatic language for consumption by our allies."

"Right." Emilia looked as Alexandra jammed a tool that made no sense to her into an indentation, and the railgun's protective casing finally popped open. Carefully, of course, replicating the even damaged weapon had been…'expensive', didn't quite cover it. She could have built the bertha all over again for that price! And it wasn't even functional! "Finally?"

"Finally! Yeah. Now let's take a look." One thing she'd realized was that her interface could have a lot of uses, but that it was just abominably useless with high tech weapons. Whatever system it had to automatically discern the purpose of things seemed to stop working past a certain point. Which, given what she'd talked about with her other self, who was still lurking somewhere in her psyche, made perfect sense. Why load the database with all the niceties for high tech weaponry when the control program is supposed to prevent the dungeon core from making it? Which meant she had to get her hands dirty if she wanted to be able to do anything with what she'd acquired.

At least she was lucky that the basic golems she had hadn't registered as high tech military. It seems that the 'Sagitarius Empire' had used off the shelves civilian models for their primary security units, and simply given them guns. The military bots she'd smashed however…were a more complicated matter.

She quickly gazed at the railgun, and frowned. Something was…off. Familiar, even.

"Is there a problem?" Asked the vampire girl.

"No. I mean, yes. There's some sizeable differences, obviously, from what I know, but a railgun's a railgun. There's just something off with the base design…"

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know, it seems almost like…" She frowned as she inspected the weapon. Then it clicked, and her eyes went wide. She knew that gun. She knew it inside and outside. Because she'd spent over a year in the hills and barely terraformed marshes of Alpha Centauri lugging the damned thing around, fixing it and hammering more together from destroyed models and spare systems.

It was a T96 'shell-breaker' EuroFed railgun. The power system was just plainly wrong, and the magnets were different, but the basic architecture, the ammo feed, all the central designs were completely the same.

She felt a twinge of unease as another train of thought hovered just out of reach, and she realized her other self was as much in shock as she was.

"Alex? Alex! Can you hear me?!?"

Alexandra shook herself, and looked at Emilia, who was trying to shake her around and failing miserably. The avatar was, after all, thirty centimeters taller and covered in heavy armor.

"Yeah, yeah. I can. Hey, uh….Emilia?"

"What?" Said the vampire girl, worried by the very rare use of her actual name.

"I think we have a problem." She tapped the weapon. "This? This is a terran railgun."

*****

"Of course I understand your concerns. But you must remember that my lady requires resources for her own defences, especially as the Republic has amply demonstrated teleportation capabilities in their previous attack, and almost succeeded. Who's to say how many troops they could send through with an entire army at their fingertips?"

The maid's smooth, almost velvety tones reverberated through the command center, and Allya had to admit that she had a point. It sounded perfect reasonable.

But she'd seen far too much, and come to suspect too much, to take it at face value, or even remotely believe it. Her councilors however…

"That is an excellent point, miss Ella." Said Willard as he bowed slightly. "We did not wish to imply that lady Crystal has been derelict under her obligations." He chuckled. "In fact she has delivered above and beyond, despite the…difficulties. And as we have said numerous times." His face darkened. "Be assured that we will intervene if they attempt the same trick again."

"That assurance is much appreciated, councilor Willard. Let us hope that it is never needed."

Allya hid a shiver as the maid spoke once again. She was the picture of charm and honesty, but the baroness recognized a cold blooded killer when she saw one. There was a reason she'd had sabotaged the magical contract with Arkor, the man who'd formed the party that had eventually led them to fighting Crystal and discovering her dungeon, after all. The thought brought her back however, it had been…what, a year, at most? It felt like half a millennia.

"Let us hope indeed." Said the baroness, before leaning forward onto the map table. "But let us address some more tactical concerns. The enemy's airships have been humbled, but not crippled. Still, even without that…bertha, was it?" Ella nodded. "I doubt they will attempt a pure air attack again. The main threat now is going to be the main army, now that they are no longer threatened by the gun they have moved their camp within attacking range. We have the advantage of having the interior position, allowing us to shift troops from different sides faster than they can, so an encirclement would have little use to them. There's also no way for them to hide significant troop movements, at least close enough to us to matter."

"So they cannot mass forces at a single point without warning, thus allowing us to do the same." Said Philia. "But the problem is that while we have artillery superiority in terms of number of guns, they still have siege bombards capable of crushing the walls, and a massive contingent of mages. The latter worries me the most. A conclave of war mages can do a great deal with time and mana, and unfortunately while they are short on the former there is no shortage of the latter, even kilometers from a dungeon."

"Agreed." Said Ella, her eyes shading thoughtfully, and her facade slipped for a split second, revealing the cold calculating machine behind her warm gaze. "You know, there is something my lady mentioned to me once that I believe is relevant to this. When discussing guard schedules, she told me that our golems do not sleep, eat, or even need maintenance."

"So?"

"So, it is quite simple. Most of our forces need no rest…but they do. And as you said, they cannot mass forces without us knowing it, but...can they see us do the same?"

"Are…are you suggesting a sortie?"

"Not as a mass attack. But we have thousands of golems. We can spend a few hundred in night attacks to prevent them from sleeping."

"They'll be slaughtered."

"Correct. But every raid will give them three choices. Either honor the threat, wake everyone every time they are attacked, and thus ruin their soldiers' rest, retreat outside the range we can launch a raid without being detected by the airships during daytime, or chose to let their sentries handle it."

"And if they do the latter, we attack, correct?" Said Pyn, and the vampire maid nodded.

"Indeed. And if they retreat, well, mission accomplished! The former would also massively degrade their combat capabilities, and massively disrupt any ritual they might prepare."

"It's not foolproof." Said Philia, bluntly, before grimacing. "But honestly without a new bertha to keep them at bay, I really don't see a better way to go about it. Baroness?"

Allya sighed.

"It's going to cost us troops. But you're right, we can, and should, trade forces, especially disposable ones, for time. Every day more transports arrive, bringing supplies and reinforcements, thanks to the docking tower. And if we can hold them at bay long enough…"

"The army of Sarth will smash them against the city like an hammer against an anvil." Completed Willard with a fierce smile.

"Yeah."

"Do you really think that's like to happen?" Said Pyn softly.

"No. But they know it will happen if they don't hurry. And the more pressure we pile onto them…the more miscalculations and mistakes they'll make. And war isn't about skill or talent. It's about who makes the most fuck ups. Let's make sure it's not us."

Everyone nodded.

She was just hoping trusting Crystal wasn't one of those catastrophic mistakes.

*****

Alexandra shouldered the railgun, and pulled the trigger.

She felt the mana being drained from her pool as magic created electricity, and the current was discharged into the electromagnets.

The railgun's butt hammered into her shoulder and she oofed as she almost let go of the weapon. But the absorption pad, not to mention the integrated recoil compensation system that had to manipulate inertia in some way she didn't really understand, worked.

And the target, a damaged spider tank who had narrowly won its fight against adventurers in the first floor's boss room, collapsed, as the slug of tungsten punched through it effortlessly, turning its own armor into the plasma that vented through its internal systems, destroying it.

"Seems to work well enough." Said Alexandra, smirking as she put the gun over her shoulder. It wasn't as effective as the one the golems had wielded, but that's because she didn't need something meant to give grav tanks a new asshole. She was fighting decayed, almost crumbling combat droids which had been bested by glorified black powder field guns the union army during the US civil war would have called obsolete. So she'd shortened the barrel, and tweaked some things to make it cheaper and easier to wield.

"Honestly, I'm impressed at how fast you did this." Said Emilia. There was…awe, in her tone.

"First and foremost, simply because I swatted aside all distractions and told everyone to leave me the fuck alone. Which I guess I should have been doing for a long time. I have subordinates I can rely on after all." She smiled at her advisor. "And, well…" She tapped the gun. "Magic, spells, gunpowder, hell, even pulsers…that's stuff I knew very little about. But railguns and laser rifles? Emilia I spent half my life designing or working with this stuff. When you think about it, the main weapon batteries of the battleships I helped build were nothing more than really big laser rifles or railguns. This, this is exactly up my alley."

Emilia smiled.

"Well, let's just say it was impressive seeing you go so quickly. I guess I'm not gonna be able to help a lot with that kind of tech."

"Oh you will. If nothing else while it clearly has a conventional technological origin, there's a lot of magitech into those babies. A lot of which I do not understand. But you might." She carefully reloaded the weapon, and checked its small screen for capacitor charge and heat levels. All were nominal, although for the capacitors that was hardly a surprise, they would only start depleting outside of her influence. Something to keep in mind for mana fed energy weapons was that those she built wouldn't run out of ammo inside her dungeon. So long as she had the mana to feed to them of course. Which was…a concern now. "Just wished these things weren't so damned expensive."

Even with the reduced cost, she could barely build two for every fully armed, crewed and supplied bertha. Which costs in and of itself a freaking fortune! Especially for the shells, granted, but still.

"But they'll tip the scales in our favor, right?"

"Oh yes, that we will. Come on, let's get these babies to Sarah. Time to fight at equal terms at last. And if we do this right, we might even catch ourselves some pretty, pretty prices."

"You're letting me near the entrance?"

"Yes." She didn't hesitate, as she'd had golems go over every square meter of the elevator shaft before even letting Sarah into the fortress that guarded it. "But no further. Now, let's go kick some high tech ass." She smiled wolfishly, and Emilia met her grin with her own, even toothier smile.

That fucking facility, or whatever the hell ran it, wouldn't know what hit them.