[MLV] 38. Rhonne Incident (Patreon)

When Alicia arrived at the steel mill, it was profoundly noisy as always.

The sound of belts, line shafts, and the constant grind of the massive engines powering the various facilities involved at ironmaking, steelmaking, casting, and rolling to produce both iron and steel meant that the complex was loud, hot, and full of activity. The separate foundry on the other side of the Orevogorsk River, which produced the steel mill’s actual finished products like enchanted tools, weapons, and armor, was no different.

All in all, Orevogorsk’s growing steel industry was her town’s largest employer. Around fifteen hundred employees worked under Orevogorsk Steel Works. That didn’t include the miners and transportation workers that fed raw materials or moved the finished goods that the steel mill churned out everyday.

Large amounts of smoke gushed out of the chimneys of the complex’s buildings. Unfortunately, to produce steel, the use of coal and its polluting effects was unavoidable, but the steel mill’s actual machines operated cleanly due to the magical properties of the crystals used to power it, which, through its controlled reactions, efficiently moved the pistons of the steel mill’s massive engines through magical force alone without the use of combustion.

Alicia viewed this as a miracle beyond words. In this world, by fusing magic and technology, producing power wasn’t limited to the usual act of boiling water. They could simply command crystals to create mechanical energy at nearly 100% efficiency. The future of their civilization was definitely going to be beyond bright. Electrification was really only a few years away at this point from mass adoption based on her estimates from reading scientific publications in Alsatia, and one day, maybe the people of this world wouldn’t even have to figure out fusion just to cross interplanetary distances.

After all, they already had the ability to produce energy that surpassed even the most advanced forms of fusion technology conceived in her home world in terms of efficiency, miniaturization, and raw power output. All they lacked was the technology and materials science to fully implement it optimally, something that would inevitably become achievable in the future.

Considering she was a long-lived vampire, she might even see that age too. The thought of it made her excited back then that her diary entries had a few notes about it, as she definitely planned to one day ensure that Vael would be first up there.

Until she found out that these miracle crystals weren’t all that rosy at all.

Underneath its innocent exterior, its promise of near limitless energy that it could provide with perfect ease, without any downside, was a dark secret. Alicia hadn’t figured out yet what that secret truly was, or if the incident at the capital was truly connected to magic crystals, or if this was just speculation from Kullervo, but the fact that his ‘ritual’ perfectly coincided with the creation of a black dungeon in the capital was too big of an evidence to be ignored.

Somehow, someway, these crystals, which stored the magical essence that made the world function at a fundamental level, not only destroyed it once used, but it might be replacing it with something far more sinister and destructive. Paired with the seductive allure of these crystals being the most efficient source of energy imaginable, Alicia felt a nagging fear that magic crystals might be the most dangerous threat to this planet.

After all, how could anyone rational even consider the option of not using it, even if it turned out to be dangerous?

So as she gazed at the product of her hard work, the steelworks she envisioned as the start of a bright new world for her kin, she felt as if its promises were just suddenly and coldly snatched away from her. It was beyond unfair. As she walked toward the administrative building, Alicia’s steps were somewhat less composed as workers cheered or greeted her, knowing that she might have just made people work on a facility that could lead to a second black dungeon in Vael.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she could simply handwave it away like most other problems using her strength. Unfortunately, black dungeons were the problem that not even her high levels could counter.

Even then, she tried her best to return the positive vibes of her subjects by giving them her signature smiles and waves as a response. Alicia knew that she was profoundly popular amongst her people. They practically adored her, only limited by the fact that they still somewhat walked on eggshells because of her status as a powerful vampiric lord. 

That didn’t matter much though, as Alicia could still lean on it and improve her image every day by simply treating them well by interacting freely with them. Presenting a friendly and comforting face was something Alicia valued. She didn’t want to be seen as a cold tyrant or anything that her heritage would suggest, but today, she felt that doing this performance was a little bit harder.

Soon, she arrived at Maxim’s office.

Once again, she plastered a smile on her face.

She couldn’t even tell him yet the full details about this issue. But she was already about to ask him for solutions.

“Good afternoon, Maxim!” Alicia greeted, presenting a basket to him. “I’ve brought some Polonian chocolates for you. Apologies for the unannounced visit.”

“Uh, good afternoon too, but there’s no need for you to bring me that much at all, Your Grace,” Maxim replied, a little bit awkwardly as he stood up while Alicia approached his desk. “Though, thank you.”

“You’re very welcome,” Alicia smiled.

These past weeks, due to how busy Alicia was, their communications had been largely done through Lyra. Since their construction efforts didn’t really need Alicia’s assistance yet, she could largely leave them to Maxim, who was now acting as a bit of her ad hoc captain of industry. It seemed that these calmer times were a positive for Maxim.

He looked far healthier than the last time Alicia met him. He seemed like he was having good sleep these days, and he was eating well. Good for him, because Alicia was about to ruin his stable work life again.

Hence, well, the chocolates.

“So,” Alicia started as she placed the basket on his table. “I have plans.”

“Plans?”

“And you, as usual, will be the guy doing the heavy lifting at implementing it.”

Maxim finally sat back on his seat, nodding along, clueless about the insurmountable task ahead of him.

“Well, that’s what I’m being paid for. Shoot.”

Alicia took a deep breath.

Then she dropped the bomb.

“I want you to figure out how to restructure our industries away from using magic crystals, in the low-probability scenario in which we would have no choice but to do this.”

For a while, silence dominated Maxim’s office.

The gargoyle stared at the vampire as if she’d gone insane. Alicia’s eyes, however, told Maxim enough that she was a hundred percent serious.

“...What?” Was Maxim’s only response as Alicia finally explained everything to him, minus the part about magic crystals leading to the creation of miasma and black dungeons, as that still needed more research for confirmation. For now though, she told him that she had a problem about the magic crystals, and she needed options in case these ‘problems’ forced her hands to phase them out.

Understandably, Maxim was utterly bewildered by this even as he listened to Alicia’s request and suggestions. Without knowing it, their discussions soon took hours, and the sunset turned into a full moon.

“So…” Maxim tiredly massaged his temples. “This is all necessary?”

“We will find out soon enough,” Alicia said. “But I want us to be fully prepared if a strategic pivot in our industrial processes becomes necessary. We have to have viable plans we can experiment on in a pinch.”

“I think this is a pointless diversion…”

“It must look that way to you, yes.”

Alicia frowned.

“But I am serious. We might really have to shift away from magic crystals. I have reason to believe they are dangerous, and the evidence is damning at the moment.”

“But it’s not yet confirmed.”

“I would like to act as if it’s confirmed anyway just in case.”

Maxim sighed, leaning back on his chair.

“Alright,” Maxim nodded. “I’ll try figuring this out.”

Almost immediately, Alicia began blabbering ideas at Maxim, mostly pulled out of her home world’s energy sources. First was naturally coal, which they had in great abundance, then fossil fuels, then hydropower. All of them were, in comparison to magic crystals, utterly inferior. Alicia was essentially asking Maxim to figure out how to downgrade their technology from rudimentarily harnessing the equivalent of fusion to coal power.

She explicitly told him, though, that these were just the starting ideas he would have to work on, that she would try to figure out another method closer to magic crystals while avoiding their pitfalls. Magic was full of possibilities after all. There must be another path to producing energy without literally burning existing mana out of existence.

In fact, she could do it easily by herself. She could technically use her magic to repeatedly move engines herself over and over again, and the mana she ‘used up’ would naturally return to the environment. It was a great distinction from activating magic crystals and burning up that mana.

Of course, this ran into the problem of this not being feasible, as Alicia didn’t want to turn herself into a living engine to power every industry out there. That would be madness, but it was a useful working concept that gave her hope that there might be other avenues out there. However, since she was preparing for the worst-case scenario, she told Maxim for now to focus on designing something based on internal combustion.

In other words—boiling water to produce steam.

When he began drafting designs for this over the coming days, it was good luck that Maxim didn’t find it difficult at all. The idea of combustion engines wasn’t entirely lost to the people of this world. In fact, since ‘burning’ magic crystals produced a lot of heat, one of the first few magical engines conceived involved boiling water.

Unfortunately, the engines they had built right now weren’t of this design. They operated on purely commanding the magic crystals inside to produce magical force, simply because this was far more efficient. It needed no cooling, it didn’t lose any of the magic crystals’ energy as waste heat, and its power output was far higher.

“To make things short, the designs I have right now definitely won’t work if we plug them into our factories,” Maxim summarized as he presented his rudimentary designs in front of Alicia one morning. “Your Grace, this is all impractical.”

“I know,” Alicia murmured.

“We literally would have to demolish our factories, redesign the machining we have to operate on a weaker engine, and naturally, our productivity will suffer drastically.”

“I’m not really planning to tear down our existing factories to plug these engines in anyway. If I decide to make use of this, they would be in our new generation of factories.”

“But then, they’d be utterly outpaced by the ones used by the Virtuous Races.”

Alicia lowered the design paper on her table and sipped her tea to calm herself.

There are a lot of problems here…

Goodness, I might go mad.

What Maxim was essentially saying was that most likely, solutions drawn up from her homeworld weren’t going to work well here. In fact, now that she thought about this, even if she adopted using fossil fuels and combustion engines to mitigate risks, she’d be completely alone in that.

Again, why the hell would anyone pick coal over old reliable magic crystals?

Only someone without good business sense would do that, and Alicia herself recognized that her current ‘solutions’ were going to hit her profit margins very, very hard.

Considering how reliant Orevogorsk and Vael would be one day at exporting, gaining foreign capital, and importing critical things they needed to survive like food, any disruption to the present level of profits and its future growth trajectory would be unacceptable.

She looked back at Maxim.

He was a scholar of industry.

He was reliable, but he wasn’t a do-everything man. As Alicia expected, Maxim could produce decent, workable industrial solutions. Building a steam engine and a factory designed around it was definitely achievable. The problem was, that wouldn’t be enough to compete in a world with magic, and Maxim wasn’t someone who would be able to create a true alternative to magic crystals.

Either Alicia would have to figure that out on her own or find help.

She thought about this for a very long time.

This world was huge. Alicia still hadn’t even visited most places yet, outside of the countries near Polonia. She hadn’t seen Concordia, Hesse, the so-called Celestial Empire, and the dozens of other petty kingdoms, dukedoms, far-away tribes, colonies, and so many other cultures and societies. While the mainstream magical-technological fusion was based on magic crystals, there might be insights or alternatives over there that were buried.

As such, she wasn’t losing hope yet.

In fact, she was just getting started.

“Alright,” Alicia placed her teacup down. “Maxim, for now, I’d like you to focus on your usual work. Maybe try to make a proof of concept of a coal-powered engine, but that’s it.”

She handed the finished design back to Maxim. The gargoyle nodded.

“As for me, I’ll try finding contacts and foreign talent to help me figure this out,” Alicia said, standing up. “Hmm, actually, now that I’m thinking of it, maybe someone in Alsatia can help me out?”

She smiled.

“Well, since she might be in need of help too anyway, this might actually be perfect.”

“Your Grace?”

“Do you remember Crown Princess Lucille?”

Maxim placed a hand on his chin.

“You mean, the royal that’s buying up most of the monster cores you harvest?” Maxim asked.

“Yes. I’ve heard she’s obsessed with researching magitech,” Alicia said. “Since she’s going to be the next empress, she also needs to deal with Alsatia’s black dungeon problem one day. I’ll try finding an opening to see if we can collaborate.”

“I don’t really know her well enough to comment on that, but I suppose good luck is in order.”

“Of course. Thank you, Maxim. You can go back to your work now.”

Maxim nodded, told Alicia good bye, and left.

As for Alicia, she looked back at the skyline of her growing city.

Earlier, she felt like she was starting to succumb to a mild form of defeatism. After all, the challenges presented to her were starting to get ridiculously overwhelming to overcome. Somehow, in fact, governance could definitely drain the mental energy of even a powerful, ancient vampire.

But now that she began running her mind on solutions again, where she was reminded that she had friends over there who might have the capacity to help, she felt her energy rushing back to her body and mind.

Alright, she curled her fist, a determined smile on her face. Let’s do this.

And so, she began planning the finer details of her next expedition in Alsatia. Specifically,  the question of how she would be able to get Lucille fully on her side. After all, as she remembered back then, Lucille seemed wary of Alicia, even when the two continued to have a friendly business relationship.

At last, Alicia decided that something had to be done to address that.

Deep in the Rhonne Exclusion Zone, a platoon of Vaelrin soldiers conducted a patrol mission in the darkness of the night. They were members of the 33rd Demon Brigade, nicknamed as the ‘Mole Rat Brigade,’ a name given to them because they were usually assigned to exploration and reconnaissance missions where miasma concentration was most severe, creating dangerous topography anomalies.

Luckily, the current mission of this Vaelrin platoon wasn’t that bad, as they were only asked to patrol the areas near the edge of the containment perimeter.

Antonio Matteotti, a draco Vaelrin, was the lieutenant in charge of this platoon.

He was now on his 2nd ‘Volunteer Tour,’ a two-year military service term for Vaelrin men living in Alsatia. Joining this tour was necessary to give Vaelrin families the right to be recognized as residents, giving them some legal protections and rights, like the right to own a plot of land or the right to move freely, but these rights were only in effect 20 years after being granted at the start of a volunteer’s term. To maintain residency rights, families would have to send one of their sons again to join the program and renew a family’s access to it.

As a result, Vaelrin men must take turns to fight for Alsatia just to maintain the bare minimum rights of their families.

Unfortunately, joining the demon brigades as a ‘volunteer’ was essentially an act equivalent to turning oneself into disposable fodder. But, since the alternative was the state harassing you and your family or being deprived of land, shelter, work, and food, this was the only option.

‘Demons,’ especially those fit to fight, belonged in hell, they said. Well, here they were in hell, serving as the first line of defense for people who didn’t even see them as people.

This job was unenviable, especially so for Antonio. Death and deprivation were a natural part of their daily life. They operated in zones where the world seemed to break, where the influence of everything good seemed to disappear, replaced by an evil, sinister energy determined to consume and consume.

His two elder brothers already died a long time ago in the exclusion zones. One of them, his eldest brother, died here at the Rhonne Exclusion Zone. His body was never recovered. This wasn’t so unusual. Many Vaelrin families practically wrote their sons off when they volunteered to the frontlines, and the only way they got to keep their limited freedoms and privileges was to produce another boy to replace anyone who might fall.

Antonio’s family, however, was already hollowed out. His mother was old and frail, his father had already passed away, and all that was left was his three sisters, all of them younger than him. He was the last man who could buy them time to have some rights in the meantime, just enough time to let his sisters find families to marry into. Maybe they’d even luck out and get adopted as servants by a kind noble family. Being employed by nobles meant that they’d have residency rights under them. It was one of the ways for Vaelrin women to get by.

As for men like Antonio, there wasn’t much future waiting for them. All they really had was their pride as men who chose to sacrifice themselves for their families. Till this day, the sons of Vael still found themselves on many different battlefields, each generation molded by it, warfare practically inseparable from their character. 

Antonio’s generation might have it the worst, as instead of fighting other soldiers under the banner of Alsatia, they were the first ones to fight and die underneath the darkness of black dungeons. At the very least, the pay was good, if one managed to survive till the end of their tour.

His platoon took a small break on the route they walked on.

He gave orders to remain vigilant, and then Antonio sat near a boulder to give his legs some rest. He popped open his waterskin and drank from it. It was so refreshing. They’d marched miles on foot, checking if there were any distortions nearby, and if there were, they dispatched them before they grew in numbers and strength. It was necessary dirty work to maintain security in the perimeter of the suppression towers.

As such, he was very tired. He wished he could have a light supper and sleep, even if he’d have to sleep on cold, hard ground. But, until tomorrow morning, they’d march and march. They were lucky that this sector’s corruption wasn’t too severe, or else navigation would be near impossible due to spatial anomalies.

After drinking water, he briefly stared at the sky, savoring the brief moment that he managed to clear his weary mind of any thought.

Unfortunately, his break was short-lived. His second in command, Simon, approached Antonio. Unlike Antonio, Simon wasn’t fully Vaelrin, as his father was a wealthy human businessman who took Simon’s mother as a mistress before kicking her out. 

Unfortunately, having even a drop of Vaelrin blood meant that the Alsatian state classified you as Vaelrin, no different from full-blooded Vaelrin like Antonio. As such, Simon was here too, fighting to secure his residency rights for himself for a few years. Since he had no brothers, he’d have no choice but to return to the battlefield to renew residency repeatedly with only a few years of break in between his tours. Most likely, unless he started his own family and produced a son to take his place, he’d do this until his final, inevitable destination in this battlefield: death. 

Even with their different circumstances and heritage, Simon and Antonio found themselves in the same situation. Though in Antonio’s case, he didn’t plan to bring a new Vaelrin boy to this world just to free himself of this fate. It wasn’t an uncommon sentiment for his generation now that their new battlefields were this bad.

Simon’s eyes seemed tense as he kneeled near Antonio, speaking to him in a hushed tone.

“We’re in a bad spot,” Simon said. “There’s movement east of us. Lots of them.”

“Lots of them?” Antonio asked, frowning.

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Too many. At least a few hundred.”

The two immediately stood up. The rest of Antonio’s platoon were scattered about in various positions on the side of the well-trodden path they were on. Some of them were having snacks, and some of them checked the crystals of their staves or cleaned their swords and polearms. Then, there was a pair lying on a ridge that overlooked the fields below them, observing it with their binoculars.

Both Antonio and Simon kneeled close to the two observers, taking care that they wouldn’t be too visible.

“Give me the glasses,” Antonio demanded from one of the observers, who handed his binoculars to him without a word.

Right then, Antonio had a glimpse of what was moving below them.

He couldn’t count how many of them were over there. Their bodies twitched and disappeared erratically, visibility so low that it was difficult to make things out clearly, but he could see that there must be hundreds, no, maybe thousands of distortions marching on the fields. By the time he lowered his binoculars, speechless, Simon leaned close to Antonio.

“Orders, sir?” Simon asked.

“That’s…” Antonio felt his heartbeat racing.

He did a double take with his binoculars, surveying a wider area below them. They weren’t just coming from one direction. No, they were coming from everywhere, like a swarm of locusts in the horizon. He felt his hold wavering, cursing underneath his breath.

“Retreat, we need to retreat now,” Antonio ordered. “We need to alert everyone else.”

“Sir?” Simon gulped.

Antonio turned back to Simon.

“This must be it. The equivalent of a dungeon break, but for a black dungeon.”

It was a mere theorized possibility that had never happened before, but now…

Both men ran quickly, giving out orders to prepare for a quick forced march back to the towers, bearing the worst news possible for the rest of their kin fighting in the Rhonne Exclusion Zone.

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A/N

Have a great weekend y'all!