Chapter 53: Everything I’ll Need
According to the reports Naïa brought her every evening, Aldric was growing more and more attached to his batch of slimes.
He talked to them, apparently. He counted them every morning, worried whenever one of them seemed less lively than the others, and had even started recognizing certain ones individually, which, for gelatinous creatures that were rigorously identical, was already something of a feat.
Which suited her rather well, since the time had come to move on to the second part of his internship, the one that would take place at the slaughterhouse.
According to Naïa, again, the reaction had lived up to expectations. Aldric had first assumed it was a misunderstanding, then flatly refused, before launching into a lengthy plea on the value of all life, whatever it might be, which Naïa had listened to patiently right through to the end before reminding him very calmly that these slimes had been raised for precisely that purpose since day one, and that refusal appeared nowhere on the list of available options.
Freya had to admit it tugged at her heart a little too, but she forced herself not to stand in the way of it, because at the end of the day, it was all for her own future.
Business is business, and I have a hero to level up.
The first reports reached her the very next day, and they were conclusive, killing a slime did yield experience, but absolutely no loot.
Which she should have seen coming, really, since it already took a Butcher Mycofox and an entire dedicated building to get anything at all out of them.
So she settled on the best possible compromise, one half slaughtered by Aldric, for his levels, and the other half left to the Butcher Mycofox, for the loot.
And so the days rolled on, each one much like the last.
The hero would raise a batch of slimes, then cull half of them to bank his levels, and come evening, Mei would collect him for sword and hand-to-hand training.
Except his day didn’t end there, because once the training was over, it was Freya herself who took over to give him lessons in politics, trade, and management, which, by his own account, proved infinitely more grueling than anything Mei had inflicted on him all day. And the next morning, it all started over again.
Meanwhile, Laïa was honing her magic alongside Pen-chan, who was still stubbornly determined to weave his flying carpet without leaving a trail of ink everywhere, Naïa carried on with her lessons while supervising the plan to grow the hero, and Mei, faithful to the order she’d been given, was slowly turning every corridor of the dungeon into a sculpture gallery.
As for Freya, she ended up spending most of her days with the newcomers, of whom she’d only named the first, Kumoko, in honor of... well, you all know already.
Anubia, for her part, stayed clamped to her arm a good portion of the time, when she wasn’t busy building her great hive against the wall of the Heart chamber.
Freya had witnessed something fascinating there, in fact, since the hive climbed the wall in translucent cells, each made of a material close to stained glass, so that the Heart’s glow passed straight through it and cast colored reflections across the entire chamber. And one morning, she’d caught the queen mid royal laying, depositing one after another eggs nearly as big as a fist, with crystalline shells that caught the light like so many little lanterns.
But those two weeks amounted to more than admiring eggs and riding spiders.
Because the dungeon itself had changed beyond recognition.
She’d ended up placing absolutely every available building, including the second Storage Vault, which she’d set at a strategic point in the middle of the workshops, and she’d discovered on that occasion that the two Vaults shared universal storage between them, which vastly simplified her Mycofoxes’ logistics. She’d also summoned every fox it was possible to summon, so that all she was missing now was the Cabinet of Wonders.
The Researcher Mycofoxes hadn’t been idle either, having upgraded the farms, the servants’ quarters, and the guard hall. As for the Soldiers who hadn’t yet crossed the threshold, they’d all done so in the meantime, so that all twelve now stood at the rank above, each having chosen his own branch under Freya’s shining gaze, since she wouldn’t have missed a single one of those evolutions for anything in the world.
She was only waiting on Roku’s now.
But the most satisfying part of all this was watching her dungeon finally become self-sufficient.
Because it now produced on its own, from one end of the chain to the other.
The Alchemy Workshop was turning out its first vials, three for the moment, a minor healing potion, a minor speed potion, and a minor mana recovery potion. Nothing spectacular, she readily admitted, but it was still better than nothing, and she knew perfectly well it would all refine itself with time.
The Enchanting Workshop was running too, even if for now it settled for improving the edge of blades and the durability of weapons and armor. Modest again, but it was something, and above all, unlike her Enchantment Gacha, those effects were permanent.
And then there was the textile side.
Between the Silkweavers, the Spinnery, and the Weaving Workshop, the dungeon was now producing its own silk, and very fine silk at that. Naïa and Laïa had each inherited their own maid’s outfit, tailored to measure, which had left the little one crying with joy for a good quarter of an hour. And even Aldric had eventually traded his underwear for silk clothes of a quality his own house could never have afforded, which had left him utterly speechless.
Mei herself finally had something to wear other than that cursed black armor, which, let’s be honest, was in absolutely deplorable taste. The way it clung to every last contour instead of covering it, the way it pushed out that far too heavy chest straining the breastplate with every breath, the way it bit in at the waist before flaring over wide hips and over a backside the black steel underlined with no modesty whatsoever, no, really, it was appalling, an aesthetic disaster that Freya most certainly did not spend a few minutes here and there contemplating from every possible angle. Never. Not once.
As for herself, she’d gone ahead and put away her black suit, now reserved for grand occasions, and wandered the whole dungeon in silk pyjamas, a loose off-white set with pearly sheen, a soft collar and long sleeves that fell over her hands, so light she felt like she was wearing nothing at all. Something she felt absolutely no shame about.
Everything’s moving forward, everything’s improving, all that’s left is to let time do its work.
Then there was the Gacha, which she’d of course run every single day without missing one.
And on that front, let’s say the results had been... uneven.
She’d notably pulled the golden spoon of the Moon King, which the system had classed as rank G without the slightest embarrassment, while Aldric, upon seeing it, had nearly choked explaining that it was a relic lost for centuries, before going on to quote the sovereign’s famous line, "the State, it is I."
Isn’t he just a carbon copy of Earth’s Sun King, that one?
She’d promised Aldric the spoon all the same, if he progressed as expected.
Also dropped were a rank B treasure map, which unfortunately marked a location somewhere on Earth, a rank F microwave she’d set aside for want of a single electrical outlet, and a good dozen utterly useless trinkets, to the point that an entire corner of the Heart chamber now looked like a junk shop.
I’m really going to have to devote a whole room to treasure at this rate.
Which brought her back to the Cabinet of Wonders, that room tied to her greed she still hadn’t built. At the time, she’d told herself it would be of no use to her, and that was probably still true today, but a question had been nagging at her for a while now. Would the Cabinet work with what the Gacha gave her? That spoon, for instance, rigorously useless in itself, could it be displayed in there and earn her passive mana?
Maybe I should build it, if only to find out.
That said, if she was thinking about displaying relics, it was mostly because the Gacha hadn’t given her only trinkets, far from it, since in the middle of all that junk, she’d landed two genuinely useful things, and even very, very useful ones.
The first was a rank S item, her great favorite, which she’d ended up handing over to Naïa most reluctantly, on the grounds that the girl couldn’t fight and that she herself already had the scythe.
[ Status — Beretta 21A Bobcat "Silent Viper" ]
[ Unique Skill: Overdrive Magazine ]
[ Normal Skills: Infinite Magazine | Armor-Piercing Rounds | Perfect Ballistics | Elemental Chamber | Silent Shot | Indestructible Frame ]
[ Titles: Code Phantom | First Pistol of Agent Twilight | ... ]
Aaaah... just the name... I could die to own it...
On top of which, the weapon stacked literally every cheat imaginable, since it fired without sound or flash, could neither jam nor be damaged, allowed bullets to be enchanted with a magical element, adjusted their trajectory automatically, pierced a percentage of both physical and magical armor, and came with unlimited ammunition. And as if all that weren’t enough, its unique skill, Overdrive Magazine, multiplied the rate of fire and the efficiency of everything else for thirty seconds once a day, which was purely and simply a dream for any firearm.
A genuine work of art.
Still, she also knew it was the ideal weapon for Naïa, who had absolutely nothing going for her on that front.
I’ll borrow it from her now and then, though.
And finally came the last pull, the most important of them all, obtained at the very start of those two weeks. A skill, and not just any skill, the one that had let her rethink her entire plan from the ground up and accelerate everything.
[ Perfect Replica — Rank B: allows the creation of a perfect replica of the caster, sustained by a large quantity of mana. ]
Why is a skill this utterly broken only rank B?
Because it devoured mana at a frankly terrifying rate, and anyone else would have held their replica for a few minutes, an hour at most.
Except that over those two weeks, Freya had discovered something far more interesting. By leaving the skill active without interruption, with Anubia permanently plugged into her arm, she’d come to understand that her mana body, directly linked to the Heart, simply had no limit whatsoever. The moment she ran dry, something she’d never paid the slightest attention to until then, her body automatically recharged by drawing on the Heart’s reserve, which then dropped by all of five miserable points.
In other words, the skill running twenty-four hours a day, plus a queen bee clamped to her arm, cost her between them the princely sum of ten mana points per day.
Which is still a lot, I’ll grant you.
But measured against what that skill was going to let her do, it was practically free.
Because the word "replica" did no justice whatsoever to what she had in her hands. It wasn’t a copy, nor a summon, nor something she’d have to command or keep an eye on. Both bodies shared everything, the senses, the thoughts, the memories, down to the slightest intention, so that she saw through four eyes, heard through four ears, and reasoned in two heads at once without the faintest lag. There was no original and no copy, there was Freya, simply present in two places at the same time.
And she already had a very precise idea of how she meant to use it come morning.
That left Anubia, her queen bee, from whom she’d gotten nothing concrete so far beyond stings and a magnificent hive. But she’d seen her skills, she’d seen those crystalline eggs lining up by the dozen, and something told her that one was worth keeping warm for later.
And so the big day arrived.
In what had become Freya’s favorite spot, sprawled across Kumoko’s back, right at the top of the nest, in silk pyjamas, one leg dangling over the edge.
Or rather the two Freyas, since her replica had settled in right beside her, sprawled across another spider, in an exactly identical posture, down to the tilt of the head and the rhythm of her breathing. Both were contemplating every last inhabitant of the dungeon gathered below, with the same gaze, thinking precisely the same thing at precisely the same instant. Anubia, obviously, was still clamped to her arm.
The two Freyas sat up slowly as one, let the silence settle, and the cold gaze they swept over them from on high was worth every speech in the world.
"Listen to me well, all of you! This dungeon was nothing but a hole in the rock, an empty, damp cave where nothing lived. Today it digs, it forges, it weaves, it enchants, and it shelters those I intend to raise far above anything this world has ever known!"
She paused, savoring every second of silence.
"Up there, there are kingdoms that don’t even know we exist. Barons sleeping soundly, nobles counting their gold, kings who believe themselves eternal!"
Her voice rose a notch, and her replica’s with it, perfectly in sync, so that the entire nest seemed to ring with two Freyas at once.
"So tomorrow, we stop hiding! Tomorrow, we march on the barony, and it will be nothing more than the first stone of something this world will remember until the end of time! Follow me, serve me, and I swear to you that every last one of you will one day look down on this world from a throne!"
"YES, MADAM!"
"KYU! KYU! KYUUU!"
"SKRIII! SKRIIII!"
"BZZZ!!!"
The whole dungeon shook with the uproar, and Freya let the clamor build, arms spread wide, thoroughly pleased with herself.
Then she seemed to think of something, and raised a hand to bring back the silence.
"BUT first of all, I hereby declare that the next five litters of slimes shall be released into the forest, every last one of them!"
A beat of silence.
Then the clamor started up again louder than before, and Freya settled back down onto Kumoko’s cushion, perfectly satisfied.