Xvodane and Ijiane. Two countries that have been at odds ever since Xvodane united under a single banner from squabbling mountain tribes.

  Ijiane shows off its grassy, rolling pins full of able-bodied men farming in endless, fertile pins, watched over by refined nobles and powerful, chivalrous knights. It shows off its ancient history, looking down on Xvodane for being rough, dirty upstarts still in diapers by the time Ijiane was a full country.

  Xvodane boasts a rough terrain, showing contempt for the decadent, bloated Ijianian nobility, while their nobles are picked from the best and brightest, inherited from the hard life of its pioneers. It mocks the inability of the rger country to even pierce throughout its border despite numerical inferiority, the poor tactics of their general.

  At the southern end of both countries, mostly in Ijiane but with a portion in Xvodane, a rge forest separate the countries from the sea. The aptly-named Seaguard Greatwoods are a mystery to most commoners, its name mostly spoken in lurid tales of impossible monsters.

  Within the Greatwoods lies a mountain, and dug inside that mountain, a dungeon. Dungeons are, for the average human of this world, things of nightmare. They were eerie pces of magic where monsters swarmed and fanged, cwed death waited at every corner.

  Beasts could rampage out of it at any moment, taking and tearing apart all in its path, and the only recourse of the weak would be to flee. The being commanding the dungeon was the Warden, enigmatic, undying figures who sent out monsters to act as their hands and feet and bring bloody tribute in their name.

  For those who spent their lives protecting the people, whether soldiers, hired mercenaries, or knights, dungeons were dangerous pces to avoid and keep watch on. They were filled with monsters, but unlike an average commoner, they knew tactics and had the appropriate equipment and training to fight off the beasts. But their abilities were still limited and were unsuited to fighting efficiently in dungeons.

  Those who primarily visited dungeons were adventurers, who were all skilled in the art of combat, and made monster sying a important part of their profession, although to varying degree depending on the party.

  Adventurers had several strengths over soldiers, mercenaries and knights. The first was number. Dungeons had many different backdrops and came in many shape and forms. But a recurring notion was one of small, crawling, snaking corridors and hallways, unsuited for full army deployments.

  Adventurers adventured sometime on their own, but generally in parties of 2 to 5. They were much more adept at moving lightly and fighting in cramped conditions than soldiers and knights, who possessed advanced skills of teamwork and cooperation and whose numbers were always an important part of their strengths.

  The emphasis of quality over quantity and individualistic, more closely fitted skillset of adventurers only added further to this notion – any monster is less threatening to the average adventurer than it is to the average soldier.

  But there are some dungeons which are not dens of murderous beasts, although this fact unknown to the commoners of those nds. And the dungeon within the Greatwoods count among their numbers. And that started with its Warden...

  A short, scrawny, brown-eyed girl named Zoemie, who was currently looking at a computer screen, grossly immersed within her video game. "So, that strategy was a miserable fucking failure. Gd I tested with a save editor first."

  She shook her head, her scraggly bck hair giving her the appearance of a feral, if cute, creature, closing the emutor and switching to another video game. "Let's see about this one instead..."

  It was the next day, now, of her fight against her old cssmate Rickard, and Zoemie was taking a break. I can finally rex properly. She was quite content to leave this whole mess behind, and focus on things she actually cared about.

  Such as progressing through her backlog of video games. Her alternate approach attempt had completely failed, so she would have to reconsider. Instead, she focused on the game she was currently pying.

  Somewhere else within the dungeon, a strange-looking woman with skin halfway between human and a strange shade of greyish red-purple, clothed in a maid outfit, busied herself with taking inventory. She looked at the various items, her eyes glowing unnaturally as she did so. Nothing of exceptional value.

  Xajymzia had to acknowledge that Rickard's group had better equipment than the three adventurers who came before. By no small measure, to boot. But they simply didn't have the skill that those women had, and had much less tricks in their bag overall. The fact that Xajymzia had become significantly more powerful was the final nail in their coffin.

  No sve colrs, no wall breakers. They had clearly not engaged in much of the way of dungeon crawling. Combat specialization were bandits and weaker monsters. They mostly cleared chaff, instead of fighting truly dangerous creatures. They weren't interested in truly challenging themselves.

  She decided to take a second look at their equipment. The female adventurers had given her some insight, but they were from that... Ijiane ? Country thing, whereas Rickard's team was from another one called Xvodane.

  The sonorities sounded a little wrong to Xajymzia, who was more used to the Umdoranz tongue, but she focused anyway.

  ...More simirities than differences, she concluded after a while. The construction of the weapons and armor wasn't the exact same, but it was close enough to compare anyway. And it was clear that while the materials used by Rickard's team were better, the smith was inferior in ability.

  That said, the way they wove the mana conduits within their equipment was quite ingenious, unlike the Ijiane adventurers. It expined how Rickard's shield had lived for as long as it did. Not only was the surface enchanted in this fashion, but so was its handle, making it hard to knock away.

  It even made it possible for the wielder to locate their shield if it was close enough, but that part had been wholly unused. Then again, once Zoemie had sent it into storage, it wouldn't have helped either way.

  Xajymzia dithered on whether she should modify her body a little to use that technique, but decided to keep experimenting first. There might be hidden downsides, after all. She put it on her to-do list and refocused.

  All of those tricks had simply been far from being enough to ever hope to match Xajymzia, let alone Zoemie. The combination of modern Earth alloys, Zoemie's mana infusion, her curses, and her fusion ability, were together force multipliers that far and away outcssed anything Rickard had.

  He had lost before he even arrived here. A part of Xajymzia wondered why Zoemie hadn't cursed the man before. Clearly, she had nothing but loathing for him. She probably forgot. Xajymzia made a pointed decision to not bring it up. Zoemie might end up carrying it against herself, and that never helped.

  Instead, she focused on their magical artifacts. There were a few notable things, such as a ring of magical resistance. It was surprisingly well-crafted and enchanted, but it looked like a woman's. Origins uncertain. Maybe it was stolen ?

  Xajymzia also picked up a item that reminded her of a deck of cards. That goddess had mentioned those. Zoemie had offered one to Yuulvan, but he had politely declined. Clearly, this was Rickard's, and Xajymzia decided to look for the men's cards. They had to have their own ones.

  She quickly found the axeman's, and took a look at it. It was a simple, bck pte with an enchantment. It was surprisingly well-designed, with multiple failsafes to prevent impersonation or usurpation. Rickard's name was written on it in white, using an alphabet from Earth.

  Xajymzia considered. These could be used to cover our tracks. However, that would only work if they didn't know anything happened to Rickard, plus depending on his reputation it might be too easy to see through. Store in "possible but uncertain."

  She also noticed another item throughout their possession. ...Another of those concoction for weight loss. That could potentially had interesting implications. They may have followed that high priest. The recipe in itself was nothing Xajymzia had any use for. Slightly less damaging to the bowels. Slightly.

  In a third area within the dungeon, an elderly, withered-looking man with white hair and electric blue eyes was reading a few floating books in the middle of a pineapple field, while looking down on a complicated device made of stone and covered in overgrown ivy.

  Yuulvan nodded. The fertilizer device was working well. Adding enchantments to prevent phosphorus loss to runoff had been another good idea. The biggest problem is rge-scale production.

  The problem was simple, on its face. In order to ensure that most of the commonfolks could access those devices, he would need more of them. A lot more of them. Most commonfolks were rural peasants, after all.

  Normally, he would simply have told them how to construct the device and let them to it. It was generally simpler and more practical to proceed this way, and it made it harder for those of power to sabotage the knowledge.

  However, this was not a simple device to construct. The enchantment were precise and advanced and some of the reagents and materials involved were rather uncommon. Xajymzia had offered him access to her pool of advanced magical materials if he required, but he declined using those to avoid worsening the problem.

  Conjuring it, meanwhile, was prohibitively expensive in mana when outside of a dungeon, and the commonfolk understandably got rather uncomfortable at the idea of going inside the territory of one. Assuming they even had a dungeon close by, which was most of the time not the case. A recurring problem.

  It was not the most complex magical device he had had to construct, not by a long shot. But most of those devices were specialized for a few specific purposes, and he had rarely needed more than a dozen or so of those.

  He knew ways to copy runes and engravings from a subtrate to another, they weren't even difficult, expensive or tiring to use. The problem was that it simply wasn't enough. I am trying to cut down the entirety of the Greatwoods with nothing but an metric ton of axes. No matter their quality, it'll still take forever.

  He had tried to increase the range of the machine, and had succeeded, but even then the radius wasn't exceptional. What I need is a paradigm shift. So, he had started to investigate whether the dungeon's jetuzran, its web of knowledge, had anything for him.

  And here he was reading three different book about industrialization. An "assembly line" would be optimal... but I can't risk unexperienced mages hurting themselves or worse. He narrowed his eyes, thinking.

  The best approach would to go up one level of device abstraction. Instead of trying to produce more fertilizer beacons, create another assembly-line device that produces those and work from there. The issue was he was simply not going to have enough time to do it in the remaining week and so he had left here.

  That, and he needed to find a pce to construct and fuel said device safely... but he had enough contacts that he wasn't worried about it. Using simpler materials had been an angle he had considered, but he was pretty sure there was nothing easier to source that what he had been using.

  He could potentially invest in looking for methods of Manaxyl Ivy farming, but that would be about it in term of making the materials easier to access. I could make tiered versions ? No... The idea sat ill with Yuulvan, but he might end up having no other options here.

  While Xajymzia and Zoemie had helped in various ways, even passively through Zoemie's jetuzran, neither of them were the kind of person who could assist him further in such a task. Yuulvan nodded, deciding on a basic idea. I'll conjure a few more while I'm here. Half a dozen or so. And for the rest, we'll see when I return here.

  If nothing else, he could give one to the First Speaker of the Demon Council. They would likely find it useful. Yuulvan considered. His radiation research only needed one more thing, and with nothing on his pte, only one major obstacle remained.

  I will have to talk to Zoemie to ask her if I can invite Hreijinda. This had gotten deyed because of High Priest Kvutar and that Rickard man showing up and stirring the pot, but with them both out of the way Yuulvan could reassess his priorities properly.

  Zoemie entered the workshop, calm, Xajymzia turning her head and facing her. "Looking at the loot ?", Zoemie asked, and Xajymzia nodded.

  "Indeed.", Xajymzia answered. "And I have found retively little of value.", she continued.

  "No artifacts or anything like that ?", Zoemie asked, slightly confused. Weren't they were supposed to be big-wigs or something ? She shrugged. Whatever. I don't actually care.

  "Not much. There's some difference in how they weave their magical enchantment within their weapons, but for the most part it's close enough.", Xajymzia expined. "Frankly, for a so-called "hero", they were shockingly poorly-armed."

  Zoemie nodded. "There might be some things we can use to our advantage, but I'm highly dubious.", Xajymzia continued. "Also, they had another of those recipes for weight loss concoctions. It's irrelevant, but I found it interesting."

  "Wonder how they even got their hands on that.", Zoemie said. "Maybe he was pnning to extort favors from that chick in exchange for it or something ?", she continued. Wouldn't put it past that piece of crap.

  Xajymzia answered by teleporting the other recipe, and inviting Zoemie to look closer with a gesture of her arm. "Judging by writing analysis, these were written by the same person. Which means that these two groups got it from the same source."

  "We know it's from that bitch, the old priest had written it in that book.", Zoemie said, remembering. "But why did that bastard have it ? I don't see him particurly interested in weight loss. Dudes don't care about that."

  "I believe," Xajymzia started, "that what happened was that Rickard's group followed the priest. And judging by comments from some of their party members and the presence of this recipe, they were looking for him and likely asked the recipe writer for information and intel."

  Zoemie shrugged. "Hope there won't be more assholes looking, then.", she concluded. "I'd rather not deal with more of them if I can help it. I'm fine with killing Rickard. His party members ? Well..." She folded her arms. "Neth once told me assholes travel in packs. Wouldn't be surprised if those guys were assholes too."

  Xajymzia nodded in agreement.

  A girl stared into space, too old to be a girl but too young to be a woman, before shaking her head. She was of average height, with long, minty teal hair, and had very notable assets as well, despite being dressed in fairly thick clothes.

  In a fair distance front of her lied the Cursed Grounds, where an abomination known as 2-7-4 once spread cursed scales that still haunted the nd to this day. It had only been sealed at a great cost, including one of her ancestors, and she, Hreijinda, student of Yuulvan, was the watcher of this area.

  The Cursed Grounds were forbidden, and her duty was to limit the number of people getting harmed by the curse. Which was easier said than done, because a lot of Northerners were imbeciles obsessed with proving their worth through recklessness. Hreijinda once again thanked her teacher within her head. He had granted her insights that she wouldn't have imagined otherwise.

  In particur, on how the raiding lifestyle of the North was just not going to cut it in the long term. She would have loved to make it stop, but she was but one woman and the Northerners were not the kind of people to unite under a singur monarch, even if said monarch had strength overwhelming.

  Her problem with the raiding in a nutshell, beyond the self-evident "you wouldn't like it when someone else takes your stuff", was best described as "you can't steal what hasn't been produced." If all of the commoners that lived in those regions packed up and left, the Northerners would have nothing to steal, and likely starve.

  She was pretty sure three-quarters of those raiding cretins didn't even know how to make bread. It was a wonder they didn't starve in the off-months. Hreijinda shook her head again, before looking to the side. Of course, Hreijinda suspected that most of the commoners didn't leave for a reason. And simirily, she wouldn't be surprised if some of the raiders had the kind of mentality that led them to forgive the stronger for stealing, even from them. She shook her head.

  A rge building was there – this was the sickhouse where those who had been badly cursed stayed. Most of them didn't stay, or even live, very long, particurly if they had received an heavy dose of the curse. Healing magic could help, but only so much, and it took its strain on Hreijinda as well. She yawned, kind of bored.

  Sir Yuulvan had told her he would visit next spring. She was not looking forwards to winter. It was the tter half of summer, now. Still hot and warm by comparison, but the days were starting to shorten noticeably.

  Winters in the North got brutal. More than once had Hreijinda had to leave people to their fate because of the blizzards. A part of her called herself selfish for it, and she didn't deny it. But like Sir Yuulvan had taught her, you can't help anyone if you freeze to death.

  An unusual shiver went down Hreijinda's back. She wondered how her teacher was doing.