Dictator From Outer Space

The Goliath production line that was brought in from the Zaium Empire was officially put into operation by the newly recruited dwarves and the workshop technicians of Fultorn.

The initial goal was to produce one Ose-class Goliath as a prototype and invest some funds to increase its output slightly.

“This line was originally used to produce Bephar-class Goliaths, so it can handle up to 140E. With that kind of output, there’s no match for it nearby.”

The output of the Goliath for Bagran’s royal guards was 130E, and Galisto was not much different.

It was insane that Elbrande had deployed 2,000 Belial-class Goliaths, which were estimated to have an output of over 180E.

In that respect, the dwarves, including Fultorn, considered it a success if they could only increase the output of the Ose-class a little bit.

But Leobold, who was inspecting the process, suggested raising the output of the core to over 200E.

“200E? Did you just say 200E? I may be old, but my ears are still fine. I didn’t hear you wrong, did I?”

Fultorn started to get excited by the absurd number, and the other dwarves’ reactions were not very good either.

It was crazy to ask for 200E from a process that could produce a regular output of 130E.

More importantly, the dwarves had never done such a job before.

But Arma’s judgment was different.

「This facility is a line for producing Ose-class prototypes, so it has a lot of potential to produce more output than that. 200E is within the safe range.」

The key to increasing the output of the Goliath core was how to arrange the ether circuits.

The material and precision of the circuits themselves were also important, but they were hard to touch unless the technology advanced.

Therefore, they had no choice but to integrate more circuits and increase the output, but fortunately, the line that Leobold brought in had a lot of room for improvement because it was for the first mass production.

Leobold took Fultorn with him and tried to persuade him.

“Look. Don’t you see that there is a lot of empty space in the core? You just need to engrave more circuits there.”

“Lord, I mean Subjugator. I didn’t want to say this to you. Are you crazy? That space is for magic circles.”

“You can float them in the middle of the core. With reverse gravity magic circles.”

“Engrave that magic circle on the core? What if ether flows backwards? There are already so many magic circles!”

The dwarves who were watching from the side looked at him as if he was insane.

“That’s impossible. If ether flows backwards, there’s a chance that the core will go berserk.”

“Lord, do you know what’s the most dangerous thing on the battlefield? It’s when the core explodes. The knights could die.”

But Arma had already finished calculating and it was worth trying.

Leobold called Lucia and tried to engrave magic circles on the spot, but Fultorn blocked him in front of the core.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re our employer, but this won’t do. It’s certain that this core will explode. I can’t produce a core that will explode.”

“If this explodes, I’ll stop working on Goliath production from now on. And I promise to follow Fultorn’s words completely.”

“…Really?”

“I’ve never lied, have I?”

“That’s true.”

The dwarves nodded their heads.

In fact, they had settled here for money, but they didn’t expect proper equipment.

This place was quite backward compared to Imir Republic.

They didn’t even have a decent smelter until recently. How could they expect anything?

But recently, it became clear that the lord was investing a lot of money.

Facilities with ether engines were installed everywhere, and related infrastructures such as shipyards for building airships increased tremendously.

The size of the floating continent front also grew and even an outpost was built, giving confidence to the dwarves.

―If we stay here and research, maybe someday we can reach the end of the sky.

―First we need to get some research funds for increasing altitude…

―Let’s think about that after we show some results.

The dwarves’ goal was nothing but building an airship that could reach the end of the sky.

But they couldn’t just ask for it, so they had no choice but to devote themselves to research.

Anyway, Fultorn trusted Leobold.

“You’re amazing with improving ether engines and all that. Your intuition is reliable enough. But this is too dangerous, so I’ll only try it once. If it fails, you’ll leave everything to us, understand?”

“What if it succeeds?”

“Then I’ll follow your words without any complaints!”

Once the conversation reached this point, it was as good as decided.

Leobold called Lucia and started working on modifying the core.

―Here, install an orichalcum plate here. I’ll float it with a magic circle.

Their core modification work was done quickly.

Arma scanned the entire core and ran a simulation beforehand, so it was possible.

Leobold just had to follow what Arma showed him through his vision.

The dwarves didn’t expect it to end so soon, and they showed doubts.

“Are you sure it’s okay? It takes at least a few days to verify the magic circles.”

“It’s the first prototype. If this explodes, it will take at least a week or more until the next core is produced.”

“200E… I heard that even Elbrande line gave up on adopting them because of the low yield.”

“If this succeeds, it’s a revolution. The whole continent will be jealous.”

“Zaium might invade us. They’ll ask for the technology.”

“Those pointy ears might kidnap or send assassins…”

―Starting now!

Lucia injected ether into the ignition magic circle from a distance.

Everyone ran away except for one person.

There was no answer if they got caught in the core explosion.

But the core did not disappoint Leobold’s expectations and succeeded in operating with a rumbling noise.

―Wow! Success!

The ether circuits on the outer plate of the core were exposed and began to spread golden light around.

The dwarves opened their mouths wide, and Fultorn rubbed his eyes and brought a measuring device.

“205E… This is crazy. It’s very stable.”

“By Jurt… I can’t believe this is possible…”

“Wait! It’s too early to judge that it succeeded! We have to run it for at least two hours!”

Someone insisted, so they waited for two hours, but the core was stable.

It was a perfect success, and Fultorn clenched his fist.

“That’s amazing! I never imagined that such a modification was possible! Where did you learn these things?”

“You can’t do these things by learning them somewhere! You have to be born with it!”

“Maybe Jurt has taken over the lord’s body?”

The dwarves murmured, and Leobold spoke to them.

“Please make one Goliath with this core and living metal. The deadline is within a month.”

Fultorn, who had been staring at the core with his eyes wide open, waved his hand.

“That’s impossible. It takes at least two months to adjust it to match the output.”

“I’ll tell you how to make the core. And the working principle in detail.”

“Hey! From today on, we’re working all night!”

“What the hell! You’ve slept enough!”

The dwarves started to complain, but there was a smile on their bearded lips.

There was probably no one more passionate about Goliath than them in Astera.

Sometimes he seemed obsessed with numbers, and that tendency became more pronounced after Leobold introduced the ether unit E.

A little stronger, a little higher.

He knew that his obsession would eventually lead to the maximum altitude of the airship.

Why the existing ether circuits could not go above a certain height was a mystery that even Arma could not solve.

But he would find out someday.

Leobold looked at the dwarves who were making a racket with Lucia on his shoulder.

He wondered what they would look like when the human empire, which would be created someday, ventured into space.

***

Leobold headed to the eastern military road with Zion and Valgard.

He had no hesitation in using the shuttle since he had already shown them the Settler.

Zion was amazed by the 12-seater shuttle.

“So this is a metal airship. Why is it so fast?”

“From my perspective, the airships are too slow.”

“Is that so? Can you adjust the altitude as you wish?”

“I can even fly to space. It’s more efficient to operate within the atmosphere, though.”

“Space? What is space?”

“The space beyond the sky. It’s so vast that you can’t even guess where it ends. It’s almost infinite.”

“So that’s where your hometown is. I heard you had a long journey. How long did it take?”

“50 years.”

“Hmm, not a big deal.”

Zion shrugged it off, but Valgard noticed that he was not an ordinary human.

“You didn’t just endure 50 years, did you? And you look older than you seem.”

“I’m 60 years old plus 20 years… 50 years… That makes about 130 years.”

“Can I assume that you divided your time because you lived multiple lives?”

Valgard was quick to catch on.

Leobold nodded.

“I was a soldier, a dictator, a sailor. And now my goal is to unify the Astera continent and meet the prophet. When I achieve that, my life will finally end.”

“What will you do after you finish all that?”

“Well… I’ll go to a quiet place and farm and fish. I don’t know if I’ll get that chance, though.”

Zion seemed uninterested in such trivial stories and was busy looking around the shuttle. 

Valgard sighed and said,

“You are someone who knows how to give up. You must have given up a lot of things on Earth as well. Am I right?”

“Everything. Except for the Settler.”

Arma was the core, but he decided to leave her out for now since they wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Do you regret it?”

“Not at all. If I could go back to the past, I would do the same thing. Because it was my duty.”

“I don’t know much about your situation, but I don’t think the prophet will let you go easily if he called you. It’s very hard to find someone who can give up. Even a baby’s hand clenches when you put your finger in it. That’s close to instinct. Let alone the dragons and gods who lived 200 years ago, they couldn’t give up their greed either. The elves and Ains are not even worth mentioning.”

“I don’t know…”

While they were having a serious conversation, Zion stuck to the window and enjoyed the outside scenery.

“Oh, that’s Yggdrasil. It’s grown quite a bit, hasn’t it? Aren’t they noticed by those pointy ears?”

“The distance is too far. And there are limits to the ether tracking system.”

“It would be fun if they were discovered. Isn’t it time for your spaceship to come out?”

“Sorry, but there’s no chance for the Settler to come out.”

Unless the Plague Queen he faced reappeared, mobilizing the Settler itself meant failure.

If ether research progressed and they could handle dimensions, maybe.

Soon after, the shuttle arrived at the island and Leobold approached the branch of Yggdrasil.

Cain’s soul greeted him with a hum.

―I’ve been waiting for you… Thanks to your generous time, I was able to adjust the two souls…

“Can you communicate with them?”

―It depends on their will… At least their ego didn’t crumble, so why don’t you try…

He didn’t need to talk to Kairos.

He could understand and pity his situation, but there was no justification for his anger to be borne by all humans.

He touched the new Yggdrasil and a fierce soul spoke to him as if he had been waiting.

―What is this power of yours… Which god’s champion are you? No… You don’t smell like any god… Not a dragon either… What are you?

“I’m not anyone’s champion, Grakies.”

At that, Valgard behind him gasped in surprise.

“Grakies is the name of betrayal. He was originally on the side of humans. To be precise, he chose the side that ruled. But he suddenly switched to the elf side in the middle. Some asked him why, but he never told them.”

Grakies didn’t hear Valgard’s voice.

―Stop talking nonsense. It’s impossible for a single lifeform to have such power! Wait, I never told you my name.

“Shut up, and answer me one thing. When you fought for the elves, I only felt despair and destruction from you. Why is that?”

―You were curious about that… But I wonder if I need to tell you…

“If you don’t want to talk, I’ll have to grind your soul like a blender and feed it to Yggdrasil.”

―Blender? What is that? Anyway, do as you please. If my soul goes to Yggdrasil, it will become a nourishment for creating a god. That’s what I want…

It seemed that Grakies’ goal was aligned with the elves’ plan to make a god out of the souls gathered in Yggdrasil through the infinite circuit.

‘Is it to prevent the Plague by hindering the development of civilization? Why would a dragon in a soul state want that?’

There must be more to his purpose.

Leobold taunted him deliberately.

“It’s surprising that a dragon joined hands with the elves. How could you betray the humans?”

―If you’re trying to provoke my anger, you failed, human. And I didn’t join hands with the elves. I just saw the same future they did.

“What future? The one where the demons destroy Astera?”

―How do you know such things, human?

“People call me a hero from another world. You can understand it in that sense.”

―You’re good at avoiding the core and getting information out of me. You must have fooled many people with your tongue.

“Thanks for the compliment. Anyway, I want to hear about the future you saw.”

―Fine! I want to feel your dismay, so I’ll tell you. I devoured a god during the war. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but I found out later. He was the god of future and foresight.

“So you saw the future through his power.”

―The future of Astera I saw was terrible… A huge army of demons invaded on a large scale and the countermeasures set up by the Elves were meaningless… Even when they combined the power of gods and dragons…

It was understandable that he felt terrified by the Plague Legion that Leobold had faced, from Astera’s perspective.

He didn’t know if that was their final evolution, but Grakies seemed to be scared by the Plague’s evolution at that time.

“So you gave up everything and decided to perish? Is that your conclusion?”

―The future doesn’t change… No matter how hard you struggle, it doesn’t change… The elves’ method can only delay that future a little…

“So you blocked Astera’s development to postpone the date of the demons’ invasion. And you kept waging wars for that.”

―You’re easy to talk to since you know so much. Do you want to hear something more despairing? Do you know why Yggdrasil rose?

“I don’t know, I can’t guess.”

―It’s to ensure the destruction of Astera’s civilization. At that time, the elves felt that the power of those who sided with humans was not trivial and they made a god with the souls they had collected. The result of sacrificing that god was Yggdrasil.

“That’s… amazing.”

Leobold was slightly taken aback by the unexpected information.

It wouldn’t be hard to reset civilization with the energy of Yggdrasil falling.

But it seemed difficult to guarantee the survival of the elves in that case.

‘Maybe they wanted to delay their doom so badly…’

He could understand a bit of the elves’ unique sense of superiority.

From their perspective, humans must have seemed frustrating.

‘They must have thought humans were stupid.’

They must have disliked seeing humans making airships and developing ether engineering by drawing in dragon power.

In that sense, he understood why Leobold didn’t show much obsession with landing on Yggdrasil.

Unlike Zaium, Elvrande didn’t try to extract any technology or concepts for landing on Yggdrasil.

He blocked them, but that was more like an interference.

‘Someday they’ll drop Yggdrasil and it doesn’t matter what’s there.’

Of course, these were things before Leobold came.

The future would change now that he was on this planet.

On his way back, Leobold gave instructions to Arma.

“We need to build a space plant. There’s no one watching here, so let’s make it close.”

「What kind of ships should we build?」

“All kinds of ships included in the Legion Strike Fleet.”

It was excessive power for this world, but he couldn’t be sure if it would stay that way.

There was no guarantee that the Plague Queen he had killed in Pluto’s orbit wouldn’t reappear.

“And tell Lucia to get ready to go to Mare. We can’t leave it alone.”

Leobold had thought that there was some condition for Plague’s evolution and as long as they didn’t meet it, he could manage them.

He had an optimistic view that they wouldn’t evolve like the Plague Legion that entered the solar system.

But without seeing the future, and with a clear purpose of meeting the prophet, he couldn’t just ignore them.

There was no Plague with Lucia’s power in Mare, so he could conquer it quickly.

「I understand. And I analyzed the information we stole from Elvrande’s soul research facility and found a clue that might allow us to reconstruct the infinite circuit.」

“Really? Do you think we can make a god?”

「Not yet…」

Arma trailed off, which meant she had found a possibility.

As always, she would give him a definite answer in time.

And by then, Leobold would be close to the essence of ether and the prophet.

***

As Zaium’s military actions became visible, Elvrande also began to move.

It was the first war in a year, and some members of the council were alerted by someone’s participation.

It was Leobold Vandus’s intervention.

Some of the councilors smiled slyly when they heard the intelligence that he was joining the war.

―Finally, the opportunity to kill him has come.

―You killed the weakened Kairos and you’re feeling cocky, huh? I’ll make you regret joining the war as you die.

Leobold had drawn too much attention from Elvrande.

It started with the leak of living metal, then he landed on Yggdrasil as if to show off, and finally he killed Kairos.

Above all, he was achieving remarkable results in ether engineering, which annoyed him.

It wasn’t widely known in places like Zaium, but the ether trains that were deployed in his territory were superior to Elvrande’s in some aspects.

―They can carry so much cargo and travel regularly between cities. That means they have very high fuel efficiency. Otherwise, they couldn’t afford the consumption of ether stones.

―He’s ignoring the height of ether circuits, too. He has a power that we don’t understand. We have to kill him before he brings destruction to Astera.

That was the order that was delivered to Tirenadel.

He said goodbye to Princess Margreta, who was doing volunteer work in the human autonomous region.

“Your Highness, I think it’s time. I’ll go and kill a human.”

She sat on a stump for a moment and wiped her sweat.

The humans passing by looked at the elf party with anxious eyes and turned their heads.

They didn’t know why Elvrande’s royalty came here and meddled with their humble work.

Margreta invited Tirenadel to sit down, but he remained standing. 

She smiled faintly.

“Is the human you’re going to kill Baron Leobold Vandus?”

“He has recently obtained the title of Count and even ascended to the position of Regent. He’s not an ordinary human.”

“I heard he was surprisingly normal when I met him before.”

“He must have used some tricks to hide his power. He probably has a great mage behind him.”

For example, a dragon…

Margreta lowered her head with sad eyes.

“They say he’s one of the few nobles who are warm to his people, but he has to die.”

“It doesn’t matter what ideology he has. His existence only delays the unification of the continent. It only increases the suffering of humans.”

“Is that so…”

Margreta didn’t understand Tirenadel, but one thing was certain.

He sincerely cared about humans and thought that the only way they could survive was to surrender.

Elvrande’s power was overwhelming, so it wasn’t a completely wrong idea.

But she didn’t think that was the only way.

She had access to the sealed infinite library with her royal authority.

There were many documents there that recorded the history of hundreds of years ago.

Margreta was shocked by how different they were from what she knew.

‘Why do they claim that they were persecuted terribly when they got along well with the Ains?’

There were some crimes by humans, but they were only a few and there was no major conflict at that time.

She wanted to ask the council members about it, but she couldn’t because she was afraid of being banned from entering the library.

So her recent hobby was copying some of the documents from the library.

There was no eye watching her, so she could sneak out a lot of records.

Organizing them in her study was also her hobby.

There was a side effect of getting dizzy from the shocking history revealed, though.

Tirenadel bowed politely when she seemed to be enjoying the breeze.

“Then, I’ll go and kill him.”

“Don’t say such harsh words, Sir Tirenadel. Maybe someday you can join hands with him.”

“I’m sorry, but that won’t happen. He has to die for Astera’s peace.”

Margreta saw him off with sad eyes.

The future where elves and humans coexisted seemed too far away.