Chapter 1150 – Mettle Plant Demolition


    Siena carefully crawled along the ceiling. Her body fully ignored the call of gravity and even the laws of adhesion, staying attached to the blank bronze of the tower with only the tips of her shard-like claws and her high-heel-esque feet. Her absolutely dark hair waved as if it was underwater, her tail raised far enough that it described a horizontal line with her curvy body. A latex-like material covered her dark blueish grey skin with a layer of black. Semi-liquid, the black matter was different from the clothes her fellow elementals could summon, but it fulfilled the same basic function. Her indecent areas were covered, even if often only to a minimal degree. What covered her arms and legs was primarily decorative, elevated elegance and thickness respectively.


    Currently closely present in her mind, John could feel the sadistic amusement of the midnight elemental. Its cause was the Ironborn sitting at a table underneath her, relaxedly humming while he was writing letters. Two servants, as broken as the set John had a floor under him, stood passively at the other end of the room.


    ‘What would he feel if he noticed me?’ Siena thought. ‘Shock first, definitely. Would that grow into terror or would my body distract him? Ah, John said they don’t have any Libido, so that delightful reaction is out. Pure horror and futile fear, then.’


    ‘You having fun there?’ John asked.


    ‘He’s my last prey, I need to savour this,’ she responded, her tail lowering until the crystal-encased edges of the spade-shaped tip could have almost cut off the decorative hairs the Lord had growing from his metal skull. Perhaps noticing the slight air movement, the last surviving Lord of the Chelmea raised his eyes to the ceiling. Siena tensed with anticipation, but the flickering eyes soon went back down to his work. Like all the others, he was unable to sense her, as long as she wished it to be so.


    ‘No witnesses,’ John reminded her.


    ‘It couldn’t be helped if he saw me,’ her sultry voice explained.


    ‘Behave,’ he chided her and a wave of displeasure reached him through their mental connection. That word had been used whenever John used the Five Rules for Shadows passive granted by Siena’s mother to force her to shut up and cease any hostilities. Such measures were no longer necessary, since the midnight elemental had largely renounced her murdering ways. Even if she acknowledged that they had been necessary at the time, she remembered the total loss of freedom that had gone along with them. It also reminded her of what she could slip back into being.


    ‘Fine,’ she hissed back and pulled her tail up into a safe position. ‘Should I remain still and patient for you, John?’


    ‘That’s what I have to ask of you, yeah,’ the Gamer responded. Because the Quest was likely to end once the final Lord was killed, they needed to attack the Mettle plant before then. The original plan was to subdue the Ironborn and have Siena keep them prisoner until they were done with the plant. The witnesses complicated that slightly, but as long as the Lord was where they could see him there was no issue. With all of the other precautions, the last thing he wanted was the lone survivor to slip away into the night. ‘Pin him down whenever you have the option.’


    ‘The only ones I care to pin down are you and the others,’ the nightmare elemental seductively whispered into his thoughts. Then she gave him a mental shove, pressuring him to leave her thoughts and return to his own affairs.@@@@


    John’s focus shifted to his own two eyes. “Alright, let’s go,” he told the group, which caused a series of thankful exclamations. It had been another hour since Eliana’s pregnancy ramble, so the majority of them were understandably bored. The sole exception of that state of affairs was constant. “Momo,” he called out to the bookworm, waving his hand between her eyes and the target of her interest. Snapping out of it, she looked up. “We’re going to the plant.”


    “Oh... can I just stay here?” she asked.


    “I’d rather not be separated when I don’t know what awaits us.”


    “...Can I take the books along?”


    “You’ll have to throw them back out before we leave,” John reminded her. There was a limited amount of stuff they could take from the Kingdom back to their world.


    Salamander, unwilling to wait any longer in his soul, manifested. “Stop holding everyone back with your book addiction, Momo! I want to blaze these cast-iron rod-heads... rod-heads... Fucking, Mother Fire, I’m clever when I get angry!”


    “What’s so clever about replacing knob with rod?” Momo asked, while slowly closing the book in her hand. It joined a pile of about seven, all of which she had devoured in the past hours.


    While the sadist did what the sadist did, the rest of the party made it to the plant. It towered over them, about fifty metres tall and expanding a hundred metres deeper into the cave. The pollution was being pumped out of a vertical opening that extended up the side of a tower. Behind it, the air was relatively clear. Heat radiated from the entire machination.


    “So, want me to smash it?” Metra asked.


    “Not immediately,” John responded, busy inspecting the plant from various angles, using the Mandala Sphere. How the plant worked was a mystery. ‘Even magic needs fuel. Mana is a hyper-efficient resource that can transform into practically any variety of energy or matter, but it doesn’t just do that on its own and it rarely occurs on its own. The plant has to run on something.’


    The obvious place to check out first was the tower at the outwards-facing part of the massive glass sphere. Transforming into Jack, the Gamer’s extension got the hands it needed to fiddle around with the cast iron plates covering the green-pulsing machine. Carefully, he ripped a cover off to peer inside. The machine moaned in protest when he did so. Reasons for that were immediately evident: the inside of the plate was inscribed with complicated runes and within the tower, various crystals glowed. Most of the crystals were about the size of a golf ball, some smaller, some larger, without any extreme differences. All of them glowed the blue and purple of arcane magic. The light was constantly getting siphoned off.


    ‘Artificial Spirit cores... no, soul crystals.’ Observe confirmed the case for every single one of these. The sickening implication caused John’s expression to darken. “They use the cores of traitors and unwanted to fuel the plant,” he explained to the haremettes. “I guess Mettle is some kind of distilled life essence, drawn out of the soil.”


    “Why the pollution tho?” Rave asked. “If ya draw stuff out of the ground, do ya need to spew more up into the air?”


    “Might be a deliberate design decision,” John theorized, while Jack dismantled more of the tower until he could slip inside. “Even if you did need to have the pollution, there’s no need to put the plant in a place where it washes over the city. Hell, you don’t even need to put the city there.”


    “Misery is the womb of the Ironborn,” Metra cited what the Baroness had said. “Guess they really like their fucking tests. They even called the drug ‘Mettle’.”


    The output of the plant gradually decreased while Jack ripped out each of the soul crystals and brought them down to where the rest of them were. ‘What do I do with these?’ he asked himself. Observe testified that the shortest duration one of them had been there for was 800 years. Evidently, the plant was incredibly old. More importantly, the people who were inside these crystals were more than likely driven mad by having been used as a mana battery for all that time. Even if John had the means to give them a body (which he had in theory through Artificial Spirit but would not apply for reasons of practicality), it may not have been wise to do so. ‘Perhaps I should just give them a swift end? I will have to sleep on that decision.’


    For the moment, John had Gnome create a stone box and he placed the crystals inside it. There were a total of seven of them. The box was sealed and hidden a metre underground. Before John dealt with that any further, he had a number of other things to consider.


    The plant was now shut down, ending both the stream of pollution and the bubbling of new Mettle inside the glass sphere. Instinctively, he just wanted to smash the damn thing and be done with it, but that may have doomed the population to die from withdrawal symptoms. Best to have it in reserve just in case.


    Inspecting the rest of the enormous plant, John discovered how the entire mechanism must have worked. The trip to the plant was way too deadly for the average human to take, so only people of either exceptional physical prowess or Ironborn could make it. In the case of the latter, everything would work as intended. The Ironborn would haul Mettle back to the city and the people would behold the Ironborn as their lifeline. When someone surfaced who could withstand the pollution for the entire walk and make it back with a batch of Mettle to feed himself, friend and family, then a mark would be left and the Ironborn could investigate that person. More than likely, such people were then either broken into the servant class or further trained to become Ironborn themselves, depending on potential.


    It was quite the perverse system of selection.


    While John considered all of this, work continued on the aftermath. First, they had to seal the Mettle plant off. People would naturally come to investigate why the constant pollution had come to an end, and when they found the entire stockpile of Mettle untouched, they would more than likely help themselves to it. Better to just have the entire segment of the cave separated with a new Gnome-made wall.


    Step two was to present the people with alternative sustenance. Using Combination, Nadine, a plant-focused elemental made from Undine and Gnome (and Salamander here to give her that extra bit of power), fertilized the soil inside the cave and filled it with lush trees, bearing fruit. The regular people probably wouldn’t have seen fruit in the entirety of their lives, but John trusted that their hunger would guide them to eat. Even a thousand years nourished by Mettle would not have eliminated fundamental human survival instincts.


    It may have been the case that they needed to get re-introduced to solid food gradually. John would have to check that in the morning. All he made sure of was that at least a few initial brave explorers saw him eat a few fruits. If they followed the example, the news would spread.


    Siena killed the last Ironborn and the party moved to the Baroness’ base of operations. While a few party members made sure that there was nothing unsavoury going on in the city while the dust settled, the rest of them continued their investigations for a couple of hours, before finally calling it a day.


    Leaving the dystopia behind was as simple as raising his hand and wishing it so.