Harbingers of Change

Chapter 3

To report that Ramiris had been hard at work since the day she joined Nazarick would have been an understatement - she went above and beyond. The former Fairy Queen had remodeled and expanded upon Nazarick's physical layout to an almost unrecognizable degree, improving upon every floor in both size and functionality.

A lot of new floors were made, ending up with over a dozen new floors interspersed throughout as defense- and production-type floors. There was even one for maids to exclusively live on, and instead of spawning the usual undead monsters, it spawned beds and cleaning supplies.

Ramiris speculated she could make about one hundred functioning floors on Nazarick alone, not to mention her own skill that would double the total floor count, though both couldn't be directly connected and her personal labyrinth wouldn't be nearly as big due to the staggering difference in energy reserves.

Beaming with pride, she charged towards her appointment with Momonga half an hour early, even completely forgetting she had Spatial Movement in her excitement. The undead ruler was working most of the time anyway, so there wasn't any need to wait until the last minute to make her report.

Failing to find Momonga in his office, she teleported to the next most likely location where she could find him; his private quarters. Though, by this point, she internally called it the royal quarters, since all three of his royal consorts lived there full-time, and oftentimes Pero or Buku could be found discussing things with him.

In her usual impatient manner, she pushed on the entrance doors right after knocking, barely letting the maid open them for her as she flew right in.

"Hey, Boss! Ready to-" She cheerfully shouted but paused mid-sentence once she came face to face with a strange scene that stopped her in her tracks.

Momonga's three consorts were eating breakfast, a massive dark-haired man sitting between them as they fed him spoonfuls of jam.

Ramiris took a double take. 'Who in the hell…Momonga can turn into a human!?'

"Good morning. I didn't expect you to be here so early." The unmistakable overlord's voice came out straight from the man's mouth, who then took a bite out of an offered croissant.

The sight was made even more bizarre seeing that he was dressed in the same white silk morning robe as the women trio.

"I…I thought you'll be ready as usual, Boss. Sorry for barging in like this." Ramiris awkwardly apologized, trying to salvage the situation before it was too late.

The three consorts were already giving her murderous stares for interrupting their personal time. Which wasn't surprising, considering how long Momonga worked each day. And now she had dared to intrude on said private time, likely the only private time they had before they all started their work day.

"Would you like to join us?" Momonga asked, trying to be polite and seemingly completely oblivious to the growing tension.

"Oh, it's very kind of you, but I already ate breakfast," Ramiris stuttered. "I'll do some minor adjustments and meet you in half an hour."

After that she practically shot out of Momonga's quarters like a magi-tech cannonball from her experiments, heart pounding as she whizzed past a half-dozen patrols and at least two dozen maids.

'Whooo boy was I close to getting murdered.' She awkwardly chuckled to herself.

Creating a simple chair right in the hallway was an easy task. Plopping down she opened Nazarick's control panel. Since the one Veldora had worked hard to create wasn't yet presented to Momonga, she used the old, rather plain-looking one.

With there always being something to work on, time flew by and within the blink of an eye, she was called back into Momonga's quarters by her direct superior Albedo.

By this time, Momonga was already back to his natural skeletal form, dressed in the midnight dark robe accompanied by the consort trio, dressed in their usual outfits.

"We are ready to start, please lead the way," Momonga announced.

"Right. Let's start with the first three floors." Ramiris uttered, avoiding the obvious stares of the three women.

Shalltear's domain had been vastly expanded and turned into a near-impassable labyrinth of death traps; doors that led to spiked pits, tunnels that twisted in loops, and enchanted floors that slowly drained the life force of intruders. Anyone who could not overcome Nazarick itself would be hopelessly lost and slowly driven to a maddening death, and that was assuming they could break past the first few floors of pure defensive bullet hell.

Now with all the undead relocated to other floors, it was truly the realm of the vampires. As Shalltear's chosen, the Kerai were the apex predators of these three floors. While they weren't quite at floor guardian level, their massive numbers in the hundreds more than made up for it.

With their mistress now living on the lowermost floor, they had a vast gothic-style castle-like area for themselves. Kyouhukou's chambers were vastly expanded as well and his countless children were fed with fresh monster corpses that were spawning in large numbers around the cities of Tempest and the capital in particular.

Besides them, countless other vampiric monsters roamed the labyrinth, inspired by her own past experiences and the literature she had read in Nazarick's library.

"It is very impressive. You have done well." Momonga praised her after the key areas were inspected.

"Indeed. Wonderful job, Ramiris." Shalltear joined in to praise the architect of Nazarick.

"I did my best." Ramiris proudly pushed her chest forward, lifting herself off the ground with an audible buzz of her wings.

They moved on to the fourth floor. Previously, it was a lake with a singular island and separate areas for the elemental spirits.

Now the vastly expanded area sported an archipelago with all types of elementals living on separate islands. The only ones without an island were the water elementals who had the entire miniature sea itself for themselves.

The earth elementals had a massive fortress on their land, the ringing sounds of blacksmithing audible as the group flew over it.

"The earth elementals are crafting new bodies for themselves and other elementals with their magics," Albedo explained, "As Lady Buku's servants, they wished to craft bodies for their peers personally."

The fire elementals had a small active volcano on their isle constantly spewing lava and rock, and the wind elementals had a tall spire wrapped in thick clouds and tornadoes. The island of the light elementals had a spiked crystalline structure akin to a greenhouse-mirror house mashup, while the dark elementals resided in a large sphere of swirling darkness that regularly patrolled around the entire floor.

The strangest of them all were the living areas of the space elementals. The meter-by-meter-sized square island had a single point on it, distorting the space around it and bending everything around it into non-Euclidian pathways.

Finally, Gargantua, as the floor guardian, resided on the largest island for himself at the center of the floor. Complete with a designated fighting area in case Milim came to spar. The door to the fifth floor was nearby in case forces had to be consolidated into the most defensive position or inhabitants were ordered to flee.

As Momonga's Omniscience worked overtime analyzing the ins and outs of the place, he noticed a school of tiny fish moving about that he didn't remember approving the spawning of.

"Did you allow the lake to sustain life?" He inquired, genuinely interested.

"Oh, the fish? No, that's the water elementals being bored. They like to cultivate them in any body of water they reside in since they serve as entertainment." Ramiris explained.

"Interesting. I think they could be used as a food source, should we fall to a prolonged siege if farmed properly." Momoga stroked his chin with two fingers, plans for tuna, cod, and perhaps even salmon to be introduced.

"I will order them to send samples to the head chef. If Nazarick produces a resource, it should not go to waste." Albedo voiced her opinion.

"Agreed, although it will have to be more numerous and higher-yielded fish such as Spear Toros." Momonga nodded.

Moving on onto the fifth floor, the changes were expected but functional. The crisp and frozen wastelands once desolate were expanded and utilized as tremendous storage facilities, capable of holding tonnes of supplies for extended durations at a time without worry of interfering with current patrols.

The blizzard climate of never-ending snow and wind made it ideal to store perishables such as vast reserves of food - that were currently being filled up as they walked - and even contain cadavers of entities below S rank with ease. With the uncertainty of the war over the horizon and the possible overwhelming might of Hinata, this was yet another preparation Momonga requested.

Massive, rectangular warehouses numbering the hundreds occupied this floor as far as the eye could see. As reluctant as Ramiris wanted to ignore the seemingly inevitable massacre that would happen sooner or later, the warehouses were still prepared.

The expansion of the sixth floor was unparalleled compared to any other floor. While it wasn't as large as the forest of Jura or even reaching one-tenth of its size, the floor was still about the same size as Blumund and was well worth its upkeep costs in terms of sheer resources available to fuel Nazarick's and Tempest's current and projected growth of citizens for the next few years.

Besides the centrally located forest, the floor now also sported fertile fields as far as the eye could see, a rainforest packed to the brim with reservoirs of every Tempest native animal or plant, and grasslands capable of holding immense numbers of almost anything for decent durations of time. With the influx of new dryads spawning within the floor as support, Treyni had joined Nazarick as an area guardian working directly under Mare to manage the new Special-A spirits.

At first, her tree had been moved into the great tomb and acted as her anchor, but Mare, being the clever and crafty boy he was, had reshaped the tree into a fully female figure and fused it together with Treyni's spirit, reforming her into a far stronger dryad than she ever was.

Without such worries as seasons, the fields were already mass-growing products that were impossible to cultivate in decent numbers above the ground, due to a lack of farmable lands in the largely forested Tempest Hegemony. Steps were taken for deforestation, but it was slow.

This was another step forward for prolonged sustainability, should all of Tempest's population need to be moved inside Nazarick. Given a few more days, these fields would become strong enough to produce tens upon thousands of kilograms of food every single day.

Additionally, the forested areas had large amounts of beasts roaming around, giving another boost to food production thanks to their magical auras and fecal droppings. They also served as a form of protection, should enemies enter this far into Nazarick.

As they inspected the floor, Ramiris' expression had changed into that of a smug one. To increase the floor's size hundreds of times compared to normal was an accomplishment even she herself was astounded about when she did it, having spent an entire day straining and pulling to do so.

At first, she was afraid that her boasting would bite her in the ass, but in the end, Ramiris could proudly assert that she outdid herself with the sheer size of the sixth floor. Even Albedo had no comment about her boasts, and she made suggestions regarding how certain locations could be shifted for more efficiency or protection.

The seventh floor was relatively unchanged. It was made twice as large for the purpose of expanding upon Demiurge's experimentation on test subjects and housing the increased production rate of pop monsters. It also contained more magitech, courtesy of Pandora's Actor, for Demiurge to use without needing to request it and thus increase their paperwork.

With the military and city floors unchanged, next came the completely new floors.

The first among those to visit was the primary designated spawning floor. With the necessity to spend Nazarick's pop monster spawning energy on both standing forces and intelligence units, Demiurge, Pandora, and Ramiris had worked together to streamline the process. This had increased the output of all units involved by hundreds of percents, bolstering Tempest's and Nazarick's forces as a whole no matter where Momonga looked.

For one, the system that could be set to auto-spawn specific types of monsters was currently creating massive amounts of shadow demons to patch up any holes in the intelligence network. Half the floor was dedicated just to the production of shadow demons, which were then spatially teleported to the seventh floor.

Additionally, the floor had a facility specifically designated to automatically spawn mercenary units the moment Nazarick's batteries hit one hundred percent capacity, dropping it down to ninety percent before allowing the magical power to regenerate. This automated process had escalated the overall growth to a new level, relying on the Master subskill to continue the self-perpetual increase in overall power by keeping every mercenary unit under merciless control. Housing was also created, albeit packed and if Momonga was honest, something he himself didn't want to live in if push came to shove.

Overall, every single preparation Momonga could think of was made, and now all that remained was to defeat the enemy that, by this point, was mere hours away from reaching the Falmuth-Tempest border. Shadow demons had already reported the charging of holy spells and summonings of elemental spirits among the rear guard, and the vanguard had long started their creation of holy barriers

"Excellent job. You have proven to be a great addition to Nazarick's personnel and the guild. I think once the war is over, we can officially elevate your rank to equal to that of a floor guardian." Momonga declared at the end of the tour.

"It's nothing. There's a lot that can be added and expanded upon. I already have plans for the creation of more floors for raw resources." Ramiris accepted the compliment with a slight blush, fluttering around.

"Then I leave you to coordinate your work with the rest of the floor guardians. Is there any reward you would wish for?"

"Reward? I already have everything I want, and if I don't already have it I can make it. I guess if you could find a way to stop my reincarnation cycle, I would be most grateful. Oh, I almost forgot. Lord Veldora and I rebuilt Nazarick's control panel to fit our needs, but we need your approval for it to be activated." Ramiris opened the panel with a long list of changes and a confirm button at the end.

"I will look into it, but I will not make any promises since I don't know what stopping your rebirth cycle would entail." Momonga turned his attention to the list.

Veldora may have been careless and arrogant at times, but he wasn't stupid and wasn't above sneaky methods to get what he wanted. With that in mind, there could be all kinds of weird changes hidden within their proposed modifications.

To his surprise, most of the list just improved the practicality of his skills' functions. Like an ability to remotely change the spawning settings and leave notes for others to see.

There were some cosmetic changes as well. Veldora apparently wasn't a fan of the clunky and plain UI and had improved the design.

Then Momomga stopped at a particular line. 'Virtual assistant.' It had been added by Ramiris and edited by Veldora, suggesting both were involved. Further inquiry into its mechanics suggested it was Ramiris who laid the foundation and Veldora who cleaned up the minor details, of which neither Momonga could interpret at the moment.

"Ramiris, what is this?" He inquired.

"Oh, that? We used lesser elementals to create a semi-sentient program that can help automate processes, akin to the artificial intelligences created back in your world. Here, let me show you the unapproved version." Ramiris opened a test version and pressed Nazarick's logo.

A transparent young woman in a fine business suit appeared in front of Ramiris and announced. "User Ramiris recognized. Nazarick's virtual assistant at your service."

Momonga instantly drew parallels to dryads, who had a similar transparent look thanks to their spiritual bodies. He couldn't tell what this specific program's look was based upon, even after racking his mind. The virtual assistant had the appearance of a generally attractive woman with black hair tied in a bun and a two-piece dress suit, giving her the appearance of a secretary. She even held a virtual clipboard and had thin, black glasses.

'At least they didn't choose anything inappropriate.' Momonga mused.

"Everyone, give it a try and tell me what you think." Momonga encouraged the trio of consorts to test the new version.

"It is more streamlined. I must admit, Lord Veldora and Ramiris have done an excellent job." Albedo was the first to comment.

"Hey, you can now see monster stats. There's a ranking… Why the hell am I not even in the top fifty!?" Shion screamed and tried to hit the floating screen, swinging an aura-enhanced punch.

Luckily, her fist went straight through it, accompanied by a ripple-like visual effect.

"Calm down! You knew that before." Albedo scolded the hot-headed kijin woman, pulling her back.

"But…But…" Shion gave Albedo a defeated look and closed the panel.

Shalltear, on the other hand, went right for the convenience functions.

"Tell me the status of the kerai," She ordered the virtual assistant.

"User Shalltear currently has one thousand two hundred and ninety-four kerai under her command, with fifty-nine having individual names."

"What is my current energy level?" She asked the next question, growing interested.

"Current energy level of Shalltear is at one hundred percent of total capacity."

"This thing is great! But that reminds me, I should name the next batch of kerai," Shalltear's enthusiasm faltered.

Getting more capable servants was great, but giving them names at this point was pure pain - and not the good one either. She had long run out of ideas for names, considering that she also named the mosquito-type insects.

As if a light bulb went off her head she perked up. "Give me a random female name." She ordered.

"Accessing the random name generator. Parameters; female. Giving a random name; Zalza." The virtual assistant dutifully executed the command.

Shalltear broke into a confident smirk. The tour had given her an excellent idea, something she was sure the others would use. "Set up an automatic process. When my energy is at one hundred percent, generate and use a random female name, and use the maximum amount of my energy they can withstand to name a random unnamed kerai while ensuring their survival."

Momonga performed a double-take at the sheer brilliance of his second consort. Shalltear by all means wasn't stupid, but she wasn't that smart either when it came to management, and couldn't dare to compete in the intelligence department with the likes of Albedo and Demiurge.

Unfortunately for the young vampire, the virtual assistant rejected her demand. "User Shalltear is using the test version. For execution of a given order, please use the live version."

She instantly flipped around to face Momonga, an overly cute expression decorating her face as she pleaded in a small voice, pointing at the translucent woman. "Can we have this, pleease?"

Even Momonga's undead heart couldn't resist such a devious tactic. When Shaltear acted like this, he could rarely not fall for her demands, something the trio knew very well.

"I s-suppose there are no problems with implementing this change." Momonga stammered, pressing the confirm button.

Shalltear immediately repeated the order, and a glowing smile adorned her face once more once she obtained confirmation that the tedious task was now automated. She even felt her power slightly draining away, and the production of her kerai amped up even further. With her current regeneration rate she could name two kerai a day, and with the dungeon's natural spawnrate, the number of named kerai would only grow by the day.

"If this thing is so smart, maybe it can tell us how to have children without either us or our beloved losing power." Shion pointed at the virtual assistant, obviously trying to find an impossible question to jab with.

"Children?" Both Shalltear and Albedo perked up.

'What the hell, Shion!? You too? We talked about this.' Momonga panicked so hard that it took a few attempts of emotional suppression to calm him down.

"Unclear order." The virtual assistant replied in a monotone voice.

"For someone on your power level, it's not smart to have children. Although in a purely technical sense, with the help of Nazarick, the energies of parents could be carefully taken and controlled, with a new being formed in a general likeness of the couple. Not exactly a proper offspring, but close enough." Ramiris shrugged, not realizing what she had done.

Momonga turned his neck to attempt to burn her alive with his gaze alone, as his arm rose on its own accord to strangle the pixie.

Ramiris, sensing the danger, gave a mock salute and awkwardly exclaimed. "We all have a lot of work, so I'll be on my way! Good luck! Bye-bye."

Momonga grasped empty air as the fairy managed to teleport away in the nick of time, just before the skeletal fingers seized her delicate neck.

'I will goddamn kill you!' He sent a silent scream after her as the trio closed in with predatory smiles.

Albedo was first to press her body against his and lovingly glanced up, the other two closely following behind.

"What a wonderful idea to explore once we have crushed our enemies. Don't you agree, darling?" Albedo purred with such a seductive voice that Momonga involuntarily gulped in response.

"I-I guess." He squeaked. "B-but let's not be hasty."

"Of course. First, we destroy our enemies, and then we can give you children without making you or us weaker." Albedo clearly repeated her intent with the same intonation.

All Momonga could do was curse the fairy who had placed him in this predicament, knowing that there was no way in hell he would be able to talk them out of the idea. He had heard the stories from Pero and knew of the trio's determination, there was no weaseling out of this.

With Albedo teaching both Shion and Shalltear how to knit and sew clothing, he knew the trio was actively seeking workarounds to the system that prevented powerful entities from safely siring offspring and now they finally had a loophole.

"We will be careful, my love." Shalltear joined in on the assault. Shion chose to hug Momonga ever-tighter instead of vocalizing her thoughts, increasing her embracement force tens of times.

"Let us concentrate on more pressing matters at the moment." He tried to steer their minds away from the idea for at least a moment.

"Of course," Albedo reluctantly let him go and resumed a more business-like demeanor. "With all the preparations completed, we are fully prepared to face the enemy. Those pathetic humans and their deranged leader will be annihilated."

Editing by aidan_lo

Proofreading by aidan_lo, FantasyTroll, Cakeeight, and Sluethen.