Debaucherous x Division 10 (Patreon)

Commissioned

Debaucherous x Division

Chapter 10 

-VB-

Cooperland

3020.12.19

Between Caede Celeste and Kelbor-Hal’s templates steadily growing toward their full value as I continued to work with machines, I began to steadily phase out my clones from the manufacturing lines. I still had some clones in quality inspection at specific points of the manufacturing process, but by and large, I replaced their work on the factory line with automation for the most part, not even artificial intelligence but regular machines. 

The only industries we haven’t started to automate were mining and farming, because in both cases, my current Tier 5 Minecraft template does a better job at mining and farming. Until I made a machine that could dig up and auto-sort materials at two cubic meters per second at a minimum, machines were less useful, especially considering that with a Tier 5 Dupli-Kat Template, I had over a hundred clones operating at the same time, eighty of which were in the mines and the farms. 

Another twenty were in the factories either as quality inspectors or as mech pilots. Of those twenty, five were traveling back from Mararn with the Twin Red Lancers. The raid, or rather a field test for my Clovers, was a success. 

What was even a bigger success was what we did in combination with my science/engineering-focused templates and my new Template: Edward Alric. 

With Caede Celeste and Kelbor-Hal, I brought to life useful tools like mass spectrometers, atomic absorption spectrometer, NMR spectrometer, Fourier-Transformed Infrared Spectrometer, and others like them to analyze Sakuradite used in all of the Glasgows. 

As a form of battery, there was nothing better than it as far as I knew. 

And I did it. 

Or rather, I did it using forty clones working 12 hours a day to analyze the elemental make-up, figure out chemical structure, and experiment endlessly to use alchemy to recreate the substance. 

“Hey, Alan?”

I looked down and saw Wiska. 

She, like her sister, was three months pregnant. There was a slight curve to her abdomen that wasn’t there before, but nothing that truly broke her figure. 

“I never asked you before, but why do you keep your clones active at all times? Even though, you know, it causes problems.”

I blinked. 

“Oh. That’s to train my power.”

“Your power can be trained?”

“Yup,” I hummed. “For the cloning power, having as many of them as around with as a constant psychic stress ticks up the, uh, leveling meter, so to speak.” 

“Huh.”

“Also, if I recall the clones, then some of the new clones have to go all the way back to where the old clones were. And some of the mines are over a hundred kilometers in length now. Even if it is a straight drive, I know I’ll hate that drive.”

“Some? What about the majority?”

I pointed down.

“Underground?”

“Yup. I think the deepest clone is 7 kilometers underground.” 

She looked at me like she just heard something ridiculous. “How long -. No, how much have you dug up?” she asked in an almost hoarse pitch.

“Dug up? On average, a clone digs up 30 cubic meters per minute. Each clone works for around 8 hours a day. All clones work in shifts so there is no downtime for each ‘lane.’ And across the eight months I’ve been here, there has been an average of thirty miners at all times. Of course, that’s eighty miners now, but back when I started, it was no more than a few miner clones. And nothing I dig up is a waste, either. Now, thanks to alchemy, I can break down everything I mined up to their elemental parts or into a different shape altogether. But most importantly, the mass they provide can be used to create something else.”

She stared at me.

Then she started to calculate.

Her eyes widened even further. 

“Two hundred seventy five million cubic meters…?”

I blinked. 

“Damn, that’s fast,” I chuckled. “It’s actually closer to three hundred million. The average is thirty but I might be hitting close to Tier 6 with the cloning power with how many clones I can have active now. And in conjunction with better tech to help move the clones who can move more material than any vehicle, the rate of material income is also skyrocketing.”

“H-How much material are you digging up per day…?!”

I grinned. “I’d say three million cubic meters worth of materials?” I hummed. “Oh, shoot. Since we’re talking about mass, then we should talk about the weight, shouldn’t we? Since the average cubic meter of rock we’re digging up is anywhere from two tons to three tons, let’s go with two and a half. So I’ve so far dug up three hundred million cubic meters, which means I have just a little under seven hundred million tons of materials. And the daily rate should be seven and a half million tons of material per day?”

I paused. 

That was a lot of materials. 

Hell, if I truly wanted to, then I could streamline the excavation to alchemy conversion to manufacturing line to completion. I could make hundreds of thousands of mechs per day! 

But what would I do with that? Sell them? Flood the market? What for? 

… Actually, that’s a wonderful idea. 

Even if I were to create my own nation, I would be limited in what I could do against the Federated Suns. For now. There were literally hundreds of planets and worlds in the Federated Suns alone, travel time between worlds taking weeks if not months. In the case of crossing the literal Inner Sphere, it could take over a year to accomplish. It would take a long time for me to permanently cripple the Federated Suns. 

But. But. BUT!

Did I have to do it personally? 

If I make and sell a lot of mechs to Davion’s enemies and they crippled the Federated Suns, then would that still accomplish my mission of permanently damaging the Federated Suns? 

Something to think about. 

“And if I didn’t use the clones on rotation and recalled them every time I wanted sex or something, then I wouldn’t have all of this material.” I paused. “And I’m going to be honest. My skill in alchemy isn’t that great, so there might be some mass lost here and there. So I need as much material as I can get.”

“But you didn’t have alchemy until just recently.”

“I’m a hoarder.”

“You hoard cobblestone?” she asked me incredulously. 

“You never know when you need a million cubic meter blocks of cobblestones. Like building a giant wall around the spawn.”

“The what?”

“Nothing. Forget about it.”

-VB-

Cooperland

3020.12.24

The wealth and abundance of food I brought to Cooperland Port City and Tor Town led to something I didn’t expect. 

A big celebration for Christmas. 

I left them to it. No need to insert myself awkwardly when they didn’t invite me. 

Instead, I had my own little celebration. 

An orgy with Tina, Wiska, Ochiai, and Grace. Well, really Oichai and Grace. Tina and Wiska were five months pregnant and were not interested in sex marathons. 

And, of course, my clones who finally got a day off of work.

-VB-

Cooperland

3020.01.17

My expedition clones finally returned home. 

And they came with loot! 

Mechs walked out of the Twin Red Lancers’ Union dropship. A Grasshopper, Griffin, and two Wasps marched out, piloted by the pirate mechwarriors for the time being, as well as my five Clovers behind them. Trucks moved in and out of the Union, and a Thunderbolt came out on a flatbed. That one was going to be fixed up with parts I have from the first Thunderbolt I ever salvaged. Hopefully, I can fix it. If not, then I have advanced my industry enough that machining some new parts wouldn’t be out of the question. 

There were other loots, yes, but those five mechs were the real prize of my field test. 

Oh, of course, I knew everything that happened as it happened because I was connected to my clones even across dozens of lightyears, but it was something else to see it with my own eyes. 

And it was something else for the denizens of Cooperland as well. 

What they saw was a triumphant return of their new lord’s expedition, and they came with looted firepower that the planet has ever seen in a single unit. 

With this, I now had seven Battlemechs (a Griffin, a Grasshopper, a Frankenmech Locust, an Enforcer, two salvaged Thunderbolt that will soon become one, and two Wasps), five Glasgow’s, and twenty of my own Clovers CLV-A (five which had just returned and another fifteen which had been made before and since the field test expedition). 

It was a whole mech battalion (or would be if I had just one more lance). It was good enough size for a defense force, which meant that I either needed to make more Clover CLV-1s or salvage even more mechs. 

With the final kinks of the factory ironed out, making the Clovers was honestly the easier of the two options. 

Which meant I now needed to focus my development on transportation. 

Spaceships.