He tried to play dumb but now it wasn't so difficult to put the squeeze on him. If he were a clan member in an honorary post, he had to get used to discipline and hierarchy. He seemed to have realized it as he mumbled,

"Seven with rings. And two crates without, that's another forty."

Logical. They had to store the grenades without fuses. Finding them was another thing. I told them to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and deliver the steel invaders' treasure to me personally. And gently, on tiptoe! I couldn't really say that the discovery of the grenades shifted the balance of power, reversing the course of history. How much explosive would they contain in total, a hundred grams? That wouldn't exceed the destructive effect of a level-90 Shooting Star spell. And that's in an ideal world, considering the weird markings. It could be a gas grenade, a signal flare or a thunderflash for all I knew. You tried to use it as a last argument in a critical situation only to discover you'd just lobbed a smoke bomb at the charging enemy. That wouldn't help you bring the world to its knees. Now if I had a whole factory of those, I could in theory give them to any number of zero-level characters, essentially arming them with the equivalent of a near-100 magic. But now all I had was a new tool, a trump card up my sleeve and I needed to make sure I used it promptly.

I turned to the two other clan members. "Lena, do leave the pup alone, will you? His mom can't wait for you to go, you've been treading all over her paws, I'm surprised she hasn't bitten you yet. Let's go outside and check on those ruins. I want to see what those mad goblins have done."

I lay my hands on their shoulders and led them toward the exit to demonstrate the whole grandeur of the Super Nova ruins. We stepped out, blinded by the piercing sun after the Temple's majestic gloom. Then we cried out: I in surprise, Lena in awe. The inner court looked as if it had been worked over by a talented landscape designer. Colored mosaic paths ran amid rich flowerbeds that climbed some of the walls forming hanging gardens. I didn't know any of those billions of flowers and plants that swayed in their pots, each humming its own note that weaved into beautiful melodies. Fruit trees offered their shade, all in different season: cherries budding and in blossom, and those bearing fruit from pale yellow to deep burgundy, all clinging to the same lace pavilion. Jesus, it was beautiful.

"Lurch?" I whispered into the artifact, unwilling to break the spell of the moment. "Got something to tell me?"

AI was smart enough not to ask me what I meant. "You did allow me to use 1% of all the units generated for my own needs, didn't you? So I thought I'd make myself pretty, the façades at least. Lying in heaps of debris for eight hundred years was intolerable. I used to be a painter once, you know..."

"I don't want to know! What 1% are you talking about? Have you done anything inside at all? I can see at least five gardeners here! Where do you think you got the money from?"

"Sir," Lurch's voice filled with injured dignity.

"Don't sir me! Okay, you can call me Master if you really have to..."

"Master, didn't you authorize me to hire extra staff with the automatic payment option? Indeed, the final version of the design you see now cost a hundred times more than I could afford. But I only paid for the project itself, plus the seeds and the enhanced-growth seedlings. The rest was all done by the staff hired as of your orders."

"Was it?" I didn't like the way he said it. "Who did you hire, then?"

"Ahem," Lurch paused. "Just some gardeners and diggers, a few stonemasons, carpenters and interior decorators, plus a couple handymen here and there..."

"How many?" I groaned.

"A hundred and seventy nine sentient beings," Lurch answered in a sunken voice. "But it's only for twenty four hours! And then I did send you a full expense report!"

"Where is it? Where the f-" I stopped noticing my friends' scared faces. "It's all right. Just the Castle's AI exceeding his authority. I've got to show him who's the boss..."

I finally trawled the message from the depths of my overflowing inbox. I opened it and groaned. "You butthead! You only sent it to me two minutes ago, didn't you? Jesus... An Elf designer, fifteen hundred a day. Total, forty one grand? Lurch?"

"He's the King's personal designer, Master. An award-winner. He used to decorate the palace of-"

"Fire everyone! Once their twenty-four hour contract is expired!"

"We can't!" Lurch protested. "All this will die!"

I looked at the glorious beauty around us. At Lena who was sitting amid the flowers that seemed to cuddle up to her, stroking a huge violet blossom that curled up in her lap ringing like a silver bell.

"Very well. You can leave the bare minimum of staff to care for all this splendor."

"You really like it?" Lurch asked timidly.

"Of course I do. But for future reference, all expenses over a hundred gold have to clear my desk. This is official, effective immediately."

"Yes, Sir!"

I heard what sounded like the chirruping of hundreds of sparrows coming from the direction of the mosaic paths. Then a screech of metal. This felt like some sick déjà vu.

I turned my head and my blood turned to ice. Squalling and quipping, a dozen goblins were dragging across the paving stones the enormous egg of a 500K GP bomb, its stabilizing fins bent.

Chapter Eighteen

"All freeze!" I squeaked, watching the metal spark against the stone. "Where d'you think you're taking that?"

Apparently relieved, the goblins let go of the bomb which thumped to one side, crumpling its fragile fins. I shut my eyes and shrunk my head into my shoulders. A second passed. Nothing. Phew. I could live without this sort of surprises.

One of the cleaners—no idea where he'd got hold of his grubby bandana—wiped his sweaty forehead. "Well, eh... You said eggs, didn't you? We're taking this thing over there," he nodded at some designer art in the shape of a hill two stories high covered in flowers and veined with blue streams.

I stared at the hill's rounded sides. Then one of the flower beds stirred, letting out the shabbily clad skinny backside of a goblin crawling out from under the amber moss. The creature cast a furtive glance around and began studying his stolen trophies. Raising his left hand to his nose, he sniffed what on closer scrutiny turned out to be another grenade. With a screech of metal against metal, he tried to bite a bit of it off, snorted his disappointment and cast the inedible thingy aside. The grenade thumped up and down on the uneven ground, rolling toward us.

By then I was quite used to the sight of ordnance being dropped. Stepping on the dirty-green sphere, I stopped its chaotic journey. The same as the one I'd taken from the dwarf, only the markings this time were a sickly glittering acid green. Good thing, anyway. Waste not, want not.

In the meantime, the goblin was already appraising another trophy. This time he was in luck. An enormous egg the size of that of an ostrich—at least—promised him a hearty meal. The goblin sniffed it greedily, bit the top off, then began swallowing the contents. I, however, was studying the handmade hill with a different eye, recognizing the familiar shapes of various ammunition in its bumps and mounds. If the whole thing detonated, holy mother of God...

As if answering my thoughts, a dull explosion echoed not far from us. The earth shook quite tangibly.