It Started With Devils & Artefacts

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~~~

Forward Knights poured out from the vehicles as the gunships landed and surrounded the confused maids. 

After the pikes-wielding knights were the jet pack ones, as these pointed their rifles at them.

"Hold it, what is going on?" Jeanne asked as she looked confused and worried. 

"Look at the butterfly bar, and tell me that you have no idea what is going on," Sirin said while brushing her hair with her fingers. Her lips curled up, mocking as she looked at them.

At that moment, Jeanne and Hippolyta paled as they saw one bar at 100% and another below appeared with 52%, but this one had a world symbol with a butterfly on it. This symbolised the planetary scale of the butterfly effect.

"...Oops?" 

"You all are under arrest in Technocracy's name." The commanding knight said as he raised his voice.

"None of this would happen if you didn't intervene!" Atalanta said as she was certain that there was no commanding officer! 

But since Sirin accepted it, the command structure was established, and they paid the price.

"I have no idea what you are saying. If I hadn't stopped, you could have brought Jurassic Era to an idea before its intended time.

"You do know how this era ends, right? The volcanic traps in China erupt and kill all of the apex animals. I am simply doing what Marcus instructed." Sirin smiled as she motioned for knights to get them arrested.

The knights moved in, and Atalanta sighed as she offered her hands. Seeing no resistance, they moved in.

'Damn it…' Artemis complained to herself. Not only did she become a maid, but she was also arrested—quite a demotion for an Olympian.

"What will happen to us?" 

"You will be behind bars until all of the objectives in Jurassic are done." The white-haired Herrscher explained with a small smile. Almost telling them to leave it to her, she won't fail them!

"You are going to collect all the points!" Le Fay realised what this meant.

"I am not stupid enough to fight maids who can access limitless energy. You all will answer to your master while I am going to be praised for stopping you and collecting his… Allosaurus." Sirin smirked as she looked at how the knights placed magic handcuffs on each of them.

"This is ridicilous…" Atalanta sighed as she got arrested! So much for a proper hunt. She looked at Hippolyta and Jeanne.

"You two will suffer. I am going to make sure to beat you two up." 

"You can do that after we return to modern times." Sirin motioned to remove these criminals.

"In the meantime, prepare the Assimilator for terrain repairs. We can do that, right?" She asked the commanding knight.

"Specific placed time bombs should recover the damaged terrain. Considering only several hours have passed."

"That's Good. Then, you can begin with your preparations. I want this place to recover, " Herrscher instructed with a nod.

"At once, Mistress." 

When Sirin heard how they called her, she slightly blushed.

'I can get used to it.'

"Right." She then looked at Hisako.

"Let's go back. We need to finish those ribs."

"...Yes." The chef girl stiffly nodded.

Seeing those knights turn on the maids was quite a reminder that she was part of an actual military.

~~~

The maids were brought aboard the Assimilator and then taken to… prison cells!

"You can't be serious…" Artemis groaned, but she still obeyed, considering she was far away from home and her powers were sealed away.

"Will we be staying in prison until we return to outside the time?" Hippolyta asked, wondering how long the sentence would be.

"The amount of damage you all did and the amount of work we must do to undo your damage is considerable. By all means, Supreme Commander should look for new maids." 

The girls stiffened as they realised that they messed up.

"But you can undo all of it, so what's the issue?" The Warrior Queen asked.

"Your perception that it's your privilege to cause all that without care is the reason why you are behind bars.

Technocracy doesn't answer to you." 

Atalanta looked at Hippolyta. Her eyes glowed with murder. 

"For now, relax and wait for the Supreme Commander's judgement. He will be quite… dissapointed that one of his favourite time period got wrecked so much." 

The maids trembled when they heard that.

The most affected maid of them all was Le Fay, as she was sitting on the uncomfortable bed as if someone sucked her soul out.

Once the knights left the prison, the lights turned off, leaving only small LED ones at foot level, which gave a small amount of light to see the surroundings.

"You two have fucked this up! Do you know how long I waited for such an opportunity to hunt? Yet, your stupid greed caused all of this!" Atalanta snapped as she realised that Marcus was not here to pull her out, and trying to escape was suicidal, considering they were 150 million years away from modern times!

"Ha, and then why did you attack me?" Le Fay snapped back.

"Because you stupid brat, I wanted to measure the animal before I looked for a bigger one!"

"Then why you didn't ask!?" Le Fay exclaimed with a baffled tone.

"Because you wouldn't listen either way!" The lioness reasoned.

"..."

"..."

"..."

"Shut up, you two," Artemis spoke with a heavy voice, carrying heavy pressure, making the pair turn stiff. The Goddess was showing Olympian heritage to the two maids. 

"Because of this ridiculous situation, my standing with my Master will diminish, " she said with a sigh, making the other girls realise that it was true. Honestly, until now, he used to pamper them. But no one knew how he would react after seeing what they did.

As they were thinking, two knights returned. One was holding a large container-like box.

As they walked to Hippolyta, the leading knight opened the container, showing a cushioned interior.

"Your suit device." The knight requested to hand over the Triangle Diamond Heart Engine.

The red-haired Warrior Goddess sighed as she put her hand on her chest. At that moment, her clothes shifted to prisoners' clothes. The device already knew it would be taken away from her, so it left one last 'gift' for her before ending up inside the container box.

After Hippolyta, it was Jeanne, then Artemis, Le Fay, and lastly, Atalanta, who still had a murderous gaze. The lioness was furious as her hard work could be easily undone. The question is…

Will Marcus learn of this? Considering that proper infrastructure has yet to be placed and initiated, there is a considerable amount of lag between periods and the base construction outside of those periods.

Atalanta is even considering doing something drastic to ensure Marcus doesn't end up learning all the details.

Well…

It's just a thought; she has no basis to make it happen.

Aurora will record everything, but will Marcus check it? She knows that he often glosses over details to get a summary of the events.

That could be her chance.

"You are not thinking of breaking out, now are you?" Artemis asked as she saw how Atalanta had been looking at the doors.

"...maybe."

"And how do you suggest that can happen? Our powers are sealed, the outside weather is dangerous to mortals, and my powers are weakened, considering how mana is unresponsive." Artemis mentioned how bad their situation is.

"I know. But this is Technocracy. The jail system is not tested. We can start working our way back if we find any faults." The Lion Maid's eye rolled as she reminded them about the faction they were part of.

"...oh…"

Just like that, they all started to inspect and look around.

~~~~~~Meanwhile~~~~~~

Sirin and Hisako finished their dinner in lands that would be Portugal in millions of years and returned to the Centre Piece of the Assimilator.

The Herrscher was smiling the whole way as she was finally the 'Queen of Jurassic'—with Assimilator under her control, she could do practically anything!

Create a civilisation, gene-alter dinosaurs, build a flotilla, and invade her place of origin! All of those are possible with the almighty Ouranos-Class Assimilator.

The only thing standing in her way of doing whatever she wants is that Marcus will get dissapointed with her, and the whole place will shut down the moment he mentions anything.

She might have control, but that's because he is not around.

'This is such a tease. Absolute power an inch away, and yet that inch is insurmountable.' Sirin sighed as she ended up in the control centre. She could see rows and rows of officers organising animal collection and restoration of the destroyed North American Continent.

"How is the land?" She asked them as she walked over.

"It will take several days to set the charges in a specific pattern to restore the way it was before. 

The damage is in thousands of miles. Even the marine life has been impacted.

What we must pay attention to is how the layers of ground are, considering we need to make sure the way coal and oil forms are the way humans will find them in the future, " the officers explained to the pair.

"...Right…" The white-haired girl rubbed her forehead when she heard that.

"Just make sure it works and it's properly recorded for Marcus to see."

"Of course, leave it to us!"

The Herrscher nodded before looking at the empty throne.

"Anything else? Any news?" She asked as her gaze went from the throne right back at the officers.

"We received an order to initiate the first contingency. The automated assembly lines went online a couple of moments ago, " the Assimilator commander said to Sirin.

"... Contingency?" This was the first time she had heard this!

"The rearmament and creation of the army, the exploration and collect operation just turned into something more. Supreme Commander is requesting a rapid build-up of a fleet."

Sirin's left eyebrow went up. Does he need a fleet?

"But there is nothing in the place outside time that would need a fleet." The Herrscher reasoned with them.

"Supreme Commander is not outside the flow of time. He left for Cretaceous a while ago… considering how slow information flows, he arrived there several weeks ago."

Sirin massaged her head when she heard that.

"With all the time flow messing, I am getting a headache."

"Understandable. Aurora has already assigned what is considered central time flow. All of the interiors of Assimilators follow this standardised time to ensure the flow is anchored to the same time regardless of where you are, " the commander explained to them.

"I know it's still confusing. Not long ago, we slipped millions of years just to collect some theropods." She waved her hand dismissively before asking the most important question.

"Why is he in the Cretaceous? I thought he was busy with evolution-related data." Sirin recalled how bad it was—he kept ignoring even her!

"Yes, he was until he got word that the Assimilator landed in a unique Cretaceous world. He went investigate." 

"...Interesting, so whatever he found made him activate the first contingency." The white-haired girl rubbed her chin as she considered leaving this place after she collected the top bingo entries.

She still needs to capture marine life forms and large Sauropods. If she could, she could just make all of the automated entries in her name, but she can't cheat when AI is fully self-aware and follows her every move for the sake of her creator.

"Precisely, it could be alien civilisation or some cosmic event." 

The Commander's words perked her interest, making her wonder if it was some strange energy similar to honkai.

"Interesting. Let me check something~." 

The girl summoned her console and swiftly noticed that her 'bank account' had a hefty seven-digit balance.

She went through some interesting menus now that she had that much money.

'I can order a Star Destroyer… fufufu, interesting.'

For a moment, she pondered what to do, but then she realised that she was the only General in the entirety of Jurassic World.

"Aurora, Since I am the current leader, could I order any construction I want?" The white-haired girl asked the AI.

[As long as you have a proper explanation for your actions, you could technically construct another Assimilator. There are no set limits, except you would need to explain yourself to the Supreme Commander.]

Sirin rubbed her chin as gears were spinning in her head.

'I see, so I don't even need to buy ships. There is no need. Thanks to my high ranking, I can simply 'loan' resources from Technocracy.' 

For a second, she thought of just building a floating and leaving for her world, but that wouldn't have a great end result, and there was no doubt that the armada's crew would realise that she betrayed Marcus' trust. The whole fleet would betray her. 

No, her revenge on Honkai needs to wait. She still needs to finish her videos as well.

"In that case, build extra dry docks for the ships Marcus wants. I want him to know that we contributed to his cause the most." Sirin ordered the officers.

"Understood, we shall begin the work at once."

'At the same time, I can begin with the creation of my troops.'

The Herrscher recalled that Marcus and Quinella have a unique set of troops which only belong to them. Well, all of the soldiers belong to Marcus, but there is a group that is 'iconic' to him, and those are the Royal Guards, which have their iconic golden armours, tower shields, and heavily ornamented plasma pikes.

While Quinella has her Integrity Knights with special mobile suits for support, such a unique army exclusive to a single girl makes Sirin somewhat jealous. She used to have a pet dragon and armies of Honkai creatures!

'Well, I can start thinking of something until I need to leave this place.'

~~~~~~Meanwhile, Reality Away, in Cretaceous Earth~~~~~~

Marcus looked at his handy work, the Riot Police Armour, for his T-Rexes and the slick Seek & Destroy Utahraptor custom armours. 

"Execute all of my designs, Aurora, and begin uploading this to Aurora Network."

[Understood. Sir. We are receiving a faint signal from time ripple outside the planet's atmosphere. I do believe that the communication tower is beginning to power up in the base outside the time.]

"About time. Over a week has passed, and I am done with almost all of my miscellaneous tasks." Marcus scratched his head while complaining. He needed a proper network to coordinate with his other Assimilators. Considering he has no idea what is happening in other periods…

[A tower that can contact any place in space, and time takes time. Sir.]

"I know, and Quinella should know, that there is no way she is allowed to be linked with our modern time. If she does that time, the time flow will even out, and we will need to leave our hunt for dinosaurs and talent." The inventor reminded his AI.

[She is aware, that much I know. Besides, we must fly for nearly 20 days to reach the location of modern times in the time stream.]

That's why he is quite relaxed, as he knows that his Ars Almadel Solomonis does not have the advanced frequencies to establish and anchor the time flow with the rest of the Assimilators. Considering his space gun is already outdated tech.

"Yes, establish communication and prepare the data packages for the main hub." 

[Yes, compressing data]

After checking his latest inventions, Marcus' gaze moved to the armada he had outside the Assimilator. The first 30 Star Destroyers are done, alongside 60 Minotaur Interceptors, 60 Cerberus missile frigates and 80 Daedalus Class Support Carriers.

"Beautiful…" He whispered under his breath as he looked at the ships floating in Earth's Atmosphere. No one can see them as a strong gravity well blocking the view from the planet's surface.

But this was not the end, as his new Capital ship is under construction at the moment. According to this data, it will take a while, considering it's the biggest combat vessel he has ever built. He is not comparing it to the space stations or the Assimilators, which are in different leagues.

Well, his Solomon class Super Dreadnought is almost as big as his Ars Almadel Solomonis, but that's because the space gun is outdated!

"Marcus, the sapient raptors are starting to settle down!" Erina blasted into the observation room with an excited tone.

"Oh? About bloody time, close to 100 thousand years have passed!" 

He never considered that it would take them this long to drop their nomadic lifestyle. He does want them to become a sophisticated civilisation, but a nomadic life is a dead end, as culture doesn't advance that much when travelling is on individuals' minds. 

Living in a single place allows culture to improve and advance in tech, writing to become a thing, and living standards to improve.

But then again. This is from the perspective of an omnivore like him, but these raptors are carnivores.

"Yes, well, they tamed ceratopsids and hadrosaurids. Allowing them to… sort of… settle down." Erina showed him a strained smile.

"Sort of?"

"Well, they need a lot of space for the herds. So they have settled down to some extent," her explanation made Marcus rub his chin as he wondered what to do next.

"We can send another monolith close to this first settlement. But first, I want to visit their previous residence."

"I was thinking the same thing." 

She nodded at his suggestion, making Marcus smile.

The pair proceeded to descend to lower levels, where they flew down to the planet below. They were accompanied by a gunship escort. 

What they found were wide holes and remnants of dinosaur bones. Such a site reminded the inventor of Stone Age cavemen's villages, which used to be made from fur and mammoth bones.

"They are using Sauropod bones to build their tent frames." Marcus scanned the site with his eyes as he looked around. Caves were in the distance as well.

"Do you think they stopped living in caves when they realised that they needed more space?" he asked for her opinion, as he had no idea about societal structures, at least natural ones.

"Possibly, or it could be both. The caves are not that wide or warm, aren't they?" She said with a frown.

"Yes. But Cretaceous Earth is one of warmest times of Earth, not counting Permian-Triassic time," he said with a shrug. That's the thing. These sapient raptors don't need to care about the coldness of the ice age like how his ancestors needed to worry.

"True, that means they have time to develop social structures."

As they spoke, the knights explored the perimeter. They picked up more sophisticated tools made from wood, grass-like strings, and stones. They were much more advanced than the ones Marcus collected 100 thousand years ago from the original cave system.

"Sir! You should see this!"

One of the knights caught Marcus' attention. The inventor swiftly appeared next to him and examined what he found.

What he saw was a rotting corpse of a blue-skinned sapient raptor tied to a rock.

"...Primitive punishments?" Marcus said the first thing that came to his mind was.

"That is possible, as this corpse is tied to a boulder."

The knight agreed as Erina walked over as well.

"Well, we can figure that out. It's time for us to test the new gadgets I prepared." Marcus said after inspecting the corpse and taking some blood and tissue samples.

He motioned for his knights to bring the new stuff.

"New gadgets?" She asked curiously. Well, he was doing something the whole time, just like she was experimenting with food. So they both were busy with stuff in their own ways…

"As I mentioned before, we arrived in Carboniferous. I will be making more ways to control time to make sure we can negate and control the butterfly effect." As he explained to her, he summoned a hologram and compared the DNA of this raptor to the one 100 thousand years ago he got a sample of.

"Well, just look at that. The DNA changed more than 6.5%!" He looked pleased with this development!

"Isn't such a difference similar between us and the primates?" She recalled this from one of the biology classes.

"Indeed, even more so. Such a thing means that there were at least two to three splits up of this genome over the period of 100 thousand years. There could be at least two to three tribes of these sapient dinosaurs in this world as we speak.

With slightly different genes." He explained to her while he stood up. 

"Aurora project this DNA for me."

[One moment]

In front of Marcus, a blue-skinned man with silver hair stood on two legs and had two arms with five fingers. This creature looked more like a human than a dinosaur, which confirmed the idea that he was in some sort of anime or manga world. It's that he still doesn't know which one this is.

[Sir, it appears…]

Aurora highlighted a specific part of the DNA.

[That these sapient beings have developed Omnivore traits over the past 20 thousand years or so.]

"Amazing, so not only do they look more like us now, but their diet has changed too?" Erina noticed how these species look like blue humans now that dinosaurs…

[indeed. This part of the world has less prey to prey on, and there were periods of cold weather as well. These creatures had to eat whatever they could put their hands on.]

Aurora showed the pair that, in the recent couple of thousand years, the world has experienced small drops in temperature from time to time.

'Just like the data I got from Carboniferous, once a lifeform starts to struggle, the cells responsible for evolution start to kick in, and the adaptation process begins.'

Marcus pondered on what he was seeing in front of him.

"Interesting. It appears the world is moving towards the early bronze age. These sapient creatures could start developing writing and early forms of pottery. We must pay closer attention now." 

The inventor realised that this was starting to get interesting. He wants to see what these beings could come up with.

After all, he is starting to feel something akin to a creator-like figure to these beings.

[Very well, I will activate my protocols related to observation of primitive civilisations.]

"Do it, and release more drones for closer observations," Marcus instructed his AI as they didn't touch the corpse more than necessary.

Instead, they recorded all their findings for safe storage and collected some samples and tools for Marcus' collection.

Not long after, the knights returned with a box with green energy inside of it. Two of them needed to hold it as it was quite heavy even for them with the support of the armour's augmentations.

"Good. It's here." The Inventor noticed the arrival of his new gadget.

"What is that? I can sense… time from it." Erina looked at the box curiously. 

"That's because it is time. This is a time projector. It can anchor to an area, check the past or future, and then overwrite it with a selected choice." He explained to her as the knights had prepared the device for action.

"That's some impressive abilities." The girl looked impressed by what this can do… Technically, with this, he could undo old age and all that stuff.

But then she realised that this kind of stuff doesn't matter anymore anyway. She controls time, not through magic, but as if it's breathing. Just by doing that, she is no longer connected to the concept of ageing… which makes her realise how crazy her life is becoming!

Not that Marcus thought of that when he created this.

"Yeah, I created this so that I could collect the world's wonders, like Artemis Temple, which was destroyed way before modern times. I can restore all the world's wonders to their pristine condition with this box." He revealed his real reason for this box's existence.

"And, of course, in these cases as well." He then looked at the corpse.

"We can glimpse into what happened here without even restoring if we want to." As he was done with his explanation, he issued his orders.

"Begin with the setup. First, tag the boundaries of the area, and then select what to restore."

The knights rapidly moved to tag the limits of the boundaries before selecting the corpse's immediate area.

The box glowed not long after that, creating a green bubble in the area. They saw how the corpse started to recover and eventually came back to life. He struggled for a while before they finally saw how he ended up in this situation. They saw some primitive sapient dinosaurs bring him here. These dinosaurs were dressed in leather clothes, a much more refined version of what Marcus saw a while ago.

"Slow down, the flow. I want to hear them speak." Marcus raised his hand, ordering the knight controlling the gadget to slow the flow of time so that he could hear them speak.

What he heard made him smile for a bit.

It was extremely primitive grunts and other sounds. What made him happy enough is that he won't need to overcome a hurdle regarding communication. They speak on the same sound wave, and their ears can pick it up. That means that they can be even more useful in the future.

He won't need to gene-alter them.

"I don't understand a thing…" Erina sounded conflicted as these creatures spoke something she could hear and simultaneously annoyed as she couldn't make sense of it!

"Relax, we still need to finish those sessions for you to unlock psionic powers to tap into their mind to read directly their thoughts.

"You can do that even in this situation?" she asked, surprised; she understood that they were glimpsing back at what happened several months ago, if not more!

"Not quite, but you will need to understand it one way or another, and they won't speak English or Japanese to you." He smirked while saying that. She rolled her eyes, and here she was, expecting something of that calibre.

"Hey, if you mix psionic and time control, you could do that." He shrugged; something like that could be possible. 

"Anyway, now we know that they have language, we can tap into it." Marcus switched his theme of conversation.

"Aurora, begin translation."

[Understood. Sir, since they are primitive, some of their words could potentially make no sense to us.]

"I know, but regardless, just do your thing."

[As you wish]

~~~~~~Later~~~~~~

After that, they returned to the Assimilator, and Marcus began working on establishing a proper connection to the rest of his empire. 

There was not that much he could do on his part as the infrastructure was outside the current reality and outside the time flow. All he could do was work on keeping the information flow stable by miniaturising the concept of Bifrost…

Something akin to the fibre optics of regular society…

Honestly, it was not that hard, considering the amount of energy he could spare and nothing else to do.

But, like always, he ended up finishing it, and then there was nothing else to do!

That was until he decided to play around with the unique energy samples they recovered from the world below.

'I could make forms of stimulants. If I am to mix this up with evolution-related cells, I could technically rapidly create a creature of my desire.'

Marcus pondered the possible uses of this material. The issue is that it's not a liquid but rather a solid material. However, this is not an issue as something like this could be altered to one's needs.

"Erina do we have spare Triceratops?"

"Spare? I mean, we got several hundred of them a couple thousand years ago. Before their numbers started dropping." 

The Cherry blonde commented that they needed to start saving dinosaurs from dinosaurs as the sapient one started doing what humans did to animals of their times… reckless slaughter for food, material and space.

"Good enough. Just give me a male and a female. I will do some gene tailoring." He asked her as he proceeded to mix a new serum.

"Okay…"

As Erina was organising a couple of dinosaurs to test on, Aurora finished with translation as it was a little bit difficult to make sense of certain things…

[Sir, I have a rudimentary understanding of what they are speaking.]

"Show me."

Marcus rewatched the video of how two guard dinosaurs tied the criminal one to the boulder.

[The criminal one was screaming about injustice and something about the 'Ones who Watch' I believe these sapient dinosaurs know that we are watching them, and they are treating us like Gods of some sort.]

The inventor stroked his chin as he rewatched it several times. He understood the gist of it. Now, he is interested in how they perceive his presence.

"Interesting…"

[Sir, another thing. I do believe I have an idea what they call themselves.]

Marcus raised an eyebrow as he wondered what their name was. What did these people call themselves?

"Well, let me hear it." He asked with a curious tone.

[They call themselves the Klaxo or the people of Klaxo. The rest I do not know. We need to study them more]

When Marcus heard that, his eyebrows went up; he heard that before!

'Wait… as in… Klaxosaur… the blue people… with horns… in Cretaceous… strange energy from the planet's core…'

'This world is of Darling in Fraxxx…'

He realised what this meant! And where he was! The world of Zero Two, the strange mechs, the soul-eating aliens and all that weird stuff.

Marcus chuckled to himself as he realised where he was at the moment. It's so weird, to say the least!

~~~

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