Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

"Make way for the caravan! Make way for the caravan!"

Banjay heard the shout enough times to start getting sick of it. But as one of the architects of the current logistic structure at Basal fortress, he was the last person who could be allowed to complain about it.

"I see things are moving fast," Banjay commented under his nose, watching how yet another long line of carriages passed through the fortress's main gate, carrying in the supplies necessary to prepare the place for another siege.

To the side, due east on the hilly area facing the Haela mountains and the labyrinths pass, a long line of fresh recruits and veteran reinforcements continued to slowly trickle through the smaller gate.

A unit of newbies would enter, only to be followed by a unit of retired veterans. Then, a unit of active veterans would follow, taking a different turn than the other two upon crossing the gate, heading straight for their positions instead of turning towards the training grounds.

"Things are moving fast, but two weeks?" Salicious shook his head. "That's barely enough to teach the fresh recruits how to throw stones or stab with spears. Unless there are some naturally talented archers inside, we won't be able to construct even a single group out of them."

Salicious raised his chin and looked up to the fortress from the hill the two of them were standing at.

"Two weeks is already quite the optimistic guess," Banjay commented.

It's been three days since he received the report about the sighting of a new legion down at the Huban port city. And going with the assumption they would all be force-marched down the labyrinth and given some rest just before reaching the fortress line of sight…

In that scenario, ten days was the most Banjay would give his country to prepare.

'The more I think about it, the better of an idea it seems to just permanently block the pass…'

As impossible of a task as it would be… the ancestors of the patriarchate cared not for it, constructing the biggest fortress Banjay had seen in his entire life.

They cared not for the cost, the struggle of bringing the materials over, or the manpower necessary to build something so massive.

Still, the ancients constructed only the main wall of the fortress, raising as high as the cliffs of the pass themselves, fully and completely shutting down the access between the labyrinth and the capital hills, leaving only five massive gates, roughly around the half of the massive wall's size, for people and carriages to pass through.

That was the main wall of the fortress, constructed with materials that no modern human could replicate. But the rest of the stronghold came from much later.

'According to the history books, the entirety of the deep fort was constructed around the time the patriarchate came to be, by the survivors of some sort of cataclysm,' Banjay thought, looking up to a construction that, while much smaller in size, still reached the level of architectural impossibility.

From the hillside, the fortress mimicked the curved nature of the main wall. It consisted of three platforms, each roughly twice the height of the former, with the highest of the platforms reaching all the way to the level of the gates within the main wall.

Looking up at the so-called "fortress steps", Banjay could see near endless lines of carriages moving supplies up the ramps, built along the curvature of each step and allowing easy access between different levels of elevation.

'Worst case scenario, we could try to collapse the platforms?' Banjay thought, looking to the bottom of the ramps, where between the erosion, wear-and-tear, and, in general, the corrosive hand of time forced the patriarchate to heavily invest in reinforcing the ramp foundation.

And now, the very pillars placed to keep the ramps steady and safe could be targeted in an attempt to collapse the entire thing and thus stop anyone from descending down to the hill level.

On the other side of the main wall, the design was pretty much mimicked, with a new set of three steps gradually lowering the fortress all the way to the level of the labyrinth pass.

The difference between the two sides, though, lay in how the outer steps were constructed in a way that made movement and access as easy as possible, the inner steps were actually the three main lines of defense of the fortress, with massive gates decorating both the start and end of each ramp, and an additional set of stone walls reinforcing the edge of each of the step.

This layout was what allowed the patriarchate to keep a hold over the pass for the last three hundred years, stopping imperial ambition to expand south over and over again.

In fact, a hundred years ago the nearest crossing to what the imperials called their new colony was still an inner road of the patriarchate, protected by the massive gateway ahead and leading to the vassal state of Uruk.

Ninety-nine years ago, though, the imperials breached the first line of the labyrinth defenses, taking over said pass and pretty much-eradicating everything and everyone within the Uruk dukedom, taking its people as slaves that were then forced to turn their formed, prospering duchy into merely a farming colony for the empire.

And now, ninety-nine years later, the imperials appeared to be super determined to one-up their ancestors, right on the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the gates.

'Knowing how they think, they will keep any invasion into the hinterland until the hundredth anniversary of the fall of Uruk,' Banjay thought, struggling to keep the dark thoughts away.

The eradication of the imperial legion besieging the Basal fortress was the greatest masterpiece he could pull off in his entire life. It took two years of constant preparations, scheming, diverting the resources away from the royal treasury, and sneakily pushing them down to the military…Nôv(el)B\\jnn

In any other situation, what Banjay did over the last two years would be enough to have him executed many times over, with all the executions ordered for different crimes.

But the current day was anything but a normal time. And abnormal times called for abnormal means and methods.

"We will defend this place to the last man, but against an entirety of a fresh legion?" Salicious muttered before shaking his head. "This level of determination, we can't really hold out against. And if they are sending another legion as soon as the last one ended up trampled to the ground… What is there to make you believe they won't send another legion even if this one fails?"

Banjay looked over at his former teacher and shook his head.

"The empire has nigh-infinite resources and manpower when considering it from our perspective. But that doesn't mean the empress is free to move all her armies at will," he pointed out, going back with his thoughts to the time he actually spent on the imperial court, far up to the north.

"For instance, do you know why their pressure lessened over seventy years ago, only to pick up two decades in the past?"

Salicious was old enough to remember the period when the unofficial cease-fire came to a tragic end, with imperial troops returning to the fortress's steps, no longer content with just securing the passage from the new colony to the main, northern exit of the Haela labyrinth.

Banjay himself was too young to remember the details, but he could still recall how the patriarchate started to change back during his childhood.

'I was but a kid back then, but here I am now, trying to figure out how to stop them from completing their grand plan.'

"Wasn't it because they were now done bringing the colony to its full potential?" Salicious suggested the official answer, the very same answer that the entire patriarchate knew by their hearts.

This answer meant that the last nation the patriarch could call friends has now fully succumbed to the imperial boot, reduced from brave and proud warriors into mere slaves to the endless, imperial greed.

The nation known for how easily they could bring their warriors all the way up to the supreme rank now became a bunch of slaves cultivating the very herb that the empire used to stifle the growth of the new supremes in any of the areas they had plans to attack.

Your journey continues with empire

A ploy so deeply hidden within the official documents of the empire that even Banjay, even while having nearly free access to all the documents of the empire, failed to discover.

It was only by chance, during one of the meetings of the conspirators back while he was still playing both sides, that he learned of the devious nature behind the Chai herb and the devilish way in which the empire exploited its questionable qualities.

In the end, though, save for how the empire tried its true and tested tactic on the patriarchate for years before Banjay managed to put a stop to it, this topic had nothing to do with why the empire lessened its pressure in the past.

"It connects back to what I said," Banjay sighed, revealing the knowledge that was too far removed from the interest of the patriarchate for him to share with anyone ever before. "Seventy years ago, the late emperor constructed a mighty fleet and sent two entire legions down south, trying to circumvent the great barrier and reach the southern lands by the sea."

"Impossible," Salicious smirked while laughing out loud. "Only a madman would…" he continued, only for his eyes to lock on Banjay's serious expression. "Wait, do you mean to say it's actually true?"

Banjay lazily nodded his head.

"It is true. And it grew to be the kind of disaster you would expect such a stupid idea to be. Between the soldiers, logistic workers, and all the other people necessary to conduct wars, over two hundred thousand people went south by the sea. And from what I've found out, a total of forty-three thousand returned."

Banjay took a deep breath and started to descend down the hill they were observing the fortress from.

"Out of those who came back, only about twenty thousand were the actual legionaries, with all the others being the support staff and slaves they caught back south."

"So it wasn't a total disaster, after all," Salicious pointed out. "Sure, a lot of people died, but what's a hundred thousand deaths for the empire with tens of millions of subjects it has?" Salicious waved his hand as if to dismiss the issue.

"It was a total disaster," Banjay sighed, slowing down so that his crippled teacher could keep up. "A disaster that took the empire fifty years to recover from. Or, if you look at it from our perspective, it was a massive blessing that gave us fifty more years without asking for the bloody prize it would otherwise require."