The moment the words left her mouth, the Doctor leaned forward, eagerly waiting to see Jeanne's reaction. To her immense disappointment, the young girl simply sat there with a completely placid expression, her face practically reading: And? What else is new?
In the Doctor's mind, a normal reaction would involve Jeanne's eyes widening in utter shock, gasping in total disbelief as she blurted out, "Are you serious?!" How on earth was she remaining this incredibly unfazed?
The Doctor stared at Jeanne, completely lost in thought. Why wasn't reality aligning with the perfect scenario she had mapped out in her head? Was there something structurally wrong with her brain again?
"Are you wondering why I didn't drop my jaw, pop my eyes out, and scream 'No way!' in utter disbelief when you dropped such massive news?"
Jeanne broke the silence, looking at the Doctor's intensely staring face. After a brief hesitation, she spoke up, secretly wondering if she had accidentally skimped on the Holy Water earlier. The woman still looked like her brain hadn't completely rebooted back to normal.
The Doctor simply nodded in a quiet, dazed silence. A sudden wave of mental exhaustion washed over her mind again, leaving her with absolutely zero desire to expend any cognitive energy. Right now, even basic analytical thinking felt like a monumental chore.
She decided to abandon any attempt to guess what Jeanne was thinking. Hearing the explanation straight from the source was a million times easier anyway—even if standard dramatic tropes dictated that she should stubbornly refuse to ask and keep guessing blindly on her own.
"I mean, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? You're a core leader of this entire organization," Jeanne said, her voice remaining perfectly level, as if she were discussing nothing more than the daily weather. "Is it really that shocking that you managed to use your past memories to successfully dig up a landship from an ancient civilization?"
Hearing Jeanne speak of such a monumental feat with such utter casualness left the Doctor completely speechless.
"Don't make it sound like we just stumbled over a rock in the dirt!" the Doctor cried out in pure, dramatic agony. Jeanne's complete lack of awareness had clearly struck a painful nerve. The Doctor immediately slouched forward, burying her face in her hands over her helmet as she began to complain about how much grueling effort had gone into the project. "Do you have any idea how much desperate engineering we had to pull off just to hide that thing back then?! And do you know how much literal blood and sweat it took just to track it down again?!"
In fairness, her complaints weren't entirely groundless. Even though she possessed the precise geographical coordinates locked deep inside her memories, a massive chunk of time had passed since her original era. Who could possibly guarantee the structural integrity or exact location of an asset after thousands of years?
Beyond the constant risk of rival factions accidentally excavating it first, there was the brutal reality of time itself ruthlessly eroding the machinery. The Doctor had burned an immense amount of mental energy to locate that landship; it was nowhere near as effortless as Jeanne made it sound.
"Alright, so tell me more about this landship," Jeanne cut in, quickly steering the conversation back on track. If she let the Doctor keep spiraling down this path of grievances, she would be stuck listening to her vent for the rest of the afternoon.
While she felt a pang of sympathy for the exhausted strategist, Jeanne valued the sanity of her own ears far too much to endure a full day of endless whining.
"The landship! Oh, right, the landship!" the Doctor blinked, snapping back to reality. She had marched in here specifically to share a top-secret asset of Babel with Jeanne, not to throw herself a pity party.
Besides, if she really wanted to complain, she should wait for a better time to sneak into Jeanne's quarters. If she kept venting out here in the open and Kal'tsit caught her talking trash, she would be completely doomed.
"We located it within the borders of Rim Billiton," the Doctor explained, her tone instantly shifting into one of profound pride. She swelled with visible satisfaction as she recalled the masterclass of engineering she had once overseen, deeply moved that her creation had survived the centuries to cross paths with her once more. "But it isn't just any ordinary vessel. It's a highly specialized, black-budget landship that I personally designed, packed with classified technologies from my time! I've officially named it Rhodes Island."
That ship was the culmination of her life's work—a masterpiece of absolute secrecy. If any of the modern Terran nations ever managed to get their hands on its internal schematics, their technological baseline would instantly leap forward by one or two hundred years.
"If you dig it up right now, do you actually have the power to protect it?" Jeanne asked, a look of genuine doubt crossing her face as she evaluated Babel's current military logistics. "Are you sure it won't just get intercepted by a rival nation halfway through the transport?"
Jeanne's skepticism was completely justified. Perhaps because the relics of the ancient civilization were overwhelmingly powerful, archaeological excavation was an incredibly popular—and violent—pursuit across Terra. A massive asset like a landship would instantly draw the predatory gaze of every major superpower on the continent.
In an era where technological advancement was strictly driven by historical reverse-engineering, unearthing a massive vessel like that was equivalent to discovering a goldmine of epoch-making scientific knowledge. It was a prize worth starting a war over.
The Doctor's proud posture instantly deflated, her shoulders slumping into a look of pure misery. "Originally, we had set up a flawless, incredibly cautious concealment protocol. Everything was going perfectly under the radar. But then that absolute nightmare of a meteor had to come crashing down and ruin everything!"
The sheer frustration in her voice was palpable; if the laws of physics allowed it, she looked ready to slice that meteor into thin pieces and eat it out of pure spite.
"Right now, our biggest bottleneck is a severe lack of personnel. We don't possess the logistical force required to repair the vessel and escort it out of the zone in a short timeframe. It was already a logistical nightmare to begin with, but now it's practically impossible..."
The Doctor tilted her head back, staring blankly at the ceiling in a display of utter helplessness. To solve this crisis, she was actively burning through her remaining brain cells at a terrifying rate.
To make matters worse, this operation required a swift, immediate resolution, yet Kal'tsit—the one person who could have shared the massive operational burden—was currently trapped in the clinic handling an endless line of mandatory surgeries. Over the past few days, the Doctor could swear she felt her hair falling out strand by strand.
Fortunately, her original era had possessed highly advanced medical therapies specifically designed to reverse corporate-overtime baldness. Otherwise, she was completely certain she wouldn't have a single shred of her beautiful hair left to protect.
"Don't you have access to mercenaries?" Jeanne asked, raising an eyebrow. She distinctly recalled that in the original timeline, Babel had relied heavily on mercenary contracts to secure the site. "Why don't you just contract a few external squads to handle the extra security? Did you happen to overlook that option?"
The Doctor let out another heavy, melancholic sigh. "If only it were that simple! Contracting mercenaries is an obvious solution on paper, but the real nightmare is figuring out which of those vultures are actually worth our trust."
She knew better than anyone that hiring muscle was the fastest way to balance their numbers, but when dealing with professional sellouts, reliability was a massive gamble. The constant terror of a sudden, backstabbing betrayal during a critical phase of the extraction was enough to keep her awake at night.
If an elite mercenary group decided to turn on them at the worst possible moment, they wouldn't just lose the Rhodes Island landship—the entire engineering and transport crew could be captured alive. And to make matters worse, the three core leaders of Babel were absolutely required to be present on-site for the initiation protocols.
Under their original timeline, the excavation and transport were supposed to take place much further down the road. Even if the landship could barely crawl on its own power by then, they would have had the luxury of time to slowly vet and filter out trustworthy mercenary factions.
But Jeanne's sudden arrival had triggered a massive Catastrophe, violently shattering that peaceful buffer. Now, the few mercenary bands they had managed to clear weren't nearly enough to hold the perimeter, especially as more and more outside eyes locked onto the crash site.
Jeanne nodded in quiet agreement, fully understanding the strategic headache. The sheer volume of independent mercenary companies scattered across Kazdel was staggering, and trying to meticulously filter through thousands of cutthroats was an absolute recipe for premature baldness.
There was no easy way around it. Even with Babel's extensive intelligence networks, they simply couldn't bring themselves to blindly trust an unverified group of strangers with a mission of this magnitude.
Unfortunately, Jeanne couldn't offer any direct military assistance either. While she possessed more than enough raw destructive capability on her own, neither Babel nor her own current reserves possessed the sheer volume of energy required to manifest her full combat potential.
The meteor had yet to be fully excavated, and if an unexpected conflict erupted before they secured the core, things would devolve into absolute chaos. Because of this energy constraint, the Doctor hadn't even included Jeanne's divine wyverns in her active combat calculations.
Kal'tsit had already briefed her on the terrifying, destructive majesty of the wyverns Jeanne could summon, but the brutal reality was that Babel currently lacked a sufficient stockpile of Originium Prime. Those pure crystals were an exceptionally vital strategic resource for the organization, and they simply couldn't scrape together the massive quantities Jeanne required to fuel a sustained deployment.
In fact, the resource scarcity was so severe that even the Doctor had to ration her own consumption, with Kal'tsit strictly limiting her to a single piece of Originium Prime per week. It was an incredibly tragic way to live.
Left with no other options, Jeanne could only offer her sincere condolences. She knew absolutely nothing about the internal politics of the Sarkaz mercenary factions, meaning she was entirely useless in this department.
Suddenly, a memory sparked in Jeanne's mind. She reached into her pouch, recalling the detailed regional map Mudrock had handed her just before her departure. Though she wasn't sure if it would be of any practical use, if it came from an organization she personally trusted, perhaps Babel could find some value in it too.
At the very least, as long as the mercenary groups listed inside weren't fanatical loyalists of Theresis, things should be fine. If everything went according to plan, Jeanne would still be able to provide significant personal assistance on the field, which would easily deter any of those cutthroats from harboring any treacherous thoughts.
"See if this piece of paper is of any use to you," Jeanne said, sliding the map across the desk toward the Doctor. "A close friend of mine gave it to me before I came here. They mentioned that if I ever found myself in need of extra muscle, I could reach out to these specific groups. At the very least, they guaranteed that once these people accept a contract, they actually stay bought."
The Doctor blinked, recognizing the nature of the document the moment her eyes swept over the markings. She already possessed a few similar maps within her personal archives.
At best, a document like this served as an excellent point of reference—a detailed log of external mercenary movements compiled by an independent faction outside of Babel's sphere of influence. Taking it back to analyze would allow her analysts to significantly narrow down their potential invitation list.
With that thought in mind, the Doctor accepted the map, offering a genuine word of thanks to Jeanne.
The two chatted for a brief moment longer before the office door slid open. A highly anxious little Amiya marched into the room, terrified that the Doctor had slipped away to cause another massive disaster, and swiftly escorted the rambling strategist back to her workstation.