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

The entire concept, the stratagem that laid at the foundation of my plan was fairly simple and consisted of three, equally as simple lines of thought.

'First, stop her from realizing that I know, while letting others know.'

I saw no limits to the endless void of darkness that Irene was tapping into. Just seeing her through that intricately fine aura of darkness forced me to acknowledge the straightforward truth about the matter.

The darkness, the element that I was now only starting to get familiar with, was Irene's very own realm. What still felt like an elusive and external power behaved as the flow of Irene's own aura.

'Just like the flow within Madam's domain.'

It was something I've noticed second-hand only. Before my first meeting with Etaria, I noticed the lingering momentum of Madam's influence hanging in the air. During the recent battle, both Fay's mom and the golden princess, for some reason, refused to deploy their domains altogether.

Still, from the few hints and clues, I recognized the very same way in which the darkness behaved around…

'No, that's not the right word.'

It wasn't that the darkness surrounded Irene's being.

This intricately fine, nearly too minuscule for me to ever notice an aura of darkness felt like the very fabric Irene's being was knitted from.

My greatest ace in the sleeve was the very thing that defined Irene's powers. Powers that I was incapable of perceiving the limits of.

And so, in the face of such an overwhelming might, I had no other choice but to do everything to avoid confrontation. And stopping Irene from realizing I was aware of her, was the first step on this particular path.

"Swarm deployed, starting the scan," Makary's soldier reported in an energetic voice.

'Now, for the second step…'

Taking a deep breath, I tightened my hold over Fay's frame.

"I will be fine."

Sensing the hint of worry resurfacing in my soul, Fay cuddled up to my side.

This personal moment of ours lasted only for a single instant before our attention drew back to the vital stuff.

"Here we go," Makary muttered, dropping down on one knee and leaning towards the simplified projection of the map of our area.

The black smoke rose from the bulky backside of one of the armored trucks. With a slight buzz, it then dispersed in the air, before allowing its currents to carry it all around.

The copy of the map from the commanding truck flashed once, then twice…

And then, a fresh set of much more detailed data started to appear all over the projection.

"It's going to take some time for the AI to properly process everything," Makary cautioned, letting everyone know the counterintuitive reality of the artificial battle planner.

"Isn't it supposed to be that far better than us, humans?" I asked, more than eager to engage in any kind of nonsense talk that would serve to draw any suspicions Irene might have away from the truth.

"It's designed to be used during active engagements," Makary replied quickly enough to prove it wasn't the first time he considered the problem. "You wouldn't want it to start blasting your own people just because its data was incomplete."

Contrary to the civilian programming of the last years that effectively supplemented if not outright removed the need for human labor in many of the professional fields, the battlefield continued to come with stipulations that limited its actual use.

And given the magnitude of the weapons that everyone was ready to bring to bear once the conflict would erupt, no one dared to risk a single software malfunction wiping out entire cities off the map.

Waiting for the swarm to gather all the necessary info for the battlefield planner to feed on, I took a quick look around. And what I've only needed a single look to find out, only proved Makary's worries to be well-founded in reality.

Sure, we didn't have the caliber capable of wiping out cities… But between the guns mounted on the commanding trucks, the cannons on Maglev, scythe-class machine guns mounted atop the predators' cages…

With most if not all of those heavy guns integrated into the battlefield planner's programming, a single AI's miscalculation would be enough to wipe out half of Makary's forces within a single instant.

"It's about to…"

Makary didn't even finish his words before the projected map flashed three times in quick succession… Only for a sea of dots to appear all over the place.

I took a deep breath… And took a closer look at the area directly where we stood.

"It feels weird to look at yourself from a bird's-eye view," I muttered, leaning it over the projection.

Makary gave me a quick look before turning his eyes back to the projection, or rather, its specific part depicting our direct surroundings.

"It is indeed, but…" Makary held his voice for a second before giving me a sneaky, cheeky look. "Would you believe if I told you it's the first time I've noticed it?"

I gave the man a long glance… while internally having a solid breath of relief.

I looked as closely as I could, but the AI didn't display any presence I wouldn't recognize. And while it only applied to my most-direct surroundings given how just a few meters further the crowd of soldiers and Fay's kin alike made such observation impossible…

This simple realization, as pointless as it was in the grand scheme of things, irrationally allowed me to relax a considerable bit.

Makary gave me another look… only to turn his eyes back to the map, again.

"Just a little bit more and we will see that bitch," he pointed out before waving at the projection and causing it to scale out, rapidly increasing the size of the area it displayed.

In a second, the map grew big enough to cover the distance all the way to the edge of the forest. Within three seconds, it reached out the edge of the camp of Etaria's imperial army.

By the time the process slowed down and ground to a stop, we could see first hints of what was going on in the frontier city nearest to the forest.

"This damn wench…"

Makary took the news displayed on the map in silence. I took a second to figure out what to even say.

Only Fay displayed no inhibitions and openly uttered what we all wanted to scream out.

Busy dealing with the issue of Irene, we've allowed Etaria to bring out the bulk of her forces outside of the forest. And while I anticipated the possibility she would quickly invoke a general retreat that would make any decisive victory pretty damn hard to claim…

I surely couldn't help but gasp a bit when I saw that that damned princess not only managed to bring her battered forces out of the woods and rally them at the old, mercenary camp… But also reorganize them into a brand new army and even start the process of putting them all in a formation!

"It seems we are running out of time if we want any hope of dealing with this matter before it turns ugly…" Makary muttered, his attention instantly snapping away from my slightly cryptic behavior and moving on to the issue at hand. "If they reach the woods again…"

"Yeah, I get it," I spat down on the ground before raising up and slapping my own cheeks to let the slight sting of doing so help sober up my thoughts. "We need to get on the move."

"Good thing is, my men weren't slacking off!"

By now, Makary appeared to have completely forgotten my weird behavior and cryptic messages from before, fully focusing himself on the actual task at hand and even going as far as to give me another cheeky smile.

As if on command, all the vehicles that already moved through the gate started to rev their engines up. And in a moment shorter than it would take me to say "What the actual fuck," all of the battle vehicles started to move and form an orderly line.

A line aimed straight at where Etaria was about to finish forming her army in a bid to try her luck in the forest again.

Caring not for all the trees in the way of any serious armored column to drive through, Makary simply waved his hand to give the order to advance…

The late-modern inventions of humanity quickly proved the superiority of metal over wood.

The armored truck at the front served as the waymaker, crushing all the trees in its way under the immense weight of the armor designed to withstand low-yield nuclear discharge. The tracks on the truck's back squashed all the broken bits and pieces of the trees, turning them into a solid mix of soil, wooden chips, and scattered scones.

Following the main truck, one of the Maglevs hovered low above the newly established truck, making use of yet another quality of its mysterious operating force to further compress the mold of earth and wood, turning it into a suitable track for all the other vehicles in line.

"Let's go," Makary called out, going as far as to grab my arm and pull me forth, effectively abandoning the mobile map projector to his subordinates as he rushed the four of our group back to the insides of the main commanding truck before it too would move to join the column.

'Third step,' I thought, gulping my saliva down as my thoughts inevitably turned back to the unknown threat that Irene's mere presence represented.

The first step was all about stopping Irene from realizing I knew about her presence.

The second step was all about distracting her and making her believe we were going out to massacre the living shit out of anyone who stood in our path.

And the third step has just now begun!