16 Tanks And Machine Guns

A month after the landing, Jack, Emma, and Naomi had fully integrated with people in the village.

As they backtracked the human army, the trio encountered a village on the way. They remained outside, observed the people while having their Alexa analyzed the speech of the locals. They survived on foods and drinks scavenged from the crashed spaceship.

Following seven days, both Emma's and captain Jack's Alexa chips had enough data to compose a language neural package. The neural data packages were injected into their integration module, which acted as a virtual secondary brain, during their sleep.

To put it plainly, they could now fluently converse in the language of the locals. Naomi, nonetheless, did not have an Alexa, so her learning of the language had to be done the natural way.

They stole many items of clothing during a carefully planned night raid, and patched various parts of those together to form new articles of clothing. They buried their Corporation attires and wore the new garments, completely transformed into a medieval family of a burly husband, a delicate wife, and her lively sister.

Naomi's clothes had been designed to conceal her various augmentations, including her metal right arm, the shock absorbent modules on both her legs, and her augmented eyeballs. She still wore her glasses. Although the design of the glasses was a bit modern, they weren't very eye-catching since some scholars of this world donned glasses as well.

As such, Naomi resembled a tomboy girl with a poncho, a pair of gloves, and a big straw hat. She also acted mute.

The infiltration of the village afterward was simple. The village did not have any method to keep track of their citizens. They just waltzed right through the gate, after smiling to the soldiers keeping guard.

The village looked like a peaceful German town in the human history book. They learned numerous things after Jack visited the bar, and even the church, many times.

The humans in this world had the same level of advancement as humans on Earth in the seventeenth century, according to the Catholic calendar.

A day on this planet was roughly 24 hours, and a month consisted of 30 days. A year had 360 days. No leap year. It was strangely similar to the Earth before the comet hit.

They had a religion that resembled the Catholic church, albeit they did not worship a human savior.

There were also many things that were different from ancient Earth. The fundamental differences were the appearance of dark energy manipulation techniques, the vile beasts, and the witches.

The church monopolized dark energy manipulation. They called it "holy magic". They channeled "mana" through a "magic stone", to perform various "miracles", including healing, a communication range of one kilometer, attack using heat conversion of dark energy, defense by dark matter dimensional displacement, among other things.

The "vile beasts" were the animals in the forest where they came from. Apparently, these beasts carried some kind of pathogen. If their bodily fluid came in contact with yours, you would get infected. The locals called it "being tainted with the devil's power."

All the males that become infected will, without fail, turn into raging beasts that attack and infect others. After a few days, some of them will die, some of them will become docile, but having lost their human intelligence.

However, less than half of the infected females will survive, and gain supernatural powers, which the trio suspected as dark energy manipulation.

These powers were described as "without any magic stone or mana tank", unlike the church's form of dark energy manipulation. This was baffling to the team, since no intelligent biological entity had ever been recorded in the Federation history to be able to directly manipulate dark energy.

And what did the church do with the witches that carried the same power as them? They burned the witches, of course. It was not even surprising anymore. "Church" seemed to be a synonym of "witch burning" no matter what world they were in.

***

Jack was the last to enter the room. Emma and Naomi were already waiting inside. He hanged the coat on the wall, and caught the protein bar Emma threw to him.

After the nutritious, but unsatisfying meal, Jack went to wash himself with the bucket of water Naomi had raised from the well earlier today.

When the matter of personal hygiene was done, he sat down on the floor. In front of him were two ladies on the straw bed.

"I will summarize the situations, and then I will propose the arrangement I have thought of." Jack said. "Feel free to cut in if you find any issue with what I have to say."

Emma nodded. Naomi said in a small voice. "Yes, sir."

"We can't reach the ship at the moment. The deeper into the forest we go, the denser the beast populace is. We can't protect ourselves during the maintenance that would likely take years." Jack continued. "We barely escaped alive the last time."

"We need a team of educated people that can manipulate dark energy to perform the maintenance. And an army to protect us from the danger of the beasts. Our options are the church, or the witches."

"The church is very hostile to people with the same power as them."

"They don't revere human. Their god is the source of mana. We can't pretend to be their gods."

"I personally discourage this direction." Jack emphasized.

No one had any opposing opinion.

"Since the church is very powerful both politically and militarily, we can't directly cooperate with the witch." The captain made the gesture of his right index finger advancing and got stopped by his left hand.

"So, we need to build our own political and military influence in this world". His right index finger was joined by his thumb, his middle finger and finally the entire right hand.

"And we take the church out of the picture." The right hand slapped the left hand away.

"Or we force them to cooperate with us and the witches." The right hand grabbed the left hand in a clutch.

"And I have found the perfect starting point to build our army and influence." Jack grinned. Emma and Naomi had guessed what Jack was talking about.

"The mercenaries, sir?" Naomi asked the high-spirited captain. She had no idea why the captain was so elated. Most of the things he presented were awful news.

"Yeah. We are going to build the greatest mercenary company ever, with tanks and machine guns!" Jack laughed.

The engineer and the young intern pilot looked at each other and helplessly sighed.