Anturia shifted uncomfortably in her new armor, looking around. It had been a day ago Gamma had shown the freshly formed team how everything worked, and today was the first time that she wore her new equipment.

All in all, she hated it. While it wasn't uncomfortable it just felt wrong. She was a medic, not a warrior, why did she have to wear armor?

Gamma claimed it was for her own protection and since they were talking about dragons here she hadn't been able to counter his rock-solid argument, so now she was standing here, publicly in battle gear together with the rest of the team that was spread across the area around the building site.

She hoped that none of her former colleagues would see her like this. First, she had hoped that she could hide her identity behind her helmet, but that vision had quickly been shattered upon seeing her armor.

Instead of the usual copper and brown that the other armors had been colored, hers was black with white stripes. Additionally, she lacked the second layer of protective chainmail armor to make her lighter and more mobile than her other teammates. Finally, a blue medical cross had been painted onto the chest, backplate, and backpack to identify her as the medic.

In other words, everyone knew who, or at last what she was. Hiding was not an option.

Why had she allowed herself to be convinced of this?

…

Well, probably the same way Gamma convinced Robin to make Basil's existence public.

She looked around for the freshly assigned leader of the Enforcer taskforce. She had originally expected Gamma to take that position, but he had explained that he lacked the military experience Robin had to show. Gamma himself was only the Head-Executive of the Enforcer program.

It wasn't hard spotting him. First of all, it was because, like her, his armor stood out from the rest. It was completely gray, slightly shimmering metallic without being reflective to avoid any light giving away his position in battle. Finally, blue stripes ran along the helmet and chest plate an additional giveaway of his rank as captain.

What really caught other people's attention however was the fact that a brown/orange dragonbite viper had coiled around his neck, its head lazily resting on his shoulder.

She could see that most people were keeping their distance, clearly intimidated, although nobody came to complain, be it for Basil himself, or Robin's new status as captain. That didn't stop them from curiously watching and pointing fingers, silently whispering among themselves.

Robin himself seemed quite tense about that, although he was hiding it pretty well, the only giveaway being that his hand rested on his folded-up weapon. Basil himself didn't care, probably because he was sleeping although that was hard to tell with snakes not having eyelids and all.

Talking about the snake, she had to think back to yesterday when Gamma had introduced him to the rest of the team.

Jimmy had freaked out at first being confronted by the most toxic snake on the continent, if not the world, followed by calming down and freaking out again, this from excitement and glee of having the most toxic animal of the continent on their team.

Jerom had simply taken a step back as a precaution, before accepting the snake with the usual professional attitude he handled everything else. "Bosses word is command." was all he had to say and while blank, 10 times better than the overexcited "THIS IS AWESOME!" from Jimmy's side.

Basil himself had been curious about the new members but kept a respectful distance from Jerom the same treatment Jerom gave Basil while doing his best to stay away from the excited bundle that Jimmy had been.

Overall nothing too interesting and nobody got bitten which was a pretty good start in her opinion.

She was still in her thoughts when she noticed someone approaching her from the edge of her vision.

"Anturia, is that you?"

She silently whined. So much for not being spotted by former colleges. Nevertheless, she acknowledged the greeting. Susanne wasn't the worst person she could have stumbled across.

"Oh my gosh, I almost didn't recognize you under all that armor…" she continued, making Anturia internally cringe. "Well a good thing that Gamma thought about labeling you." she chuckled. "How has your new job been doing?"

"Fine I guess…" she replied, wishing she could turn invisible. "It's just the first workday so don't expect too much…"

"Asked him for a date jet?"

Now she had Anturia's attention.

"Sorry, what?!"

"Come on, don't be like that, you know what I'm talking about." she replied with a wide grin. "You hate conflict, and there's no way you would've just joined a task like without a good reason. It's Robin correct? I have been suspecting for a while already that you got a crush on him…"

Anturia was suddenly very happy for the helmet hiding her expression. This was even worse than she thought it would go.

"Alright that's not true…" she replied in an as stable tone as she could muster.

Before Susanne could reply a loud ringing sound washed over the crowd causing all conservations to halt. Gamma had stepped onto the stage, some kind of noisemaker in his hand to get everyone's attention.

Anturia let out the breath she didn't know she had been holding. Saved by the bell.

"Alright everyone please calm down." he started. "Sorry for taking so long, I needed to make sure everything was working correctly before I could begin… Anyway, first of all, I want to thank everyone for helping with this project no matter if you're a builder, guard, or otherwise. This has been a wild ride, and was admittedly not without any danger considering the large number of dragons we attracted."

He looked over the crowd again, a smile appearing on his lips. "Nevertheless we didn't lose a single person! We set through with this and now the excavator has finally been finished. Yes, now that it's done I'm finally revealing what this machine can do…"

He turned back towards the machine, looking at one of the workers who gave him a thumbs up. "Everything ready sir."

Gamma nodded, before climbing up the ladder and from there onto the exterior catwalk that winded around the excavator.

The crowd fell silent, watching with anticipation how he walked towards a small cabin that was positioned near the left top corner at the front of the huge machine.

"This might get a bit loud." he called down. "And maybe a bit scary… oh you will understand in a second, but be ready to get blown out of your socks!"

Multiple people in the crowd took a step backward.

"Not literally by the way."

The crowd relaxed.

After that he disappeared into the cabin, closing the door behind him. Nothing happened for a while. Then more nothing happened. After a few more moments of nothing, the crowd started to whisper among themselves.

"You think something went wrong?" she could hear Susanne wonder, along with several others who had similar questions.

WOOOOSH!

Multiple surprised shouts could be heard throughout the crowd and many backed up nervously.

Looking towards the source of the sound she saw that flames were coming out of the two giant hollow towers built near the back of the excavator, sending dark clouds of what she presumed smoke into the sky. A second later a wave of heat washed over the crowd originating from said towers. Even more, people backed up now, but it still wasn't over yet.

HISSSSSSS-HISSSSSS-HISSSSS-HISSSS-HISSS-HISS-HIS-HIS-HIS…

Anturia's mouth fell open upon recognizing that sound, and multiple people seemed to have the same revelation. That sounded similar to one of those steam engines Gamma liked to use for all kinds of things.

This however sounded different in the fact that it was no longer a song of quiet, rhythmical hissing followed by the cute rattling of gears. This was way louder, the hissing now so fast that it had shifted into a constant roaring. It was so loud in fact that the Mountain Dragon that had been circling them from a safe distance almost fell out of the sky in shock, before quickly regaining itself and flying away in hurry.

She however only briefly paid attention to it out of the corner of her vision, before focusing back on the giant machine.

Then it started moving, the top portion with the huge metal grit that stuck out of the front of it turning towards the mountainside, the giant wheel that was mounted at the front of the grid slowly spinning.

Before she knew it the wheel made contact and the digging buckets of the wheel dug into the mountain ripping huge chunks out of the mountain with a rumble loud enough to put an earthquake to shame.

"This is unbelievable…" she heard some mumble. "That crazy lunatic is actually tearing down a f*cking mountain right now…"

The cockpit opened, and Gamma stepped back outside. The machine continued on its own without him.

"With over 90 meters high, 170 meters in length, and approximately 900 tonnes in weight this project has not only been the biggest I ever performed, but also the biggest on this continent. Even my diary has barely any that extend the size of this one." he laughed. "But anyway, you're probably more interested in what it's capable of. While we're talking here right now multiple kilos of ground resources are dug up from the earth and sorted by density, including iron, coal, copper, cobalt, magnetite, granite, silver, and even things like diamonds and gold."

Exited whispering went through the crowd at the mention of the last two.

"Finally I want to say that everything that gets yielded from the excavator will be shared throughout town. After all, we build this as a community, so we profit as a community."

He took a step forward.

"With this, I officially declare the Mountainside Excavator as operational!"

The crowd erupted into a sea of excited shouts and applause.

Back from holiday, with a new chapter to show.

PS: Am I being to fast with technology development? I want to speed up a bit and get past the technical explanation, but I don't want to make it seem unrealistic.