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

According to the treaty they ironed out after the initial show, the imperial army would remain under Etaria\'s authority for an entire month, while those strange, newfound allies would gradually take over more and more people.

The schedule they set up was as simple as it was ambitious. Or in all honesty…

\'All in all, it\'s merely a dream.\'

In the few hours that passed since the princess\'s meeting with the other side came to an end, Peter and his allies proved their intent to uphold the weird yet extremely generous terms of peace.

And according to the schedule, they were to take over an entire five thousand soldiers at once and right off the bat. In the following three weeks, they were to accommodate a further ten thousand each weak, all the way to the remaining five thousand at the end of the month.

An extremely ambitious plan that even imperial planners would struggle to accomplish, and with all the connections and resources they could abuse.

The connections and resources that those strange people clearly lacked… and brought an extreme abundance of at the same time.

Overall, the terms of the peace were unrealistic to uphold… but this strange, young man didn\'t seem to care about that fact, opting to make it happen anyway.

"Tacticians, step up!"

A group of five Makary\'s soldiers stood at the helm of a thousand imperial soldiers.

And following their order, begrudgingly, a group of ten men stepped out of the crowd.

Conveniently, they were all near the front of their units, from where they could maintain effective command of their troops.

"So it\'s a hundred men each," the soldier dressed up in a black, military gear remarked under his nose. "Perfect," he added, raising his face with a huge smile on it.

"Listen and listen well! From this point on, you are all primary workers. And for the foreseeable future, we will all have one, shared goal!"

Stay connected via empire

The same soldier shouted into a portable loudspeaker while pacing in front of the imperial unit.

Even standing a fair distance away, Etaria could feel the tension of the men formerly under her command.

And, to her own surprise, she noticed a sense of anxiety in herself, born from watching the spectacle… Even though it was a third time for the princess to see it happen.

"And it is to build you basic housing first. Once we make sure that all five thousand of you can sleep while protected from winds, rain, and cold, we will move on to gradually improve your barracks, to turn them from shelter to livable quarters."

Makary\'s soldier didn\'t even bother raising his voice. With a loudspeaker in his hand, there was absolutely no need for him to speak loudly after all.

\'So they are really doing it…\'

By now, Etaria struggled to doubt Peter\'s intention.

The scale of his commitment to the act, assuming it was truly the case, was simply too big.

Just a moment ago, Etaria witnessed a column of a total of eleven, massive metal monsters unlike anything she saw before in the forest.

Consisting of three different kinds, they apparently all served an extremely specific purpose. Or so, Peter claimed, when he spared Etaria a second out of his busy schedule to explain.

His story thought, made him either a bard capable of telling the greatest tales… or an accomplished wizard who treated the laws of the world as mere suggestions.

"Aarrgh…" Etaria groaned, annoyed by the sheer level of competence everyone in the newfound camp displayed.

"It will suffice to say," Makary\'s soldier continued, "those who will excel at the simple construction and maintenance work shall be the first to gain the benefit of better housing and the opportunity to take on better jobs."

Princess heaved a tired sigh.

"Worry not, all those who work hard shall be fed and taken care of. But those who excel…"

The soldier didn\'t bother explaining the potential benefits of being an excellent worker. Instead, he waved his hand at the other four that accompanied him.

And just like that, for the next fewteen minutes, those overwhelmingly powerful foreigners busied themselves distributing some sort of sweet snacks among the ranks of the imperials.

The curiosity among the rank and file was great… But they were all under strict orders to wait until everyone got their fair share.

\'Oh right, I forgot to ask about it,\' Etaria thought, feeling desperate when her thoughts went on a side track yet again.

But how was she supposed to stay calm, when in a mere few hours, Peter turned this empty plain into a greatest display of disregard for any semblance of common sense.

"Now, you can all try it out. And this is just the simplest form of benefits you can get for doing your best!"

Etaria gulped down her saliva.

She watched how her men tried the strange, dark-brown snack for the third time by now. And every time, she could see their faces lighting up, as if the snack was happiness incarnate.

"Haaa…."

Heaving yet another long sigh from the bottom of her tired guts, Etaria pushed through, moving from one impossible scene to another.

One of the hosts, or brigades as they called them here, swept clean a huge and flat area of the plain, going as far as removing stones and boulders and cutting grass to an even shape with a set of scythes. And now, this cleared-out space was occupied by a strange crane-like monster that continued to unload massive containers off the back of yet another, long yet strangely compact monstrum.

This impossible metal beast would leave its load to be stacked by the crane monster on one side of the cleared-out space, only to return to the forest with a guttural roar… And its sibling to appear with a new load within a few minutes.

A big further down the plain and away from the forest, six more monsters of yet another kind continued to swallow a massive load of earth with each swing of their powerful arm, creating long but relatively narrow ditches, all set in the same direction and a neat row.

With those monsters appearing quite early, they left a considerable number of those ditches in their wake, where a few more brigades ran around, busier than they ever were while within the imperial army.

"And I still have no idea what they are doing…" Etaria muttered to herself, watching how her men ventured inside the dark bellows of those strange, rectangular blocks of metal brought over from the stockpile…

Only to bring out some sort of heavy, steel beams and haphazardly throw them into each of the ditches, stacking a total of six beams per ditch.

"Wait, what?"

Turning her head to where the row of ditches started, Etaria blinked her eyes a few times, struggling to believe what she was seeing.

Sometime while she wasn\'t watching, around forty ditches changed.

The steel beams that the imperial workers haphazardly threw into the shallow ditches… They now stood erected at the corners and in the middle of the ditch, locked in frame by something too small for Etaria to see properly.

\'Even if they create those frames, what they are…\'

For a second, the princess entertained the idea of doubting the reason behind Peter\'s plans and the orders of his men. And then, she looked around, at the plain busy with bustling activity and metal monsters that moved on their own and completed tasks at a rate not even a hundred humans could.

"I guess that\'s where that wood will be used, huh?"

Pretending to connect the dots, Etaria recalled Peter\'s explanation regarding the expedition of the eleven metal beasts she had seen before.

And then, as if to prove the princess\'s thoughts right, the sound of the horn announced the return of some of the metal monsters from their expedition.

The same metal monsters as the one who continued to move in and out of the forest, delivering massive cages full of precious and extremely convenient cargo. The three that returned from the forest a few minutes gallop away, though, brought a massive stack of cleared-out trees in place of said cages.

"Haaa…"

Blinking her eyes a few times as if to let her brain rest a bit, Etaria shook her head while a sense of powerlessness spread throughout her limbs.

The things happening around… were simply too strange. Too impossible. Too much out of the ordinary for the princess to accept it. And yet, all of those things continued to happen regardless of her will.

"Right, I was to ask him about that snack," Etaria recalled out loud, throwing a quick glance to where…

Where the thousand from before has already vacated the area, only the fourth, second to last unit for this week to take their place.

"Tacticians, step up!"

A different soldier from before shouted, preparing himself to give the exact same show as his colleague from before.

\'What was it called?\'

By now, tired of the futile attempts to comprehend what the hell was going on around her, Etaria\'s brain simply ignored all the things that made no sense.

\'Koko? Loko? Choko?\' Etaria brought her eyebrows together, struggling to recall even a name that she heard just a few moments ago, when she last bothered Peter, pulling him away from his tasks to ask some random questions.

\'Oh right,\' Etaria\'s face suddenly brightened up, as something in her mind finally clicked. \'It was Chocolate!\'