NOVPUBThis emotional suppression isn’t healthy.
One of Emily’s cores forms a small bird of crackling charge, sending it out to alert Podrick and Earnie as she rolls her shoulder, feeling out the connection with her new mechanical limb.
Having my emotions locked in this… emotional vault, has limited my enjoyment of my day-to-day life. The emotional separation is helpful for my memory and certain situations, but I should be able to control it.
The metal hangs heavily against her flesh, but it isn’t uncomfortable. The segmented cuff touching the flesh of her bicep rotates, tightening with a thought as a tingling feeling of strength surges through her.
“I’ll have to work something out later,” she mutters quietly. “For now…”
A quick glance at the system explains the refreshing power flowing through her veins.
¯¯¯¯¯
[Emily – Left Arm {Gen.1}]
[Rank:] D
[Stats:] +8 Str, +6 Dex, +3 Agil, +3 Vit
[Description:] An enchanted mechanical prosthesis to replace Emily Coldstone’s left arm. Contains an integrated activator for The Clock and a spatial quick-change weapons system.
[Effect:] When activated, merges with the host to replace the function of an arm.
_____
“This is incredible.”
Podrick and Earnie step back into the workshop, following the tweeting bird of blue energy, and approach Emily to admire her creation with her.
She holds the limb up to the light, curling and flexing the delicate metal fingers, formed to be a near identical mirror of those on her right, with small lesser spatial crystals embedded into their bases, just above her knuckles.
Her eyes trace the faintly visible cracks spreading across the dark metal of her palm, drawn in a unique pattern mirroring the creases on her right hand, before moving to the reinforced ball joint in place of her wrist.
Emily flexes the hand back and forth, noting it doesn’t stretch back quite as far as her organic wrist once did, but it can rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees, a quality the elbow shares.
Her new forearm is made from several panels of plain alloy plating pressed together with a spatial crystal fixed in the centre, but no signs of any runes. The metal segments of her bicep are much the same. However, instead of a spatial crystal in the centre, there’s an empty circular socket.
“Can we know what that’s for now?” Podrick asks, noticing her gaze resting on the socket she never explained.
“It’s just a place to keep this,” Emily replies, lifting The Clock from a pocket in the lining of her robes.
She flexes her mechanical bicep in the same way she would if it were organic, with a small twitch of machina, and feels a small mechanical servo above the socket activate.
Perfect!
Raising The Clock, she presses it into the socket with its activation button pressed against the actuator of the servo. The metal shifts, curling up around the edges of the timepiece and leaving only its face exposed.
Podrick seems slightly confused by the addition, but he chooses not to ask any more when Emily nods with satisfaction, turning his focus to the important question.
“How does it feel?”
Emily straightens her fingers and flexes her arm.
Her forearm splits open, revealing small purple runes covering its inside surfaces, and exposing the moving pistons, gears, and wires packed together in a delicate balance in place of her flesh and blood. Her palm opens too, revealing a gaping hole through the centre.
The hole looks far too large for the small space available between her mechanical muscles, but neither Podrick nor Earnie question it, both already used to spatial magic.
“Just right,” Emily answers with a fleeting smile.
The magic crystal in her thumb pulses, pouring a dense purple mist into the hole in her palm that solidifies a moment later into a complicated mechanical contraption that seals the gap.
She tilts her palm away, feeling the machina and mana flowing through the entire limb, including the new addition tucked into an expanded space in her forearm, as smoothly as it does through her flesh. A flash of light blinds Earnie and Podrick for a moment, and as their eyes adjust, they see Emily admiring a silver blade the length of her forearm.
“The tension balance could use a little work, but you followed my instructions well,” Emily praises Podrick’s work, retracting the blade and making a mental note to enchant it later.
She withdraws it back into her thumb and draws upon the crystal in her pointer finger next.
Her arm adjusts around the new attachment, and she glances at Earnie, gesturing with her head towards his testing target control panel.
“If you would, please?”
“On it,” he responds, turning to set up a test.
“So, is it an attachment per finger?” Podrick asks while the unawakened mechanic fiddles with his controls.
“No, the spaces I’ve created in these fingers could easily fit ten attachments each,” Emily responds, watching the ceiling above them adjust, ready to fire targets for her. “I just like to keep them organised. Thumb for melee, pointer for ranged.”
She raises her arm, standing in a relaxed stance and nodding at Earnie. Her pinkie lights up as a channel of needle-thin engraved lines glow purple, flowing down into her palm.
“Little finger for ammo.”
Machina and mana crackle to life in sync in her forearm, twisting together to form a spiralling coil between a lightning crystal in the rear of the weapon attachment and a lesser lightning crystal buzzing in the palm of her hand.
The scrap cannons above her fire to life, filling the air with scattered refuse, and her machina flicks the firing mechanism in her forearm.
A small cylindrical projectile is injected into the rear of the barrel and immediately ripped forward with the hum of lightning. The bullet flies from her palm, and machina dances across her fingers.
Emily flicks her wrist, faster than the blink of an eye, redirecting the projectile and sending it off to plough through two malformed gears with a howling crack.
Another twitch and a second bullet cuts through the air, shattering a brittle wooden rifle body and burying itself in the sand below.
Podrick and Earnie watch in awe as she systematically shreds the falling debris, firing off nearly a dozen devastating shots a second.
She doesn’t move from her spot, firmly rooted to the working platform with only her arm moving, until the scrap stops falling thirty seconds later.
“Damn, that’s impressive,” Earnie mutters as he shuts off the test. “How’s it shooting without powder?”
“A mixture of magic and,” she pauses, glancing at Podrick before continuing, “electricity. It’s an electromagnetic cannon balanced using magic. Unfortunately, I don’t have sufficient technology to create and control them without magic. Yet.”
Podrick doesn’t notice her gaze as he peers over the edge of the platform, staring at some of the destroyed scraps.
“That thing hits scarily hard,” he mutters. “Those holes are huge, and some of them look half-melted.”
“It puts more energy into each shot than a small artillery shell, and the projectiles I’m using right now are about two fingers wide. This one can go smaller too if I want, but I’ll have to design another launcher for larger, less uniform projectiles like the blades in my old Claws.”
Emily shifts her arm again, pulling the projectile launcher back into her pointer finger and releasing the last finished attachment from her thumb. This one is a much simpler mechanism than the last, consisting mostly of an extra battery, to complement the main cells thrumming beneath the surface of her bicep, and capacitors.
She activates it, watching electricity arc between her fingers with a fizzling pop.
“All the extras work,” she says as she deactivates the current, closing her mechanical fist. “Shall we test crushing force next?”
***
Two days later, a mercenary from Silver Moon knocks on the workshop door and requests Emily’s presence at headquarters to meet Old Man Silver again.
She tosses the half-finished spear she was inspecting back to Podrick so he can continue his work and follows the mercenary out and across the city. In the headquarters, Emily leaves her guide and slips out of the main room through one of the hidden B rank exclusive passageways.
She makes her way straight towards the only fourth circle presence she can feel in the building, arriving at Old Man Silver’s office.
“Come in,” he calls out before she can knock, so she pushes the door open and steps into the surprisingly cosy space on the other side.
The room is a lot smaller than Emily expected, with wood panelling on the walls and a stone fireplace crackling away despite the beating sun outside.
Old Man Silver is sitting behind the only desk in the room with a cup of steaming tea set before him, scanning Emily with an inquisitive gaze. His eyes pass over her new loose, sandy overalls and the scorched scarf around her neck, before settling on the ticking mechanical limb on proud display thanks to her missing left sleeve.
“Please, take a seat,” he says, gesturing to the plush chair across the desk from him with a matching cup of steaming tea set before it. “You gave us quite a scare there. Even I was asked to visit the front in case of retaliation, but, by your report, it looks like we should have been the ones hitting back. Could I ask you for a more detailed account? It’s hard to get a good picture going from a basic report.”
He taps the side of his head to emphasise his point.
Emily reaches for the tea, taking a sip and feeling gentle mana brush her tongue with a salty tang. She tastes a familiar earthen bite in the drink that she recognises from her potion brewing.
Vothral weed tea? I didn’t know it could be used like this.
“There isn’t much more to add,” she says, taking another sip and relaxing back in her seat, drumming her metal digits on the armrest. “We walked into a trap because I got careless. Thinking back now, Pretty Boy was acting strangely from the moment we were assigned the mission, before that too. He displayed clear signs of visual discomfort when mixing with the group while we passed through no-man’s-land, repeatedly fidgeted with a set of pistols I suspect had communication crystals hidden within, and he always asked more questions about my scouting and anti-detection measures than I should have answered.”
Old Man Silver frowns, leaning forward and taking a sip from his own drink.
“That sounds obvious in hindsight…” he trails off, leaving her to read his meaning herself.
“Yes, and it should have been obvious at the time too. I was overconfident and made a mistake. I won’t repeat it. Simple,” she declares firmly, clenching her mechanical fist. “I’ll build a team I can trust, and I’ve already started working on more contingency plans for if I’m surprised again.”
“As long as you’re okay with that, I won’t press any further. I know the loss of a team can be trying.”
He flashes her a small smile before nodding to her hand.
“While that looks incredible, I know an Elder who can regenerate it instead if you want.”
“No, thank you. I…” She lifts the limb, rolling her fingers over each other smoothly. “Quite like it.”
A light mist of purple mana seeps from her twisting fingers, forming into a thick coin of metal, twice the width of New Denntimo’s usual currency and shining with a dull silver hue. Emily holds the coin between her thumb and forefinger, squeezing them together and bending the coin in half with a single steady motion.
Before her audience can react, her hand twitches and the fixed blade protrudes from her palm, rocketing to full extension. The folded coin splinters in half, flying out and tumbling to the floor with a light thud.
“And it certainly won’t decrease my lethality.”
Old Man Silver lets out an impressed whistle as his eyes trace the thin edge of the long blade.
“Impressive. How is it connected? I’ve never seen such a well-articulated prosthetic.”
“Unfortunately, that isn’t a technical detail I can share. Just a small personal quirk,” Emily responds with a wink, unwilling to elaborate for now.
“I see… Anyway, what about this dungeon then? I’ve never heard of one forming when a mana vein is destroyed before.”
“Me neither, but I’m guessing it has something to do with how long that oasis has existed for. I have a running theory on time, mana, and consciousness, but I need more data to finish it.”
“You believe mana veins can become conscious?” Silver asks with a disbelieving chuckle, finishing his cup and standing up to collect the boiling kettle from where it’s hanging over the burning fireplace.
“I believe it’s a possibility.” Emily shrugs, not mentioning the dungeon’s communication with her system.
Silver refills both their cups before sitting back down.
“So, Everette Dennal?” he says with a knowing grin. “What did you think?”
“Waste of mana,” she replies without a change in expression, causing Silver to chuckle softly to himself. “I was focused on ending him as quickly as possible for fear of fighting a fourth circle mage without most of my weapons, but he barely put up any resistance. It was disappointingly easy.”
“Hahaha, not something most could say,” Silver says, pulling a set of papers from a drawer and tossing them over his desk.
Emily scans over the scattered sheets, seeing countless names marked against several mercenary companies and the Defence Force.
“That’s his list of confirmed kills in the war so far.”
She blinks in surprise but nods a moment later.
He was still a fourth circle mage. Even if he was unprepared to fight me.
“Well, I say so far, but you’ve put a stop to him now, something we’ve struggled to find a chance to do for years. Thank you. Both for that and successfully completing your mission despite the setbacks. I have increased your contribution, but that isn’t an appropriate reward on its own. Is there anything specific you would like?”
“Actually, there are a few things.” Emily nods. “I have an apprentice I’ll be taking on any jobs I take from now on. I’d like to sign him up and administer his entrance test myself. I need to make sure he hasn’t been slacking on physical training since I last saw him.”
“It can be easily done. You don’t even need to use any contribution for that. Just bring him in and ask at the reception, I’ll make sure they know you’re permitted to test him.”
“Perfect. In that case, do you know of any spare mana veins? I want to build a factory.”
