Eliot watched through the cameras as Sally and Tartu brought a plate of fish out for Mark. He was excited and thankful, and then he picked up a piece and bit into it, and it was like watching an industrial metal shredder finally find something that caused the engine to require effort. Mark’s face split into a wide grin as he tasted the fish, actually had to chew, and then got super happy.

He said something about how it was still soft, but in a very good way.

Sally cheered, Tartu said something about other methods they could use, and the conversation meandered slightly, with Mark talking about how he was still doing Glory, so of course the fish would taste better later when he wasn’t self-empowered, which reminded the other two that they were still in a warzone, and that dragons could burst through the fish-cover any moment now. Sally and Tartu remained on the deck for a moment, though, still talking; they’d head inside, soon.

Mark smiled softly, for a good long moment, as Sally and Tartu just stood out there with him, talking.

Eliot sighed a little, feeling happy, too, as he turned back to Andria and the scanner.

Andria looked at him. “Did the fish work?”

“Looks like it did, thank Hearthswell. Not sure what we would have done if it hadn’t.” Eliot lifted his head at the scanner. “This looks ready for me?”

The Storm Prism was locked into the center of the housing sphere, while a whole bunch of crystals, mithril, and even some more adamantium, was curled into the cube that contained the sphere. Inputs and outflows were all wired to one side of the whole contraption, which was unnecessary and required a lot more diligence and cleanliness in artificing than Andria needed to do, but that’s why Eliot liked her.

Eliot could put the part anywhere and hook from anywhere, but Andria had put in the effort to make the hookups in one location, the wires welded properly to the machine, and all orderly. No crossed wires here!

Andria solidly said, “It’s ready.”

“I got a place for it behind main command. Upper command can get a hologram display.”

Andria kinetic’d the scanner onto a cart, and then she pushed it along as Eliot led the way into the ship, into main command.

The main command was in two parts. An upper floor with chairs, screens, and other normal interfaces for people to use, and several lower floors full of towering servers, insulated electronics, and the engine core, in the very center of the ship. Further below the engine were all sorts of various sensor arrays, with the most sensitive sensor arrays located at the very bottom of the ship, hanging down from the bottom castle.

Fat lot of good those sensors had done sensing that yellow dragon bastard.

This thing here would do better.

Eliot went to the floor directly below main command, to a series of pillars set to the side, connected to sensor arrays located across the ship. Thanks to that yellow dragon Eliot put in 3 more circuit breaker systems between this location and everywhere else, as well as a great deal of shielding. Most of the main sensors could go here, with this pillar bank.

But this sensor needed to be integrated with the main shields themselves, in a very special location.

Eliot opened a tunnel in the Faraday cage and other shields, and pointed to a sensor tower located 20 meters down a tunnel, to a location some amount of meters below the Pantheonic Spire, in the backside of the ship. He led the way to a pillar sticking out of the ground.

“Here.”

Andria looked up and said, “We’re below the Spire?” as she kinetic’d the sensor onto the pillar.

“Yup,” Eliot said, digging deep into the pillar, into the wires and the electronics, and into the Castellan power he had imbued in the Spire overhead. Wires slipped up from the pillar, into the sensor, as he pulled a stabilizing pillar down from overhead. “This should be good.”

Eliot emplaced the Storm Prism in the systems of the Dreadnought and began running through some system checks. Interfacing magic-to-machine was not always easy, and it was never clean. Eliot pulled sensors out of the wall, connected to sensors out in the hull of the ship, compensated for interference with a dedicated server that also acted as a last-line breaker, and all the while the Storm Prism flickered and came to life. The sphere inside of the cube began to float. The cube glittered with inputs. The sphere began to rotate, unimpeded, spinning wildly—

“Shit,” Eliot said.

“No no no,” Andria muttered, stepping forward, disconnecting something even as Eliot did the same.

The rotation calmed. The lights dimmed.

“I see what the problem is,” Andria said, moving some parts and some runes around with a flow of mithril, separating them more from their connection to the electronics. “There. Try again.”

Eliot restarted the system, digging deep into the actions allowed to him by the interfaces Andria had created. This time the inner sphere rotated slowly, carefully. Eliot opened his eyes and the inner sphere was softly hovering. Not catching on anything. “There we go. Now for a test run. Andria? Since you’re here, let’s find you a metal kaiju.”

Might find one for Mark, too.

Andria grinned, and then she held forward, even as she was saying, “Obviously I’m not the first one.”

Eliot nodded but said nothing as he just let her work, as she brought forth a drop of mithril.

The front of the scanner had a dimple in the top right corner of the cube. It was a hollow space with some hover magic, for liquid mana to float within. Andria put her drop of mithril into the divot in the corner, and that drop hovered there.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Slowly, the sphere began to rotate, to shift left and right, and then to flow in a downward turn. The scanner leveled out and then began to turn back, and after a few settlings, which Eliot hurried up with some tighter inertial dampeners, they had a heading.

Eliot brought up a screen to the right of the small room, listing some coordinates.

16 layers, 8,900 kilometers, 80% match.

“… Did it work?” Andria asked.

“Well it’s not pointing at the moon, so…” Eliot said, “I think it did?”

Andria winced. “That’s pretty far, though… right?”

“Pretty darn far, yeah. But an 80% match to your own mana signature, which includes Prosperity as well as Mithril Shaper…” Eliot wondered… “Do you think you could end up with Prosperity as a real Talent, instead of just through the Chosen system?”

Andria froze.

She hadn’t considered that.

Eliot was pretty sure no one here had considered that at all, but he had. Eliot already had a 98 in Castellan, which was way, way higher than it should ever go naturally. He was probably just a bath in prismatic mana away from getting the real, actual Talent.

Andria had never considered as much for herself at all.

“Maybe?” Andria looked up at the ceiling, toward the Pantheonic Spire in the gardens overhead. “Do you think the gods would want that for me? For… oh. For us?” She asked Eliot, “There are a lotof paladins on this trip.”

Eliot nodded. “I don’t know.” He looked upward. “Seems possible.”

Andria reached out and plucked her mithril bit away before vanishing it into her astral body, telling Eliot, “Put yours in there.”

The readout screen vanished.

Eliot said, “I’m still trying to crystallize my own mana. Let’s get Isoko down here, though.” Eliot tapped the button on his chest, saying, “Isoko. Come down to main command, to the tunnel leading to the back of the ship. You can’t miss it. We have a scanner, now. David, please take over driving.”

“Coming!” Isoko said.

“Affirmative,” David said.

Eliot let go of the button, and said to Andria, “This is an amazing piece of work.”

Andria nodded seriously, saying, “I think we made something truly miraculous… if it works.”

“I think it will. The readouts are all funky, but it is working… Let’s set it to the nearest kaiju. Actually. I’m gonna put up some holograms around here. One sec.” Eliot dug into the ship and put hologram emitters into the room as he spread the room out, into a spherical-ish space. A few buttons onto the base of the scanner were the final touch. One button for kaiju scanning, one button for mana signature scanning. Elito was kinda scared of that first button, but… Hmm. He almost touched the kaiju button, but then he stopped. He told Andria. “You can do the honors.”

“I don’t want to touch that button either!”

Isoko was in the hall, running this way, asking, “What buttons are we touching!”

Eliot stepped to the side. “That kaiju scan button there.”

Isoko breathed heavily, happy, and then she took a breath, stood before the machine, and slapped the kaiju scanner button. “I bet we’re fucking surrounded— Oh shit.”

It was like turning on a light in a room full of cockroaches, but the cockroaches didn’t flee at the light.

Eliot’s heart almost leapt out of his chest.

Lights populated in the air around the sphere, which was the Dreadnought, each little light illuminated with numbers. Most of the lights were scattered, with several sitting at 300 kilometers away. That made sense, since the nearest layer was about 300 kilometers away. Distance was funky here in Endless Daihoon, where the layers of reality crossed and uncrossed each other all the time, like auroras in a sky. So those 300-km-away kaiju were probably more like 320 to 650-ish… or something like that.

The slipper fish cloud was kinda visible in the scan, like a cloud of soft light.

The problem was the 4 kaiju, floating in a line, about 30 kilometers away, right in front of the ship. Right beyond the edge of the slipper fish cloud. The Dreadnought was maybe 10 minutes from breaching the waterfall of fish.

Eliot tapped his button, saying, “Red alert, kaijus straight ahead. 30 kilometers. 4 of them in a line. An organized response. I’m not sure what to do— turning on alarms!”

Red lights flickered on across the entire ship—

David spoke, “That would be the dragon greeting party.”