Emily leads the group through the palace hallways, scanning for rooms dense with magic and carefully watching for any defences left to protect against intruders. In one of the first rooms they check, they’re all hit with a sharp mental attack woven into the walls, but Emily barely bats an eye before planting her palm against the runes forming the attack array and releasing a flood of lightning, scorching them useless.

After leaving that room and continuing their search, following rough directions that Beau has pieced together from several of his spies’ accounts, they eventually turn into a long hallway that stretches deeper into the heart of the palace, lined with enchanted suits of full plate armour. Emily narrows her eyes, holding up a hand to stop the others as her gaze roams across the faint signs of rust creeping up around the armours’ joints.

Without a word of explanation, she lines up her left arm and pulls the railgun module from its fingers, charging it to full before releasing a bolt from her palm that rips through several of the armours’ heads. The moment the screech of bursting metal sounds from the first helmet collapsing inwards upon impact, the hallway erupts with motion as every single suit of armour turns to face the intruders.

Emily fires off a few more shots from her hand, tearing down the closest metal knights as they charge, brandishing the swords, spears, and shields they were displayed with, before drawing the Stream from her belt and unleashing a spray of metal that shreds the defensive horde. The suits of armour keep running into the shots, only falling when their heads are destroyed or half their bodies are filled with holes.

The hallway falls silent only seconds after the shooting started, and Emily calmly puts her gun away before walking over to inspect one of the broken metal defenders, leaving Pod to collect her spent bullet casings with a wave of machina. She pulls one of the undamaged breastplates apart, tearing the thin metal with her bare hands, and studies the runes covering its internal surfaces.

They’re unstable water golems inhabiting a metal shell. That explains the rust. They focused too much on magical conductivity and used the wrong metal blend for something exposed to so much humidity.

Retracting her machina after analysing the material’s makeup, she checks inside a fallen helmet that has tumbled away from its owner and finds a cluster of crystals responsible for powering the constructs. Emily stands up and covers the scattered metal corpses with a thick blanket of purple mana before drawing them into her storage and continuing onwards.

At the end of the hallway, they find several locked doors covered in dense enchantments, including one twice the height of a normal person and covered in golden vines.

“That’s their family archives!” Beau declares with certainty, pointing Emily towards the large door.

“Perfect,” Emily hums, slowly approaching and inspecting the mana-dense protections blocking her way, being drawn to one of the smaller doors with an especially nasty formation covering it. “And these must be personal studies. This one’s protected better than the archive.”

When she tries to probe the small door with mana, she gets an immediate response as it heats up, burning away her probe and launching a sharp attack on her mental defences. The others back away to avoid the attack, but Emily reaches out and takes the door’s handle anyway, ignoring the heat and releasing a cold mist from her skin that seeps into the lock’s physical mechanism. She shatters the lock with a strong pull, opening the door and disabling the array that was assaulting her mind.

The room that greets her is immediately familiar, with most of the space taken up by worktables and equipment. Emily has to resist the urge to sweep up various contained specimens lined up along one wall in enchanted jars, sticking closely to her agreement with the Elders and narrowing her focus on the bookshelf standing in the corner next to a comfortable-looking desk with a book still sitting open, half-written.

She approaches and scans through the books on the shelves, with Pod following close behind, as Josephine and Beau check out the preserved materials. Emily chooses a book titled ‘A Study on the Effects of Methods for Breaking in Your Tools’, written by Charles Denros, and opens it, quickly flipping through its pages.

Previous studies have proven that any subject, awakened or not, will attempt to resist following orders correctly once subjected to mind-altering spells. In this study, I aim to explore the relationship between the mental state of our subjects, the methods used to gain control of them, and the end quality of the tool…

***

Subject five: unawakened male, age twenty-two

Initial mentality: total disobedience, maximum resistance possible, very angry

Control method: Ordered to torture and execute his lover, unawakened female age twenty

End mentality: Unstable. Subject shows a tendency to intense mood swings between absolute obedience and intense resistance. Very hard to predict.

***

Subject forty: awakened female, age seventy-five, second circle

Initial mentality: Resisted control fiercely (high magical resistance), showed no obvious signs of disobedience once controlled, but twisted orders to perform sub-optimally

Control method: Forced to watch the execution of her children, unawakened male age six, unawakened female age twelve, awakened male age seventeen

End mentality: Stable. Subject is yet to show any further signs of resistance.

***

Subject sixty…

Control method: injected with mind crystal solution

End mentality: Total brain death…

***

Though awakened subjects showed greater pride and resistance, even going so far as to utilise their magical resistance to disobey orders outright, they proved easier to break than most unawakened subjects. I shall next be expanding my research and requesting our allies supply me with more accounts of their own tests to verify my results…

As the final cover closes and the rustle of quickly moving pages quiets, Emily can’t help but wonder if she gave Charles too painless a death, seeing a shadow of his research in the way the Mandragos treated her.

“I’m going to open the main archive,” Emily says, drawing Josephine’s attention and throwing the book to her as she walks out of the study.

The red-headed mage catches the tossed book and curiously flips it open, her expression immediately distorting with rage as she scans its content. It only takes a second for her to regain her calm though, schooling her expression and handing the book to Beau for storage with a calculating glint in her eye as they follow Emily into the hallway.

The golden vines on the main library’s door emit a warm light that coats its surface, preventing Emily from making contact with the lock. Unlike the study, it doesn’t immediately try to consume her mind. However, she still feels a small mental probe reaching out from the enchantment, revealing a blatant weakness to her.

Emily draws The Needler from the sling on her shoulder, waking her son, who immediately reaches out to connect with her mind. She allows the connection and begins feeding him the new data from Charles’ book as she scans the door’s enchantments for their weakest point.

She manages to locate a small imperfection, where one of the vines doesn’t sit flush with the frame as it should, and points the barrel of The Needler at it, charging the weapon with machina. Mensacus fills a needle with malice before she pulls the trigger, firing the metal shard into the small, exposed gap, poking a hole in the door’s defences.

Immediately, Mensacus latches onto his connection with the needle embedded between the door and its frame, pouring malice into it and quickly infecting the surrounding barrier. The mental aspect of the barrier gives way without resistance, and as a stream of black and red mist pours from The Needler’s barrel, the golden vines covering the door shrivel and decay, falling away and taking the barrier with them.

Emily caresses Mensacus’ receiver as he exhausts his mana reserves and falls asleep again while buzzing with satisfaction, before stepping forward and pushing the unlocked door out of the way. It swings open to reveal a room filled with books.

It’s less than a quarter of the size of The Covenant’s, but Emily doesn’t care, eagerly stepping forward and pulling a tome from the shelves to begin soaking in new knowledge.

***

A couple of days later, Emily finishes absorbing all of the Denros family’s useful records and leaves after a quick look at the array of The Sunbeam curling around the palace’s main spire. She boards Elisime and flies back to The Sand Wall to feed Mensacus, hoping to push him to fourth circle with the abundant food source. He slowly draws in the dark mist through Elisime’s air vents as Emily leaves him behind and steps out into the storm herself, dropping down to land on the ground before placing her hands flat against the sand.

She pushes her senses down towards the mana vein below, finding it’s too deep to reach. Emily calmly returns to her ship and flies east for a few kilometres before checking again, repeating the process over and over again until she finds a point where the vein passes close to the surface in a particularly violent patch of the storm. She settles down cross-legged, shutting her eyes and shutting out the raging wings buffeting her unmoving body with sand as she reaches for the vein, listening to the resonant hum saturating the air and the ground with the tones of earth.

Days pass as Emily searches for something in the mana vein’s song while slowly becoming buried. But, after the sand reaches her chest, a system notification snaps her out of her trance.

¯¯¯¯¯

Quest completed: War-Machine

[War-Machine]

[Rank:] B

[Description:] You joined this war with a goal that’s been met, but is that really enough? They targeted you, sacrificing people and resources to eliminate you because you posed a threat. Can you leave without ending what they started?

Requirements:

-Win the war for New Denntimo (Complete)

Rewards:

-Mechanic Knowledge: Basic Astrophysics

-Blueprint: Simple Nuclear Reactor

_____

Her eyes snap open with shock as the new blueprint and knowledge settle into her mind, and something else clicks deep inside her.

What a brilliant power generator. That reaction would be horrifying if weaponised… And black bodies! That’s what I’ve been missing!

She raises a hand and focuses on the concept of absorption, imagining light entering a tunnel where it’s thrown around, dashed against the walls repeatedly until it peters out, unable to escape the endlessly consuming darkness.

Shadows slowly seep from her skin, unaffected by the raging winds of the surrounding storm, as they gather together into a black dot floating above her palm, emitting a strange warmth that doesn’t comfort, only acting to make her realise how cold she is in comparison.

She disperses the darkness manifestation, basking in the satisfaction of finally unlocking the last common element as she returns to her attempts to deepen her connection with earth.

It takes another week for the dark mist filling the storm to finally fade, and a few days more for Emily to resonate with the mana vein, shattering the spell it was fuelling. She doesn’t manage to push her earth connection far enough to establish a true link for elemental casting, but she does receive a welcome injection of pure mana from the vein in wordless thanks as it sinks away from the surface, moving somewhere else.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Attributes:] Strength 23 (42), Dexterity 142 145 (156), Agility 110 (122), Vitality 21 (34), Intelligence 347 365

[Health:] 330/330

[Stamina:] 820/880

[Mana:] 86780/87600

[Machina:] 85636/87600

_____

Emily closes out of her status window as she digs herself out of the mound of sand that has formed around her, stepping out into a disconcertingly quiet desert landscape. She floats up towards her ship on a gust of wind, entering through the open hatch below the cockpit and sending a signal to Pod as she heads up to the command room to find Mensacus stuffed full of mana, sitting at the peak of third circle and practically bursting at the seams, just waiting for a final push to send his growth to the next level.

“Perfect,” Emily hums, reaching out and caressing his receiver. “I’ll build you a new body when we return.”

Pod walks in as she’s turning the ship back towards their factory on the northern shore of the continent.

“There was a message from Silver about a week ago,” he says, settling into his seat. “They’ve finished removing most of Denros’ resistance now and are beginning to solidify their hold over the other half of the continent. Our contract is considered closed, and he said you can either visit Liberte yourself or send a carrier there to claim this year's shipment of materials whenever’s convenient.”

“I see. Let him know we’ll be sending Calypso as usual, then,” Emily replies while pulling out her communicator. “I’ll put together the material list and send it over to Anton. I was going to call him soon anyway; it’s about time we headed back to Modo.”