Exactly seven days and seven nights later, Emily finally feels a change and switches from drinking in mana and pouring it back out to draining her existing reserves as she activates Mother’s Blessing. The skill takes hold, and she feels a connection forming with the nascent consciousness of her daughter buried below.

The second she finishes, Emily uses a blade of earthen mana to part the floor, pulling up the rune-covered clay pot, which shatters the moment it makes contact with the air. Out stumbles a sandy-red fox with a hardened skin, traced with cracks like parched earth. Her once-empty eye sockets are filled with miniature swirling sandstorms, and her delicate claws that dig into the ground appear to be made of sharp, hardened winds.

“Hello, my child,” Emily whispers softly, crouching down to the same level as the two-metre-long golem and holding out her flesh and metal hands. “I’ll call you… Silica.”

The fox golem places her head in Emily’s palms, stretching her cracked lips into a distorted mirror of Emily’s affectionate smile that shows a few too many of her jagged, sandstone teeth. Emily gently strokes a hand down her newest child’s spine, observing the magical pathways she has grown within the pot and the now-repaired and balanced core in her chest.

Despite using a third circle material as a base, her consciousness is weak, and she appears incapable of speech or holding more than a first circle level of mana for now. She’s closer to an artificial elemental than New Denntimo’s unintelligent golems.

“Can you show me what you’re capable of?” Emily asks, receiving an enthusiastic nod as Silica’s expression once again mirrors her now blank stare.

The fox turns and bolts away, moving slowly in Emily’s eyes but still twice as fast as an unawakened human, before pausing after a few metres and looking back. Facing Emily, Silica takes a deep breath before letting out something between a sneeze and a huff, sending a small, rolling wave of warm wind and sand out that rises up and harmlessly breaks around her mother.

“A weak but nonetheless ranged magical attack using not only sand and wind but a hint of fire?” Emily mutters, making note of the unexpected bonus. “Good. What else?”

Silica stands up a little straighter at the praise before turning her head back and biting her tail. Emily crushes the fleeting protective urge that slips through her emotional dampening, telling her to prevent her newborn hurting itself, and watches Silica chew her own flesh as the chunk missing from her tail quickly regrows, draining her mana reserves in the process.

She can self-repair superficial damage with mana alone? That’ll be incredibly useful in battle.

More and more of the fox’s mana pools in her grinding jaw and, after a few seconds, she spits out a glob of clay that immediately forms into a small fox cub. The miniature golem spawn looks like a near-identical copy of Silica at a tenth of the scale, and it pads over to Emily to present itself for her inspection.

“A self-cloning ability of some form?” Emily questions as she looks closer, finding the cub’s internal structure to be identical to Silica’s, other than the slowly leaking, compressed marble of mana in place of her core. “It’ll break in one hit, but they should be useful for scouting, depending on how far they can move. Can you see and hear through them?”

Silica nods, and Emily makes a note to test her control range later before setting the cub down on the floor and sending it back over. The cub disintegrates on the way back, collapsing into a pile of sand that soon vanishes as Silica reclaims all of the mana that was keeping it together. She uses the regained mana along with almost everything left in her reserves to charge her tail, letting a blend of green, brown, and red light shine through the cracks on its surface before it shatters.

In an instant, Silica is engulfed in a small sandstorm seeped in her mana signature. It only spreads to cover a few metres, but Silica blends into it perfectly, making it nearly impossible to tell exactly where she is as it conceals her mana and heat signature.

“I can still see you, but get a little stronger and increase the area you can cover, and that’ll be a nasty skill to deal with.”

The churning cloud of sand fades after a few minutes, gathering back together to reform Silica’s tail and leaving the fox exhausted, with barely a drop of mana left in her core. Emily leaves her second child to sleep in the gathering chamber and takes her first up to her workshop, pulling up the new designs for his body that she started while Silica was gestating. She spreads an illusion of several blueprints over a workbench, letting Mensacus observe them all.

“While I designed your first body for you,” she says, running her fingers along his receiver to soothe and keep him calm as she continues. “I don’t believe I picked your ideal form.”

A spike of anger and hurt flows into Emily through her grip on her son, but her machina rushes to eliminate the negative emotions like white blood cells to a virus, keeping her calm to repair the wounds her words inflicted.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she says firmly, highlighting several sections of her designs that take inspiration from his current form. “But I know you can be so much better. You certainly fit your current body, and I think with a few modifications you could still reach fourth circle in it, but your consciousness was semi-formed before I even met you, and it would be a shame to ignore the benefits that a less mechanical design could give you.”

Emily can feel Mensacus’ resistance to the idea reducing as she speaks, and his attention is noticeably drawn to a few of the designs floating before him.

‘I… I want teeth.’

***

A few days later, Calypso approaches the walled-in compound. Once again they are struck by the unusual lack of the smokestacks, present in most settlements across the world, here replaced by only a few vents for excess steam. The crew inside admires Elisime’s imposing form in the distance, casting a shadow across a fraction of the factory’s footprint despite her size.

The ship passes through an unseen barrier as they pass over the compound’s walls, and the only noticeable changes are the gauge for external air temperature ticking up and a light condensation forming on the cockpit’s glass. Anton directs the ship with practised ease towards an empty landing pad where Pod awaits them, standing with a small squad of weaponless metal androids.

“Hey little man,” Angela greets him, as Calypso’s cargo hold drops open, stepping out and paying no heed to the robots marching past her to begin unloading. “You here for us, or the goods?”

“Both actually,” Pod responds, matching her grin. “Emily needs some of the crystals you’re bringing for the favourite child’s new body, and she wants to inform you of our departure timeline.”

“The favourite? Isn’t he her only child? Oh, Pod,” Angela teases. “Are you feeling jealous that he has all her attention?”

“Actually, she’s had another.”

Angela’s expression morphs into shock, and she steps forward to pat Pod’s shoulder reassuringly.

“You poor thing. Now you’re third?”

They leave Calypso when Anton and Ash join them a few minutes later, heading towards Emily’s workshop with an escort of crate-carrying robots. Their friendly conversation dies as they enter the main working area though, feeling two powerful presences that fill the space with a heavy, lingering chill, threatening to take their legs from beneath them as their voices catch in their throats.

Pod, unaffected by the pressure, leads the worker droids towards where Emily’s sitting, giving the others time to adjust before they catch up. The crates in the workers’ arms open as Emily grabs the greater darkness and ice crystals inside with her mana, pulling them into her belt without turning her eyes away from the metal plate she’s engraving.

Ash is the first to regain their senses when the scattered mechanical pieces suspended in a dizzying cloud around Emily catch their eyes, igniting their curiosity. They step forward, jolting Anton and Angela into motion with a light tap on their shoulders, and approach the far end of the workshop.

“I would do you the courtesy of withdrawing my presence and asking Mensacus to do the same, but we’re a little tied up right now,” Emily says, filling the space without raising her voice.

“It’s fine,” Anton replies, shrugging it off despite the sweat beading on his brow. “It’s not as bad as when we left Modo… just, heavier.”

Emily nods in understanding, but his words spark a hint of surprise.

The pressure when I was angry at third circle is worse than Mensacus’ natural presence when bordering fourth?

“What is all this?” Ash asks as they reach the edge of the floating cloud of scattered parts, reaching up to touch what looks like a pneumatic piston made from a dark, inky-black alloy.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,” Emily says a moment before Ash recoils in surprise as a cold jolt runs through their body and the end of their finger burns. “I’m building my son a body that better fits him, and part of that is attuning every single piece of it to his energy signature, hence why neither of us can retract our presences. He’s filling everything with his mana, which is highly volatile, and I’m helping to control and direct his energy while using some of it to assist in carving the runes needed for him to fully connect with the vessel and its mechanical parts.”

Ash brings their finger to their lips, warming the frosted tip as they step away from the scattered metal filling the air with a newfound caution.

“How does it go together? I can hardly tell how any of this stuff works.”

Emily wordlessly flicks her right hand, sending a wave of motion through the drifting fragments and loosely gathering them together around Mensacus, who’s already floating freely a few metres above his old Needler shell. The pieces quickly grow into a humanoid form, with the small, pulsing tooth buried in its chest, beside the miniature Steam Source in place of its heart, and above the batteries replacing its innards.

The arms and legs of the two-metre mechanical monster look like writhing metal tentacles, formed from hundreds of small interlocking plates and curled around each other. Its head holds the crystalline circuitry of a logic chip to help Mensacus manage his mechanical parts, with two thin slits of glass in place of his eyes and a wide, unhinged maw beneath them. The teeth lining the jaw resemble vicious, curved needles, with faint black and red magical traces pulsing along them like veins.

“Woah…” Ash sighs in wonder, stepping closer despite their caution to inspect the delicate interlocking mechanisms holding the mechanical tentacles together.

“Beautiful, right?” Emily hums proudly, still carving runes into a missing piece of the plating intended to covere Mensacus’ spine. “The movement’s controlled with a set of internal pneumatic bladders, and the weak gripping force is going to be compensated for with some finer magical manipulation. If my calculations are correct, he should achieve the same flexibility and strength as his sister for half the passive mana draw.”

“Pod mentioned that. You’ve made another child?” Angela asks, turning her gaze away from the unsettling metal monster.

“Yes, I have,” Emily replies, finally looking away from the work in her hands to glance down at her feet beneath the workbench with a small, proud smile turning up the corners of her lips. “Silica, say hi.”

With a small huff of air, Silica pads out, standing up to her full height with her head at Pod’s waist before pausing, cautiously observing the new people with a tilt of her head.

“Anton, Angela, and Ash,” Pod points them out one by one for the fox, patting her head while Emily returns her focus to her work. “This is Silica. She’s much more friendly than her older brother.”

A sharp fragment of Mensacus’ forming body flashes past, nicking Pod’s cheek before Emily pulls it back into place and silently admonishes Mensacus for losing focus and nearly ruining her work.

“Nice to meet you, Silica,” Ash says, crouching down and holding their hand out to the living golem.

Silica creeps forward, sniffing Ash’s palm before springing back suddenly when Angela reaches down as well, disappearing back underneath the workbench.

“So,” Anton says, finally addressing the main reason for their presence. “You’re returning to Modo soon?”

“Yes.” Emily nods. “I’m now strong enough to wage war against a kingdom if needed, so it’s time to tie up some loose ends. As I said when I asked you to come here with me, I’ll guarantee your safety if you want to return. So, do you?”

Anton glances at his crewmates for confirmation before taking a deep breath and steeling his nerves.

“We do, but we’d also like to ask you for something else; a deal of our own if you will.”

Emily’s eyes meet his, sending shivers down his spine and mesmerising him in as shadows dance across her irises. She releases the plate she was engraving, snatching another from the air and immediately continuing her carving without even sparing her hands a glance.

“And what would that deal entail?” she asks, not showing a single hint of reaction in her blank stare as the shadows in her eyes freeze over.

“You mentioned before that you’d be willing to talk to the royal family themselves if it was needed to get us pardoned and, as far as we’re aware, you have an amicable relationship with the New Denntimo Council of Elders, right?” Anton continues, receiving a small nod in confirmation. “Then, would you be willing to negotiate for our trade rights? If we gain the right to trade between Dennari and Keban we could make a fortune.”

Emily doesn’t react, holding his gaze as the ice in her eyes thaws, melting into a pool of shadows.

“Obviously, we’ll give you a cut of all our dealings in return, and we’ll run any collections you want at no charge. What do you think?”

She finally breaks eye contact, as Anton squares his shoulders and waits for her answer, turning her head back to her work and nodding in satisfaction.

“I’ll get you your trade rights, but I don’t just want a cut, I want fifty per cent of your profits,” Emily says, ignoring Anton’s sharp intake of breath. “In return, I’ll provide you with a few more ships once I’ve established another base in Modo, and I’ll give them my mark so no one will mess with you. Satisfied?”

“Yes!” Anton cheers immediately, his previously pained expression nowhere to be seen. “When do we leave?”

“Now that I have the rest of the materials, Mensacus’ ascension should be finished within a week, but I want to make a few small additions to my army before we go, so let’s say two. You’re welcome to stay here if you want, and if not, we can meet you at the border.”

Anton turns to Ash and Angela, getting nods from them before deciding.

“We’ll stay then. We’ve been in the air for a while now, and it’s about time we had a proper break. So, what’s this ascension thing then?”