Jessica looked equal parts worried, furious, and afraid. She sat on the plywood bedframe that had become her spot for these all too frequent council meetings, then paced the room, then sat down again hard enough to shake the frame. It took her almost a minute to calm herself down enough to start talking. When she did, she practically spat the words.

  “The Fireborn Crusade wants a ceasefire.”

  Calvin and I weren’t the only ones in on this meeting. Jessica had ‘invited’ Tori, Zane, and Carol, plus a handful of others who’d broken through to Rank One. The tower was standing room only, since no one wanted to spread out into Jessica’s stomping-around space. Tori had wisely zipped her lip the moment she saw her stepmom’s anger, and Zane and Carol didn’t look like they wanted to say anything, either. Calvin and I glanced at each other, almost daring each other to speak first.

  “Well?” Jessica asked.

  I swallowed. “Why wouldn’t we want peace with them?”

  She looked at me like she couldn’t believe I’d said it. “They attacked us. If they want a ceasefire, it’s to get an advantage in our war, and I won’t let him run over us. Level Seventy-One or not, Liu can’t dictate terms to us, and the week he’s offering isn’t long enough.”

  I doubled down. “Look, Tori and I are bottlenecked on experience. The Tier Two Dungeons don’t give enough, there aren’t enough Tier Threes in Chicago to get us both to seventy, and the Tier Fours are too much. Killing other Delvers, though? That’s where it’s at.”

  “So you’re going to turn Tori into a murderer?”

  “I’ve already killed people, Mom,” Tori said.

  “Zip it. Hal, I’m not—“

  “Let me finish,” I said. “I don’t want to turn Tori into a murderer, and I don’t want to kill people. I’m going to find a different solution to this bottleneck issue. And you’re right, we need to treat the Fireborn Crusade like a war—but there’s a second war coming. The orcs are building something in the Union Center, and whatever it is, it won’t be good. So, I’m proposing we accept Liu’s offer, take the ceasefire, and bottleneck his troops at the same place we’re stuck.”

  “That’d work,” Calvin said, stroking his too-long beard. He hadn’t worried about keeping up with appearances in the weeks since the apocalypse started, and he certainly didn’t care now, but it was still in better shape than it had been when I’d met him. “We’re not giving up. We’re denying an enemy a resource.”

  “Unless they’ve got other places to fight,” Jessica said. “If they do, we’re only denying that resource to ourselves.”

  “What exactly did Liu say?” Zane asked.

  Zane didn’t talk much—ever since Brian’s murder and the days he and his sister had spent on the run from Eddie’s gang, he’d been quiet in a scary way. Like someone about to break. So when he spoke up, Jessica replied right away. “He said he wanted to stop the killing between us and him, focus on surviving the second phase of the apocalypse, and take care of the rest of the crusade instead of focusing on people outside of it. He said he wanted to meet at Whiting, halfway between us.”

  “That’s a trap,” Zane said.

  Carol nodded.

  Calvin cleared his throat. “It’s definitely a trap. But the choice of place itself isn’t one. He wouldn’t commit himself if he wanted to trap us there. That town’s got a million entrances and exits. It’s the safest meeting with him we’re likely to have.”

  “Could we do it through the key?” I asked.

  “No. He’s leveled his City Key up more than we have, and even so, he only had a minute to talk,” Jessica said. Her anger had shifted; now she was more furious with Calvin and me than with the Fireborn Crusade. “You’re going to overrule me on this, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Yep,” Calvin said.

  I started pacing inside Jessica’s half of the room. “Look, we should do it. We need to be ready to do it, though. That means being at our best, especially if he’s Level Seventy-One. He’ll be a serious threat to us if he’s that strong, trap or not.”

  “Fine. Fine.” It wasn’t fine, and everyone knew it, but Jessica had the grace to know when she was outvoted. “We’ll leave tomorrow. Get ready for the trip tonight, all of you.”

  I didn’t groan, but it was a close thing. It looked like it’d be another night of working in the lab, and not of sleeping.

  The prototype fabrication bot had, indeed, made a mess of my laboratory.

  It had also successfully created three acceptable fragmentation battery bombs, so I was willing to forgive the mess—this time. It sat on the ground, powered down and recharging from the Voltsmith’s Laboratory’s innate Charge—the bombs lay nearby, on the floor. That felt less forgivable than the mess, but I didn’t have time to chastise the fabrication bot.

  I ripped into it, tearing it down to the Charge battery, wire harness, and four parts of a Mana Coil that it used as wheels. The design was fine for fabrication, but for combat, I’d need something a lot more agile.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  My first thought was to design a series of weapons—tasers, rail guns, giant scissors like the Knife Crabs had, and so on—and build each bot around its weapon independently. That’d give each individual machine a lot more utility. A flying taser cannon could be useful as a distraction, while the rail gun needed a tougher, more grounded chassis to fire from.

  But it’d also take time, and I didn’t have any of that. So, instead of individually designing a quartet of combat bots, I started with a simple goal.

  Acceleration, brakes, and steering.

  I already had that in the form of the now-scrapped fabrication bot, but I needed these combat drones to be a lot faster and way, way more maneuverable than a factory worker. That meant a bigger reserve of power dedicated to the drive, wheels that were more wheel-like than the Mana Coils, and a reverse gear—and that’d be a whole engineering project on its own.

  I sighed and got to work.

  As I assembled the first combat rover’s chassis, I thought back to Jessica. She’d been ready to go to war with the Fireborn Crusade, and I couldn’t blame her. Liu had sent his henchmen to attack our safe zone for no apparent reason. Neighbors didn’t do that to other neighbors; when our ditch had clogged with brush and half-rotten cornstalks because the neighbor upstream from us hadn’t bothered cleaning his section, we went and talked to him, just in case he’d had a good reason not to clean.

  He hadn’t. We’d ended up doing it ourselves that year, and everyone knew that Larry wasn’t trustworthy for anything important after that. No one in the Riley family spread that, but word got around.

  Word always got around. That might not be enough to handle Liu, but it got around.

  The biggest problem with the rovers turned out to be installing a second drive engine, one for going forward and one for going back, while having room for functional suspensions—while on a budget of just nine Charge per machine. And that was after I cut the fourth design completely and simplified it down to two Taser rovers and a single, heavy-hitting rail-gun rover. But I only had twenty-nine free Charge, and while I could rely on the Voltsmith’s Laboratory here, I’d be on my own in the field.

  Once I had a working chassis model—involving machine-cut steel, wheels from some of the guys’ tool cabinets and workbenches, and custom-bent springs made from aluminum—I put the machine through its paces. The four-wheel drive I’d built into the drive engine shafts turned out to be unnecessary and way too much torque for the frame.

  I’d wanted to build these as off-road vehicles. Hopefully, I’d find the time later, but the wheels they had weren’t bulky enough to handle extended contact with dirt and rocks anyway.

  I reduced their power levels, which had the benefit of freeing up more Charge. They were already running at five each; that was a problem because the four left over wasn’t enough to run a weapons platform—at least, not if I wanted the rovers to punch as hard as the Voltsmith’s Grasp did.

  For now, though, the frames were enough. I set them aside and started working on the weapons. The tasers came first.

  I’d built my initial taser launcher design in a hurry; it had bolted onto the back of the Voltsmith’s Grasp and fired a little like Spider-Man’s web-slingers. But it was an ugly design, and with the whole laboratory and Cindy’s supplies at my disposal, I could do a lot better.

  I had plenty of tubes that could take the place of the Imbuing Rods I’d used in my initial Taser launcher design, and the tools to ensure that the wiring was spaced right. Even so, I spent the next half-hour test-firing the taser, trying to get the optimal amount of distance and pop from the cannon while leaving power in the tank for the weapon itself. The correct balance of the four available Charge, once the chassis and weapon were both in place, turned out to be three in the cannon and two in the shock.

  Obviously, that wasn’t going to work.

  I rubbed my eyes with my palms.

  Three bots were the minimum I wanted to drop down to, but at the same time, each bot needed ten Charge, and that was with only a single shot per recharge. They wouldn’t be very useful in that kind of state.

  I depowered the cannon even more, reducing its range from a fifty-foot launch to about twenty-five. That was…that was fine. Fine in the same way that Jessica was ‘fine’ with us meeting this Liu guy. Then I had a breakthrough.

  I could build a toggleable power system. The bots wouldn’t need full power to their wheels all the time; after they took a shot, they’d want to go full speed, but on patrol, they’d only need half of their maximum. And the weapons themselves could toggle, too. They only needed the full three Charge for long-range shots, and realistically, most would be within ten feet—the one-Charge range. It took a lot of trial and error, but I managed to build a gear transmission for the chassis and a regulator for the taser launcher.

  With both in place, I could rely on the Taser rover for two low-powered shots at ten feet, a ten-to-twelve mile-per-hour speed, and a total Charge consumption of ten. That was still too high, but I couldn’t get it lower—not if I wanted the taser rovers to do their job. I set them aside without feeding my own Charge into them and got to work on the much simpler rail gun bot.

  This one’s weapon only needed to fire at full power, and it didn’t need Charge for the projectile—a sawed-off bolt—only for the cannon. I used a similar length of pipe, wrapped the wiring carefully around it, and made microscopic adjustments as I soldered it all together.

  Then I opened the garage door with the chain-pull and aimed the cannon across the street.

  I couldn’t take the rain gun outside of the Voltsmith’s Laboratory unless I wanted to power it myself, and I definitely didn’t want to do that. Not yet. But I did need to figure out the maximum power output for a single shot, so I could start toning it down. I started at six Charge.

  The test-fire blew a hole in the building across the street’s facade big enough for me to stick my hand through. That was close to what I needed from the rail gun rover, but not quite there.

  If it only got one shot, it’d have to be the kind of shot that ended fights.

  So I turned it up another notch and fired again. This time, the hole was big enough for my arm, with some wiggle room on each side. It had even bent the rebar—though it hadn’t shattered it. That’d have to be good enough.

  The rail gun rover ended up able to take a single shot, run at four to six miles per hour, and needed eleven Charge to do it.

  And that sucked. But it also meant I needed to rebalance my expectations. I wasn’t going to be a one-man army of robots overnight. It’d take vast amounts of Charge to pull that off. But for now, I could overfill the Taser rover with a second small Charge battery, giving it two more shots, and run one of each type. That’d give me a lot of flexibility in deciding how to handle fights.

  More importantly for the long term, I’d made several really great strides toward getting the Ford Explorer running. Everything I’d done at a small scale with the bots could be done at a larger one for the SUV. It’d just take more power. I was tempted to work on the big engine for a while, but tomorrow was already here, and I needed a couple of hours of sleep if I wanted to be at my best for a meeting with our enemies tomorrow.

  Containment Breach!

  Today, The Halcyon System Book One: Halcyon Nightmares is out on Kindle and Audible.

  If you haven’t read it yet, I think The Halcyon System is some of my finest character writing. Claire was an absolute treat to write (although she was also a pain in the ass), and I love the story a ton.

  It’s an SCP-themed anomalous apocalypse LitRPG with an untrusting, paranoid high school girl MC. If you’re interested, or if you’ve read it already and you want to check out Book One again (maybe as a paperback copy with amazing art by Kittra McBriar - it'd look phenomenal on your shelf!), please help me out at the following links.

  Kindle:

  Audible:

  Thank you all so much!