I’d been feeling it for a while.

  My overall effectiveness hadn’t gone down, but the gap between Tori’s magic, or even Bobby’s weakspot-creating fists, had grown. He hadn’t been trying in that fight, and I could tell. I could also tell that he’d been at least a little untruthful about his relationship with Taven Liu, but that was fine. They’d clearly had a falling-out at some point, and Bobby hadn’t trusted him at all this entire Phase. And he’d helped fight the Crusade in Phase One. I could trust him for this.

  But even with the best creations I could muster for myself, I wasn’t doing enough. The Siege Hammer had been an attempt to patch that gap. It did plenty of damage, but while I was swinging a hunk of metal around, Bobby was punching through armor. Tori was wiping out enemies left and right—not to mention controlling any battlefield she was on and being an artillery mage when she needed to be one.

  I needed to build something new, and I needed to do it now.

  So, the deal was simple. Bobby and Tori would keep watch. I’d be ready to help, but it’d mostly be the two of them—outside of the room. I’d take control of the Waypoint Beacon while I worked on my new toy. And then, when it was done, Tori and I would go hunting.

  I started with my stats.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 74, Rank One]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 40 (+5)

  ?Awareness - 47

  ?Charge - 4/106 (+15) (73 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 4

  [Class Skill - Decharge/Recharge - Drain the charge from magic items to power your own creations]

  [Class Skill - Remote Voltsmithing - Use your Voltsmithing to empower Creations even when others are using them—or when no one is.

  [Skill - Spellcoding - Transfer spells from Tomes to Spellscrolls, allowing weaker versions to be cast with Charge instead of Mana]

  Items

  ?Fabrication Engine (Epic): 1 Taser Rover, 1 Rail Gun Rover

  ?Voltsmith’s Grasp Upgrade Two (30/45 Charge) - Rail Gun Module, Taser Launcher

  ?Siege Hammer (Charge 0)

  ?Warrior’s Sheath (Bio-Electric Scanner)

  Remote Voltsmithing

  ?Runners (30 Charge)

  ?The Explorer (5 Charge)

  I’d need everything. Every scrap of Charge I had in my build, I’d have to dump into the thing I was about to create—and then some. I wouldn’t be able to spend a point on Body—not even with the distant promise of fixing my arm. It was going to even the odds, but it was also going to be the messiest, most complicated contraption I’d ever built, and with only a few days left before the Phase ended, I’d need to cut some corners.

  I started by putting the Siege Hammer in my inventory, then draining all six of the Runners. I left the Explorer—I had no idea where Erika was, and I didn’t want to abandon her in the middle of nowhere. The Museumtown folks wouldn’t be too far away from Chicago, though. They’d be alright. Then I pulled the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s Charge down until it had only enough power to move my arm, and no more. The Bio-Electric Scanner went next, then the Fabrication Engine.

  In the end—and after adding the four floating points into Charge and consuming a few common items—I had 100 Charge even at my disposal.

  Then I got to work.

  The armor I had in my head would be a little over nine feet tall. I’d be able to sit in it—it’d be tight, and I wouldn’t be comfortable, but I’d manage. The arms would be short and stubby. The longer an arm was, the more detail I’d need to put into the actuators, and the longer it’d take. I didn’t have time for anything clever. Two equally stubby legs would move the machine forward, and weapons would go in the ‘hands.’

  The majority of the passive running power would come from the Voltsmith’s Grasp.

  Charge poured out of my damaged arm as I slowly added it back in to run a small welder. The leg joints came first—it took almost an hour to design the double joints of the knee and ankle, and even longer to add two hips to the mix.

  After that, the frame for the armored cockpit fell into place, along with a pair of controls. One of them was a Charge plug-in that I could attach the Voltsmith’s Grasp to, using the fingers to direct liquid and electric Charge to different parts of the machine.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Three hours in, I was ready for my first test.

  I’d conceived of something like this—sort of—after fighting Saul for control of Museumtown. The Autoplate Pauldron had been the prototype. If I’d continued it, I’d have a sort of body armor that increased my speed, strength, and toughness, and in a lot of ways, it’d be superior to the thing I was building.

  But only one respect mattered right now, and that was getting it done, getting it into battle, and stopping the Fireborn Crusader before he wiped out Museumtown by taking the Beacon.

  Things kept falling into place.

  Long pipes. I’d taken them from a cratered section of street; they were an inch and a half wide on the outside, a touch over an inch wide on the inside, and as luck would have it, I also had several dozen chunks of half-inch rebar that were six feet long. I cut most of those into four-inch slugs and dropped them back into my inventory, then worked the long pipes, Charge batteries, and wire along with some Mana Coils until I had a three-barreled rail gun that dwarfed my old build.

  When I test-fired it, the impact blew chunks of scaffolding across the room, then left a six-inch-wide hole in the unfinished dungeon’s wall. That’d be good enough; it went on a makeshift swivel mount on the armor’s shoulder, and I wired a Charge control system to it.

  An axle. It was the mirror of the one I’d built the Heavy Trip-Hammer from. I cut it in half, doubled it over itself, and welded it into a single piece. Then I welded an engine block to the end, braced it with the leftover rebar, and called it good. It wasn’t a siege hammer, and it definitely wasn’t the Trip-Hammer. It was simpler. More brutal. But it’d still hurt.

  Chunks of subway car. They turned into armor, as well as a window that I built a rebar cage over the front of.

  The hammer slotted into the suit’s two arms. It had two attacks: a left-to-right sweep and a right-to-down smash. The joints I’d designed wouldn’t do more than that—and that was fine.

  And it was at this point in the build that I realized something.

  The dungeon’s resonance had shifted. No, not shifted. It had gone silent. In fact, it had been quiet for a while—ever since the System message I’d been waiting for had appeared.

  Waypoint Secured

  A Waypoint Beacon within this dungeon has been activated by [Hal Riley]. It can now be moved to a safe zone, where it will offer protection to it and up to three nearby safe zones.

  The Fireborn Crusader had to know. He’d seen the message. But he hadn’t made a play to take the beacon from me.

  It hummed along, sucking Charge into itself. The one in the Toxic Garden had felt…empty…at a distance. But when I’d gotten close to it, the resonance had been almost overwhelming. This one felt different. There was no resonance. I almost stopped building to figure out why—but no, that’d be a problem for a later Hal Riley. When Taven Liu was gone and his Crusade wasn’t a threat, then I could start playing with the beacons.

  Besides, a no-resonance zone without any ambient Charge would be perfect for my test runs. “Tori, can you cover the beacon room for a little while? I’ve gotta put this thing through its paces.”

  She came around the corner and stopped. “You built a mecha suit?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.” Then I climbed into the cockpit and pulled the front down in front of me. The Voltsmith’s Grasp plugged into a five-fingered slot that let me direct Charge down a conduit and a wire in each finger; the pointer finger onto had wire, since the conduit had been damaged. I flooded the machine with every ounce of Charge I could spare. The gauntlet would direct Charge as needed, but even walking with nearly a ton of metal and two hundred pounds of person would take a lot of power.

  “Beginning basic movement test,” I said.

  Then I took my first step.

  Voltsmith’s Chariot (Created Item, Charge 70/70, Upgrade Level 0)

  The Voltsmith’s Chariot is a Charge-driven suit of armor and weapons system. In its unupgraded, prototype state, it can support either ranged or melee attacks at the same time, and its armor is capable of turning most Rank One monsters’ blows, but will be less effective against bosses.

  First Created by Hal Riley of Earth.

  It worked. No, more than worked—it was alive! Clunky, awkward, but alive.

  The Voltsmith’s Grasp was its heart, but it was more than the beat of the Heart on my arm that drove the machine forward. Every dungeon-shaking step I took during my first test felt alive. More than that, as I stepped away from the Waypoint Beacon and entered an area of the unfinished dungeon with more resonance, the Charge inside the Voltsmith’s Chariot seemed to react to it—and the resonant Charge reacted to the energy in my creation.

  It felt like the internal Charge, both fluid and liquid, were reaching out to the resonant Charge outside. Like they were trying to become one. Like they were desperate to become one.

  That made sense. Charge was lifeblood, after all, and blood called to blood. I was strong enough to put off heading west for Cozad, but my sister Beth was out there somewhere, and Mom and Dad were probably dragging the entire town through Phase Two even as I tinkered with mech suits. I wanted to see my family, to be reunited with my people. The lifeblood I was using as Charge wanted that, too.

  Once I’d finished this Phase, I was going to learn how to make that happen—one more thing to add to my list of tasks.

  “Soon,” I muttered to the internal Charge. “Soon, I’ll fix Integration. Or, if I can’t do that, I’ll break it.”

  Tori had watched tabletop miniature games when she was younger. She’d seen battle-mechs lined up against each other on hex grids and blue-armored marines chainsawing their way through piles of green-skinned monsters. Later, she’d played as the pilot of mech suits in video games, fighting in first-person through her computer screen and giving orders to her squad through a headset.

  What Hal had built was the closest she’d ever seen to one of those battle-mechs made reality.

  It loomed over her, almost looking hunched as it shouldered its way through the scaffolding. The hammer caught on a steel bar, and Hal paused. “Beginning melee weapons test.”

  Something about his voice made her shiver, and she took a step back.

  Then the massive engine block ripped across the hall. Shattered shards of scaffolding blasted out from the impact. Steel and plastic rained down on the far wall. When the dust settled, Hal’s mech took another step forward, then repeated it, swinging the other way.

  “Test complete. Beginning ranged weapons test.”

  The firing was almost silent. Tori was expecting it, and she only heard a slight hum as Hal’s mech suit’s cannon rotated. The impacts were anything but quiet, though. Each shot slammed into the far wall like a blacksmith’s hammer-blow. Three times, the floor shook under Tori’s feet.

  Then the hatch opened, and Hal emerged.

  He looked filthy, and he reeked of sweat. Dirt covered his face. It was in his teeth. His eyes were red from the dust. But more than that, they looked feral. Furious.

  She’d seen those eyes. Not in real life, but in games. They were the eyes of a paladin about to fall in the name of protecting the people he’d sworn an oath to. Of a warrior ready to stand up against an enemy he couldn’t hope to beat because he’d said he would. The eyes of promise—and of wrath.

  “You ready?” Tori said.

  “Yes,” Hal said. “Let’s end this so we can get to the real work.”