“So, they agreed to help us?” Jessica asked the next morning. The three of us sat on the steps inside of what had once been the Captain’s fort outside of the Field Museum. None of us wanted his shattered chair, and we’d gotten used to council meetings feeling more informal, anyway.

  I nodded. “Yes. The West Side’s not well-organized, though. It was less that their leadership agreed and more that over half of the delvers out there just grabbed their stuff and started walking toward Museumtown. I’d expect them later today. They’re good people, but none of them is as strong as Zane or Carol. That’s okay, though.”

  “Why is that okay?” Calvin asked. I glanced at him. “I mean, I believe you. I’m just trying to understand why. We need firepower to win this, right?”

  “Because,” I said quietly, voice low to make sure no one but the two other council members could hear. I hadn’t even told Tori about the value the Iron Corpse had yet. “Those tanks I was talking about? They’re not just a fantasy. I’m on the right track with something. One day—maybe two—and we’ll be able to try one out.”

  Jessica looked impressed, but Calvin was skeptical. “The boys in the back room always have some gizmo for war, Hal.”

  “This is going to work, Calvin.”

  “Boys in the back say that, too. In the end, there’s no substitute for trained bodies in the line of fire. Wish there was.”

  “I’m working on it, okay? Just give me the time, and I’ll have Erika out of our hair and a surprise ready for the Fireborn Crusade. And if I don’t have the time, then we’ll have bodies—from the West Side, and maybe from the Rat’s Nest too.” I took a deep breath. “What’s been going on here while I’ve been gone?”

  “People are getting worried. They know the beacons are showing up soon, and they know the Fireborn Crusade’s getting ready for war to make sure they get one.” Jessica looked at the floor. “And they know that you four have been clearing dungeons instead of figuring out the solution to both of those problems. No one knows how your Voltsmithing works, Hal. They only know that you’re using magical items you make. That’s not enough to inspire confidence. They need something—something like those tanks.”

  Calvin snorted.

  I ignored him. “Two days. That’s all I need.”

  “I understand, Hal. Get to work, and try to hurry.” Jessica stood up, and the three of us headed for the door.

  I didn’t waste any time. The Iron Corpse was lying on my work table, half-disassembled, and I wanted to finish taking it apart so I could solidify what I’d already learned. So far, that was three things:

  First, I’d been right. The Grovetender’s Heart was a model for building self-sustaining Charge creations.

  Second, I’d been wrong. The Ironmonger hadn’t been able to power both the War Machine and his own body and equipment. But it hadn’t been because of anything he’d been doing wrong.

  And third, one hundred Charge was the breakthrough.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 70, Rank One]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 40 (+5)

  ?Awareness - 47

  ?Charge - 4/102 (+15) (68 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 0

  [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 One (19/30 Charge) - Rail Gun Module, Taser Launcher

  ?Empty

  ?Warrior’s Sheath (Bio-Electric Scanner) (7 Charge)

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The resonance made more sense now. I’d been feeling it in the dungeons, but now, the outside world carried wisps of the orange, resonant power. There was Charge everywhere; the conditions inside of the Voltsmith’s Laboratory I’d built in Cindy’s Garage weren’t unique. They were just accelerated by…a similar effect to the Grovetender’s Heart. If I took the lab apart, I’d probably find a model for exactly what I wanted to build.

  Then again, if I stripped the lab down, I wouldn’t be able to do any of the work I needed to do, and I had plenty of resources to work with now. And plenty of ideas.

  I stepped into Cindy’s place fifteen minutes later.

  “Almost out of time, farmboy,” Erika said from the driver’s seat of the Explorer.

  “Get out. I need to work on that for a while.”

  “No ‘please?’”

  I stared at her until she got out of the Explorer. Then I waited until her aura shut down. I didn’t care if magic worked here, but there was no point in introducing more variables. The problem was complex enough as it was.

  The Warhammer went up. Then it came down, and the Charge engine I’d built was nothing but scrap: useful scrap, but scrap.

  “What the fuck, Hal?” Erika asked. Her weapon was in her hand.

  I waved that off, too. “Inefficient design. We can do better. Now watch, and be quiet. Or go away. Either way is fine. I’ll have the Explorer running in four or five hours.”

  She left.

  The second she was gone, I got to work. The old parts of the half-built, scaled-up heart came out, and I added a few more gears and a second Lens Array to the left side, then took away a single gear on the right. It wasn’t perfectly modeled off of the Grovetender’s Heart anymore. Now it looked a lot more like the one that had been running the Ironmonger’s body. I spent almost two hours slowly adding and subtracting Emitters, Refiners, and Lens Arrays to the entrance hole, then running the Voltsmith’s Laboratory’s Charge through the machine I’d created.

  And gradually, the upscaled Heart began to beat.

  It felt less like engineering and more like experimentation. I wasn’t trying to create something replicable. Not yet. Just throwing ideas at the Charge drawing board, seeing what worked, and making adjustments until it worked well enough for me.

  Not that this first Heart would have to be perfect. It’d be enough if it could get Erika moving at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour, away from here. On a longer timeline, she could have been a good member of Museumtown. She wasn’t evil, or even a bad person. But I couldn’t trust her to help us, and I couldn’t trust her not to sabotage us if it helped her.

  And there was another reason to get her out of here. She deserved to be with her people. Everyone needed to be with their people if they could be.

  So, the Heart. It beat slowly, then faster. Its rhythmic Charge cycling fed off the ambient energy in the Voltsmith’s Laboratory without me forcing it. Its dozens of gears spun, and its frame slowly expanded and contracted. After running it for ten minutes, I took it outside.

  It stopped immediately.

  I’d expected that, though. I needed to add my own Charge to it here for the components to operate. I consumed a common, adding its ten Charge to my pool, then applied all ten to the Heart. It started up, beating strong, and I slowly bled off first one, then two, then finally all the way up to five total Charge. When I removed a sixth, the Heart’s pulses started falling out of rhythm, and I quickly added it back in from my own reserve.

  Then I dragged it back inside and started working on the Explorer. The wreckage of the old engine came out first, in chunks of twisted metal. I’d salvage what I could later, but Erika was right; I was running out of time, and I’d had to move fast and break stuff.

  I cleared enough space for the Heart to fit inside the hood, then welded a frame to hold it in place, connected only to the bottom half of the massive, two-chambered device. Then came the hard part. I needed two Emitters and a Refiner.

  The first Emitter had its opening literally stuck inside the other part like a finger through a ring. The second rested against the input conduit for the upscale Heart. I soldered them into place, then connected the whole device to the Explorer’s drive shaft.

  This was my solution to the pressure issue. Calvin and Carol had been right; the sheer amount of Charge I needed to move through made maintaining pressure inside the Heart harder than avoiding overpressurizing the conduit. It was weird to think of Charge as a liquid when I’d been handling it like electricity, but in this form, powered by the Heart, that’s exactly what it was. The Emitter/Refiner pair took that ‘liquid’ Charge and refined it into electrical power, then poured it into the Explorer’s system. The solo Emitter forced that electric Charge into the Heart, which moved it like a liquid again.

  It was ridiculous and unwieldy, but when I turned the Explorer’s key, it started up. I pulled it out of the garage and onto the street, and it kept moving, its engine pulsing at a painful-sounding two hundred beats per minute instead of the comforting fifteen-hundred RPM I’d gotten used to in the shop. And it wouldn’t rev faster. Two hundred beats was its top torque.

  That made it a slow accelerator. But that didn’t matter. Its top speed was over twenty-five. That was enough for Erika. I’d made the Explorer work—and I’d made it work on five Charge.

  Principle of Voltsmithing Learned: Liquidity

  One of the first strange principles of Charge as its scale increases is its shift from electricity to liquidity. Fluidity enables Charge to be much more efficient in its energy conservation and to operate in closed systems more easily. In its fluid form, Charge requires an understanding of fluid dynamics in order to optimally deploy it. Fluid Charge is anything but simple, and Liquidity is the basis for many new Principles.

  I brought the Explorer back in and parked it, then threw a tarp over its hood and driver’s seat. The Heart inside of it was much lighter than its original engine or the one I’d installed previously. While I chewed on the Principle of Liquidity and its implications for that resonance I’d been feeling in dungeons and around Chicago, I wanted to work on something simple. Reducing the Explorer’s weight would make its handling flighty, but I could only add so much after stripping the frame down to its Mad Max-looking current form.

  I settled on some additional armor around the two-person front cab, and a hatch on top—not because the Explorer needed the hatch, but because I wanted to use the time to design one. The Explorer was Erika’s ride to Wyoming, yes—but it was more than that.

  The Principle of Liquidity talked about efficiency and energy conservation. Both of those would be necessary for my next two projects:

  First, the war machines I’d promised Calvin, delivered on time and ready to make a difference on the battlefield.

  And second, a new hammer. The Ironmonger’s weapon was close, but it wasn’t right. I wanted the Trip-Hammer back—but I wanted it to be better.