“Jinx,” Luke’s muffled voice said, “There are better ways to tell me you want breakfast. A simple meow would wake me up, I’m sure.”

  He shoved her off his head and got up to get her food. “I’m serious. I’ve half a mind to give you dry cat food instead of the good stuff.”

  Jinx ignored his complaints and waited near her food bowl for the canned cat food that was entirely too expensive. She must know that Luke would cave in any breakfast confrontation.

  Once he fed her, Luke prepared a large breakfast for himself. He often didn’t even eat breakfast, but today he was famished. Probably because he had been healed overnight, his body needed to replenish nutrients.

  After breakfast he fished out his cell phone. It was still dead, even with a new charge. It didn’t even flicker when he tried to turn it on. First on his list of things to do today would be to replace it. Maybe even buy a backup while he was at it.

  He pulled out his laptop and found a shop for his carrier nearby. Then he started earnestly looking into how to sell his mana cores. There was worldwide demand, they were the only way to power an enchanted object this side of the portal. Dozens of sites online offered to buy them. Separating reputable options from scams took some time.

  Eventually he listed his cores on a site called KaliBay. It was a lot like ebay, but for things that came from Kalibutan. The main difference was that they provided security for the handover at a building near the portal. He pulled out an old digital camera and took pictures of his cores. He set up the auction with a buy-it-now price of above market prices. He needed to make sure and get the most out of the cores. In three days when the auction closed, he would find out if the price estimates he had found were correct.

  Then he drove off to get a new cell phone and Jinx tagged along. Luke was starting to get weirded out that Jinx wouldn’t let him go places alone. On the way home from the cell store, he stopped at the hardware store and picked up a pair of the heaviest sledgehammers they had. Thirty pounds each was a lot for his human hands, but they would feel light in his armored gloves. Still it was a good backup weapon in case he got attacked tomorrow before he could collect the magic swords.

  Back home he set up his phone and checked his messages. He had one from Allen and several missed from Vanessa. He winced. She had reached out to him about getting together and then gotten slightly miffed when he ‘ignored’ her even into the night. She specifically said she wasn’t mad at him, just that she thought he had been interested in her.

  He decided to call her right away. The call went straight to voicemail and he left an awkward message about how he had been off planet, then his phone had died. Halfway through he realized it sounded like a lame excuse. He cut himself short and offered to take her to dinner tonight and explain everything.

  He took a big breath and let it out. Either she would forgive him and it would be a fun night, or she wouldn’t and he would know she wasn’t right for him.

  To distract himself he pulled up the pictures he had taken of the magic swords. Thank god for cloud storage. He wanted to figure out a rune or two for elemental damage. He had pictures of the lightning, fire, acid, and ice swords. Of those four, the ice runes were clearly the safest to experiment with. He just needed to figure out which rune held the elemental damage and what intents he should use.

  To his surprise, he didn’t recognize most of the runes along the sword’s blade. For some reason he had gotten the impression that he was getting a handle on most of the runes available to him, but that clearly wasn’t true. There were still hundreds, possibly thousands of runes out there for him to learn.

  Luckily, the hilt was full of familiar runes so he had a place to start. It included flow runes, a regulator, and of course a siphon to absorb mana. He traced the pathways up the sword until he found a complex rune. There were more than a dozen runes above it, but Luke had a feeling this was the elemental ice rune. He guessed that this rune transformed the mana into ice-aspected mana and the runes above it determined what that mana did afterwards, like spray out in an arc, or stab forward in a long spike.

  ???

  ??????

  ??????

  ζ??

  Judging by the number of symbols in the rune, this was probably an adept rune, three times as complex as the novice runes he had spent years working with when he was repairing power loaders. And yet. It didn’t seem that complex to him anymore. He had just barely got the Adept Agility rune to work, but for some reason, he felt like he could easily inscribe this rune.

  He was wrong.

  Inscribing wasn’t the issue, he got that right the first time without practice. His combined high memory and dexterity were more than enough to get the physical rune down. The problem was with intent. He knew with adept runes there would be three separate intents to get it right. He tried cold, ice, and frost for the first time. Freezing, glacial wind, and hard ice for the second attempt. Both were failures.

  He spent the rest of the morning attempting permutations before he had to stop and drive out to pick up Allen. Getting out of the apartment without Jinx was a bit difficult, but he knew that the restaurant wouldn’t appreciate cat fur everywhere.

  A short drive later, Luke picked up Allen from the Norfolk Complex and drove them to their favorite taco place, Las Delicias. The food was good, but he mostly liked the goofy name and the friendly servers.

  “Luke. When are you going to stop being mysterious and shit and tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “About that. Something came up and I can’t tell you anything today. Sorry.”

  “Luke!”

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  He chuckled. “Alright, fine. So, I told you the new job was repairing power armor, right? Well, there was an incident.”

  Luke proceeded to tell him most of what happened, only leaving out Cormac’s cracked core. Once he was done telling him about the new mech designs, fighting monsters with magic swords, and the details of his magic class, the food was long gone.

  “Oh and don’t tell anyone I have a magic class,” Luke finished. “There is this rumor that the men in black are abducting them and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “This is honestly insane,” Allen said and ran his hand through his curly hair. “If I didn’t know you so well I would think you are lying.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Hell, yes! I want magic powers too! Why do you think I started working at the repair shop?”

  Luke shrugged, “You know, you could come work for me if you wanted. I don’t have finances nailed down yet, but I think I’ll be able to double your salary if you join my company.”

  Allen sucked in through his teeth. “I want to, I really do. But I ...”

  Luke sat there patiently after Allen trailed off. No need to rush his friend.

  “I’m not sure I’m brave enough,” Allen said softly.

  “Dude. You don’t have to fight monsters with me. You can handle repairs with me, or HR, or whatever. You don’t have to like fighting to join us.” Luke leaned forward and put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “But don’t feel like you have to join me at all. My company doesn’t even really exist yet. I know it’s a huge risk to leave a stable job and join a startup.”

  “I want in. Now that I know you don’t want me to fight monsters with you, I would love to work for you. I can do repairs and accounting. Oh! And I’ll handle the website. Gotta use my degree somehow.”

  Luke chuckled and patted him on the back. “You are in. You’re my first official employee of Jaeger Inc. You can do repairs and accounting but I don’t think we need a website. The people on Kalibutan don’t really use the internet.”

  “But people on Earth do, moron. How do you think people are going to apply to be on your monster killing squad?”

  “Oh yeah. Heh. Ok, you make the website, I’ll kill the monsters.”

  This time Allen was the one to pat Luke on the shoulder.

  On the ride back to the Norfolk Complex Allen said, “We can’t claim Jaeger Inc dot com. It’s already some textile company.”

  “Boo. How about Monster Jaegers dot com?”

  “Are you sure? That’s a bit cheesy. I mean, it’s available, but still.”

  “It’s available? Then that’s our company name. Monster Jaegers Incorporated. It doesn’t matter if it’s cheesy, it’s easy to remember.”

  They went back and forth a bit, but Allen eventually bought the website monsterjaegers.com. Luke asked him to register the name as an LLC while he was at it. He wasn’t exactly sure what that did for them, but it seemed like a good idea. Very businessy.

  He also convinced Allen to keep working for Kruger for now, at least until the mana cores sold in three days. Don’t count your chickens and all that. Luke walked into the shop with Allen when he got there, intending to pick up his last check from Kruger.

  His former manager wasn’t in his office when they got there. Which was weird. Kruger was lazy and incompetent, but he was always present. Allen went back to work while Luke asked around for the boss.

  Apparently today was a special day. The bigwig, Atticus Adelson, was here today and Kruger was showing him around. Luke smiled. Kruger must be sweating bullets. Atticus was a billionaire who was heavily invested in trade through the portal. He owned dozens of businesses, including ManaTek, the repair shop’s official name.

  Luke decided to watch. Since they weren’t out here, they must be in the attached storage warehouse. He wandered back there and noticed several concerning things at once.

  The first was that Atticus apparently had security. There were men in gray suits posted at the entrance to the warehouse and near the bigwig himself. The second concerning thing was that the group of people were standing in front of the bay his mech was stored in. Atticus, nameless suits, and Edith from the Inscriber’s guild were all talking about Luke’s power armor while Kruger fiddled with the lock on the chain link door.

  Luke nodded to the guards and stepped into the room. He stopped a respectful distance from the group so the guards wouldn’t get nervous. “Excuse me. That is locked for a reason.”

  Mr. Kruger looked up like he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His expression firmed up when he saw who it was. “Mr. Moore. You don’t work here anymore. You are on ManaTek property and I’ll have to ask you to leave now.”

  Luke folded his arms and said, “I’m here as a representative of Monster Jaegers Inc. We own those two sets of power armor there. And I don’t appreciate you trying to break into that bay. What are we paying storage fees for if you aren’t going to protect our investments?”

  Kruger sputtered, unable to come up with a reasonable response. Atticus walked past him to get a good look at Luke. The billionaire was about sixty years old, a white guy that spent a lot on his appearance and still managed to look misshapen. It was something about his wispy hair combined with his custom suit tailored to his out of shape body.

  Atticus smiled widely. “Mr. Moore. How fortuitous to meet you here now. We were just discussing your work. I’ve heard many things about you from your former boss and the guildmaster here. I’m afraid I haven’t heard of Monster Jaegers before. Is it new?”

  Luke matched his fake smile. “I hope you’ve only heard good things about me. And yes, Monster Jaegers is a newer company. Are you thinking of investing? I’ll have to send you a prospectus. Perhaps one of your employees has a business card for me?”

  “Perhaps. What does your company do, exactly? Hunt monsters for their parts? I’ve heard wyvern hides are in demand, but they are fairly dangerous. It doesn’t look like this modified power loader can take that kind of punishment.”

  “I’d be happy to tell you all about it after you sign an NDA.” Luke said. He wasn’t sure exactly how a nondisclosure agreement would help in this situation, but it sounded officious.

  The smile slipped off Atticus’ face. “Sounds like you have some interesting secrets Mr. Moore. Talk to Jenkens about scheduling a pitch. If you’ll excuse me, I have a busy day.”

  The billionaire walked off in a huff, his entourage following him like little ducklings. Kruger hurried to catch up with him. A man near the back handed Luke a business card and asked him to call him tomorrow. Luke had no intention of pitching his company to the man. If he did this right, the money would be easy to come by. Expanding wouldn’t require any outside funding.

  Edith, the Inscriber’s guildmaster, gave him a crusty look as she walked out last. Luke gave her a polite smile, mostly because he knew that would infuriate her. She was a witch that let her position go to her head.

  Then he was left alone in the room. He had a decision to make. He clearly couldn’t leave his mechs here. They wanted to take them apart to steal the designs. He needed to find a different building within the complex to store his mechs in. It was technically possible to take them out of the complex, but that would introduce a hassle and the mana core would drain faster in the mana dry environment further from the portal.

  Another consideration was that Atticus owned at least half of the companies in the complex. He couldn’t be trusted, so neither could any of his businesses. Luke pulled out his phone and started searching. He immediately got distracted by a notification from KaliBay.

  Luke’s eyes widened. All of his mana cores had been sold at the inflated buy-it-now price. The same buyer had snatched up every listing. They even sent a message offering more money if he could produce them today. He rubbed his hands together. He could make that happen. He just needed to find a safe place to store his mechs first.

  Today’s chapter title comes from Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

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