The next morning Luke discovered the possible best part of having a magic class. No hangovers. He had gotten drunk with Vanessa last night and had an amazing time playing minigolf. She was playfully upset that he kept beating her so she kept buying him drinks to throw him off his game.

  Luke’s enhanced Memory stat let him remember every goofy thing he said while drunk. He was only mildly embarrassed. Vanessa had driven him back to his apartment and they had kissed on the doorstop, but she hadn’t come in. She did hint about meeting Jinx during their third date though. He grabbed his phone and texted her that he had lots of fun and asked her if she wanted to meet up next Friday.

  Then he was up and going, getting Jinx her breakfast before she had time to sit on his head. Kalibutan morning started at 11AM MST Earth time, so he had several hours to play with magnets. If his guess was correct, they were the key to keeping his phone from breaking every few days.

  Actually, there was an easy way to find out if he was right about that. The Lighthouse forums were the go to place for anything related to Kalibutan. He grabbed his laptop and plopped down on the couch.

  Before he searched for information on magnets, Luke navigated to the rune forum by habit. He had visited at least once a month since its inception. In the beginning, there were dozens of people posting new runes every day and discussing how to use them. They were all taken down with copyright claims. These days people talked about design and runic intents, but no one posted pictures.

  Luke’s jaw dropped as he saw he was proven wrong. Someone had posted pictures, dozens of them. They were pages from a book for elvish apprentices in the plumbing guild. They had more than fifty novice and apprentice runes, along with instructions in elvish on how to use them. Luke immediately downloaded them to his computer, even before he read the comments. Once he was sure he had the full post, then he scrolled down.

  The first three comments were calling the poster a liar, claiming he used AI or something. Luke flipped back to his stored pictures and checked. AI always messed up some of the symbols that made up the runes, warping the lines enough that it wouldn’t work in real life. These symbols looked pristine. This might be the real deal. He flipped back to the post.

  It was gone. Taken down by a Lighthouse mod. That was as good as an endorsement that he was going to get. He had a small book meant to teach apprentices on how to use runes. It was perfect for Luke, it would give him the foundation he needed to experiment with new power armor designs.

  Before he delved into that, he checked to see if his luck held. He did a site-wide search for magnets. There were a few oblique references, but nothing clear. It seemed like some people knew, but they didn’t want it to become public knowledge. He hit the jackpot when he saw a reference to a magnetic resonance field, including a frequency. It was in the middle of a dense scholarly article, but that frequency was a huge clue. With that information he could tune an electromagnet to oscillate a magnetic field. It had to be the secret to affecting mana.

  First he would need an electromagnet. If Radio Shack still existed, he would be heading there now. Of course he could buy what he needed online, but he wanted to experiment with magnets today. He grabbed his keys and headed off to the second best thing, Mountain States Electronics. The selection wasn’t great, but it did have some options. In addition to the electromagnets, he grabbed a package of neodymium magnet balls.

  The rest of the morning was full of wires, solder, cursing, and endless experimentation. His Ice Sledgehammer ended up being the key to testing. Normally mana was completely invisible, but when he activated the hammer, the wisps of ice mana were visible because of the air condensate. With that visual cue, he was able to tune the magnets to keep mana away from a shoebox he was using as a cell phone stand in.

  He discovered that polarity mattered a bit, but both the positive and negative sides drew mana in, it didn’t push it away like he expected. The neodymium magnet was also able to draw in mana from several inches away. He lost a few of them in the experiments. The cold made the magnets work better for a time, but eventually the extreme temperature demagnetized the cubes.

  A shiver ran down his back as he had an idea for a new weapon. Almost all of his training at the guard had been with rifles. He was much more comfortable fighting ranged instead of melee. Could he make a ranged weapon with magnets? If he pushed elementally aspected mana out and the magnet caught it, he could then fling the magnet forward to deliver the spell.

  It couldn’t be a gun, magnets would disintegrate from the force of the explosion. A slingshot might work, but he wanted something that would work at longer ranges and be reliable. Maybe a crossbow? He could probably inscribe some crossbow bolts. It would be expensive, both for the ammunition and the mana dust needed for the inscriptions.

  He started researching random weapons and pricing out different magnets. A possible design started coming together in his head. He hurried over to Walmart to purchase things to experiment with. Most of his ideas probably wouldn’t work out, but he had the money to blow. And if he came up with a working ranged weapon that wasn’t too expensive, that would make everything worth it.

  As he was exiting the store, he realized he would need to hurry to meet up with Bumblebee. He packed everything away in a second backpack and got ready to go. He would have to experiment on Kalibutan. Jinx noticed him packing up her treats in the other bag and she jumped up on the backpack and peeked her head over his shoulder.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Luke lured her into her own transport, the cat backpack. It had hard sides with a clear plastic dome so she could see out. He was a lot more comfortable bringing her to an alien planet if she couldn’t run away in the middle of the forest. Luke was still a little late to meet up with Bumblebee, but it wasn’t like they had a schedule they needed to keep.

  “Hey bossman. I hope you aren’t gonna buy our uniforms here. These threads are cheugy,” Bumblebee said when they met in front of the fashion warehouse.

  “No, no. This is just where we stored the mechs. I couldn’t keep them at ManaTek anymore, the owner is trying to steal my designs.”

  “No cap? That must mean you have bomb ass skills if they want to snatch your shit.”

  “Dude. What’s with all the slang? You sound like you are still in highschool.”

  Bumblebee threw up his hands. “Well excuse me for not masking around you. I will endeavor to be proper from here on, sir.”

  “Oh come off it. Don’t act like I’ve got a stick up my ass, you weirdo,” Luke said and shoved him playfully.

  Bumblebee laughed. “Whatever, man. Let’s get going. I wanna paste some monsters.”

  “Actually, I wanted to do some tinkering before we head out,” Luke said. When he saw Bumblebee’s shoulder’s slump, he continued, “But I have an idea for you. You said you are stuck at level 12 because you can’t advance your Rush and Evade skills, right?”

  “Yeah, your class level can’t ever be higher than your skill level. Sandwich called it a gate.”

  “Right, so. I was thinking about your Evade skill. What if you need to use it in new ways to advance it? Instead of evading objects, maybe you can evade their attention. What do you think of the idea of suiting up and running around the complex and trying not to get noticed?”

  Bumblebee tilted his head to the side. “Is this some sort of lame ass prank? I don’t want to run around playing hide and seek.”

  “No, I’m serious. Try it out while I am working on a new weapon for us. Oh, that’s right. The company has a name now. Monster Jaegers Inc. What do you think?”

  Bumblebee shrugged, “Not GOAT, but it’s got a vibe.”

  “Well, I hope you get used to the vibe because you are now an employee of Monster Jaegers Inc. I’m gonna venmo you a bonus for the core collecting work, and then I have a few jobs for you,” Luke said and pulled out his phone.

  He verified Bumblebee had Venmo and used his phone number to pull up his account. For the first time he learned the young black guy’s real name, Eugene Simmons. No wonder he preferred the nickname. Luke sent over $10K and waited for Bumblebee to see it appear in his bank account.

  “I think you made a mistake,” Bumblebee hesitantly said.

  “Nope, that’s your bonus since we earned so much that day. I’ll hand out bonuses any day we collect more than ten cores. That’s on top of your salary. Our CFO, Allen, is still finalizing things, but we were thinking 4K a week. Earth time.”

  “A week?” Bumblebee said, still glancing down at the 10k in his bank account.

  “Yeah, but we will also be bumping up the amount of visits. It will be every other Earth day, so every Kalibutan morning you will show up to work for eight hours. None of this 10 hour a day stuff. I don’t want anyone to burn out. So, you in?”

  “Hell yeah I’m in. I’m gonna paste so many little buggers. You are gonna pay me a bonus every day.”

  “Excellent. Your first shift starts now. First thing I need you to do is get me six padded pilot suits. I’m tired of getting bruised every time I head out. Bring me the receipt for reimbursement. After that, I really do want you to try and use Evade in a novel way. If you can’t think of a better idea, then go with mine.”

  Bumblebee looked up from his phone and saluted, “Yes sir!”

  Luke chuckled as Bumblebee hurried off. He grabbed Jinx’s carrier and the other two bags and schlepped everything into the warehouse. The first fifth of the warehouse near the door had offices and racks of clothing. The entire rest of the warehouse was empty except for the two sets of power armor.

  Jinx loudly demanded to be let out of the carrier and Luke obliged. He borrowed a table from the surly employee hiding in the front office, one that they weren’t using. He still had to promise to return it undamaged by the end of the day. Luke texted Allen to buy everything needed for a workshop and bring it to the clothing warehouse.

  Then it was back to crafting. Luke had his set of inscribing tools, ones that made crafting a breeze and eliminated the need for custom made parts. He could kludge together whatever he wanted and it would work. Probably.

  An hour later he was ready to test out the new weapon. He had taken neodymium magnets, slightly smaller than a marble and adjusted an air rifle to use them. It had compressed CO2 for propulsion. On both sides of the breech, Luke had inscribed the Adept Ice rune. He had connected them using the apprentice plumbing runes he had learned from the Lighthouse forum. If he ran water through the barrel, it would come out as ice. But he hoped that the magnet would catch the ice mana and carry it along.

  As much as he was tempted to test it inside the warehouse, Luke was responsible and took it outside. He aimed at a scraggly bush near the fence line eighty feet away and pushed a tendril of mana into the gun as he pulled the trigger.

  The small ball of magnetic metal shot out of the rifle’s barrel a bit slower than the speed of sound. The pop and crack of the air rifle was much quieter than a gunpowder rifle. The ball streaked across the air and exploded into tiny shards as it hit the bush.

  A few heartbeats later, the bush froze solid and shards of ice grew until it was a small ice sculpture. Luke’s eyes widened. His first attempt had worked? He hadn’t even been sure the concept was sound, let alone his haphazard application of it.

  He looked down at the experiment in his hands. This would change everything, almost more than the power armor itself. He had years of training with a rifle, not just marksmanship but tactics and maneuvering too. Now he could apply all that training to fighting monsters. He started chuckling, laughter growing louder and louder. The laughter grew maniacal as he imagined monsters running from him as he gunned down the horde.