“I bet you think you are clever, Mr. Moore,” the taxman said with folded arms.

  “What are you talking about?” Luke said and shifted his arms a bit to hold on tighter.

  Bumblebee and Luke were carrying the wing casings from six Stone Beetles. The chitin was heavy, but their power armor easily handled the weight. It was the unusual shape and size of the monster parts that made it awkward to stand there talking to the official.

  The balding man stuck a finger upwards, almost reaching Luke’s face. “I’m on to you though. I already researched monster parts. Monster Insect Exoskeleton? Hah! You aren’t going to trip me up with that. I already know how much tax to charge you. Looked it up two days ago. You are going to have to try harder to mess up my day.”

  “I’m not trying to make things difficult for you,” Luke said, confused.

  “Yeah, yeah. Don’t want to admit I’m smarter than you,” the taxman said and leaned back on his assay table.

  “What? ... Look. Can we go now?”

  “Sure. Once you pay $3800 in taxes or a tier one core.”

  Luke rolled his eyes and set the wing casings down with a thunk. He decided to keep his monster cores and paid the tax with his debit card. Once the official gave them a receipt, they were on their way again. He forgot about the strange little man as soon as they left the building.

  A short while later they arrived at the fabric warehouse they were renting. Towards the back of the building was a door for deliveries, a roller shutter door. They dropped their bulky wing casings at the door. Luke asked Bumblebee to walk around and open it up.

  Bumblebee sighed in relief and sat down so he could climb out of his ten foot tall suit. He was a bit sore from running around all day. As he was ready to walk around, the shutter door rolled up.

  “I thought I heard something out here. What’s with the rocks?” Allen said.

  “Allen, good to see you. These are monster parts for a new mech. Thanks for opening the door. I wasn’t sure if you would still be here,” Luke said happily. He set Jinx in her backpack out of the way.

  Allen said, “Yeah, I finished setting up the workshop before lunch, I’ve just been working on paperwork since then. Setting up a business takes so much paperwork. I got our LLC officially approved, we are now Monster Jaegers Inc, no changing it now. Our website is up too, pretty basic for now until I have more time. I also registered with Norfolk Complex. They have cleared us for six portal entry badges, we gotta pay extra for more. I bought some payroll software and created some onboarding documents for new hires. The forms are in for our Employer Identification Number with the IRS. I also set up a business bank account with Wells Fargo. You’ll need to transfer over some operating funds, by the way. I’ve been spending my own money and I am almost broke.”

  Luke held out his hands. “Whoa, buddy. Take a breath. First off, thank you for doing all of that. You went above and beyond. You just got a promotion to Chief Finance Officer and Head of HR. Great job, give yourself a raise. Secondly, meet Bumblebee, he’s a fantastic member of the Jaeger team.”

  “Sup,” Bumblebee said and gave Allen an upward head nod.

  Allen returned the gesture and said, “I’ve heard good things, Bumblebee. Although if you want to get paid salary, you’ll need to give me your real name and info.”

  Bumblebee looked away and said, “It’s Eugene Simmons. You want my address or something too?”

  “To start, yeah. Come on inside and we’ll get everything set up.”

  They walked inside together and Luke started bringing in monster parts and stacking them near the workbenches. Allen had gone all out. There was a full crafting setup, complete with a chassis hoist, power tools, and spell tools. He had small boxes of parts too, everything from mana infused steel pistons to purple chitin. Luke couldn’t wait to put it to use.

  So he didn’t.

  Luke closed the warehouse door and let Jinx out to explore. Then he got to work. His first project was to see if the Stone Beetle wing casings were even usable. If he couldn’t cut and mold them, they would be useless as anything but a handheld shield.

  He got out his personal mana torch and vibro wrench and got to work. To his relief, the material did deform after prolonged exposure to his mana torch. It took about four times longer than normal, but he could work with it. It was perfect. It gave him high hopes for surviving a battle or two without needing to use Repair Craft every time.

  Originally, Luke had been planning on adding a layer of Stone Beetle parts to his existing suit, but that would be a waste of material. He could just make an all new set of power armor and give his current one to Bumblebee. He could only imagine how fast the young guy would be with the extended legs.

  Now that he had decided to start from scratch, Luke changed several things about his design. First off, he would have normal legs, the extending digitigrade legs were good for speed but bad for stability on uneven ground. It seemed like he was always on uneven ground. He still wanted to be able to run around the peninsula without getting exhausted though.

  As a compromise, he sketched out longer legs and put an order in for heavy duty springs. It should give him the mechanical advantage even before he added in runes.

  Next, he sketched out four spell guns attached to his arms, two embedded within each forearm. A different element for each barrel. He only knew the ice rune for now, but he was sure he could figure out the rest. While he was at it, he hooked up the runes to run off of the same monster core powering the suit. It would mean he would have to replace the power core more often, but he could use his personal mana for his skills instead of the weapons system.

  The last big change he thought of was to make the suit water and airtight. That meant changing out dozens of small things, including sealing up his visor and a filtration system.

  Before he started actually crafting, he transferred over 200K to the business account and sent Allen home. It was only 6PM in Colorado, but he wanted his employees to have a good work/life balance. Even though he wasn’t going to quit working himself. He told himself that crafting something new counted as fun.

  By 9PM, he admitted to himself that it wasn’t a race and took Jinx home. He watched TV and surfed his phone. He wasn’t getting nearly as much social media time in since he spent so much time on a different planet. The only important post he missed was the opening up of a temple to the Kalibutan gods in Denver. He left some comments warning about sacrificing emotions to the gods, but he doubted anyone listened.

  He did get into a bit of a rabbit hole on the Lighthouse forums. He found and copied another group of runes before the mods removed them. Then he spent a while researching the legality of copywriting something from a different planet. Unsurprisingly, there was no precedent. There were a few people who had sued about rune ownership, but none of those cases had completed yet. Even though it had been five years since the portal opened up, corporate law took longer.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  The next day he was driving back out to the complex at 7AM because Luke was so excited. It was a good thing he had keys of his own, the office workers in the front half of the warehouse didn’t even arrive until 11am. Allen got there promptly at 8AM. He alternated between improving the company website and helping Luke work on his new mech.

  The two friends worked well together and had most of the power armor put together by 3PM. They had all of the parts but they had to wait for some of them to soak. The springs and other parts were made on Earth and hadn’t had time to soak up ambient mana. Without being mana infused, they wouldn't stand up to the rigors of fighting monsters. Luke sacrificed a tier one core to create a slurry that he had dipped all the new parts in.

  “So, how are things with you and Vanessa?” Allen asked as they both relaxed in gaming chairs near the only laptop their company owned.

  “Good, we have another date Friday.”

  “Awesome man, I know you’ve been wanting to get with her for a while. Do you think she would want to work for our new company? I bet we could use a medic for after the teams return to Earth, you know give them a checkup, make sure they are good to go for their next shift?”

  “Maybe. Not sure if I want to work with someone I’m dating though. That can get messy.”

  “Yeah.”

  They sat there together in silence for a bit, drumming their fingers.

  “So um, I had a terrible idea last night,” Luke said.

  “Do tell.” Allen said and put his elbows on the table and his face in his hands.

  Luke chuckled at the silly pose. “Alright, so, technically, runes aren't copyrighted.”

  “Um, yes they are, numbnuts. Remember that NDA we had to sign when we started working for ManaTek?”

  “NDAs aren’t copyright. There really aren't any laws about runes yet. People have tried to claim they have copyrighted runes before, but no one has won a case saying they own it. The only reason you can’t post a rune library online is that Lighthouse and all the social media companies are scared of being sued. They are just waiting to see what the courts decide.”

  “So, people with a lot of money say it is copyrighted, but you say it isn’t. Sure, I’ll buy it.”

  “What if we created our own website? We could host it ourselves, and post everything we know. It’s actually a lot at this point, way more than ManaTek taught us. I can even post their stuff and say I learned it in Kalibutan. I bet we could be super popular and no one could stop us.”

  Allen sat back and nodded carefully. “You are right.” When Luke smiled, Allen continued. “That is a terrible idea.”

  “Hey! Everyone wants to learn about magic, it could be popular.”

  “There is maybe a five percent chance you could make that happen. That you could squeeze around the rich and powerful and carve out a small chunk of some magic nerd’s attention. Even if you succeeded in that long shot, you would have every rich asshole hell bent on suing you into the ground. Why? So you can spend all your profits on lawyers? Why would anyone throw away their money like that?”

  Luke opened his mouth to defend his idea, but stopped. “Well, whatever. I said it was a terrible idea. Anyway, will you set up an internal website for all of our runes? It would be good to have something easily searchable for our mechanics. A picture of the rune, its grade, the intents needed, and common uses. Can you do that?”

  “Sure, send me what you’ve got and I’ll add the stuff I remember.”

  Luke sent over all the files on runes he had. There was the plumbing handbook, the elemental swords, the Adept Agility rune, his ManaTek manual, and finally the hovertruck schematics. He wondered if he could incorporate that hover rune into his new design. The rune was too mana hungry to make his suit fly, but there had to be some way to use it. Nothing came to mind yet, he would have to keep thinking on it.

  He twiddled his thumbs for a bit while Allen worked, then he said, “I think I am going to get out of here. There is a wake for the people who died on Kalibutan. It's at 7PM, I’m going to go home and get ready.”

  Allen looked up solemnly. “Hey, should we donate something to their families? You said some of the monster cores came from that spider fight they died in, right?”

  “I already planned on it. That’s why I kept some of the money we earned in my account. I’m gonna contribute tonight. Speaking of cores, do you think we should buy a safe? I’ve got seven monster cores in my power armor compartments, probably worth about a hundred grand.”

  “Uhhh. We need to protect them somehow, but I don’t know if a safe is a good idea. This is a warehouse, our security is nonexistent. Someone could just walk off with the whole safe. I think I’ll ask around, see if the Norfolk Complex has something else we can use.”

  ???

  Luke hadn’t been to enough funerals and wakes to know if this was normal, but there weren’t a lot of sad people there. Of the more than two dozen people at the wake, only two or three seemed sad. The family standing in front of the picture of Ellen seemed to be enjoying a reunion, the older men in front of Samuel’s picture were loudly talking about what they were going to buy with the death benefits, and no one had even come to pay respects to Marcus.

  The posterboard picture of Marcus, who Luke knew as Cuddles, showed a large black man on a motorcycle with a smile on his face.

  “That was his family, right there,” someone said.

  Luke turned to see Bumblebee dressed in all black. He was wearing a tailored suit with thin silver chains. He hadn’t known that the guy could look that fashionable, but then again he hadn’t known him for long. “Family?”

  “Yeah, the motorcycle. That’s all he cared about. He had a distant cousin still alive, but they didn’t keep in touch. That bike was his baby. It’s the only thing that could make him smile.”

  “I guess that’s why no one else is paying their respects here.”

  “Ain’t nobody paying respects in this building,” Bumblebee said and scoffed in the direction of the happy family.

  “I noticed that. I thought there would be more crying at a wake.”

  “The only ones crying are the reps for Elwood Services. They had to pay out a half million death benefit for each of them.”

  “A half million, each?”

  Bumblebee shrugged. “It’s a dangerous job. I think the payout is the only reason Degenerate and Rooster kept showing up. They cared about their family, even though the feeling wasn’t mutual.”

  “Grief looks different for everyone.” Luke said, the excuse sounding weak to him.

  Bumblebee left after introducing him to the families. Luke went ahead and gave each family ten grand. He didn’t feel like they deserved it, but the money was for the fallen, not them.

  Shepard and his buddies showed up shortly before the end and made the rounds. They clearly didn’t know anyone there so conversations were brief. They walked up to Bumblebee and Luke at the end.

  “Still alive, I see. Did’cha end up wussing out?" Shepard asked.

  Bumblebee stepped forward. “You’re the one that wussed out. We have been out there all week killing monsters while you were hiding on Earth.”

  Luke put a hand on the young black guy’s shoulder and pulled him back slightly. “What he’s trying to say is that we have fought dozens of monsters. We have more than proved ourselves. I have a company set up with funding and a real payroll. I would love it if an experienced fighter like yourself decided to join us.”

  Shepard looked between the two of them, trying to decide whether or not to be angry. Eventually he said, “What’s the salary?”

  “It’s about triple your old pay, but we will need you to fight every other Earth day. At least until we have a handle on monster populations. There’s also extra pay if you gain a magic class.”

  Shepard’s eyes widened a bit. Luke fought to keep a smile off his face. He knew it. The man already had a class.

  “I guess we could try it out, see what it’s like working for you,” Shepard said.

  “But what about-” one of his buddies started.

  Shepard cut him off and said, “We’ll work with you until you give us a reason not to.”

  Luke looked between the two, but they didn’t say anything more. “Alright. Meet us right outside the portal building at 10AM tomorrow. We’ll do an eight hour shift and I’ll pay you for your time so you know we are on the up and up.”

  They all agreed and headed out. The next morning, Luke got to the warehouse early to work on his new suit. The new parts had soaked in enough mana that they wouldn’t break when a monster looked at him. He completed the assembly just after nine and slipped inside. He couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces when Shepard and the others saw him walk up in his largest mech yet.

  Today’s chapter title comes from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

  Everyone say thanks to gilyant, Sants103, and Raveneye. They wrote out reviews and we are getting a bonus chapter later today. Woo!