Deepika felt at home.

  Others might mourn the wealth they lost when Energy began to permeate Earth and complain about having to move from a large house to a relatively small apartment, but she wasn’t.

  Not just that Sarah, Howard, and she were safe, but they also had a purpose in helping this exciting place to thrive.

  And now, the last missing piece of the puzzle had arrived. She sat with her three graduate students—Xiang Lu, Martin Smith and Navneet Ravindran—in an HQ office Adam had allotted them as a temporary workspace.

  Spatial enchanting certainly wasn’t what she had expected to teach, but it was—broadly—related to physics after all, and the key thing for her had always been the teaching and the learning that always came with it, at least if you kept an open mind.

  Everyone settled.

  “Okay—same as always. Anyone want to present an idea? Let’s stick to ‘compression and expansion’ for now; I don’t think we’re ready for teleportation or barriers yet,” she said, curious what kind of mad idea they'd bring. It was exciting.

  Navneet cleared his throat. “I have observed that our fighters, Protectors I should say, struggle to penetrate the fur or hide or other forms of armor of the more advanced monsters attacking us. I would like to suggest that it should be possible to change the local geometry of space at a blade’s edge and reroute the strain energy away from the material lattice into a controlled spatial field.

  “We'd compress space by microscopic fractions on the blade side and slightly expand it on the opposite side. The metric compression reduces local surface volume, effectively increasing atomic density there—creating a harder, denser surface layer without altering the bulk lattice.

  “When the edge contacts a target material, the mismatch in local geometry would cause the target’s bonds to pass through a transient differential frame and fail with less applied force.”

  “You want to make sharper blades,” Lu said dryly.

  Navneet got flustered. “Well yes, that’s what I said!”

  Deepika had to cover her mouth to hide her smile. “I think that is an idea well worth exploring. Before we deep dive, did anybody else want to present something?”

  “Gravity grenades,” Lu said.

  “There is value in being to the point, but maybe you want to expand a bit?” Deepika said slightly sarcastically. She knew the young woman could take it.

  “Sure, with sufficient Energy and the proper enchantment it should be possible to project a tightly confined, short-lived zone of altered inertia—a ‘micro-inertial field’. Within that zone, the effective coupling between mass and acceleration would briefly increase, making movement suddenly heavy and resisting acceleration. In other words, gravity grenades.”

  Martin, who in these discussions typically was more reserved than in a more social context, weighed in. “Sounds interesting and potentially feasible, but very Energy intense. Every grenade would likely require at least one, if not more, Energy cores…”

  Lu nodded. “To be verified but likely true. Could still be a lifesaver in the right circumstances.”

  Deepika agreed, but withheld judgement for now. She tapped her finger on the table. “Very good. Let’s now deep dive into both ideas and see if and how we would want to take them further.”

  A few exhausting but stimulating hours later, she returned to her desk to the large chest Thomas had crafted in record time. It was beautiful. He'd oiled the wood, bringing out a brown that shimmered dark red in certain light.

  She slowly patted it, enjoying the smoothness, before opening it. She had completed the enchantments on three sides of the chest and would spend the rest of the day finishing it. She was curious how effective the item would be after she was done—assuming she wouldn’t fail. But she was hopeful as she was more experienced and the larger space of the chest and the more robust material, compared to leather, should help.

  With a little luck, she'd soon craft a new type of magical item.

  ***

  Ben stepped out of the portal. He was tired after two missions in a single day. Overall, they had brought 52 people to the settlement—split fairly evenly between a tiny Pacific Island village and an Alaskan settlement.

  The missions had thrown his agenda for the day into disarray, but now it was finally time to see what Deepika had crafted.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He met Adam on the way to the HQ, where they would meet Deepika and Allison.

  “Are you as excited as I am or have you already had a sneak peek?”

  Adam laughed, “I would never spoil myself needlessly. All I know is that this time I didn’t have to provide too many cores for her.”

  “That sounds like good news, let’s see!”

  They stepped into the office on the first floor of the HQ where Deepika and Allison were waiting and her graduate students were huddled in one corner. The place was clearly too small for all of them, and Ben hoped they’d have the budget for a few more workshops soon.

  His eyes fell immediately on a beautiful chest, almost a meter wide and half as high and deep, that rested on the central table of the room. Its finish was perfect, shining with fresh polish.

  Chest of Transport. Energy-infused item. Tier 1. Epic – Intermediate. Expands storage to 10 cubic meters, reduces weight significantly.

  He grinned at Deepika, “Epic and Intermediate—you have outdone yourself! What an incredible achievement.”

  The physicist and professor blushed slightly, proving that everyone liked to be complimented for their work. “Thank you. The material was very good and it would not have been possible without Thomas crafting this beautiful piece. He also crafted a cart to move this up and down the mountain. It’ll still be a major hassle, but it should be doable if you have enough strong people that can take shifts.”

  Allison patted Deepika on the back, “This is such a wonderful item, and it will help so many people—you should be proud of yourself.”

  Adam nodded, “I agree. It’s not like this will feed all of Simonston, but it should make a real difference.” He turned to Ben, “I thought about it and I would like to come along to the city to negotiate with them a bit.”

  Ben frowned, “Hmm, I thought we were donating the food to them?”

  “They will get the food for free, but I could imagine that they could also use some of the other things we produce or have access to with the System Store—and I doubt that they currently have a use for the Energy cores that they have probably collected. Even if they have just a small fraction of the number of beasts attacking them, it is a big city…

  “Think about it, we can mostly make use of cores because we have the Store and because we have access to crafting guides. Others might get there at some point, but right now we can use the cores much more productively than they can. It seems like a win-win.”

  Ben nodded slowly. “That makes sense. Yes. Why don’t you come along.”

  Allison lifted a finger, “Son, we now have a couple of well-performing Protector teams, I would like to give one of those a chance to make the next run to the city. You have a lot to focus on right now, and it always takes four or more days to go back and forth.”

  That went against all of Ben’s instincts—sending others down the dangerous mountain while he sat back and trained.

  But instead of reflexively saying no, he thought about it for another moment. One of their values was ‘Growth—Ever forward.’ It was hard to grow if you didn’t stretch yourself. If he were to do all the difficult and dangerous things he would continue to grow, but the gap to the others would likely expand and it would leave them all weaker. That had also been the reason he had kept the Witch of the Dead dungeon, after all.

  He sighed and scratched his head. “Okay. That makes sense. It is your call, anyway.” He turned to Adam, “How much food can we deliver anyway?”

  “We have a good surplus in food production. Between the space in the chest and our food reserves we should be able to provide enough for about 3,000 meals, probably more if they are efficient.”

  Ben smiled, “That’s awesome! It should help some of their weaker citizens for some time.” He held out his hand for a fist-bump with his friend, “Safe travels! We will miss you!”

  ***

  Ben was sitting in the late-summer sun close to the training ground where the latest batch of Protectors was undergoing training.

  He had sent off the team around Adam to the city in the morning and committed to himself that he would use the time gained from not traveling to the city to focus on progressing some of his perks.

  He felt that he was getting closer on some of them and he finally wanted to make tangible progress. It was funny how he now defined tangible progress as something that appeared on his Status sheet, even though he knew he was improving—for example, in his fighting style.

  For the last hour he had been going through the exercises for [Perceptive Mind], one of the Triune perks for the Mind attribute. If he were to acquire all three, they would merge to [Strengthened Mind], which would give him +1 in Mind. He had not given up on potentially reaching 20 in Mind as well and the exercises had become a part of his daily rituals in recent weeks.

  If he remembered correctly, it had been one of the first perks Michael had received—Ben wasn’t sure, but he assumed the man had already completed the Triune for Mind, and it was time to catch up.

  He continued to cycle through his senses, first, he grabbed the little toy some of the crafters had created. With closed eyes he tried to identify the materials that were held together with a steel ring, the small square felt a bit like a honeycomb.

  Next, he pulled a little pellet out of a box with a cloth cover that prevented him from seeing what he pulled out. He put it in his mouth and frowned heavily as he tasted the bitter coffee powder that seemed to be mixed with some spice, maybe cinnamon.

  Barry had worked with the crafters to create a box full of small wooden plates infused with specific smells. It took him a moment to recognize, but he guessed it was the fur of a dire wolf rubbed off on the wood.

  The exercise for his hearing was one of his favorites. It simply required him to create a landscape in his mind, purely based on what he heard. There was no right or wrong—at least none he could easily verify—but it was something that he felt could help him in actual combat as well.

  He heard the shuffling of the would-be Protectors as they went through katas and tried to link the sounds to the forms he knew in his mind.

  Twenty meters or so behind them, he heard two men talking while being on watch on the palisades and he tried to pinpoint specifically where they were.

  Even further away, he heard a bunch of kids screaming and he tried to identify what game they were playing from the noise alone.

  He opened his eyes and was about to start the eyesight exercise when a golden notification popped up in his field of vision.