KeroKeron

  Emily and Podrick return to a warm wele aboard Calypso. The moment they step through the ship’s main hatch, they’re met with the barrels of several guns. Podrick steps ba surprise, but Emily simply walks forward uned.

  “Hey,” she says with a small wave before reag up to drop her hood and pull the scarf from her face.

  The guns lower as Anton, Ange, and Ash let out sighs of relief.

  “You should have taken that off before ing in,” Anton grumbles.

  “Sorry,” Emily responds unapologetically as Podrick drops his hood and finally ehe ship fully.

  “Did you get everything?” Anton asks the boy.

  “Of course! I even saved you some silver,” Podriswers proudly, tossing him the ste pouch.

  “Thanks,” Anton says, shutting the hatch behind them before turning his attention baily. “So, how’s it looking out there?”

  “Strange,” she answers with a shrug. “There’s a rge bounty on my head, but no publiowledge as to where I am. Also, there’s nothing being spread publicly about this ship carrying me, but I get the feeling we’ll be targeted if we try to enter a city.”

  “Will there be people pursuing us then?”

  “I don’t know. I mao make tact with someone in the capital, but all they said was that the royal family had beeioning my friends to work out why I’ve turraitor. They didn’t mentie forces moving out of the capital, so I’m guessing they’re waiting for us to try leaving the try before they attack us.”

  “Okay,” Anton says resolutely. “We’re ging our route a little then.”

  Emily raises a curious brow as he turns to Ange and tinues.

  “ge our heading to north-north-east, we’re going to stop off in Folkard.”

  “Route B?” Ange asks, receiving a nod in reply.

  Seemingly satisfied with the answer, Aurns around and heads towards the bridge.

  “Route B?” Emily asks with intrigue, notig Podrick’s excited grin at the mention of his home city.

  “While you’ve been gone, we’ve been discussing our best path out of the try,” Anton says, nodding towards Ash and the empty corride left down. “Route B was for the sario where stopping in a city would be dangerous. We still o stop somewhere we refuel properly: we only mao refill half of our stocks at Eimdon because we had to leave so soon. Also, we want to get rid of the products in our ste to lower the ship’s weight for the sea crossing and gather some funds fetti up oher side. So, Route B takes us up to Folkard because we stop off at the Rockworth shipyard. They’re outside the city and friendly, so we should be safe there for a bit hopefully.”

  “It will also give us some time and space to refit the ship’s outer pting like you wanted,” Ash adds.

  Nodding, Emily pushes away from the wall she was leaning against.

  “That makes sense. Speaking of, I should get started preparing the ship's upgrades,” she says, walking towards the ste at the back of the ship and waving over her shoulder. “Give me a shout if you need me.”

  As she’s disappearing around the er, Emily hears a hurried set of footsteps ing after her.

  “Taken to followihin the ship now too?” she asks Podrick without looking back.

  “You said I could watake the ship’s modifications!” he argues with a defeone.

  “Ha,” Emily scoffs with a small smile pulling at the er of her lips. “That I did. Well, if yoing to watch, you might as well help. Go to the room I awakened you in and move everything out, please. I’m going to go grab my workshop to set up in there.”

  Podriods and runs on ahead as Emily ges course to head towards her room. She grabs the spatial ste bag she left behind and quickly makes her way to join Podrick. By the time she arrives, he’s almost finished clearing the space for her, with only three barrels left by the door.

  “Perfect,” Emily mutters, gng around the open space.

  It’s slightly smaller than her old room in The Dome, but without the bed taking up a wall. Emily flips open her spatial backpad reaches in with her mana, pig out the maes from her workshop and pulling them out in the form of a dense purple mist that fills the room before solidifying into wood aal.

  Gng at the maes, a small frown creases her brow.

  The pting is going to be too big for most of these to be helpful. I may then some of my haools.

  Her eyes drift around and nd oeam Source, her magical steam geor.

  The easiest way will be to upgrade that.

  She pulls up the blueprint as a floating virtual page in her notebook and starts pulling the design apart.

  “If I add a colle array here… make this a closed system… ge that to a normal fire crystal,” she mutters to herself rapidly, quickly f the geor into a piece more suitable to her current teological and magical prowess.

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  [Steam Source {Gen.1}]

  [Type:] Magic Steam Geor

  [Tier:] 1

  [Rank:] E

  [Description:] A magical steam geor.

  [Effect:] When activated, gees vast quantities of steam

  _____

  Emily finishes her sed iteration of the steam geor as Podrick finishes his task and shuts the door behind himself. Without sparing him a gnce, she starts pulling the mae apart and gathering the pieces to modify or remake. She pulls some pipes and raw metal ingots out of her ste, using a few spells to form them into workable parts.

  Podrick watches in silence, ented by Emily’s delicate use of her power as she works. After finishing the basic bodywork of the mae, she brings out an assortment of crystals: two lesser air, a normal fire, and a normal water. She ys them with the lesser fire and water crystals that were in use in the geor before, pig up her engraving tool aing to work carving runes into the metalwork around several sockets ected by els of white iron.

  Her focus on her work never wavers, and she doesn’t even look up as Podrick leaves aurns with their meals for the evening. She fihe runework as down her carving tool as Podrick is halfway through his food.

  “Are you done?” he asks as he notices her sitting bad admiring her work.

  “I should be,” she responds with a satisfied nod. “I just o put the crystals in and turn it on.”

  Emily follows through with her words, pg the crystals into pside the geor, sending a burst of mana into a few of them, and closing up the access panels. She steps bad gestures for Podrie over.

  “When I say, press that button,” she instructs him, pointing te broton in the tre of a trol panel on the front of the geor.

  Podriods and stands at the ready as Emily moves to the side of the mae and hooks up a handheld steam cutter. Stepping back from the geor, she makes eye tact with Podrick.

  “Ready!”

  On her cue, Podrick pushes the button and immediately the pressure gauge oeam cutter jumps up. Emily watches it climb with a smile, squeezing the trigger oter aing a powerful stream of vapourised water and particute fly out, cttering against the floor a few metres away.

  To test, Emily pulls out a thi of metal and pces the cutter against it. She pulls the trigger and traces a line, cutting slowly, leaving ay el iool’s wake.

  “It looks good. Now twist the button terclockwise for me,” Emily says, watg the pressure gauge again with her spare hand sitting on The Clock’s pouch.

  Podrick twists the button and it pops out. Immediately, the pressure in the system drops.

  “Perfect.” Emily nods, rexing her free hand.

  “Did you not think it would turn off?” Podrick asks with a fused gnce as Emily walks over to start eg the geor to the other maes lining the walls.

  “Kind of,” Emily says with a shrug. “I k would turn off, I wasn’t worried about that. But I was worried it might blow up when it did.”

  “What?!” Podrick shouts, jumping away from the geor. “It might have exploded? Is that why you got me to press the button?”

  “This geor is less a mae and more a magical artefact,” Emily expins. “There was a low ce, but if it did have a problem, only I’d be able to tain and deal with it. So yes, I kept my distance when turning it on. Don’t worry, you would have been fine.”

  After a few seds at her in silence, Podrick sighs and drops his head i.

  “Fine,” he grumbles, taking the pipe and wrench that Emily hands him and copying her in eg the maes to the steam system. “What’s the differeween a mae and an artefact then? It looks like it’s pumping out steam like a normal geor.”

  “There isn’t really a proper separation as far as I know. So far, I haven’t seen or heard of anyone else trying to mix the two like I do. If I had to give a differehough, maes are multiple moving parts w together to achieve a purpose, while an artefact is a single magical struct that achieves its purpose aloake that with a grain of salt though. I just meant that the button there is messing with the magic array ihe mae, so any backsh would be magical in nature,” Emily says, moving over to the geor, flipping open the main chamber auring for Podrie look at it. “I wahe system to be activatable by a non-mage because my st design required a manual mana iion to turn it on, so I had to e up with a way of making a button to activate an array. I don’t know any ruhat respond to non-magical tact yet, so I opted to ge the circle holding the array instead.”

  She points to a moving panel within the geor, where a line of white iron is split in the middle with a part of it shunted aside by the panel.

  “The entire array feing steam is pleted other than this line here. When you press the button, that panel moves down and pletes it. Then the array is activated by the mana being pushed into it by the gathering array down here,” Emily says, pointing to the green crystals outside the geor otom.

  “Okay,” Podrick says with a fused tilt of his head. “What are runes and mana?”

  “Runes are these letters.” She points out a tiny rune carved into the metal. “They’re basically the building bloagic. Think of them like pos in a mae while mana is the fuel source.”

  Emily shuts the geor and pats Podri the back as she returns to work, setting up the piping system. After an hour, they finish up ale down for Emily to drink her cold soup. Ange knocks on the door aers as Emily’s halfway done. She asks Emily to take over trol of the ship for the night and gives her a warning about an armed mine in their path, telling her how to avoid it.

  “There you go, I’ve takehe trols now so Tony knows he sleep,” Emily says after Ange’s doh her expnation, using some bread to scrape her bowl . “Is that all?”

  “Yeah, that’s everything. Thanks,” Ange says, turning to leave before pausing and looking back at Emily with a flicted look on her face. “Hey, Emily?”

  “Yeah?” she responds, gng up from her bowl.

  “I’m sorry about before. I blew up on you when I shouldn’t have.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Anton and I didn’t expin anything to you, so you couldn’t have uood. Besides,” Emily says with a small grin. “I respect you for fronting me, despite hhtfully scared of me you were.”

  “Ha,” Ange scoffs, reag down and ruffling Emily’s hair. “Me? Scared of you? In your dreams, kid.”

  “Oh? But you should be.”

  Ange’s hand freezes and a small shiver runs down her spine as she stares at Emily’s uliionless mask, but a moment ter she gives o swipe of her hand before turning around with a small chuckle.

  “Don’t fet the course ges!” she says, waving over her shoulder as she steps out of the door. “I left notes on my seat in the bridge if you need a reminder.”

  Emily sets down her empty bowl and stands up as the sound of Ange’s footsteps fade down the hallway, running a hand through her hair with a buzz of maa aurning it to its normal state. Podriotices her moving and scrambles up from the floor in front of the Steam Source, tug a small notebook into his pocket.

  “What are you making first?” he asks as he walks over.

  “Metal,” Emily responds, ign the look of fusios iurn and taking out several rge ks of raw material from her backpack.

  She spreads out everything from steel and copper to bck iron and mythril, c the floor in front of them. The moment she finishes, Emily raises both hands and casts a spell she created during her months of frozen time in The Gde, femaster.

  A torrent of runes pours from her arms, ing the metals in a rge magic circle e and silver. Several threads of mana stretch from Emily’s fingers, floating at the ready as the spell casting finishes.

  Podrick watches in silent awe as Emily starts weaving her fingers deftly, flig around the thin tendrils of mana to manipute the scattered metals. She selects a feicks them up with a couple of strong silver threads before slig off a piece from each with a burning e thread. She gathers together multiple ks of differeals before ing them in a co of threads, a blend of the two colours, and leaving it floating above the workshop as she moves on to a different bination.

  Emily repeats the process over and ain, trying multiple ratio blends as she bines dozens of different variations. She soon fills the room with glowing cos and pletely clears the floor of her prepared metals. , she removes the first alloy she made from its co, finding a single orb of perfectly mixed, molteal waiting for her.

  She takes the orb and fttens it down into a thin pte, a timetre thick, matg of the pting oside of Calypso’s hull. The moment the glowial is in shape, Emily s it tightly with silver threads and ys it down on the floor.

  The room slowly heats up as she works, making pte after pte of armour, and s them intaacks. By the time Emily has finished, Podrick is dripping with sweat, watg her with a horrified look as she calmly dispels femaster, instantly breaking all the threads around the ptes and revealing her finished work.

  “Why do you need so many of these?” Podrick asks, lifting one of the sheets of metal from its stack.

  “So,” Emily says, pulling out the Spitter and screwing its silencer onto the end before taking the pte from his hand, “I test them.”

  She ches her fingers oe in a vice-like grip and points her gun at it before pulling the trigger. A bullet silently leaves the chamber and sms into the pte with a loud pop, ripping a hole through it and flying into a barrier of spinning wind that Emily jures at the st sed.

  Podrick barely has time to process her as, staring at her in disbelief with his hands halfway to c his ears.

  “Crazy,” he mutters as Emily carefully is the bullet hole as if nothing happened.

  KeroKeron