“So, you’ve already been through this?” Earnie asks, turning to Pod with a raised brow as Emily finishes her explanation of awakened mechanics. “It’s not going to kill me, right?”

“Well, you are a lot older than me,” Pod hums teasingly, tapping his fingers on his chin and sending sparks of machina dancing across his skin.

“Your age will make this process a little harder, but I’ve prepared some potions to counter that,” Emily reassures the old man, pushing open the door to The Source as the elevator comes to a halt. “You’ll be fine, and you’ll feel ten years younger when we’re done.”

Earnie nods and quietly follows them into the massive steam turbines chamber, drinking in the sight as he mulls over the decision.

“That sounds great and all, but why? I know you’re not just doing this to help with my dodgy knees.”

“I have my reasons, but as the first awakened mechanic on the planet, I want to spread the vocation and give people another option,” Emily explains, leading him past the hissing steam turbines and humming coil banks towards a sealed set of heavy metal doors where a battery used to stand. “I believe everyone should be given the chance to pursue power and knowledge if they want them. However, I don’t have the time to sit around and teach people.”

Earnie nods in understanding as his gaze drifts up to the thick cables overhead that stretch from the coil banks to a socket above the door they’re approaching.

“Why awaken me, though? If you told Minerva about this, she'd leap on it.”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t be able to awaken her, given her cultivation as a mage, and if I left the country only leaving behind knowledge, there’s no telling how long it would be before you managed to awaken someone naturally,” she explains, pushing open the door to reveal a short buffer corridor a few metres long, connected to an identical door on the other end. “It would be possible, since you’ll now have the technology required to expose a batch of intelligent young candidates to electricity, but it would require time and be unreliable. Much better to awaken you. Even with your age impeding you, you’ll reach second stage within a few years, at which point you’ll have enough machina and control to help awaken others.”

“So, you want me to take responsibility for teaching other mechanics while you run off to have fun?” Earnie asks with a gruff chuckle as the door shuts behind them. “Sounds like a deal to me. What do I need to do?”

Pod begins explaining the full awakening process as Emily approaches a translucent screen set into the wall beside the next door. She adjusts a few sliders, reducing the lightning mana concentration to zero and the active electrical discharge to a mortal-safe level.

With a final press of a button at the bottom of the panel, the door slides open with a hiss, revealing a small chamber only big enough to fit four people shoulder to shoulder.

The walls are a bright silver metal, crackling with electricity, with faintly glowing blue lines etching detailed patterns between crystals filled with lightning.

Emily steps into the room, and Pod blocks Earnie as he tries to follow.

“Give her a second,” he says. “She charges the chamber with lightning mana for her use, but it’s useless to me and possibly lethal to you, so best let her drain it before we step in.”

After a few moments of focusing on her Technomancer’s Breath, Emily calls them in. Pod places his palm against the wall and, with a pulse of machina, shuts the door behind them as Emily guides Earnie to sit cross-legged in the centre of the space.

He shivers slightly at the tickle of active charge flowing through the ground beneath his legs but sits obediently. Emily hands him a thin vial filled with a vibrant red liquid, speckled with black dust suspended evenly through it. He pops the cork and downs it without hesitation, looking down at his chest calmly as a deep warmth builds within it.

“You take strange potions a lot?” Pod asks as Emily hands the old man a second vial, this one filled with a thick, toxic-yellow solution.

“Unfortunately, yes. Every few months, Old Man Silver seems to find a new strengthening potion of some kind,” he grumbles as he downs the unsettling concoction, though Pod and Emily both recognise the faint, affectionate softening of his tone at the mention of the elderly mage. “None of them ever seem to quite fix my damn knees for good though. Little Red can’t find anything wrong with them either.”

Emily raises a brow as she hands him the third and final potion to prepare his body for the stress of the awakening, this one a cold, sky blue. She places a hand on his shoulder as he drinks it.

“Don’t resist,” she tells him before releasing a light wave of machina and scanning his body in an instant.

The cartilage in his knees is shredded. Surely their healing magic could fix this. Does this Little Red’s magic struggle to penetrate bone?

“Don’t worry, your knees will be fine after this. Now, relax and shut your eyes, please.”

He does as he’s told, placing the last empty vial on the floor and shutting his eyes, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.

“Pod, pay attention,” Emily says, holding up her left hand with her palm facing up, releasing a buzzing flow of machina that licks at the air eagerly. “You don’t have the strength to replicate it yet, but you’re on the cusp of second stage, so you should have the sensitivity needed to understand it at least. This is the correct concentration and frequency of machina to induce an awakening.”

She lowers her hand to Earnie’s head, grasping it firmly and sending a ripple of charge across his skin.

In an instant, he begins convulsing, and the faint charge in the metal floor below is drawn to him, flickering out in small lightning tongues to join a steady flow of energy entering his skin.

Emily lets go and steps back, releasing a rootlike network of machina from her feet to maintain control of the surrounding electronics. She slowly dials up the charge in the room, directing more power from the massive cell banks buried in the walls and filling the space with the soothing hum of electricity as arcs of energy leap from the walls to all three inhabitants.

Pod watches with rapt attention as Earnie writhes in pain, his eyes staring through the man into the dancing energy surrounding him. A spark of enlightenment illuminates his thoughts and, without a word, the boy drops into a lotus position to begin cycling his energy, meditating on his realisation.

Earnie, whose sagging skin has drawn taut again, his complexion glowing like that of a man half his age, gasps for breath as the gruelling transformation comes to an end.

A small smile twitches at the corner of Emily’s mouth as she glances over at her apprentice. She can feel an electric thrum from deep within his being, so she reaches out and brushes her hand against his head, refreshing her blessing.

The next time he opens his eyes, he’ll have completed his first ascension.

A small bud of pride takes root in her chest, remaining long after she assists Earnie to his feet and leads him out of the Cultivation Chamber to leave Pod to his devices.

***

A pulse of mana from her belt pulls Emily’s attention away from the armour plating she’s fusing to the frame of a ship.

She steps back and pulls out her communicator, receiving an incoming call from Old Man Silver.

“I take it this is about my request?” she asks the moment the call connects.

“That it is,” Silver responds, unbothered by her immediate leap to business. “They were reluctant to part with so many greater crystals at once, but Earnie and Minerva spoke in your favour and helped me persuade some of the more conservative members of our council to see reason. That, and an urgent issue just cropped up that I assured them you would be the fastest and most effective answer.”

“Ha, thank you,” Emily chuckles, a ghost of a smile flickering across her face at the prospect of ten greater space crystals. “What do I need to do?”

“How secure is this call?”

“Considering I’m currently standing a few hundred metres from the main relay and no one else is here, one hundred per cent.”

“Good. In that case, I can tell you that since your unfortunate run-in with Pretty Boy two years ago, we’ve been slowly going through the process of silently vetting every member of our company. Most of our allies have been doing the same. We haven’t been removing the traitors we find, since they’ve provided a great opportunity to feed Denros false information, but unfortunately, it seems the traitors have now realised they’re exposed to some extent.”

Emily listens to Old Man Silver’s explanation while heading out of the large hangar she was working in, approaching the main clifftop warehouse over her workshop and sending a signal to Pod through the small device curled around her right ear.

“They’ve somehow managed to get themselves assigned en masse to a few outposts without us noticing. We’re now waiting for them to reveal their hand and turn on the few loyal men and women still posted there. And if that happens… well, we’ll be adjusting our maps, that’s for sure.”

“So, you want me to clear a few outposts of traitors?” Emily asks doubtfully, pausing in front of the elevator as it rises from below. “Surely the Defence Force could handle that without bringing me in.”

“Yes, but all four of the outposts they’ve chosen are grouped together on the far east of the battlefield. The forest makes it easier for them to defend the claimed outposts and harder for our troops to approach quickly. They likely already have people moving through no-man’s-land under stealth wards, and they’ll speed up their advance the second it’s clear the outposts are theirs, so I was hoping you’d be able to reclaim them before that and hold them when their reinforcements get there.”

“I take it Earnie told you about my metal soldiers then?”

“The moment he landed in Liberte,” Silver responds with a chuckle. “So, can you do it?”

“Just give me the coordinates and start preparing people to take over the outposts when I’m done. I’ve been looking for a chance to introduce Pod to the battlefield.”

She hangs up as the old mage directly transfers a cluster of information through the communicator. She scans through the data that covers their coordinates, descriptions of their concealment measures and defences, and even their roster of current staff, with ninety per cent of the mercenaries marked as traitors.

Wow. Looks like Pretty Boy had a lot of friends.

The elevator doors slide open, and Emily steps in to join Pod as they continue up to the aircraft hangar on the floor above.

“Where are we going?” her apprentice asks, holding out Mensacus and a metal spatial backpack, filled with a company of mechanical soldiers.

“A coordinated revolt along the border of no-man’s-land,” Emily replies, slinging the bag over one shoulder and resting her son against the other. “They need a fast strike team that can hold four outposts after retaking them since Denros will already be moving in reinforcements.”

“How fast?”

“We never did test the top slingshot speed of the Cutters, did we?” Emily asks, flashing him a grin that he matches with enthusiasm.

The elevator’s doors slide open, and they both step out into a long hangar. The far wall has a split in the centre, with four large hydraulic arms fixed to the two halves, ready to retract them into the ground and ceiling.

Leading straight up to the massive bay door are two sets of raised rails a few metres above the ground, with two sleek, black aircraft resting on top of them on either side of the elevator.

The ships are only about fifteen metres long, with sharp blade-like wings stretching out from their noses to form an arrow-shaped silhouette. There’s a large circular rotor in the centre of each wing, floating in place, held by electromagnetic discs fused to the wings. At the rear of the fuselage is a third rotor, as long as the other two are wide, with the engine closely connected.

There aren’t any visible runes on the ship unless you peer through the rear rotor into the inner walls of the engine, but there are faintly-glowing black and blue traces of mana streaking the external plating of the jets.

Emily and Pod split apart and climb onto a Cutter each, pressing in a panel behind the thin streaks of glass forming the cockpits. They slide open with a hiss, letting their pilots slip through small openings into cosy seats in the confined capsules.

Emily sets her bag and Mensacus’ Needler form in her lap and rests her palms comfortably on the highly conductive panels of her armrests. Her machina courses through the small craft, activating its electromagnetic rotors and sending a ripple through all of its moving panels like a cat stretching as it wakes. The large, bladed rotors on either side of the Cutter spin up with a faint whir, and it shudders in place, rising a few millimetres from the rails holding it.

“All flap checks positive. Hover engaged,” Pod says, his voice emanating clearly from the communicator behind Emily’s ear.

“Opening bay doors and commencing launch rail charging,” Emily responds, reaching out to the Logic Core below with her machina and activating the Cutter Slingshot launch protocols. “Prepare for maglock.”

Her ship suddenly freezes in place as Emily feels a pair of powerful electromagnets turn on above and below her, pulling on the invisible electromagnetic fields around her. She can feel the movements, despite not being able to see them, and her left arm is particularly sensitive to each delicate shift.

The rails, running in a straight track over a hundred metres long, begin to crackle with electricity, and the far doors part, pulling away to reveal the open ocean stretching out before them under the midday sun.

“Deploying anchor pylon.”

As the words leave her lips, the calm sea before them quivers, churning and making way as a single, thick-girthed pillar of metal bursts from beneath the surface. It rises tens of metres, shedding a skin of salty brine to reveal a gun-metal grey surface, covered in blue and silver runes with a layered stack of electromagnetic discs at the tip.

“Rail charging complete,” Pod informs her as she enters their target coordinates into the Logic Core, letting it calculate their optimal launch vectors while checking them against her own calculation.

“Launch values set, activating automated firing sequence.”

Emily engages the final activation for their launch and waits with bated breath.

“I launch in ten seconds, and you in eleven,” she says, flexing her ship’s control flaps like her own fingers and rolling the wing rotors around freely in preparation. “Follow my lead and don’t bother engaging stealth as we launch. I want to feel it. Let everyone hear.”

“Got it!”

The pylon ahead of them, rising from the sea slightly to the right of their flight path, erupts with light as mana and electricity rush through it.

They sit through a silent countdown, and the moment it hits zero, the magnets holding Emily in place disengage. The field being generated by the rails below the ship grabs hold of it, ripping it through space and sending it hurtling out of the hangar with a mighty crack as the sound barrier shatters into pieces.

Emily lightly nudges her flaps the moment she’s free from the strong magnetic field, twisting her jet perpendicular to the sea with her right wing pointing towards the water. A crackling arc of plasma leaps from the anchor pylon to her Cutter barely a fraction of a second later, grabbing hold of her with another strong magnetic grip and using it to rapidly change her direction.

The pylon lets go of her once she’s pointing over the land towards the east, and Emily flips herself back upright and relaxes as her Cutter slices through the air into the distance.

Pod swallows his nerves and anticipation, reeling from the impact of her launch in spite of all the comfort-based enchantments protecting his cockpit. Without any time to second-guess throwing himself through the atmosphere at nearly eight times the speed of sound, Pod’s Cutter detaches from the magnetic lock holding it in place.

He’s able to react in time to turn his ship thanks to his greatly enhanced reflexes, but he only gets it to an eighty-five-degree tilt before the pylon grips it, leaving it to shudder unstably as it’s forced into a tight turn.

He breathes a sigh of relief as he levels out in Emily’s wake, flipping his wing rotors perpendicular to the ground to keep pushing him forward as he informs Emily of his successful launch.

“I’m on your six! I lost a little momentum on the slingshot, but my Goddess, this is insane!”

She chuckles hollowly at his excitement, her own already fading as she looks out at the world flashing by *as they rapidly approach the eastern edge of no-man’s-land.

“Enjoy the view,” Emily tells Pod, reaching into her belt and pulling out the communicator, blinking with another call from Old Man Silver. “We’ll engage stealth ten minutes before our landing in T-minus thirty-five minutes.”