I jolted awake, and slipped off my bed. A rush of information made my brain throb as I slowly shuffled around to the kitchen. Owl’s Repository of Knowledge hurt. There were so many books, so many articles, and so much stuff I had to cram into my head just to get out of there.
I thought the Aether Jumping stuff was bad, but gravitic was on a whole other level. The purple crystal had been researched far more than the portal tech, which meant there was even more stuff to get through before I could get out of there.
It didn’t help that I dove back in for a double-dip of enforced learning. Right after I cleared my gravitic studies, I thrust head-long into metallurgy. If I thought gravitic was bad, then metallurgy couldn’t even be put in the same universe. Thousands of years of information was all crammed into my head.
”Ugh.” I rubbed at my forehead. Probably best I used that place sparingly in the future. Or, at least, one at a time. Past Shiro was incredibly stupid to go for that. I really didn’t want to end up brain-dead from absorbing too much information.
My throat felt like shredded glass from dehydration, and my entire body felt a little weak and winded. Even with so much growth all around, being out for a couple days still kicked my ass. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad since I woke up in between gravitic and metallurgy to take care of myself.
Crow’s Canteen of Chaos appeared from the shadows, and I greedily gulped down fresh spring water. It felt incredibly soothing against my burning throat. I really needed to get some kind of IV set up for long stays in the interface.
I pulled out my phone—it was 4 in the morning, and two and a half days had passed. I’d gone into Owl’s library as soon as I got back from the conversation with Brunhilde, and that felt like it’d been weeks ago, not a couple days. The eidolons' time compression magics were on a whole other level.
I threw on my clothes, and shuffled around my apartment to grab my equipment. Once I was ready, I silently slipped out of the Crusade apartment and moved down toward the bottom floor.
As could probably be expected, the entire BC Gym was pretty empty. Sure, the actual gym part had quite a few night owls pumping iron, but there was a nice quiet to the air that usually came alongside early mornings and the night shift.
Once my brain warmed up and started to work properly once more, I checked the messages I’d gotten.
Shinobu: Master Yoshi agreed to take you on, mikata. Pop by whenever. Here’s the location. Elevator code is 3689 (Attachment)
Whenever? Did that mean I could go now? I stepped out onto the surprisingly still active streets of Aythryn City and took a deep breath. The morning mist was cool and slightly refreshing. Probably for the best I waited till later. I had some other stuff to do, anyway. It was time to meet up with my Kinetic teacher once more. I wanted to drag Mira and Vox to Nine Peaks while I was at it.
Feras: Might have a job for a friend of yours. A contact reached out to me. I’m checking everything to make sure before flicking it your way. Think she’d be interested?
A job for Nightshade… that was probably who he was talking about, anyway. A friend of mine? The only person he’d call that was my alter ego. The legend of Nightshade grew with every flawless heist, so it was only natural people would start to reach out with gigs. There was a reason I was in such a rush to finish my armor.
Mira: Saw you were passed out. Figured it was the thing. I’ll probs be outta contact for a bit. Had to leave the ring behind too. If you don’t hear from me in the next couple days, that’s why.
My connection to Mira was entirely gone. A bolt of panic briefly surged through me, and I forced myself to breathe through it. The Packheart Rings were good, but they were only good as long as the other party kept it on. Not knowing where she was… it made me incredibly uncomfortable. Felt like she’d disappear at any moment again.
Mira wasn’t a kid, though. Hell, she was older than me, so… I could be patient and wait until she came into contact. If several days passed, though, then I could start worrying. Until then, there was no need to panic.
It did mess up my plans a bit, though. It was fine. I’d just drag Vox alongside me, and I could get Mira to Nine Peaks some other time. Hopefully Fox wouldn’t be too disappointed.
I headed down the street to get breakfast, and then headed back up to the flyer bays of the Crusade for my hover bike. The engine kicked to life, and I flew out over the city.
Once I got down into my workshop, I immediately got to work on finishing up the Nightshade armor. More specifically, the gravity barrier that I wanted to design. Throughout the entire time I was in Owl’s library, I came up with quite a few plausible ideas for how I wanted to do this.
First and foremost, there was the easiest method. I could simply create a nanite swarm around the thermal vent, each lined with small gravity repulsion fields. It’d probably work, though it would be a massive drain on resources. Not to mention I’d never worked with nanites, so that’d be an issue too. I was close to being able to sometime soon, though.
The best way I could try and get something to work was actually an extrapolation of information from Owl’s library, and not something that I’d explicitly read. Gravitational forces moved through the path of least resistance, a bit similar to electricity. For instance, a dropped object will always drop downward unless acted upon by a different force.
Using that information, and gravitic’s nature of distorting and controlling the flow of gravity, I had an idea. Why not just make a gravitic-infused metal of some kind? A superalloy, of a sort. It was why I’d gone for not only gravitic, but also metallurgy in Owl’s library.
Basically, gravity flowed incredibly easy through gravitic. Gravitic itself was quite fragile, though. An alloy infused with the crystal could theoretically offer a path of least resistance, and be well suited for controlling gravitational fields. It was all up in the air, but I had some high hopes for it.
With my newfound information of metals and alloys, I could vastly improve a lot of my tech. My new armor, specifically, could be slimmed down by at least 30% with some better alloys to replace the armor plating. That’d have to wait for another time, though.
I grabbed some parts from a half finished foundry, and set up an external material crafting array. There were so many machines in metallurgy, and it was way, way more complex than I originally gave it credit for. If I wanted to make some truly incredible stuff, my current tech wouldn’t cut it.
Thankfully, the documents I read in Owl’s library had pictures and schematics attached. I took quite a bit of time to copy them all into my 3D modeling program and get my foundries to start working on some advanced metallurgy machinery.
While that was running, I finally started work on the gravitic superalloy I’d been thinking about. The first experiment was actually pretty simple. I used the laser cutting parts of the material array to cut titanium and gravitic into an extremely fine powder so it’d be easier to meld together.
The first issue appeared as soon as the material array fired up. My tech used electricity to superheat and meld powder. Gravitic reacted extremely violently to electricity. I knew that—manipulating the reaction was part of how flyer tech worked.
Unfortunately, while I knew that, it didn’t exactly mean that it registered. I dumped quite a bit of gravitic into the machine, and every single bit of that powder surged with oppressive gravitational force.
Insight pulsed through me a moment before it went wrong, and I instinctively backed up a few steps. The machine creaked, and bent inward. Materials and scrap laying around were all sucked inward like a black hole opened in the middle of my workshop. The metal ruptured, and in the span of a few moments the entire fabrication array was warped into a cracked metal sphere.
The sphere floated impossibly for a moment and then clattered onto the floor as a useless chunk of metal. Well… so much for this being easy to figure out. I shook my head, and adjusted one of my foundries to make a bunch of back up components stead. I had a feeling this was going to take me a long time to figure out.
— — —
A stomach churning sensation filled me, and I was pulled from my Aether bunker to Nine Peaks in an instant. The concrete walls faded to pristine mountains, and pure-white snow scattered along ancient structures.
Vox clung tightly to my shoulder, and looked around the area alertly. Her metal eyes tracked each and every fox sprite moving around the place. “Yip?”
“This is Nine Peaks.” I patted her head lightly, and stretched out. Before entering my bunker, I’d swapped out my Title, Shorty, for Scion. The immunity to Aether Sickness was an incredibly nice boon given the situation.
Swapping Titles was way more complicated then I thought it’d be. I couldn’t just do it from my interface, and had to actually enter the pavilion. Since I always entered the library, that meant I had to walk down to the title room. It took me five minutes all in all.
I could maybe do it in a couple if I sprinted, but swapping around my Title wasn’t something I could do instantly. It’d take quite a bit of forethought on which Title I should run. Not like my opponents would give me a couple of minutes to just swap it around.
”Hey, Shiro.” A black-furred fox sat waiting for me at the entrance of Nine Peaks. A faint layer of snow gathered on his head like he’d been waiting a while. It’d always been Vulpes, so it threw me off a bit to see a different Greater Sprite come to fetch me this time around.
”Uh, hey. Cain, right?” A lot had happened since I last saw the sprite, but that should be right? He stood out quite a bit with his pure black coat of fur compared to the others.
One of his tails wagged lightly behind him. The others wrapped around it as if to stop it from giving him away. Despite the nonsense with his tails, he continued to look totally nonchalant. “Yeah. That’s Vox?”
“Chek.” I pulled the metal fox off my shoulder, and held her in the air. She struggled around for a moment before settling back down. “Fox wanted to see her.”
”So I’ve heard. She’s cute.” He lifted an appraising eye to the metal fox, and sniffed around at her. The metal fox wiggled around in my hands like she’d rather be anywhere else.
I likewise squirmed uncomfortably as he looked her over. I’d modeled Vox almost exactly after myself, so hearing other people comment on how cute she was always made me a bit uncomfortable. It was like they were calling me that by extension. “She busy?”
”Probably not. My lady is hardly ever busy.” He rolled his eyes, and walked toward the center shrine. Vulpes at least tried to give Fox some face, but he seemed like he could care less. “Your instructor isn’t here yet. Shall we start up there?”
”Chek. After you.” I set Vox back on my shoulders and followed after the large Greater Sprite.