Chapter 297 – Claiming Their Dues

Emily returns to the station a little over a week later to collect the material portion of her prize. She enters the mercenary sector to a chorus of whispers and a flurry of turned heads, news of her exploits clearly having spread.

“How can I help you?” asks another clerk as she approaches their counter.

“I’m here to collect the remainder of a bounty.”

“Of course. Please present your mark so I can confirm your identity.”

Emily complies without complaint before moving to a free seat to wait as the clerk heads off through the doors behind them to recover her payment. She keeps an ear tuned in to the mutterings following her and catches several mentions of spatial magic and robotic soldiers. Turning to scan the hall, she notices several people with their Terminals out, glancing between her and the screens.

Have they moved the recording of my battle to the Net?

She pulls out her own Terminal to confirm, and it only takes a minute to find a page within the station’s subnet offering the video for a few credits. A quick backtrace finds the monetary transfer is linked to a shop operating out of the mercenary sector: Melvor’s Magic Menagerie.

I wonder if he’s allowed to do that…

It doesn’t take long for the clerk to return to the main hall with their hands clasped before them. They approach Emily and open their hands to reveal a golden ring covered in glowing purple inscriptions with a lesser space crystal embedded in the surface.

“Here is your payment, mercenary Coldstone. You will find your entire reward enclosed. You can check the contents by applying machina to this rune cluster here,” they explain, pointing to a dense bundle of runes on the inside of the metal band. “And the storage will empty its contents if you apply machina here.” They gesture to another cluster on the outside, opposite the embedded crystal.

Emily takes the ring from them and makes a show of emitting sparks from her gloved fingers to activate the first cluster. A stream of information flows into her mind like a usual machina scan, showing her a long list of items held within: three pills, two potions, a strange chemical blend, five talismans, five scrolls, and an enchanted blade.

“Thank you for your service,” Emily says, rising from her seat and nodding her head to the clerk before heading straight out of the hall.

She half expects someone to follow her out, given the number of eyes she can feel following the reward clasped in her gauntlet, but none do. The recording of her slaying a sixth circle mage and crushing the ship around him probably helps.

She is stopped before she can reach the transport bubble to take her back to the station’s surface, but it’s by a familiar voice coming from one of the shops she passes.

“Coldstone!” She pauses her steps and turns to see two grinning faces and three of Melvor’s hands waving at her. “I take it you’re leaving? Still not interested in any of my wares? I have a few special items other than my usual scrolls, you know.”

“I have no need for the things you sell,” Emily declares, stepping into the entryway of his temporary shop, the digital sign above the door and the displays full of wares all set up so as to be cleared with the wave of a hand when he decides to move on. “However, I’m a little interested in your sale of the recording I provided as proof of contract. Are you permitted to make profit from items you’ve verified in your Guild duties?”

The mage’s eyes widen, and the grins on his faces freeze.

“You… you tracked it back to me?”

“It wasn’t exactly a challenge. You only bounced the payments through two proxies, and none of the transfers left this station.”

“Tsk, damn tech-heads,” Melvor grumbles as his second head speaks over his complaint: “It’s not technically allowed, but no one ever complains when we do it, especially not the mercenaries such as yourself who gain a boost to their reputation from our efforts. How about this? If you agree not to report me and force me to deal with the lengthy audit process, I’ll make it worth your while. Shall we say… thirty per cent of the proceeds?”

“Fifty.”

“You drive a hard bargain. How about forty?”

“Fifty,” Emily responds flatly.

“Fine.” The two-headed mage deflates and waves dismissively, an expression of distaste on both his faces. “I’ll send it to your group’s account, you damn ingrate.”

Emily leaves the station, not really expecting him to follow through on their agreement the moment she’s gone. She instructs her squadron to head back into Xeroph 5 and makes for her room to inspect her prize. In the week of waiting for the Guild to prepare the material reward, she’s called Silvia and agreed to transfer seventy per cent of the credit reward into the crew’s main expenses account to replace and repair the ships she damaged and destroyed, keeping thirty per cent and any of the storage ring’s contents she wants in return for her efforts.

Instead of using the release runes to dump the ring’s contents, Emily inspects them, noting the way they’re set to react to any energy, be it mana, machina, or qi, and tracing the intricate connecting links woven into the main storage enchantment. She adds the localised array to her long catalogue of known enchantments for future use before tinting her mana with space and reaching into the ring to draw out the talismans and scrolls.

She fails to understand the ornate, rune-like script sprawled across the talismans in qi-dense ink even after several hours of inspection, the knowledge floating at the edge of her awareness but just out of reach in a mind-bending manner. She can, however, feel that there’s enough qi packed into the hand-sized rectangles of paper to equal a seventh circle spell, and each one bears a few characters in universal common explaining their functions in simple terms: two cut, two crush, and one sever.

The scrolls, on the other hand, she understands perfectly. They’re made from a thin, leather-like fabric that’s almost certainly the skin of a magical beast, and the runic circles covering their surfaces are written in a blend of mana-dense inks like those Emily has made in the past to tattoo herself and others. The spells written on them are sixth circle and too complex for Emily to fully comprehend, appearing as twisting, mind-numbing fractal patterns no matter how hard she focuses, but she can discern their basic attributes without reading the explanation in common. Two will create devastatingly large and hot constructs of fire when torn, a blade and a ball, while the other three will create barriers of wind, water, and earth respectively.

Emily tucks the one-use items away in her belt for now and turns her attention to the pills and potions within the ring. The potions she quickly identifies as fire and water-based elixirs strong enough to give even her a considerable boost in cultivation, but the pills are harder to understand. They appear as small, dense, translucent capsules of qi with the same strange characters as on the talismans swirling within them, constantly shifting. Emily knows they’re made from herbs and beast components like the potions, but unlike those made using the craft she’s used to, she can’t identify their makeups even with a detailed machina scan.

She can’t resist popping one into her mouth to test and waits for it to dissolve on her tongue, feeling streams of hot and cold energy disperse through her body. The qi constantly fluctuates between burning heat that seems to tear away at her muscles and metal bones, and a soothing chill that builds them back up again. She circulates the energy until the pill completely dissolves, and, though her machina and mana reserves increase throughout the process, it’s less than half as effective as a potion of the same level, so she puts away the remaining two to give to others who’ll benefit from them fully.

She drinks both potions, one after the other in rapid succession, letting the conflicting elements clash in a raging storm, trying to claim dominance, and forcefully holding in the overflowing energy that threatens to rip her apart. Emily knows such an act would be suicide to another fifth circle being, given that the elixirs were designed for someone a circle above, but her hold over the energies within her is too strong to let them run amok, and the strain only boosts her speed of improvement. She lets her connections with the two elements flow through her and deepen as the potions burn away and her reserves continue to increase, eventually leaving her in a controlled cloud of steam with tongues of flame and ice-cold streams dancing around her.

She drops the connections, letting the glowing light leave her eyes, and finally looks to the last two items within the ring: a strange, glowing purple mixture of chemicals seeped in neutral energy, and a beautiful dagger the size of her forearm, covered in a complex array of azure runes that reaches in to connect with the weapon’s vessel.

Scanning the chemical blend first, she quickly understands it to be the mechanic’s equivalent of a potion or pill: a power-boosting serum. It contains the refined blood and hormones of many beasts, along with several herbal extracts to balance them, and it’s clearly designed to aid the development of a humanoid mechanic. However, Emily’s instincts scream against taking the draught herself, so after taking pages of notes on how she could go about attempting to replicate it, she puts it away to gift to Pod later.

The dagger, on the other hand, proves the greatest boon from the bounty. It’s missing a crossguard, and while the hilt holds several enchantments to boost its durability and usability, practically binding itself to the hand of any user to keep it from being dropped in battle, it isn’t linked to the blade’s complex runic array. An array which charges itself from ambient mana allows for a single, unattributed sixth circle severing spell to be used a day. Emily grins as she inspects the piece. Already planning to extract the blade, she puts together several designs to integrate it into her modular arm system.

She takes to her workshop with glee, several new projects on her mind as she returns to place the final touches on her new armour.

***

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[Status]

[Name:] Emily Coldstone

[Race:] Humanoid Cyborg

[Age:] 25 > 26

[Magic Circle:] Fifth Circle

[Machina Cortex:] Fifth Stage

[Attributes:] Strength 60 > 78 (105), Dexterity 325 > 352 (367), Agility 286 > 305 (323), Vitality 57 > 66 (116), Intelligence 720 > 810 (1060)

[Health:] 2175/2175 > 2625/2625

[Stamina:] 5750/5750 > 6450/6450

[Mana:] 270000/270000 > 303750/303750

[Machina:] 249750/270000 > 284006/303750

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Talents:

[Intrinsic] Magical Engineer

-Mechanical Genius

-Magical Genius

-One With The Elements

Skills:

[Intrinsic] Magic Network (passive)

[Intrinsic] Technomancer's Breath (active)

-Parkour (passive)

-Intermediate Machine Construction (passive)

-Intermediate Melee Combat (passive)

-Advanced Spellweave (active)

-Mental Fortitude (passive)

-Overdrive (active)

-Intermediate Metalworking (passive)

-Advanced Mana Manipulation (passive)

-Intermediate Runesmithing (passive) > Advanced Runesmithing (passive)

-Perfect Silent Casting (passive)

-Internal Casting (passive)

-Ballroom Dancing (passive)

-Intermediate Shooting (passive) > Advanced Shooting (passive)

-Flow (passive)

-Linguist (passive)

-Mother's Blessing (active)

-Intermediate Condensed Casting (passive)

-Mechanical Casting (passive)

-Intermediate Programming (passive)

-Overclock (active)

-Subconscious Casting (passive)

-Parallel Processing (active)

-Vessel Enchanting (active)

Knowledge:

-Basic Clockwork

-Basic Steampower

-Basic Electrical Theory > Intermediate Electrical Theory

-Basic Mana Formation > Intermediate Energy Formation

-Basic Particle Physics > Intermediate Particle Physics

-Basic Material Science > Intermediate Material Science

-Basic Kinematics > Intermediate Kinematics

-Basic Waves > Intermediate Waves

-Basic Thermodynamics > Intermediate Thermodynamics

-Basic Elemental Theory > Intermediate Elemental Theory

-Internal Energy Collection

-Basic Alchemy > Intermediate Alchemy

-Basic Array Formation > Intermediate Array Formation

-Basic Fields > Intermediate Fields

-Basic Chemistry > Intermediate Chemistry

-Magic Vocations

-Basic Computer Systems > Intermediate Computer Systems

-Basic Astrophysics > Intermediate Astrophysics

Equipment:

[Intrinsic] Clockwork of Time (Ex)

Emily - Left Arm {Gen.4}

Subdermal Plating SD64

Claw {Gen.3}

Second Skin {Gen.3}

Metal Treads {Gen.2}

Spitter {Gen.3}

Earrings of Isolation {Gen.2}

Whisper {Gen.3}

Stream {Gen.3}

Broken First Love

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Advanced Runesmithing (passive)]

User is experienced in the art of creating and using runes.

-Grants +30% rune creation chance

-Grants an instinctive understanding of combining runes up to the eighth circle.

-User can identify and remember runes beyond their current understanding.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Advanced Shooting (passive)]

User knows how to use ranged weapons and firearms.

-Grants +30% dexterity and agility when fighting with ranged weapons

-Grants an instinctive familiarity with ranged weapons

-User can make seemingly impossible shots with near-unavoidable accuracy

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Emily – Left Arm {Gen.4}]

[Rank:] C

[Stats:] +12 Str, +9 Dex, +6 Agil, +5 Vit

[Description:] An enchanted mechanical prosthesis to replace Emily Coldstone’s left arm. Contains an integrated activator for The Clock, a thermonuclear battery, and a spatial quick-change weapons system, and artificial musculature made from the parts of a world-eater.

[Effect:] When activated, merges with the host to replace the function of an arm.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Second Skin {Gen.3}]

[Rank:] C

[Stats:] +25 Vit

[Description:] An enchanted, skin-tight metal armour made from the metallicised skin of a world-eater.

[Effect:] Provides armour to the chest that defends against magical and physical attacks.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Earrings of Isolation {Gen.2}]

[Rank:] D

[Description:] A set of magical earrings designed to protect against harsh sounds with integrated connection to mechanical communication system.

[Effect:] Upon activation, creates small barriers of wind that block high-volume sound waves and allow intended sounds through.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Progression]

[Circle/Stage:] Fifth

Requirements:

-Intelligence 810/925 (Not Complete)

-Cleanse your mental demons (Not Complete)

-Upgrade 10/10 knowledges to intermediate grade (Complete)

-Upgrade 3/3 skills to advanced grade (Complete)

-Slay 0/5 sixth circle beasts alone (Not Complete)

-Raise 0/2 linked child beings to fifth circle (Not Complete) {Optional}

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