Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess
Chapter 181 – Project Progress

“This is my son, Mensacus,” Emily says, emphasizing Pod’s lack of involvement as they walk through the mana-gathering chamber towards a new pedestal set up to feed mana into The Needler floating above it. “Mensacus, this is Earnie. Say hello.”

Three threads of mana, invisible to Earnie and Pod, reach out to them. The threads loop around their wrists, fusing with their skin and relaying a melodious whisper into the backs of their minds.

‘Hello, Earnie.’

The man in question winces, and Emily can feel a flicker of dissatisfaction leaking through her connection to her son.

‘Play nice,’ she sends back, controlling the link to make sure only Mensacus hears her.

‘He’s weak.’

‘He’ll be gone soon.’

A thrum of satisfaction from Mensacus ends their almost instantaneous exchange, and Earnie’s tensed expression relaxes as Mensacus continues to everyone.

‘Are you one of Mother’s followers?’

“Ha, I may be old, but I’m not senile,” Earnie scoffs in response. “I don’t follow anyone around. I’m just here to have a nosey and borrow any ideas she’ll let me take.”

The temperature around them suddenly drops, and thick black malice begins leaking from The Needler’s cracks. The colour leaves Earnie’s face, and cold sweat slips down the wrinkles of his back as he feels like an invisible hand is closing around his neck.

Emily flares her mana in warning, releasing a crushing pressure that seems to make the air around her grow heavier as it hums with charge. The pressure vanishes as quickly as it came, bringing back heat to the chamber as Mensacus cowers under his mother’s wrath, letting Earnie gasp for air.

‘He’s not trying to insult me,’ Emily whispers through the mental connection that hasn’t broken despite Mensacus flexing his strength, now far more robust than when he first learned to thread his mana. ‘I haven’t even offered him the chance at awakening yet.’

“Sorry about that,” Emily says, turning to Earnie and watching as he glances between her and Mensacus with a disgruntled gaze that almost hides his lingering fear.

“What was that?” he asks in return, brushing his fingers against his throat and frowning when he doesn’t find it sore despite feeling like it was being crushed moments ago.

“That was Mensacus’ mana. He’s essentially a curse given consciousness. This gives him a very unique blend of mana I’ve taken to calling malice.” Emily steps forward, affectionately brushing her metal digits over Mensacus’ upper receiver. “It’s perfect for corrupting minds. This Needler I’ve made for him to inhabit for now works with mental attacks as the focus.”

“You made a gun for mental attacks?”

“Why not? A physical medium is the most effective way to apply a large dose of malice to a target at long range for now.” She pulls a thin needle covered in small engravings from her belt to show him as she continues her explanation. “Once one of these gets stuck in a target, it dumps its payload of mana into their system, sending it straight towards their brain. Depending on their mental strength, the curse eats away at their resistance until all it takes is a whisper from Mensacus to send them into a hunger-induced craze.”

“Craze?”

“Soldiers will tear their brothers in arms limb from limb like their lives depend on it. Even Mensacus can only nudge them towards the right targets once they’re activated. It sends the subject’s body into a frenzy, as if they believe they’re on the brink of death, that allows them to use the full limits of their strength even at the cost of their bodies.”

Earnie shivers, looking up from the gun at Emily with a twisted frown.

“Subjects? You’ve tested it on people up here?”

“I never said they were human subjects. Though it will work all the same. This is a crude, fast-acting use of malice, but I’ve seen the end results of a much more insidious one used on a human before.”

She pats Mensacus and says goodbye telepathically before leading the others away, leaving him to continue his meditation.

Emily recounts her encounter with the Wendigo as they take the elevator up to her alchemy hall.

“So, he can still do that?” Earnie asks as the moving platform below their feet locks into place and a door opens on the opposite side of the chamber they just left.

“Yes, but it requires a long, slow exposure and a lot of effort on his part.”

“And you’re not worried about him doing it to you?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Earnie glances at Pod to gauge his response, but he shrugs without a care.

“He won’t ever permanently harm me because it would piss her off,” Pod explains. “He’s a massive mummy’s boy.”

“Permanently harm?”

“Well, I can’t say with confidence that he wouldn’t try to hurt me a little. He’s got a bit of a short temper, and I don’t think he likes me all that much.”

Earnie shakes his head as the boy’s smile doesn’t waver once.

“Psychos, the lot of you,” he grumbles, following Emily into the hall and surveying the stark division of the room.

On one side, taking up about a quarter of the floor space, is an alchemical laboratory with several large worktables, half of them metal and half of them wood. There are several cauldrons of varying sizes interspersed between them, mounted on heating plates linked to the chamber gathering fire mana far below, and the far wall is lined with glassware holding various alchemical ingredients, from frog entrails and powdered mana crystal blends to thriving terrariums.

The rest of the hall is taken up by a large ritual space, with a massive multipart array covering the smooth stone floor and walls. There are five clearly divided circles among the mess of runes and mind-bending geometric carvings, one larger in the centre with four half its size surrounding it in the cardinal compass directions.

The central and southern circles are empty, but the others all hold small pedestals.

Dotted around them in a perfectly symmetrical pattern are close to a hundred empty fire braziers, held suspended in the air at varying heights by metal chains attached to the ceiling.

“Getting ready to sacrifice me to your child?” he asks with a chuckle.

“Not quite. This is my transmutation array, an original design,” Emily replies, waving her hand and producing a small bundle of items from her belt, dropping them into Pod’s waiting arms. “Back in my time in Modo’s Covenant, I read most of their library and gathered a lot of fragmented knowledge. One of those fragments that caught my interest was the research notes of an alchemist from back before the empire’s fall. He was fascinated by changes of state, pouring his efforts into understanding the nature of materials. One of his many tests used an interesting runic circle to try and turn ice directly into steam.”

As she explains, Emily guides Earnie to stand in a small sliver of empty space between the transmutation array and the lab. Pod carefully arranges the items Emily has given him, placing an uneven chunk of stone in the central circle, a small nugget of raw iron in the southern, and a few magic crystals in each of the others.

“His test didn’t work as he intended and instead ended up changing his ice into glass. He didn’t understand the true value of his discovery and never developed it, but I did. He found a special balance with the form he created, and after a lot of tests and modifications, I refined it into an art. Now, with the correct material sacrifices and a lot of mana, I can transmute most non-magical materials between each other.”

She sweeps her arm in a wide arc, casting a simple spell and scattering flaming petals across the room. Each burning orange petal finds its way to one of the suspended braziers, igniting them all and filling the hall with warm light.

Emily reaches into her belt with both hands, grasping two handfuls of various powdered minerals before tossing them into the air. Green runes shimmer across her skin, and several light breezes billow out, splitting the scattered powders and carrying them off to drop into the lit fires.

As the wind spreads through the hall, the orange flames shift one by one, with over half of them changing hues to vibrant reds, greens, blues, and even a few purple.

A final pulse of mana into the floor activates the array, spreading a cold blue glow across the carved patterns covering the floor. It snakes intentionally across the ritual space, curling around the divided circles one by one. As the light passes on the ground, nearby fires roar to life, burning to two or three times their height for a few seconds before flickering out.

The iron nugget in the southern circle remains untouched, but all of the magic crystals in the other circles turn to dust, vanishing into the pedestals they’re set upon.

After the light of the array has spread to the carvings on the ceiling, it pulses twice before quickly receding towards the central circle that rapidly grows brighter and brighter.

The stone in the middle changes before their eyes, taking on a metallic sheen as Earnie flinches and covers his eyes, leaving only the two awakened mechanics to watch the final seconds of the transformation.

The light vanishes, and as Earnie blinks away the dots in his vision and lowers his hands, he sees a hefty chunk of pure iron sitting in the middle of the array.

“Incredible,” he mutters, following Emily to inspect the produced metal. “It’s so pure.”

“One hundred per cent so, without any impurities whatsoever. Obviously, we can’t use it like this, but it’s very nice to get such fine control over the ratios of my alloys. It’s a shame I haven’t been able to work out transmuting magical materials yet.”

After answering a few of Earnie’s queries about the process, explaining the requirements for the ritual and the laws of equivalent exchange, they show him around the rest of the lab and then head back up to the main workshop floor. As they step out into the open chamber with natural light flooding in through the wide glass window taking up one wall, Earnie’s attention is immediately drawn to the unnatural lights mounted overhead.

They’re formed from a strange, crystal-like silver metal that shines with a cold-white light as electricity passes through it.

“What are those made from?” he asks, gesturing up at them with his chin.

“A tungsten-steel blend treated in an electrically-charged solvent bath with a high concentration of light crystals,” Emily replies, momentarily rendering him speechless as she leads him towards a large metal frame in the centre of an open workspace surrounded by machines. “The lab downstairs isn’t just for show. We’ve been doing a lot of experiments with magical material science, especially as we progress with this project.”

Earnie’s gaze follows hers away from the lights, landing on the odd metal frame with countless thick black wires blooming from the top, drooping across the ceiling as they stretch to other machines within the workshop.

Suspended in the middle of the frame is a dull silver, humanoid skeleton. It’s covered in an artistic blend of pneumatic actuators that replicate human musculature, with small electrical servos to help with fine motor movements. There are tens of tubes and wires twisted around the other components, carrying electricity and steam through the body like blood through veins.

Fused to the centre of the spine is a large extrusion where a backpack would sit, holding a large cylinder with several valves feeding out to the pneumatic tubes. The head on the exposed metal body’s shoulders has the vague form of a human skull, but it's split along a seam and folded out flat to expose a dense cluster of electrical components flickering with lights, made from materials Earnie doesn’t even recognise.

“It’s… beautiful,” Earnie exclaims with wonder, his eyes drinking in every minute visible detail of the sleeping metal soldier.

“Thank you,” Emily says with a nod as Pod beams with pride beside her, staring at the machine he helped to create. “But it’s not finished yet. We still have a few major issues stopping them being battlefield-worthy, like the tank of Steam Powder on its back. That thing will go up in flames if a single bullet hits it. But those should be fixed in a few more iterations.”

She leans back against a workbench covered in half-formed circuitry as Earnie walks circles around the prototype.

“Then we just need to build production lines to mass-produce enough bodies to match the number of armaments we’ve prepared and to improve the portable logic chips they’re running. The current generation of chips is too slow to handle the number of concurrent operations a full body needs to function.”

“Logic chips? Is that what all this is?” Earnie asks, gesturing to the brain-like cluster of wires and translucent green, glass-like circuit boards etched with sharp silver traces.

“Logic chips are what I’m calling those small portable processors, yes.” Emily nods, pushing herself off the workbench and gesturing for Earnie to follow as she leads him across the room to another half-finished project.

In the centre of another designated space is a large, several-metre cube formed from dozens of tightly packed panels of the same glass-like material as the circuit boards in the metal soldier’s head. The metallic traces covering the panes are so dense that Earnie’s vision blurs as he tries to squint through them and the humming electricity visibly flickering along the silver highways.

Above one of the nearby workbenches is a screen of the same glass-like material, this time tinted blue and displaying a constantly updating console, filling up with data from the machines running in the factory above ground.

“That beauty right there is my Logic Core, a massive processing unit that can perform logical and arithmetic operations for me at a rate of nearly ten billion operations a second. Both this core and these logic chips we produce,” Emily says, pulling one of the several-inch circuit boards from her belt and flashing it at him, “can be programmed with a saved set of instructions that they’ll complete using those available operations. They can do anything from modelling and predicting where a gunshot will land to wirelessly controlling an airship, depending on how you program them. Though, these chips currently only have a fraction of the processing speed of the Core.”

Earnie wordlessly takes the chip from her, turning it over in his hands and staring at it with a hard-to-read expression.

“This is incredible. I honestly don’t have the words.” He hands the chip back while shaking his head ruefully. “I don’t think I can even steal this one without your magic. It feels beyond me.”

“That’s where you’d be wrong,” Pod cuts in, pointing at the chip in Emily’s hand. “I can make those, given the right materials, and I can’t use magic.”

“And even the materials have non-magical alternatives,” Emily continues his point smoothly. “We’re just taking advantage of my unique disposition and skillset. For you, science alone should be enough.”

She raises her hand, releasing a crackling cloud of raw machina and grinning widely as she offers the old man a chance to break his mortal bounds.

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