“Absolutely not,” Jessica said as Bobby and I walked into her clinic.

  I’d used the point in Body, but it hadn’t healed everything. Bobby was beat up, too; he hadn’t taken as many hits as me, but when he did get hit, he didn’t have the same level of armor I did—or even as much Body.

  Tori didn’t look any happier to see Bobby. She shot a glare his way and headed for the door. Bobby held up his hands before she could get by, though. “I’ll wait outside, then?”

  “Yeah, you do that,” Tori said.

  Jessica shot her the same look she’d just given Bobby, then turned toward the man. “You do that.”

  I sat on the table as Jessica started prodding and poking at my wounds. “They look like they’re a few days old, but I can help with them anyway. Why is he back?”

  “Because he’s the highest-leveled person I know, and you—we—need his firepower. We cleared the Soldier Field dungeon.”

  “God dammit,” Tori muttered. Clearly, Jessica’s presence wasn’t stopping her from swearing.

  I powered on before either of them could sidetrack the conversation. “And we learned a lot about what’s happening. It’s all biased, and we only got snippets, but from what we heard, the Consortium is preparing us for something. Something big. I don’t know if they have control over it, but they know when it’s coming. That’s what this Integration is probably about—getting us through it alive.”

  Jessica and Tori listened as I explained what the announcers had said. The whole time, the gray-eyed woman worked on my wounds and Tori leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. When I finished, Jessica nodded slowly. “Have you heard from Calvin yet?”

  “No. I was hoping he or Tommy would be back by now,” I said.

  “I haven’t heard from him since…” Jessica trailed off, touching the still-red wound on her face. I winced; it was going to scar, and she couldn’t heal herself.

  The silence stretched, and I pulled my shirt back on.

  “We need Calvin. He’ll be able to get this mess organized,” Jessica said after a minute. Tori nodded as her step-mother kept going. “We’ve got food issues. Most of what we’re eating comes from those coolers, but we’re over-using the ones near us. We also need to figure out how to get people to use communal toilets instead of defacating wherever they think is private. I don’t know if Body points help with disease, and I don’t want to find out.”

  “Also, people aren’t listening to Jessica. Like, at all,” Tori said.

  Jessica raised an eyebrow at her, and Tori returned the stare. After a second or two, Jessica deflated. “No, they’re not. They actually listened to Tori more than me.”

  “It’s the number over my head,” Tori said. “People are starting to figure out that everyone’s got a literal power level, and there’s always going to be someone who only listens to power. Right now, that’s everyone, because everyone’s scared.”

  “Okay. I’ll go talk to everyone tomorrow. We’ll get things figured out,” I said, pushing off the table and standing up. Jessica’s magic really was something—I felt exhausted from dungeon-delving, but my wounds were all fixed up.

  “You get that Bobby Richards in here, too. I want to have a talk with him,” Jessica said. She pointed at me. “And make sure he knows I’m serious. I don’t care about his nameplate or level—he needs to listen if he’s going to stick around. And…” she sighed and looked at the floor, “I could use his help.”

  Tori didn’t stick around for Bobby and Jessica’s conversation. She followed me as I headed for my workshop. “So, what’d you get?”

  It took me a second to realize she meant the new equipment. I pulled the sheath out of my inventory first and handed it to her. “I need this back. Don’t equip it. If I can take it apart and figure out how it works, maybe I can build similar items for other people.”

  “Like tailoring or leatherworking in World of Warcraft,” Tori said. She examined it, nodded approvingly, and handed it back. “What else?”

  “A dagger. I’ve got a plan for that one, too. Don’t worry. It’s no good for you—none of the items we got were. I think Bobby had worse luck than I did.” We started climbing the tower, Tori obviously annoyed at the mention of Bobby. I ignored that for now. Right now wasn’t the time.

  Right now, it was time to get to work.

  “I also got a Rank Two Voltsmith’s Box,” I said. “I’m hoping it lets me get to work on the Voltsmith’s Grasp, because it’s upgradeable, and I haven’t figured out how to improve it yet.”

  “The rail gun doesn’t count?”

  “No. The rail gun doesn’t count.” I took the glove off and set it on my workbench, then spread out my components. Then, once I had everything the exact way I needed it to be, including a row for my tools, I pulled out the oil-smelling box.

  Charge Battery (Medium) x1

  Assorted Voltsmithing Parts

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Refiner x1

  Mana Coil x1

  Spellcode Scroll-Reader x1

  That last one was interesting; it looked like a series of tiny hammers—a little like what was inside my grandma’s piano—all lined up against several holes, with a tiny treadmill covered in metal clamps that ran over them. I pushed the treadmill along, and as I did, all the hammers fell softly and in unison to plink into some holes in a tube below the treadmill.

  I’d never seen anything like it before and wished I had an item description, but it was undeniably more advanced than the refiners and emitters I’d been playing with. So was the medium Charge Battery—instead of the size of a lug nut, this one was about golf ball-sized.

  The first thing to do was check my stats and top off my Charge.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 46]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 28

  ?Awareness - 42

  ?Charge - 1/53 (43 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 0

  [Class Skill - Decharge/Recharge - Drain the charge from magic items to power your own creations]

  Items

  ?Autoplate Pauldron (8 Charge)

  ?Voltsmith’s Grasp (15 Charge) - Rail Gun Module

  ?Heavy Trip-Hammer (20 Charge)

  I had ten Charge to go—one of the pieces I’d gotten from beating Saul filled me up without overflowing, and just like that, I was at en out of fifty-three. That gave me a little wiggle room to play with.

  “I don’t like him,” Tori said. “I don’t trust him, and I think you and I should check out the precinct. It’s definitely a dungeon, and it probably has something on a slimy guy like him.”

  “Easy there, Tori,” I said. I opened up the gauntlet so I could see the inside. If I wanted to rank it up, it’d definitely need more power—but more power would overtax the wire-cage I’d built for it. I started sketching out the current system in blue and orange lines of energy, then tweaking it slightly until I had a blueprint I thought could handle two or three times the Charge of the Rank Zero Voltsmith’s Grasp. I couldn’t be sure without testing it, though, and right away, I ran into a problem with that:

  If I tried to take the glove apart, I’d dump all the Charge in it out into the air, and while I could rebuild it, I couldn’t fill up the next one if it took more than eleven additional Charge.

  That put the whole plan on hold for now; the wire-cage went on the backburner, and I pulled the dagger I’d gotten from Ursa Prime and the one I’d gotten from the fight with Saul out and laid them on the table.

  “I’m serious,” Tori interrupted before I could add the Trip-Hammer to the mix.

  “I know you are, Tori, but I’ve fought with him a couple of times. He’s had my back, just like you have. I don’t want to mess things up with him—and we do need him. Jessica needs him, too.”

  She didn’t have a response right away, and I got to work on the Trip-Hammer.

  I’d come to a realization as I used the railgun to throw bolts at lightning speeds: bolts were a solution, not just a weapon.

  The original Trip-Hammer used sledgehammers. So did the current one. But as great as the sledges were at cracking armor, they weren’t good at killing things. Ursa Prime’s armor had also pushed its limits. I could just weld the blades to my hammers to add some damage, but instead, I grabbed two heavy bolts, six equally heavy nuts, and the Voltsmith’s Grasp. Then I got to work.

  I started by slowly melting the hammers’ heads one at a time with Charge, then carefully working a hole into the molten metal with a bolt and nuts. Once the nuts were good and locked in, I unscrewed the bolt and made sure the hammers were still solid. When I’d finished, I had three nuts locked into each hammer head, all lined up and ready to take a bolt. I checked a few times just to be sure they both fit. They were tight, but I didn’t want the knives coming loose mid-fight.

  Then I started on the knives.

  The handles came off first. Then I welded the blades to the bolts, pouring tiny bits of Charge into them until they were done and taking care not to compromise the blades in any way. If I did too much damage, there was a very real chance that neither would keep their powers, and I couldn’t have that.

  Tori started talking when I was about halfway through. I did my best to ignore her since I had to focus, and after a few minutes, she realized I hadn’t heard a word she said. I could feel her anger almost as hot as the Charge-welded joints I was working on, but if I messed this up, I might wrecked the Trip-Hammer’s structural integrity for nothing.

  It took a long time to slowly build the two attachments, then another couple of minutes to slot them into the Trip-Hammer’s heads. Once the first one was wrench-tightened into its hole, I held up the weapon and handed Tori the safety glasses. “Test firing in ten seconds. Get those on.”

  “Whatever,” Tori said, but she put them on.

  I fired the Trip-Hammer. It tore through the air, and this time, it left a silvery blur behind. I didn’t dare use it on the building—and it wouldn’t have had a different result than the hammers by themselves—but after firing it up a half-dozen times, I checked the bolt’s tightness.

  The blade hadn’t rotated even a degree as far as I could tell.

  A few minutes later, I had the second blade attached, and the Trip-Hammer was working beautifully. Better than beautifully, in fact:

  Heavy Trip-Hammer 2.0, by Hal Riley (Created Item, Charge 25)

  The Trip-Hammer uses magical energy, external power sources, and salvaged parts to apply incredible destructive force to a small area. First created by Hal Riley of Earth.

  This upgraded version includes two separate hammers, one with the Hemorrhage debuff and the other with increased piercing damage in addition to the Trip-Hammer’s already-potent armor-crushing effect.

  It took another five of my charge, leaving me with only six and pushing me further from upgrading the Voltsmith’s Charge, but I didn’t care. The increased firepower—not to mention the flexibility of slicing or stabbing instead of just crushing—made it more than a fair trade. I stared at the weapon’s new look: mean, aggressive, and a serious upgrade from its first version. Yes, this would do.

  I slowly put away my mechanic’s tools and Voltsmithing supplies, then turned to Tori before she could explode. “Okay, what were you saying?”

  “Even if you don’t want to check the police station dungeon for anything about Bobby—and I’m sure there’s something there—we should still get an idea of who The Captain was working with. Eddie’s gang’s not the only one out there,” Tori said quickly, like she was worried I was going to put her on ignore again any second.

  She had a point. Any of those gangs could show up again, and while either Bobby or I was strong enough to handle them, any information we could figure out would only help push the odds more in our favor. “Fine. We’ll check it out tomorrow. Then Bobby and I have a Tier Two to clear.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that, Hal,” Tori said. She headed for the stairs, yawning, and I looked outside into the late-night darkness. I’d been working for hours, and she’d been trying to get me to listen the whole time. I winced. She was serious, not just messing around.

  “I promise,” I said.

  But the next morning, I had to break my promises—both to Tori and to Bobby.

  Patreon, if that's something you're craving! If you're not sure, you could also become a free member, and get access to one (1) chapter in advance!