Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

Urgh.

Jeb peeled himself off the chair and limped down to where Eddie was working.

The shop smelled like diesel, ozone and motor oil, and Eddie was standing there, staring intently at a drone about three feet wide, hovering silently in front of him.

“Who’s that?” Jeb asked, picking his way through the scrap-laden area, over to the gold-processing plant in the corner of the room. It was a permanent structure they’d built around the chip of a gold-laced quartz lens.

“Legolas,” Eddie said. “I stripped some smartphone processors and now I’m working on making them play nice with each other. Once I’m done with that, I’ll be able to work on his AI.”

Jeb glanced over at a pile of smartphone casings that had been torn apart, their exceedingly small microchips scavenged from their circuit boards.

“Is he weapons ready?”

“Not yet.” Eddie glanced at Jeb. “I need another Myst engine for that.”

“They’re military issue, as far as I know. I don’t know where we could get more yet,” Jeb said, channeling a thin thread of Myst into the gold refiner. The mechanism split Jeb’s Myst into several parts, threading them into a homemade regulator that allowed a tiny spool of his gold Myst to interact with the chip. The resulting quartz gravel tumbled into the furnace, which got the lion’s share of Jeb’s output. The rest went to stirring the mixture and mechanically separating gold from rock.

The reason Jeb had to do it personally was because Myst engines were imperfect. The engines shot out the full spectrum of Myst as radiant energy, and a tiny fraction of that spectrum was the antithesis of the lens it was being shoved into. Therefore, lenses fed by engines would slowly degrade.

They degraded when Jeb used them too, but much, much slower. Jeb imagined the only way to get a lens to last forever was to pour an exact match into it. Eddie was investigating a way to filter Myst, but he said not to get his hopes up.

“Set Buddy outside the orphanage as a watchdog until I can come back with some mercs.”

Eddie glanced at Buddy in the corner, and the bomb-robot’s engines rumbled to life before he headed for the stairs.

“That’s spooky.”

Eddie chuckled evilly and continued his work on Legolas, staring at the robot, his eyes flickering from side to side like he was reading something.

By the next morning, Jeb had enough money to hire on a handful of adventurers from the Hunter’s Association willing to defend them for a couple weeks. The mere sight of half a dozen brutes on the property should convince their enemies to seek legal options rather than violence.

And that would buy time.

After that, Jeb grabbed all the lenses and wands from his room and brought them down to the shop, all the while mulling over the poor showing against Kebos. He had been systematically stripped of every advantage before he’d even met the guy, and Jeb hated it.

I need more, better weapons, Jeb thought, unloading his backpack full of goodies. He never wanted to go into a fight naked again, if he could help it.

Click. The cellar wall beyond Jeb resolved into an image.

“Hi there! I’m Amanda Courvar!” his former healer said, bouncing into frame.

“And I’m Brett Courvar,” Brett said, putting an arm around her waist. “And we’re here today to talk to you about choosing the right build for your profession, why balance is important, and why you might want to save some of those Ability points for a rainy day!”

“But first, we’ve got a new segment where we read your fan mail and answer frequently asked questions!” Amanda said.

They get mail? Jeb thought, brows rising. Of course they get mail, they’ve got a fixed address!

Chapter 22: Factory Settings

The lens merchants looked at Jeb like he was going to get everything dirty and/or plot some kind of terrorism, but when Zlesk walked in covered in wounds, they bent over backwards to accommodate him as soon as they saw his Citizen club card, selling him whatever he wanted without question.

Forget the fact that Jeb was actually planning on doing violence with the supplies; it still rankled to be viewed with suspicion.

Bah, Jeb thought as he fed another Annihilation lens into the grinder. The grinder was a modified belt sander with a case/funnel around the business end. Just throw a lens in and the machine would make short work of it.

RRRR! The machine sanded the lens down into a murky powder, depositing it into the small bin underneath. Jeb brushed off the belt and made sure the funnel was perfectly free of Annihilation lens particles. That’s the kind of shit you don’t want floating around your shop.

There wasn’t enough spare Annihilation lens to go around, even though Zlesk had bought a handful of cleansing wands. Not for what Jeb wanted to do.

When you go big game hunting, you need the proper equipment, Jeb thought, glancing at the Beautiful Revenge, hung up on the shelf. It was a beautiful piece of gear, but Jeb wanted something with a little more shock and awe.

He carefully dumped the lens dust into the machine that he’d helped Eddie make.

The Squeezer.

At its core, the machine was a hydraulic press that allowed two halves of a die stamp to press against each other at outrageous pressures. Then the magi-tech got involved. You couldn’t just press lens dust together and expect it to come out as a whole, functioning lens.

While a pressed lens would work for a couple uses, the whole thing was incredibly brittle and tended to fall apart from the slightest touch. After quite a bit of experimenting—and Jeb was ashamed to admit, a couple tiny deer getting squished by a hydraulic press—they were able to figure out how to make The Squeezer