Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

The Stream barks, kicking back against Emily’s shoulder as it spews glowing brown bullets, with cores formed from a blend of mithril, white iron, and powdered tezerite.

Each small projectile smashes into the rotating magical shield protecting the Denrosi mages with a weighty thud, sending spiralling cracks across each hexagon with one shot, and shattering them with a second. The first half of her magazine shreds the wall protecting her targets, draining one of its crystals empty, leaving them exposed.

The mages are ripped to shreds by the hail of metal, the enchantments and armour hidden beneath their robes failing under the force of Emily’s enhanced weapon.

The bolt of her automatic rifle clicks back as the final empty casing flies from the breach. Emily removes the spent magazine, empty of both bullets and mana, and slides it back into her belt while extricating herself from her hiding spot, gathering the scattered bullet casings with a small wave of her hand.

She pulls a magazine powered by a single wind crystal from her belt, reloading her gun and holding it against her chest as she jogs forward to check the fallen enemies.

A quick scan through their ranks confirms that only the first dead wind mage was third circle, while the rest were second. The crack of gunfire in the distance removes any thoughts Emily may have had about checking the corpses one by one, so she holds out a hand and releases a flood of machina, blanketing the bodies in a cloak of electricity as she checks for valuables or spatial storages.

The scan quickly reveals matching drawstring pouches hanging around the necks of each of the miners. After pulling them from their owners, Emily sweeps her mana through them, finding a sizeable collection of harvested crystals.

How convenient.

She ties all of the pouches to her belt and takes off back into the trees, not heading straight for her squad but instead trying to get behind their attackers. She weaves between densely packed trees with her eyes glowing in a fiery hue and two birds leading her way. It doesn’t take long to find a first circle mage leading two soldiers armed with heavy cylinder-fed rifles.

The mage is clutching a wand, similar to Ice Petal’s but with a vibrant, red fire crystal embedded in the handle.

Emily rests her cheek against the cold leather of her gun’s stock, lining up her iron sights before squeezing the trigger.

There’s a small burst of hissing air as the magazine on her gun lights up and a few standard hollow point rounds cut near soundlessly through the three soldiers, dropping them in an instant.

Emily turns away and continues her hunt, picking off a few more small groups while closing in on her team.

She arrives to find them braced behind a thick wall, conjured by Sandman, hiding from a storm of gunfire and spells being flung at them by almost all of the remaining soldiers defending the crystal vein, who are gathered around the mages that felled squad Vensec.

Emily goes unnoticed as she creeps towards the compact battlefield from the side, sliding a fresh magazine without any bells or whistles into the Stream and bringing it to bear once again.

Her bullets cut through the grouped-up soldiers, each one accurately finding its mark despite the rapid rate of fire. A few shots are sent back towards her, but those that hit her armour crumple and fall away with little effect, and the only one that hits her leg digs into the tightly wound flesh, barely making it halfway to the bone.

Her magazine drops to the floor empty, and after sending a conjured blade of wind into the head of a fallen mage, who is slowly bleeding out, to end his suffering, Emily finally lowers her weapon.

Silence falls over the woods, and Sandman drops his defences, letting the squad bask in the aftermath of their attack.

“Nice shooting,” Pretty Boy comments, his eyes scanning through their fallen foes. “This is going to be a nightmare to clean up.”

“We’ll have a little while to do it,” Emily comments, drawing her squad’s focus as she throws the Stream’s sling over her shoulder and swings the gun around to rest against her back. “This vein is large, and too close to Denros for us to claim it properly. We’re going to scrape as much as we can from it, then get out of here and ruin it before they send reinforcements.”

“You think they’ll react strongly?” Ice Petal questions as everyone clears and holsters their weapons, preparing to search the corpses for loot.

“I can’t see them taking kindly to us stealing their mine, and the only reason I can see for their current operation being so small is they didn’t want us to notice,” Emily explains, spreading her birds back out into the surrounding woods to search for any stragglers. “Now that they know we have enough combat force here to take the mine, they’ll probably send someone to try to wipe us out and recoup their losses.”

“Can we not just fight them off?” Pretty Boy questions as he slides an enchanted ring from the finger of one of the awakened corpses, gesturing to the blood-spattered trees surrounding them. “I doubt they’re expecting this kind of combat force.”

“Possibly,” Emily admits with a shrug. “But that’s not our job. The longer we stay and fight, the longer we risk them doing something stupid like bombarding us from afar. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be here if the mana gathered in that vein detonates.”

“Agreed,” Sandman mutters with a shudder.

They chat calmly as Ice Petal moves around quietly, seemingly the only one affected by the abundant death surrounding them. As they begin dragging the stripped corpses towards the main crystal vein, intending to dispose of all of them in one go, Emily splits away from the group to hunt down the stragglers she has found with her scouts. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Some of them have returned to their hidey holes, tucking themselves away in hopes of getting the jump on Emily’s squad later, and some of them have started running away towards their territory, presumably to warn their allies of the loss of the mine.

Emily first heads towards those running, charging her legs with lightning and catching up to them before they even escape the range of her scouts.

However, as she descends on a burrow hidden beneath a tree’s roots and inhabited by two whimpering mages, one of them clutching a communication crystal and trying to send a message out, she feels something strange from the belt at her waist. One of her hands reaches down and slips into one of the pouches as the other lashes out, drawing the blade of her Claw across the neck of the man trying to contact help.

Just as she’s about to finish off the second shocked mage, her hand closes around the reacting object that she can feel releasing a faint stream of foul mana, immediately recognising it as the Mensacus. Her fingers close around the sealed, cursed tooth, and she pulls it out as her blade sinks into the other mage’s chest.

The mage coughs up a mouthful of blood and slumps back against the root-woven dirt behind him, and Emily feels the mana leaking past the seal in her hand increase.

“Damn, is it still feeding through my seal?” she mutters, crawling out of the burrow and holding up the ovoid of metal to inspect it.

The once-white metal has gained several grey-tinted patches, and the engraved runes, despite remaining vibrant and full of energy, are touched by a dark, almost black, light.

“Looks like I need to seal it again.”

She feels the energy emanating from the cursed object noticeably decrease at her words, like a wounded beast cowering under threat.

Did it understand me?

Emily’s eyes light up with curiosity, and she notices another oddity.

I don’t feel weaker.

Glancing at her system stats, she sees her intelligence hasn’t dropped at all, completely unaffected by the malevolent mana seeping from the seal.

“It’s not affecting me. Is that because I’m stronger, or something else?”

She tucks the metal egg back into her belt, ignoring the faulty seal for now and returning to her task.

Emily stomps her foot once, channelling mana through her leg and casting a spell to turn up the earth, collapsing the burrow and burying the corpses before she runs off after another group.

She feels the Mensacus getting gradually stronger as she harvests a few more lives, but by the time she meets her squad at the mouth to the crystal vein, it still hasn’t made a move to attack her or spread its influence, keeping all of its mana contained within the metal of its seal.

“Hey,” Whistler greets her as Emily approaches, lowering her cannon’s barrel to the ground.

“The area’s clear now,” Emily informs her, letting her relax her caution a little. “I have birds surrounding us for now, and I’ll work on a wide area detection array in a moment. They really should have been using the ambient mana here better.”

“Got it,” Whistler nods, turning to help their squad mates dumping bodies into the crevasse that splits the earth through the clearing.

“How much do you think we’ll get out?” Pretty Boy asks, peering over the edge. “It seems a shame to waste it.”

“I don’t know,” Emily responds, walking up to peer into the mine herself. “It doesn’t feel the most stable from here, but we’ll only know for sure when we start extracting. I’d guess we’ll get at least half of it out if we’re lucky.”

The crack stretches down tens of metres, and after the first metre of solid grey rock, the walls appear to be made entirely from glistening green crystalline structures. Emily can’t help but draw a deep breath as her eyes scan over countless large hunks of crystal packed with enough mana to push the upper boundaries of greater wind crystals.

Should I reset and save squad Vensec to get some more hands to help?

She calculates quickly.

They only had one wind mage; it’s not worth the time.

“Hey, Sandman, Whistler,” she says, tearing her eyes away from the enticing sight and looking at her equally entranced allies. “You have much experience excavating crystals?”

“I’ve taken mine shifts a few times,” Whistler replies with a shrug. “I’m no pro, but I can pull my weight.”

“I’ve taken a fair few jobs to help mine in the past,” Sandman answers smugly. “I’m comfortable extracting anything up to greater crystals, though those will take me a while.”

“Okay,” Emily nods, scanning over the clearing. “Leave anything you don’t need up here and go spend all your mana doing just that.”

She unties two of the drawstring pouches from her belt, moving their contents into the other bags with a wave of spatial mana, and tosses them over.

“Use these to gather your bounty for now. As for you two,” she continues, turning to Pretty Boy and Ice Petal. “Finish dealing with the bodies and set camp.”

They all nod and follow her instructions, so Emily finds an empty spot and drops down cross-legged, shutting her eyes and diverting all of her processing power towards forming a large-scale, wind-based detection array, leaving only two cores to watch her birds.

She doesn’t even sleep, remaining rooted in place without moving a muscle as day turns to night and then back to day. It’s not until exactly twenty-four hours after she sat down that she moves, tapping The Clock’s button without even opening her eyes.

***

Two long resets later, she opens her eyes moments after sitting down with a solid plan in mind.

Emily reaches into her belt and pulls from it a smooth wooden staff. The main body is a rich mahogany with thin silver veins etched into its length, and at the very bottom, there’s a fine metal spike, sharpened on one side into a vicious blade.

She grips the wood firmly in both hands and pours her mana into it, focusing on wind and lighting the tool with a dim green glow. The silver veins slowly change colour, spreading down from her hands until it looks like the staff is wrapped in luminescent vines, at which point she finally drives the spike into the ground.

The mana-charged blade cuts through the solid rock below like a knife through butter, gliding through the ground and leaving a vibrant green line of mana in its wake.

Emily carves the first rune and pulls the staff back, inspecting her work with a close eye.

Slightly too shallow at the start, but passable. It’s drawing a little ambient mana to maintain itself, but this engraving will fade in... two hours without interference. That will suffice for now, but I’ll need to modify the staff if I want to complete more complicated arrays.

Satisfied, Emily draws a stabilising circle around the first rune before carving an arcing connective line to where she starts the second. She works quickly, her hands moving with mechanical grace as she follows a precisely planned pattern, covering the clearing with widely spaced runes.

After devoting close to four thousand points of mana to the earth, Emily connects the final rune to the first, sealing the array and watching it pulse with strength.

The ambient mana leaking from the crystal vein pours into the gathering runes, solidifying the fading patterns etched into the rock into thick green bands of light.

The light pours from the array, gathering the surrounding wind in a twisting maelstrom that draws the attention of her squad mates. The churning winds scatter Emily’s hair as she steps into the array, waiting for it to fill completely.

After a few moments, the array pulses again, and Emily raises a foot before stomping it down, releasing a burst of mana and activating the temporary defensive array.

The chaotic winds disperse, spreading out and rustling through the leaves of the forest.

The array itself calms down, and the light seeping from its runes floats up, forming together into a faintly illuminated area of still air in the centre of the array. Five green fireflies of mana blink into existence in the centre of the array, signifying Emily and her allies, while a few dimmer clusters form around them, marking a few groups of nearby beasts.

“Perfect,” Emily mutters with a satisfied nod, turning to address her squad mates who are looking at the glowing image with brimming curiosity. “These bright lights mark people. If you see any others appear, let me know.”

Pretty Boy and Ice Petal both nod in agreement, so Emily puts away her staff and turns to the large crack her, now straddled by her array, ready to strip the walls clean of their magical bounty.