Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

A couple of weeks later, on the eve of the new year, Emily sits hunched over a workbench, tightening together the final screws on a new gun.

Unlike her previous designs that follow sleek, streamlined forms, her newest creation is chunky, with sharp contours and a blocky frame. The rear stock is a thin plate of silver metal, perfectly cut to sit comfortably in the nook of her shoulder, with ice and darkness crystals embedded in its sides.

There are no visible runes on the gun, but black and frigid blue glowing lines stretch out from the crystals, running past the ergonomic grip and over the boxy rectangular receiver and barrel assemblies.

Emily places down her screwdriver and reaches out to pick up a battery, clipping it into the prepared slot below the barrel. An electrical buzz spreads through the gun as she flips on the three-stage power switch, sitting in place of the safety, and a faint electric-blue glow seeps out through the gaps between its panels.

She squeezes the trigger, and the coils in the barrel hiss in a satisfying three-stage ignition.

The sound draws Pod’s attention, so he turns off the press he was using and stands up, scurrying over to the recently sealed workshop window. He slams his fist into a button beside the clear, reinforced glass pane, and the motors in the ceiling whir to life, pulling the panel out of the way and letting in a salty, late-evening breeze.

Emily picks up a magazine from the workbench beside her, tilting it to inspect the densely packed alloy needles, all of which are hand-engraved with reinforcement and mana containment enchantments.

Automating my ammo engraving should go to the top of my list once I finish producing logic chips.

She slams the magazine into the gun as she spins in her chair and raises it to her shoulder without racking a bolt, flooding it with machina to watch the internals closely.

Pointing the scopeless barrel out into the open sky, Emily narrows her eyes on a magicless seabird flying by, lining up her shot and squeezing the trigger to halfway, where she feels a small click.

A single needle is ripped from the magazine, shooting up into the chamber as an electromagnet activates in the roof of the receiver. It holds in place for a moment as the characteristic hum of high voltage builds in the barrel’s coils, then Emily completes the trigger draw, and the needle vanishes with a soft crack.

The bird in the distance drops limp from the sky, plummeting towards the sea.

“That’s…” Pod mutters in awe, words failing to find him as he stares at the falling corpse.

“Incredible, right?” Emily finishes for him, standing up, slipping the gun into her belt, and turning towards the elevator. “And it’s not finished yet.”

Pod doesn’t follow her, waiting patiently as she heads down to the gathering array deep in the earth below. The chamber she steps into hasn’t changed much, other than the addition of two unique structures set up to draw in the ambient mana.

One of them, a sealed orb of blue-tinted metal covered in runes, holds her four remaining aquacillis fruit, which she has sealed with a blend of magical materials to refine into an elixir. It draws in almost all of the water mana being produced by the vein, but with no other use for it yet, Emily doesn’t bat an eye at the expense.

She approaches the elixir cauldron first, placing a palm to it and closing her eyes, probing inside to see the brew’s progress.

Almost a month and less than five percent of the reactants have been consumed… Looks like it should be ready in two years, given no complications arise.

Emily turns her attention to the other new construct, a stone pedestal with several darkness crystals fixed around the base and a single mental crystal in the centre of the dais, with Mensacus floating above it in an ominous, contained cloud of liquid malice.

The unattributed mana swirling around them is being actively sucked into the pedestal, running through the glowing lines of the array before wrapping around Mensacus and pulsing, forcing a small part of the focused malice into the tooth.

She had built the pedestal a few days after Calypso left, when she felt Mensacus letting her know that he was getting close to completing his refinement and needed an extra push, but it didn’t have the desired effect and only worked to solidify his foundation.

“You’re moving,” Emily informs Mensacus, charging her voice with a flicker of mana to help convey her intent. “You can take the crystals.”

She reaches out, pressing her hand to the mind crystal in the centre of the array and letting out her entire mana reserve in one go.

A dense, vibrant blue mist with hints of other colours shimmering in its depths bursts from her body, flowing into the crystal as she feels her stamina drain. The exertion isn’t enough to make her falter, and she starts converting machina to balance out her reserves as Mensacus takes advantage of her help.

The rush of mana sends the array into overdrive, and the misty bubble around the cursed tooth pulses rhythmically, rapidly condensing in on itself. The dark crystals at the base of the structure shatter one by one until finally the mental crystal bursts, the last of its energy flowing into Mensacus along with the condensed malice.

He pulses happily in her hand as Emily picks him up, and she smiles softly while pulling out the new body she has made for him, The Needler.

She racks the bolt of the coil gun back, opening a socket in the top of the receiver, between the stock and the magazine. The walls of the socket are traced with miniscule runes, carved into the metal and coated with powdered mental crystals.

Emily slots Mensacus into the socket before driving the bolt forward, locking him into place and leaving him to adjust to his new body as they ascend the elevator back to the main workshop.

“Do you have a target for completing him?” Pod asks when she returns.

“Something strong has been poking around the detection buoy I spread for a few days now,” she replies, walking towards the open window and casting Air Walk. “I’m not sure what it is, but it’s at least third circle if its attacks are anything to go by.”

“Have fun then. Please try to keep the fight above water if you can. I want to watch!”

“I’ll do what I can. It’s a little way out, though, so you may need a scope.”

Emily leaps into the open air, sprinting through the sky as she quickly leaves the cliffs behind. She drops a few kilometres out, halfway to the horizon, getting close to the surf and scanning for the lingering mana signature of her buoys.

It doesn’t take long for her to find the shattered remains of her scouting tool. She sweeps up the fragmented metal shards floating in a mana-charged cluster, pulling them apart with a stream of machina and rearranging them to reform the scout’s original shape.

Her eyes trace the lines of damage, quickly attributing the twisted metal to a set of razor-sharp teeth.

A physical attacker? That should make this easy.

She reaches into her belt, pulls out a small, powdered water crystal-coated metal orb, and twists its two halves before dropping it into the water. A small set of vents open up around the orb, letting in water before releasing it in turbulent streams, spinning the orb in place and disturbing the water around it.

With her lure set, Emily rises into the air and shoulders The Needler, squeezing the trigger to half. As a needle rises into the chamber, Mensacus releases a stream of corruption, letting it flow through the prepared channels to seep into the projectile, slowly tainting it black.

She holds the shot, standing completely motionless with her breathing steady. The needle in the gun’s magnetic breach finishes charging, and Mensacus stops releasing his mana before it can overpower the projectile’s protection and degrade the metal.

The sun dips below the horizon, and as light fades for the last time of the year, Emily notices a flicker of motion deep below the surface. It starts as a dark shadow, quickly rising to the surface in a beeline for her lure.

Her finger finally snaps back, and a cursed needle flies out, burying itself into the gills of a sleek three-metre-long fish.

Emily’s eyes widen at the sight of the creature’s vibrant, crimson scales, streaked with veins of glowing, magma-like mana. She can’t immediately put a name to the fish, but an entry from a tattered, unnamed sailor’s journal in The Dome rises to the surface of her mind.

We thought ourselves smart taking the northern pass to avoid the territory of The Titan.

We assumed that those fools following Old Man Magellan were doomed to sink into the reaches of the sea, dashed to smithereens at the tentacles of the old terror always waiting to claim her bounty.

We trusted the whispered rumours of a lake of fire were nothing more than easy lies spread to cover a smuggler's trade path.

I fear Magellan’s fate, but compared to this, the sea is a familiar mistress.

Selachime doe fo phoram.

Echime moe no mass.

The final lines in the journal were written in the tongue of the Lerus Isles, but that doesn’t keep Emily from understanding their meaning.

“The Red Devils come for us,” she mutters the first line’s translation, watching the selachi writhe violently and sink as the needle’s corruption erodes its mind and its glowing markings shine brighter, boiling the water around it. “The burning seas march on mass.”

As if responding to her first target’s call, the water around the lure begins to bubble violently, a constant wave of steam lifting from the surface and rising to meet Emily, quickly spreading out to cover tens of metres.

More shadows form beneath the churning surf, and Emily kicks off a platform of wind, rising higher and creating some distance between herself and the water’s surface. She squeezes The Needler’s trigger to halfway again, but Mensacus senses the countless vibrant life forces below them and goes beyond charging the loaded needle, instead sending his corrupted mana through an alternate set of pathways in the gun to soak the entire magazine in advance.

Suddenly, a fast-moving red blur breaks the water’s surface twenty metres from Emily, swimming in a wide arc around the lure and igniting into a burning inferno that crackles in the open air. She turns the barrel of her gun on the new target and fires, sending a half-black needle into its eye with pinpoint accuracy despite its blinding, flame-propelled speed.

However, as the hiss of her gun sounds, more selachi break the surface between thirty and fifty metres from the lure, one in each of the four cardinal directions, perfectly spaced around her. Emily pivots to shoot one of them, and three more fish rise directly behind her, all bursting into flames as soon as they hit the air.

Two more needles punch through the scales of two first circle beasts, and ten more take their place, completing a wide circle around her as their flaming trails blur together. The temperature of the air rapidly increases, and fish start surfacing in the dozens.

Most of them are first or second circle, but Emily also feels a few third circle fires adding to the inferno. The air starts to distort, pulled by the burning mana into a twisting vortex of fire and steam, rising around Emily on all sides and closing in towards her.

After three more half-charged needles hit their targets, she feels a pulse from Mensacus letting her know he’s done, and immediately she flicks The Needler’s power switch into its final position. Tainted black needles spray out, cutting through the circling beasts. Emily targets the strongest fish she can sense, sending each one hit into a writhing mess as they sink below the surface, breaking their formation.

As the magazine clicks empty, all thirty of her needles spent, Emily lowers the gun and expectantly stares down at the circling beasts.

Any second now…

Emily blinks in surprise, and one of her cores throws her into full assistive processing as a raging inferno of mana appears directly behind her, mere inches from punching a hole through her chest.

Another core pulses with mana in response, activating the spell constantly being held at the ready with mechanical casting: Blink.

In an instant, Emily vanishes as the space she was standing in twists and destabilises. She reappears four meters to the left in stable space and turns her head to see a small, fist-sized selachi wreathed in blue flames shooting past. It flicks its tail with a harsh crack and changes directions in the blink of an eye, flying towards Emily’s face.

She bends in half at the waist, letting the fish sail past parallel to her torso before it sinks into the flames rising above one of its brethren and disappears, taking its mana signature with it.

“Thank Goddess I tested mechanical casting Blink and fixed the nausea,” Emily mutters to herself, calling upon her lightning connection and glancing down at the water below, still waiting to see if The Needler worked as intended. “That thing would’ve taken my head off.”

The burning blue, fourth circle fish reappears from the twisting domain of fire trying to trap her, but Emily flickers from one end of the enclosure to the other in a stream of plasma, calmly avoiding its assault without breaking a sweat now that she expects it.

Finally, a disturbance in the water below brings a smile to Emily’s face.

The selachi formation shatters as every fish she shot rises from the depths to attack their comrades, tearing at their scales with their powerful jaws and filling the water with burning blood.

“Are you controlling them?” she asks Mensacus, sidestepping the blue fish again and reaching out to catch it in her metal vice-grip.

A single quick pulse from the cursed tooth tells her it’s not quite that simple, and she nods while flooding her hand with machina and lightning, electrocuting the fish and slowly crushing its dense bones. She ignores the heat trying to melt her digits, using a coating of her own fire mana to reinforce the metal against the heat and squeezing until the fish’s squirming stops.

“Well, you can explain soon,” Emily whispers with anticipation, feeling an excited shudder from Mensacus as the sea is dyed with burning crimson blood and his body begins to greedily drink in the atmospheric mana and death swirling around them.