Technomancer: Birth of a Goddess

After days in frozen time, injecting a variety of magical materials beneath her skin, Emily finally finds the perfect blend of elements. Her fingers dance now intimately-familiar patterns across her skin, starting at her stomach and spreading out in concentric circles of alternating colours. The central spiral of runes covering her abs is a blend of purple, blue, and silver, binding the array with space, metal, and lightning, while traces of all six common elements are woven into the layers surrounding it.

She switches pigments as her fingers brush her shoulders, carving arcs of silver and blue across her back and arms, using a mana-charged crystal blade to engrave her metal limb. Green and purple dominate the lines curving up her neck, and when her hand slips below her waistband, earth replaces wind, with a core of metal binding it to the electric blue tracing her hips.

The entire time she works, Emily suffuses her body with metal and lightning as usual, turning the remainder of her mana to space and letting it twist her insides. As the final rune is carved into place, a three-colour blend in the small of her back, the complex array covering her skin pulses, suddenly distorting space around her and drawing in atmospheric mana three times faster than her Technomancer’s Breath.

Elisime quivers as storm clouds gather, and a low rumble begins to spread, rattling Emily’s bones as she doubles over, falling to the floor and opening her eyes wide in surprise as a searing pain spreads to every fibre of her being.

Well, that’s new.

She lets out a silent scream, clutching at her chest and head while rolling onto her back as both her energy reserves empty at a worrying pace, pouring into a pit forming in her stomach. The fleeting thought of failure passes through her mind, but despite her energy running haywire and setting off the dead man’s switch in her arm, The Clock doesn’t activate. Emily grits her teeth and immediately looks for a way to supplement her quickly dropping mana reserves, reaching into her belt and pulling out a greater space crystal before crushing it in her hand.

The crystal erupts with energy, but the intense draw at the centre of her being suppresses the violent eruption, drawing every morsel of vibrant purple mana into her and slowing the drain on her reserves by a small fraction. She repeats the process with the only greater metal crystal she has left, before shattering three greater lightning crystals and wincing as her machina drops below ten per cent.

Six greater fire crystals vanish, and her machina calms with only a couple of points left. Four wind and five earth crystals later, her mana freezes with only a drop left. Eight water crystals crumble, and a feeling of weakness spreads as her skin starts to pale.

Silica whines with concern, poking her head out from under a workbench but keeping her distance.

“Get… brother,” Emily forces out through her clenched teeth, moving on to shattering weaker crystals to try and feed the greedy enchantment.

Silica nods and vanishes from her sight, scurrying off through the ship’s corridors and yipping out panicked calls.

Blood leaks from Emily’s eyes, and she watches the new patterns covering her skin shift, moving as if they were alive. They pulse in beat with her heart, and the colours seem to blend and separate with no discernible pattern, fading away in places as they burn themselves into a deeper layer of her flesh and metal.

After what feels like an eternity, but could have been an instant, the hurried screech of metal limbs dragging along metal walkways gets closer, and Mensacus bursts into the workshop. He rushes to Emily’s side, unbothered as his own mana slips from him to join the vortex of energy swirling around her with the dull, multicoloured dust of tens of shattered crystals.

“Mother,” he hums with concern, his voice slipping into a guttural hiss as he tries to take hold of her and immediately withdraws his arm as the temporary magical pieces she made for him dissolve. “What do I do?”

“Lifeforce!” she growls in response, spitting out a mouthful of dark blood in the process.

Mensacus nods and shuts his eyes, opening his mouth and letting out a thin black and red mist. The mist wraps Emily in a dark blanket, seeping into her skin and returning some of the colour that she’s lost.

“It’s not enough,” he says after a few minutes as his mana reserve dips, and he runs dry the lifeforce he absorbed in the recent battle. “Bring me the prisoners in hold E3.”

Silica yips in acknowledgement and runs off again.

Emily barely pays any attention to them, though, pulling up her system window and watching her stamina and health ticking down, dropping below one hundred each. She reaches a shaking hand back into her belt and pulls out the raw flesh of a fourth circle archite, trying to lift it to her mouth.

Mensacus notices her movement and rushes to help, using his non-magical tendrils to take over and feed her. She takes a laboured bite of the soft flesh, feeling mana-charged blood slip down her throat and watching the drain in her system window slow by a fraction. Struggling to chew thanks to the lack of machina in her system, she gives up and splits the half-eaten flesh out.

“Blood,” she whispers, and her son understands immediately, reaching a tentacle into her belt to pull out a sealed jar filled with crimson liquid.

He doesn’t check the label, popping open the lid and pouring it straight into Emily’s mouth. Her decreasing health slows to a crawl at sixty points as she gulps down the thick liquid with an earthy, metallic tang, but her stamina keeps dropping, hitting thirty points as her consciousness begins to slip.

She’s faintly aware of the sounds of a distant metallic march and, just before everything fades to black, a sudden rush of energy enters her chest, running through her heart and into the greedy pit in her stomach. Emily’s eyes fly open again, and she sees her stamina and health ticking back up rapidly.

Glancing to the side, she sees Mensacus strangling the life out of the Lonicera Matriarch, surrounded by a twisting matrix of red-tinted black runes, drawing a crimson mist from her body and directing it through himself and into Emily via a tentacle pressed against her chest. The woman’s body shrivels as Emily regains her strength, and the flow of lifeforce stops as the woman breathes her last breath.

Mensacus tosses her corpse to the side and takes hold of the Canarien Patriarch next, repeating the process again and ignoring his own limbs quaking as he starts to lose strength.

Luckily, as the man in his grip succumbs, the uncontrollable energy vacuum Emily has accidentally created is satiated. It stops drawing energy in and, for a moment, the entire world seems to go silent, holding its breath.

A thundercrack erupts, echoing out across the desert and the surrounding oceans, spreading to every corner of the globe and beyond, shattering the tense anticipation of Emily’s newest achievement.

An odd mix of fullness and weakness hits Emily at the same time as she shuts her eyes and relaxes, accepting the splitting headache slowing her thoughts and holding up a hand to keep her children from speaking as she looks inwards at what she’s done to herself. She finds the dregs of mana still left in her system flowing smoothly with no interruptions despite what just happened and, when she looks towards her stomach where the energy was gathering, she finds a strange twisting of space, similar to the distortions she saw in The Dome’s basement hiding sections of The Mist array.

Despite forcing her remaining energy to follow the flow of Technomancer’s Breath, Emily’s reserves are barely affected, as if they refuse to take in energy again after being drained past the safe threshold.

She finally opens her eyes and looks at the system notifications floating in the air above her.

¯¯¯¯¯

Congratulations! You have successfully bound a private pocket dimension to yourself whilst below the fifth circle!

Even most high-level awakened beings fear messing with their own spatial signature, but thanks to your intimate connection with mana and absorbing the vitality of others, you’ve achieved the near impossible.

[Rewards granted]

Tear of Light

Dimensional Stabilisation Anchor

_____

Space twists above her as she reads the floating screen, folding in on itself in a complex movement Emily can’t follow with her weakened senses. A single glistening, golden water droplet falls from the distortion as it stabilises, falling onto Emily’s chest and vanishing. Comforting warmth spreads through her, washing away the aching emptiness in her heart and head as her energy reserves and health rapidly fill before the feeling vanishes, leaving her in perfect condition.

“What was that?” Mensacus asks from the far side of the room, having retreated the moment the glowing teardrop appeared. “That wasn’t your magic.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Emily nods in agreement, sitting up and inspecting the tattoos tracing the curves of her body.

Most of the runes are still familiar, but they’ve all taken on a silver-blue hue, with no visible sign of the common elements and only a few specs of shimmering purple fading in and out across them.

“That was…” she hesitates for a moment, considering how much to tell her children before relaxing as Silica buries her head in her lap, “my system fixing my mistake.”

Mensacus slowly creeps closer again, tilting his head curiously but not voicing his questions.

“I’ll explain in a moment, but I want to test something first. Here.”

Emily releases The Clock from her arm, holding it out to her son.

“Try pressing the button on top.”

He gently takes the timepiece from her outstretched hand, turning it around to look at the front face before curling a single tendril over the top and depressing the activation button.

In an instant, The Clock’s ticking slows and reverses, and Emily returns to the moment the Tear of Light healed her, immediately identifying her new tattoo’s completion as a point of no return.

It worked! Was he able to activate it because I gave him permission, or because he holds traces of my energy signature? I’ll have to test with Pod later.

“What was that?” Mensacus asks, showing no signs of remembering repeating this conversation.

So, he can activate it, but I’m still the only one whose memories are protected.

“A Tear of Light,” Emily replies, caressing Silica’s head and gesturing for Mensacus to sit down beside her. “What that is exactly, I’m not sure, but it was a reward from my system, a gift from the universe I received when I awakened to help me progress, to fix my mistake. As for why it was needed, these new tattoos are an array to create and bind a portable pocket dimension to myself. Clearly, that wasn’t a process I should have attempted at fourth circle since it nearly killed me. Thank you, both of you, for helping.”

“We don’t need thanks,” Mensacus hums, lowering his head for Emily’s metal hand to run down his scaled neck while Silica yips in agreement. “We’d do anything for you, Mother.”

“Well, if something like this happens again, or Goddess forbid I actually die, the first thing you should try is taking this,” she says, removing The Clock from her arm and showing it to both of them, “and pressing the button on top. This was my first magical creation, and it was blessed by the universe to give it the ability to rewind time by a day.”

Her kids both nod in understanding, not doubting her for a moment and taking her words at face value. They fall into a comfortable silence as Emily puts The Clock back in her arm and returns to stroking their heads, shutting her eyes and focusing on the internal flow of her energies.

Now that they’re completely refreshed, she can feel her mana and machina flowing through the twisted space in her gut, passing through it without reducing at all but slipping beyond her control for a few moments before returning. She tries to follow the energy with her senses and feels her tattoos heat up.

Opening her eyes, she sees purple spreading across the patterns tracing her stomach, so she stands up and pushes her kids back.

“I’m testing my pocket dimension now. Keep an eye on what happens out here for me,” she says before the last silver-blue rune changes colour and an intense pull draws her into the twisted space inside herself.

Emily feels space distort around her and, in the blink of an eye, finds herself standing on top of a pulsing disk of electric runes in an empty metal box with glistening silver walls and a blend of lightning mana and machina filling the air. The space has no noticeable seams, without a single visible way in or out, and is only large enough for her to stand with her arms outstretched, brushing her fingers against opposite walls. But, instead of feeling claustrophobic, the small room feels comforting, like a small extension of herself.

Emily pulls up her system and immediately receives a description of her new personal dimension.

¯¯¯¯¯

[Dimensional Factory] 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

[Rank:] B (bound)

[Description:] A one-of-a-kind private dimension created by and bound to the Technomancer Emily Coldstone. The space is optimised for machine creation and can grow with the user by absorbing mana and machina over time.

_____

“A private factory that moves with me?” Emily mutters, her lips curling into a faint smile. “It’s perfect.”

She moves to pull one of her birds from her belt and feels the mana charging the air move with her thoughts, reaching into her belt before her hand can and drawing out the small machine. With only a thought, the machina in the air thrums, latching onto the bird’s pieces and pulling it apart in an instant. A full scan of its structure flows into her mind at the same time, and a wave of her hand is all it takes for the small robot to reform, fluttering around the confined space with machina dancing along its wings.

The space is still limited, but my control in here is impeccable, and it seems any machine in the space receives the same boost as if I were actively burning machina to Overdrive it. And without sustaining damage, too.

She recalls the bird and looks down at the disc of runes on the floor, pulling up its system description as well.

¯¯¯¯¯ ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ novel★fire.net

[Dimensional Stabilisation Anchor]

[Rank:] C

[Description:] A runic sequence designed to hold a pocket dimension together.

[Effect:] Prevents the collapse of unstable dimensions.

_____

“Would the factory have collapsed inside me if this wasn’t put in by the system?”

A shiver runs down Emily’s spine at the idea.

“Maybe I should stop testing things like this on myself and trusting The Clock to save me… Ah, well, it’s not like I have any more plans to make drastic changes to my magical makeup any time soon.”

She files her concerns in the back of her mind for now and focuses on the twisting still present in her gut, pulling herself back out into the real world at the cost of a few thousand mana. She reappears in the same spot she left, standing in the middle of her workshop with Silica and Mensacus watching her.

“Well?” she asks, turning to her son for his observations.

“There was nothing,” he replies. “One moment you were there, then the next you weren’t. I could still somewhat feel your presence in the room through our connection, but I couldn’t find any noticeable signs other than a feeling.”

“I see.” Emily nods, holding out her hand for him to wrap his metal tendrils around. “I’ll have to pay Gaius another visit then and see if he can find anything. I returned to the same spot, and you could still feel my presence, so there’s almost certainly some form of spatial mark left behind.”

She pulls herself back into the Factory, the mana cost doubling as she takes her son with her. They appear in the cramped space, pressed close together, but Mensacus still lets out a relaxed sigh despite what should be uncomfortable, given his limited movement.

“I like it here,” he hums, breathing in the charged air. “It feels like home.”