The after-effects of my little outing were luckily rather minor. I managed to get out of the interrogation by business barbie by acting the surly teenager to a T, claiming that I had stuff to think about but never actually explaining stuff. There was no doubt in my mind that she would try to use anything I told her to further her own goals, as she tried to offer me to listen, to be a sounding board, even claiming that she understood and had been a teenager once.

As if I would tell her anything that could be used against me.

For the next few weeks, she kept an eye on me, staying at the mansion most of the time but not actually interfering with my life. She simply was there, spying on me. Luckily, her spying didn’t stop me from thinking and theorizing. I had asked Galatea to use the movement-restrictions of my armour and design a fighting style custom-fit for it, using the hundreds of martial arts in existence. Having dedicated maneuvers and training would hopefully reduce my disadvantage at pure and fair hand-to-hand fighting.

Not that I wanted to fight fair. Fair fights were for the practice-mat, without wagers riding on it. I only cared about being the one to walk away from a fight, bonus points if my objective had been met. But even meeting objectives was secondary, compared to walking away.

A few of my ideas were so simple, I kicked myself for not thinking of them sooner. Setting small LEDs between the knuckles of my gauntlets was the first measure I’d take. The LEDs would be set a bit back so they would not break if I punched something but I could overcharge them, burning them out but for every diode burned out, I would get one incredibly bright, short flash. Not quite the strength of a flash-bang but I only wanted something to use as a momentary distraction while I punched them. And a bright flash, directed at their face during night-times? It would work. In addition, it would mess up their night-vision and allow me to use the light-absorption properties of my armour to hide if I needed to. Add a routine that blocks my visor the instant the diode flashes and I can use them without being affected myself. Simple but effective, especially if the enemy has some sort of improved vision.

In the same vein, I would make myself actual flash-bangs and smoke-bombs, my armour could easily protect me from their effects but they could be used as getaway tricks.

But the serious work would have to be something more substantive. Yes, small tricks would be useful but they were just that, tricks. One of the things I had needed for my energy-crystals was a strong magnetic field generator, allowing me to create strong magnetic bottles to put pressure on plasma. If I managed to make those fields stable outside the generation-equipment, I could do some fun things with them. The fields themselves were easily accelerated by electric coils, similar to the rail-gun idea but they did not hold up when moved. The magnetic lines simply broke apart if they were outside their generation-field holding them together.

As I visualised the various lines that made up my magnetic bottle, I had an epiphany. They were just like threads and just like threads, I might be able to knit them together, interweaving them to make the bottle stronger and keep it together without dedicated outside-fields. The bottle would still unravel but it would take longer, long enough to make it to a target. And the stronger bottle would allow me to put a lot of pressure inside, making the projectile heavier and thus giving it more punch - but the field would break at the point that came into contact with solid matter, probably even if it came into contact with too much liquid matter, it could only move through gas, maybe push aside droplets of liquid.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And it would make my idea even stronger. Instead of using the mass of my projectile and maybe the plasma-payload against hard targets, I could use the payload against any target. Just not as a hot impact, but using cold plasma and simply using the pressure to smack against my target. With enough pressure in the bottle, it would make quite the weapon, almost as strong as my armoured punches.

Ionizing the air as it was pushed into the bottle would be easy, I could use two different ways to do so, one creating hot plasma, adding a temperature-component to the weapon, so I could shoot my enemies with a payload a few thousand degrees hot. It might even give my railgun-idea a run for deadliness. But I could use the second way, keeping it at room-temperature, making the impact easily calibratable by increasing or decreasing the amount of plasma within each shot, thus changing both mass and pressure.

I got seriously giddy as I designed it but once more, reality intruded. Building it into the armour was not feasible, it was quite a bit too big and too much of a power-hog. Not even a rifle was large enough to house the necessary components. It needed to be an added component to the armour, a backpack, sending the muzzle over my shoulder and aiming via small servos. That would allow me to keep my hands free and allow Galatea to aim for me, if I needed her to do so.

And the railgun was back on the table as well, never again would I be cornered like a rat. If someone wanted to corner me, the gloves would come off, so to speak, and I would happily shoot to kill.

In addition, I needed information. If I wanted to gain notoriety and the eye of the Guild, I would either work for or against the league. I could not walk up to the Guild and say ‘Take me in and piss off one of the most powerful man on the planet while doing so.’ No, I needed a reputation so they would approach me and I could make demands. Working for the league was out, my father was too powerful for them to work with me without telling him about it and getting his approval. And that approval would be given the day it snowed in hell, while I was riding a flying pig.

So I would have to work against the league and therefore the law. I didn’t really care about that as long as I wasn’t caught. As I was lacking a cause to fight for, I would simply do what many had done before me. As soon as I had enough power to keep myself safe, I would hire myself out as a mercenary, working for the highest bidder as Powered muscle. What a joke, my family was among the wealthiest on the planet, with a net-worth to rival small countries, and here I was thinking about working as a merc. The things you do for freedom.

But to work as a merc, I needed information, both on the opposition I would face and, more importantly, about the people who hired me. It would not do to get caught in a sting-op, as I had no more illusions about my invulnerability. Without the girl in black, I would have been caught, registered and sent back to my father. Looking at the potential problems, the whole ‘fake my own death’ idea looked quite enticing but it would destroy every bridge behind me. Not just burn them, but bomb them to rubble. I was not quite desperate enough to do that.

For information, the easiest way was to ask Galatea to comb through all available sources and compile the information for me. She was uniquely qualified to do so, but I needed more. I was certain that a lot of data was hidden away, either behind encryptions strong enough to give her problems and maybe even get her caught or simply on isolated systems. Without a connection, there was nothing she could do. So I needed some kind of information-gathering for myself which was relatively easy.

I simply ordered a small fleet of multi-rotor camera drones. Supply them with my energy storage and they could stay up for a while, maybe install improved cameras and directional microphones and let Galatea have fun with them.

I had just improved her core-system, adding multiple processor-banks and memory units to her core, allowing her to process information at a higher speed. Those would allow her enough processing to run the drones and help me with my armour. After all, she was the Queen of the Multi-Task.