If there was one thing that Anza Black hated, it was bureaucracy. Which was why she was cursing the name of her former teacher.
She lived in and operated out of Topwater, the town built on an island at the centre of a lake. The water provided a natural defence against Kaijus, and a cadre of Guardsmen with amphibious equipment were charged with protecting the town, and with ferrying farmers to the fields on the far shore and merchants to the roads. At various points, people had tried to build bridges, but they were always the first target of Kaiju assaults.
When Anza had heard that Dean Wujing had sent an order for her to be loaned a cutting-edge prototype Conveyance Core for her mysterious mission to Astralia’s Spear, her feelings were mixed. A trip that would have taken weeks would be shortened to mere days. This was a good thing; objectively it was worth any amount of hassle. But actually taking possession of that Core had meant suffering through hours upon hours of bureaucracy, dealing with self-important pencil pushers who were all entirely convinced that the valuable prototype would be much better off in their hands, or perhaps in the hands of black market dealers who would compensate them well for even just a chance to copy its Engravings.
And she couldn’t even punch them. At least, not without getting another warning on her record. Sometimes, Anza felt like she preferred Kaijus to people. Dealing with Kaijus was simple.
All this was to say that Anza was spoiling for a fight as she left Topwater, which made it positively serendipitous that as soon as she made landfall on the lakeshore, an unusually obese Rat Kaiju burst out of the trees and bellowed a war cry.
A quick Identify - which was possible because she was still within range of Topwater’s Ataraxia Node - revealed the truth;
[WRESTLING RAT - TIER 3 - Type: RODENT (Subtype: KAIJU)]
It was weak.
Tier 3 made it roughly equal to Level 15. This bloodthirsty creature had absolutely no business trying to attack a Level 51 Guardsman like Anza. If she’d taken it seriously, Anza could have crushed it beneath her foot. But she was just about to leave and needed to conserve her Mana for the journey, and also desperately wanted to inflict violence. So Anza decided to see how many of her punches the creature could take while she wasn’t using any of her Mana or Cores.
The rat, confused by the fact that the small, furless human wasn’t running away, decided she must not have heard him and roared again. Then Anza punched out one of his teeth with such force that he swallowed it.
Before he even had time to choke, her other fist came down on his nose and sent him reeling. The Rat twisted and tried to claw at her. So she punched his paw and broke the bones inside it.
Anza didn’t even have to try, really. She’d considered using one of her Techniques if the Rat caught her off-guard somehow, but it couldn’t even do that. It tried to bite her and got punched in the jaw. It whipped its tail at her and got punched in the tail. It kicked her but only received a punch to the foot. It tried not attacking at all and still got punched.
Pugilism was a wonderful thing.
Eventually, the Rat just couldn’t take it anymore. With its every bone broken, bruises covering its skin, and the dawning understanding that it had never had a chance at all, the light finally faded from its eyes and it fell over backwards.
“Well, that was cathartic,” Anza cracked her knuckles and stretched. She felt better after that, she really did.
“Now,” She peered at the small, pink-tinted Core that she’d had to make room in her Core Controller for. “What exactly is a ‘Pearl of Sports Car’?”
<=====}—o
Using Mana to power a Core was hard.
Mikayla had hoped, optimistically, that it was simply a matter of pouring power into the Core and letting the magic happen (literally). But it was much more complicated than that.
The first problem was the Core Controller. It had a sort of internal circuitry that conducted mana and allowed her to channel it into the Cores slotted into it. Unfortunately, the circuitry wasn’t labelled and she had to learn to navigate it using trial and error - and, of course, she couldn’t see what she was doing, so it was like trying to navigate a cave while blinded and deafened. Her first few attempts to channel her Mana with her Willpower had led to red sparks spraying out of the open slots and distressing dips in her Mana Bar. On her seventh try, she’d correctly identified the channels that would lead her mana to the Black Knight Armour Core. Which had led to the second problem.
“Whoaooooooooo0000000000-“ Nocturnus’ distorted screams had echoed in her ears as only the left half of the armour appeared at her prompting and the Goliath enchantment triggered, but only on her boot. She’d been left wobbling on top of a massive foot and listening to a worrying mix of screams and radio static until she’d figured out how to cut the flow.
“I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone screw up manifesting their Armour that badly,” Keldryn observed once she was back on the ground.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m an idiot. Mana Assistance, Black Knight. Nocturnus? Are you okay?”
The ghostly knight breathed heavily, even though that did nothing for him. “That was . . extraordinarily uncomfortable . .” he mustered after a long moment. “Might I suggest practicing with the sword instead?”
“Sorry! I was trying to, these things aren’t labelled,” Mikayla apologetically explained.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Then . . perhaps you ought to remove my Core from the Controller, just while you’re practicing,” Nocturnus didn’t sound happy about the suggestion, but Mikayla barely registered that.
“I can take these out? How?”
Keldryn raised an eyebrow. “You never tried to remove them?”
“No? What if I couldn’t get them back in?”
He was definitely giving her the look now. He lifted his own Core Controller and held it up for her to watch as he gripped the pearly pink Core in its centre and unscrewed it.
“Ohhhhh. So they just screw in,” Mikayla realised.
“Yup,” Keldryn held it up for her to see, revealing that underneath the rounded nub was a short strip of ridges that terminated in a strange jagged construct, like a key. “What did you think kept them in place?”
“I dunno, magnet magic for crystals?”
Confusion crept into Keldryn’s expression. “What’s a magnet?”
“. . doesn’t matter. Alright, so in that case I should be able to . .” The Black Knight Core was jammed in tightly, which wasn’t surprising since it had been stuck in there for two hundred years, but after wriggling it for several minutes she managed to pry it free.
For a moment she just marvelled at the ornately cut blue gem, tilting it back and forth in the sunlight. Even her untrained eye could pick out a clear qualitative difference between Keldryn’s Core and hers; the etching of its innards was an order of magnitude more complex and detailed, full of tiny grooves and protrusions. “This belongs in a museum,”
“Yeah, probably. A Core made by Astralia herself? Some people out there would pay a lot of money for that,” Keldryn mused.
“I am not selling my friend to some collector!” Mikayla huffed.
“I didn’t say you should,” the ranger pacified her, his ears flicking up in slight alarm. “But if you’re not too attached to that Sword Core . . well, you could probably trade it in for enough money to buy a Jade, or even a Diamond to replace it,”
Mikayla mulled this over. On the one hand, the Ruby of Sword had saved her life more times than she could count . . but she remembered the chart in Astralia’s notes. Amber is worse than Ruby, is worse than Lapis, is worse than Jade, is worse than Diamond. Ruby was the second-to-worst type of Core. She had no idea what kind of qualitative increase swapping it for a Diamond would bring, but she had to admit that she was curious.
She banished the thoughts and tucked the Black Knight away safely in her pocket. “Keep an eye out, I don’t want to be caught off guard with my Armour Core unscrewed,” she requested of Keldryn, before diving back into the internal workings of the Core Controller.
“Will do. But I reserve the right to let you trip over if I think it’d be funny,” he muttered with a small but sly smile as Mikayla’s eyes glazed over and she kept walking on autopilot.
The more she probed the inside of the Core Controller, the more she suspected that the damage and erosion it had sustained was making her task more difficult than it needed to be. She kept coming across dead ends and breaks that made her crude feelers fizzle out.
For a moment she considered asking Keldryn to swap with her so that she could try his, but then she shook her head. As convenient as a shortcut would be, she needed to develop this skill, and in a way the damaged Core Controller was a blessing. If she could get the hang of using this thing, treating its damaged internal circuitry as a puzzle against which to practice her mana control, then surely any other Core Controller she might replace it with in the future would be simple by comparison?
“Y’now, I’ve been wondering,” she idly mused, continuing to probe her device like a frustrated clockmaker, “what’s up with the colours of Core Manifestations anyway? I keep making red sparks, and when I summon the Black Knight Armour, it’s black but it also has red highlights,”
“That’s normal. Core Manifestations have their own built in colour schemes, but the user’s aura always bleeds through. Skyward Grasscutter’s default colour is green, because my mum made it and her aura was green. My aura, on the other hand, is orange,” Keldryn shrugged. “Once I saw a performing troupe that used their auras with a bunch of Cores to put on what they called a ‘light show’,”
Mikayla spent a few moments trying to picture that. “That sounds awesome,”
Keldryn shrugged a bit, and they kept walking.
A few minutes later, there was a burst of red light suffused with silver, and half of a sword grew out of Mikayla’s hand. “Yes!”
She inspected the half-formed construct, and frowned, comparing it to the internal circuitry she was stumbling her way through with her mana. It was like a network of dark rooms, and only guessing the correct pattern of lights to turn on would get her the whole sword.
Mikayla pushed harder, and her Mana Bar dipped precipitously as she accidentally sent too much mana into the Core. The sword finished forming and began to swell, its blade distending and exploding outwards unevenly as though it were being inflated in a cartoon. It crashed into the ground, rapidly growing beyond her ability to carry it.
“Whoa, whoa!” Mikayla wrestled with her Mana, yanking it back, and her sword fizzled out. “Okay. That’s progress,”
Keldryn raised an eyebrow. “The word I would have used is embarrassing,”
Mikayla spared a second to flip him off, then tried again.
“What was that? Does the middle finger mean something weird where you’re from?” he questioned, his ears tilting in curiosity, but received no response.
It took an hour of trial and error, but she finally managed to get it right. “Hah! Yes! There! I got it!” Mikayla crowed, holding the silver-and-red sword that had finally stabilised above her head in triumph.
“Great, now consciously trigger and control the Goliath function,” Keldryn reminded her.
Mikayla let out a groan of anguish. “Do I really need to be able to get huge? I can fight Kaijus at normal size, right?”
“No,”
“Damnit,”
“Still, managing that much is good progress,” Keldryn somewhat belatedly added, realising she would probably benefit from some encouragement. “But it doesn’t mean anything if you can’t keep it up in a real fight,”
“Fair, but hopefully we won’t have to worry about that,” Mikayla hummed.
“Of course we will, that’s why we’re out here,” he retorted. “Well. That’s why I’m out here,”
“What do you mean?”
“Didn’t I mention? My main job in being out here is to help cull the Kaiju population in the region. I’ve been steering us around the trails of anything that looks too strong for us to take on, but you need practice and I need to meet my quota. So I’ll go find something to kill. Wait right here, I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found a good target,” And before Mikayla could object, he was gone.
Leaving her alone in the tundra full of monsters.
She whistled through her teeth and screwed the Black Knight Core back into the flower on her bracer, not wanting to be caught un-armoured again. “You are way too cavalier about slaughtering innocent wildlife, you know . .” she murmured. “Are they innocent? They keep trying to kill me. Why is that, anyway? It’s all mindless violence, it’s like they don’t even wonder whether or not it’s a good idea to attack me. That’s not normal . . unless it is in this world? Gah, how would I even know, this place is weird,”