With a tired sigh, Jordan took a sip of refreshing water. Sitting at the entrance to his base, the Blacksmith clothing set was currently lying on the ground behind him. Now that he was done with it, there’d been no reason to keep it on when he could be cooling back down instead.

The red sun was well past its high point by now, as the time read as almost half past five o’clock on his watch. So it would be just a couple of hours longer until sundown at around eight. After taking another minute to finish his current break of just relaxing for a bit, his plan now was to head to the river for some needed bathing.

As for his grand idea of deactivating the safety feature and beginning Operation: Drone Goes Boom With You? Yeah… that hadn’t gone as well as he really would have hoped. Luckily, it wasn’t in the sense that he’d triggered something to cause his doom in what would amusingly have been his second death by an explosion of flames.

But man, that safety feature was a tough egg to crack open. The way it triggered was pretty calm, though. As soon as he went too far in trying to mess with it, the thing just triggered the fail cascade to turn off the whole core and just shut it all down.

That in turn led to what could be simply called a hard stop to his workflow. The bad part being that the core fully shutting down like that also counted as it manually cutting itself off his TP supply. And annoying enough, reconnecting his TP reserve to it was possible, but not in a way that even made a difference.

Because instead of being an actual solution to reset the drone, it just immediately shut down again. So it seemed to be that once triggered, the safety just locked itself into place. So the old trick of turning it off and on again would fail him. Meaning that he basically had to wait out the timer to summon a new land drone after ten minutes.

The silver lining to this was that those ten minutes could be well spent. After all, Jordan had only gotten blasted in the face by the power cells because he’d kept up the connection of TP, after they’d been fully separated from the exploded core and safety mechanism. Jordan had learned that the drone slowly losing power across the ten-minute period wasn’t true when the core was already fully shut off. At that point it just became fully inert, with not even a single spark of energy going through its systems.

This meant that during those ten minutes without TP, it was fully safe for him to do as he wished. Jordan could even pull out a hammer and shatter the power cells without any consequence. Which was something he did, of course, just to take a better look at their interior structure. And it was actually rather interesting. Rather than just being a solid red crystal, the power cells were actually filled with internal rivets. It was like the outside of a golf ball, but just for the inside instead.

Jordan looked down at his watch. There was only another half a minute or so left until his latest idea would fully play out. Although it was less an actual idea of real substance, and more just proving a point to himself.

Putting away his water bottle, he picked out something that only looked like the central core of a land drone. But it was actually a recreation, without the chip acting as the safety. How had Jordan managed to do so, if dealing with the safety switch had been supposedly impossible?

Well, after spending the last few hours tiring out his eyes with focused inspection of every inch of the core, Mental Blueprint had worked overtime to let him memorize every detail. And during the last few ten-minute periods of being able to safely mess around with it, he’d naturally taken it apart.

Though even with a hammer, differently shaped screwdrivers, an adjustable wrench, pliers, and other basic tools, it’d consistently taken him the vast majority of those ten minutes just to get it open. Even with Tinker helping and what ended up becoming a bit of practice, his record time to access the inside of the core had been just under seven minutes. Leaving with just over three to actually take a look at the interior itself, before it was desummoned.

Now, Jordan had tried to get rid of as an issue. Because if he could just connect his TP, even if it auto cut it off a moment later, that should refresh the ten minutes, right? Since an infinitely refreshing timer might as well be as good as no timer, for this purpose anyway.

However no, of course it wouldn’t be that easy. If the core was shut down, even without tripping the safety mechanism, it didn’t connect. Not even for long enough to be a timer reset, apparently. But if it was exploded into a bunch of tiny pieces, it could remain connected to his TP! Like what kind of logic even was that?!

Jordan was now sure that somewhere out there, whoever had designed this was now cackling with evil. Knowing full well that their drone and how it functioned as a Skill would be a roadblock for whoever tried to replicate a non-Skill version. There was simply no way that something like this hadn’t been intentional.

But after learning as much he could, he ended up being able to disconnect and take the whole core to the Transmuter. Which had allowed him to make a version that didn’t have the safety chip, and was adjusted to remain functional. Or, at least, it should in theory.

As the time hit ten minutes from the starting point, the core disappeared from his hand. Even after going through the Transmuter, it was still considered a piece of the drone. But what was extra annoying was that it still refused to let him reconnect his TP to refresh the timer, even after the chip should have been gone. This was the part that Jordan had gotten stuck on, and now felt a bit frustrated.

He knew what the core looked like before he messed with it enough to set off the safety mechanism. Yet even then, that wasn’t enough. From what he could tell, it put it into a weird grey zone, more than anything.

One where it was still considered part of the land drone and disappeared after the ten minutes were up. But not different enough to get around whatever caused the TP block to still happen, and let him connect to it like if it’d been exploded apart instead.

Jordan was missing something important, that much he was at least certain of. He looked off to the distance, where more of his land drones would still be moving around for things to shoot at. Just as a test, he’d gone ahead and given one the order to drive at full speed toward the edge of the Skill’s range. Then as soon as the TP had gotten cut off, he’d walked several feet forward and felt it reconnect the moment he was back in range.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So to summarize, there were three states the land drone cared about when it came to his TP reserve. If it was whole, if it was fully destroyed, and if it was taken apart and the core messed with. The first two had no problems with it came to his TP, while the third had nothing but problems. Yet it was the last state that Jordan needed to work with, in order to learn more and eventually succeed in recreating his own drone.

Though it was more than just the core that was weird. During his hands-on studying, he had realized the silver wiring was also a bit off. Now the thing with silver was that it reacted to oxygen and became tarnished, which obviously was bad for its capacity to act as a wire when it happened.

Because electricity that had to pass through the tarnished metal generates heat. And what does enough heat eventually lead to in a machine full of silver? Even more tarnishing. Then what does more heat made by more tarnishing eventually lead to? Fire. And what was fire? Not good.

But Jordan had believed that it was simply something like the outside of the drone being a good seal, while the inside didn’t have any oxygen inside it. Not a vacuum necessarily, just instead filled with any other kind of gas that silver didn’t react with. Even if the shell of the drone wasn’t a perfect seal, it only had to be good enough for it to be a long-term problem. The kind that only proved an issue after months or ideally even years of operation.

However, that assumption had been incorrect. Jordan had since discovered that the silver was actually treated. The revelation from Tinker had only come while he directly handled the wiring itself while the TP was disconnected and the core fully shut down, just to be safe. But he didn’t know exactly how it was treated to not rust in such a way that didn’t have any impact on its conductive properties.

He was sure that at least some methods also existed on Earth too, rather than being alien tech. But it just wasn’t something he was personally aware of. Not that he would have access to whatever chemical solution it’d be, even if he knew exactly what he needed.

Anyway, it was just another moment where Jordan was frustrated and wished he actually had someone he could rant at while pacing around. But for the time being, Operation: Unlimited Drone Works would have to be assigned as a more long-term endeavor. At least until the secret sauce that this recipe was clearly missing was eventually discovered by him.

But on that note, Jordan summoned a new instance of his land drone. Now riding it, he hit with a use of Overcharge while now making his way toward the river. At least now when he used Overcharge, he had a far deeper understanding of what was actually going on inside the drone. Rather than just vaguely knowing that the energy could either go to the guns or treads, he now knew that it was actually being cycled through the core and the chosen set of power cells.

As Jordan reached the river, he had already ordered all his drones to meet him there. Because as far as someone or something taking him by surprise, he’d be damned if it was while he was in the nude. At least over these last few hours, his other drones had done a fairly good job in farming Experience Points up until now.

EXP: 943/5625

A bit over 700 EXP gained while he hadn’t needed to lift a finger for any of it was a pretty good thing, if he had to say so himself. Which he did.

Though on the note of his current progress toward Level 7, Jordan only then realized that he’d already forgotten about what was supposedly his new morning routine. Well, nothing said morning like late afternoon or early evening, right?

Mightiest Individual:

1: Wilfred Wilbur Wyndham III (Level 8)

2: Sebastion Ironclaw (Level 7)

3: Carl Rowe (Level 7)

4: Zorliay Qorath’zyrunch (Level 6)

5: Yvaro Qorath’zyrunch (Level 6)

…

8: Jordan Joyner (Level 6)

He blinked while looking at the leaderboard. He hadn’t looked since yesterday morning, but there’d been surprisingly little movement in the top five. Aside from the top guy gaining yet another Level to be ahead, and a little reshuffling, the only other thing of note was how close Jordan was now to the top. Just three spots away until his name would always be the first seen by everyone who checked the list.

But as far as the total number of people on the leaderboard, the number had again exploded since he last checked. Now, the figure was at a new total of over 290 million people who’d at least reached Level 2 to be on it. As the river then came within sight in the distance of his vision, Jordan was still a bit bewildered.

Yesterday morning, for a world with only 16-hour days, that figure had been around 15 million. To go from that to 290 million, the jump was massive! Granted, that was still only a relatively small portion to reach Level 2 by what was the evening of day three. But even so, Jordan could only imagine that either a lot of people had been on the cusp of Level 2 when he last looked, or had gotten busy since with at least getting that first 100 EXP.

And with so many more now on the leaderboard…

The land drone came to a stop by the river. Hope was a complicated thing. Many wanted to feel it, himself included, of course. Yet at the same time, there was the fear that letting himself have to much of it would just be setting him up for an even greater disappointment. That every time he checked and couldn’t find those he cared about, it’d only refresh his worries and make them worse.

Burying hope wasn’t actually that much better, but at least he could do so while claiming to be realistic. That if he just got used to the potential reality of none of his loved ones making it, then he could be mentally equipped. Whether it was from the direct confirmation about somehow discovering that they had died, or enough time passing that it indirectly became the only possibility. If he just got ahead of it emotionally, then maybe, just maybe, it would numb the pain that’d come.

And yet…

As Jordan got off from the drone and idly stepped toward the river, he asked the System to check for names. His mother, his father, and then his favorite aunts and uncles. None of them got a response back for the leaderboard. Then he checked for his best friends. First for Adam, whose name also didn’t show anything. And secondly Leo, who-

5,854: Leo Price (Level 4)

…

29,982: Leo Price (Level 3)

…

324,555: Leo Price (Level 3)

…

100,568,421: Leo Price (Level 2)

A few more names also popped up as separate screens across his vision.

Just the fact that they were multiple meant that there was every chance that none of them were actually his friend. But at the same time, one of them could be. He found himself gnawing on the inside of his cheeks as his heart felt heavy with a furious cocktail of emotions. Hope, doubt, and fear alike all begin to fight within him.

Despite knowing that it was just his bias, despite knowing the chances were more likely not true, despite knowing it would be impossible for him to know for sure… Jordan found himself wanting to believe. To sleep tonight, thinking that at least one of his friends was still out there. That he was somewhere on this planet and starting at the same leaderboard, believing the same thing for Jordan. Jordan could only pray that he wasn’t deluding himself, and that at least one name on this list was actually the right person.

Because now that the spark of hope had flared, it’d be nearly impossible to simply ignore it again.