I sat at the bar of the speakeasy, drinking from my canteen as I idly toyed with my ectrobola. I already got everything moved over, most of which was in the back. Unfortunately for me though, my choice of tables was rather lacking. The bar was the best thing in the speakeasy to work on, at least until I got some other stuff down here, so it was my temporary workstation.

Once I went semi-public with the place, I’d have to move it all down to my stash, but for now? I was lazy. And I didn’t have a good system at the moment for getting up and down. Yet. All my stuff would stay up here locked behind two secret doors until then.

Anyway, back to the bolas. They were cool. After going through the pavilion for Throwing Weapon Master, I was actually rarely good at using them. It’s just that, well, their weaknesses never really went away with better skill. Namely, they were awkward to use. They needed too much space and took too much time.

I could quickly throw a dagger in the milliseconds while in any position or tight space. The bolas though? I need to be in a position to have my spine perfectly vertical and enough space around me to whip it around my head a few times. Add onto that it would take several seconds just to get enough momentum to have a good throw, and they were just not that easy to whip out in a fight with my life on the line.

And yet, I couldn’t deny having access to an easy shock was incredibly helpful. It was good at disabling and stunning and had uses outside of combat as seen by my efforts at Cold Moon Solutions. Just that actually using them in combat was… well… tricky. Who in their right mind would watch me wind them up for a throw and just stand there?

So that left me at an impasse with them. Extremely useful. Terribly awkward. So that got me thinking. How could I fix them? And the solution? I can’t. At least, not exactly. Their faults lay in the core framework of the weapon... so I just needed to change the core framework.

Originally, I thought of making electric throwing knives or shuriken. Then I realized that I would be practically throwing away money and shifted tracts slightly.

I started where I always start when working on new things and carefully disassembled the bolas while cataloging exactly how they went together. I took notes on how everything worked, making sure I memorized the circuits this time around so I wouldn’t have to mess around like I did with the thermal Katana. With any luck, my ‘fix’ would be one smooth and quick adjustment.

Once I had the pieces disassembled, I headed over to the pile of chrome junk I lugged up from the Underground when I decided to make this place my temporary workshop. I knew I’d get a use out of it eventually, and now the time had come. In this case, I was taking a page out of the Scavs book.

I pulled out all the hands and arms I could from the pile of scrap metal, then proceeded to break it all down into their basic joints. I separated out all the parts by pile in case I needed something for the future, but my main focus was the casings themselves, the part that acted as the metal ‘skin’.

Chrome was durable. Even more so with the stuff from way back when. It was before they got the fine adjustments and delicate parts to make some high-end and easily controlled limbs. Almost as a common compensation for the lack of fine motor control, the chrome makers of old made them extremely durable.

At least the mainstream chrome manufacturers. It was easier to get into the business back then, so there were thousands of different corporations that made shoddy products. It was easy to distinguish the high quality from the low by looking for rust on the internal components and the overall quality of the metal.

By the time I went through my massive pile of chrome dredged up from the Underground, I had a nice array of fingers and hands. I went through, eliminating anything too blocky, and picked out the lithest pieces. I did a few tests, mainly checking the durability of each piece and the tensile strength.

I pulled out the best of the best from my batch of old chrome, picking out specifically the knuckles. I welded and pinned together the joints, making them into essentially form-fitting fingerless gloves of metal for the top part of my hand.

From there, I transplanted the electrodes for the bola onto the knuckles. They originally worked by sending a current through the ball on each end for a dual-tasing effect, and the wire connecting the two had no other feature than connecting them. Such a setup made it rather easy to get the electrodes and circuitry and transplant them over to the new shock knuckles design.

The circuitry of the electrobolas was quite a bit bigger laid out flat than I expected. I hid the circuitry and initial batteries of the bola underneath the glove by adding another microlayer similar to how I layered the katana. I also went ahead and added an activation switch, getting rid of the previous signal system. I set the original signal antenna and control glove aside so I could use them for something else.

The end result was… well, it wasn’t what I was expecting. After grinding off and polishing it, the gloves looked like the porcelain hands of a doll, only cut off just after the knuckles.

A few quick tests revealed some issues with having them always active with a switch. For one, it drained the battery quickly. I added a quick connect jack to both so I could quickly charge them from the battery in my pack, but even then they just blew through charge. I took apart the knuckles again, this time adding micro pressure plates into the mix. Thank you Cold Moon Solutions for your part contributions.

It took a bit of adjusting the circuitry and fine-tuning the pressure plates to get it just right, but my end product was gloves that would shock the hell out of someone when I punched them, giving me the leg up in any close-quarters combat. Hopefully. And electricity had the potential to wreak havoc on chrome too.

While I was busy building toys, I went ahead and put my drone together. The drone itself wasn’t all that complicated. Pretty basic as far as drones go. A simple quad-copter type design. I did go out and buy a high-grade battery for it, the same one that was in my pack, but that was the only change I made from my basic design. I had the rest of the parts in-house.

I’d already printed everything out for the drone body, so it was basically plug and screw till I finished it up. Another small adjustment to my original design was a changeup from the original antennae and receiver to the micro antenna and receiver of the bola. They were smaller and longer-ranged than my typical ones, so what wasn’t to love about them?

The drone body and all that I hadn’t been too worried about when I designed it. The attachments though? That was different. For now, since I wouldn’t be able to obtain a cloaking module, a noise muffler was the only attachment I could actually make. And to make it I needed a metal printer. Hence why I waited so long on the drone.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I moved back into the speakeasy, heading into my manufacturing room past the second fake wall at the end of the private booth hallway. My plastic printer, plasma cutter, and the variety of tools I used back in my apartment sat off to the side. Taking up one of the walls sat a massive beast of a mechanism.

The SITCH had been a struggle to set up. I spent nearly two days just getting everything over and set before I got it working properly. And it was a beauty to behold now that it was all set up right.

It looked like three industrial ovens stacked side by side, except all sharing one large chamber in between. The glass view port looked into the fine mechanics and arm holding the nozzle similar to my other printer. I’d already gone and swapped out the nozzle for the Multa-Melta module Suvroc sold to me.

Although it wasn't visible through the viewport, the thing had a massive solvent tank that took forever to fill up. The printer came with enough to fill it once, but I'd have to get more at some point.

I popped the top of the printer off, checking the several spools of metal wire and a couple spools of a ceramic filament required to run the thing. Part of the beauty of the Multa-Melta module and the SITCH was its capability to run multiple different kinds of metal at a time, easily creating complex pieces that would take multiple runs with a different kind of printer.

Unlike my plastic printer which required my deck to connect up and push across the schematics, the SITCH had its own built-in terminal and design software. It could even connect to the Net, not that I was gonk enough to do such a thing. Probably had some tracking software built into it to alert Schweigen International once connected up. I'd already removed the hardware connection point so it had no way to connect up.

Of course, I could also just connect up my deck and transfer the schematic for what I wanted that way. And that's just what I did. I’d already had the parts designed since the first time I worked on the drone, so it was easy to send them over.

The muffler design itself was something I came up with after disassembling and looking at the Sonic Suppressor. Basically, the Sonic Suppressor worked by hyper-advanced active noise cancelation. The anchor points picked up noise waves coming towards them, then projected a ‘wall’ of ‘negative’ waves that completely canceled out the initial noise. With six of the walls between the four anchor points, it made a cube of silence.

The muffler was similar in principle, but quite a bit different in design. The specific microelectronics and ultra-thin metal components were heavily inspired by the Sonic Suppressor. Just that instead of projecting a panel it would project a dome around the drone, entirely cutting off any noise emitted.

I loaded up all of the components I’d need to the printer and sat back to watch it work. It was way too boring. And it would take way more time than plastic-printed parts.

The SITCH needed to first print the items using a ceramic binder filament and a metal filament together, then fill the entire chamber with a solvent to wash the parts, and then finally sinter the parts by superheating the chamber to harden them into finished metal pieces. It could take anywhere from a day to several days depending on the size and complexity of the parts.

I went ahead and cued up everything I’d need for Blackout while I was here and then descended down into the Underground with a bag full of traps and mechanisms.

– – –

I returned to my apartment way too late at night. I nearly fell asleep as I took a shower and stumbled over to my bed. As soon as I hit it, my vision went black before I arrived in the pavilion.

My exhaustion immediately cleared away. As far as I could tell, while I was inside of the interface, my physical body back in meatspace would be in a sleeping state similar to short-term hibernation. It was part of the reason I could keep going for days on end without too many issues outside of dehydration, soreness, and hunger.

Anyway, this time around I was here for the Evasion Perk. I looked through the shelf briefly, though I almost immediately found what I wanted. I still forced myself to read through the rest just in case. There were quite a few interesting Perks in Evasion.

「Burst Step」

「Reflexes」

「Momentum Shift」

Reflexes were the most mundane of the three, at least to me. It had an overlapping effect with Insight, giving me a warning and a slightly timed slowed effect when an attack was coming. I already had a time slow from Dexterity and a warning from Insight though, so it was the bottom of the three. Still, it would enhance what I already had.

Burst Step and Momentum Shift were both in a similar situation. Both of them were okay, but they really shined as prerequisites for other Perks further into the list.

Burst Step, which had a very confusing description but seemed to be a temporary speed boost, was a required perk for something called Phantom Step. Phantom Step required Stealth eight too, and granted a temporary invisibility effect as well as an enhanced speed boost on a dodge. It would be incredibly good to escape with.

Momentum Shift likewise was an intriguing Perk. Further into the list, something called Aether Shift was locked behind it. Aether Shift’s description was rather interesting. From what I could tell, it seemed as though it would allow me to temporarily become invulnerable by traveling through the Aether. And invulnerability was incredibly tempting for obvious reasons.

The deciding factor came after I checked the requirements for Aether Shift and Phantom Step one more time. Aether Shift required being either an Adept or a Magi, so I immediately eliminated it as an option. There were other Perks in the various shelves I’d looked through since getting the interface that had similar requirements, though I typically just ignored them. Don’t know how I missed it this time around.

I went ahead and grabbed Burst Step from the shelf and brought it over to the easel. It unraveled to show a cloaked figure perfectly dodging under a hail of arrows shot from somewhere beyond the edge of the painting.

I expected to get kicked out of the interface and sent back to my bed immediately. It seemed like one of those active effect-type Perks based on the description, somewhat similar to Hidden Hands and Master of Disguise.

What I wasn’t expecting was to get kicked out into a mountain range flanked by towering peaks. The moon’s glow barely reached down onto me through a layer of fog around the mountain’s peaks, revealing a secluded mountain courtyard with a flowering Sakura tree in the distance.

I stood on the edge of a raised stage in the middle of the courtyard. Ropes encircled it, giving the impression of a fighting ring. The racks of weapons surrounding it reinforced the idea.

This time around, there was a person with me. It took a few moments of observation before I realized it was another of the puppet-type entities that I’d seen a few times in the past. They were like puppets that could only act according to their design and predesignated actions.

In this case, the puppet held a sword and motioned to me.

「Dodge the attack」

I barely managed to read the message before it was on me. Insight barely saved its sword from running me through as I frantically backpedaled. In the corner of my vision, I caught sight of a path of glowing red footsteps and a faint hologram of someone dodging along the path with some fancy footwork. The momentary distraction proved to be costly as the puppet ran me through with its sword, easily cutting through my flesh as if it wasn’t there.

I was expecting to feel quite a bit of pain, but surprisingly very little came. It almost felt as if the interface had become far tamer and gentler since my first days with it. It was almost as if the pain of being stabbed had been muted and turned down to a tenth of what it should’ve been. Not that I was complaining.

The moon above flashed as my wound bled profusely, blinding me for a moment before I found myself back to where I started.

「Dodge the attack」

I didn’t fall for any distractions this time, following the glowing red path. It was obvious this was some guiding hand to help me along-

Only to have a sword slice cleanly through my spine. Even with Insight’s warning, my feet were just too slow to keep up. The moon flashed again as I was reset back to the start. I stared up at the foggy moon for a few moments as I sigh left me. Looks like it would be yet another bloody learning process.