“If a system can move it, then sure. But we don’t even know if that’s how the teleporter got here in the first place.” I point out as I reach the bottom of my shield. The teleporter sprawls out below me. It looks exactly like a broken version of the thing that tried to vaporize me. “Pearl, how long would it take to repair this thing without the specialized parts?”

“Way too long without them. But if we had them… maybe a day and a half.”

That’s about what I expected. I brush my fingers against the teleporter, feeling marked and pitted glass rub against my thick skin, and attempt to deposit it. The system tries to take hold of the massive thing, but after covering less than a quarter of its surface area, it fails abruptly.

Cannot be deposited; item too large for personal inventory.

Repurposing available at 8 Soul.

No idea what ‘repurposing’ means, but I’m more than a few skill points short of that. And the entire reason I tried in the first place just flat out doesn’t work.

Illumisia leans down a little further. “Did it work?”

I shake my head. “No dice. If someone brought it in with their inventory, they’d already upgraded it somehow.”

She snarls and lets loose a stream of half-barks that sound offensive. Pearl’s expression turns sour at the tirade, and she raises both of her hands to cover her mouth in disbelief. Don’t need an interpreter to know when someone’s cursing out their circumstances.

“Then we are stuck.” Illumisia jumps into the pit and slams down onto the teleporter. “We’re chasing a device that can teleport itself. There is no possible way to track it down before your Shelby’s time limit expires. Without it, nothing else matters. So where do we take this? To its logical conclusion?”

“Don’t say that.” Pearl warns Illumisia. “We still have options. Just… much harder ones.”

“Oh, truly? I would love to hear them.” Illumisia sits down on the teleporter and gestures a paw at Pearl. “Because to me, it looks as if your Shelby is doomed. She traded her life for our freedoms, and that does not sit well with me at all. Please, if there is anything you can think of–anything at all–I am willing to do it.”

Pearl seems taken aback by Illumisia’s desperation. Hell, I’m taken aback too. It almost sounds like she doesn’t want me to die, even if it's just because I’m the reason she got free.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with… ability.” Pearl says slowly. She slides down my shoulder, then pokes at me to hold her up in my hand. “If this could be solved with violence or competence alone, we wouldn’t be having this problem. But this is a riddle laced with restrictions and redactions. We need to find something that the system will allow Shelby to get away with. You know how much of a risk it was to revive her. Imagine what the system would do if we… did the other things.”

“I am aware.” Illumisia locks eyes with me. “But it is better than dying.”

“We can’t confirm that.” Pearl insists. “Our only chances are to somehow repair the teleporter, or to hope against hope that the one that attacked her comes for Shelby again.”

“Yeah, and that isn’t… happening…” I trail off as a memory knocks at the forefront of my mind. My brows screw together in thought as I pull out my Class Card with my free hand, all the while Illumisia and Pearl keep chattering among themselves.

A quest stares back at me. One that I wouldn’t have thought to even look at, but if a damn shovel can somehow make it all the way out here, then why couldn’t something that can teleport itself?

What Lies Below.

Something exists underneath the Seasky Shores.

It will continue hunting you at daybreak, growing in intensity every day, unless you deal with it.

Objective: Identify, Locate, and Defeat the unknown monster.

Identified: Shellraiser Teleporter.

Locate: Incomplete.

Defeated: Incomplete.

Rewards: 300 Worth, two Stat Coins, and ????.

The teleporter was supposed to come for me every day at daybreak. But it hasn’t. It hasn’t shown up even one time since I went down the damn hole. The system had to have sent me down here–into glass tunnels where there’s no chance I’d touch sand again–to make sure I never had even the slightest chance to teleport. With one offered quest, it thought it got rid of its Gambler problem for another little while. Well… there might be a way to change that.

I accidentally squeeze Pearl in my excitement. She squeaks in surprise, then shoots me a very confused look.

“Pearl. Illumisia. Where are we right now?”

Illumisia cocks her head to the side, then raises her nose upwards and sniffs loudly. “We are under a specific stretch of ocean whose name would be censored. Why?”

“Is there sand under us? Above us?” I scramble back up the shield as a real plan starts to build. “Can it be considered the same sand as on the seasky shores, even if it’s by a longshot?”

“I… suppose it could.”

“That’ll have to do.” I grin and gesture down at the shark-wolf. “We need to break a tunnel. Drag that thing out of the pit and I’ll explain the plan.”

“So the plan involves destruction and the broken teleporter. I’m intrigued.” She says as she walks onto my shield, then bites into the glass and starts pulling the teleporter out. When she talks, she doesn’t even sound like she’s got her mouth full. “Did looking at your system give you a flash of inspiration?”

“I hope it did. Or else I got squeezed for nothing.” Pearl pouts, but I can see the relief in her eyes. “What’s the plan, Shelby?”

I grin wildly as images of my first encounter with the teleporter flash through my mind. “Sandworm rules.”

She tilts her head to the side. “What are sandworm rules?”

“The teleporter followed me underground. It only knew where I was because of the vibrations my footsteps made.” I explain, then gesture at my backpack. “Check the schematics if you need to make sure, but I’m confident there’s a sensor in there for this exact kind of thing. And the quest specifically says the teleporter will hunt me every day at dawn, with no distance or specific location requirement for that hunt.”

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Pearl looks over my shoulder, then scurries into my backpack to check the schematic. I patiently wait for her to confirm it as I watch Illumisia raise the teleporter into the air with her neck muscles alone.

“Huh. would you look at that.” Pearl says from inside of my backpack. “There’s an extremely sensitive kinetic sensor in the teleporter mainframe. So why hasn’t it been tracking us through the glass?”

“That’s the thing. We don’t know that it hasn’t.” I gesture for Illumisia to set the teleporter down, then go right back to Pearl. “I’m willing to bet that it’s been following us this entire time, but there hasn’t been enough space for it to break through the glass. And if it hasn’t, then it’ll beeline right for me the second daybreak hits if I’m standing on something it can sense through. Unless the system can outright lie, I guess.”

Illumisia shakes herself, then just her head. “The system cannot lie. Or else you would be dead already. It has to find workarounds within its own abilities to get rid of you… such as sending you into a place where the teleporter cannot physically reach, effectively cutting you out of the location requirement completely. Is this why you are confident in your idea?”

I laugh and shrug. “Confidence schmonfidence. I’m just trying to live, and this seems like a longshot that might have legs. So, Illumisia–can I survive you breaking the glass, or will the pressure difference flat-out kill me?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I can hold the pressure at bay for a little while.” Pearl assures me as she climbs back onto my shoulder. “But only for… about an hour at a time, then I’ll have to recharge. Do you think the system considers ‘daybreak’ to last for longer than an hour?”

“No idea, but probably not. And I really need the teleporter to be able to get here within…” I pull open my Class Card to check the time limit. “Five days, or else I’m already doomed and I don’t even know it. Can you start clearing the bottom of the scrap well, Illumisia? We’ll use that as our teleporter bait.”

“Do you care about the condition of anything other than the teleporter?”

“Nope. Go ham.”

She nods and licks her lips. “It will take me a few hours to do this. You and Pearlescence go search for more robots to destroy for Worth, and be back here at four hours. That will give us plenty of time to prepare for the teleporter’s arrival.”

I raise an eyebrow at her choice of words. “At four hours? Do you mean in four hours?”

“No, I mean at four hours after midnight. It is currently twenty-three hours and nine minutes, so you have just under five hours to search.” Illumisia turns and walks back to the edge of the pit, then glances back at us. “I would recommend truly testing those other shellraiser devices you have. If you can use either of them, they will most likely provide greater aid than a simple coin holder.”

“Advice taken.” I say with a salute, then turn to leave. The crunching of something massive falling on scrap echoes out from behind me, and I resist the urge to take a look. “So, Pearl, we’ve got some time to ourselves. Can you mark the entrance on the other side so we don’t miss it again?”

She flicks her wrist as I exit through the wall, and a mass of glistening black stretches out along the glass. A tiny string connects it to my awareness, and I know I’ll be able to find my way back.

“Return route secured.” She says eagerly. “So what’re we going to do now? Fight robots until you have enough Worth to settle the debt? Go super in depth on testing out those devices we didn’t really get the chance to? Ooh, how about we play around with your new Soul stat and see if it does anything really cool?”

I chuckle and tap on the knife at my hip. “Slow down there. We’ve got five hours, not five days. One thing at a time; walking off into the distance in search of something to fight.”

“That sounds dumb. You can walk and look at the knife at the same time. Here, I’ll take the holster off your arm so you can reconnect the knife.” Pearl insists and runs down my shoulder to do exactly what she says. It clicks free easily. “There! Now–knife time. I want to see what it can actually do.”

I flourish my card with unneeded theatrics and start walking opposite of the way we came. “Pull my chain, why don’t you. I… huh. Why didn’t I fully check this thing out earlier? It seems like the kind of thing I really should’ve done.”

“You did check it out, remember? You just didn’t have the coins to power it.” Pearl reminds me, then bounces impatiently on my shoulder. “Come on, come on, I want to see the knife! Power it up!”

Right. I almost forgot how poor I was just a few days ago. I disconnect the coin holster from my Class Card and slot the knife into it instead, then summon a single ghost quarter as I connect the knife to my Class Card. My awareness latches onto it like a thick cable, transferring information from it to me at a frankly terrifying rate.

Except it all comes in completely blank. Censored by the system.

“Bastard’s even censoring input from my own body. That’s bullshit.” I sigh as I study the knife. “Alright. The description said it was coin-powered, so let's see how the coin powers it.”

I slot the coin into the knife as Pearl watches with wide, excited eyes. It disappears into the slot with a sound that reminds me of the click of a gumball machine, and a thin aura starts to bleed out of the edge of the blade. A completely colourless aura that doesn’t feel much like anything at all.

Pearl and I both stare at it. I’m waiting for a popup, and she’s waiting for me to react to getting a popup. After ten seconds I start to feel like nothing’s going to come. After thirty I’m damn sure there’s nothing. But after nearly a minute of waiting and walking, the system finally deigned to give me a notification.

Attunement complete; this weapon has been set to your clearance level.

When loaded with a coin that has no spell in it, this weapon will calibrate to your current clearance level.

Doing so grants the ability to upgrade it to that level at the cost of Worth.

“Upgraded to my clearance level?” I spin the knife around in my hand, but it doesn’t look like anything’s changed. “I guess I should’ve expected weapons would have levels, too.”

Pearl reaches down and taps a finger against the words ‘no spell’. “The system says that like you can put coins with spells inside of them into the knife. Try out a shield first?”

“So it doesn’t blow up in my face?” I chuckle and produce another regular ghost quarter and fill it with the most standard shield I can imagine. “Let’s see what happens now.”

The coin slides into the knife completely silently. Once it’s fully in the handle clicks softly, almost like a padlock being opened, and the knife starts to vibrate. Not heavily, but just enough that I can feel something working inside of it. Something magical. Something that tugs heavily on my awareness, begging for an image instead of the shield I’d given it.

My mind flashes to a much longer sword for a split second. One with a tiny initial blade, but that projects out a bladed hologram at will. I don’t know where the picture came from, since it doesn’t feel like something I’d imagine, but when I glance over at Pearl I find my answer. She’s bouncing from one foot to the other, whispering something about a holographic blade that is followed by censorship so heavy that it makes my head spin.

Jet-black projections erupt from the knife’s blade. It shears through the air in a spray of multicoloured sparks, creating a double-sided sword with a half-moon tip that emerges perfectly from the knife. A prismatic edge coats the sides of the projected shield-blade, promising deadly sharpness and durability beyond anything regular metal could hope to provide.

Pearl squeals in happiness as I hold it up to get a better look at the strange blade. “It’s just like the other ones! Except smaller and a lot less resource heavy! Shelby. You have to try and change the shape of the blade.”

Before I can say anything, another popup overtakes my vision.

Shellbound Knife: Coinbound Shield activation.

When activated with Coinbound Shield, the weapon projects durable magic based on the user’s specifications.

The greater the Worth used for the spell, the greater the amount of magic this weapon has to work with.

I bring the blade down through the air, expecting it to have a little more weight behind it, but the thing’s still as light as just the knife itself. If I knew a little more about weapons, I could tell you if that was a good or bad thing. Instead, I’m just happy that I don’t have to swing around a fifty pound monster of a sword like some kind of anime character. But… does it even have to be a sword? The popup only says it projects a ‘durable magic’, not a durable magic blade.

“Ooh, Shelby, test subject!” Pearl taps on my face and points off into the distance. My awareness latches onto something the moment she points it out. “It looks like a slightly better version of the terrible robots from before! Go brutalize it with your new sword!”