After his moment of jubilation, Beck pulled himself away from the big woman, embarrassed.

Meanwhile, Mason and Cora had stayed at the window, only having turned at his exclamation. Now they were staring, while Kenna wore a genuine smile. He holstered the focus gun and cleared his throat, "I uh, I learned a spell." The notification still hung in his vision for a moment before he dismissed it.

Mason's eyes widened, and while Cora's hair was once more clouding her eyes, he got the distinct impression of a raised eyebrow from her tone. "That was fast."

He could only shrug. "I got a pretty good view of what you did, so I just copied it as best I could."

"You 'copied' a divine spell, after seeing it once, with thirty minutes of thinkin'." The gnomish woman began walking across the room.

"I copied the idea of it. I think, anyway. System called it Ice Bullet."

"What else? What grade is it? How much does it cost to cast?" As she spoke, her pace increased. By the time she finished with her questions, she had pulled him down by the collar of his breastplate. Manic red eyes bore into him from behind a split curtain of cloud.

In response, he pulled up the system description of the spell.

Ice Bullet Grade: Basic Cost: 5 mana Fling an icy projectile with the force of a sling.

As he read it aloud, point by point, the small woman relaxed. Once he was done, she let him go, brushing her hair back over her eyes. Kenna cleared her throat. "Right. Now that you're done manhandling my boy, how about we get a move on?"

Cora nodded and turned, headed back toward the window. Meanwhile, Beck turned to Kenna, confusion etched onto his face. "Your boy? What does that mean?"

The big red woman only smirked and flicked him on the forehead before going to follow the gnome. Beck sighed and followed, grumbling, "Nobody ever tells me anything."

Once their group was assembled at the window once more, they began to plot their route through the facility. A multitude of portholes and plate windows dotted this side of the wall, allowing them to easily identify which sections were routes they could take and which were seemingly empty space. Their consensus was reached quickly: the most direct route to the floor would be best.

That in mind, they budgeted only four places were hallways looked to let out into larger rooms. The halls they chose were all steep, the last one being so steep that Beck hoped it was a stairway. Near the end of their deliberations, the sound of grinding stone sounded from the back of the room, and when they turned, another of the automatons had emerged from a new hole in the far corner.

The metal gnome clanked and clanged its way over to the bulkhead they had come from, then turned to them. A halting voice emitted from the thing, high pitched and tinny. "You are not authorized to be here. Please present authorization or you will be forced to vacate the premises. Any unauthorized personnel who refuse to vacate-", another, more natural voice came through before it switched back, "The Pleasant Peaks Hydropower Facility- will be treated as trespassers. Trespassers are designated as ‘kill on sight’."

Before anyone else could get a word in edgewise, Kenna stepped up to the thing and swung, taking its bronze head from its silvered shoulders. She turned back to the group with that same smug smirk. She wasn't prepared for it to grab her thighs from behind, where her armor didn't cover. "Hostile action detected. Perpetrators will be treated as hostile."

The automaton made a crackling sound, and the next thing they knew, Kenna had fallen to the ground, her entire lower body convulsing. The thing still had a hold on her, so Beck drew his focus gun and put his new spell to the test. One, two, three bullets punched through the metal torso. It seemed almost completely unfazed. "New aggressor detected. Engaging."

One hand released Kenna, only to be pointed directly at him. Thankfully, the others had sprung into motion as well. Cora set her polearm to work on metal joints, while Mason interposed himself between Beck and an arc of lightning that cast the room in bluish-white for a brief second.

By the time his eyes recovered, the arm holding Kenna had been crushed. Mason flanked around to the opposite side of Kenna, and now that she wasn't convulsing, she kicked the machine into his shield. Before the thing could recover, Mason pushed it against the wall, where Kenna and Cora added their own strength to keep it pinned. Despite their efforts, the shield was already being pushed back towards them. A quick glance revealed his remaining mana: 55/100.

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Beck darted around to the side and braced himself against the wall. The barrel of his weapon just barely fit between it and the shield, but he was able to get a bead on his target. Five Ice Bullets went through the open cavity that was the automaton's neck, punching through the plating of its torso. 30/100. Thankfully, after a few more moments of struggle, the thing went limp.

Mason pulled his shield from the wall, and the metal remains fell like innumerable pots and pans. It even made a similar sound. Cora was the first to investigate it, taking the torso and examining it thoroughly. Mason wasn't far behind, though he inspected limb segments. Meanwhile, Beck and Kenna had retreated a bit. "That thing was entirely too tough. I put, what, eight shots through it? And it still kept movin'."

His companion snorted. "Yeah, and I took its head off before that."

It was his turn to chuckle, now. "True. Probably wasn't the best idea, lookin' back."

Kenna faked a scoff and mockingly brought a hand to her chest. "It was gonna try and kill us anyway. I just took initiative."

"Yeah, and you just about got yourself killed. We’re both lucky you're tough."

The pair fell silent for a moment, until Cora found what she was looking for. “Ah-hah! Y’all c'mere and look at this!”

The three of them gathered around. The gnome had pried off the section between the legs and was holding it up for them to inspect. The first thing that Beck noticed was the hole punched through the middle, surrounded by engravings. Beck had no idea what he was looking at. “What is it?”

“This, boys and girls, is a control circuit. Every time we managed to get our hands on one, they’ve had these. Different places, usually, but they’re always on the bronze parts. Head isn’t a common place for it, but we’ve found one there before.”

Kenna leaned over Becks shoulders, “So what, we just play a guessing game if one tries to kill us again?”

Cora made a show of turning her palm up and down. “Yes and no. Easiest way we’ve found to deal with them is just crushing them. Still, easier said than done.”

“Yeah, and we just tried that. It didn’t work. And that one only had one arm.”

“Then yeah, guessing game. Hope you get it the first time.”

The quartet lapsed into silence once more. And again, it didn’t last long. Beck took a look at his mana display.

“So uh, how do you get mana back?”

Cora looked at him like he was an idiot and Mason wore a quizzical expression similar to his own. Kenna, however, had the blank stare of someone who had just been reminded of their spouse’s birthday on the day of. “Shit, I forgot to tell you about that.”

“What do you mean, you forgot to tell me? How do you forget that?!”

“Listen, it's been a long time since I did it on purpose. I don’t really think about it anymore. Anyway, since I remembered, now’s as good a time as any.” She grabbed his hand and pulled him over toward a couple of nearby desks, one of which she sat down on. He followed her lead, sitting cross legged on a desk directly opposite her. “So, quick explanation: You'll get a bit back over time. It should be ten an hour, but I'm not sure if yours'll be different. Should get something that tells you at Level 5 in [Mana Manipulation]. That's the slow way. You can speed it up if you just grab mana from the air. There's less that I can use here, but you should be golden. Place is full of water mana."

He took a moment to process all of that. First off, he had no idea that Level 5 was a Skill milestone. That gave him another thing to look forward to in the near future. Second, why was doing it actively less efficient in certain areas, while passive was seemingly unaffected? Finally, how was he supposed to do it in the first place? Kenna simply sat there like she had just answered every possible question he could have had, so he dove into himself to see if he could figure it out on his own.

The first thing of note was his new mana channel. It ran up into his right shoulder from the top of his core, then dropped down through his arm and into his hand, terminating where his palm met his wrist. Due to his teacher's brilliance, after a few minutes of trying to simply _will_ the outside mana into the channel, He figured it out. From his core, he pulled his mana back through the channel, leaving it empty for but a moment. The atmospheric mana burned on the way in, sending small needles of pain through his arm the further in that it went. Once it was in his core, he could finally understand why. The mana he had brought in wasn't pure water like he was used to, but instead, a mix of the four main elements. Trace amounts of fire, air, and earth mana all stretched through the stream of water that poured into his core.

The pond at the center had shrunk considerably after everything that had transpired, past even the icy pillars that supported the new mana channel. Now, the atmospheric mana plunged into the pond like a flood. It didn't grow, though. Over the hole in the center, a whirlpool had formed that sucked every drop of the new mana into the depths. When the whirlpool subsided, bubbles filled its place. As soon as those bubbles started, he got the hiccups, which went away the moment the bubbles stopped.

A few minutes later, slowly, the pond began to fill again. After what felt like an hour, but was more likely only around thirty minutes, it had filled completely back to where it had been.

With that figured out and taken care of, Beck returned to the outside world. Mason and Cora were waiting for the two of them, Mason seemingly having taken the time to gather up all of the parts of the automaton into a sack. Once they had all checked to make sure they weren't leaving anything, they unsealed the next bulkhead and stopped short.

What should have been a hallway with a slight downward slope was instead... nothing. A wall of pure, inky blackness met them, and only when it began to quietly unspool into the room with them did they realize what it actually was. Smoke. Mason set his shield while the others backed away, wary of attack from within.

What they didn't expect was for the smoke to come to life and attack.