Ignoring the chaos around him, Jerry looked at his new skill and smiled.

Emergency Recharge: instantly refill mana and stamina reserves. Each use of this skill reduces max reserves by 10%. One percentage point of reduction is removed for every full day of rest per level of the skill. The skill cannot be used if you've changed location or fought in the last minute and has a cool-down of one minute.

The skill's cost and limitations were terrible, essentially reducing his maximum capabilities for days with every use while being useless in the kind of personal fights they'd been engaging in since the monster invasion began. But as events had repeatedly proven, Jerry wasn't and shouldn't try to be a front-line fighter. He was a superpowered engineer; he built things. In comics and movies those guys tended to wear awesomely powerful armor and mow down legions of enemies and for a time Jerry had been living that dream.

But was that really the best way to help, outside personal protection? A suit of armor could only fit so much tech and introduced a host of engineering problems with both its shape and the need to accommodate the pilot. Simpler shapes, larger devices, both could easily be far more powerful than a battlesuit given the same level of tech... plus they didn't endanger their creator when deployed in the field. As said creator, Jerry gave significant weight to that last feature.

Which brought things back to his latest skill. What he could build on short notice was limited by his available mana. In fact, for those projects that needed to be built in one go due to the limitations of magical fabrication or the fragility of individual components, the magical energy he could get on short notice put a hard limit on both size and complexity. With the new skill he could essentially have up to half a dozen times as much magic to work with if he was willing to pay the price... and with a monster army closing in and those lightning towers pinning them down he certainly was.

Using Emergency Recharge was like a dozen shots of coffee, a gallon of energy drinks and a connection to a main power line straight into his system. Pain, exhaustion, even wounds no longer seemed to matter as he was filled with a sense of invulnerability, the potential to do anything. Jerry didn't need to look at his still-depleted hit points to know that was a dangerous idea to indulge, something he'd immediately turned away from without the need and motivation to come up with a solution to the team's problems.

A nearby demon roared as it charged a fireball in each hand; it really motivated him.

Energy delved into the ruins of the underground passage beside Jerry, coursing through the concrete rubble, the iron of rebar and old pipes, the lead and antimony of illegally poisonous sealants the companies building the city hadn't cared about, the copper in underground power cables and the fiber optics of communication lines. His Fabricate skill reached deeper still, to the ruin of his power armor and all the power sources, servos and energy weapons he'd put to great use against the monsters before.

None of what he'd previously built would be enough against the inhuman army assaulting their position now. Their team of three was not fighting isolated undead foes, or enemy groups of hundreds, or even multiple powerful enemies. His armor's sensors could detect and count the thousands of vibration and heat sources approaching through the ruins and by interfacing with it so could Jerry even with his eyesight still shot to hell. He crunched the numbers almost instantly and came to an unpleasant result. Nothing he could build would stem that tide, even with his new skill. Of the girls' efforts he was less certain, but from how they were already struggling they wouldn't be able to either - not unless they had trump cards of their own.

And intelligence score of eighty got working on the problem, backed by a far lower but still borderline superhuman awareness and common sense. His system called it "Wisdom", but Jerry was not certain the appellation was correct. He didn't really feel wiser. Then again, how would a seventeen year old boy know how being wise felt? A question for later; coming up with a super-genius, foolproof, invincible plan to get his hide and the girls out of their imminent deaths took too much processing power. Mentally reviewing all he had ever read about science and technology, extrapolating from that basis what his skill enhancements could do and simulating potential solutions was not something even his superpowered brain could do reliably or even close to completely, but Jerry knew it didn't have to be perfect; it only needed to be good enough.

At the same time, copper, iron and carbon flowed out from both existing materials his Fabricate skill repurposed and his resource-creation skills. His entire mana supply emptied within a minute and he had to use Emergency Recharge for the second time because bulk construction was the most energy-intensive part of the process. He had to be careful, tally up every cost for his plan and keep it in mind or risk either running out before he could finish or undershooting the size of the project and thus sufficient effectiveness. A gleaming translucent scaffolding and overlapping plating rose from the ground like a sculpture of crystal, seemingly delicate enough to shatter at a single hammering blow. Appearances could be deceptive though, for this was the internal armor and skeleton of his new creation, made of steel that was also glass. Had it been purely mundane matter, it would have already been about three times as tough as the toughest tool steels against everything except pure heat, but Jerry's skills boosted it to far beyond that level. Being armor, its defensive properties were boosted by 480% thanks to Enhanced Armorer. Being part of both a robotic system and a purely electrical device, all its properties were boosted by 210% for each skill, for a total multiplication of slightly over fifty-five times. Jerry doubted even Maya could punch through it without protracted efforts.

Copper with a similar glass-like sheen flowed over the inner structural and armor layers, though this time it remained fully opaque. That wasn't because the copper-scandium alloy lacked the completely disordered atomic structure that would have made it a glass but due to the network of carbon filaments throughout the material. Well, not exactly carbon any more; Jerry had used his Fabricate skill to reorder their atomic structure to something much closer to diamond. The network of diamondoid filaments were a single, seamless, flawless, absurdly complex crystal. While such a thing was not physically impossible to exist without magic, it would be impossible to make until humanity invented 3d printers capable of accurately rearranging atoms. In short, it was a metamaterial straight out of space operas, with some very interesting properties Jerry's device would soon abuse. Properties that were multiplied by his skills just like everything else.

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But the exterior, armored parts of the construction were merely a shell to protect the internal components. Half of Jerry's magical energy and attention went to said components, cubic yard after cubic yard of electronics taking shape along with the armored exterior. First, came the rotating inner shell and the servos responsible for said rotation. Due to how the internals were designed, even though the primary emitter would be capable of rising or lowering to aim at targets at different altitudes it would be incapable of rotation thus the whole device had to rotate with it; more robotic turret than robotic limb, though fortunately both fell under the umbrella of robotics.

Then came the layer after layer of induction loops, diamondoid coils wrapped around steel cores that caused electric currents to the next wire in line. The idea came to Jerry from inductive cell phone chargers that used that principle to wirelessly charge cell phones. They were less efficient than simply plugging the charger in but way cooler. Except Jerry's skills multiplied the properties of electrical systems, efficiency and output included; he could build a pair of loops where there was greater electric current produced to the induced coil than the current in the inducing coil. By chaining coils together he could multiply the power output again and again, the only limits being the size of the device and the resilience of the conductive materials he used. The diamondoid was not a true superconductor; Jerry's knowledge and skills didn't go that far. It was, however, not far from one either and its conductivity was multiplied by Jerry's skills too. Starting with his armor's 10-kilowatt energy cells, the projected output of his creation would exceed that of most nuclear power plants... assuming they were not overrun before he managed to finish it.

xxxx xxxx

Half a dozen demons charged me, trying to hold my attention while several dozen wights swerved around our fight and made a beeline for the slowly rising tower behind me. On the other side of Jerry's construction, Mandy was busy fending off wave after wave of wight and ghoul infantry who were using their speed, swarm tactics and lack of fire magic in an attempt to wear the redhead down and push through her defensive spells to their goal beyond. Whoever ran things on the monster side had seen Jerry's new school project and was violently objecting.

Neither of us would let him. Mandy had shifted from ranged blasts and magical confiscation to a thin but intense layer of aggressively defensive magics that had so far obliterated everything that attempted to pass through them. Lacking her versatility, I'd been forced to spend most of my energy on crafting lasting force-fields to do the job for me.The wights found that the hard way the moment they came within forty feet as several blades of invisible force hacked them apart. The same blade-shaped fields of proximakinesis struck the demons charging me in turn as they rotated around me, but only caused welts to appear on the demons' pebbly, iron-hard skin. My forcefield-creation power was simply not good enough to give them a cutting edge without being applied on objects that already had one but in exchange the fully immaterial blades neither broke nor stopped when they failed to overcome the monstrous obstacle; they simply passed through, made a full orbit around me and struck again.

The twenty-foot piece of rebar I was holding suddenly doubled in length mid-swing; its length was a distance, it was a weapon I wielded so that distance was to myself, and it wasn't a living being so the alteration worked just fine. Reinforced by both Proximakinesis and Force Adjustment and swung at superspeed, the metal rod could handle the move without bending or breaking. It also maintained its angular velocity as it doubled in length, so the kinetic energy of my best swing was suddenly multiplied by close to a factor of four; the rod went through the demons' necks like a tire iron through melons.

A flight of Stymphalian Chickens tried a kamikaze dive at Jerry's tower. A Chronal Leap took me to the air to intercept them without needing to waste time to accelerate or cross the distance, the piece of rebar reduced to half its length and already mid-swing. The lead chicken's head shattered in metal fragments and molten goo before they knew I was there and two more Chronal Leaps did the same for a pair of its fellows before the flight could adjust. Stymphalian Chickens were about as tough as tanks; they also had the annoying tendency to violently explode on death, turning their thirty-ton mass into detonating lumps of shrapnel and magic. A Spatial and Chronal leap combo took me back to the ground as the lead third of the flight burst to bits, severely damaging and knocking aside those that followed. At the speeds they had been flying the Stymphalian Chickens failed to recover quickly enough and even the toughness of a tank won't save you if you hit the ground at five hundred miles an hour.

A rush of energy at their deaths, my third since the battle started, was ignored as I fell on the mass of skeletal archers trying to get close enough to shoot Jerry to death. I simply could not afford to increase either my powers or my attributes while playing defense; even a few seconds of distraction while I adjusted would let monsters swarm through to kill Jerry then attack Mandy from behind. Breaking their formations had stopped working as a means to get some breathing room; their numbers had increased enough that there were less enemy "formations" as there was a loose sea of monsters rising to drown us in a tide of violence.

They were succeeding too. Despite my speed, powers and enhanced abilities, I could not be everywhere, or notice and dodge every attack - not even close. And while toughness and adaptation was reducing any hits I took to the equivalent of paper cuts, pinpricks, or cigarette burns, enough of them would eventually take me down. As more and more monsters arrived, the knowledge that I could stop fighting at any moment whispered seductively in the back of my mind.

Chronal Leap and Retributive Defense meant the lightning towers were no longer a limit to my movements. If I wanted to I could get to any part of the city essentially unopposed, moving large distances without physically crossing them. If I needed to I could get out of the city entirely in only a few seconds. But that would mean abandoning my friends and the other survivors to their fate. Getting out of the city just to bring help had crossed my mind in the past few minutes but been immediately discarded. I did not trust myself to get back to this monster-infested place after the help was found.

So I held the line, hoping Jerry had a solution that got all of us out of this alive...