I reached out to the potted seed, offering it my power.

The golden light from the soil brightened, then waned, sucking my mana toward the seed.

But then nothing happened. No sprouts formed; the soil didn't even stir.

[Seekflower Bloom: 0.5% complete]

This could take a while.

Actually, you know what, I didn't have time for this.

After a phone call, and a fifteen minutes' wait, the door into the armory creaked open. Hei peeked in.

"Sup," I said. "Make yourself comfortable, I need to borrow your mana."

He looked around warily, as though checking if anyone else was here. "For what?"

I grinned. "It's a secret."

I settled him down in an armchair and handed him the mug with the seed potted inside. As far as I knew, Doublerift didn't assign him any tasks, so it wasn't like he had much else to do.

"This doesn't look drinkable," he said.

"Please do not drink it. OK so, all you need to do is, like, hover your hand over it, and let it take your mana."

Hei looked at me, then at the pot.

"It's a Seekflower?" he asked.

"Dang it," I said. "Is it that obvious?"

"Lucky guess."

This was the reason I called Hei over, instead of some random underlings. It wasn't hard to figure out what I was trying to grow, and I'd rather keep info about this new Seekflower to myself for now. And Hei.

That being said, I did have work for the underlings. I called up Kevin and asked to borrow three of his for the week. He was hesitant, until I managed to get Doublerift on the line too.

"I need research assistants," I explained.

"Let her have them," Doublerift told Kevin, who responded with an audible sigh of resignation. Kevin assigned several of his subordinates to me and gave their numbers. While Hei continued to feed the Seekflower mana, I called my new minions to assign them their first task: Look for plasma science books from across the city.

"You know what you're gonna make?" Hei asked after I hung up.

"I've a rough idea," I said. "I'm pretty used to modding my Arcane Railgun, so I think I'm just gonna do that some more."

"Making a plasma rifle?" Hei guessed.

"I think that's the general direction." I walked over to my Arcane Railgun, which I had leaned against the wall in the corner. It had served me well, especially its metal-scanner. I hated to risk it by experimenting around more, but I literally knew this gun inside and out, and if there was one item I was confident in working with, it was this.

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Worst case scenario, if my experiments broke the gun, I'd need to downgrade to one of the Magical Crossbows the LCS had around.

I squatted down next to my gun to give it a good look.

"All energy can be turned into heat" I told Hei. "The LCS has a ton of items that put out energy in some form. Flaming daggers, electric blasts, sound waves, laser beams, you name it. I think I'mma convert all their energy output to heat, clobber them together, and cook up some really spicy plasma."

Hei sat in the armchair still. His mana had completely drained by now.

"That's unexpected from an ice mage," he commented.

"Well. My magic can still be used to provide cooling."

Kevin's underlings came back at the end of the day, and delivered about two dozen books. Way more than I had time to read, but better too many than too few. I thanked them, then headed out the armory. My work there was done until tomorrow. But I brought the Seekflower seedling out with me.

"You can come over," Hei offered me. "Back to the grocery."

"Sounds good," I said. I wondered if I should move in with him. We had about two weeks left before the final confrontation, according to Doublerift's timeline. I'd rather not waste any nights alone. Not when after everything, I had finally found him again.

I got in Hei's car. We visited a furniture outlet, grabbed a second bed for me, and then returned to Hei's grocery store. We found dinner from the frozen aisles, ate together, and rested for the night. I set my bed in the store office, across the room from Hei's. It was getting a bit cramped in there. All the better to keep us close.

While I slept, I held the Seekflower pot, feeding it my mana.

The next day, I made a tour of the LCS's armories to gather all the magic items I wanted to use, a bit over 20 in total. Most were pieces of equipment with elemental emanations, like flaming daggers and all that. I brought them all back to my "main" armory, the one where I discovered the Seekflower. I began setting up initial experiments there, referring to the science books brought to me once in a while. Hei kept me company there.

A couple days passed that way. I pried the Sunstone out of the flaming dagger's hilt, and peeled off blue dragonscale from an electrified armor. From each item I intended to use for raw energy, I harvested their core components – magical gems, enchanted woods and metals, artifacts from mythical creatures. At the end, I mounted all those cores on to a mithril armguard. To synchronize their outputs, I attached electrodes to each harvested component, then drove a 120Hz current, mixed with my own mana, through them all.

"I'll call this the Armguard Engine," I told Hei. "It's gonna be the power source for my gun."

Before I had a chance to test my new creation, Doublerift texted me an emergency summon.

"We gotta go," I said to Hei, who was on the other side of the armory, doing what appeared to be spear drills with an imaginary spear. "Doublerift wants us in his throne room."

"For what?" Hei asked.

"I don't know," I said. "But it sounds urgent."

Hei and I drove off through the streets. After entering an underground passageway and clearing several gates, we arrived at Doublerift's inner chamber, his throne room.

To our surprise, the rest of his Champions and Chief Officers were also there. Eight in total, four on his left and four on his right, lining the side walls of the chamber. Doublerift sat front and center, behind his grand table of carved stone, upon his elevated dark throne.

Doublerift raised a hand. A blue aura circulated around his fingers, and the door behind us closed and locked themselves.

I snuck a glance at Kevin, who stood near us to the left. His skull helmet obscured any hint of emotion I could've discerned.

I steeled my nerves.

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

Doublerift leaned forward, his hands clasped upon the table.

"Please, take your positions," he said to Hei and me, gesturing us to the side of the rooms. We moved to join the duo-queues with the other Champions and Officers.

Doublerift cleared his throat. "Good. Let us now discuss the details of our final battle."

"Our main task will be to kill Alice," he continued. "However, there is one complication. She has achieved immortality."