I asked Jack to take Saber upstairs, up to the third floor, where she could rest, and he could keep serviceable watch over the vicinity of the neighborhood.

"You better make this worth it," Jack said to me before departing with Saber. "Ten hours. That's as long as I'll wait."

That was how long I had to figure out a way to survive.

We had few options, if any. We had no way of taking on the Bounty Hall in a straight up fight, not after what we had seen from Cirrus and whoever sent the exploding rats. The odds stacked doubly against us while we bore severe injuries. Neither could we outrun the Bounty Hall, not without venturing out of our shelter while on death's door.

Our best bet was to keep playing our game of cat-and-mouse, and beat them at it.

But according to what Tanin mentioned during our travels together, Seekflowers weren't exactly rare in Gold. The Bounty Hall, as the strongest organization around, was bound to have multiple. They were the key to navigating through the obscuring fog of the massive suburb. They'd also be the key, I reckon, to tracking down bounty targets like Saber. And that made them our biggest problem.

The Seekflowers had a crucial weakness: their mana cost. Each time you used a Seekflower to find someone, it'd cost 200 mana. Even a mage would run out after five, six uses. It wasn't something they could spam. Even if they had a small party to pass the Seekflower around in, they wouldn't be able to use it more than twice or thrice an hour, I'd reckon.

Meanwhile, my metal detector had a cooldown of just one minute. As long as we could see them coming, as long as we could decipher their trajectories, we could change our courses to evade them.

The problem: The Seekflower had infinite range. My detector, meanwhile, had a range of 50 meters.

At least, it did for now.

I had ten hours left. I'd bet it all on one project, on boosting the range of my metal detector. Tenfold. Twentyfold, even. Enough to see our enemies coming before they get close.

My gun and its metal-detection feature had names. The railgun was the Arcane Railgun, and the metal detector was the Electromagnetic Pulse.

The pulse, I noted, came from a stubby antenna sticking out the top of my railgun. A thin, metallic stick roughly the size of a pen. As far as I could tell, it served both as the pulse-emitter and the receiver.

A radar, as far as I could remember, worked similarly to echolocation. A radar has an antenna, which sends out an electromagnetic pulse, then detects the "echo" as the pulse bounced off nearby metallic objects. In the case of my railgun, the echoes would then be magically transmitted to my visual cortex. Or something along those lines, but the end result was that I'd be able to "see" all the metallic objects around me as cobalt-colored auras.

Which was part of the problem. I wasn't interested in seeing all the metal objects. I didn't care about the water pipes under the ground, or the street lamps overhead. If I wanted to watch for enemies, I'd only need to scan at eye level. 360-degree spherical coverage was a complete waste of the power of the electromagnetic pulse, the EM-pulse.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

Which was where the dish-heater would come in. Specifically, the dish part. The parabolic reflector dish.

I brought the dish-heater into the garage. There, I found various tools: Hammers, saws, screwdrivers. Well-stocked with all the usual. I put myself to work to detach the dish from the rest of the heater. I loosened screws, then sawed furiously at soldered joints.

The dish's purpose was to reflect the infrared radiation of the heater in a single direction, so you could heat up a specific part of the room. Satellite dishes functioned very much the same way. A dish concentrates all the energy of an EM-pulse into a single direction, into a beam. Furthermore, it catches the bounceback echo and funnels everything it intercepts into the antenna. Thus, a dish serves double-duty to enhance the range of a radar.

As I sawed through the second soldered joint out of a dozen, a cough interrupted my work. A trickle of blood ran down the corner of my mouth.

[HP: 165/1040]

My condition was worsening. I doubted that physical labor did me any good.

I set the saw down on a table and waded to the corner of a garage. I leaned against the walls, gasping for air, then sunk down until I sat on the cement floor. The tightness and pain in my chest made it hard to breathe. Black splotches danced across my vision, and my head felt light.

This wasn't going to cut it.

I needed a break. Maybe thirty minutes. Then back to work.

And that was what I did. Half-conscious, in the corner of the garage, with only the hum of a bare bulb overhead to accompany me. The floor felt damp and cold. Though I didn't mind, being an ice mage and all.

Though - that gave me an idea. I was a mage. Why did I need to saw through things with my hands?

Fifteen more minutes, I alloted to myself. Just enough rest to stabilize my condition.

At the end of it, I stood back up, still light-headed, but marginally better. I grabbed my railgun, walked up to the dish-heater, then aimed it at one of the soldered joints attaching the dish to the wire-grate covering it. I steadied my hand. A glancing shot should do the trick.

I squeezed the trigger.

A bullet of arcane force blasted out of the bore. It tore clean through the wire-grate, and thankfully didn't damage the dish itself.

Looking good.

I fired shot after shot at the grate, until I knocked its last bits off the dish.

The door to the garage swung open. It startled me, and I almost dropped my gun. But I knew better, and managed to regain my grasp and aim it through the doorway.

It was just Jack, thankfully. He had a scowl on his face, and a drawn dagger in his grip.

"What's going on?!" he asked, scanning the room.

"Just working," I told him, recovering from my own shock. "No worries."

He sheathed his dagger cautiously. "Sounded like there was a fight. And you look half dead."

"Just doing metalwork. Is it loud?"

"Quite," Jack said with an uneasy nod. You'll need to keep the volume down."

"Sorry. Will do."

And with that, Jack left me to my task.

I had made progress. With two last railgun shots, I managed to free the dish from the rest of the heater. I picked it up. The prize of my sweat and blood. And I held it behind the antenna of my railgun for a test run.

A faint glow pulsed down the length of my railgun. The same glow that I'd see upon leveling up. Something had happened to my weapon.

I held my breath and checked its new stats.