Amazon Apocalypse 4: Chapter 25

The Lich King put up no last stand in some hidden fortress. If such a base existed, it wasn’t anywhere we could find. Sharky might have eaten him and all his remaining men before we found them, but I doubted we’d be that lucky. Still, our favorite Void Leviathan had vanished with a few hundred of those creepy Voidlings he made trailing behind him, and nobody had seen him since. Presumably, he was off having a bit of fun scavenging for food. I’d resummon him when I had to and let him roam free until then.

Meeting the heads of other survivor factions in San Antonio was more a job for Margaret and the others than for me, so I got out of their way and let them do their thing while I returned to work on my ongoing projects.

I couldn’t run my experience point farm with Sharky out adventuring, but whether he was killing monsters at home or abroad, it mattered little to me. I was still grouped in a party with my companions, and the experience points were going to them.

Now that I looked, one of them was gaining a level every few minutes. Last I heard, they were all on diplomacy duty with Margaret, so the levels seemed strange. They must have run into some trouble to be racking up so many kills. Even I’d gained a few levels from whatever they were up to. I kept an eye on their health bars, but none of them were taking any damage. They must have been easy fights.

I left them to it. The best thing I could do for our faction was figure out how to upgrade our gear. I spent several hours with my legs crossed and a furrow in my brow as I thought things over. I’d tried working with engineering design software, but it would take extensive modifications to rework what I had into a program that could handle the multidimensional aspects of what I planned to build.

So instead, I did it all in my head and only went to the software for anything I needed to 3D print. The lot of goods I picked up in San Antonio contained a variety of 3D printers, and I was happy to put them to work. It was a good thing I was building a bigger workspace, because I was running out of room in my barn.

Gobgob came in to investigate a few times, likely intrigued by whatever it was I was designing. She and the other goblins had finished everything I had for them and were on a well-deserved break. I waved her off and told her to enjoy herself. Once I was done with the prototype, I’d need plenty of help mass producing it.

The exact design of my Mark One power armor would be a monstrosity made of about a thousand pounds of steel, with most of the mechanical components stored in pocket spaces. That would make them much harder to damage and allow the person inside to comfortably operate the device.

Ultimately, the goal was to make power armor of high enough quality that an E-Grade combatant could fight a D-Grade one comfortably. Pitting my companions against the Lich King’s army had proven that having a few people at a higher grade made all the difference in a large-scale fight. If I could make equipment that bumped everyone up an entire grade, we’d be practically unstoppable.

Here, my early experiments with making golems came in handy. I’d designed a system back then that would turn sensory inputs into motion through enchantment. Magic was much better at sensing intent than any of the sensors I’d picked up, so after some thorough testing, I stuck with magic for most of the visible components.

Technology was far better at handling calculations and activating enchantments when and where they were needed. This had the added benefit of concealing exactly how the armor worked. My time in the Dragon Lodge proved that high-end artificer equipment could fetch a tidy profit. I needed something to sell to get more contribution points.

I figured power armor ought to fetch as much as one of Dan’s sensual golems, so just making one or two extra of these would make my next trip over to the Mucaria pocket realm far more comfortable. The last trip had done a lot for me, and I was eager to take at least a few of my companions through the place in search of similar results.

Maybe Reluna would even like to make the trip, though since she wasn’t a native, bringing her back to Crownhill might prove more complicated. Maybe once we went through one more integrations and C-Grades could come and go freely, she’d be able to travel with us. By then, I’d finally be able to bring Cyra over instead of only ever visiting her.

I thought about the future, while most of my mind focused on constructing the frame for the power armor. I had a few scrap armor sets kicking around, so much of the work was already done. From the scrap, I assembled the biggest set of armor I had. It was comically large by most standards. Maybe Knuckles from the Chain Brigade could wear it, though he'd have to stand on his tiptoes within it. Cyra was tall enough, though the armor was currently shaped a bit too masculine for her figure.

For me, the extra bulk would largely be for intimidation. It wasn't strictly necessary, but warriors tended to have larger builds thanks to their stats. Besides, I had a certain image of what someone in power armor looked like. It just meant I'd have to fudge some of the internals a bit. Like building giant platform shoes.

Next, I started adding the pistons and servos. While the enchantments provided strength, durability, and power sourced from monster cores, these would add raw brute strength. Each arm would have the strength of an excavator behind it, and once I reduced the weight by hiding a lot of the mass in pocket realms, the legs would have enough strength to jump straight over a two-story building like my farmhouse.

Hours passed in a focused frenzy of construction. It should have been weeks, but my new abilities let me assemble and disassemble everything in minutes instead of hours. And my new ability to manipulate temperatures meant I could melt and bend steel faster than any smith. Reginald would be terribly envious if he could see me at work. He’d probably wonder what smith helped me forge this thing when I was finally ready to show him the components I needed to begin mass production.

During the building process, I coded hundreds of different diagnostic protocols onto a dedicated single-board computer, which would output to the center of the helmet. Most of the controls were on an armored control consol on the inside of the left forearm, but I programmed in a few voice commands and a bit of a fast and dirty method to navigate menus using only facial movements.

The enchantments I carved into each component were far more potent than anything I’d crafted in former projects. Copying letters from the Book of Sacred Knowledge gave me thousands of new ideas. I took a few of the most potent of them and discovered they had an even more profound reinforcement effect when copied there than on paper.

When I was done, I marveled at my creation. Its appearance seemed downright horrific, spread out as it was. Cables, wires, and mechanical components spread out from every surface, like a living creature that had its guts turned inside out.

After running through the last of my diagnostic protocols and feeling confident everything worked as intended, I pushed everything except the armor itself into a higher spacial dimension. A thousand pounds of metal soon turned into a mere two hundred, and I tried on the armor.

I sat there for a moment, admiring the whole thing. Just the mechanical components alone should have taken a full team of engineers years of work. The magical components should have taken a team of artificers as well, only I wasn’t sure any such team existed.

And yet, I’d managed it all on my own. I took a certain measure of pride in my creation.

“Time to put you on and take you for a spin...” I rubbed my hands together.

That was when I realized I’d never come up with a way to put the armor on. I’d built the components in such a way that the armor didn’t come apart, with each component welded into a seamless whole. But without a way to equip it, nobody could ever use it.

I sighed and popped the whole thing back into real space. Then, I spent the next hour coming up with a hinge system so the back could pop open and I could slip inside. It weakened the back of the armor more than I’d like, but it was better than leaving the armor as nothing more than a showpiece.

Eventually, I was done and finally wearing my new power armor. The first real test went decently. I didn’t quite clear my roof when I tried to jump over it, but I was close. After instructing the mannequin construction workers to patch up the hole, I fine tuned the system a bit more. I worked straight through the night, testing and iterating until morning came and I finally had something that worked.

“Computer, activate autopilot,” I said, bleary-eyed after a day of work. I set several waypoints in the direction I knew San Antonio lay and had the power armor run in that direction. Then, I tried to take a nap during the trip.

That turned out to be significantly harder than I thought it would, since the autopilot made no effort to evade trees or other obstacles. Thankfully, it was bulky enough that all but the strongest trunks snapped in its wake, and I got a few minutes of shuteye. I was eager to test this thing out in the field.

My legs felt a bit weird moving despite me trying to sleep, but after the trip was done, I’d rested just enough to not look like a madman beneath my helmet. I woke up from my nap because dozens of monsters were attacking my suit and I was stuck in a giant spider web.

I blinked, yawned, and tore my way free. An enormous D-Grade spider was wrapping me up, but I snapped off one of its mandibles and buried it in its head. I found myself up in the tree canopy, and when I tore myself free of the web, I dropped three stories to the ground, where I crushed a dozen minor monsters down below. They had probably also wanted to eat me and had sensed my curse, but had been slower to find me.

I spent a minute stomping them into a paste. Truthfully, it would have been faster to use Mana Bolts to deal with them, but I wanted to give the suit a test. To an E-Grade with a far smaller toolkit than what I had, this suit would have been the difference between being completely screwed in this hostile patch of wilderness to being able to fight their way to freedom. All in all, it was shaping up to be a successful project.

I arrived in San Antonio after stomping through monsters and wilderness. Partway through, I realized I needed a weapon for this suit. The car had a few cars on it, so I ripped out the axle and a chunk of the undercarriage. The metal wasn’t that great, but I quickly bent it into place thanks to my new skill with reshaping metal. I even shaped a few quick enchantments into it to reinforce it. Soon, I was holding a giant sword. If I were out of this armor, it would be taller than I was. Wielding it in the armor, it looked closer to normal size.

Looking in the side-view mirror of the car I just cannibalized, I realized I looked like a big bruiser of a man, complete with my giant sword. Something about being a spellcaster disguised as a brute tickled something inside me. I lumbered around a while longer in my armor until I finally came across people from Crownhill.

“Stay where you are, stranger. This area is under the control the control of a dangerous criminal organization. We’re official forces from Crownhill to bring peace to this area. What is your affiliation?” Kyle shouted, pointing his spear at me.

I felt a tingle run up the spine of my armor, but not up my back. Much to my surprise, Kyle’s examine targeted the armor instead of me.

This was a rare opportunity to see another side of my subordinates and maybe do a bit more field testing for my new power armor.