Chapter 308 – Homeward Bound

The flight back to Xlanax takes a little under six months, giving Emily plenty of time to utilise most of the materials she spent all of Elivarus’ funds on. Surprisingly, having checked the mercenary group’s account on Morten Hub, she found that Melvor had honoured the loose agreement they’d made and paid several thousand credits into it.

She uses a large portion of the raw materials she bought improving the production lines within Elisime and building back up her army, pumping out a new generation of her standardised foot soldiers with pressurised air propulsion systems to give them increased manoeuvrability in a vacuum. She creates tens of new unintelligent half-golems, focusing them on defensive roles that magic’s more efficient in achieving, and finishes her large flock of spatial anchor birds. She also branches out into more inhuman creations, making several large, automated shooting platforms loaded with railguns, rocket batteries, and plasma cannons, all running on the same logic chips as the rest of her troops.

Most of her time, however, is dedicated to more personal projects. She spends nearly a full month working on creating the materials and weaving the enchantments of a gift for Silvia, visiting Elwaine several times in the process to pick the elf’s brain, and over two months are sunk into the next implant playing on her mind. Emily tears apart an array of sensors, everything from spatial fluctuation detectors to advanced planetary thermal imagers used for locating subterranean hotspots of activity. She spends hours picking through all of the cameras within the fleet’s ships, finding the most efficient design architectures already available, and she even takes over several of the engineer branch’s routine maintenance tasks to advance her understanding of the neural links the pilots use.

Her research culminates in borrowing Wilder’s artificial eye, a request that amuses the pilot no end, and she finally completes her own enhanced version mere hours before their arrival at the border station.

She carefully fuses the last microscopic components together with a burst of machina and a touch of fire and metal mana, before stepping back and staring at the completed piece with an excited grin and a touch of awe.

A crystal-clear blue eye stares back at her, with the shifting runes of dozens of boosting enchantments swimming in the vibrant iris. She touches her fingers to the top of the implant, releasing a tiny stream of machina and connecting to it in an instant, sending a new flood of visual data to her cortex and splitting her view, seeing herself staring down at herself. She shifts through the eye’s varying layers of perception, peering through her clothes and skin to stare directly at the metal below, before going even further and tearing that away as well, leaving her magic network clear as day, the thrumming lines of energy filling her vision with two pulsing vortices in her head and chest.

She switches to another filter, reducing the detail to leave herself appearing as a dense cluster of energy, with a cloud of mismatched shades surrounding her: the ambient energy of her Factory. Flicking through a few other filters to check her temperature profile, spatial footprint, and even the humidity surrounding her, she gives a satisfied nod before disconnecting from the eye and taking a seat to prepare for surgery.

Emily takes out a prepared jar from one of the spaces in her cargos, its surface covered in a blend of space and time-based runes without any crystals to power them long-term, and places it on the workbench next to her. She forms a blade of unattributed mana in her right hand and uses her left to hold open her left eye before carefully cutting away at the extraocular muscles surrounding it. She phases the immaterial blade through the eyeball to cleanly slice the optical nerve behind it, before shifting the tool into a perfect shell to wrap around the eye as she pulls it from the socket, leaving a copy of the shell behind to maintain the socket’s shape.

Dropping the removed eyeball into the stasis jar, she seals it, perfectly preserving the organ to be reimplanted later if needed, or used as a material if not.

Next, she picks up a syringe filled with a newly-designed liquid-metal muscle blend based on her subdermal armour, injecting a small amount into each of the exposed extraocular muscles before sliding the implant into place and fusing it directly to the metal where it weaves itself into the organic muscle fibres. She attaches the ocular nerve to the implant’s synthetic nerves with a stream of machina, completing the procedure.

She flicks through the implant’s scanners one more time to test everything, finding no noticeable issues, before zooming in on one of the bolts holding a laser cutter together on the opposite side of the workshop. She sees it clearly, as if from only inches away, despite the tens of metres separating them.

“Perfect!” she beams, standing up and taking the sealed eyeball to one of Elisime’s workshops, set up as a more permanent lab. She leaves it on a shelf, with a weak mana gathering enchantment woven into it, beside several similar containers holding the various remaining parts of the world-eater serpent.

Emily leaves her Dimensional Factory and makes her way to the training room she knows Silvia is occupying. She opens the room’s door and steps in to find the vampire partway through her usual practice forms, performing an elegant dance across the blank space with the top of her robes tied at her waist and only a cloth wrap covering her chest. Shutting the door behind herself, Emily leans back and watches, unwilling to break the woman from her trance.

When Silvia finally slides to a stop, withdrawing the rampant qi cutting furrows into the floor around her, she turns to her observer with a teasing smile.

“Enjoying the view?”

Emily pushes off the door and approaches, letting her eyes trail over her partner’s exposed muscles.

“Very much so.”

“You’re-” Silvia cuts herself off with a frown, reaching out with one arm to draw Emily in close and clasping her chin with the other, forcefully tilting her head to get a clear look at the new eye. “I see you finished your little project.”

“I did. What do you think?”

“I don’t like it.”

Emily matches her frown, but Silvia doesn’t let her pull away, reaching up to stroke her cheek just below the new eye.

“You were far prettier when they were mismatched: it adds to your charm.”

Emily lets out a huff, but she still runs a gentle current through the artificial iris, shifting the variable pigment to an emerald green that matches the eye she removed.

“Better?”

“Much.” Silvia grins, kissing her before pulling back to put her robes on properly.

“Wait.” Emily reaches out to stay her hands, meeting her raised brow with a grin of her own. “I made you a little something as well.”

“Oh?”

Emily pulls a spatial mist from her tattoos, letting it form in the air between them into a set of flowing silver robes covered with streaking, Lichtenburg-style patterns of deep black. The base fabric is formed from tiny scales only visible at a squint, and, though there are no visible runes, it’s dripping with mana.

“They’re beautiful,” Silvia mutters with wonder, reaching out to take hold of them and brushing her fingers over the fine fabric.

“They’re not finished,” Emily replies, smiling at the confused glance she receives in turn. “Let a drop of blood touch them.”

Silvia doesn’t hesitate, splitting open her finger with a nail and smearing the blood that flows onto the robes. The liquid sinks into the enchanted fabric, vanishing completely, and the black patterns gain a crimson core.

“It’s bound to my energy signature?” Silvia says in a questioning tone, recognising the process but not the need for it.

“It allows you to passively fuel its self-repair enchantments,” Emily explains as the vampire pulls off her old robes to put the gift on. “It also means the defensive effects won’t activate for you at all, allowing you to easily tear segments off to get at your skin and draw blood. They will, however, automatically register the type of any incoming attack, only allowing through those likely to draw blood whilst resisting the rest. The robe’s defensive properties pale compared to real armour, but its base is the skin of the world-eater we killed, just like my protective skin, so it should still be adequate.”

“I love them,” Silvia beams, looking down at the flowing fabric hugging her figure before wrapping her arms around Emily and giving her a kiss. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. At least this way you won’t end up half-naked on the battlefield.”

“Haha. You know, this is the best gift I’ve ever been given, but I reckon you could top it by putting on a set of robes yourself.”

Emily rolls her eyes. “What’s with your obsession with seeing me in robes? They’re not that exciting.”

“You wound me,” Silvia sighs exaggeratedly. “They’re the height of fashion in a large part of the universe, I’ll have you know.”

Emily gives her a flat, unamused stare.

“I think you’d look pretty, that’s all.” Silvia shrugs. “Can’t a woman want to dress up her girlfriend?”

“I see.” Emily blushes at the clear label, biting her lip. “Well… I may have had to test the enchantments before I made your set…”

“No…” Silvia lights up with a wide grin. “Please?”

Stepping back, Emily slips her jacket off, sending it into her factory and drawing out another spatial mist. It covers her completely before solidifying into a matching set of robes with a black base and swirling silver waves covering them, each one holding an electric blue tint in the centre.

“They obviously don’t carry the same combat benefits for me, but I laced the fabric weave with lightning essence, so they can act as a weak magical focus…”

“They look incredible, combat benefits be damned. Though, I seem to remember you mentioning you’d only dress up for a special occasion…”

“Oh, shut up,” Emily huffs, though there’s no heat behind it. “There is a special occasion actually: my emotional vault is finally breaking down. It’s not yet completely empty, but the machina bound to it decreases by the day now, and I give it another year or two before it’s gone entirely. I mostly have you to thank for that, so I thought you deserved a treat. Don’t make me regret it.”

“I’d never.” Silvia smiles, her tone completely genuine. “Besides, I’d attribute the success to your own efforts; I just gave you a little push.”

***

They stop at Xlanax for several days to restock and give the crew a short break from the confines of their ships. On their second stationary day, Emily’s in her Factory lab working on a new recipe for a strength tonic when Silvia walks in with an amused grin.

“So, I decided to pay a visit to the pirate sector to check in and make sure no one else has registered the Archanem job as completed, and you’ll never guess what I found,” the vampire says, hopping up to sit on an empty workstation behind Emily as she continues to work. “Somebody has sent our crew a personal request.”

“I take it by the tone that their identity was not included in said request?” Emily asks, still not looking away from heating the beaker in her hands, gently swirling the contents and watching the colour slowly change.

“You’d be right, and I think you’ll find that particularly interesting once you hear the contents. It’s an elimination request. Of Elivarus.”

“Oh?” Emily sets the beaker down and turns to look at her partner with a raised brow. “We’ve made enemies already? And they’re trying to pit you against us.”

“I thought you might be interested. Any idea who it could be?”

“Not really.” Emily leans back against her workstation, tilting her head in thought. “I can’t think we’ve upset anyone beyond this crew. Maybe Melvor, but he didn’t seem the type. What’s the reward?”

“Eighty thousand credits and a mid grade spirit essence.”

“Definitely not Melvor then. It’s a pretty good starting bounty for only a fifth and a fourth circle.”

“Incredibly good for a starting bounty. You’re already worth more than Perinith was.”

“How very curious. I take it we’re going to deny that request?”

“We won’t complete it, that’s for certain, but why bother with a denial? Let’s leave it open and see if the sender is willing to push more and give us a clue as to who they are.”

“Why not?” Emily shrugs, turning back to her work. “This is your area of expertise after all.”

They don’t hear anything else from the mysterious requester by the time they leave Xlanax, and their flight out of Guild space is equally uneventful. They slip back into Moer 385 without being spotted and, within five weeks of leaving the station, Emily catches the first glimpse of her home planet in over four years.