Jace spent the next hour flitting around the room, following Kinfild’s instructions while helping out the others with small tasks.

  According to Kinfild, the best way to finish the Soul-Circle Opening stage was to take your mind off it and focus on other things.

  Which was easier said than done when he had to be monitoring the soul-circle and trying to pull it downward, then merge it with his core.

  Jace had said, “I thought the blending part happened in the later stages…you know, this included.”

  All Kinfild had said in response was, “You’ll see.”

  After an hour, Jace had only managed to envision a line connecting through the center of each new arc of the soul-circle, forming the bounds of its new circumference, then pulled it down what felt like a few inches (but he couldn’t really tell when it came to the internal geography of his body).

  “Take your mind off it,” Kinfild said again. “The soul-circle is incredibly responsive to your willpower, and the harder you push, the more it wants to move in the opposite direction as well. It is easier to make it move downward if you aren’t paying close attention to it.”

  “You’d think that the last point one percent would be slightly easier than this,” Jace mumbled.

  “Most Wielders also don’t try to do it in a single afternoon.”

  Perril looked up from her work—consulting with Lessa about where they would place the accumulator nodes in the suit—and faced Kinfild. “I did it in a single afternoon, aye.”

  No pressure. None at all.

  “Not a single hour, then,” Kinfild replied.

  Jace crossed his arms. “It’s been longer than an hour.”

  “It took me two and a half hours, if I recall,” Ash provided. “There is still time. Do not worry.”

  “Alright, alright,” Jace said. He shook his head, took a deep breath, and tried to clear his mind. “What can I do to help?”

  “I think we’re ready to start welding,” Perril responded, and glanced at Lessa. Lessa nodded in approval. “Same as before, if we work together, we can put this thing together pretty quickly. I will, however, need a technique card to draw the Aes out of the nodes.”

  “They don’t have anything left in them, do they?” Jace asked.

  “They have a little,” Perril said. “But they’re still responsive, functional machinery. I can activate them to draw in ambient Aes by…” She stuck her tongue out the corner of her mouth, then pressed her fingers into six points on the bottom of the sphere. “...by putting the right pressures here. It’s not fast, but it’ll be enough to power the suit. Given, of course, I can draw the Aes out.”

  “We can work on one,” Lessa said. “We made one like it before, though it kinda got destroyed. But I should still remember how to do it! It was a pretty simple card.”

  “Yeah, got destroyed,” Jace chuckled. “I definitely didn’t abuse its cooldown to empty three nodes at once.”

  “This suit will respect the cooldown,” Perril assured them.

  So, as Jace and Lessa used a blank card template and the soldering wire and engraving needle to make a card, Perril, Ash, and Kinfild began assembling the larger portions of Lessa’s suit.

  As they made the technique card, Jace tried not to focus on the soul-circle, but the less he was doing, the easier it was to fall into the habit of drawing his mind inward and focusing on his innards.

  Still, by the time they finished the card (which wasn’t long; it only had a few sets of runic circles and a simple engraving in the center), Jace’s soul-circle had descended along his spine a few more inches.

  Stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about it.

  They brought the card to Perril, and she slotted it into a nest of wires, then clamped it down and covered it over with a panel. The entire power apparatus was starting to look like a squash. It had the gourd-like shape, with the accumulator nodes forming a round, bulbous section, and the cards and the Aes-drawing mechanisms forming a sphere below it. The section would perch right in the small of Lessa’s back, like a messenger bag might.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  To test the device, Jace fed the card a little bit of Aes. A blue line lit up around the equator of the bottom sphere, and he sensed the technique card within trigger. The accumulator nodes whirred, and Aes poured out of them. With a flicker, the line turned gold.

  The entire system provided a steady stream of pure-aspect Aes. It wasn’t enough to even consider harvesting, but it’d be enough to power an exo-suit.

  They set to word constructing the frame for the body. It had to be light, and it couldn’t be too rigid—Lessa still had to move her upper body, and if she was going to be their marksman, mobility was paramount.

  At first, they’d considered using Luminian steel to give it a bit of an armour casing—after all, they’d been flip-flopping between calling it armour and an exo-suit—but it’d be heavy, and for not much of a reward. The steel was good, but against any of the opponents they were facing, Luminian steel plates would be as good as paper. Its weight would just draw strength from the motors, which could instead be funneled into speed and agility.

  After that, they made sure it fit her perfectly. At first, the equipment was still a little heavy, but with the harness and a couple extra straps, they distributed the weight better. It barely made her look any bulkier, so Jace figured they’d done a good job—just a few pistons up the back, some cords to carry power through the suit, and joints for the shoulders to connect.

  Then they added the arms. They added a small frame to her arms, with motors at the elbows hidden beneath protective fins of brassy Luminian steel. While they needed to keep it light, they couldn’t expose the complex machinery to the elements either, and it’d give her elbow pads.

  “Like you’re riding a skateboard,” Jace said.

  “A…skateboard?” Lessa asked.

  “Uh…hoverboard, maybe?” He shrugged. “Back home, most kids wore knee pads and elbow pads in case they fell.”

  “Am I gonna fall?”

  “Considering we’re basically building a fortification technique for you…well, it’s hard to control at first, that’s all I’ll say.”

  Lessa chuckled. “Alright, don’t need to scrape up my elbows.”

  At the ends of the arms, they added an augmented glove for each of her hands, slotting into the arm and aiding her control of the limb. It would hopefully move with her, responding to her movements, but having a little more stability wouldn’t hurt.

  “But…if all I have is a basic plasma rifle, how am I really going to be that effective for helping you guys take down opponents?” Lessa asked. She flexed her fingers, then snapped. Her thumb moved in a blur, almost faster than Jace’s eyes could comprehend.

  “Woah…” she muttered. “That’s good.”

  Perril approached from the side and tapped the panels on the backs of Lessa’s wrists. “There’s a trigger in the glove, which connects to the panel. You can attach a weapon to each of the wrists and activate it. And—” She bent down and hoisted up one of the oversized rifles from the Luminian coffin.

  It was made of brass, except for a grip on the barrel and the stock, which were white wood. The grip would be too large for a regular human to wrap their hand around, but it was still a hunting-rifle, bolt-action rifle style. Just…no bolt. No magazine. A cooling fin swooped out down from the barrel’s front, almost like a bayonet, but there was no mechanism to attach a whir-blade.

  When Jace stared at it, a tag appeared above it, reading, [Luminian Starbolt (Ammunition: Plasma Aes)]

  Unlike other weapons, it didn’t give a shell size or ammunition type. “Just…Aes?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t certain about it,” Perril said. “Plasmathrowers aren’t my speciality, aye?”

  But Ash leaned in and said, “I took a look at it with her, and we deduced a solution. It should be rather elegant. See, this rifle doesn’t use solid ammunition, not like the other weapons of the modern era. It uses mechanisms we just don’t understand anymore…to convert pure-Aes, or any Aes aspect for that matter, into plasma.”

  “We don’t understand that?” Jace asked. “I thought it was just a crystal.”

  “Well, that part would make sense,” Ash said. He took the rifle gently from Perril and wrapped his arm around the stock, then slotted his finger into the trigger. The barrel was nearly six feet long. As soon as he slotted his finger into the trigger, he fed a wisp of green Aes through a set of runes on the grip. It swirled up through the rifle’s body and fed into the internal mechanisms, before lighting up a single magenta line on the side of the barrel.

  “It took my Aes and converted it to high-power plasma Aes,” Ash explained. “Unstable, but about level sixty for quality. And then…”

  He pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked, but he resisted it. The stock still slid back under his arm and the sight notches slammed into his shoulder, and he grunted.

  A plume of magenta plasma seared out the barrel, along with a puff of smoke, then a beam roared across the room and bit into the wall. Instead of glancing off like Lessa’s old rifle’s shots would’ve, the Aes melted straight through the metal and left a charred hole a few feet deep into the wall.

  “Alright, alright, let me try!” Lessa exclaimed. “Wait…but I can’t fuel it.”

  “That’s what the panels are for,” Perril said. “Attach the rifle to it, and it’ll charge while not in use. It’ll build up a full accumulation of discharges with the suit’s energy, then when you’re ready, you can fire it. It might charge slowly, aye, but it’ll be strong.”

  “And if you do not want to carry it on your wrist, you can slot it into the holder on your back,” Ash provided. “Which, indeed, will also charge it.” He passed the rifle to her, and, using the suit’s enhanced upper body strength and speed, Lessa hoisted it up.

  “It’s a little big,” she said. “If…if I whittled down the stock and shortened the barrel, and carved away the grip enough to wrap my fingers around it, would it break?”

  “As long as you don’t cross over any runes, no,” Ash said.

  “What about the second one?” Jace asked. “We pulled two rifles out of the coffin. You think the exo-suit would be strong enough to dual-wield?”

  “It’d be, sure,” Perril said. “But…”

  “But I can’t just dual wield rifles,” Lessa said. “Not when you want accuracy. But with the wrist mountings…”

  She and Jace glanced at each other and shared a grin. “Wrist-mounted plasma cannon?”