Chương 133: 132. Reverse Engineered Runes

A cool, static buzz filled her temples as the Runes left her mind. She uploaded a thousand runes at random, the first batch of many, a flood of arcane shapes that made the machine's fans whine. The senior technician Karl, meanwhile, guided a cart into the bay. The cart was loaded with hastily acquired mana-channeling crystals that barely glowed with a dull internal light. Strapped to the same cart, bound in reinforced restraints, were three aged goblin shamans. They hissed and struggled.

A Genecorp logo was stamped on their restraint collars.

"Courtesy of our new partners," Karl said, following her gaze, his voice tight.

"That's the first war crime, i guess," Kelly said, watching one of the shamans try to gnaw through its bindings. She almost felt bad for the little green perverts, until one of them met another technician's gaze and started biting. Karl's footsteps echoed down corridors that got progressively hotter. He stopped at a set of double doors and pushed through without ceremony.

"Lab" was what they'd decided to call it, which worked about as well as calling a furnace a toaster. The space sprawled across what must have been half the building's basement—metal processing stations feeding directly into assembly lines, furnaces that roared, automated arms moving with hypnotic rhythm. Guns, ammunition, rockets. The work moved forward with relentless efficiency. Some of the technicians wore variants of Kelly's labcoat.

Theirs hung looser, lacked the reinforced plating, looked designed for people who planned to survive a normal workday. Eventually Karl led them deeper, to the section he'd built himself. The space bristled with equipment—devices that hummed with purpose, contraptions two years ahead of everyone else's budget. Glass bulbs cast everything in amber. Workbenches crowded with things that probably had names in manuals nobody read. There was a reinforced glass cage. Inside it, a table with restraints.

The kind of setup that meant someone had thought through what happened when things went catastrophically wrong. The walls held cameras. Lots of them. Mounted weapons too—enough firepower that the space felt less workshop and more like something that had armed itself against the universe. A massive anti-aircraft launcher sat in the upper corner. Cannons hung from the ceiling, angled downward. Above the door frame, beam array weaponry bristled.

It was decor that said " welcome"and" you will be vaporized" in the same breath. Kelly stopped walking. She stared at one of the larger installations—a compact sphere that twisted space around itself.

"That's a miniaturized gravity fusion reactor," she said.

"Weaponized." Gravitational weapons were the messy, expensive toddlers of modern warfare. Humanity had bent gravity for starships centuries ago. Turning that into a controlled weapon had a historical success rate of "catastrophic boom." They hadn't cracked weaponization until recently. And the word 'cracked,' was doing a lot of heavy lifting. The things were rarer than honest politicians and cost more than a small moon. Karls's face betrayed some surprise, although he remained calm and focused.

He recovered quickly.

"I'm surprised you noticed. Your file mentioned dark matter research. Theoretical physics. I didn't expect you to recognize a militarized core, Timegod."

"I worked on one, once," Kelly said, still examining the basement.

"Nothing this advanced. Also, has everyone read my file, or is that just a thing we're doing now?" kelly replied, examining the rest of the newly upgraded basement lab.

"And plasma beam arrays. Nice. Those are smart. Redundancy on offense." Karl watched her move through the space with the intensity of someone holding a question.

"Is it true? I heard..." He hesitated. Stolen story; please report.

"—You carried advanced tech with you, Timegod," Karl said, tentative, like the question had been on his mind the whole day.

"You have a customized shrinkbox? and a custom Switch, a weapon that's functionally a Relic? Did you build that yourself?"

"More or less." Some of the design had come from stolen data chips, but Kelly had spent so many loops tinkering with the thing, she might as well be its sole designer. The distinction felt academic. She flicked her wrist. The bracelet shot off her arm and flew across the room at a technician. The man fumbled, caught it, and immediately cradled it with the reverent, stiff-armed caution of a priest holding a divine child, if the child was made of atom cutting blades and some very deadly, life extinguishing beams.

The immortal intern also noticed multiple eye-shaped cameras dispatched all over the place, perhaps to watch every single detail without facing the risk of, say, being turned inside out and replaced with pancakes—assuming the right combination of runes could do such a thing. If runes could do that, she'd build a device specifically for it. To show-off as much as possible, of course. Her final demonstration needed flair. An hour later, Dr.

Haider was waiting by a massive planning table, a mess of blueprints and holographic schematics swirling under his hands. Staying clear of the active mana scanners during rune testing would be a problem. Kelly solved it by insisting the main review hub be set up a full room away from the testing chamber where the live subjects would be held, ready to have thousands of different runes carved into the space around it to see what stuck, what screamed, and what unraveled.

She cited safety protocols concerning possible contamination in a closed environment. It was a legitimate concern. It also conveniently kept the scanners far from her own mana-absorbing body. The shaman they'd brought was secured to the table in the reinforced cage—strapped down, still conscious, radiating resigned fury. If they understood goblin, they'd be shocked—and deeply offended—to learn it held very specific grudges against every one of their mothers.

"The ambient mana has shifted. Good," Dr Joe Haider stated that fact like it was the most normal thing in the world. It turned out Joe was a genuine freak when it came to mana theory. A genius. Haider's expertise made kelly want to kick herself for never working with him in any loop before. The man just knew the stuff. Like, really knew it. His knowledge rivaled Kelly's in areas, and considering it was his first day—just hours—and it was more than Kelly's thousandth? He was honestly making her look bad.

Joe launched into an explanation, his hands carving shapes in the holographic data.

"The energy usurps the law of conservation, and when it's rearranged into the right formation, it can perfectly transform or produce any effect by converting itself into it. Arrange the mana signature into the correct symbolic formation—the rune—and it becomes the effect. It decides fire exists here now." Kelly mentally, and somewhat hypocritically labeled him a show-off.

"Suspected as much," Kelly said, leaning over the table to follow his diagrams. Manuel, standing nearby with his arms crossed, shook his head.

"I don't get it." Stacy, who was idly scratching the ears of her oversized wolf-cub, chimed in. The creature let out a low, rumbling purr.

"It's juice. You plug in a toaster, it makes heat. You squeeze mana the right way, it does a thing. Whatever you want. Seems straightforward." Manuel looked as though someone had stepped in his breakfast.

"That makes no sense. It has to come from somewhere." He gave the entire setup a skeptical look.

"It sound's like a child's understanding of a fundamental force," Manuel stated flatly, pure doubt in every syllable. Dr. Haider didn't look up from his schematics.

"If electricity was only in media, Manuel, you'd call it ridiculous.

'An invisible energy in the air and the ground. It powers light, heat, motion, and everything useful—phones, refrigerators, factories—everything. You stick a metal pole in a potato and you get it. Rub your feet on carpet and you generate it. Sometimes it shoots from the sky and kills people. You can draw it from the sky with a metal rod, if you're feeling lazy. It runs every machine in civilization.' Sounds ridiculous until you have a phone." Kelly nodded, a faint, jagged smile on her face.

"Right. And sometimes it leaps out of the wall socket and stops your heart. The best magic always has a body count." Manuel went silent, a thoughtful frown replacing his frustration. They began. Dr. Haider at the main console, Kelly beside him feeding in stolen Runes from a new invasive civilization. In the sealed chamber, the first rune ignited in the crystal linked to the shaman, a symbol of brittle light. Joe Haider pointed, and highlighted something about mana that Kelly had never even considered.

The shaman's body tensed. Mana sensors spiked. Kelly watched the view flood in, her mind already working. Haider and Kelly worked in synchronization—he calling out adjustments, she making them, neither of them wasting energy on unnecessary words. The shaman screamed. The equipment hummed. The cameras recorded everything. Kelly and Haider, two scientists at the end of the world, started inscribing, testing, and unraveling thousands of runes.