Edmund flicked the air, and a hologram appeared out of nothing and floated towards the woman walking next to him. It was filled with diagrams and formulas, showing a design for a new Hume pipeline he had been working on for a few days.

“Janet, can you please check this math?”

She took the screen, plucking it out of the air with her fingers, and then pulled out her glasses and gently put them on her nose. She examined the numbers for a good minute, walking down the corridor she knew by heart without slowing down.

“Yeah,” she hummed, “looks okay. May I ask what this is going to be for? Looks like some sort of portable Hume source, or something like that.”

Edmund nodded. “Just a pet project. Something that should help me when I finally grow tired and sick of being confined inside this cage.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“You mean the Network? That’s your cage?”

He nodded.

“What’s that got to do with you being confined?” she asked.

“Everything. If I leave the Hume Network, I become… weak.”

“If you want to visit the universe, just stock up on Humes, take a few hundred high-capacity Hume cells with you and hop on a ship.”

He scoffed. “You’re kidding, right?” he said, in a mocking tone. “What do you think a few billion Humes are going to do to me? Do you have any idea just…” he looked in the distance in search for a word but didn’t find it. “Space. You just don’t get how dangerous space is.”

She just stared. “I think you’re overreacting.”

He shook his head. “You don’t get it. I envy you, so free and you don’t even know it.”

She scoffed. “Yeah, the oh so high and worrying troubles of the man at the top.”

He chuckled. “I’m not going.”

“Your call, boss.”

“Don’t call me boss.”

“I won’t, boss.”

He laughed, the tension in his body defusing in an instant.

“I also have a design to increase the range of each Pylon by a hundred thousand miles, give or take. Stackable.”

She took the new hologram and looked at it. “Not stackable. Look here,” she pointed.

“Crap.”

“Still, it’s decent, no? This should help fill some holes we have in the solar system where the Network doesn’t reach.”

He mulled over it. “I’m still thinking we should just blast an Axiom field everywhere.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“Why? We already do have full intel of everything the Network touches. This would only be so that we also have control.”

“So that you have control.”

“Yeah? Who else should have it?”

She rolled her eyes. “Right.”

***

Edmund fought back the pounding headache and groaned. It had been a long time since that conversation, and so many things had changed. For starters, the Network was gone, shrunk to a single underpowered Pylon with barely a few thousand miles of range. So was his awareness of what lied within the Network: with magic everywhere, it was like looking through a dense fog. Useless. No awareness. Not like his body and mind could take it, weak as he was now.

The high-capacity cells and the portable Hume generator were nowhere to be found either. Janet… why was she in every memory he had of the past, and yet every time he thought about her, he immediately classified her as just a random technician or engineer?

“Is everything alright?” Toora asked.

She does remind me of Janet…

“Yeah, sorry.” He masked his grimace.

He looked at the canisters enveloped in a forcefield. They were still sealed, their content hidden from sight if not for the small plexiglass window. Through it he could see that a reaction was going on inside of them. Reality and non-reality were colliding, fusing, and in the process, they were creating Humes for him to get. Edmund took note of Toora’s annoyed tone.

“You almost fucked it up there.”

“I know. I… remembered something.”

Her stern expression melted. “I hope it was a nice memory.”

“A weird one. Useless, I think.”

She put her hands on his shoulders. “No memories are useless. Maybe you will only discover its purpose when looking back, a long time from now.”

He looked into her eyes and then away. There was an intensity to her that kind of made him nervous. He exhaled. “Maybe. If this was a novel, I’d say that the flashback made no sense, though.”

“Things don’t have to always make sense. Not at first glance, at least.”

He looked at her and saw that her eyes were still locked onto his own. Shaking his head, he looked away again and paced around. “Is that how your visions work?”

Her eyes went to the floor.

“Nevermind. Forget I asked.” He said. “Let’s get the show rolling, now, shall we?”

He approached the forcefield and rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. He looked at the shining glassy surface, a mix of reality bending and magic Toora had somehow managed to cook up, and breathed. Impressive feat.

“Alright, get ready.” He said. “If my numbers are correct, it’s going to be three canisters of 10k plus one with 2k for a grand total of 32k Humes. I might pass out.”

“I got your back.” Toora said.

Lisa watched from behind. She knew she had no part to play in all this and was only here to observe. Her magic, her powers, her functions in the team were useless in this situation. She looked with interest, though, as Edmund stuck his arm inside the forcefield. A stream of glowing mist, like a fog, rushed from the canisters and into him. As it flowed, the containers lost their luster, and decayed as if time had only now decided to exact its toll of three thousand years on them. She could see that on the edges of the stream of power, where it touched upon the world, the ambient magic reacted to it and vanished. What it left behind was just nothingness, and a ripple in the fabric of the very world she lived in that sent a shiver down her spine.

That power, she knew already, was dangerous. Only, now she had seen just how dangerous it could be.

Edmund passed out in Toora’s arms. Lisa felt a surge of emotion go through her, but let it pass. She reminded herself of the way Edmund looked at the mage, like he didn’t care, but then she thought about how Toora looked at him and anger welled up within her. Why did it have to be like this?

She breathed out. She knew from the very beginning that it was going to be impossible for her to have anything to do with Toora apart from being a good team member and a friend, and she had accepted it. All it mattered to her was that she could be with her, and that Toora was happy. Which meant that she was going to have to deal with the other situation, make sure the two former team members were both gone for good. There was time for that, still.

Edmund came back to his senses a few minutes later. He shot up to his feet and flexed.

An aura, just like magic but somehow opposite to it, exploded outwards from him. It far surpassed D-rank, and for a moment even C-rank before it disappeared. Like a mirage, it left Toora and even Lisa speechless. After the surge was gone, nothing could be felt coming from him. There was no proof of Edmund even having a smidgen of power right now, not even a single Hume.

“What?” he asked, seeing their faces.

“Did you just spend it all?” Toora asked back.

“No, why?”

“I can’t feel it anymore.”

He laughed. “Yeah, well. You will see, in time.”

He turned back to face the corridor. “Time to put an end to that monster.”

As he said that, he outstretched his arms and grabbed. He took a hold of space itself and pulled it, twisting it around itself. The trio found themselves back in the cavern with the two monsters, suddenly and without warning. Lisa fell to her battle stance immediately, with Toora following suit.

Edmund was completely relaxed. Just as Toora was about to yell something at him, he just raised his arm to stop her. Then he smirked and turned towards the monstrosities.

The two nanite constructs immediately activated as soon as the intruders appeared in the cavern, lunging and forming new and more dangerous appendages to slash, pierce and crush. They swung at Edmund.

He closed his fist.

Both constructs, and with them the whole room, immediately turned to dust, plunging the space in complete darkness. There was only silence.

A timid light coming from Toora’s staff lit the room up.

“That’s… it?”

Edmund smiled. “Yeppers.”

“That’s underwhelming.” Lisa said, but her teeth were clenched and her hand was clutching the shield so tight her knuckles were white.

Edmund went from smiling to all out laughing. “True power, boys. This is what true power looks like. No fancy tricks, no restrictions.” -3700H, 29288H left.

“And now,” he said, “to put an end to this business…”

“Wait!” Lisa said, then looked at Toora.

Edmund looked impatient.

“She, uh, her unique skill… she can extract a gem from monsters killed with her help to empower herself.”

“Oh,” he was interested, “even these ones?” he pointed at where the construct were before he destroyed them.

Toora nodded. “I think so, yeah.”

She looked at Lisa and nodded. Lisa nodded back and approached the place where the two monsters were. Underneath the dust, there was a single gem on the ground: a yellow egg that glowed as soon as she touched it. She took it and returned to stand behind Toora.

“Only one?” Edmund asked.

Lisa shrugged. Toora sent her a sharp look, to which she responded with a sorry.

“I think her unique skill considered the monsters to be one entity.” Toora said.

“I guess they were. Alright, then…”

The room around them changed, space warping yet again. The team appeared out of thin air in a room not too far away from there. There were vats full of metal, solid and unmoving, and several machines embedded in the wall. These machines, Edmund knew, were nanite replicators: the source of the very first generation of autonomous nanobots. A quick Hume-powered glance told him that they didn’t work, but with a swipe of his hand he destroyed them anyways, just to be safe.

He approached the central control console, which came to life on its own just as he touched it. A few seconds later the whole hill started to vibrate furiously, like an earthquake was threatening to destroy it from within. A tidal wave of liquid, silvery metal rushed to the room, flooding it. It went around the girls, keeping a distance from them as if they were protected by a forcefield.

Toora watched in stunned amazement as the nanites disappeared into Edmund’s body.

“It’s time to pay you back.” He said. Stretching out his hand, he let a flow of metal leave his body again and coalesce into the shape of a small hammer.

He took it in his hands and examined it. He felt its weight, flipped it over a couple times, then frowned. The hammer disappeared back into a flow of microscopic particles of dust that rushed back into his body, through his skin as if he too was one of the monstrosities they fought back in the cave.

He repeated the process a few times, until he seemed satisfied with the result. Then, he approached Lisa, hammer in hand. She reflexively took a step back, feeling the sheer threat coming from both from the man and the hammer. Well, Edmund was no man, not anymore.

“For you.” He gave her the hammer.

She took it, unable to say anything except for a “thanks” muttered almost without her noticing. She felt the heft of the weapon in her hands, almost too much fer her to carry. As if knowing what she thought, the hammer suddenly became lighter, until it settled on a weight that felt perfect in her hands. It was small, compact, barely larger than a normal hammer you would use to drive a nail in a wooden plank.

“It’s yours. Made completely out of nanites, it can be whatever you want it to be. Hammer, sword, shield. Although I think your shield would still be a better shield. Light, heavy, you can change its weight and shape freely. Well, almost freely. Play with it a bit.”

She said nothing, and Edmund liked to think that she was too stunned to speak. He smiled internally. One step in the right direction. He then turned to Toora, who had been watching the whole scene unfold with visible interest.

“Here,” he said.

A straight line of dust, glittery in the artificial neon lights that lit the room, flowed downwards towards the metal floor. It stopped just shy of the steel plates of the floor, then solidified and thickened until it was as thick as an arm, and long. Its texture was rough and uneven, like a fractal that formed tiny irregular building blocks that, in turn, made up the long stick. The opposite of Lisa’s tidy, shiny and smooth hammer. A hammer which she had transformed into a sword in the meantime, made of perfectly polished silver, Toora noted distractedly before her eyes returned to the stick.

No, not a stick. A staff. As a huge amount of Humes entered the item and disappeared, she knew for certain what this thing was. The best, most beautiful staff she had ever seen.

Edmund wordlessly offered it to her. She let go of her old staff, which fell to the ground, abandoned. She felt the cold metal in her hands.

“Tell me how it feels.”

She let a small amount of magic into it and, to her surprise, there was no trace of reality-bending energy to obstruct its flow. Instead, the staff let the magic flow through without resistance. She almost gasped at the sensation, but managed to remain composed. She wasn’t sure she had ever touched something like this, not only in terms of power but also in terms of how well it seemed to fit how her magic worked. With a flow purity this high…

Edmund smiled. “Your face says all.” He laughed. “Both your items will grow more powerful as they get accustomed to you, just as you will get used to using them. I dumped a considerable amount of Humes and nanites into them. Treat them well.”

“T-thank you.” Toora said, tearing up.

“Now, now.” He waved her off. “It’s the least I can do. Consider it an investment.”

She nodded, sniffling.

Suddenly his demeanour changed, and his face grew serious. Barely a moment later he masked it behind a smile, but Toora knew something was up.

“I have to go do a thing now. You stay here and rest up.”

An arch of obsidian metal emerged from the floor, with chevrons and glyphs all around its circumference. Lights lit up, and a portal appeared within it in a matter of seconds. He walked into it, turning around just as he was about to cross the event horizon.

“I will be back as soon as I can.” He said. “Oh, you should think of a name for your weapons.”

And with it, he was gone.