16. Mechs and Wands

Mechs and Wands

Cheng Rui pushed the metal plate into the opening in the robot’s chest until it fit perfectly against the surrounding armor plates, neatly covering the far more delicate machinery and cables underneath.

Then he grunted again and pressed against the robot for several seconds.

Nothing happened.

He could not help cursing. Then he picked up a two-handed demolition hammer and began pounding the plate with all his strength, until at last it locked into place with a clear metallic click.

Once the whole sequence was finished, the foolish boy collapsed into a chair beside the robot. The chair had almost certainly been placed there specifically so he could rest.

“Aren’t you going to tell him to stop?” I asked the other person in the room.

She was concentrating on a much thinner cast-iron rod.

“I stopped trying after the seventeenth time he started working the moment my back was turned.”

Chi Li did not even bother looking at the idiot currently trying to exhaust himself into the floor.

“He knows perfectly well that he needs to heal and rest. He isn’t stupid, and he isn’t a child. He is just as frustrated as the rest of us.”

The red-haired girl brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes and gave me a look full of helplessness—somehow understanding, patience, irritation, and sympathy all at once.

Then she returned to spraying a stream of fire at the finger-thick metal rod.

The flame narrowed as it twisted into a vortex, until a needle-thin, blindingly bright crimson line carved mysterious symbols into the metal.

“What are you doing?”

Whatever operation she was performing looked much more complicated through Force Sense than it did to the naked eye.

Chi Li was pouring an enormous amount of heat into the metal rod, enough to blast a hole through a brick wall.

Yet instead of melting the foot-long piece of metal into a glowing, boiling puddle, the heat was being drawn… somewhere else.

Inside the rod, but not exactly inside it.

I tilted my head, trying to look from an angle that was not from the side, above, or below, but something more like a layer beside the rod.

The shape was not easy for me to see. It looked like a sphere—if countless transparent spheres had somehow been stacked together while still remaining one single sphere.

Yes. That made more sense in my head.

In my defense, I had never seen anything like this before.

“I’m trying to make a wand,” Chi Li said with a frustrated huff.

The stream of fire flickered abruptly. For one tiny fraction of a second, the many-layered sphere seemed to melt into a true sphere, and all the heat inside it could no longer be contained. It wanted to violently release itself.

Then I blinked, and it quickly returned to being that many-layered sphere, stable once more.

“Cheng Rui has been nagging me about this. ‘If you can enchant walls and buildings, then you must be able to enchant something small enough to carry around.’”

The spherical thing flickered only slightly, but held.

“You didn’t see him try to cram something the size of a house into an oversized pencil, did you?”

“…You seem to be making decent progress?” I said cautiously.

My best friend gave me the sort of glare that answer deserved.

During the conversation, she had already finished several more wands, and the entire base had not exploded. So by my standards, things were going fine.

“How does enchanting work?”

Because if it worked the way I thought it did, it would be very, very useful in future battles.

“It takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, and gives you a headache,” she retorted, setting the wand she was working on beside several others that looked finished.

Now its many-layered sphere seemed a little full.

In fact, if I stared at the other wands from the right angle, they all had nearly identical spheres connected by networks of glowing red lines. The lines crossed between layers and angles, looking a little like a house’s plumbing.

“Don’t get me wrong. Carrying magical devices I prepared in advance is very useful. But it feels like squinting at several different things at the same time.”

“Sure, but how does it actually work?” I asked, picking up a rusty old bolt large enough to have been removed from a train car.

“What are you specifically doing when you make a wand?”

I squeezed the bolt in my palm. It bent like modeling clay, if modeling clay made a sound worse than fingernails on a blackboard.

“Could you not?” Chi Li said, rubbing her temples.

“Sorry.”

Using Near-Object Manipulation, I stopped the bolt from vibrating so it would not make noise. Then I tried again.

This time it deformed silently, just like clay.

“So. The wand?”

“Fine. You win.”

The red-haired girl slumped in her chair, every inch the bullied little sister who had finally had enough of her elder sister’s tricks.

The memory made the corner of my mouth lift slightly. Fortunately, every family member I needed to worry about was thousands of kilometers away from this hell on earth.

“You know I can cast fire magic and shape and control it as I wish, right?”

“Right. But you can also set traps and things like that, can’t you?” I replied, then laughed. “I clearly remember one of those traps exploding in my face.”

“That was what you deserved for trying to capture an extremely dangerous enemy,” she shot back.

We both broke into giggles.

Even in the middle of an apocalyptic magical disaster, it felt good to laugh with my best friend.

“Anyway, most of my magic is either completed instantly or actively maintained as an effect. If I stop concentrating, it stops working. Traps are different.”

She hummed a few notes, and a symbol made of red fire appeared in midair.

“Besides my intention, they need two other things. First, a trigger condition, which decides when they activate. Second, magic to power the activation. That lets me set something to happen later, whether at a specific time or when a particular condition is met.”

“Hmm…”

That was interesting. But…

“How do they know the trigger condition has occurred? Like how much time has passed, or whether an enemy walks by, or anything else?”

“How does magic know I want to launch a fireball of that strength in that direction?” she asked in return. “It’s flame. It doesn’t have ears to hear me or a brain to understand. In combat, I certainly don’t have time to calculate the intensity and trajectory of every fireball, let alone guide spells that track enemies or follow complex paths.”