46. Upgrading the Mecha

Upgrading the Mecha

A suit of armor could only hold so much technology.

Its shape, and the need to accommodate the wearer, also created a whole series of engineering problems.

A larger device with a simpler shape could easily be far more powerful than a combat suit at the same technological level.

And when deployed on the battlefield, it did not endanger the person who made it.

As the person in question, Cheng Rui considered that last point very important.

Which brought him back to his newest skill.

What he could build in a short time was limited by the mana available to him.

In fact, for projects that had to be created in a single piece because of the limitations of magical manufacturing or the fragility of individual components, the amount of magical energy he could access over a short period set a hard ceiling on both size and complexity.

With this new skill, if he was willing to pay the price, he effectively had as much as six times his mana available for manufacturing.

And with a horde of monsters closing in while lightning towers pinned them down, of course he was willing to pay.

Using Emergency Charge felt like drinking a dozen cups of coffee, chugging a liter of energy drink, and plugging himself directly into the main power line.

Energy poured through his system.

Pain, fatigue, even injuries seemed to stop mattering. He filled with a sense of invincibility, a conviction that he could do anything.

Cheng Rui did not need to check his still-limited health to know that indulging in that dangerous thought would be unwise. If not for the need and motivation to solve the team’s problem, he would have suppressed it immediately.

A nearby demon roared, gathering a fireball in each hand.

That was very motivating.

Energy sank into the collapsed underground passage beside Cheng Rui. It flowed through rubble and rebar, through the iron in old pipes, the lead and antimony in illegal toxic sealants used by construction companies that had not cared what they buried under the city, the copper in underground power cables, and the optical fiber in communication lines.

His Manufacturing skill reached deeper still, touching his damaged powered armor and all the power sources, servos, and energy weapons he had previously used against monsters.

Nothing he had made before was enough to fight the inhuman army now attacking their position.

The three of them were not facing isolated undead.

They were not facing a squad of hundreds.

They were not even facing multiple powerful enemies.

His armor sensors could detect and count thousands of vibration and heat sources moving through the ruins toward them. By connecting with those sensors, Cheng Rui could perceive them even though his eyesight was still terrible.

He ran the numbers almost immediately and reached a depressing conclusion.

Even with his new skill, nothing he could build would stop that wave.

As for the girls’ efforts, he was less certain, but judging from how hard they were already struggling, they could not do it either—unless they had trump cards of their own.

Supported by perception and common sense far below his Intelligence but still at the edge of the superhuman, his eighty-point Intelligence began working on the problem.

His system called it Perception, but Cheng Rui was not sure that was accurate. He did not really feel smarter.

Then again, how would a seventeen-year-old boy know what becoming smarter felt like?

A question for later.

Creating a super-genius, foolproof, unstoppable plan to save himself and the girls from imminent death would require too much processing power.

Reviewing every piece of science and technology he had ever read, inferring from those what his skill enhancements could do, and simulating potential solutions—

Even his superpowered mind could not do all of that reliably.

Not even close.

But Cheng Rui knew the plan did not need to be perfect.

It only needed to be good enough.

Meanwhile, copper, iron, and carbon emerged from existing materials repurposed by his Manufacturing skill and from his resource-creation skills.

All of his mana reserves emptied within one minute, forcing him to use Emergency Charge a second time, because large-scale construction was the most energy-consuming part of the process.

He had to be careful.

He had to calculate every cost his plan required and hold it in his mind, or he risked running out of resources before completion—or making the project too small to matter.

A gleaming, translucent scaffold and overlapping layers of plating rose from the ground like a crystal sculpture, so fragile-looking that it seemed one hammer blow would shatter it.

Appearances could be deceptive.

This was the internal armor and skeleton of his new creation, made from a material that was both like steel and like glass.

If it had been purely ordinary matter, aside from pure heat, it would already have been roughly three times stronger than the hardest tool steel.

Cheng Rui’s skills pushed it far beyond that.

As armor, Enhanced Armorer increased its defensive properties by 480%.

As part of a robotic system and a purely electrical device, each relevant skill increased all its properties by 210%, for a total multiplier slightly above fifty-five times.

Cheng Rui suspected even I would have trouble breaking through it without sustained effort.

A layer of copper with a similar glasslike sheen covered the internal structure and armor layer, though this time it was entirely opaque.

That was not because the copper-scandium alloy lacked the complete atomic disorder that would have made it glass.

It was because the material was filled with a web of carbon fibers.

Well, not exactly carbon anymore.

Cheng Rui had used Manufacturing to rearrange their atomic structure, making them closer to diamond.

The diamondlike fiber network was one seamless, flawless, extremely complex crystal.

Without magic, such a thing was not physically impossible, but human beings would not be able to make it until they invented 3D printers capable of precisely rearranging atoms.

In short, it was a metamaterial straight out of outer space, with several very interesting properties that Cheng Rui’s device would soon make use of.

Like everything else, those properties would be enhanced by his skills.

But the outer armor of this creation was only a shell to protect the internal components.

Cheng Rui spent half his mana and focus on those components.

As the outer armor took shape, cubic yard after cubic yard of electronics formed inside it.

First came the rotating inner shell and the servo systems that would drive its rotation.

Because of how the internal structure was designed, the main emitter could rise or fall to aim at targets of different elevations, but it could not rotate on its own. The entire device had to rotate with it.

It was less a robotic limb than a robotic turret.

Fortunately, both belonged under robotics.

Then came layer after layer of induction coils, diamondlike coils wrapped around steel cores so current could be passed into the next wire.

The idea came from inductive phone chargers that used the same principle to charge phones wirelessly. They were less efficient than simply plugging in, but much cooler.

Cheng Rui’s skills, however, enhanced all properties of electrical systems, including efficiency and output.

He could make a pair of induction coils where the induced coil produced greater current than the inducing coil.

By connecting the coils in series, he could increase power output again and again. The only limits were the size of the device and the toughness of the conductive material he used.

Diamondlike material was not truly superconductive. Cheng Rui’s knowledge and skills had not reached that level.

But it was not far off. Its conductivity was also enhanced by Cheng Rui’s skills.

Starting from the ten-kilowatt energy cell in his armor, this creation was projected to produce more output than most nuclear power plants.

Assuming, of course, they were not overrun before he managed to finish it.