Just like the Rank One Trial, the Rank Two Trial didn’t give me a lot to go off of.

  I wasn’t as overwhelmed by it as I had been the first time, though. For one thing, I’d already passed one of them, and while it had been a slog, I knew what to expect—right from the complete lack of direction down to the sheer effort of building something that would move my Rank up. I also had a lot of stats—and knowledge—to work with.

  [Hal Riley] [Class - Voltsmith] [Level - 82, Rank One]

  [Stats]

  ?Body - 40 (+5)

  ?Awareness - 47

  ?Charge - 27/126 (+15) (50 Used)

  Stat Points Available: 0

  [Class Skill - Decharge/Recharge - Drain the charge from magic items to power your own creations]

  [Class Skill - Remote Voltsmithing - Use your Voltsmithing to empower Creations even when others are using them—or when no one is.

  [Skill - Spellcoding - Transfer spells from Tomes to Spellscrolls, allowing weaker versions to be cast with Charge instead of Mana]

  Items

  ?Empty

  ?Voltsmith’s Grasp Upgrade Two (45/45 Charge) - Rail Gun Module

  ?Empty

  ?Warrior’s Sheath (Empty)

  Remote Voltsmithing

  ?The Explorer (5 Charge)

  I had a lot of Charge to work with—especially when I stripped down my gear to the bare minimum. The only things I was still running were the Voltsmith’s Grasp—for crafting purposes, and because it was literally my arm now—and the Ford Explorer. I couldn’t bring myself to risk abandoning Erika Samson somewhere in the Midwest—not even if her route had taken her near Cozad.

  Strategically, I was planning on splitting my time between the Waypoint Beacon and the half-scrapped Chariot sitting in the lab’s corner, against the wall. The mecha suit was cool, but in its current form, it was missing…well…a lot. Even as I’d piloted it into battle against Taven Liu, it had felt limited, and I had dozens of possible upgrades in mind for it, from armor made out of a single piece of drop-hammered steel to arm joints that enabled complex motion.

  That’d be my Rank Two Trial project—a weapon that’d help me stay competitive with Tori, Zane, Carol, and Bobby Richards. I reviewed my most recent Principles of Engineering.

  The Principle of Scale simply stated that larger-scale projects stopped following the basic rules of either Voltsmithing or physics. I’d seen that in the last few dungeons I’d entered—dungeon engineering—or system engineering, for that matter—both operated at a large enough scale to change the rules completely, but even a machine the size of the Explorer or the Chariot did that, too.

  Next, I’d picked up the Principle of Liquidity. As Charge’s functional scale increased, it changed form from electricity to liquid, and that change came with increases to its energy and to its functionality in closed, looping systems. The Hearts I’d found were fundamental to understanding and deploying liquid Charge.

  I’d learned the Principle of Overload in my first fight with Taven Liu, the Fireborn Crusader, when I’d used it to take a Waypoint Beacon away from him. If not deployed carefully, a self-sustaining Charge reaction would occur, overloading and melting down any Charge creation. I’d built a little device that could trigger one intentionally, and I’d used it as a weapon a couple of times.

  One of the ways I’d used it—with a few modifications—was as an energy bypass, and that was the next Principle. Energy Bypass reduced what electricians called resistance by going around resistors instead of through them, increasing a creation’s efficiency.

  I’d also learned about Resonant Harmonics—that was, playing fluid, electric, and ambient Charge off of each other and how the world itself did that. The unique resonance of Earth or Solemnus Six, or of the dungeons the Consortium had seeded across the planet, was something I could take advantage of. I just had to keep digging to find out how. This was a more advanced Principle of Voltsmithing, and one that, despite learning, I didn’t fully understand.

  And, finally, I’d learned the Major Principle of Grand Engineering. The combination of Scale, Overload, and Liquidity, Grand Engineering would be my main tool for approaching the Waypoint Beacon, the few memories I had of the machine below the Whole New World dungeon, and whatever the World Engine was.

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  I set that last one aside for now.

  Instead, I cleared a space near the garage door, wide enough for the Waypoint Beacon itself to sit with enough room around it for me to work—and helpfully set up over the pit in the floor we’d used to get under cars back when the garage had mostly been for repairs. I wanted it here as soon as possible, and then I wanted to start ripping into it and seeing what made it tick.

  Once I’d built a space for it, I headed back to Museumtown and grabbed a few other dungeon-delvers who were just sitting around and doing nothing. Presumably, Jessica and Calvin were still coming up with a plan for Phase Three, and until everyone knew what to do, they’d want folks to stay close.

  We headed to the entrance of the Reliquary of Bones, and there it was.

  The Waypoint Beacon was fifteen feet tall—barely small enough to fit into the oversized RV garage, and even then only because Cindy had built big. Eight feet to a side, and it should have had ceramic armor across its myriad gears and metal frame, if someone hadn’t removed them.

  That someone was me. I’d been poking around inside the Waypoint Beacon before Phase Two had even ended; I couldn’t help myself. It was a genius piece of Voltsmithing, and I couldn’t see everything it was trying to do. But I could see flaws in the design, and they weren’t necessary ones. The whole machine, from power inputs to the escapement that released energy into the thousands of gears and cogs, was inefficient and full of mistakes.

  “Alright, let’s get it out of here and on the way to Cindy’s,” I said, and together, the folks I’d tracked down carried the Waypoint Beacon out of the fortress, across the sidewalk to the parking lot, and right onto the back of a semi-trailer.

  I added Charge to the armored vehicle hooked to the trailer, then slowly picked up speed until the whole machine was moving about twenty miles an hour. Then I settled into the driver’s seat and navigated the streets of Chicago.

  A half-hour later, the dungeon-delvers were gone, and I was alone with a masterpiece of Voltsmithing and all my tools for the first time.

  My gut instinct was to do what I’d done to my first remote-controlled car—tear into it, start figuring out how the parts worked, and end up with a pile of plastic, metal, and wires. It’d be the fastest way to learn.

  Judging by the beacon’s complexity, though, it’d be irreversible.

  So, instead, I carefully shut down the Waypoint Beacon and started with a single gear at the end of an axle with no other cogs on it. It connected to what looked like the electrical Charge system, and when I pulled it free, nothing happened. It didn’t explode. The entire machine didn’t collapse into a pile of parts.

  When I fired it up again, though, the beacon didn’t fire again. No purple beam. No build-up of Charge in the air. None of the things it had done every time a beacon had started to activate. That confirmed a theory—and demonstrated just how smart I’d been not to screw around with the beacon during Phase Two. Even better, I hadn’t ripped into the machine like a kid tearing apart a present—or a remote control car. I was being methodical.

  Really, though, it was just an engine. An impossibly complex engine, sure—but just like the components of a modern BMW racing engine were pretty much the same as those of a ‘60s VW bus, this wasn’t any different than the device I wore in place of my arm. The same parts, in a slightly different order.

  I could figure it out.

  For the next half-hour, I puzzled with it, pulling individual gears from the massive assembly in an attempt to understand the ‘how’ of what it did, even if I couldn’t figure out the ‘what’ itself. Sometimes, engines were like that. Mysteries. Confusing mysteries. And to fix them, the first step was to understand the clues.

  Then, when I got frustrated, I disengaged. I had three weeks, after all—and Rank Two would probably give me a few clues the Waypoint Beacon wouldn’t be able to.

  The Chariot sat against the wall; I powered it up just enough to stomp it to the center of the room, cleared the hard-light Charge table, and slowly built the mecha suit’s current schematic. Then I ripped it apart down to its ankle joints and feet, which also got a redesign into three-toed, triangular platforms. I worked that ankle joint and toe combination until it ran smoothly on the table, then started moving up the machine’s legs. Gears, conduit, wire, pneumatic systems from car hatches—this wasn’t going to be a cobbled-together mecha with three possible attacks, winning off sheer bulk and surprise.

  No.

  The new and improved Chariot was going to be efficient, powerful, and above all, functional. The time for Rube’s Principle had ended midway through Phase Two. The time for Grand Engineering was now.

  Tori Vanderbilt missed her emo days.

  The Doc Martens she’d begged her real mom for were still holding up a month into the end of the world, but she hadn’t bothered with make-up, styling her hair, or what color she wore in…a long time. The black in her hair was coming out as mousy brown grew in under it. Her crowd at school would have looked at her like a total loser.

  On the other hand, she was hanging out with Carol—who, apparently, had been a basketball player—and her twin brother. Neither of them was emo. She didn’t actually know what cliques they’d been in, but Carol had probably been in charge of whichever one she’d hung out with.

  God, Carol was cool.

  Anyway, there was a Tier Two dungeon that, according to the schedule, was about to open up. They were going to take care of that problem—permanently. Phase Three was nice that way—they’d be able to end dungeons, and end the threat of them breaking and spewing their monsters into Chicago. It was a chance to finally make some headway.

  Her favorite MMO had ended an expansion like this. Both factions had been playing on the same continent, and in the last two months, after the Prison Keeper was killed and on farm by most guilds who cared enough to raid, the devs had opened the continent up to faction warfare. It had been bloody, violent, and fun.

  Tori wasn’t stupid, though. What was happening right now might look like an MMO, but sometime during Phase One, she’d finally truly snapped out of it. This wasn’t a video game. There were real people’s lives at stake—like her moms’—and while Hal’s plan to hack the game might lead to a quick win and save everyone’s life, Tori wasn’t so sure it’d work out. If it didn’t, it’d fall on her to fix everything. Carol, Zane, and her.

  She reached up and brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes as they closed in on the baseball stadium. Hair gel would have fixed that—just one more unfairness in the world. Then she focused on the dungeon and on Phase Three.

  It always fell on the player characters to fix everything when the devs messed it up.