Deep underground in one of the many workshops of her factory in Modo’s desert, Emily lets out a slow breath as the mechanical arms surrounding the table she’s strapped to move in sync, stabbing her with tens of needles at once. They empty their viscous payloads into her flesh, and her muscles lock up as she feels the thick sludge crawling beneath her skin, spreading to cover every inch of her being. She doesn’t disable her pain receptors, unwilling to dull the sensation at all as she uses the discomfort to track the artificial metal’s movement, feeling it break down layers of muscle, dermis, and subcutaneous tissue to take their place.

  Her flesh visibly writhes and, while Ivor winces, Pod doesn’t bat an eye as they watch over the process closely, occasionally glancing at the diagnostic screens tracking her vitals.

  It takes several minutes for the imbued mana helping to guide and circulate the solution to fade, and as Emily’s mana rushes in to replace it, the metal hardens into a semi-liquid state, letting mana flow through it just as smoothly as through her flesh.

  “It… It worked!” Pod cheers, rapidly tapping his fingers across the touch-sensitive display to fill in more parameters from the test. “Sub-dermal plating test forty-six marked as a full success on subject T0. No incompatibilities or autoimmune response detected, and complete integration confirmed. How do you feel?”

  “Heavy,” Emily responds, rolling her shoulders and organic wrist, as Ivor undoes the binds holding her in place, feeling the armour shift beneath the surface without impeding her movements. “But fine. Great even.”

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  [Status]

  [Name:] Emily Coldstone

  [Race:] Human

  [Age:] 21 > 24

  [Magic Circle:] Fourth Circle

  [Machina Cortex:] Fourth Stage

  [Attributes:] Strength 28 (47), Dexterity 155 > 181 (193), Agility 121 > 154 (167), Vitality 26 (64), Intelligence 380 > 408 (508)

  [Health:] 400/400

  [Stamina:] 1046/1170

  [Mana:] 96328/97920

  [Machina:] 90670/97920

  _____

  She closes her system window after a quick look at the new vitality boost and deploys a blade from her left palm, bringing it down on her forearm and watching it slice through the top layers of skin before scraping against the metal below. It digs in a bit as she draws it along its full length, but it doesn’t break through before its tip slips free. A small groove is left behind, visible through her parted skin, but within seconds, more metal bubbles up to repair it, consuming a drop of her mana but otherwise leaving her unscathed as her skin knits itself back together.

  To her surprise, the sensation Emily feels as her flesh repairs is nearly identical to that of the liquid metal doing the same.

  Oh? Am I finally ready to try integrating Faraday Cage?

  “I think you’re going to need to rename your external armour,” Ivor signs as she puts back on her Second Skin.

  “Ha, yeah, that’s probably smart,” Emily scoffs in mild amusement, checking her system to confirm the subdermal isn’t large enough to complete her progression requirement yet.

  “Other than the self-repair function, SD64 should operate the same in a non-magical subject, right?” Pod questions the metal’s creators, eyeing the operation table.

  “Yes.” Ivor nods. “We haven’t confirmed how your machina will interact with it, and you’ll need top-up injections if it suffers too much damage and you lose material, but I can’t think you’ll struggle with any affinity conflict like our past magical subjects.”

  “Perfect, in that case ca-”

  Pod’s cut off by a loud chime echoing through the sterile lab and, moments later, Harriet’s high-pitched, crackling voice rings out from the speakers embedded in the ceiling.

  “It’s finally happening, I repeat, we get to do something fun for a change! There’s been a huge spike in activity at observation targets D1 through 3. Sending you the video feeds now.”

  The screen in front of Pod changes to show three live images at the same time as Harriet sends a spark of mana directly into Emily’s head, giving her a detailed copy of the feeds. Each shows a different environment: one a swirling whirlpool; another a frosty cave; and the last a bubbling pool of magma. But all three images share the same rippling crack in space at the centre.

  The changes since Emily assigned squads of her droids to watch them are immediately apparent. The cracks that once looked like distorted tears in reality, with nothing but disjointed nothingness behind them, have grown into fractured webs, reflecting twisted copies of the spaces they inhabit like a shattered mirror. They’re still obviously unstable, but Emily can see the mana being drawn towards them, so thick it’s taken the form of mist.

  “Damn,” Pod mutters. “Guess my armour will have to wait.”

  “Do we not have time?” Ivor asks, squinting at the screen. “That dungeon doesn’t look ready yet.”

  “The mana levels are spiking,” Emily replies, setting off towards the elevator as she reads the data feed Harriet’s transmitting into her mind from the base’s Logic Core above. “It will reach what I theorised as the domain of fifth circle in two hours.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The elevator opens before them to reveal Mensacus waiting with his wendigos crouched behind him, twitching with excitement at the prospect of leaving the tunnels they’ve inhabited since birth. Emily and her two apprentices step in without batting an eye at the creatures, and they ascend to the surface.

  Harriet flows through the ground as they pass the Logic Core, rejoining Emily and taking to the new layer of metal beneath her skin like a fish to water. They meet Silica in the centre of the base’s mana gathering array, and she lets out an excited yip as she runs over to press herself close to Emily, excited to test out her new second circle strength.

  Emily doesn’t waste any time in taking control of the mana-dense winds churning in the array, charging them with space and chanting a short verse to shrink the gap between herself and her target to a single step. Their group appears in the middle of the ocean in a blink, standing on a floating metal platform operated by several mechanical troops and occupied by a few familiar faces.

  “Damn,” Colette, the captain of the New Denntimo Defence Force’s eighteenth squadron, mutters under her breath in shock at the newcomers, glancing at the hunched wendigos with discomfort that she quickly covers. “That was fast. We only just sent word to the mainland about the sudden spike in mana density.”

  “I’ve been waiting for this dungeon to open for a while,” Emily replies, walking over to the mana counter installed at the edge of the platform and checking the still rising levels as they approach a hundred thousand.

  “We’ve been watching it too, but it’s still going to take a few hours for our main assault force to get here. Anyway, you mentioned finding some other forming entrances too, right? Should we be worried about running into opposing forces once we’re inside?”

  “It’s likely.” Emily nods. “I informed Lebard of the entrance I found in their territory, though I buried the path to the one in the Morzean Mountains, and there’s a chance there are other paths I didn’t find. Also, their mana signatures are reaching the point where they’re quite hard to miss. At the minimum, there’s a high chance you’ll run into Modo’s Demon. Gaius left his seclusion a little over a year ago now, and I did mention the dungeon to him in passing, so it’s safe to assume he’s found an entrance.”

  Colette draws in a sharp breath at the casual mention of Gaius, but her reaction is quickly tempered as she stares at Emily’s back, feeling the crushing pressure she thoughtlessly emanates.

  “Will he be hostile?”

  “I doubt it. If you don’t get in his way, he won’t care about you. If he does cause you issues, though, give up any boon he’s after and remind him that you’re my allies, then he should move on.”

  “Thank you,” Colette says with a small, grateful bow.

  Emily waves her off and gestures for her family to follow before stepping out onto the open water. She coats the bottom of their feet with a thin sheen of water mana and leads them closer to the raging whirlpool, standing at the edge to get a good view of the dungeon’s entrance.

  Pod pulls out a tablet to note down his observations as Ivor produces a notebook from the folds of his armoured robes, and they all watch with bated breath as the fractured space pulses with energy, growing in size at a visible rate.

  The cracks in reality spread, reaching closer and closer towards them as a procession of ships sail towards the observation platform a few miles away to begin unloading soldiers and mercenaries, armed to the teeth and with several fourth circle signatures among them. Old Man Silver and Gem, the leader of the Black Fang Mercenaries, join Emily’s small group as the cracks reach halfway out of the whirlpool, while Maximilien remains with his troops on the platform.

  Finally, once the growing fracture has covered a little over three-quarters of the whirlpool in unstable space, it rapidly begins to fold in on itself. Cracks superpose, lining up and melding, sucking in chunks of misty mana like a starved beast, and the gaps between them twist, flashing between images of burning wastelands and silent watery graves, filled with the carcases of creatures so large their ends can’t be seen.

  Once the densely-layered mesh of space has returned to the size of a person, and the cracks are so numerous that Emily can no longer see the spaces in between, it solidifies into a swirling, ocean-blue doorway leaking a mist of mana with edges too sharp for something natural. The moment it stabilises, a deep bell tolls, echoing out across the open water and rattling the bones of everyone nearby.

  Somehow, Emily can tell by the uncanny, otherworldly tone of each toll that the sound has reached every corner of the world, alerting all of its inhabitants to the coming change.

  “The Path of Ascension has opened,” Emily mutters in sync with Mensacus, Silver, and Gem, the words rising from them unbidden.

  The New Denntimo mages blink back their surprise quickly, while Emily doesn’t hesitate in striding forward, leading her party down towards the dungeon's entrance.

  “I’ll see you in there,” she calls over her shoulder, waving goodbye to Silver without looking back. “Though for your sake, I hope you don’t set your sights on anything I’m after.”

  “Tsk, damn brat,” Silver grumbles without malice as he and Gem turn and walk away, their focus going to the mercenaries awaiting their orders.

  Emily approaches the glowing door and reaches out towards it, pausing only a few millimetres away as a chill runs down her spine. She pulls back her hand and considers for a moment before turning to her son.

  “Hold us together,” she instructs him, following her instincts without question and sending Silver’s communicator a quick warning just in case her hunch proves correct, telling him to reconsider the number of people he enters with. “I don’t want us to get separated.”

  Mensacus nods and unfurls his arms, wrapping a small metal tendril around the waists of everyone in their group. With his grip tight, Emily reaches out and sets her hand on the door.

  The blue, mana-based film stretched over nothing feels warm to the touch. The warmth quickly spreads as it flows along her skin, swallowing her arm before she can blink and continuing across her chest and up her neck. Emily tenses but doesn’t pull back, letting the doorway swallow her.

  A sinking, twisting feeling pulls at her gut, and her spatial senses churn in a sickening manner as a flood of information too complex for her to understand slams into her before being ripped away just as suddenly.

  Emily grits her teeth and blinks, and the world rights itself around her, all dizzying sensations vanishing like a lie as she finds herself in an unfamiliar landscape. Mensacus’ arm is still wrapped around her waist, and with a glance back, she confirms they haven’t lost anyone, although Pod’s face has turned green and Ivor is emptying his stomach onto the blackened metallic floor beneath their feet.

  Looking around, Emily takes in the towering buildings flanking the street they’re in the centre of. They’re formed from thick steel beams, with massive panes of glass filling in the gaps and showing their bare insides, and they stretch up to the thin clouds above that barely conceal the three balls of fire hanging in the sky far above, banishing all shadows with their omnipresent light.

  “What is this place?” Mensacus asks, letting go of everyone and rewinding his arms together. “It feels so… empty. I can’t smell anything alive.”

  “Nothing?” Emily questions with a raised brow, hearing a faint clink like metal chips falling somewhere in the distance, bouncing off every nearby surface as if the buildings themselves were speaking.

  “Nothing I could eat.”

  “So, you can’t eat robots then?” Pod asks in a subdued voice, drawing Emily’s attention as he points to the narrow alley beside the nearest building, just out of her sight.

  Emily takes a few steps towards him and discovers the source of the quickly growing noise as her gaze meets tens of dog-sized metal arachnids, scurrying along the building’s walls towards them with glowing red eyes locked on their position.

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