The Broken Arm (Patreon)

This is a followup short story to The Debt Collector, and as such, has a lot more language than usual.

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Cora leaned over her arm on her workbench, examining the disassembled device, and using her one human arm to trace the lines of mana that ran through the metal prosthetic. 

The fight with the Assocication agent had cost her more than she’d like to admit, even if she was only admitting it to herself. The null-steel that served as a large portion of the outer frame to prevent external spell interference, as well as serving to act as containment for the enchantments, was thankfully fine, but the rest… 

Cora had to bite back a grimace.

The arm worked, and that was probably the best she could say about it. The pinkie and ring finger were both jammed, hairline cracks running through the ball bearings and wedging into the metal. 

She pulled out a pair of tweezers from her desk and began to pull at the scraps of metal. Once the fragments jamming the joints were out, she used a quick Levitate Metal spell to pull the remnants of the ball bearings out. 

That caused the digits to flop loosely, but that was fine. The minor enchantments that would be needed to allow them to orient with the greater flows of energy in the arm weren’t too difficult for her these days, and Inscribe Metal should let her get the job done just fine.

She scrabbled around in her desk until she found the spare ball bearings, then set to carving the stabilization and orientation spells onto them, as well as the energy conduit, then set them into the joints, popping them into place.

While she was working on the hand, she unscrewed a small panel on the back, where the chargestone sat. The glowing blue grade-one stone, now upgraded to grade-two, was dull, nearly spent from the electric shocks she’d used to attack the Association agent. With a sigh, she touched the stone and cast Augment Mineral. 

Slowly but surely, she restored the power until it was back up to a bright blue color, and felt full to her mana senses. 

Technically speaking, she didn’t need to remove the panel and touch the stone, but there was an efficiency loss to charging it through her prosthetic, and she needed all the efficiency she could get. 

Stones weren’t usually like plants, that naturally recovered their power over time by absorbing it from the air and dirt and water. Sure, they recovered from ambient mana over time, but they weren’t alive. That meant she had to charge it all up herself. She could charge it mid-battle, like plant mages did, but it was far more mana expensive.

There was an upside – magical minerals could in theory be stretched to hit a stable saturation point, where they formed magical generating cores of their own and stabilized into, essentially, natural magic items. Pushing more power into one then expanded the effect, or could be used to detonate the core for a massive burst of power.

That’s what her null-steel was, steel that was soaked with abnegation mana to its saturation point, and gained an innate resistance to magic. When she’d used her null-steel bullet to break the agent’s shield, it had been the overloading of the core.

She tried not to wince at the loss of one of her null-steel bullets. Those were expensive, damnit, and just because she’d stolen a crate of null-steel bars from Arkstone didn’t mean that she was happy about losing a bullet. The fireball bullet was going to be expensive to replace too… 

She shook herself off and examined the rest of the arm, meticulously repairing a handful of scratches to the outside, and any areas where the internal enchantments were broken. She had secondary and tertiary systems to carry the energy flow, of course, but not fixing the primary was just shamefully sloppy. 

She started moving up the arm, and noted that the space in the center that she’d left for any other unique minerals had taken a bit of damage from the fight, but nothing she couldn’t touch up easily enough. 

The rig of repelling-quartz at her elbow that served to enhance that strength and spread the power of the lightening-stone more evenly had a cracked crystal, and it took a bit of work with Augment Mineral to fix it and ensure that it stayed fixed. There were a few minor tweaks to the energy flows too, then she moved on to the lightening-stone itself. 

Technically, it wasn’t a single stone, but rather a group of them arranged in a pentahedron, alongside a series of supporting enchanted spellwork that spread the effect out through the arm in a manner that was close enough to a real arm, and woven into the same area was the series of telluric-enhanced quartz stones that served as generative cores and artificial mana sources to power the energy flows of the arm, so it didn't drain her mana dry in order to keep itself running. 

The complex nexus of enchantments and power sources was arguably the important part of her arm, since not only was it power, but it also made the prosthetic light enough to not throw off her balance terribly.

That had been a pain in the ass to figure out. Her initial model had simply negated the pull of gravity entirely, and while that had worked, it hadn’t felt quite right. She needed some weight, but distributed like a normal arm. 

She shook off the distraction of admiring her best handiwork yet, and studied the nexus. 

It was strange. Sure, Cora hadn’t built the arm to act as a flight device – she couldn’t afford trimcopper and windspun-topaz, but it should have been able to keep her suspended for at least four minutes. That was enough to slow or stop falling anywhere in the tower without killing her, and the short time she’d had to hold herself during the fight shouldn’t have caused much damage.

But the stress had nearly popped one of the crystals, and she frowned, leaning in, trying to see what had gone wrong. 

Ah, there. When her enchantments had rerouted all of her power into it, she’d missed a connecting line, and the load had been overly focused on that stone. She cursed and checked the other connectors in an outer ring, then went over them twice more, before she was certain that it wasn’t going to happen again. 

Then she examined the only other piece of the arm that was arguably just as important as the power and weight arrays, the body-connector. 

That was a truly impressive bit of enchantment. She had no idea how it even worked, and she’d had to pay that creepy little shit Maxim for his help with the mental magic portions, and instruct Etta on enchanting the life magic portions. 

Whoever had created it had been an absolute mad genius, and she respected the hell out of them, even if they’d probably were a corporate spell engineer. The design mimicked the complex parts of full-gate mobility aid spells, like creating limbs out of force, and the way they integrated with the body’s life and mental energies to allow you to move another enchantment as if it was a part of your body, without needing to burn a massive chunk of your mana-garden. 

Compressing something that complex into an eight centimeter diameter, grade-two array was… 

Well, Cora couldn’t have done it, and she’d designed the entire rest of the arm. 

It was also the part she was most worried about having damage. When the Association agent had hit her with the magic suppression spell, it had mainly disabled the power source, but with the power source so close to this, there was always a chance of leakage. 

She spun the end and studied it, then let out a loud series of curses, and was only interrupted when the small communication mirror on her wall glowed a bright red of an incoming message. She threw her labcoat on to give herself an air of professionality and stepped up to the mirror, using a spark of ungated mana to activate it.

The enchanted mirror turned pure black, and an overly confident male voice drifted out of the darkness.

“Evening, kid,” the voice said. 

Cora let out a sigh of relief. This mirror’s ID number wasn’t registered to her, and only a few of her black market contacts even knew it, but there was always a chance one of them had sold her out. She hoped not, but it was always a possibility. 

“Hey Kevin,” she said, and a sigh drifted out of the darkness. 

“I regret every day telling you that was my name. I should hire a mind mage to wipe that from your memory. If only Arcanists weren’t so damn expensive…” 

“What did you call for?” she asked, getting down to business. 

For all that Kevin – or as most people knew him, Eyes, was relaxed, he was also dangerous. Anyone who lived to be in their fifties with a corporate bounty on their head, without either paying it off or faking their death was, and Kevin was wanted by just about every member of the Association.

And that wasn’t even mentioning the fact that he worked for One. 

“Well,” Kevin drawled, “first of all, the boss man wanted to ask to make sure you’re not interested in a few rounds in the arena. Gun users past grade-one and mineral mages in general are both already rare enough, and someone with a homemade prosthetic arm? We might be able to arrange you to get that healing artifact of yours fixed up as compensation. It’s got to be running low on magic now…” 

For a moment, Cora was tempted. One’s Arena was one of the most notorious parts of the underground, though, and even if she was a masked fighter, her arm was too distinctive for true anonymity. 

Not to mention that they wouldn’t want her for an official duel, the kind of professional sport that you could bring your kids to, with abnegation and spatial spells to whisk contestants out of danger at a moment’s notice.  

No, they’d want her to take part in the Death League. 

But still, if they could recharge her grandmother’s Bloodstone, or better yet, bring it to saturation, that would be worth a lot to her… 

Cora had relied on that for her survival. She might not be the highest priority on the Association’s shit list, but after the shit her parents had pulled to get high on allyiane dust and gamble their entire mortgage, she was sure she made the top thousand, at least.

She shook her head a moment later 

“No, sorry.” 

“Shame,” Kevin said. “Well, if you change your mind, just call the arena. And my own offer of bringing you onto the Eyes team stands too. We can always use a good enchanter, and you’d make for an excellent maintenance worker.” 

“I don’t want to get any deeper into this than I need to,” she said. “Was that all? I’m working on some upgrades…”

“Nah,” he responded. “This is just a courtesy call, since you did us the favor of disposing of some Association trash. From me, not from One, though One would be happy to buy anything you looted off the agent at the standard price.” 

That sent a chill through her, and her normal fussing with the random detritus on her desk ceased for a moment. 

“What is it?” she asked. 

“Your little girlfriend, Etta?” 

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Cora said. Her and Etta’s relationship was… Complicated. 

“Yeah, sure,” Eyes said, and this time, it was definitely his professional voice, not a casual one. “Maxim took her to dinner, then to a wyldcine parlor… One that I happen to know sells a few things other than wyldcine. Things like allyiane dust, crystal love, and mindfuzz.” 

“Shit,” Cora said. She knew Maxim was a little creep, but Etta was a good person, and as far as she knew, Maxim and Etta had never even met. Why would they? Etta went to a private college on one of the nicer layers, while Maxim was street trash like her. 

“Mmm, yeah,” Eyes agreed. “Try not to do any permanent damage, kay? One doesn’t take well to having one of his mind-warpers killed. Otherwise… I’ll make sure that One doesn’t have to hear about whatever you do.” 

There was a ripple, then a glowing pink circle of light appeared in her vision. 

“That should give you directions,” Eyes said. “Consider it a sample of what could happen if you work for my team.”

The mirror winked back to normal, and Cora found herself staring into her own eyes, then she started moving, shoving her arm over her stump, and sending a pulse of mana into it to activate the enchantments.

The body-connector had suffered a bit of damage from the spell that the Association agent had used, but she didn’t give a shit about that right now. She had a creep to go beat the shit out of.