Chương 76: The Battery

The device changed the camp within a day, and not in the way Alex had expected. He'd built it thinking about waves, about Liam emptying his pool in one cast and standing useless for the rest of a fight, about mages running dry at the worst moment. And it did fix that. But the thing that surprised him was how fast it stopped being a combat tool and started being infrastructure, a piece of the camp the way the wall was a piece of the camp, something everyone touched and everyone fed. Because everyone charged it.

That had been Cassandra's idea, and it was a good one. The device lost roughly half of whatever went into it, a brutal inefficiency they hadn't found a way around, so filling it was slow work, and the answer was simply everyone. Not just the mages. Every person in the camp with a mana pool, which by now was most of them, stopped by the great ugly box at the end of their day and poured in whatever they had left before sleep. A warrior with a few points of mana he'd never use in a fight put it in the box.

A cook, an armorer, a kid too young to fight but old enough to have awakened, all of them topping it up a trickle at a time, and the trickles added up, and the box filled. Alex watched the line of people at the device one evening and thought about what it meant, and the thought ran further than he expected. Mana had never been worth anything before. You had it or you didn't, you spent it or you didn't, and when it was gone you waited for it to come back. But a thing that could store it changed that.

Store enough of it, and mana became something you could save, spend, give, take. Something you could run out of and buy more of. He could see it, dimly, a version of the world further down the road where mana was a currency like any other, where a person low on it could purchase a charge the way you'd buy fuel, where the stuff that powered everything had a price. They were a long way from that.

But he'd built the first crude vault for it, and standing there watching his neighbors fill it a drop at a time, he understood he might have built the first coin, too. Liam had feelings about the device, and the feelings were complicated.

"It's incredible," he said, the first time he used it in earnest, drawing a reserve out of the box to fuel a working that would have flattened him otherwise.

"It's genuinely incredible, I could kiss it, I could kiss both of you." Then his face did something conflicted.

"And I also kind of hate it, and I need you to understand that both of those are true at the same time."

"Why do you hate it?"

"Because look at it. Look at all that mana just sitting there." Liam gestured at the box with real anguish.

"If I could turn that into spatial mana, if I could convert it, I could power portal creation off this thing. Real ones. As many as I wanted. The only reason I can't spam portals is they empty me instantly, and here's a giant tank of the exact solution to my problem that I cannot use, because it stores mana, not spatial mana, and I have no idea how to convert one into the other." He put his forehead against the cool metal of the box dramatically.

"It's the answer to my whole life sitting three feet away in a language I can't read. Do you know how that feels?"

"nah" Alex said"You did do that. This is your fault, actually." Liam lifted his head, mournful.

"You built me a treasure chest I can't fully use... oh, can I use it again tomorrow?"

"Why not""Thank you." And Liam wandered off muttering about conversion runes, which Alex privately thought the kid was probably on some kind of drug or on a spectrum of some kind, because that was what Liam did, but not today. The device's real future, the one Alex kept turning over, was bigger than portals or waves. It could be a battery for anything. The rune lights on the wall, the enchantments that ran the camp, all of it currently fed by hand, could someday draw from a store instead.

There were possibilities in it he could only half see, machines that ran on stored mana, systems that didn't need a person standing there feeding them. But those needed something the camp didn't have yet, someone who understood complex mechanics, engineering, the marriage of rune and machine that turned a battery into an engine. They had the battery. They didn't have the engineer. Alex added it to the long list of things the camp would need as it grew.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The camp kept growing under all of it. They'd decided to expand, after the leaf-blade wave showed them the ceiling was lower than they'd feared, and expand they had. The combatant count pushed past a thousand now, the total past fifteen hundred with the children and the non-fighters, the settlement sprawling wider every week.

Scouts ranged further and came back with more survivors, because the truth of the tutorial was still the truth, most outposts died, torn apart by infighting or waves or the monster nests nobody cleared, and the survivors who lasted long enough to be found were glad past words to be found.

They walked in wearing whatever they'd survived in and looked at the camp like a fever dream, the rune lights, the enchanted gear, the potions, the walls that clearly hadn't come from any store, and most of them wept, and most of them stayed. And the name had started to travel. Alex noticed it slowly, the way you notice a thing that has been happening a while before you name it. The scouts came back saying the survivors had already heard of them. The Morningstars. The family that started this camp.

People spoke of them in the camp with good regards. But the reputation had two faces, and he was one of them. Because for every survivor who arrived speaking the Morningstar name with hope, there was the other thing, the thing that followed him specifically. The family was respected. Alex was feared. The stories that traveled about the Morningstars were warm: the healers, the builders, the ones who took you in. The stories that traveled about Alex were something else.

The giant who threw fiery death and destruction, who cleared armies alone, who'd put his hand through a man's skull in the middle of his own camp. Praise for the family. Fear for him. He'd walk through the growing settlement and watch new arrivals figure out who he was, watch the warmth they felt for the Morningstar name curdle into wariness the moment they connected it to the enormous shirtless man who looked like he could end them by accident. He'd made his peace with it, mostly.

It still cost him something every time. The one place it didn't follow him was wherever Cassandra was, and so he found himself there more and more. They'd gotten close over the device, closer than he'd been to anyone outside his family, and the closeness had an ease to it that he didn't have to work at.

They fell into conversation the way they fell into rune-work, naturally, without effort, and one evening after the box was charged and the day was done, sitting in the quiet of the workshop that had nearly killed them both, she told him about the orphanage. She didn't make a thing of it. That was her way, the same way she'd told him about the bartending, small and dry and without any bid for sympathy.

"I grew up in a home," she said.

"Not a good one. Not a movie-bad one either, nobody was cruel, exactly. It was just a place that had too many kids and not enough of anything else, and the people running it were tired, and mostly they got through the day by not looking too closely at any one of us." She turned a leftover rune-sheet over in her hands.

"The food was terrible. That's the thing I remember most, which is stupid, of all the things to remember. But you're hungry as a kid in a place like that, a little hungry all the time, and it does something to you. Makes you sharp. Makes you notice who has and who doesn't, who's going to help and who's just going to look away." She shrugged.

"There were one or two people there who actually cared. A cook, for a while, who used to slip me extra. A woman who ran the place for a couple of years who saw me, actually saw me, before she left. You hold onto those. But mostly it was a place you survived, not a place you lived, and I got out of it the second I could."

"The bartending," Alex said quietly.

"Yeah, I lied about my age, got the job, and the second I had income I filed for emancipation. Sixteen years old, standing, proving I could take care of myself." She almost smiled.

"People think emancipation is this dramatic thing. For me it was paperwork. It was just making it true on paper. Nobody was coming to take care of me, so I'd do it myself." She set the sheet down. Alex listened to all and took from her expertise when he spoke about Liz. He just received it, and let it stay in the atmosphere, and understood her a little more completely for it, the carefulness, the counting, the way she read a room like her life depended on it because once it had.

The self-sufficiency that ran all the way down. She'd built herself the way he'd built himself, out of a thing that could have broken her and hadn't, and he found he wanted to know all of it, every piece, the whole shape of how she'd become the person sitting across from him fixing runes.

"Thank you for telling me," he said, which was what she'd said to him, and she recognized it, and something eased between them.

"You listen well," she said.

"For a man who looks like a nice-looking brute."

"I try," Alex responded with a silly grin on his face