Engineering, Magic, and Kitsune

John did not sleep for long, and what he got was mercifully dreamless, but he felt better. Different. Yuki was right. What happened was in the past, even though it tore him up inside. He couldn't change it.

What he could do, though, was change the future, which was why he was in his workshop at dark o'clock, drawing out ideas for a new gauntlet. Inspiration struck him when he woke; possibly losing it entirely by returning to sleep was unacceptable.

Besides, since when had a little arm pain stopped him before? It hurt like hell, a lot more than yesterday, even through the numbing agents in the bandage. Still, it seemed to be healing. Slowly, at least.

Back on topic: the fight and the ensuing… encounter with Kiku exposed three core issues with his gauntlet that he needed to fix.

First, solely finger-driven controls were subject to interference by third parties. That one was pretty easy to solve in concept. Rather than something akin to a power glove, John could entirely enclose his lower arm in a capsule, creating a situation where someone couldn't disable him by grabbing his fingers and more space for controls, storage, and other mechanisms!

Of course, this would lead to the capsule not having fingers, but, well, he already had a solution for that.

He could adapt the same system that controlled his miniaturized arm or the flying disc. It'd be a simple matter to mimic the former, just with a more limited range of motion and on a larger scale. Of course, he'd want it to have its own capacitor rather than working off the main battery, but it would sip power for ninety-nine percent of use cases.

One minor problem was that this would make it much heavier than a relatively light armoured glove, but he could solve it with more gratuitous telekinesis. It was very tempting to try to make some sort of powered exoskeleton, but there was a reason he hadn't done that in the past. It would only take one number being slightly off for the thing to be able to move faster than expected or twist beyond allowances, leading to his fragile human joints being dislocated at best.

At worst, a leg being twisted off because the telekinetic focus powering that limb decided everything there should turn seven hundred and twenty degrees was plausible. John had… issues with the earlier versions of the miniature arms that made it clear such was a possibility.

He'd never take his range of motion for granted again.

The second problem was that it was too hard to modulate the power he was putting out while under stress. This one was, comparatively, simple. With all the extra room that a bigger, heavier gauntlet would give, he had ample room to add a knob that throttled the flow of magic to the glove to the inside of the main body, then he could mirror it outside in the form of a gauge so he could actually see it. Of course, that didn't entirely eliminate the problem, but it would decrease the chances of another… accident.

Last, how it melted down could have been prevented. Thankfully, the lightning focus itself was entirely fine. A post-mortem of his poor, poor gauntlet revealed that it was actually the air-aligned mana channels cracking, leading to some of it explosively destabilizing into lightning, which then jumped over to the metal lining on the fire-aligned channels, where it then caused those to spew energy uncontrollably. Thankfully, he wasn't actively using fire for anything, so it only had what was always present in the lines to work with, so when it became unstable and turned to heat, it didn't cook him and everything within a good few feet into char. Given that it was inside his warding, he probably would have melted if the line had been in use.

The thought scared him less than it would have yesterday, which was terrifying in its own right. Perhaps either Yuki's talk last night or Kiku's grasp had rattled something free in his mind.

This one was a lot more complex to solve, although lightning was his only real big "burst" focus right now, so there was nothing else that would pose a breach risk. Even then, there was no reason not to future-proof. Each different line can cause different failure modes due to how the differently aligned magic acts, so what solution works for one won't work for all of them. If he were back home, he'd just use rubber, with a metal top layer to protect it from the various non-lightning effects that air could destabilize into that channel, but it wasn't an option here with his lacking materials.

Hmm. Maybe he could use ceramic? It was an excellent electrical insulator, and he had some various broken pieces in storage that he could melt and cast around something to get the shape he needed. Fire was easy, so was water, and earth was pretty… sedate. Order and entropy were more complex to deal with, for sure. How the hell do you even insulate against them? For order, he could probably get away with glass. Hmm. What would he use for the entropy line? If it broke at the wrong time, he would probably end up as a puddle.

Perhaps some sort of pure iron coating for that? Of course, everything would have to be magically treated anyhow, so the energy didn't phase through the material, but the base material was critical. Pure iron was, at the very least, a low-entropy material, so it would hopefully prove resistant enough.

He jotted down more notes and filled out more of the ungodly equations he was working on, which both had long since stretched out into sprawling, page-devouring monstrosities that would be the nightmare of any university student.

Yes. That may work.

It was a small mercy that he was abnormally good at doing math in his head. He hated to admit it, but the insistence of several of his teachers that he "wouldn't always have a calculator" probably led to skills that came in handy now. However, if he ever got back home, one wouldn't be able to torture that admission out of him.

A good while passed as he worked on his latest project, scrapping a few designs along the way as he sketched up appealing drafts, only to realize when he actually ran the numbers that they wouldn't work out. Once, he was getting close to done when he remembered an idea from a few months ago and had to redo the routing to accomplish it.

It was embarrassing how long it took him to realize he could route the final channel that terminated in the emitter for the effects to a knuckle and thus free up his pointer finger for another control. Unfortunately, he wouldn't see any actual benefits from that design choice until he designed new focuses that could take advantage of it. Again, future proofing was ideal here.

It took some time, but at the very least, he had a skeleton of a design for the War Gauntlet version 0.1. It'd be much too bulky for daily tasks, but that wasn't what it was for. No, he needed a dedicated weapon, and he needed it now.

He also needed to figure out how to stop Kiku from doing… that to him ever again, but he didn't even know where to start there.

Shivers raced up his spine at the thought of being in her grip again, but he crushed the dread back down to focus on his task.

The issue came from the fact that he wasn't entirely sure HOW to block an attack directly on his mind. He could squash Presence with his warding, muting the effects, but this seemed to bypass it entirely! Either it worked on a wholly different mechanism or bluntly overpowered his defences.

No, if she overpowered his warding, he wouldn't have expected it to still run well afterward; that Nameless tackling him would have done much more damage. But what was the vector? If she only needed to exist near him, she could have hovered behind him until his mind was putty, and then carted him off. It probably required either her to speak to the target, or to grab them to maintain physical contact. Perhaps a bit too much of an assumption for his taste, but it felt like it tracked.

If it was the former, perhaps he could figure out a way to garble sounds on command? That may neuter the effect. It's hard to suggest something to a target who doesn't understand you. For the latter, perhaps a full covering suit of clothing made of the same magically null sap he used for focus making and ensuring magically "clean" environments would work? Of course, he'd prefer to never be grabbed, but solving that problem was even harder; he might as well say the plan was to hit her and not get hit. Maintaining distance was a must, but he'd have to rely on Yuki and maybe Rin.

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If she could control the latter, that would prove disastrous, so he shelved that for now.

A sharp knock shook him out of his thoughts. "Yes?" he asked, snapping his head from his drafting bench to the door.

"It's Yuki, may I come in?" asked the kitsune.

"Yuki! Please, come in," John replied.

The door slid open, and she stooped through the doorway with a bowl of… soup? After everything was dealt with, he had to extend a good few doors; this place was not made with an eight-foot-tall kitsune in mind.

"Soup?" he asked, shuffling his papers over to clear space, making it just in time as Yuki put the bowl and utensils down in front of him.

She nodded. "You skipped breakfast, so I figured you should at least get lunch," she explained.

John's brow furrowed. "Skipped breakfast?" he asked. "It's nowhere near time for—" He cut himself short as he glanced outside and beheld the noon sun beating down. Had he really zoned out that much? It should still be before dawn. Moreover, how did he not notice that when she opened the door? He must be really out of it today.

Sighing, he graciously grabbed the utensils. "Thank you, Yuki. I don't know what I would do without you," he said, then started to dig in. It was a good soup, but there was something strange… Was that rice? He didn't have any rice. Where the hell did she get rice? Come to think of it, he didn't like working with mushrooms either due to the risk of poisoning himself, so where did she get those for the soup, or even the base for this broth?

He put it down as Yuki doing Yuki things and ate some more. It was a delicious soup, although an unfamiliar style of one. It was reasonably mild overall, but with a heady umami taste, and the assorted vegetables added a pleasant texture.

"Enjoying the Zosui?" Yuki asked, and he gratefully nodded.

Swallowing, he replied, "That's what it's called? It's amazing." He did decently as a cook, but there was only so much you could do with what you could find in a forest or steal from destroyed carts. It still bugged him that they had New World plants here to no end.

Wisely, John elected not to question the source of her ingredients, but as he tried to come up with something to talk about, his heart dipped, guilt gnawing at it again. "About last night…" he began, trailing off as she scoffed and locked onto him, having previously been glancing at his work.

"Don't," Yuki all but ordered, taking a surprisingly imperious tone.

"Don't?" John questioningly repeated back.

"Don't apologize," she finished, brow furrowing. "You'll work yourself back up thinking about how you could have done better."

He grunted, turning back to his soup. "You could at least pretend that I'm not an open book," John complained, although his tone held no real heat.

For a few minutes, he ate silently. Yuki leaned in, quietly scanning his work, although it was all in English, so she presumably couldn't read it. He hoped so, at least. This world seemed to have some weird effect on language, given he taught himself without some equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, but he didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"I see you're working on a new gauntlet," the kitsune commented once John had finished his meal. "Was the destroyed one your only one?" She tensed as she asked, and he could detect a slight edge of worry in her tone.

John shook his head. "No. I have some previous versions, but they aren't as good. I wouldn't want to have them in a serious fight. Besides, the fight exposed a few… flaws in my design. It's time for an upgrade, something specifically for fighting rather than purely a tool."

She focused on the sketches of the designs, her eyes narrowing as she soaked in every last detail, shuffling papers to see others before carefully putting everything else into its resting place to avoid disturbing his system. "It seems heavy," she noted. "Are you sure you can handle aiming it?"

"A fair concern. See this spot toward the back?" he asked, grabbing the most recent sheet and tapping at the spot. "I plan to mount an altered version of the levitation focus there, on a different power supply. It's a hair too expensive to run at all times, so there will be a toggle inside that I can flip on when a fight starts."

"I see the… 'capacitor' is larger as well," she noted in approval, her pronunciation of the English word almost eerily on point. "That means you can hold more magic, yes?"

"Yeah. I should be able to have a test version ready in a day or so, assuming I work solely on that. There are many components I can salvage from the wrecked gauntlet, but a lot needs to be custom-made."

Back home, this would easily be the work of a few weeks, maybe even a few months, but it was incredible how much you could speed work along with telekinesis and the ability to weld things at room temperature or cast any material made up for many flaws.

"And your hand?" she asked.

John sighed, unwrapping the bandages around his left hand. His flesh was still ugly, too red, and warped like a microwaved hot dog. Still, the medicines you could get from plants around here were potent, and it was just a bit less red than yesterday around the edges, and some colour had started to return to the zone outside the blast radius.

"The damage seems mostly superficial, but it hurts," he admitted, flexing his fingers and ignoring the jolt of pain. "I still seem to have a full range of motion, which is a good sign. No significant muscle or… nerve damage, I think? I'm not a healer. If something happens, I can slap on one of my old gauntlets. Some of them were designed to be right-handed. Do you have any idea what Kiku is going to do next?"

It was a small blessing that John was… mostly ambidextrous, but he still couldn't write neatly with his left hand for the life of him. At this point, the muscle memory was pretty baked in regarding what side his gauntlet should go on, but he could handle a right-side one for a bit. He probably wouldn't want to build his war gauntlet like that, though.

Yuki pursed her lips before shaking her head. "Despite everything, we might have bought ourselves more time before she acts. She seems adverse to fighting us directly for reasons I don't understand. She should not be much weaker than me, and killing me would likely prove a greater prize than any Nameless army she could conjure in a poor region like this. Yet, she didn't attack when I was exhausted and your weapon was shattered."

That was a good point. Why did Kiku back off? As terrifying as the idea was, she probably could have finished Yuki there, and then… claimed him anyhow. Besides, the Nameless nest still had all the wealth, and it would just spawn another Greater eventually. Unless she was attached to the monster, which she didn't seem to be, given she ordered it to fight the pair of them without support, there was no reason she couldn't have won then and there.

John shivered. None of this made sense, and it felt like they were missing something vital.

"You figured out what I did, didn't you?" Yuki asked. "The Greater Nameless seems to have trouble commanding its lessers like its peers might. It was almost eerie given its relative strength."

"What, you think it's stupid?" John incredulously suggested.

Yuki shook her head. "No. I think it might be new. It's strong, but inexperienced. It sounds like there has been a Greater Nameless around this area for a while. Otherwise, we probably would have heard tales of survivors of haphazard, instinctual attacks… and so would have the proper authorities."

Confusion was written across his face as John furrowed his brow. "You think Kiku killed the last one for stepping out of line?"

"Almost certainly, and that's something we can use. But first, we might have to do something unpleasant."

He tensed.

"Yeah? What is it?" John tensed, preparing for the worst.

"Most of those involved yesterday were the tax collectors from in town, although they obviously brought in forces from elsewhere," Yuki explained, "And we still have our captive tax collector."

Oh. Oh no. Had anyone been feeding that poor bastard? John forgot with everything going on! Wait, Yuki couldn't possibly be implying what he thought she was—

"The time has finally come. They are reeling. They are broken. They shall either kneel or be driven out at the point of a blade," Yuki paused, clicking her tongue. "I hoped to keep this quiet, but with an event like this? It'll be clear yokai are involved even without my involvement, and under the terms of the Grand Bargain, I can officially take the stage."