Tori Vanderbilt had always hated mind-control bosses.

  Her guild wasn’t the best at dodging mechanics, and that was fine at lower difficulties, but there’d been one boss whose area of effect attacks inflicted a debuff. If the debuff stacked up to ten, the player’s character joined the boss’s side.

  On normal difficulties, that wasn’t a problem. The stacks fell off after a few seconds, so players had to really mess up to get mind-controlled. But at the difficulties Tori liked to play, the ones that really challenged her, those stacks didn’t go away. And every single time the guild pulled the boss, they ended up getting wiped by the same four players, who just could not dodge the AoE.

  They’d never cleared that boss. Over eighty attempts, and they’d never even seen the final phase. It had killed the guild for that entire raid. People had stopped logging in for raid nights, and that had been that.

  Taven Liu was that boss.

  Tori saw what the Fireborn Crusader was doing before Hal even said anything. If he could flip Bobby, the battle would be over. Hal and Tori couldn’t possibly beat both of them. The level gap would be too high. Without Bobby, they’d have almost no chance of killing Taven alone. And Hal was out of position. He couldn’t stop the mind control.

  The only difference between her guild losing to mind control and them losing to it right now was that right now, it mattered.

  No.

  That wasn’t true.

  There was one other difference. It was a small one, but it was critical.

  Friendly fire was on.

  Tori didn’t attack Taven Liu.

  She attacked Bobby instead. She Pushed him across the floor, and the Fireborn Crusader got ripped off his feet as his grip on Bobby’s arm made them temporarily one. Bobby kicked him in the face, and another burst of resonance echoed across the room.

  I hardly saw any of this—my entire mind was on the puzzle in front of me, and on its solution.

  Charge resonance. The entire dungeon felt empty of it, except for the contested, active Waypoint Beacon. It was under Bobby’s control now, and that made the resonance his, not mine. It was acting exactly like the Waypoint Beacon in the Toxic Garden.

  As Tori and Bobby fought with the Fireborn Crusader, I closed my eyes and reached into my inventory. The Charge Converter was still there—I hadn’t taken it apart. It slipped into my hand, and I stared at it for a moment. Something flashed in the beacon room. I ignored it; the device was the only thing that mattered, and it was incomplete. All it could do was overload something—it couldn’t do what I needed it to do.

  The Charge Converter didn’t actually convert Charge. More accurately, it did, but only for a very small amount, and not in the way I needed to convert it.

  Bobby swung back into the fight, his fists slamming against the Fireborn Crusader’s back before he danced away from the boss. Every impact threw a burst of resonant Charge outward. Now that I knew to look for it, the orange glow of the weak spot wasn’t just the system marking a place to hit, either; the system was literally using Charge to mark those spots. The dungeon—and the world—ran on Charge.

  The Charge Converter only converted electric Charge to fluid Charge, not vice versa. It wasn’t a Heart—and that was okay. The five-second duration on the Converter was fine, too. I could work around those problems—but what I couldn’t work around was the ambient Charge in the dungeon.

  Not just in the dungeon, though. There was ambient Charge all over Earth’s surface—and probably all the way down into the core. Earth’s World Engine, whatever that was, ran on life force, and life force was Charge. It only made sense that a creation at the world’s scale would produce ambient Charge, just like Solemnus Six’s Grafted dungeons had. I’d even detected it a few times. Erika’s antimagic power had revealed Earth’s resonance by its absence.

  The device I needed to make had to be similar to that, but it had to operate not on a macro scale, but on a micro one. It wasn’t the Explorer, a technical, or even the Chariot. It was a remote control car, just like the one I’d torn apart as a kid.

  I got to work.

  The Charge Converter was simply an Emitter, a Refiner, and some wires and tubes. The extra parts I’d added in helped to stabilize the device, but they weren’t necessary for activation. All they did was buy five seconds of time. I’d need them—but first, I’d need to change the Charge Converter itself.

  The Emitter-Refiner pair had to change. I needed an extra step in there. A storage device, maybe, but when I thought about the batteries I had left, they weren’t right. It didn’t need to store Charge for a long time, just delay it. It was less important that I convert the Charge, and more important that I resonate it.

  A Mana Coil. That was the solution. The Mana Coil slotted in between the Emitter and Refiner, and I strung a few wires and a single, short length of conduit through the spring-shaped component. The wires and conduit spiraled around each other in reverse of the Coil as I twisted them, wrapping them into a single, tight package. Then I stared at the device. It still needed something, but it took me a moment to realize what it was.

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  A deployment method.

  I thought about it for a moment. Then I pulled the door to the Chariot open and climbed out onto one of the short, stubby arms that held the massive, engine-block hammer. The rail gun hung overhead; I yanked on the barrel until I’d pulled myself up and it down enough to work on modifying the weapon itself. Not the cannon—I was only using it as a brace while I tore into the massive hammer’s engine-shaped head.

  It took a minute—and only a minute—to rig up the device. When it was finished, it sat on the business end of the makeshift hammer, and I slid into the cockpit again.

  A pair of System messages appeared, and I smiled like a wolf after a lamb. The tables had just turned on Taven Liu, but he didn’t know it yet. He would, though. Soon.

  Then the Chariot powered up, and I stomped toward the battle.

  Everyone heard me coming.

  The Chariot wasn’t subtle, after all.

  I fired the rail gun. Rebar bolts slammed off the wreckage of all the scaffolding that’d been destroyed in our fights around the Waypoint Beacon. Taven Liu disappeared in a puff of smoke as two shots slid through him and the third ricocheted off a pipe and caromed off the far wall. Tori reacted fast, but not fast enough; her Crush missed the smoke cloud by inches and annihilated a steel plate nearby instead.

  Bobby stepped back as the cloud surged toward him, then dashed toward Tori as the Fireborn Crusader changed direction on a dime and rushed her. I didn’t react except to narrow my eyes as the rail gun slowly reloaded. It wouldn’t be done in time, and I didn’t want it to be. Tori would be okay for a second or two, and that was all I’d need to make sure she was safe from the Crusader forever.

  I needed to run a little experiment.

  Two things had changed the moment I saw those System messages. The first was that I’d successfully modified the Charge Converter into something new—and something that attacked on a totally different front than the Converter had.

  Charge Harmonizer, by Hal Riley (Created Consumable Item)

  The Charge Harmonizer uses the Principles of Liquidity, Resonant Harmonics, and Overload to force electric, ambient, and fluid Charge to change states within created items. Last for three activations before overloading its refiner. First created by Hal Riley of Earth.

  Warning: The Charge Harmonizer will also attempt to overload any magical items its Refiner impacts against in a chain reaction.

  And the second was that my understanding of resonance and how it interacted with Charge had shifted dramatically.

  Principle of Voltsmithing Learned: Resonant Harmonics

  Charge is everywhere. The aspiring Voltsmith recognizes this, and takes its presence into account in all its forms—as well as in how fluid, electric, and ambient Charge play off of each other. The harmonic nature of Charge creates resonance, and that resonance—whether between two types of Charge or all three—is a core principle of advanced Voltsmithing.

  The Charge Harmonizer sat, inactive, on the hammer’s head. As Taven Liu re-formed, his hand already reaching to burn through Tori’s hair and convert her to his team, I adjusted the Voltsmith’s Grasp, plugging it into the swinging controls. The hammer tore through the air like a blur. It caught Taven in the chest.

  A ringing filled the air.

  Bobby paused. “I didn’t get him,” he said, staring at me.

  “No. I did.” I stepped forward, the Chariot closing the gap quickly. The ringing sounded like the bells at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, but it had only been one clap, and it didn’t stop; it just rang on and on as Charge built up around the hammer’s head.

  Taven’s wrecked armor was already overloading, and he struggled to his feet. “What did you…?”

  “Do?” I finished. The hammer crashed down in the smashing motion, and Taven tried to throw himself backward. He wasn’t fast enough; the Charge Harmonizer caught him in the shoulder, and a second, higher-pitched ringing joined the first bell. “I had a breakthrough. I’ve been building creations using the Charge I had at my disposal. It’s been a limiter, but it’s kind of like working in the shop with Dad as a kid.”

  The Chariot’s hammer slammed down again, and Taven’s flame-orange glow subsided as the Charge Harmonizer hit him for the last time.

  He pushed himself to his feet and pulled an axe from his inventory. “I’ll find him next.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said, and I stepped the Chariot backward.

  The massive hammer had glowed brighter and brighter after the first two impacts as resonant, ambient Charge built up around it, and the Charge Harmonizer tried to process it into liquid and electrical energy. But after the last impact, it had gone dark. Taven hadn’t, though—the swirling miasma of Charge in all its forms had simply transferred to him. A new pair of messages had appeared.

  Creation Compromised

  A creation within this dungeon has been compromised.

  Time Until Overload: 4:29

  4:28

  4:27

  System Interface Compromised

  A system user’s ability to interact with [Earth’s] system has been compromised.

  Time Until Overload: 4:29

  4:28

  4:27

  I stepped back even more as Taven Liu stood up, weapon in hand, and glared at me. “What did you do?”

  “I took away my limiters.”

  Something had gone wrong.

  The Everburning Axe felt wrong in Taven’s hand. It had never been his favorite weapon, never felt perfect, but it hadn’t ever felt like an overbalanced, dull slab of pig iron before. His body wasn’t reacting correctly, either.

  Firelord should have been working, but after Hal Riley’s mech had hit him the last time, he’d gotten a system message.

  System Interface Compromised

  Your ability to interact with [Earth’s] system has been compromised.

  Time Until Overload: 4:29

  4:28

  4:27

  And right after that, when he’d tried to feed a Body point into the skill to rapidly heal and accelerate his flesh and bone’s strength to beyond his own limits, the Firelord kill had outright failed.

  Instead, he felt a wave of static wash over his body. It vanished almost as quickly, but when he locked eyes with the cobbled-together mech’s viewport, everything swam like he was looking through a shimmering heat wave. He tried to lunge toward the machine, but something weighed him down; it took him a moment to realize what it had to be. The girl. She’d cast something to weigh him down. He looked over his shoulder.

  Tori was on the ground. She’d pushed herself to her hands and knees, but there was no way she’d just cast anything. So if it wasn’t her, and Bobby couldn’t do anything like this, it had to be Hal.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  The Voltsmith stared back through the armored viewport. “I took away my limiters.”

  Kindle/KU:

  Audible: