I was tightening the straps of my leather cuirass, wincing as the buckle dug into a rib, when Ronan cleared his ethereal throat—a sound that felt less like an interruption and more like a gavel banging in my parietal lobe.
'It's time,' he said. Simple. Final.
I didn't need to ask what he meant. We had been benching the idea of a full-scale core-farming expedition for months, waiting until our mana engine wasn't running on fumes. But now? Now we were a Solid Green Core.
Forty-eight, I thought, letting the number settle. We can field forty-eight active clones now.
'A platoon,' Ronan corrected, the satisfaction radiating off him like heat from a forge. 'Two full squads for the Wilds, and we'd still have twenty-eight slots left over for logistics. We don't just have a B-Team anymore, Murphy. We have a garrison. But we need to rearrange the furniture first.'
I looked around the cramped room, running the numbers. Currently, our mana economy is a delicate ecosystem. Forty clones were tucked away at the tannery, meditating in shifts to draw enough ambient mana into the Inventory to keep the lights on and the refinery running.
'I'm going to dispel twenty of the meditators,' Ronan said, his tone brooking no argument. 'That leaves twenty at the tannery to keep the intake stable for the refinery clone in our inventory, but it frees up twenty-eight slots for tonight. We need the muscle.'
I didn't argue. I didn't have to. A split second later, I felt a sharp snap in the back of my mind as Ronan severed the connections. Somewhere across the city, twenty copies of us vanished into smoke, and I felt the sudden, expansive return of my capacity.
'The focus tonight is scaling,' Ronan continued, moving on immediately. 'We are no longer looking for a few spare legs for Grace's spiders. We need to secure the chassis and materials for the Ghost Wagons. Five of them at least, though ten would be optimal.'
I paused, one boot half-on. 'Ten wagons?'
'If we can build a mobile fleet of portals on wheels, the profit will dwarf our laundry route. It gives us the capital to gear the hunters properly.'
The math in my head started to smoke. Ten wagons meant a fleet. It meant we weren't just picking up litter at the Voss yard; we were stripping it to the bedrock.
'Ronan, do you have any idea how much scrap that is?' I asked, feeling the cold prickle of genuine anxiety. 'We aren't talking about sneaking in for a spare part. We're talking about an industrial-scale heist in the backyard of a Noble House. If the Voss guards catch us, I can't talk my way out of that. I'll be expelled, imprisoned, or just quietly stabbed.'
'The risks are negligible,' Ronan countered, dismissing my panic with annoying calm. 'It is House Voss. Grace is the heir. If we are caught, we are not thieves; we are "over-enthusiastic friends of the daughter" reclaiming refuse. I do not expect more than a slap on the wrist if Grace's parents catch us stealing their garbage.'
'A slap on the wrist usually involves a gauntlet in this city, big guy,' I noted.
'Why not just use the clones?' I countered, not knowing why I was trying to find a hole in his logic that didn't involve us breaking and entering. 'We have the slots now. Use Mimicry to disguise ten clones as couriers. They can run around the city, visit the clients, and teleport the laundry directly to the tannery. It's faster, it's mobile, and it doesn't require us to steal ten tons of scrap metal.'
'We have discussed this,' Ronan replied, his voice flat. 'It is a security nightmare. The Courier Guilds are territorial to the point of paranoia. Currently, our legitimate couriers are the only reason the Laundry Guilds haven't burned down the tannery; the Courier Guild's influence keeps the harassment to a minimum because we are paying customers. If we switch to clones, the Courier Guild will view us as an unregistered rival. Suddenly, we lose our protection and gain a new enemy. The Laundry Guild and the Courier Guild would band together to remove us from the board.'
'We can be careful,' I argued weakly.
'And it is inefficient,' Ronan pressed, dropping the financial hammer. 'Sustaining ten active clones who need to find safe places to secretly teleport massive amounts of laundry? The stamina drain on them would be unsustainable. A new clone would need to be created for every delivery. Not to mention the drop in ambient mana intake. I calculated the load; it would cut our personal Core growth by up to thirty percent.'
I winced. 'Thirty? That's... steep.'
'We are Solid Green now, Murphy. The growth curve has gone vertical. We cannot afford the drag. If we wait until we reach Dark Green, the math changes. At that rank, we can double the ambient battery to eighty clones and add a second refiner inside the Inventory. Then—and only then—can we spare eight or ten clones for a dedicated delivery network. But that is weeks, perhaps months away. The wagons are the only bridge to that future.'
'Fine,' I grumbled, conceding the point. 'Theft it is. But what about the gear? Gearing a ten-man squad of clones for the Wilds is going to cost a fortune. We are talking proper enchanted steel, not just wobbly water constructs. If a clone dies, we lose the gear. We need the capital to replace it.'
'I have already done the calculations,' he said, pivoting back to the logistics. 'We need three distinct gear profiles: a Defensive set, an Offensive set, and a third geared specifically for Stamina Regen. To field a ten-man squad, we only need to purchase three original sets. We can use the White Mana in the Inventory to clone multiple sets. It will take a few days to process—cloning magical items is an immense drain—but with the white core mana, it is doable at our current rank.'
I stopped. There was something in his tone—a hunger that had nothing to do with mana or profit. He was pushing for this squad with an intensity I hadn't felt before. He wasn't just building a farming team to collect cores; he was building an expeditionary force.
'You're planning something else,' I thought, narrowing my eyes. 'Why the aggressive push to farm cores?'
'We need answers, Murphy,' was all he said, the link between us turning cold and distant. 'And I can't find them from this bedroom.'
I let it go. For now.
'Fine. three sets, ten wagons, and a massive amount of high-risk theft,' I thought, grabbing my cloak. 'I would object, but I know you won't listen. Just try not to get me killed over a pile of rusted axles.'
'Just get to the workshop,' he said, the amusement seeping back into his voice. 'And try not to look suspicious.'
'I never look suspicious.'
'You're wearing all black in a lit hallway. You look like a stagehand for a school play.'
Ignoring him, I slipped out of the room. The hallway of House Argent was silent, the stone damp and cold. I moved toward the basement stairs, the plan settling. We weren't just stealing trash tonight; we were building the infrastructure for an empire.
There were three burnt-out heating manifolds on the workbench next to me, their silver rune-inscriptions fused into slag. Beside this pile of expensive magical debris, Grace was vibrating with an intensity that suggested she was about to explode or start reciting complex arithmancy.
"So," I said, leaning against the workbench and watching her shove a coil of copper wire into her bag. "Just so we are clear. We are breaking into the industrial heart of the Empire's military-industrial complex to steal... trash?"
"High-grade trash," Grace corrected, not looking up. She packed the bag with the frantic energy of a squirrel preparing for a nuclear winter. "And it's not just the complex. It's the Graveyard. House Voss produces eighty percent of the Empire's heavy-infantry golems. Do you know the failure rate of a standard casting?"
"I assume it's high, given that their products usually walk like they've soiled themselves."
"Thirty percent," she said, finally looking at me. Her eyes were bright, manic. "Thirty percent of the castings have micro-fractures. They toss them. They're supposed to melt them down eventually, but the backlog is massive. It's mountains of star-steel alloy golem parts just sitting there, Murphy. Unguarded."
"Unguarded," I repeated flatly. "I doubt that. And if we get caught inside a House Voss facility, 'trespassing' is going to look a lot like 'industrial espionage' to the guards."
Grace waved a hand dismissively, though she didn't quite meet my eye. "I know the place inside out, Murphy. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in those chassis graveyards. I know the patrol routes better than the captains do. We definitely won't get caught."
She paused, tightening a strap on her bag with a sharp tug. "And even if we do? I just drop the hood, say 'Hello Father,' and we face a stern lecture. It's a scolding, not an execution. You are worrying about nothing."
"I worry so I don't have to bleed," I noted, though I let it slide.
"The sentries are mostly constructs anyway," she added quickly. "They look for heat signatures and movement patterns. We'll be ghosts."
"Tell me about the software," I said, shifting gears. "If we're stealing parts, can we steal the code? Your family has a monopoly on command runes. If we could crack that syntax..."
Grace froze. The excitement dimmed, replaced by a grim respect for her family's paranoia. "We can't. The source code isn't written down. It's... It's copied."
"Copied from what?"
"The Prime," she whispered, as if the words were heresy. "House Voss doesn't invent golem artificial intelligence. Centuries ago, the First Patriarch found an ancient construct in the deep mines. It was intact. It had a 'Learning Core.' Every golem in the Empire is running a stripped-down, copied version of that Prime's operating runes. But they can't replicate the Learning Core."
"And they keep the code safe, how?"
"Two pressure plates," Grace said, tapping the steel table. "The command runes are inscribed on a star-steel plate that gets fused to the Golem. They immediately fuse the edges to a second plate of enchanted star-steel. If you try to pry them apart or drill into them, a fusion rune triggers. The plates weld together into a solid lump of slag. The code destroys itself to prevent theft."
I whistled low. "Extreme."
"Effective," she countered. "That's why we're sticking to the scrap. I don't need the code yet. I need the raw materials to build the bodies. The code... We'll write our own."
"Right," I said, pushing off the table. "Let's go rob your parents."
The exit was smooth. We moved through the darkened corridors of House Argent like ghosts, slipping out the heavy oak front doors into the biting chill of the night air. The moon was a sliver, offering just enough light to break your neck if you were clumsy, but perfect for two people trying to be invisible.
We paused on the stone steps, checking the perimeter. The courtyard was empty. Silent.
"Clear," I whispered.
Then the silence was murdered by a hum.
It was a drinking song. Something about a maid, a dragon, and a very improbable use of a lance.
Finn stumbled out of the shadow of the hedgerow. He was swaying like a ship in a gale, his tunic unbuttoned at the collar, a lopsided, sloppy grin plastered across his face. He blinked at us, his eyes struggling to find focus.
"Murph-phy!" he cheered, the volume knob on his voice apparently broken off. "Grace! The party... the party continues!"
He took a step towards us, tripped over his own feet, and corrected with a stumble that looked like interpretive dance. Then he stopped. He blinked again, hard.
The alcohol haze cleared just enough for him to process the visual data. He looked at my dark leathers. He looked at Grace's tactical satchel. He looked at the distinct lack of beer in our hands.
The sloppy grin melted. It slid off his face like wax, replaced by a sudden, sobering hurt.
"Wait," Finn said, his voice dropping. "You guys... you're going out?"
"Just a walk, Finn," I said, keeping my voice level. "Go to bed."
He ignored me. He stared at the gear. "Why are you wearing black leather armour? You're going on a mission..." He looked between Grace and me, the betrayal warring with the firewater in his blood. "Without me?"
I stiffened. This was the nightmare scenario. To pull off this heist, I needed full control of my arts—Inventory, Shadow Clones, the works. Finn was a friend, yes. But Finn was also a drunk, a gossip, and currently, a massive security leak waiting to happen.
"I thought..." Finn swayed, putting a hand on the stone railing to steady himself. "I thought we were a squad. The Slag Squad, right?"
"It's not a mission, mate," I lied, stepping forward to block his path. "Grace needs some heavy scrap for a project. It's manual labour. You'd be bored."
"I'm drunk, not stupid," Finn slurred. A flash of anger cut through the fog. "I can lift. I can scout. I can..." He gestured vaguely at the sky. "I can even listen to the wind…"
"We need quiet," I said.
"I can be quiet!"
"You're shouting right now," Grace pointed out softly, shrinking back behind me.
Finn's face crumpled. "It's the inner circle, isn't it? You and the genius. The brain and the... whatever you are. And I'm just the runner. The meat shield you drag along so you don't look like loners."
The accusation hung in the cold air. It was messy, fuelled by cheap ale and deep insecurity.
I looked at him. I saw the desperate need for validation. I saw an insecure teenager who wanted to be included.
And honestly, I just couldn't give a shit right now. I have zero patience for needy drunks. They are emotional landmines, and I didn't have the time to disarm him gently.
I made the choice.
I stepped into his space, using my height, letting the cold, jagged edge of Murphy—the survivor, not the student—surface in my eyes.
"You're making a scene, Finn," I said, my voice stripping away the warmth. "Look at you. You can barely stand. You're a liability."
Finn flinched. He actually recoiled, as if I'd slapped him.
"Go to bed," I ordered. "We don't need a scout tonight. We need professionals. Sleep it off."
The fight drained out of him instantly. The anger vanished, leaving just a hollow, kicked-puppy look. He stared at me for a second, searching for the joke, for the wink.
He found nothing.
"Right," Finn whispered. He pushed himself off the railing, stumbling slightly on the threshold of the dorm. "Loud and clear, Captain. Wouldn't want to be... a liability."
He pushed past us, heading for the dormitory.
'That was handled with the tactical grace of a brick to the face,' Ronan observed, his voice icy in my mind. 'He was seeking reassurance, and you confirmed his worst fears.'
'Feel free to jump in at any point next time,' I snapped back. 'I'm sure he'll get over it. If he even remembers it tomorrow.'
'Will he?' Ronan asked.
"Murphy?" Grace tugged at my sleeve. "We have to go. We're on a tight schedule."
"Yeah," I said. "Let's move."
Getting out of the Academy grounds was the easy part. The perimeter walls were designed to keep mundane vagrants out, not magically enhanced students in, and a few well-placed foothold boosts got us over the stone and into the treeline of the buffer zone.
The air here was still clean, smelling of pine and damp earth. It was quiet, peaceful, and apparently, the preferred habitat for sickeningly wholesome teenage romance.
We froze. Ten yards ahead, silhouetted against the moonlight, two figures were sneaking back toward the wall we had just hopped over.
It was Kael and Pippa.
The massive berserker from the Iron-Reach was walking softly, looking like a granite siege engine trying to tiptoe. Beside him, Pippa—the healer who fainted at the sight of a papercut—was practically skipping. They were holding hands.
Kael said something low and rumbling. Pippa laughed, a sound like wind chimes, and leaned her head against his bicep, which was roughly the size of her entire torso.
We crouched in the brush, watching them pass.
"Aww," Grace whispered, her voice betraying a traitorous level of sentimentality. "Look at them. They're adorable."
"Well, I'll be," I whispered back, forcing a tone that mimicked surprise rather than the negativity I actually felt. "I did not see that coming."
I decided to keep my darker thoughts regarding romantic entanglements to myself. Why crush their hope when reality would eventually kick the door in and do it for me?
I'd seen this play performed a thousand times in a thousand different lives, and the ending never changed. To me, a "loving relationship" wasn't poetry and sunsets. It was thin walls, screaming matches that shattered the crockery, and the kind of suffocating misery that only two people who once "loved" each other could manufacture.
To my eyes, they weren't falling in love; they were stepping into a bear trap and smiling about the view. Why would I sign up for that? Why would anyone?
'You are projecting,' Ronan noted softly.
I'm predicting, I corrected. Hope is a statistical error. Entropy always wins.
I looked at Grace, who was still beaming at them like a proud aunt. She believed in the fairytale. She probably thought they'd get married and have little barbarian-healer babies.
I envied her that blindness. I really did. Mostly because my brain immediately went to the logistics, and the engineering didn't hold up. I mean, look at them. It would be like a Great Dane trying to court a Chihuahua. There are structural integrity issues. At a certain point, physics just puts its foot down and says "Absolutely not."
I shook the disturbing mental image away.
We waited until the lovebirds had scrambled up the wall—Kael effortlessly hoisting Pippa up like she weighed less than a sandwich—before we moved.
We headed south, away from the dorms and toward the brown stain on the horizon that marked the Industrial District.
The transition was abrupt. One moment, we were walking on the manicured lawns of the upper district; the next, the ground turned to packed dirt and oil-stained cobbles. The air grew thick, tasting of copper and unwashed bodies, while the sky above the district glowed with a sickly orange light from blast furnaces that never slept.
This was the engine of the Empire. It was dirty, loud, and smelled like burning hair. I felt right at home.
"Keep your head down," Grace muttered, pulling a scarf up over her nose. "The guard patrols here aren't looking for students. They're looking for thieves."
We reached the perimeter of the Voss Estate twenty minutes later. Calling it an "Estate" was a generous rebranding. It was a fortress of black iron and red brick, dominated by smokestacks that clawed at the smog. We stopped in the shadow of the outer wall, which was thirty feet high and topped with spikes that hummed with mana-sensors.
"Alright," I said, cracking my knuckles. "Time for Operation Penetration."
Grace stared at me, her eyes flat. "Please never call it that again."
Ignoring her, I summoned a Standard Clone. He stood there, looking bored. I grabbed him by the back of his tunic and the seat of his pants, feeling the raw torque of the Green Core flood my muscles. If Blue meant being twice as strong as a normal sixteen-year-old, Green meant I was hitting four times the limit. I hoisted him like he was made of paper. He went rigid, understanding the assignment.
"Phasing entry," I grunted, spinning in place as I wound up. "On three. One. Two. Heave!"
I threw myself—literally—at the wall. A surge of strength that would have terrified my old self launched the clone like a javelin made of meat.
The clone hit the brickwork. Instead of splattering, his silhouette rippled like a stone hitting a pond. He dived into the masonry, phasing through the solid matter.
It was exactly like diving into a pool of thick slime. Your momentum starts off great, but the moment you hit the water, drag kicks in.
My clone got halfway. Then he stopped.
The wall was much thicker at the base than I'd calculated. The clone's torso was inside the wall, but his legs were sticking out of the brickwork, kicking uselessly in the air like a cartoon character trying to swim through a block of cheese.
"Push him!" I hissed, slamming my shoulder into the clone's boots.
I shoved. The clone's legs flailed.
It was no use. Gravity took over. Without forward momentum, he began to sink—not through the wall, but down into the dirt, phasing towards the bedrock.
I stepped back, panting. "Fine. Dispel."
The legs vanished.
'Wait,' Ronan said, his mental voice sharp. 'Did you notice that?'
Notice what? The shame of failure? You know I have no pride, right?
'He was inside the wall for forty seconds. He was encased in stone. He should have suffocated.'
I paused. He was right. I replayed the memory packet from the dispel. The clone hadn't been holding his breath. He had opened a micro-portal to the Inventory inside his own throat, sucking air from the Void directly into his lungs.
He made a snorkel, I realised, a grin spreading across my face. A trans-dimensional snorkel. Clever son of a bitch! Ronan, we just unlocked underwater breathing.
'Score,' Ronan added with a mental high five.
"Graceful," Grace noted, leaning against a tree, unaware of the magical breakthrough. "Very professional. I liked the part where he sank into the floor."
"Well," I shrugged, dusting off my hands. "Celebrating 'Operation Penetration' may have been premature, but I, for one, left satisfied."
She stared at me, expressionless for a long, flat second.
"The base is reinforced," I said, slapping the wall to cover the awkward silence. "Shit architecture if you ask me. Who builds a wall that thick? Are they stupid!?"
"People who have an unlimited supply of golems that can lay bricks about..." She gestured with her hand above her head. "...this high."
"So we just need to aim higher!" I said, but Grace wasn't convinced.
She moved towards a city waterway that ran alongside the factory walls and pointed down toward a grated manhole. "Or we use Plan B."
I looked down. Half-submerged in the iridescent, toxic sludge of the river was a rusted outflow pipe. It was wide enough for a human, provided that the human didn't mind crawling through chemical runoff that probably dissolved skin.
"I used it to sneak in from time to time," Grace said, sounding strangely nostalgic about industrial waste. "The corrosive sludge is harmless to mages. Well, not harmless. It might leave a bit of a rash."
I looked at the pipe. It was dark, wet, and smelled like the bowel movements of a giant.
Then I looked back at the thirty-foot wall.
Getting us on the other side wasn't the issue. The problem was stamina.
'What do you think? We get a clone through the wall and port us through the inventory, or should we crawl inside via an industrial anus?'
'Porting is not a good idea,' Ronan replied instantly. 'Transporting a living soul through the Void will drain a third of your stamina. That's a third just going in. It doesn't include coming out.'
I checked my internal gauges. I needed a bunch of clones to strip the scrapyard. Clones spawned with a copy of my current stamina pool. If I drained myself getting us to the other side of this wall, I'd be summoning two dozen exhausted workers ready to pass out, never mind opening portals.
"We could wait," I argued, eyeing the sewage pipe with disdain. "Pop through, sit on the grass for an hour, and let the stamina regenerate. You know I recover fast."
'An hour to recover the transit cost,' Ronan corrected immediately. 'Another hour to get back to full capacity for the mass summon. That's two hours sitting in a hostile zone doing nothing. We don't have the window. Enough thinking.'
'We cannot afford the overhead,' Ronan concluded. 'Save the teleport for an emergency. If we get caught, you need that energy to run. If we want the loot, we take the pipe.'
I sighed. He was right.
Sorry, Grace, I thought. Budget cuts.
"Brilliant idea, Grace! We shall use your elegant pipe. However, I think I can make the passage a little more comfortable."
"It's a sewer, Murphy," Grace said, thinking she was being clever. "Being wet is part of the experience."
"Not today, my young padawan… Not today."
The clone coalesced, looking less like a person and more like a hole in the world. Ronan had abused the Mimicry settings to strip away the vanity of being human, leaving only a silhouette of pure utility. Its skin was matte, covered in black obsidian scales that drank the gloom rather than reflecting it. It stood stark naked, though there was nothing to see—Ronan had smoothed over the anatomy, removing genitalia and navel alike. No clothes to snag on a window latch, no hair to leave as DNA evidence; just a featureless, genderless shadow designed to disappear.
We had spent some time working on adding extra arms, but it failed miserably. Apparently, creating an extra arm is just half the work. The other half is learning how to use it.
He didn't speak. He simply dropped a rolled-up rug onto the muddy bank and unfurled it with a sharp snap of his wrist.
Grace gasped and covered her mouth. "What in the seven hells is that!? Is it a Fae? Are you a Fae, Murphy?!"
"Easy big fella… Easy…" I said, holding my hands up to placate her. "Just a modified clone. That's all."
"My god, Murphy. That thing looks like a demon. Why do we need it, and why did it just put some carpet down!?" Grace was whisper-shouting so loud I winced every time she spoke.
"It's the perfect humanoid. Built for insertion and covert operations. The carpet is simply insurance," I explained. "Rule one of spatial magic: Never enter a hole you can't teleport out of. If things go south inside, that rug is our anchor. It's the 'X' that marks the exit."
I cracked my neck, staring into the gloom with a thousand-yard stare.
"Trust me, I know a thing or two about holes. I'm an expert at crawling out of them."
I shuddered as a few painful memories of being born tried to surface, and then I smashed them. I smashed them back down into the deep, dark pit where they belonged.
The Ronan Clone nodded, acknowledging the tactical prudence of his own existence. He turned to the pipe, the shield on his arm sized exactly to the diameter of the tunnel.
"Proceed, Sir Plunge-alot," I ordered.
Grace didn't know the clone was a completely different person. She just thought it was a clone of me. It was the one secret we would never reveal, which meant Ronan could only scowl as I ordered him around.
Ronan's clone stepped into the channel, splashing into the ankle-deep water. He approached the pipe mouth, where the toxic water was gushing out, and slammed the shield forward against the flow.
A portal spiralled open across the entire face of the shield.
He didn't just block the water; he consumed it. The torrent of sludge hit the shield and vanished instantly into the Inventory.
WHOOSH.
The pipe went silent. The Ronan Clone marched forward into the darkness, holding the shield out like a riot cop clearing a street, sucking up every drop of liquid before it could touch his boots.
"After you," I said, gesturing to the now dry—if still stinking—tunnel.
Grace stared at the clone disappearing into the gloom, acting as a human cork for a river of filth. "That," she whispered, "is amazing."
"He certainly earned his namesake! Now let's get this over with. I'm already sick of this smell."