He deployed from the Kerenth operations center at 0600 on a Wednesday.
Sera walked him to the deployment bay. She didn't give a speech. She stood by the door with her arms crossed and watched him step onto the platform with the calm attention of someone who had watched people step onto platforms before and knew that some of them didn't step back.
"Come back," she said. The same two words she'd used last time.
"Plan to."
The Nanosuit was on, compressed to its default state beneath his reinforced jacket and pants. Three kilograms of adaptive nanotechnology sitting against his skin, dormant, waiting. His Spatial Pocket held the rest: Healing Charge, tourniquet, knife, flashlight, rations, hemostatic compression bandage, first aid kit, comm-link, and the Dimensional Anchor in its sealed compartment.
The bay's automated systems ran final checks. Vitals registered. Deployment window confirmed.
DEPLOYMENT CONFIRMED
World: [REDACTED — revealed upon arrival]
Tier: L2 (final expedition at current tier)
Deploying in: 3...2...1...
The light went white. The platform dissolved. The world folded.
Heat.
That was the first thing. Dry, still heat, the kind that came from concrete and asphalt holding the day's warmth after the sun had gone down. Adam opened his eyes, he was standing in an alley between two low commercial buildings. Brick walls on either side. Dumpsters. A chain-link fence at the far end with a streetlight beyond it casting orange light across cracked pavement.
Night. Urban. The air smelled like exhaust and warm garbage and something chemical that might have been industrial runoff from a factory district nearby.
He moved to the mouth of the alley and looked out.
A street. Four lanes, divided by a faded yellow center line. Cars parked along both sides, all boxy, all angular in the way that cars from a specific era tended to be. A pickup truck with a square body. A sedan with chrome bumpers. A van with wood-panel siding that he'd seen in enough period films to place within a decade.
Late twentieth century. American. The signage confirmed it: English text, imperial measurements on a speed limit sign, a neon bar sign flickering halfway down the block.
The Bazaar interface pulsed.
EXPEDITION ACTIVE
World Classification: L2 — Technology / Threat
World Time: Active (real-time progression)
Primary Objective: Extract power component from humanoid android intact
Bonus Objective: Component extracted without structural damage
Secondary Objective: Minimize timeline disruption
Failure Condition: Explorer death / Component destroyed or rendered irretrievable
Extract a power component from a humanoid android. Intact. Without structural damage for the bonus.
He looked at the cars again. The buildings. A newspaper vending box on the corner, the kind that took quarters. He crossed the street and looked at the front page through the scratched plastic window.
The date read May 12, 1984.
Los Angeles.
He stood there for three seconds. May 12, 1984, Los Angeles. A technology extraction mission in a world classified as Technology/Threat.
The Terminator.
The recognition came with a pulse of something that was half amusement and half disbelief. A humanoid android. May 1984. Los Angeles. A robot sent back in time to kill a woman.
Another Arnold movie. The thought almost made him laugh. The Predator had been Arnold. Now The Terminator. Two in a row. The Bazaar didn't care about patterns, but apparently patterns happened anyway.
He leaned against the newspaper box and thought through what he remembered.
The Terminator. A robot sent back in time to kill a woman. Sarah Connor. A soldier from the future sent back to protect her. The robot looked human on the outside but underneath was a metal skeleton that didn't stop. It chased Sarah across Los Angeles, through a nightclub, through a police station, and into a factory where the soldier died blowing it apart with a pipe bomb and Sarah crushed what was left in a hydraulic press.
He didn't remember the exact date it all happened. He remembered 1984, Los Angeles, and the broad sequence. The robot would start working through the phone book, killing every Sarah Connor it could find. Then the nightclub. Then the police station. Then a motel, and finally the factory. The order was clear enough. The specific timing wasn't.
A humanoid android. The Bazaar had told him what he was looking for. The robot had a power source in its chest. A nuclear cell, something small enough to fit inside a human-sized torso but powerful enough to run the machine for over a century. That was the extraction target. A nuclear power cell from a machine that wouldn't exist for decades in this world's timeline.
The bonus objective said "without structural damage." Which meant he needed to extract it cleanly. No cracks, no punctures, no deformation to the casing. The cell was housed inside the robot's armored skeleton, layered under whatever alloy made the thing nearly indestructible. He needed to get the robot down and then get the chest open.
Which meant he needed to find where the chase ended. The factory. And the only way to find it was to follow the events as they happened. Watch the news. Track the aftermath. Let the timeline lead him there.
Time to move.
He spent the first four hours establishing his position.
Los Angeles in 1984 was large, sprawling, and navigable if you understood its grid system. Adam didn't have a map, but he had Accelerated Cognition and a city that was built on straight lines and numbered streets. He walked east from the alley, found a major boulevard, and oriented himself using the mountain range visible against the northern horizon and the glow of the downtown skyline to the southeast.
The Nanosuit was invisible under his jacket. He'd deployed with clothes that were generic enough to pass in most eras: dark pants, dark jacket, boots. In 1984 Los Angeles at night, he looked like a teenager who should have been somewhere else, which meant nobody looked at him twice.
He needed to find the factory. The problem was that he didn't know where it was. He remembered the movie's ending: a factory, industrial equipment, Sarah Connor reaching the controls of a hydraulic press while the broken robot dragged itself toward her. But the factory's location hadn't been the kind of detail that stuck in memory. Somewhere in the industrial part of LA. That was all he had.
The solution was to follow the events. The robot was systematic. It would work through the Sarah Connors in the phone book, then find the right one at the nightclub, then chase her to the police station, and eventually the chase would end at the factory. If Adam could track the aftermath, he could find the endpoint.
He found a motel on the edge of a commercial strip. The sign advertised rooms for nineteen dollars a night. He didn't have nineteen dollars, but he had TK and a lock mechanism that was older than he was. He stood at the door of a ground-floor room with no light behind the curtain, placed his hand flat against the lock, and threaded telekinetic force into the keyway. The pins were simple. Five of them, brass, sitting in a spring-loaded housing that hadn't been replaced since the building was built. He lifted them one at a time, felt the cylinder give, and turned it. The whole thing took about four seconds. He stepped inside a room that smelled like cigarettes and cleaning solution.
He slept for five hours. Set his internal alarm for dawn.
The morning of May 13th brought news.
Adam found a diner three blocks from the motel and sat at the counter nursing a glass of water, which was free, and watching the television mounted above the coffee station. The waitress gave him a look that said she knew he wasn't going to order anything and decided not to make it her problem.
The news came on at seven. The anchor's voice was measured in the way that news anchors were measured when the story was bad but not yet catastrophic.
A police station had been attacked overnight. Multiple officers dead. The suspect, described as a large male in dark clothing, had driven a vehicle through the front entrance and then systematically moved through the building with automatic weapons. Two people being held for questioning, a woman named Sarah Connor and a man identified as Kyle Reese, had escaped during the attack.
Adam watched the footage. Shaky helicopter shots of a police station with its front wall demolished. Emergency vehicles. Body bags.
So the events were already well underway. The nightclub had already happened. The police station had already happened. Sarah and the soldier were on the run. That meant only one major event was left in the sequence he remembered. The factory.
He needed to find the industrial district.
He walked.
Los Angeles was a driving city and Adam didn't have a car, which meant he covered ground on foot at a pace that Reinforced Physiology made sustainable but not inconspicuous. He kept to sidewalks where they existed and side roads where they didn't. The sun came up hot and stayed hot. May in LA wasn't the worst month, but the concrete amplified everything and by noon his jacket was tied around his waist and the Nanosuit's thin layer was the only thing between his skin and the sun.
The industrial districts were south and east of downtown. He found them by following the rail lines, which cut through the city like veins connecting the commercial heart to the manufacturing edges. Warehouses. Processing plants. Lots surrounded by chain-link fencing with razor wire on top. The buildings got larger and older the farther south he went. Some were active, trucks backing into loading docks, workers in hard hats moving between structures. Others were empty, their windows dark, their parking lots cracked and weedy.
He didn't know which factory. There were dozens. Hundreds, maybe, in this part of the city.
But he knew the chase would end here. Somewhere in this sprawl of industrial concrete, Sarah Connor would run from a machine that wouldn't stop, and a soldier from the future would die trying to protect her.
He spent the afternoon mapping the district. Walking the perimeter roads, noting the larger facilities with heavy machinery visible through loading bay doors. Hydraulic presses were industrial equipment used in manufacturing. Food processing, metalwork, automotive. He looked for facilities with the right profile: multi-level, operational, with the kind of heavy-duty machinery that could crush a metal skeleton.
By late afternoon, he'd narrowed it to a section of the district near a highway overpass. Three large facilities within half a mile of each other, all with the equipment profile he was looking for. He couldn't know which one. He didn't need to. He needed to be close enough to hear gunfire and an explosion, because the factory scene ended with both.
He found a rooftop with a clear view of the three candidate buildings and settled in to wait.
The wait was the hardest part.
Adam sat on the rooftop with his back against an air conditioning unit and watched the sun go down over industrial Los Angeles. The sky turned orange, then red, then the particular shade of purple that came from smog and city light mixing at the horizon. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees in an hour once the sun was gone, which was desert climate doing what desert climate did.
He ate a ration bar from his Spatial Pocket. Drank water from a bottle he'd refilled at a public fountain earlier in the day. The hemostatic bandage was a backup contingency, but he didn't plan to need it on this deployment.
He thought about the movie. The details were coming back in fragments, the way memories did when you were in the place they belonged to. The robot's face, human-looking on the outside but wrong somehow, too still, too symmetrical. The red eyes of the metal skeleton underneath. The soldier was thin, desperate, haunted by a future that hadn't happened yet. Sarah Connor started as a waitress and ended as a survivor. The power cell was in the robot's chest, roughly where a heart would be on a person.
He thought about the extraction. The movie ended with the robot crushed in a hydraulic press. That was how the woman destroyed it. But extracting a power cell from a flattened mass of compressed metal would be almost impossible. The cell housing would survive the press, but the metal around it would be folded and interlocked, gripping the housing from every angle. His TK maxed at twenty-eight kilograms. Not enough to pry apart compressed alien alloy.
Better to get to the robot before the press. After the explosion that blew it in half, but before the woman finished it. The upper body would still be functional, dragging itself across the factory floor. Dangerous, but the chest would be intact and accessible. The Nanosuit's Power Mode could pry the torso open. TK could handle the delicate extraction once he had access.
He ran the scenario in his head. Crippled robot, upper body only. Still lethal with its arms. He'd need to immobilize it, crack the chest plating, locate the cell, and extract it without damage. All while the thing tried to kill him with whatever it had left.
Doable. Maybe. If nothing went wrong.
Things always went wrong.
It happened at 0147.
Adam was dozing against the AC unit, maintaining the light-sleep state that Accelerated Cognition allowed, when a sound cut through the industrial quiet. Not gunfire. An explosion. Deep, concussive, with a pressure wave that he felt in his chest from two hundred meters away.
He was on his feet in under a second. The explosion had come from the easternmost facility, a large food processing plant with loading bays facing the highway overpass. Smoke was rising from inside the building, visible against the yellow glow of the facility's security lights.
He ran.
The Nanosuit's baseline enhancement pushed his sprint to a speed that covered two hundred meters in seconds. He dropped from the rooftop, Armor Mode engaging on mental command to absorb the three-story fall. The energy bar in his HUD dipped and he switched back to default immediately. Save the energy. He'd need it.
The loading bay doors were open. The interior was lit by overhead fluorescents that buzzed and flickered from the power disruption of the explosion. He could smell smoke and chemicals and something metallic that his Accelerated Cognition flagged as thermally stressed metal.
He slowed at the entrance. Inside, the facility was a maze of industrial equipment: conveyor belts, sorting machines, packaging stations. The heavy machinery was deeper in, past the processing floor, in a section that the facility used for pressing and shaping.
Sounds. Scraping metal on concrete. A rhythmic, mechanical sound that wasn't any machine in the building.
Something was dragging itself across the factory floor.
Adam moved along the wall, staying low, using the equipment rows for cover. He deployed the helmet. The nanotechnology flowed up from the collar and sealed around his head in under a second, the visor overlaying HUD data across his field of vision. He reached a vantage point between two conveyor assemblies and looked through the gap.
The robot was on the floor.
The explosion had done its work. Everything below the waist was gone, blown apart into fragments scattered across a twenty-meter radius. What remained was the upper body, a metal skeleton stripped of its human covering, chrome and steel and exposed hydraulic tubing. It pulled itself forward with its arms, one functional, the other damaged but still moving. The red glow in its eye sockets tracked something ahead of it with mechanical focus.
A woman was running. Brown hair, torn clothing, blood on her face. She was limping but moving fast, heading for a section of the factory where a massive piece of industrial equipment sat against the far wall.
The hydraulic press.
Adam didn't wait.
Letting her crush it in the press would solve her problem but create his. A flattened mass of compressed alien metal with the power cell buried somewhere inside, and twenty-eight kilograms of TK force to try to pry it free. That wasn't going to work.
He had to get the cell before the press.
He stepped out from behind the conveyor assembly. The robot's head swiveled. The red glow in its eye sockets locked onto him, assessed him as a new target, and dismissed him in favor of the primary objective. Sarah Connor. It kept crawling toward her.
Adam hit it with TK.
Twenty-eight kilograms of telekinetic force slammed into the robot's upper body from the side, shoving it three meters across the concrete floor. The endoskeleton scraped and sparked against the factory surface. The robot stopped, recalculated, and turned toward Adam.
It was fast. A lot faster than it had looked in the movie. On screen, the crawling endoskeleton had seemed almost pitiful, dragging itself in slow pursuit while the music did the heavy lifting. In person, with half its body gone, the thing used its arms like grappling hooks, digging chrome fingers into the concrete and hauling itself forward with a speed and mechanical determination that had no pain response, no fear, no hesitation. One arm reached for Adam's leg.
He jumped back. The suit's baseline enhancement made the movement fast enough. The chrome fingers closed on air.
"Get out!" Adam shouted at the woman. She was staring at him from near the press controls. "Get away from here. Now."
She didn't argue. She ran.
The robot tracked her for a moment, the targeting priority fighting against the immediate threat. Then it turned back to Adam, because Adam was closer, and the programming recognized that he was between it and the primary target.
Adam activated Power Mode.
The suit surged. He felt the amplification hit his muscles, his reflexes, his reaction speed. Four times baseline strength. He circled to the robot's damaged side, wound up, and drove his boot into the side of its skull with everything Power Mode gave him.
The impact rang through the factory like a hammer hitting an anvil. The endoskeleton's head snapped sideways, chrome plating denting inward around the temple. The red glow in the eye sockets went dark. The arms stopped moving. The whole upper body went still on the concrete floor, hydraulic fluid pooling beneath the shoulder joints.
Adam stood over it, breathing hard. The thing looked dead. No light in the eyes, no movement in the servos, nothing. Just a broken metal torso on a factory floor. Creepy.
He waited three seconds. Five. Nothing.
Done.
He dropped to one knee beside the torso. The chest plating was right there. The armored torso of the endoskeleton, scorched and dented from the explosion but structurally intact. The power cell was underneath that plating, roughly where a human heart would be. He needed to get through.
He jammed his fingers into a seam where the chest plating met the shoulder assembly. Power Mode turned the grip into something meaningful. He pulled. The metal resisted. He pulled harder. The seam widened by two centimeters, then three. Hydraulic fluid leaked from severed lines inside.
The red glow in the eye sockets flickered back on.
The functioning arm swung around without warning, fast and mechanical and utterly silent. Combat Instinct fired a fraction of a second before the arm moved, but Adam was committed. Both hands on the chest plate, Power Mode draining his energy pool, TK holding the robot's torso in place on the floor. He couldn't block and extract at the same time.
He chose the extraction.
His TK shifted from holding the torso to threading into the widening chest gap, feeling for the denser mass of the power cell housing. His fingers kept prying. The gap was five centimeters now, and through it he could see components, mechanisms, and deeper, a cylindrical housing that his TK registered as significantly heavier than anything around it.
The arm hit him.
The robot's full hydraulic force, everything the upper body had left, concentrated into a chrome fist that slammed into Adam's left forearm. He wasn't in Armor Mode. The energy pool was committed to Power Mode for the prying. The Nanosuit's default layer took the impact and held, but the force transferred through, jarring the bones underneath. His wrist went numb for a half-second.
Pain flared up his arm. The suit's HUD flashed: integrity 96%.
But he didn't lose the TK.
The telekinetic field was already around the power cell housing. He pulled. The housing shifted inside the chest cavity, separating from its mounting brackets. One bracket. Two. The third was the problem. It was a retention clip, and when the housing rotated to clear it, the outer surface scraped against a jagged edge of the bent chest plating that his prying had created.
A thin, metallic scraping sound. The kind of sound that meant a surface had been scored.
He pulled the housing free.
It came out of the chest in a rush, clearing the gap and floating into the air in his telekinetic grip. A cylinder of alloy roughly twelve centimeters long and eight centimeters in diameter, warm to the touch, humming faintly with an energy output that his Accelerated Cognition couldn't quantify but could feel.
There was a gouge on the casing. A thin line, maybe two millimeters deep and four centimeters long, where the housing had scraped the bent plating on the way out. Not a crack. Not a puncture. A surface score that compromised the "without structural damage" condition of the bonus objective.
He'd clipped it.
The robot was still reaching for him. The arm grasped at his leg, at the air, at anything within range. It had come back once already. He wasn't giving it a second chance.
Adam stomped on the robot's head. Power Mode, full force, the boot driving down into the dented chrome skull with everything the Nanosuit's amplification could deliver. The cranial plating caved. Internal components cracked and separated. He stomped again, and this time the skull split open, exposing the processor core and the tangle of wiring that connected it to the rest of the body.
He hit it with TK. Not to push or hold, but to scatter. Twenty-eight kilograms of telekinetic force threaded into the exposed wiring and ripped outward. Cables tore free. Circuit boards snapped. Connector pins sheared from their housings and clattered across the factory floor in a spray of components. The arm went limp. The red glow in the eye sockets dimmed, stuttered, and went out.
Adam stood up. He looked at the gouge on the power cell housing. Two millimeters. Four centimeters. The difference between S-rank and A-rank, carved into the casing by a jagged edge of metal that he'd created himself when he pried the chest open.
A hundred and twenty years of operational power, housed in a container smaller than his fist. With a scratch along one side because he'd been one degree of rotation away from a clean extraction.
He placed it carefully into his Spatial Pocket. The interface accepted it without resistance. Mission objective items always transferred. The Death Note had, years ago. The power cell did now. The Bazaar wanted this extracted, so the Bazaar let it through.
He looked at his forearm. The suit's HUD showed 96% integrity. His wrist ached underneath, bruised but not broken.
The woman was standing by the loading bay entrance. She'd stopped running when the robot went still. She was watching Adam with the rebar still in her hands.
Adam walked toward her. He kept his hands visible.
"It's done," he said. "The power source is gone. When they find the remains, they won't have everything they need."
She stared at him. Her eyes were wide, her breathing ragged, and her grip on the rebar was steady in a way that told Adam she would swing it at his head without hesitation if he made a wrong move.
"Who are you?"
"Someone passing through. The machine can't function without its power source. It's dead."
"Kyle said they'd come back for it," she said. Her voice was hoarse. "The company. The technology company."
"They'll find the skeleton. The arms, the processors. But not the thing that powered it. That changes what they can learn."
She processed this. The soldier from the future had told her about the future war, about machines and nuclear fire and the destruction of civilization. She understood what Adam was doing, even if she didn't understand who he was.
"You're not from here either," she said.
"No."
She looked past him, toward the factory floor where the soldier lay. Kyle. She lowered the rebar and walked back inside without another word.
Adam let her go. She needed to get to Mexico. She needed to survive. She would.
He left the factory through a side door and walked three blocks east before stopping in an empty parking lot to assess.
The night air was cool. Sirens in the distance, coming toward the factory. Sarah would leave. She'd go to Mexico, and she'd survive, and her son would grow up to lead a war that hadn't happened yet.
He retracted the helmet and looked at his forearm. The Nanosuit's damage indicator showed 96% integrity. The robot had hit him hard enough to stress the suit's outer layer, and underneath, his wrist was swelling with a bruise that would take days to fade.
He noticed the number change during the walk.
97%. Then, a few minutes later, 98%. The indicator was climbing on its own.
The suit's description had mentioned regenerative capability. He'd known it could repair itself in some form. What he hadn't known was how fast, or how complete. He'd imagined something slow, partial, the kind of self-repair that patched holes but left scars. Not this. The nanotechnology was redistributing material from undamaged sections to reinforce the compromised area, smoothing out the stressed surface in real time, a molecular-level process that happened automatically without any input from him.
By the time he sat down against a chain-link fence and waited for the extraction timer, it read 100%. The surface was flawless. No mark, no deformation, no evidence that a machine from the future had hit him with everything it had left.
Fifteen minutes from 96% to full integrity. That wasn't patching. That was restoration. Sera had told him to test the suit in the field. The field had tested it for him.
He pulled up the Bazaar interface.
EXPEDITION COMPLETE
Primary Objective: COMPLETE — Technology component extracted
Bonus Objective: INCOMPLETE — Component sustained minor surface damage during extraction
Secondary Objective: COMPLETE — Timeline disruption minimal
Rating: A
NP Earned: 1,800
A-rank. Not S. The two-millimeter gouge had cost him the bonus and dropped the rating. Eighteen hundred NP instead of what would have been closer to twenty-five hundred with the bonus intact.
He looked at the notification and felt the specific frustration of someone who understood exactly what had gone wrong and exactly when it had gone wrong and couldn't go back and fix it. The bent chest plating. The housing rotating one degree too far as he pulled it free. A jagged edge he'd created with his own hands when he pried the torso open. A chain of events that lasted maybe half a second and cost him seven hundred NP.
But eighteen hundred was still eighteen hundred. His balance after this expedition would be 13,570 NP. More than enough for the first round of L3 purchases.
And he was advancing. After this extraction, L3 was unlocked. The worlds would be harder, the threats would have supernatural abilities and energy systems, and the Bazaar's expectations would scale accordingly. But so would he. Observation Haki. Nen Foundation. Hamon Breathing. The abilities that turned a physical fighter into something more.
The extraction timer counted down. He sat in the parking lot and listened to the sirens converge on the factory and thought about the pattern. Predator in a jungle. Terminator in an LA factory. If the next world had Arnold in it too, he was going to start suspecting the Bazaar had a sense of humor.
The timer hit zero. The world folded.
He materialized in the Kerenth deployment bay at 0614, standing on the platform with a nuclear power cell in his Spatial Pocket and dried blood under his nose.
The bay's vitals monitor flagged him immediately. Not critical. Elevated heart rate, mild dehydration, TK strain markers in the neural band, but nothing that required emergency response. The medical tech on duty, a woman he didn't recognize, checked his readings and cleared him within ten minutes.
Sera was waiting outside the bay. She looked at him the way she always looked at returning team members, with an assessment that checked for damage first and asked questions second.
"Successful," Adam said. "With complications."
"What kind of complications?"
"Extraction target sustained minor surface damage during removal. My fault. Clipped it on the way out." He paused. "The world was a technology threat. Android, humanoid, military-grade. Nuclear power cell in the chest. I had to crack the torso open and pull the cell before the locals destroyed the whole thing."
Sera processed this. "Injuries?"
"Bruised wrist. The suit took the worst of it." He looked at his left forearm. The Nanosuit's surface was flawless. No mark, no deformation, no evidence that a machine from the future had tried to crush his wrist twelve hours ago. "The regeneration is faster than I expected. Ninety-six percent to full integrity in about fifteen minutes. No scarring, no weak points. Complete restoration."
Sera's expression changed by approximately one degree, which for her was equivalent to someone else's jaw dropping. "That fast?"
"It is."
"Write it up. Hana will want the data."
He walked to the elevator. The morning light was coming through the operations center's east windows, pale and clean, and the building hummed with the quiet energy of a facility that was always active, always ready for the next breach or deployment or crisis.
His phone buzzed. A message from Kael.
How'd it go?
Adam typed his response in the elevator.
Got it done. Clipped the objective on the way out though. Tell you about it later.
The elevator opened on the fourth floor. He walked to the briefing room, set down his bag, and pulled up the Bazaar interface one more time.
EXPLORER STATUS UPDATE
Previous Tier: L2
New Tier: L3
L3 Shop Listings: UNLOCKED — available for purchase
Next Mandatory Deployment Window: 5 years
L3.
He looked at the shop listings. Observation Haki: 800 NP. Nen Foundation: 2,400 NP. Hamon Breathing: 600 NP. The prices he'd memorized months ago, now available. Not grayed out. Not locked behind a tier he hadn't reached. Purchasable.
He didn't buy anything yet. Not now. Not until he'd sat down, reviewed his full build plan, and made sure that every NP went exactly where it needed to go. The programmer in him wanted to optimize before committing. The Explorer in him wanted to rush. The programmer won, as it always did.
He closed the interface and went to find Hana, because Sera was right. The self-repair data needed documenting, and Hana was the kind of person who would ask the right questions.
The door to the briefing room was open. Morning light came through the windows. Somewhere on this floor, Tomás was already in the training hall, and Ren was probably reading the same news he was about to tell her.
L3. The real work started now.
AN: Extra chapter dropping later. We hit the 100 power stones. Thank you all. If we can hit 200, I will drop one more extra chapter. If you wish to read some extra content, participate in progression and support the fic visit [email protected]/skeri123