Chapter 176

  Alexander flew across the vault toward Jimmy.

  The forgehero knelt on the concrete, one cybernetic leg completely non-functional, the servos seized and sparking. Both arms were raised to cover his head in a defensive posture, shielding himself from the drones that circled above him.

  Metallokinesis seized the massive cybernetic frame.

  Jimmy’s Will shattered beneath the pressure. The man had almost nothing left. He felt the resistance crumble as his power wrapped around tons of augmented metal and flesh. He lifted the forgehero into the air, rotated him upside down, and pinned him against the wall.

  Jimmy made a sound halfway between a whimper and a gasp.

  “Relax,” Alexander said, drifting closer. “I’m not going to kill you. I just want your eye.” He paused. “Not your real one. That would be messed up.”

  The forgehero tried to struggle. Cybernetic arms flexing, attempting to break free. Alexander tightened his grip, forcing the man completely still against the concrete.

  He leaned down to examine the MALOS.

  The ocular rig glowed red in its housing. Advanced military hardware wrapped around the eye socket, integrated directly into the skull with precision that spoke of surgical expertise and serious funding. The laser emitter sat at the center, surrounded by targeting arrays and power distribution systems.

  The device began charging.

  A barely audible whine built as capacitors filled. Energy signatures spiked across Alexander’s senses. He reached into the cybernetics with Technopathy, smashing through the final surge of Jimmy’s Will, and shut the attack down mid-cycle.

  The whine cut off.

  His senses traced the hardware connections. Mounting plates welded directly to skull bone. Neural interfaces threaded through optical pathways. Power conduits running deep beneath synthetic skin. The entire assembly formed an integrated system that couldn’t be separated without major surgery.

  He considered ripping it out, but immediately dismissed the thought. Even if he was careful, he’d likely cause microfractures in the skull and rupture surrounding blood vessels.

  “Making lasers isn’t hard,” he muttered, still examining the rig. “It’s just figuring out how the military maintains beam cohesion over distance in something with such a small aperture while also not melting your face off. Maybe I can just take the ocular component…”

  His senses pushed deeper. Found the hardwired connection running from the ocular system directly into a brain implant for neural control.

  He sighed.

  Metallokinesis released. Jimmy dropped, crashing onto his shoulder and side with a heavy thud of metal on concrete.

  “It’s your lucky day,” Alexander said, already rising back into the air. “Without my tools, I can’t get it out of your head without probably killing you. Or giving you permanent brain damage. So just lay there and don’t bother me and we’ll call it even.”

  He flew toward the center of the vault, reaching out with both hands. Metallokinesis pulsed outward toward Vault 5B. Semiconductor containers began rising, flowing out in steady streams toward the waiting trucks.

  The drones maintained their vigilance overhead, tracking his movements. Below, Jimmy shifted into a sitting position, leaning back against the wall. The forgehero didn’t try to stand.

  “Serious?” Jimmy called after him. “You ain’t gonna kill me? I shot you.”

  He glanced down at his shoulder. “What, this little thing?”

  The wound was already beginning to close. Slowly. The nanites didn’t give him anything close to superpowered regeneration, but he was healing at a factor far beyond human norms.

  “Nah, this is nothing,” he said, waving his cybernetic arm. “Last guy I fought cut my whole arm off.”

  Jimmy just gaped at him.

  He returned to loading the transports.

  The semiconductor containers settled into truck beds with gentle thuds. Weight sensors reported increasing loads. Seventeen trucks. The materials flowed in organized streams, filling the available space quickly.

  “Just curious, but how does superhuman augmentation work exactly? Compared to superpowers, I mean.”

  Jimmy blinked. “Uh. We have stats that track each cybernetic. Like power and efficiency and mastery. And they each have Tiers.”

  “Huh. And what happens if you replace something?”

  “We lose some of our stats and have to build them up again,” Jimmy said, relaxing a bit. “Completely new systems start from zero though. We’re still figuring a lot of things out though, because cybernetics only started being recognized by the System six months ago.”

  That explained a lot. The guy had clearly pushed himself hard to ascend his Willpower, but still lacked combat experience. And a cushy job guarding a vault wasn’t the best place to gain some.

  Until tonight, at least.

  “Alex, you’ve got incoming,” Augustus interrupted, using their open comms channel. “ETA less than four minutes.” A pause. “The two I can see, anyway. They’re burning hard over the city, lighting up the night.”

  “I’m almost done here,” Alexander replied, guiding another container into position. “Which direction?”

  “Southwest.”

  “Good. I’ll be heading away from them.”

  “Got everything you need?”

  He nodded, knowing Augustus could see him through Droney’s feed. “Just loading the last of it now. Start spinning up the convoy portal at position 1.”

  The twentieth truck reached capacity.

  Alexander surveyed the convoy below and frowned. He was out of weight despite there still being plenty of space.

  The thought was frustrating. Billions in goods surrounded him. Vaults still full of materials he’d need for manufacturing. What he’d taken had barely scratched the surface.

  Then again, hovertech was always rated conservatively. Safety guidelines typically set capacity somewhere between half and a third of actual technical limits. Engineering margins built for longevity and warranties and operational safety.

  He didn’t care about any of them.

  He spun slowly in the air, reevaluating. The trucks could probably handle another two and a half tons each without issue. That meant fifty more tons. Maybe more if he was willing to risk failures.

  His mind went to the gold. Vault 6A held over a hundred tons. Billions in value, and the most valuable metal per gram that remained. He could fill every truck to maximum capacity with nothing but bullion.

  Except The Curator couldn’t move that kind of volume. Nobody on or around Earth could. Trying to fence billions in stolen gold would take years.

  Better to take what he could actually use. Materials for immediate manufacturing needs.

  He reached out with both hands.

  Vault 5B on his left. The remaining semiconductor containers rose, flowing toward the trucks. Vault 3A on his right. Titanium billets began moving, aerospace-grade metal joining the stream.

  He split his focus across more vaults. Silver from 4A. Platinum from 4B. Gold bullion from 6A. The materials converged on the convoy below, carefully distributed across all twenty trucks to balance the additional weight.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The remaining ten tons of semiconductors. Fifteen tons of titanium. Five tons of silver. Ten tons of platinum. Ten tons of gold.

  The loads settled into place alongside the rare earths and ultra-rares already loaded. The hovertech systems developed a slight whine as they pulled more power than usual for the increased mass. The sound wasn’t alarming yet. Just strained.

  He swept the facility one last time, checking for anything he’d missed. He found no more metals of note, but his attention was drawn to the clipboards hanging next to the entrance of each vault.

  Curious, he floated the one next to Vault 6B over, caught it, then scanned it quickly. It was a form. A sign-in sheet for logging the materials going in and out.

  Dates, times, reason for access, authorized personnel signature.

  He grabbed the attached pen and filled in the current date and time.

  His hand hovered over the reason field. Wrote down ‘Borrowing.’

  Then signed it. ‘Machine God.’

  He studied the form a moment longer, then nodded in satisfaction. Reattaching the pen, he snapped the clipboard sideways toward the vault. It spun through the air, missed completely, and clattered against the wall before falling to the floor.

  He made a quiet hiss of disappointment at himself.

  Alexander floated in the air above the convoy, turning around one final time to survey the aftermath. Metal embedded in walls and ceiling. Smoke cleared. Vault doors stacked together. Jimmy seated against the far wall. Watchdog unconscious beside his fallen hound.

  He waved a hand.

  All twenty truck doors slammed shut simultaneously, the sound echoing through the loading bay.

  He descended, flying down toward his lead truck. He landed beside the driver’s door and pulled the handle.

  It didn’t open. The door was locked.

  He glanced through the window. Both guards huddled on the passenger side, eyes wide with terror. The ones he’d grabbed from the depot and security booth. He’d tuned them out with everything else that was going on.

  Alexander knocked on the window.

  One guard reached over hesitantly and pressed a button. The window opened an inch.

  He raised an eyebrow. “This is your stop. Get out of my truck.”

  Both guards nodded frantically and scrambled out the passenger door, nearly tripping over each other in their haste to escape.

  Alexander disengaged the lock with a quick pulse of power. He pulled the door open and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  The convoy headed for the ramp.

  Droney shot by overhead. The surviving drones followed, racing up the tunnel and back out into the night air of Manhattan, scanning in every direction for threats.

  He sealed each bulkhead behind them as they climbed. Metal thunked as locks engaged, three separate barriers slamming shut in sequence. It wouldn’t stop anyone determined, but it would buy time for them to investigate and confirm his departure. Even thirty seconds per door added up.

  The convoy emerged into Manhattan’s night air. Streets stretched ahead, mostly clear thanks to the careful traffic system manipulation. A few late delivery trucks. Some taxis. Witnesses on sidewalks with phones raised. Nothing that would slow him down.

  They banked hard around a corner. Hovertech whined under the extra weight but held. Twenty four trucks accelerated down a wide avenue, their engines echoing off glass and steel towers.

  “Portal’s forming ahead,” Augustus said. “Right on schedule.”

  Alexander spotted it a hundred meters down the street. Reality twisted, opening wide enough to swallow the entire convoy. The rift stabilized into an inky black hole in space.

  The empty trucks split. Two peeled left, two right. The portal passed between them as the twenty loaded transports vanished.

  Behind him, the portal collapsed.

  “Received,” Augustus confirmed. “The team has already loaded the other vehicles and are beginning on the hovertrucks. Oh, and Annie says, and I quote, ‘What the fuck did you do Alex? And without me? How could you!’”

  Alexander laughed. “Tell her I’ll make it up to her.”

  “Will do. Don’t think it’ll help though.”

  The remaining four trucks reformed into a tight grouping. He pushed them harder now, racing toward the tech corridor. Older glass towers gave way to newer construction. Startup headquarters. Venture capital dreams made manifest in steel and concrete.

  Ahead, the street ended in a T-intersection. FabBetter’s tower rose directly ahead, floor-to-ceiling windows reflecting the city lights. He’d looked them up after finding they had everything he needed. It was some billionaire playboy’s tech startup with the goal of miniaturizing fabricators and making them safe enough for the everyday home and broad enough to replace the half a dozen specialized fabricators that already existed, ranging from clothes printers to food synthesizers.

  He didn’t turn.

  Two of the trailing trucks accelerated past him, pulling into formation directly ahead. Side by side, they became a battering ram.

  All four remaining transports began to rise, hovertech thrumming as they climbed toward the fifteenth floor. Alexander’s senses reached into the building and found half a dozen bioelectric signatures scattered across the floor he was aiming for. None of them were in his direct path.

  The lead trucks smashed through. Glass exploded inward. Metal frames shrieked. Alexander’s transport followed behind, sliding across the open-plan floor scattered with monitors and ergonomic chairs. The convoy came to rest and rotated, loading bay doors facing inward toward the floor’s center.

  Alexander jumped out.

  The floor was lit in low lighting punctuated by the soft blue glow of computer screens. Several engineers were scattered across the workspace in various states of late-night attire. Pajamas. Hoodies. One guy even lay in a sleeping bag on a couch near the far wall.

  Someone stood frozen at a kitchenette counter, mug hovering beneath a hot chocolate dispenser mid-pour. Steam rose from the cup.

  He walked past the frozen engineer and took it from the man’s hand. “Thanks.”

  The engineer’s arm stayed extended, holding nothing.

  He continued toward the floor’s center, sipping the hot chocolate. Four glass-walled observation rooms surrounded a cross-shaped hallway intersection. The rooms looked designed for vacuum sealing during operation. Two contained quantum supercomputers in massive spherical housings, monitors hanging from their ceilings displaying constantly updating data streams. The other two held fabricators. Long white rectangular units, two per room. Industrial and utilitarian.

  The observation rooms’ reinforced security glass had metal frames running along their corners and ceiling joints.

  Alexander seized all four frames with Metallokinesis and ripped them free. Metal shrieked as bolts tore from their mountings. Glass exploded inward, shattering as the frames twisted under the force. Reinforced panels collapsed in cascades of fragments across the floor, leaving the observation rooms completely exposed.

  He walked into the first supercomputer room. The sphere sat on a marble slab with an engraved semi-spherical indent. Ornate clamps held it in place. Cooling tubes ran from the top into the ceiling, probably connecting to a dedicated cooling system somewhere above.

  Both supercomputers hummed, processing whatever calculations the company was working on.

  He shut them down with Technopathy. The hums died instantly. Monitors went dark mid-display across both rooms. Liquid cooling pumps stopped.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” someone shouted behind him. “Do you have any idea what you just did?”

  He turned. A woman in sweatpants and a stained MIT hoodie glared at him. She took a step forward, then seemed to register who she was talking to and flinched.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I just... that was three weeks of work.”

  Alexander glanced at the ID badge clipped to her hoodie. Dr. Katerina Marshal. Materials Science.

  “I’d be pissed too in your shoes, Dr. Marshal.” He paused, realizing why her name struck him as familiar. “Though you already know this whole thing is impossible. You wrote a paper on thermal envelope constraints in post-processing for hybrid material systems.”

  She stared at him. “You’ve read my dissertation?”

  “Parts of it. You made good points about why you can’t mix organic and metallic fabrication without contamination risks that scale exponentially with miniaturization.” He gestured at the fabricators behind him. “So what are you doing working here?”

  “Student loans don’t care about physics.”

  Alexander nodded. “Fair enough.”

  He turned back to the observation rooms and seized the cooling tubes from both supercomputers with Metallokinesis, ripping them free from the ceiling. Liquid spilled across the floor before the emergency valves kicked in. The ornate clamps released with a thought.

  “What are you doing?” someone asked from behind him. The voice was thick with sleep.

  “Yeah,” another added. “And who even are you?”

  Alexander lifted the spheres, floating them carefully toward the trucks. “I’m the Machine God. And I’m here to borrow your equipment.”

  “Uh... so you’re going to return it?”

  He laughed. The question was genuinely funny. “What? No, why would I do that?”

  The first guy stared. “Then, isn’t that just—”

  “Dude, shut up,” the second engineer hissed. “He’s a supervillain.”

  Alexander guided the spheres into the trucks.

  The fabricators followed. He tore them free from their reinforced floor mounts and sent them floating after the supercomputers. Two per truck, stacked on their narrow sides. They jutted out slightly from the cargo beds.

  The whole process took less than two minutes.

  When he finished, most of the engineers had clustered near the elevators. Some looked shocked. Others just stood there with bleary-eyed acceptance. The guy whose hot chocolate he’d taken still stood at the kitchenette island, though now with arms crossed and a mean glare.

  Alexander walked over to a nearby desk and grabbed a notepad. Wrote down his email address and tore off the page.

  He handed it to the woman in the MIT hoodie. “Here. Just in case you or the others need it.”

  She took it automatically. Read it. Looked back up at him with confusion. “Complaints at the Machine God dot com?”

  He shrugged. “You might lose your jobs because of me. But I’m a supervillain, not an asshole. So, if you do, then you can’t find another job, and things get so bad that you’re living in the streets, begging for scraps, when, finally, you realize you’re willing to turn to even the supervillain that cost you everything… Well, here’s my email.”

  “But why is it ‘complaints’? Why not ‘contact’ or something more professional?”

  “Because this way I’ll know who it’s coming from.” Alexander headed for his truck. Then turned back. “You’re not allowed to give it to the authorities, though. I don’t want to deal with police newsletters and recruitment spam.”

  She stared at him, head turning to follow as he walked back to the truck and climbed in.

  The convoy flew back out through the shattered windows into the Manhattan night.

  “Auggy, spin up the portal at position 2.”

  One last stop remained.

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