Chapter 161: A Sudden Flip (Bonus)
These dreams had been happening for the last month without end. It didn’t matter what pills she took or what remedies she tried. The nightmares haunted her relentlessly, night after night.
Her room was decently sized, a significant upgrade from where her family had lived before.
Thanks to all the money she’d made tutoring Ethan, she had been able to put some of it to use moving her family out of the trench quarters they used to live in, and into a better place in the mid-class district.
Now she worked as an assistant at Belsorth Academy, and combined with her father’s pay as a tutor in another academy, they were able to afford the rent to keep this place for the foreseeable future.
Bettie walked quietly into the small bathroom attached to her room and closed the door behind her. She turned on the faucet and let the water run for a moment before cupping her hands and splashing water onto her face.
The shock of the cold helped clear her head slightly. She reached for the towel hanging on the wall and dried her face, then looked up into the mirror above the sink.
And froze.
The version of herself staring back from the mirror grinned at her.
It was only for a split second, but it was unmistakable.
The reflection’s eyes were darkened, almost black, with dark veins stretching outward from the corners. The grin was wide and unnatural, stretching just a bit too far across the face.
Bettie flinched and stepped back quickly, her heart racing again. She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes with both hands, then looked back at the mirror.
The grinning version of herself had disappeared. It was just her normal reflection now, pale and tired but otherwise ordinary.
She let out a shaky breath and gripped the edge of the sink to steady herself.
"Get it together," she whispered to herself.
She wondered just how badly this whole situation was getting. Was she beginning to see things now? Hallucinations on top of the nightmares?
After a few more moments, she turned away from the mirror and walked back into her room. She sat down on the edge of the bed, careful not to wake Mylo again.
Her attention drifted to the small bedside table next to her.
Scattered across its surface were several pieces of paper covered in spell diagrams, and complex magical circles that filled each page in meticulous detail.
Two things over the past month hadn’t quite made sense.
The nightmares.
And the fact that she could now somehow comprehend even Tier 6 spell logic.
—
The Next Day at Stark Industries...
In the New Workshop, as most working men in the company had taken to calling it, Ethan and Lucy stood side by side in white overcoats. Lucy per usual, wore her goggles.
They were looking over a large diagram spread across a workbench. In front of them were scattered components that could eventually be used for an airplane.
Thin aluminum sheets were stacked to one side, some already cut into experimental wing panels.
There was a prototype propeller nearby, with engine casings in various states of assembly, though none of them were functional yet.
Around them, a handful of workers moved about the workshop. One man was testing electrical wiring, connecting copper cables to small power cells and checking for conductivity with a handheld device.
Another was welding two metal plates together, sparks flying as the torch hissed.
A third worker was hammering out dents in a chassis piece, shaping it manually since they didn’t yet have the proper machinery for precision molding.
Overall, nothing here looked particularly serious or advanced, as they were in the earliest experimental stages of a brand-need craft.
Lucy adjusted her goggles and tapped one finger on the diagram.
"Without getting some of those materials," she began, her voice carrying a note of frustration, "it’s going to be difficult to really make progress with anything here."
Ethan nodded. "I know. We’ve been delayed by an unforeseen circumstance." He was referring to the whole permit diversion situation with the Black Hearts Guild.
"But me and the guys are heading into an A-rank breach today, so I’ll have some of the necessary cores soon."
Mana cores or stones were essential power sources for most advanced technology. The higher the grade of the core, the more stable and powerful the energy output it could provide.
For airplanes specifically, cores would serve as the primary power source. In this world, fuel refining hadn’t yet been developed to the level needed to accommodate aircraft propulsion.
So the cores were to take the place of traditional fuel.
A-rank breach zones typically dropped cores that could sustain complex machinery for extended periods without degrading.
Lucy stared forward at the scattered components for a moment, then turned to Ethan. "When I first saw the design for this airplane, as you call it, I was marveled."
Her voice held genuine admiration. "I didn’t take you for an extremely talented magi-engineer."
"Hehe," Ethan smiled but said nothing more. He wasn’t about to explain that these designs came from Allen’s memories of the real world.
Then he leaned forward and pointed at a specific section of the diagram. "Speaking of which, on the propulsion system, what if we use a dual-core configuration instead of a single central core? One for thrust generation and another dedicated to stabilization?"
Lucy’s eyes widened in her googles. "That... actually works." She grabbed a pencil and began sketching modifications on the edge of the diagram. "If we route the.."
And so, they trailed off into a rapid-fire conversation filled with technical talks and problem-solving, their voices overlapping as ideas bounced back and forth.
Eventually, they both made their way to a more secluded part of the workshop.
This was Lucy’s private workspace within the overall large area.
It had been sectioned off with temporary dividers to give her room to focus on her personal project without distraction.
At center of the space was a mechanical arm from the mecha they had been building together.
Its surface was on a hydraulic lift platform that could rotate and tilt the arm for easier access during construction.
The arm itself was roughly eight feet long, constructed from reinforced steel plating with visible joint mechanisms at the elbow and wrist.