Angel’s thoughts remained on the relic throughout the rest of their travel. He found himself thankful for Lilian’s map of the desert more than once when he realized that his mind had wandered so far that he’d completely lost his sense of location.

When they stopped for the night, Angel spent a few hours working on the relic before taking first watch. The next few days fell into rhythm, split only by the occasional monster sighting. Only twice did they have to fight anything, and both times their combined strength was enough to take down the creatures.

About a week into their travel, when they stopped to set up camp for the night, Angel didn’t take the broken relic out. Instead, he asked Lilian to show him the Magitech inside her chest again.

“I want to make sure everything is running like it should be,” Angel explained. “Don’t forget that you’ve only got a temporary solution right now.”

“And you want to figure out how everything else works,” Lilian said with a dry smile as she laid down and moved her shirt so that Angel could access the port in her side.

“And that,” Angel agreed. The latch clicked open and his eyepiece swung down. The small orb he’d created floated between the prongs, humming with energy. There was less than when he’d first put it in, but the device seemed to be functioning as intended.

He scanned everything one more time, committing any runes he hadn’t learned yet to memory before leaning back. “Looks fine. You’ve got a month of charge left in you at the minimum. More than enough time for me to figure out a more permanent solution.”

“Good. I’d prefer not to drop dead after all this,” Lilian said. “I’ve gotten a little too invested in staying alive now that the hope is dangling in front of me like a carrot.”

Angel chuckled and closed the latch. He helped Lilian back to her feet. “So long as we’re on the same side, I’ll do what I can to make sure you can get that carrot.”

With that out of the way, he promptly pulled the broken relic out and got to work. Lilian shook her head, then made her way over to her bedroll to eat dinner.

Over the course of the next few days, Angel made leaps and bounds in his progress on the relic. On the second day, he managed to repair the internal mechanisms of the relic so that power didn’t just flood out of it after activation.

On the fourth day, Angel got his first taste of the relic’s true strength. After repairing one final rune, he sent a pulse of energy into the device’s input. The three pieces at the top sprung open, revealing the rod as it started to glow a brilliant blue. Crackles of energy zipped from the rod down to the unfolded parts and dissipated into the air.

“Buried Gods,” Angel breathed. “Look at that amplification. I put in one little spark, and it makes that?”

“A light show?” Lilian asked, unimpressed.

“And then some,” Angel said, rubbing the back of his head in wonder. “It used up all the potential of the magic at once. That’s pretty darn close to active Old World Magic. It’s almost like a crutch.”

“So it makes your magic stronger?”

“Essentially. This honestly works similar to how a canister does. It’s just much, much more complicated. You know how canisters work by sealing magic within them, causing a pressure buildup?”

Lilian nodded.

“Well, this relic takes the magic and pressurizes it instantly, spitting it right back out and using it up all at once. Normally, a good portion the energy in a canister is wasted while it gets pressurized. Meanwhile, this has almost no loss whatsoever.”

“That sounds pretty impressive,” Lilian admitted.

“It is. And it’s going in my arm as soon as I figure out how to link it properly. I don’t care how strong Reave is, if I hit him with a spell empowered by this thing, he’ll have at least a little trouble.”

As it turned out, figuring out how to meld the relic with his arm took about two days. The first was spent modifying the runes within his internal machinery to make sure the relic would have a spot to safely connect, and the next was spent double checking all of his work.

Making a mistake with an artifact could cost an arm. Making one with a relic would probably end up costing life. Lilian watched on from a safe distance as Angel activated the Liquid Metal feature of his arm. The smooth bronze flowed out of the way, allowing Angel to insert the tube into the center of his arm, right beside the grappling hook mechanism.

Metal shifted to hold the rod in place while Angel picked his scribe up and started modifying both the relic and his arm to link them. The process was slow and nerve-wracking, with every stroke taking his entire concentration.

When he was finally done, his arm reformed itself around the relic, sealing it in as if it were never there. He turned it over, opening and closing his fist. The chamber whirred as he ran through his canisters. Everything seemed to function properly.

“Would you look at that,” Angel mused, letting out a small laugh. “It works!”

“You haven’t even used the relic yet,” Lilian pointed out.

“It’s all connected to the same power source. I know the relic activates when energy is sent into it,” Angel said. “And it’s directly linked to my power source. That means it has energy flow, so it’s working. If it wasn’t, I would be a smoking crater right about now.”

“So now what? You just wait until you need to use it?”

“Of course not,” Angel said, scoffing. “That would be stupid. Imagine not knowing how a weapon functions. It would be just as dangerous to me as it would be to someone else. The next step is a test shot. I think lightning would probably be the best one to test this with.”

His arm whirred, a canister clicking into place. Angel a mental command to his arm, telling it to activate a line of runes linking the relic to the canister chamber. There was a click as the relic slid into place. A low whine rose up from it as blue energy lit up within it, growing brighter as it slipped through the gaps in the metal.

The sound grew louder and a small hole opened in his palm where the grappling hook would normally shoot out of. The tip of the relic emerged, splitting open as energy gathered at its tip. Plates shifted outwards as the power gathering within his arm seemed to forcibly expand it.

Angel aimed at a dune a short distance away from them as the whine reached its crescendo. The plates on his arm started to vibrate and the thin glass tubes near his shoulder flared with red energy.

A brilliant flash lit up the night as a bolt of yellow lightning roared out of Angel’s palm. It into the dune with an earthshaking explosion, turning a huge portion of it to glass and sending up a cloud of smoke and sand.

Angel flew back from the force of the spell, landing hard on the ground and letting out a grunt as all the air was knocked out of his lungs. He remained there for several moments, breathing heavily as he caught his breath and tried to still his racing heart.

His arm was burning hot. Even now, the energy was still slowly whining down. Plates slid back into place as the blue energy faded and the relic retracted back into his arm. Even so, the glow didn’t fully return to its normal, dim level.

“Buried Gods,” Lilian cursed, gaping at the smoking dune. “That could have done damage to a Buried God!”

“Good,” Angel rasped, sitting upright and shaking his hand off. There was still steam rising up from the vents on the back. “I’d like to see Reave ignore that one.”

“Can you fire it again?”

“No way,” Angel said, inspecting his arm. “I nearly liquified myself. If I try to do that again, I’ll end up melting a rune and blowing us both up. We’ll see how long it takes my arm to get back to normal, and that’ll be how often I can use the relic.”

Lilian shook her head. “You know, I just realized that you’re technically one of the wealthiest people in the Barren right now. You’ve got two relics. Only the magistrates and a few very lucky people have that many.”

“Just don’t go telling other people,” Angel said with a grimace. “The last thing I need is a bunch of Seekers coming after me to get their hands on my relics while I do the exact same thing to the Reawakening.”