Aside from the brief diversion of attention to throw together a mobile home for Seth's family with enough towing capacity to move his entire flock of sheep in trailers, and adding some last-ditch defenses around my core just in case, almost the entirety of my attention was focused on getting my chassis ready to move as soon as I could.

As it turns out, the 'placeholder' reactors that my Gremlins came up with were actually a dirt-simple modification of my original Proton Piles; the only functional difference had to do with the coolant flow. In my original design, the coolant was simply expelled as soon as it had gone through the turbine, wasting the majority of the mana that went into conjuring it. In the Gremlin-built design however, the coolant was sent through a magitech cooling system that I had a hard time making sense of, before being fed back into the reaction chamber. The practical upshot of this is that it almost completely eliminated the mana expense for conjuring coolant, meaning each reactor would produce 28 usable mana per hour instead of 10. As a side effect, the visible plume of steam was almost eliminated, which should help improve stealth a bit.

With these new reactors, I was able to very rapidly put the finishing touches on my chassis and motor systems once I upgraded all the ones I would actually be keeping. With my new frame, that left only two jobs to do before I could finally get moving. First and most obviously, I would be needing even more potent reactors in order to get myself moving, but second came the fact that I was still almost completely buried in the terrain, and I would need some sort of mechanism to get myself out of the ground. My gremlins could keep working on the reactors for me, but right now I was the only one able to excavate the terrain fast enough to get that part of my escape plan ready.

Thus, I set about excavating the terrain around my chassis and converting it into an utterly massive elevator, which would be able to lift my immensely heavy frame to the surface when it was completed. I was about halfway done with this when my UAV detected another incoming signature, but this time it wasn't a group of people approaching on foot. No, instead it was an utterly massive blue dragon wearing an imposingly spiky crown flying directly towards my location at almost half the speed of sound.

Fortunately for me, the dragon was still nearly three hours away when I spotted it, but that was still pushing the envelope far closer than I was willing to deal with. Internally, I had already reserved the jar of mana beads Seth gave me for emergencies, but considering that the damn things had almost 5,000 mana tied up in them and the current situation with the incoming Dragon, I figured that this qualified.

Almost instantly, I was able to finish excavating my hull with a flash of expended mana, quickly kludging together an elevator system with no regard for optimization. All told, this was about a thousand mana down the drain, considering how hellaciously inefficient I was being, in favor of expedience. Once this was done, I immediately informed my Gremlins "The timetable has been moved up; we have hostiles inbound within three hours. I don't care anymore what sort of compromises or trade offs you have to make to get those improved reactors working to the necessary power level, just get that design finished ASAP!"

My crew of Gremlins in the Engineering Lab replied immediately "Yes sir! We will do our absolute best, sir!"

With my Gremlins on that task, I turned my attention to cramming some extra hardware into my frame. My original plan had been to get myself mobile and sneak out of the country before I could get in any serious fights, but it was now clear that was wishful thinking. So, in the remaining time before that dragon would be arriving, I set about equipping myself with additional equipment both to speed my escape, and to give myself a means to shoot back.

The mobility equipment was fairly straightforward; I basically took a generation 1 Proton Pile, cranked up the levels of coolant and fuel being conjured until the reaction chamber could only barely contain it, and routed the massive amount of steam through a rocket nozzle instead of a turbine. I quickly mounted these thrusters to both the undersides of my massive steel feet and the palms of my hands, which I calculated would give me a maximum aerial acceleration of 1.6 times local gravity.

Next was weaponry; this was similarly dirt simple, as I took the machine guns I used on my Armed Clockworks, scaled them way up, exchanged the chemical propellant for steam heated by a Proton Pile reaction, and mounted them to my forearms.

I wasn't satisfied by this arrangement at all, but this tinkering had only cost me an hour of precious, precious time. That done, I immediately stuck my nose into what my Gremlins were doing on the reactor front, and pulled up their plans for what they were doing, hoping against hope that I would be able to possibly finish ahead of them.

Looking at the plans, I was actually rather impressed by the Gremlins' ingenuity; it looked like they had ditched the idea of a physical reaction chamber cooled by water, in favor of drastically ramping up the level of Protonium being conjured and containing the hyper-energetic plasma with intense magnetic fields; this plasma was then fed through what basically amounted to an inverted linear motor, which captured the kinetic energy of the rapidly moving Hydrogen plasma as it traveled through the containment field, and converted it directly into mana with truly amazing efficiency. Admittedly this required an exhaust port once more to dump the superheated plasma once it was done doing its job, but I could work with that.

That said, there were several issues with the magnetic containment field leaking, along with the generator melting down for various reasons. Instead of trying to solve these problems the smart way, I simply threw more mana at the problem, directly infusing into components to arbitrarily adjust physical properties, and replacing the magnetic containment field with one that was made out of crystallized magic. I winced slightly as the mana cost per reactor skyrocketed to nearly a thousand from these changes, but I immediately set about replacing my current reactors with the new setup, calming slightly as my mana income skyrocketed. Still, by the time I had all the reactors replaced, I had only five hundred mana worth of beads left as a buffer for future emergencies, and the dragon was only ten minutes out from reaching the site where I currently resided.

With my preparations completed as well as I could arrange, I sent the command to the opening system on my 'hangar', feeling a distinct feeling of discomfort as my first two floors were forcibly disconnected from my humanoid frame. I didn't bother with waiting for the elevator to reach the surface, instead activating my thrusters immediately with the goal of getting myself the hell out of here as quickly as I could.

Quickly, I ascended, flinging myself in a random direction across the sky courtesy of having very poor control of my aerial movements, but I didn't dare land or the dragon would catch up to me. By my estimates, I'd reached around two kilometers of altitude by the time the dragon fired their first shot my way, a lance of nuclear fire streaking across the sky from their mouth and only barely missing.

Without much hope of scoring a hit, I pointed my forearms in the general direction of the dragon and opened fire with the massive autocannons I had mounted to them, sending shells screaming across the sky at several times the speed of sound. Not a single one of my shots managed to connect as far as I could tell, but the dragon's return fire certainly struck true, as their next blast nailed me right in the leg, demolishing most of my ability to exert any control whatsoever over my trajectory.

After several hectic minutes of performing frantic midair repairs as I continued to thrust, I finally managed to restore what little control over my trajectory my leg offered me. Then I realized that I was now flying over what looked a lot like a dusty wasteland, devoid of even the hardy lifeforms that might be expected to grow in a desert. Immediately afterwards, I realized that the ground was approaching quite rapidly indeed. This, I decided moments before impact, was going to suck.

As he gazed after the accursed flying Titan, Supreme Leader Corenzite hissed in annoyance. If their wild uncontrolled flight had taken them in literally any other direction, then he would have been able to easily track the Titan to their crash site and deal with them before they had a chance to truly become a threat. However, that Titan had instead been on a course directly toward the Dead Wastes, where anything alive would be sucked dry of life in mere minutes, Grand Dragons included.

Privately, Corenzite mused if this was a category that Titans were actually part of, before deciding to default to the pessimistic answer and assume that they would probably have to deal with that Titan later, after they had time to build themselves up into some immensely powerful form and come trudging out of the Dead Wastes on their own sweet time. Either that, or the immense amounts of mana that Titan was producing would be enough to wake up whatever was in the center of the Dead Wastes, and then everyone would be fucked.

Still, as Supreme Leader Corenzite turned back towards their capitol, they had to admit that this was a situation which they really had no ability to influence. There was nothing that more annoyed a Grand Dragon than having no ability to influence a situation.