The entire process of creating a vehicle of war took Felicia exactly ninety days. From the moment she woke up knowing what to do, it took her a full three months to gather all the knowledge, data and materials she needed to execute her plans. There had been a lot of obstacles standing between her and her dreams of owning a modern machine of speedy death, though. Luckily for her, the first and most pressing issue turned out to be completely needless.

She had lived in fear for six entire days. As she went about rebuilding the productive farm she had had previously, a small part of her mind kept being terrified. She kept expecting to see shining metal-clad men appear out of nowhere at any moment. As she cleared the animal pens, she kept glancing backwards. As she refilled the forest with plants for the freed animals to eat, she kept expecting to feel cold metal cutting her flesh apart. It was exhausting. Then the seventh day of unexpected freedom came, and she felt stupid. She had heard the soldiers talk about this very thing. The core was gone. No core meant no food. No food meant no checkups. No core meant a temporary hole in the growing cycle. Felicia was street-wise enough to realise that this entire hexagonal prison business was probably all about growing dungeon cores. The core that was still preventing her from talking was the true product being produced here. Its nutrition was to be human, and its purpose was unknown still, but Felicia expected that Agren would have been used for energy or material generation purposes.

In short, she realised that the cell she was residing in was probably written off as an acceptable loss. She cried herself to sleep that day. Not tears of fear, but happy tears of relief had accompanied her into slumber that night. The next day, she had looked upon her works and felt great. The farm was working better than ever, and she had felt the first signs of repair from the gem sitting beside her spine. Constantly working with the mana originating from her throat gave her a pretty idea of how much juice the stone could hold. And that volume seemed to be growing day by day. This was also around the time she took up the practice of meditation. She had used this superstitious habit as a way to try to get a feel for why she kept feeling that horrible grinding pain when full up on mana, but it was only after the eighth day that she took it seriously. She tried to get a feel for the state of the stone in her throat and felt the fact that it was repairing in her very bones. She had wondered why she couldn't feel the crack inside the diamond previously. The very source of her sustenance had a terrible tear inside it, and she had somehow overlooked it.

The next few weeks, she had filled with experiments. She called all the actions she took ‘potential market analysis’, but honestly, it was just her mucking about and seeing what kind of shit she could pull off. The base components for her military dream project had come together with surprising ease. She had divided her days into four sections, one part meditation, one part dungeon and mana farm maintenance, one part relaxation and leisure, and one part tank construction.

The first part was rather easy to describe. Felicia usually did this before she went to bed, from the moment the sun went down to when she fell asleep. She just sat in a comfortable position, usually materialising a nice couch or laying on her bed as she tried to get a mental picture of what was happening inside Agren’s core. The fact that the - seemingly - corpse of a semi-friend was stuck inside her own body was something that she just couldn't get over initially. This matter kept popping into the forefront of her mind each time she tried to mentally relax. It took her weeks before she managed to find some form of peace with this rather macabre facet of her new reality. The process of accepting that an antagonistic and hostile construct of consciousness inside a magical stone was something she came to see as a friend had been another mental block standing between her and mental peace.

The dungeon management part was made up out of mindless busywork. She tried automating the dungeon initially. She found that the amount of maintenance she needed to do on solid stone rails or compressed dirt wheels and cogs was around as much effort as doing the hauling herself. She found she could create any form of matter she had absorbed, and the sad fact was that she had not absorbed any form of metal, ever. Agren had eaten a lot of exotic stuff, but those materials and skills were unavailable to her. So she spent the dungeon related part of her day with harvesting newly grown crops and throwing the fully grown animals down the kill-chute. She did manage to streamline certain tasks like sorting the animals in size and mana capacity through various clever means though. Enticing foodstuffs just out of reach, only letting the fittest animals reach the tasty morsels before making the floor fall out from under the being, for example. This allowed her to operate at the same level as she had been operating while having five employees. This only took a single week of dedicated optimising and streamlining.

The mana farm maintenance part was the smallest part of her daily routine. She did this part constantly. Each time she ‘freed’ another animal by throwing it into a death trap, she performed the mana farm task by absorbing the cooling corpse.

This mana was then used in her tank construction project. She had dedicated the shower and employee living area to a genuine mad scientist laboratory. It was in this part of her day, that she figured out how to separate minuscule metal particles from ordinary earth. Here she tested for the best way to construct composite armour. Here she reverse-engineered millions of man-hours of science by making smokeless gunpowder from some bird droppings, a bit of charcoal and a lot of potash. She used her dungeon given powers of materialising anything her heart could want at the cost of mana to set up a laboratory that any contemporary scientist would have sold their mothers for. She set up a wide array of destructive tests before arriving at the optimum way to defend against kinetic impacts through armour plating. She wove a web of carbon molecules through a hyper strong metal alloy that was too fine for electronic microscopes to see. She made materials harder than any produced on Earth, succeeding mainly because that stuff just felt really strong to Felicia.

Her leisure time was not really leisure time. She could only wander through the small hexagonal prison for so long before becoming extremely bored. It took her two days before she decided that working on what she enjoyed could also be construed as relaxation. She usually spent this portion of her day in the lab attached to her living quarters. Instead of researching immediately useful things, she tended to tinker with ways to make chairs more comfortable or methods to materialise pretty pictures. She tried recreating books she had read but found that having to replicate each and every single letter from ink woven through paper gave her a massive headache. Any and all writing or notes she made consisted out of thin sheets of strong, carved stone.

So it was that three months after all her employees were murdered, that a massively unhinged and manic Felicia decided that enough was enough. She had spent over ninety days in a haze of magical productivity. She had spent three months in perfect social isolation. There was proof that man was an industrious species when isolated, though. Felicia just couldn't stop smiling when she walked up to the massive monstrosity that was the result of all her labours. On the one hand, she had this gushing and roiling feeling of pride inside her chest. The feeling that every single molecule of the beast she was gazing at had come from her own brain was like the most potent drug she had ever experienced. On the other hand, she was constantly talking to herself to cope with the lack of social interactions. The fact that she could control mana and was capable of hyper-precise matter materialisation did not eliminate the fact that her throat was still blocked by the diamond corpse of her friend, Agren.

With a manic gleam in her eyes and a mindset that would have been rather alien to most normally adjusted people, she stepped inside her baby and started the engine. She sat her much-shrunken ass down inside the driver's seat, grasped the weird set of controls in her hands and put her creation into gear.

As the results of three months of work set into motion, Felicia had a crisis of perception. For the briefest of moments, she refused to believe where she was. She suddenly failed to grasp the events that had happened over the past few months. The acceleration pressing her into her chair, the rumbling of mechanical objects and the horrendous noise generated faded away as she refused to acknowledge what had happened.

Then the momentum of recent events swooped in, and she screamed for joy as she steered her murderous contraption towards the walls that had been keeping her locked up.