The tiger thing recovered quickly and took a swipe at Carnivac’s head, which ducked back down and out of the way. When it poked its head over the edge to check on Carnivac, he grabbed a fistfull of fur on the side of its head, then another on the other side.

The creature jerked its head back in surprise but wasn’t fast enough. With his full body, Carnivac planted his feet near the top ledge and shoved, pulling the creature over the lip and flipping over Carnivac’s head. At that point, gravity kicked in and Carnivac sailed right off the cliff face after the tiger.

Keeping a tight hold on the shocked tiger’s face, Carnivac allowed the momentum to pull him on top. The tiger smashed into the ground on its back with Carnivac landing knees first into its chest and stomach. All of the air escaped out of the tiger with a crunching sound.

Carnivac climbed off of the creature as Dad wandered over to have a look.

“That was quite the move,” Dad complimented Carnivac. “You’re pretty comfortable in the air, eh?”

“I’m getting better. You know what this thing is?” Carnivac asked with a gesture.

“That’s a nimravour. Well, a ridge-back nimravour. Named for the NorthRidge mountains they live in.”

“Think there’s more of them?”

“Nah, they tend to be pretty solitary creatures with large territories. Nasty buggers though, even hunt their own kind.”

“I guess I don’t have to feel so bad about killing it then,” Carnivac said as he attempted to put the beast into my [Inventory]. An error message popped up in his HUD warning him that living souls could not be stored in Inventory space.

A low groan came from the creature as it feebly tried to roll over and ineffectually waved its paws around.

“You should put it out of its misery,” Dad suggested. “It’ll never survive with those injuries anyway.”

Carnivac drew one of his wakizashi and walked around the nimravour judging where to best strike. “I don’t know what materials sell best on this thing... So I don’t want to damage something I shouldn’t...”

“I know the fur sells well if it’s clean and intact...” Dad offered. “The eye can be crystalized and is used in magic rituals I hear... and I think the horn for medicine.”

“Got it.”

With a sudden burst of movement, Carnivac pierced the nimravour’s throat, driving his blade up and into its brain. All movement stopped in an instant and its labored breathing ceased after a final exhalation.

“Yes, very skilled indeed,” Dad said, “I can see why our Shirogane relies on you. I’ve truly never seen anything like you or Shirogane’s lion form, and I've seen all manner of Automata in my time.”

“You can tell I’m an Automata?” Carnivac asked, successfully storing away the nimravour this time.

“Not as such, no. Just a guess based on what we’ve seen so far and how you and our boy interact, even though he’s an Automata. You treat him like a proper person, which made me wonder if you might be one too. Plus even after carrying my old bones all this way you haven’t once gotten tired or needed to break.”

“I see.”

Dad gave him an odd look. “Sometimes... it seems like I’m talking to two different people.”

“How so?”

“Like that. Sometimes you seem curious and have a lot to ask and to say and other times it’s like that, just minimum conversation.”

“I see... I’ll... try to work on that.”

Dad shrugged and walked back to the campfire. Carnivac pulled Shrapnel out of [Inventory] and let him fly up into the air to have a look around. The light was fading fast but all that could be seen was rocks and small shrubs. Shrapnel spotted a couple of wolves, or possibly coyotes, prowling around but they didn’t seem interested in our group.

The parents went to sleep and Shiro watched over them while Carnivac continued to patrol the area through the night. He secretly wished that something would attack them. He didn’t have the creative skills that some of the other proxies had and was mostly built for the purpose of stealth and combat. Without anything to fight or a need to be sneaky, Carnivac was bored.

Normally, he’d be offline during these times and put back into [Inventory] when not needed. If he were an organic being, he might do some training to work on his accuracy for throwing kunai or increasing his shadow abilities. As an Automata, he either could or couldn’t do something. He was already as good at whatever it was as he was ever going to get, without an upgrade to his systems. Training was pointless for an Automata.

Carnivac was nothing if not always on alert. It was his job, his function, so it became a part of who he was. Even for an Automata, being in a constant state of ready can be draining.

So... You want a break buddy? I asked in my mind, feeling a bit silly to be asking myself something.

...yes.

That... that was my thought responding but at the same time it wasn’t. Was I actually developing multiple personality disorder, like I’d been joking about? Nothing else came, but I got the distinct impression that it was Carnivac responding to me.

Carnivac split open and I climbed out and turned to look at him curiously. My other proxies were also developing more defined personalities the more I used them. I always thought of it more like becoming more comfortable with a role in the acting sense of it. I was still fully aware of what each one was doing and thinking and could take direct control whenever I wished. They weren’t what you’d call independent, but they were certainly becoming more defined. Interesting. I’d have to research that at some point. Was it possible that there might be a time when I don’t know what they are thinking?

“Have a rest buddy, I’ll call you if something comes up,” I told Carnivac, who gave me a slight bow as I returned him to [Inventory].

Shrapnel was circling overhead, monitoring anything with a heat signature in the area. He seemed to be content and generally just happy to be of use. No sense bothering him.

I pulled out my portable work station and some paper to start sketching out some ideas. I now had a wealth of materials thanks to Carnivac’s trip to The Factory as well as time to think about how to use them while I was riding shotgun.

The top priority was probably building a new body for the princess but I wasn’t keen on making anything without her input only to have to end up redoing later. I sketched out some rough ideas and would present them to her to get her thoughts. I’m always tempted to incorporate weapons and some sort of transformation gimmick but the princess wouldn’t need any of that.

Just what functions did her body need to perform? There was a look of royalty, of course, but beyond that? Strength? Strong defenses to protect against potential assassins? I didn’t have enough information here and would need to talk to her myself rather than through a proxy. I should probably also include Prince Milliardo in the discussions too.

Not that decisions about Princess Relina’s body shouldn’t be the sole domain of Princess Relina, but he might have some insight from a political perspective that I wouldn’t think of. I came up with a handful of elegant designs but they mostly felt like art pieces to me rather than something functional for a person.

I set the designs aside and started mentally going through my [Inventory] to see what sorts of bodies I got from Carnivac’s shopping trip. Most of them looked to be pretty basic, but that was fine. I found two that were of the same warrior model type and pulled one of them out to inspect it. These should work nicely for Jaff and Meern, I could probably install them as-is, but it wouldn’t hurt to see if they had any requests.

Next I found a bodyguard type body that shared a lot of the same parts as Sentinel’s original base body. This looked to be a newer model of the same type. The mana efficiency was improved and it had a higher capacity brain module but otherwise the changes looked to be mostly cosmetic.

I looked up from my work when Shrapnel noticed a large heat signature in the area coming our direction. From what he could see, I guessed it was grizzly sized. It looked like it might have caught the scent of the parents and was stalking around.

The sky was overcast so everything was darker than dark. All that Shrapnel had to rely on was infrared and ultraviolet light filters, which weren’t great for discerning fine details. The large heat signature spasmed and thrashed for a moment like it was being attacked by something invisible before the heat started leaking out and pooling around it.

Shrapnel switched over to the ultraviolet light filter and caught a glimpse of a possibly humanoid shape, with wings, apparently feeding on the large creature. With the vague shapes of mana energy that were visible in ultraviolet, Shrapnel couldn’t make out much other than the mana from the large creature was being drained by the other one.

I pulled Carnivac out of [Inventory] and woke him up, but the winged creature vaulted off into the sky and out of Shrapnel’s sight range. I left Carnivac to keep an eye out while I made repairs and upgrades to Sentinel. Knowing that there were things out there that we weren’t aware of kept me on edge. Shiro must have sensed something but I didn’t feel like dealing with his weirdness in regards to my main body and proxies. Carnivac sat with him by the fire and kept watch with Shrapnel while letting Shiro quietly chat away.

Given how extensive the damage to Sentinel had been, it ended up being easier to just salvage what I could from his body and install it into the new one while rebuilding his unique weapons and systems. His clothes were a little harder since I didn’t have any sewing supplies or fabric on hand. He felt naked to me without his signature cowboy hat and duster but what could you do?

Could I make fabric out of magiSteel? The first step would be making magiSteel wire and from there, thread. It wasn’t something I could do with a portable work station though. I’d need a proper forge and some serious muscle. Damn. I needed Ram... who was currently on loan to the princess.

No wait! IronHide had fire crystals built into him too, for his boiler! He also had muscle in spades. I pulled IronHide out and powered him up. With my craft skills, I was able to reshape a bar of magiSteel into a rod, but I couldn’t get much thinner than a couple of centimeters before it started getting wonky.

I had to climb inside to provide the mana for his skills, but IronHide used his [IronGrowth] ability to grow thick and heavy armor plates that could be shaped into a series of draw plates with decreasing diameters. I had to make some modifications to IronHide’s systems in order for him to access the fire crystals in a different way but in the end he was able to focus a point of heat between his hands.

We used the heat to warm up the steel and then forced the rod through the draw plate. I enlisted the help of Sentinel to pull the steel through as the rod got decreasingly smaller. As the rod got thinner, it got longer and increasingly more annoying to work with. I was tempted to shorten the length by cutting it but knew I’d want this stuff on a spool eventually. By morning, we’d drawn the length of magiSteel until it was a single millimeter thick and I could wind it around a makeshift spool.

It wasn’t good enough yet but I’d keep working on it until I had something I could use. I remembered something from my old world called “memory wire” that was a thin metal wire, shaped into something like an animal or a heart or something. The wire was soft enough that you could straighten it out and deform it but it would return back to the defined shape. I also recalled there being types of memory wire that would stay deformed until you passed an electrical current through them. Then they would return to their defined shape.

Aside from making a lightweight metal fabric, since this was magiSteel, I wondered if I could do something similar with some mana. I clipped off a short length of the magiSteel wire I’d made and bent it into the shape of a lightning bolt.

I opened up my [Console] and [Inspect]ed the little wire shape. I got the basic info about the metal, as expected, but what I was looking for was enchantment. I found an enchanting section in my developer tools and loaded a starter template.

It had all the basics like setting starting attributes, triggers that could invoke various functions, embedding functions into the item, etc. I wrote something simple that basically defined the item current shape as its “natural” shape and when supplied with some mana it would return to its natural shape.

I embedded the enchantment into the wire shape and crushed it in my palm, mangling it into a little ball. I then opened my hand up, letting the little wire ball sit in the middle and gave it a little mana.

To my delight, the wire started writhing like a worm until it settled on the lightning bolt shape.

“Ha!” I yelled, holding the wire shape out and punching the air. I looked around, but there was no one to share the discovery with. IronHide and Sentinel had already been put back into [Inventory] and Shiro and Carnivac were about a quarter mile from my location so that I wouldn’t disturb them with my metal work.

I hmphed and held my hand up for a high-five, or rather high-four, and slapped it with my other hand.