I wanted to get acclimated to the new shop, or AutoFoundry as the Prince had called it, as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that’s a little difficult when you’re little more than a head and an arm.

First order of business would be repairing myself, though calling it a “rebuild” would be more accurate. The last time I tore myself up, my internal systems were able to kinda heal me by pulling my bits back together and then doing some fabrication and repair work to help it along. My internal components and mana infrastructure system has a self-repair function, it’s just slow. The external components like my armor plating and lighting systems need to be manually repaired though.

This time, I would need to completely refabricate an entire arm as well as most of my lower half. With Professor Recht’s help, I salvaged what I could from the mass that used to be IronHide. I was so incredibly thankful to have a Ratchet this time around. I would have need of Ram and Rom, but I left them back in AutomaTown for a while so they could get the town's warriors repaired and back into fighting shape.

The assault by The Factory had failed, but only because they weren’t prepared for my shield upgrade. The troops they brought would have easily been enough to wipe out the village if the shield had been left as-is. If they attacked again, they would likely bring a force strong enough to flatten us. Remi couldn’t say if any of the enemy units had escaped to report back or not so it would be best to assume that at least one had.

Professor Rechts had a number of his graduate students assisting; all clever and smart kids; all artificers. It was crazy seeing the flurry of activity going on and seeing people bounce ideas off of each other. I’d missed that, only having myself as maker company.

I had managed to talk Milliardo into giving me two of his destroyer class airships. They were only large enough for a crew of 15 with a range of about 100 kilometers before they’d have to return to dock. They could only be docked at special aether ports and acted more like zeppelins than boats. At present, the design wasn’t great for a reaching campaign or even practical for travel so they were limited to defending the capital and moving those titans around the city quickly.

I didn’t think he would go for it when I initially asked so I asked for two of them, so I was surprised when he readily agreed. I supposed that it showed just how dire the situation was and how eager he was to move me along. I had the Academy group working on tearing the ships apart. I’d be reusing a lot of the material and rebuilding it for my dragon slayer.

Ratchet reconstructed my mana infrastructure and internal frame from a combination of what was salvaged from my damaged parts and new parts from one of the bodies I had in [Inventory].

Both the Prince and Princess would pop in from time to time, Lena more often, to check on my progress. I had expected Lena to hang out full time, but she had plenty of things related to court that kept her busy. Her cousin, Naina, had made herself scarce. I felt a little bit responsible and a lot bit guilty about that. For Lena’s sake I hoped that the relationship could be repaired more easily than I was.

The temptation was there to rebuild myself taller, but it would look weird with my remaining parts. I’d end up needing a completely new body to make that work. Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to fit inside of Cyclone any more. Eventually, I’d build a Cyclone Mk II that wasn’t a shell for me, but that was a lower priority. Even if he did grumble about it.

I couldn’t get any bigger for the time being, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t add some upgrades. Since I had to remake my cannon arm from scratch, I ditched the original RockMortar design. The new design built on the concepts that I’d put into Elita’s needler, but with a larger bore so I could use the ammo I already had.

I called the new one “RockBuster” and it transformed out of my forearm like the previous model. This one could fire single shots at a rate of 1 every 0.75 seconds, 3 round bursts with a 1 second cool down, or charge for 3 seconds to fire a single shot with twice the power. The range was still largely dependent on what type of ammo I used, but it was all theoretical until I was able to test it out anyway.

Via a modification of my [HotSwap] function, I developed a grappling attachment for the gunarm. I couldn’t use both at the same time, but I felt like using the grapple in tandem with the swordarm would make more sense. Wire cable with high strength and high flexibility didn’t really exist in this word yet so I made due with a 15 meter chain line instead. The anchor had three options. The first was a modified, four-claw version of my fist, the second was a spear head with barbs, and the third was a morning star, spiked steel ball. The keywords I gave to the various options were [Spencer], [Hasashi], and [Belmont].

My blade arm needed repair as well. I was going to just fix the mechanism and replace the blade, but one of the students told me that the holy church of Jamnasia had things they called “holy swords” that used a technology called “Pyrophoric Light”. Apparently, they had some type of mana crystal that could generate this light that would encase the blade of their swords and turn them into light sabers. I needed one.

In anticipation of one day getting my hands on one of these kyber crystals, I made sure to build a port for it into my arm, along with placeholder parts for the emitter and shroud. I also built a larger and stronger steel blade into my arm to replace the broken one. This one had a hinged joint in the middle so that it could deploy folded in half like a clever or unfold to a proper sword length instead of the stubby blade that was limited to the length of my forearm. Like with my gunarm, the two weapon types could be swapped out with the modified [HotSwap].

In my leg rebuild, I added some boost jets to the bottom of my feet. It wasn’t enough to be able to fly, but it would probably add four or five meters to my hoops game. I might also be able to use them offensively, but that would take some training and a lot of testing.

In the background, MainFrame was working on a DeadMan system that should kick in if I go fatally offline. I hoped that I’d never have to use it, but in theory, it might be able to transfer my consciousness to a backup body.

Building a backup body wasn’t actually as hard as one might think since I was already fabricating a lot of replacement parts already. Since the new one was a combination of scratch-built and off-the-shelf parts, I did make it a bit taller, a bit sleeker, and gave it a proper face with a retractable battle mask. Milliardo said that I should kill myself now to transfer to the better looking frame, but Lena said she liked the original better. I admit, that did make me happy, if a bit embarrassed.

I shipped the replacement to my shop in AutomaTown where Rom placed it into a specialized vault. I had thought about keeping it in my [Inventory] but if I went offline, it would be stuck there and couldn’t be accessed. The whole process was waiting on the DeadMan system to be finished by MainFrame anyway so I put it out of mind for the time being to be worked on in the background.

With the help of some of the students, it took Ratchet six days to get me back on my feet. I had a ton of new stuff to test out, but forced myself to set testing aside to focus on dragon fighting weapons.

According to Prince Milliardo during the time that I was repairing and rebuilding, the dragon had also not made much noise. I assumed that it was also being repaired. His WyverRiders made contact with a spy in Trone that reported that Jhaix had been wounded and was recovering. Guess I didn’t kill him after all.

I didn’t know if that bought us any time, or if it was all used up. Ratchet had just finished up the last bit of work to get me on my feet, but my personal upgrades certainly wouldn’t be enough to take down the dragon. Other than that, so far, we just had two destroyers that were mostly destroyed.

“Master Prime! Check this please,” a german shepherd corgi mix on two legs, wearing artificer robes, asked me.

I swung my new legs off the table and carefully hopped down, steadying myself on Ratchet until my systems calibrated.

“Couldn’t wait till I could make my rounds, eh Zooty?” I said, taking a glass tablet from her.

“No sir,” she said, fidgeting and pushing up glasses that were in a constant state of slipping down. “I think I’ve solved the non-manifold overflow issue for the luciphor blade.”

“Ooh, nice. Let’s take a look.”

The artificers of this world used a special glass tablet to interact with MagiCode. In the most basic sense, they acted like a BASIC computer terminal. The artificer would have to copy the code from whatever thing they were working on to the tablet in order to be able to inspect it and then install it back to the thing. The result was like trying to program an Arduino with only Notepad. Entirely doable, but also entirely annoying. I was certain that I could improve the quality of life for these artificers once this whole robot uprising thing was done with.

Rather than try to use the device the way they did, I just [Inspect]ed it and could bring up the code in my own [Developer Tools]. I set my windows to “public” so that Zooty could look over my shoulder as I scrolled through her code. She was working on developing something that would allow me to wrap all that pyrophoric light around a blade shaped force field instead of just an edge around an actual metal blade.

“Hmm,” I said, “the non-manifold field issue looks good... Well, as good as it can without being tested... Let’s run a simulation.”

I copied the code over to my code simulator and ran it. The field held together without collapsing and the pyro light part seemed to work, though the projected mana consumption was crazy and the ambient temperature was climbing at a rate that would likely melt my arm off.

I tapped a section of code, “We’re using up a ton of mana in this part, but we could probably drop that by 80% if we include another crystal type that can handle those functions. This heat is nuts though. Is that something that the holy knights deal with? I guess holy swords of flame and all that, right?”

Zooty stared at her code without saying anything, then grabbed the tablet from me and scampered off back to where she’d set up a deskspace.

At first, I was really worried about having these kids and their proff running around the shop. Not just because of my lack of ability to properly manage people, but also because of the whole Automata are tools not people thing. Maybe it’s because they were all high-level academics and their thinking was more flexible, but they rolled with things pretty quickly once I was able to demonstrate my skills as an artificer. They didn’t seem to care that I was a bot; and less than half of one at the time.

Now that I had a full body again, the real work could begin. I pulled out a huge sheet of design paper and started sketching out the detailed schematics that I’d been working on for days while Ratchet repaired me.

“A new IronHide body?” a young, if metallic, voice whispered over my shoulder.

“Hey Lena,” I responded without looking. “He’ll get one, though I may need to rename him given what I have in mind. No, this is a new armor shell that will act as a base platform for a bunch of other stuff. Unlike the others, this will be strictly a suit of armor for me and not a proxy that can act on its own. I call it... Convoy.”