“Gods-damned …” Simon clicked his tongue, pulling out his phone. He dialed some number and quickly held it against his ear. He waited for a few moments, rushing out of the hookah lounge, and spoke the moment someone on the other side accepted the call. “Gather your men. At midnight tonight, come to the address I’m about to send you.”

  Back inside, the lamia settled back into his seat, an annoyed frown on his face. “How hard can it be to defend yourself against a damned spirit?”

  He looked down at the watch on his wrist, trying to use the dim light to read its face, “But speaking of … I should check up on Vanda. I need to make sure my little ‘gift’ does its job well tomorrow.”

  Christopher smiled lightly, pulling out his phone. The idea of what must be going on right now was quickly lifting his mood.

  Ryan squatted down with a long sigh. He hadn’t been able to concentrate on the last two rounds against Richie and Roxie at all. It wasn’t a total failure, but it definitely wasn’t close to as satisfying for either side. Even the round where Maximus was fighting on his own, he was sluggish and clearly unable to concentrate on anything but Gaia’s fragment.

  “Are you okay?” Richie asked, with a concerned frown. “Is your shoulder acting up?”

  “… Something like that, yeah,” Ryan replied. That was a good excuse, though it was clear that Richie knew something else was going on. He was sensible enough not to pry, though, and Ryan was quite happy about that.

  “In that case, if you want to call it a day, you can—”

  “No, no, it’s fine! I just need to take a break, don’t worry,” Ryan assured him, not wanting to leave just yet. He had to stay nearby and figure out what exactly this “Vanda” was doing with the fragment.

  Currently, she was setting up everything that she needed to start her first duel of the day, rushing to get ready. Ryan kept glancing over at her the whole time. Now that the Spirit Link skill wasn’t active anymore, he couldn’t sense the fragment on his own, but Maximus and the fragment already with Ryan definitely could.

  “Dude, what’s going on?” Modak knelt down in front of Ryan. “Are you alright?”

  Ryan looked around to see who exactly might be able to overhear him, and slowly stood up. He asked Modak and Silvia to follow him outside the room, and the moment the door closed shut behind them, he started to explain.

  “She has one of Gaia’s fragments,” Ryan explained immediately, and both Modak and Silvia were taken aback.

  “What? Who? And how, even?” Silvia asked. Ryan had filled them in on Gaia’s fragments before, but that being something that suddenly popped up here seemed just far too random.

  “That Vanda girl, I don’t know why or how, but she has a fragment on her. I can feel Gaia shivering in my head.” Unsure how to better explain it, Ryan tried to word it that way. But it was much more than just shivering. Gaia was practically crying, wanting to be reunited with another part of herself.

  Modak looked at the door, clearly unsure what to say to that. “I mean … can’t you just talk to her about it? She’s really nice, like … I’ve known her since before uni, we went to the same school. Her siblings are friends with mine, and … I can’t imagine her having any bad intentions, you know?”

  Able to tell that Ryan seemed to be assuming the worst, Silvia suggested something else, agreeing with Modak, “Right! What if she just … happened to pick it up somewhere?”

  Ryan considered it for a moment. His gut was telling him that there was more to it than her just having randomly found it, but he couldn’t say for sure that this wasn’t the case either.

  “So what, I should just ask her about it? ‘Hey, do you happen to have a spirit core’s fragment somewhere on you?’ I doubt that’s going to work all too well,” Ryan pointed out, and Modak thought about it for a little while.

  “I get why you’re nervous about it, considering where you found the first fragment, but … can you link with Gaia’s core? I mean … maybe you’ll be able to figure out more? Like exactly where it is, and what Vanda’s doing with it,” he suggested. Ryan raised his brows immediately, carefully thinking about the idea.

  “That … could work. It’s worth a try at least … but what if she won’t give the fragment to me? I can’t just steal it from her … can I?”

  “Let’s not worry about that for now,” Silvia replied, trying to calm Ryan down a bit. “If she doesn’t want to give it to you, we can figure something out then. Let’s not resort to stealing, alright?”

  Ryan slowly nodded his head. “Yeah, alright. You’re right. Thanks, I’m just really … I don’t know, there’s just a ton going on today that’s kind of stressing me out, you know?”

  His gaze slowly wandered over to Silvia, and they locked eyes for a moment. Silvia looked away, and Ryan sighed inwardly. “Alright, let’s just … get in and wait? There’s another twenty minutes until I can use the skill again anyway.”

  “Alright, I can try to talk to Vanda for a bit as well. She seemed a bit stressed earlier,” Modak replied, and Ryan slowly nodded.

  “Right, of course, do that,” he responded with a nod, pulling open the door. Since Vanda and Modak knew each other already, maybe his presence could calm her down enough that even if it came to the worst-case scenario, it would help improve the situation a bit.

  The three stepped back into the room, and Modak quickly walked over to the hobgoblin. “Yo, Vanda, how are you doing?”

  “Oh, hi, Modak! Yeah, I’m fine, just a bit stressed … Sorry about the other day, by the way, I kind of pushed my way through you guys and didn’t even say hello,” she replied, setting up her Duelist to get it ready, while Modak just shook his head.

  “All good, I could tell you were busy. Honestly, it looked like you didn’t even see us properly,” Modak pointed out. “You were already gone by the time I realized it was you as well.”

  “Yeah … I really should pay more attention to what’s going on around me sometimes,” she pointed out, carefully glancing past Modak over toward Ryan. “So your friend is the one that awakened? I saw him and his … summon thing during the duel earlier. I guess they’re not used to things yet?”

  Modak wasn’t sure exactly what to reply. Clearly, Ryan and Maximus were acting off because of the fragment Vanda had on her, but that wasn’t something he could just tell her. “He’s had a pretty bad day, I guess. He’s a great fighter, usually.”

  “… Clearly not good enough to get a physical class, right?” she pointed out bluntly. Modak noticed that she seemed a lot more confident around him than she did around most of the club members, though that could probably just be attributed to the fact that they’d known each other for years now. And clearly, through some kind of miracle, Vanda didn’t know about Ryan yet. So, he figured that he shouldn’t mention it.

  “Well, what about you? You happy with your Duelist?” Modak asked, slowly trying to move the conversation away from Ryan. The hobgoblin grinned smugly and quickly looked down at the small robot in front of her.

  “Happy? I’m ecstatic. I was struggling so much to get this to work. So, I’m using both electricity and mana to get this to work, right? I’m intertwining them together, and because I need the mana to function in a specific way, I had to overcompensate with a ton of it. So I wasn’t able to get the right mana source, until just earlier this week.”

  Modak’s stomach dropped as he listened to her words. “Mana source? Like, a really good battery?”

  “Hm, something like that? You know how there are types of crystals that just hold a ton of mana?”

  “… Yeah, but those are really expensive, aren’t they?”

  “Well, sure … and don’t tell this to anyone, but I met this guy recently—he’s really nice and we’ve become really close friends. When I told him about the Power Duel projects, and what exactly I was struggling with, he offered me this crystal. His family is apparently really well-off, like, old money well-off. And he just … gave it to me.”

  Modak frowned in confusion. So someone else gave her the fragment? In exchange for … nothing? That felt off. Really, really, off. “So are you going to be paying him back or anything?”

  “Well … I’m going to try to? I can’t right now, obviously, but depending on how tomorrow goes, I might get some good job offers. Right now, all he asked for was to … try Energizer out before tomorrow. It’s part of why I was late, actually …”

  Modak glanced over toward Ryan. He seemed to be trying to concentrate on calming down, but was still glancing over here every once in a while.

  “So … this crystal, is it going to run out of mana anytime soon? You probably only have one, right?”

  “Oh, no, no, Energizer doesn’t use that much mana. The crystal should last for quite a while.”

  “Do you think you’re still going to need it after the presentation tomorrow?” Modak asked, and Vanda raised her brow, confused.

  “I might, yeah. If they like Energizer and anyone wants me to show it to them again some other day, I’ll obviously need it then,” she explained. “Why, do you need something like this as well?”

  “Not really, I do have something I’m working on, but I managed to get it to work pretty well already. Hold on, I actually have it with me,” Modak pointed out, about to head over to his bag to get the magic cassette out again, but Vanda just shook her head.

  “My first duel is about to start, but I can take a look at it later. Oh, if you want, you can look at some of my notes about Energizer, though—here.” Vanda pushed open her old and thick laptop that was already open to some documents and sketches.

  The hobgoblin quickly stepped away and moved over toward her arena together with her Duelist. Modak was going to take a look at the notes in a second, but for now, he had to tell Ryan, though he was nervous how he was going to react.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Energizer

  Modak walked up to Ryan and leaned closer toward him, cupping his hand by the side of his mouth as he whispered, “She’s … using the fragment as a battery.”

  The orc could practically hear his friend’s heart skip a beat as he snapped his head toward him. “What? She’s doing what?” Ryan asked, in full volume, but Modak quickly pulled him to the side.

  “Calm down, seriously. It looks like she doesn’t know what it is, someone else gave it to her,” Modak explained, as Ryan tried to slow down his rapid breaths.

  “But … how can I just let her use Gaia like that? It’s not …” Ryan muttered, frowning deeply as he stared at the small robot stood at the edge of the taped-off arena. His role was to protect her, and letting this happen definitely didn’t feel like he was doing a very good job at that.

  “Just … wait it out, alright? Try to link with the core, and maybe … see how it … she’s doing? If she seems fine, then we can just calmly figure something out,” Silvia suggested, trying to place her arm onto Ryan’s back but flinching back before she could, as if worried. He didn’t notice this either.

  Ryan took a deep breath and nodded. “You’re right … you’re right.”

  He looked at the other side of the duel area, seeing Kit standing across from Vanda. Lightspeed and Kit were going to be her first opponents. It seemed like most people that weren’t actively partaking in a duel were gathering to see Vanda’s Duelist, Energizer, put into action. It was the only one that they hadn’t seen yet. Even the ones that were actively taking part in duels were peering over, almost wanting to take a quick break.

  One of the two club members activated the countdown, and both Kit and Vanda got ready. While Kit was using a combination of a keyboard and a tablet to control Lightspeed, Vanda seemed to be making use of a customized game controller. It had more buttons and dials placed onto it, to the point where it seemed completely over-the-top and unusable, but Vanda seemed confident.

  The moment the countdown hit zero, Lightspeed shot forward to get to Energizer. Vanda’s Duelist, however, was just carefully walking forward, almost casually. Kit didn’t immediately have Lightspeed use the “jump pads,” as he had dubbed them, but instead was just making use of its generally fast speed. It struck Energizer with a kick, and Vanda seemed to “parry” the attack with a swing of the robot’s arm. It honestly just seemed like a light tap, but Lightspeed was thrown away, unable to find balance against before dropping onto the ground. Kit seemed taken aback, but quickly recovered. Just like before, he stuck to his guns and, for the first round, didn’t use Lightspeed’s “gimmick.”

  Lightspeed continued to try and attack Energizer, but it seemed almost impossible to get a good attack in. Energizer wasn’t moving fast, or rather much at all, but Vanda’s control over the robot was almost perfect. Parries, counterattacks—they were all timed perfectly, and Lightspeed didn’t seem to claim more than just a couple of points at a time.

  However, on the opposite side, every single one of Energizer’s attacks, even if they just barely grazed by Lightspeed’s body, did an immense amount of damage and threw Lightspeed across the improvised arena, forcing it to close the distance just to repeat the same thing again. The power running through its body was ridiculous; almost impossible for what it was showing. But then, Ryan had a small hint of understanding why exactly that was.

  Energizer was not only strengthened through whatever methods Vanda had found, but also by the Garden Golem’s power. As Ryan understood it after talking to Maximus about it, part of their power and stats were inside their bodies; the ones that Ryan built for them. But another part of it, the part that actually grew stronger when Maximus leveled up, was within the spirit core. So while Energizer wouldn’t be able to use the full extent of that, some of Gaia’s stats were clearly flowing into Energizer’s body. It was like a mock version of what Ryan could do, giving Gaia a body to use. But it couldn’t be more different from the way that the Spirit Keeper’s method worked.

  Ryan could see threads of green mana flow out from Energizer’s body, though he knew nobody else could. It was Gaia’s mana that was being used to strengthen the robot’s body. The only reason he could see it was because he was Gaia’s keeper, even if he only held the first fragment thus far. But as Ryan looked at the mana, his stomach churned. These threads were supposed to flow beautifully, like the wind over densely grown tall grass.

  But these? These were tangled and cut, a mass of frayed ends. Just seeing them like this made Ryan feel like he failed.

  Today was not a good day for Ryan. He was already anxious to begin with, considering that tomorrow was the day that whatever Runar was dealing with was going down. Then, the bit of excitement he had while heading out to this exact event was immediately replaced with anger after he was attacked by Simon.

  Once he finally arrived here, he was met with the fact that most people in this room were scared of him. Not only that, but Silvia, one half of his best friends, saw his back and started acting distant immediately after. And now this. He couldn’t go a second without feeling Gaia shivering in his mind. If she could produce them, her tears would probably have formed a puddle underneath the fragment currently in the domain.

  They weren’t tears of pain or anger; that was something that Ryan was sure of the more those emotions constantly filled his head. Instead, they seemed more like an immense sense of loss or fear that Gaia was experiencing, unable to handle with a fraction of her being. Honestly, all Ryan wanted to do was step into the arena and rip open that damned robot to just take the fragment; it was taking all he could to not just do that right now.

  Inside his head, the cooldown of the Spirit Link skill kept counting down, and he was clinging to each second, as if trying to speed it up. But of course, he couldn’t. He just had to wait. Ryan chewed on his lips nervously, tapping his foot impatiently, as if the activation of the skill would just fix everything magically.

  The duel continued on. It was a fairly simple win for Vanda and Energizer, and both sides quickly went to grab their Duelists to check up on them. In particular, Kit was looking over Lightspeed with a bit of concern due to the strength of those attacks.

  In the meantime, as the break between the rounds continued, Modak started making his way back to Vanda’s laptop, reading through the notes that she took during her construction of Energizer. But Silvia stayed with Ryan.

  “It’s going to be fine, don’t worry. It will all work out,” she tried to reassure Ryan. Silvia knew what kind of person Ryan was. When he saw someone in trouble, he couldn’t hold back. It was ingrained in his DNA. Whether it was a service worker getting yelled at by an entitled asshole, or some kid being picked on, he always intervened in some way. Though of course, not always violently, but in more extreme cases, it did come to that. Silvia couldn’t imagine what exactly Ryan was experiencing right now.

  He slowly nodded his head, closing his eyes. “I hope so. Thanks.”

  “… I’m sorry for how I was … you know, acting after …” Silvia slowly let out, not sure how to best word it. She was good at speaking most of the time, but this situation was different.

  Ryan turned his head and glanced at her. “It’s fine, I get it. It’s not really something you see every day. I won’t go into any details, but … they’re basically ancient, you know? They’re healed, they’ve faded as much as they’re going to, and they don’t hurt or anything. I forget about them most days now, it’s not like I can see them super easily. You’ve got nothing to be worried about.”

  “… Alright. If you ever want to talk about it … even if not with me, I could ask my dad?”

  Ryan scoffed lightly and shook his head. “I’m fine, really. I’ve been in therapy for it for like ten years now. I do need to find a new one here, but …” He looked to the side, weirdly feeling calm while being distracted from the fragment, even if the topic that was distracting him was something as big as the scars covering his entire back. But then, he saw Silvia’s confused expression.