“You want to take on a billionaire? Need I remind you our company has earned just over one million dollars? It’s like a gnat fighting an elephant.”

  “We won’t be fighting him on Earth. I have that arrangement with Lord Edobar, I have a lot of power on the other side of the portal. We just need to decide on what we should do.”

  “How much power do you have? Could you send him a tax audit too?”

  Luke rapped the desk with his knuckle. “A Kalibutan tax audit? I like that idea. I don’t know if they do audits there, but I’m pretty sure I can arrange something similar. Who do we target? Do you know which companies Atticus Adelson owns?”

  “He owns the purple coats, the scientists, and about half of all power loader traffic through the portal. I can get you a list.”

  “Yes, totally, print me out a list.”

  Allen slid over to his computer and started typing. “Thanks for including me in the planning. I feel left out sometimes.”

  Luke put his hand on Allen’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I know we are in this together. Just because I’m the one crafting mechs and killing the monsters, doesn’t mean I don’t realize how vitally important your sales and financial skills are. Your organizational skills are going to make this audit a breeze.”

  Allen smiled “True, my skills are vital. But I think I’m going to drag out the audit. Pretend like it’s hard to get together all the documents. If they think their first attack is working, they won’t try anything else. It will give us time to shore up our defenses, maybe find people on Earth to ally ourselves with. Fight fire with fire.”

  “Fantastic idea. I knew there was a reason I went into business with you,” Luke said and gave him finger guns.

  Allen laughed and shook his head.

  Luke left feeling optimistic about the situation. Jinx seemed to be in a good mood too. She had grown again and since her back legs were flesh and bone now, she didn’t have to wait for a new set of prosthetics to run around. She was the size of a small panther now.

  She was eating like a full sized panther though. In addition to eating bits of frozen monster earlier today, she cleared out the last of the cat food in the apartment as soon as they got home.

  Luke grumbled about buying new cat food so soon, especially since it was the good stuff, canned wet cat food. But it didn’t actually hurt his pocketbook much. He was paying himself a salary from the proceeds of Monster Jaegers Inc. and Jinx’s voracious appetite wouldn’t even put a dent on his finances.

  The next morning, Luke's patience was tested again.

  ???

  Luke put his hands on the desk and said, “Agent Brown, are you trying to make yourself an enemy?”

  Agent Brown held up his hands. “No, I like you, Luke. Seriously. I appreciate you hiring Daniel. This is me trying to help you.”

  “How is demanding that I turn over my power armor designs helping me?” Luke said and threw up his hands.

  “Believe it or not, I already tried to push back on this for you. The director made it an order. If I want to keep my job, I have to give you this order.” Agent Brown said and tapped a vanilla envelope. “I think we both know this isn’t a legal order. SPEAR doesn’t own your intellectual property. The oath doesn’t apply. So you could walk away if you wanted. But! I think you should provide me with some plans anyway.”

  “Why would I want to?”

  “Because listen to how they worded the order: ‘Provide SPEAR with working power armor designs, complete with runes and their accompanying intents.’ That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

  Luke felt the order settle on him, and then slide off. It wasn’t legal, just like he said. “That’s still bullshit. I don’t want to give up my designs. Why are you telling me to do it anyway?”

  Agent Brown lowered his voice. “They are asking me for power armor designs, not your designs specifically. What if you gave them shitty designs? Ones that work, but only technically? It would waste so much of their time.”

  Luke took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose that would be one way of fighting back.”

  “If you really don’t want to do it, I can tell them you refused. They can’t kick you out for an illegal order. But then whoever is after your designs will try something else.”

  “Alright, fine, I’ll get you some crappy designs. Still incredibly frustrating, but not the worst thing in the world. When do I need to get you the designs by?”

  “They want it as soon as possible, but I believe I can stretch things to next Wednesday. Not any further though.”

  “See you Wednesday morning then,” Luke said and left deep in thought.

  This order wouldn’t have come from SPEAR originally. They knew he used mechs and didn’t ask for the designs before. It was clearly the same person who ordered the preemptive tax audit. Most likely the billionaire Atticus Adelson. Either him or someone else in a position of power.

  Whoever it was, it seemed likely they were trying to steal Luke’s business out from under him. They wanted him drowning in red tape from the audit and they would swoop in with their knock-off power armor and offer to kill monsters for Lord Edobar for cheaper than what he was paying Monster Jaeger Inc.

  That would be a funny conversation to eavesdrop on. What would they say when they found out the lord had an exclusivity agreement with Luke? They weren’t even allowed to work for the other two lords near the portal.

  Luke was still pissed though. They were going to try and steamroll him, but they didn’t know who they were dealing with. They would get their power armor designs, but they were going to regret not coming up with their own designs.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He was going to give them a short and crappy power armor design with all novice runes. It would be slower than even the ones Kruro made. He would overload the runes to waste mana and require repairs more often. Parts would grind against each other and even when they changed the designs to work better, they would be working off incorrect assumptions. If they swapped out his crappy gears for better ones, they would miss the fact that pistons were better than gears for limb movement.

  They would rue the day they tried to rip him off.

  When Luke arrived at the company warehouse, he saw a rugged truck parked in the dirt nearby. A pair of men were standing off to the side, just outside the building's parking lot. They were wearing cargo pants and combat vests, one holding a rifle and the other a handgun. Their weapons were drawn but pointed down. It didn't take long for Luke to figure out what they were doing there. Atticus had hired mercenaries to intimidate them. Which was probably the stupidest move the man had made yet.

  Luke stomped over to them, exaggerating his mech's heavy steps. The twelve foot tall power armor towered over the two men, and Luke didn't stop walking until he was almost on top of them. He saw them twitch their guns, tempted to aim them at him. He ignored the movement, his power armor was bulletproof before he strengthened it with magic.

  Looming over them, Luke growled out, "Leave before you get hurt."

  "You can't tell us what to do, we aren't on your property. We've got Norfolk passes, we have every right to be here."

  "I didn't ask if you had passes, I'm not security. I said leave. This area of the complex is dangerous. We throw deadly magic around here all the time."

  Without turning, Luke pointed one of his barrels behind himself and fired off a lightning bolt and ice shot. Snaps and crackles sounded behind him along with crinkling and cracks. He watched as the merc's eyes widened. He leaned over further, practically on top of them. "Like I said, dangerous. When we are testing weapons systems later today, I wouldn't be surprised if one of them got out of control and hit you. I would hate to see you get hurt. You should back up. Maybe if you were outside the complex fence, that would be far enough. Maybe."

  The men glanced at each other. They weren't cowards, people in their profession couldn't be. But they clearly couldn't accomplish their mission to intimidate someone who was wearing a two ton death machine. The guy with the rifle nodded to their truck and the other one holstered his handgun. They walked back to their truck and drove off without another word.

  Luke nodded to himself and turned to the warehouse to deal with the other attack Atticus had attempted. Luke was bizarrely excited about the prospect of designing something insidiously terrible. It was interesting to think about Atticus’ engineers and how to lead them astray. They would easily correct the obvious flaws, making the mechs taller and with better armor. But if he could convince them to improve the linkages instead of replacing them altogether, then their knock-off power armor would be forever inferior to his.

  Luke told Allen and the other senior employees about the meeting with Agent Brown and scaring off the mercenaries. They were predictably upset, but Luke’s intimidation and planned sabotage helped ease their frustration.

  “I doubt this is his final strike. We need to defend ourselves from other angles of attack,” Allen said. “For example, they might try to disrupt our supply chains and restrict our access to pistons, gears, and mana dust. We should buy up replacements now.”

  “Totally. Buy larger components while you are at it. I intend on making the next generation of mechs even bigger,” Luke replied. “Also, see if you can talk to someone in KaliBay management. They are going to try and cut off our main source of income, we need to preemptively secure our sales channel.”

  Allen grimaced. “I hate talking to big shots like that. Can’t you do it? You are the CEO.”

  “You are the CFO, you can do it. You’ve sold more than a million dollars in cores through the local branch of KaliBay. I bet they will be happy to talk to you. Besides, I can’t do it. I’ve got crafting and designing that needs to be done today.”

  Allen groaned but agreed. Luke had Sandwich and Vanessa handle new hire training, similar to yesterday but here on Earth. Since their assessment period didn’t progress while on Earth, they could afford to spend a few days training.

  He gave Bumblebee a different assignment.

  “I got lots of skill ups from driving actual war machines. I bet you would shoot up in levels if you had access to a plane.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll wander over to the airport and say, ‘Trust me, I’m a pilot.’,” Bumblebee said and rolled his eyes.

  “Dude, you need to trust me more. I booked you an intro course at Front Range Flight School. The flight instructor will take you up in a Cessna and let you handle the plane for a bit in the air. She isn’t supposed to let you do more than hold the yoke for a minute, but I think you’ll need more than that for some level ups. So Allen is going to give you some cash for bribes. Start with $200 and go up from there. Oh, and bring a cracked core diffuser. The system will need a source of mana to help you level up that far from the portal.”

  Bumblebee’s eyes widened. “Back up a step. Bribery is illegal, fam. That’s super sus.”

  “Bribery is only illegal when you bribe them to do something illegal. You are just going to pay her some money to ignore her boss for a little while. Rack up those skill levels, fam.”

  Bumblebee made a face like he smelled something terrible. “It’s not funny when you do it.”

  “Maybe that will teach you for being delulu, using all those cringe slang words. No cap.”

  Bumblebee groaned and hurried away. Luke smiled to himself. Then he got to work.

  The first thing he made was practice batons for the new hire training. He added just enough lightning magic to sting, but not really hurt. It was also perfect for Vanessa’s training.

  Once he handed off the batons and gave Sandwich suggestions for combat exercises, he got back to work. Another few hours slid by, drawing up a design for subtly terrible power armor. The trick was to go back to first principles and change them to worse ones, then build from there.

  Allen helped him make the design worse, using his experience from repairing power loaders. They were cackling in the corner when Vanessa came back from lunch. She shook her head and got back to training the newbies. She didn’t have much more experience than they did, but her boundless enthusiasm had her doing better in every exercise.

  When the designs were complete, Luke slid them into the manila envelope and handed them over to Allen to deliver at the last moment. He turned to his final project for the day. A titan killer.

  Cormac and Lord Edobar only expected him to divert the titan away from the estate village, but Luke wanted to try and kill it. The core from a titan would be worth a million dollars, maybe two if it was a tier nine core.

  The torso for his Mark IV power armor was complete, so Luke decided to make it his weapons platform. The way elemental resonance worked, Luke could only have four weapons on his mech, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make two of them super sized, borrowing the mortars for the forearm guns. He would keep two air rifles in the design so he could still hunt normal monsters.

  The other major change would be to the legs. He needed to be able to move quickly. From what Cormac said, titans were faster than anything Luke had seen before. There were worse monsters closer to the large cities, but Luke had no intention of leaving the area around the portal.

  In addition to making these legs bigger, he added industrial springs for explosive power and wider foot pads for better traction. He also added a few more integrity runes to make the armor stronger. Manually activating the Master Inertia rune would let him start and stop faster too.

  Once the final touches were done, Allen gave him some spray cans of truck bed coating. He guessed that the tough polymer would add another layer of defense once it soaked up enough mana. Luke thanked him and applied the red coating.

  Luke stepped back to admire Mark IV when he was done. When he activated Overcharge, his mech would be a force to be reckoned with. Time would tell if it would be enough to kill the titan.