Sweat and heat. Steam screaming and bubbling—the pop of toxic chemicals nearby.

  Simeon’s. Not hers.

  Another pop. Another.

  With anyone else, she’d worry—the substances used in willbrandsmithing were toxic, destroying, brutally extracted from ores—leached of life—by the smiths who, regardless of safety precautions, were always in at least a little bit of danger.

  One wrong move, one stray drop of sweat splattering over the workspace, and everything would be over.

  That was, in part, why the government mass-produced cheap willbrands now. They had an army of ill-trained smiths wandering about, using subpar—and therefore less dangerous—extracts of brunite to create those willbrands. The weapons didn’t last, of course, and usually only had one or two forms they could take. Government issued willbrands bent and broke and every so often exploded—a few people had been quite seriously harmed in said explosions, but the government had managed to settle all those lawsuits, while also claiming no responsibility.

  The hero misused their willbrand.

  There was no fault on behalf of the government, who simply distributes the willbrands.

  No, you cannot hold the willbrandsmith responsible either—there are terms to their use, and one is no liability for injuries sustained in the use of the product.

  Use, of course, was definitely as having the willbrand in your possession. Shitty, cheap-ass willbrand explode on your person when you were nowhere near a raid? You were using it. In your house, when you were nowhere near? You still possessed it, and were therefore using it.

  On a whole, Emilia didn’t have any issue with these policies—and she was sure that if she looked into the contracts that went along with Simeon’s creations, they were probably pretty similar. Willbrands were powerful, and that also made them deadly—come back in twice a year to have them checked, or learn how to check their integrity yourself.

  Even the most expensive willbrands carried some risk of backfiring—or randomly exploding. Most people, even among Simeon’s clients, weren’t getting the best, for the simple fact that the difference between the best and pretty fucking good wasn’t going to be noticeable anywhere outside of war and the cost difference was… painful.

  Refining the chemicals used to make the best willbrands—not to mention all the aspects of design that went into them—was difficult, and as previously noted, dangerous. Someone asking their smith to increase the risk to their life to make them a weapon was going to pay for that privilege.

  Instead, her issue was with how low quality the mass-produced willbrands were. Regardless of how unrefined the brunite in particular was, it was still being used up in the creation process—actually, in reality, more was being used due to its bad quality. There wasn’t an unlimited supply of brunite, and yet, the government was wasting it. Plus, it really wouldn’t have taken much more work, nor increased the risk that much, to make them noticeably better!

  It was terribly annoying, and unfortunately, while Emilia was personally acquainted with the dumbass who managed the government’s distribution of willbrands, that woman was… unlikely to listen to her complaints on the topic. While she’d been tempted a number of times to go yell at the woman—especially after several heroes’ willbrands had backfired when they tried to face an echo and the results had been deadly, something the government blamed solely on their inexperience—she knew it would just be a waste of her time and energy.

  In the grand scheme of things, that woman was only a cog in the machine that was government sponsored raids. She wouldn’t listen, and no one above her would either. The raids would go on. The brunite would continue to be over-mined so more shit-tier willbrands could be distributed. Eventually, who knew how long from then, there would be a need for more powerful willbrands and not only would they have no one to make them—even now, there were only a handful of smiths who were actively making the more expensive styles of willbrands, due to low demand—but little material to make them with.

  What a terrible moment in their history that would be. Emilia half hoped she’d be long gone when that happened, half hoped she’d still be around to laugh at the idiots in power as they scrambled.

  The sizzle of aether pulling itself apart cut off and Emilia turned towards Simeon, his blonde hair pulled back into a messy bun that was both adorable and totally didn’t suit him, although—as had been common since they were children—his bangs were clipped back with a purple bow hair clip Lux had given him after noticing how his hair wouldn’t stay out of his eyes during tests.

  “Do we have a brunite reserve?” she asked, suddenly aware that if the government wasn’t being sensible, someone on their side probably should be.

  Simeon hesitated long enough that Emilia knew that if there was, he had no knowledge of it. “I keep a small store here, for work. It is enough to remake… perhaps a quarter of the unit’s willbrands.”

  Assuming nothing went wrong—that none of it was corrupted or fucked up during refining or production, something that happened… hopefully in a non-deadly way, but did happen.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  In the corner of her vision, the unit’s group message—which she still glanced at in passing but had spent the morning ignoring—lit up, presumably as Simeon asked if anyone had had the sense to create a brunite reserve. It lit up several more times as people responded, and Emilia couldn’t bring herself to look.

  No one else had ever responded to her ridiculous question about the raid rewards. Part of her still hoped those she’d messaged were asleep, or busy with other things—they could easily be inside ongoing raids, for instance! But as the morning wore on, quickly edging into afternoon, Emilia knew that was unlikely the case for everyone.

  Rather, she’d just fucked up her friendships so badly by disappearing that even for this silly reason, they wouldn’t bother to answer her. Now, she couldn’t look at the group messages—couldn’t see proof that she was being ignored while Simeon was immediately answered.

  Unfortunately, despite the messages, Simeon didn’t tell her what they said! Instead, the little brat went right back to smithing, moving off to a different section of the workshop to begin forming the shape of the willbrand’s base form. Did he know she was avoiding opening the messages? No, but still! Clearly, he should have! They’d known each other for sixty years, for stars sake!

  Emilia glared down at the liquid sitting in the little bowl in front of her. It was more than Simeon would be using for his assigned willbrand, although, as he had tasked himself with making a collection of smaller, CierSuit willbrands for her friends, in total, the amount of brunite he’d need to refine would be far higher than she’d need to deal with.

  The refined brunite in her bowl was a glittering gold, which she’d chosen to match Hyr’s colouring. While it was traditional to encase the refined chemical in glass, leaving whatever colour had been chosen for it visible, most mass-produced willbrands covered the chemical in a metal casing. She’d never actually seen what their chemical looked like, but when Simeon had cracked open Pria’s willbrand to drain it…

  It had been gross. Thick and lumpy and… and both of them had concerns—Simeon wasn’t really someone anyone but the ultrarich, who would never touch a government willbrand, could afford to go to, so he’d never seen the quality of their refined brunite either.

  Luckily, they weren’t reusing any part of Pria’s willbrand, only using its design as the base. The original intention had been to use her resonance code to create a new one—as much as mass-produced willbrands worked for everyone, they were still artificially tied to their owners through their resonance code, allowing the shitty things to work a tiny bit better.

  After she’d explained to Simeon what they were doing—the whole… trying to take down a purist terrorist thing—however, Conrad and Hyr having disappeared into a pair of Virtuosi Rigs Simeon had in his workshop for bored customers who didn’t want to leave, and he had been disinclined to let them go off to fight who knew what without proper protection.

  Hence, she’d ended up having to message all her friends anyways, asking for their resonance codes, and stealing Pria’s willbrand hadn’t been very useful, other than allowing them the disgusting experience of seeing what was inside it.

  Emilia was already sorting through the people who knew around school and the city that had the government’s terrible willbrands, trying to figure out how much it would cost in time and effort—not to mention actual materials—to get them all equipped with even low-grade professional willbrands.

  Not now, later—there was no way she was letting anyone she even vaguely cared about wander around with these things from now on, thanks—because they were already stretched for time.

  Like, really, really stretched for time, and after a brief discussion, Emilia had eventually agreed to request help with the CierSuit willbrands from Master Shaw. In exchange for his help, she was now expected to report to his house for dinner in two weeks—he was a grumpy, if accepting man, and believed her when she told him she had a purist terrorist to take out, followed by a mystery, government raid, which while she was perfectly happy to ignore, she didn’t think Sil was going to let her get out of—in order to explain herself… mostly regarding the whole purist terrorist thing, she thought, rather than her disappearing act. Who knew with that man.

  As a result, Simeon and Master Shaw were splitting the production of the six CierSuit willbrands between them, while she was responsible for updating her and Conrad’s willbrands, and making new ones for Hyr and Pria. The updating could wait, if necessary, but Hyr and Pria needed theirs.

  Pria’s was already done, sitting in cold storage to chill and relax into its new state of existence before being given over to her roommate. Hers hadn’t taken long because, in the end, despite Pria rarely raiding, Emilia knew her—knew her style. A quick query to her friend gave her a list of every skill Pria knew and could use, and just as Emilia had suspected during their rare raids together, her friend was clearly a support. That meant that, on top of the CierSuit, Pria needed some additional help keeping herself safe while she aided her allies. The hardest part of dealing with Pria’s willbrand wasn’t the willbrand itself, so much as her friend’s lack of skills.

  Fortunately, Pria was still at Sil’s, peppering Samina with questions, and a short conversation between the three of them had ended with Sil digging into Pria’s Censor and skills, optimizing it in a way that Emilia was sure Pria was rather unenthusiastic about, especially after she realized she was going to be thrown into the original training system—as original as it could be considered, anyways, given it had been updated on and off since the war—in order to master her new skills. Too bad. They were going somewhere potentially dangerous, and unless Pria figured out how to at least keep herself safe, she wasn’t coming.

  Hyr’s willbrand, on the other hand, was more complicated. From what she’d seen—and then confirmed in a brief conversation with them, because she wasn’t so stupid as to not discuss their needs with them—they could be both a front-line fighter and a support. That was always more complicated to begin with, but the fact that they were also a Free Colonier with a strong core and no experience with willbrands?

  Definitely complicated, especially since they’d been earnest about their desire to learn to sign—that’s what the syn and Conrad were currently doing: learning as much of her personal sign language as they reasonably could in only a few Virtuosi days. Conrad had already had to hack Hyr’s Censor for them, so they could go past their time limit, and really, there was just so much to do and no time to do it.

  In an ideal world, there would be more testing, more learning, more time to sleep and shower and worry about V because she still hadn’t heard from him and was definitely starting to panic now.

  She couldn’t panic now—not when her slight spike in emotions was already causing the volatile chemical in front of her to warble.

  No, she needed to get her shit together and make Hyr a willbrand that would keep them safe and let them follow whatever path the aether set out for them.

  Yeah… something told Emilia that that sort of pressure was why the syna Gru had never taken anyone up on their offer to make them a willbrand.