Bad Beat - Chapter 60 - Armory (Patreon)

Gabriel played with his armor for a bit, letting Sparky park her drones on the armor and walk around the room, dropping into gunslinger stances, his now-increased movement power making them much more dangerous-looking than he felt.

All in all, it was a pretty good upgrade.

Adding the color change would help him sneak around much better, as well as distancing himself from the fake Enchanter persona. And the mounts, two on his shoulders, two on his arms, and one on his back, would allow the small AI to seamlessly integrate into the armor.

Now all he had to do was upgrade those drones to be able to do something while attached to his armor. But first, he took out the voice recorders and the small toy bugs and began to fuse them. The end result was small, semi-autonomous bugs that Sparky could control when in range. Then he took the voice recorders and more of the burner phones and fused them together. It was a simple card with a blue border: 1 x Box of Radio-Controlled Listening Bots.

Each and every one of them was smaller than a quarter, lightweight, and had an operating time of at least an hour. More if it didn’t move around. Their software was upgraded and cleaned up by Sparky after Gabriel pulled them out of the card. She even upgraded the communication protocols to prevent anybody from listening in.

It wasn’t a big creation, but he felt that it would sooner or later become useful.

Next, with a few drone chassis printed by Sparky in preparation for this moment, he took the toy drones and began fusing them en masse. They wouldn’t be as advanced as the first three, as he had put some serious amount of hardware in them, but for disposable drones that they could use while fighting, they were perfect.

Soon, he had several Multipurpose Radio-Controlled Drones lined up in front of him. Compared to the three that could transform at will, turn invisible, and do so much more, they were little more than the toys they were made from.

But this was where the rest of the items he had acquired came into play.

Sparky made sure to “order” a whole pile of laser toys. He pulled one out from the pile and began pointing it at the wall, playing around with it a little. Sparky, sensing an opportunity to be a silly little goober, transformed one of the drones into a metallic kitten and began following the red dot on the wall.

After the second dent, they stopped playing around with it and returned to the task at hand.

There were red, green, and blue-colored lasers, so he simply took three of them and fused them together. The result was a card with a white border: 1 x Tri-Color Laser Toy.

“This is going to take a while…” Gabriel muttered as he looked over the piles and piles of toys. “Sparky, let's get the next movie.”

[Roger. Roger.]

The next movie in the installment was surprisingly about how a double wedding could go wrong, and what kind of shenanigans several superpowered individuals could get up to while trying to get hitched.

An hour later, he had something much more powerful in his palm than the silly little toy it started out as. Granted, he had to add Electricity and Light cards for the power and effectiveness. The items in question were two dozen lethal-looking barrels that shot a pulse of light that burned through anything.

At least he hoped so.

The pots and pans didn’t survive, so he was hopeful.

The card itself had a green border, which told him that it wasn’t exactly rare based on what cards had green borders so far, so he suspected others had similar devices and equipment, and maybe even more powerful ones.

1 x Multi-Phase Laser Device

An unassuming name, but it was only one part of his plans. Then came the Nerf guns, slowly transforming from super cool toys into lethal devices that would outshoot any of the guns on the current market.

And they did this while shooting foam bullets.

Gabriel made sure to set one aside, just in case he needed to prank somebody. The rest were to be repurposed for a higher calling. Taking an even dozen of the Perfected Non-Lethal Handguns, he began to merge them with even more Electricity, Air, and Light cards. The end result was a lethal-looking gun, all angles and with a very visible focusing lens at the end. The card itself had orange borders, showing that with the merging, it probably became something very lethal and rare in the current world: 12 x Multi-Phase Variable Laser Weapon.

Thanks to the inclusion of the elemental cards, a small printed dial courtesy of Sparky, plus the computational power of an upgraded burner phone, the strength of the fired “projectile” could be varied and set to everything from the original toy laser to something that melted metal in one second.

Looking down at the weapon, Gabriel frowned. “We need more energy generation…”

[Note: parental unit has electromagnets and magnets.]

“You are thinking flywheel?” he asked as he began searching for the magnets in the battlefield of packaging and debris littering his living room.

[A pulsed alternator would be extremely simple to construct and would provide the energy requirements of the laser weapons.]

[Already printing the non-magnetic parts for the upgrade using the parental unit’s power.]

“Thanks, Sparky!” he called out as he finally found the boxes labelled with warning signs that they contained heavy-duty magnets. “Let’s see if we can create a perpetual machine.”

[As long as you hide the motor well, then yes.]

They didn’t have the space or the equipment to put together a proper pulsed alternator, or rather, a compulsator. He pulled most of the electrical components from the many upgraded toys, like wires, coils, capacitors, and small batteries, while Sparky simply looked up plans for compulsators on the net, which were made for students and schools specifically so that they could experiment with the technology.

They were small and extremely simple in construction. But in theory, it was the same as the giant real one. With the printer working overtime, they had the enclosure and the pieces holding everything together.

Then Gabriel just had to put together several of them. Sparky helped, using the very precise arms of the drones to put the “toy” compulsators together much faster than his sausage fingers. Still, at the end, they had several of the things on the table. A brief jolt of electricity, and they were working.

He pulled the first one into a card. It had a white border, as expected, and the name told him everything he needed to know: 1 x Roughly Made Toy Pulse Generator.

Looking over the table, he saw that they had made a good amount of the things. Or rather, Sparky did. By the time he had assembled one, Sparky had already finished the tenth. So Gabriel simply began to fuse and fuse and fuse, until he had six new generators. They had orange borders, and energy was practically radiating off the cards: 6 x Miniaturized Advanced Compulsator Generator.

Grinning, he selected six of the Multi-Phase Variable Laser Weapons and lined each one up next to a generator. Then came one Multipurpose Radio-Controlled Drone next to three of them, while the space next to the other three was taken up by the original drones that Sparky had been controlling.

[This unit requires more power.]

[And this unit requires more pew-pew.]

[Every girl must be able to protect herself.]

Gabriel just rolled his eyes, but didn’t say anything. Soon, the Augmented Covert Multipurpose Drones evolved into Armed Augmented Covert Multipurpose Drones, or ACME Drones, after Gabriel saw how long the name became. The acronym didn’t really work, but he found it funny, so it stayed.

The other three drones soon followed along and transformed into Radio-Controlled Weapon Platforms. With Sparky controlling them, they could simply mount on his new armor and become his weapons. When connected to the armor, he could fire with them, especially the ones near his wrist, or Sparky could take over and become the controller of his personal defenses. Or the sassy AI could fly them around and use them to take potshots at the enemy.

Either way, he wasn’t without the ability to rapidly strike back.

Naturally, his energy power was still there, but that was much more conspicuous and less reliable than technology. At least until he managed to gain full control over it with practice. Until then, he would use the best superpower ever: guns.

Gabriel was pretty happy with them. The only problem was where to store them.

Leaving the other items behind for a little while, Gabriel turned his attention toward the many, many boxes littering the living room and the giant pile in the corner. However, before he approached them, he decided to prepare. A few cards of Nothingness would probably be useful.

He tried to think for a while about how to capture the concept of space into a card, but he couldn’t come up with anything.

This was followed by the mind-numbing process of taking the boxes, one by one, into a card, then fusing two together, before endlessly repeating the process. At least the next movie was nice. The wedding was over, and now the two families were living next door, and a new family moved in. Naturally, the head of the family was a villain they had to stop, thus the hijinks.

Gabriel stared down at the box in front of him.

It was made of cardboard, but its commonality stopped there. The measurements were perfect, as it was an exact third of a cubic meter, every line crisp and almost ready to cut, while the material itself was way stronger than any cardboard he had ever seen or touched.

The card it came from even said so: 1 x Perfected Cardboard Box. Seven more stood next to it. He slowly reached for two of them, almost feeling like it was sacrilege touching them, and fused the two together, creating an Augmented Cardboard Box. Then, after the others were consumed in a similar manner, he fused two of those together. The next level was an Evolved Cardboard Box.

For a moment, he was tempted to leave the two of them separate and use one of them to craft the ultimate stealth device, but in the end, the need for storage defeated the urge. He bade a tearful goodbye to the box and fused the two together.

The card created this way displayed a perfect cube made out of cardboard without any embellishment. Just the cardboard box and nothing else. The border was red: 1 x The Box.

A weird name, but he didn’t really want to think about it much. Once again, he was tempted to cut out holes for eyes on it and go hunting, but with great effort resisted the urge, and instead pulled out a Nothingness card and fused it with it.

Summoning the box onto the table in front of him, Gabriel saw that it was closed. With slightly trembling hands, he reached over and flipped the box open. Staring back at him was pure darkness. It didn’t matter that the light overhead was shining down; it was as if, at the lip of the box, somebody had placed a plane of darkness. Nothing went through.

He got the broom, turned it around, and inserted the handle into the darkness, slowly pushing it deeper and deeper.

By the time the broom was almost gone, going way beyond the visible depth of the box, he let out a victorious laugh. “Yes!”

Pulling out the broom, he was relieved that it was still intact and nothing had tried to gnaw on it or worse.

Putting it aside, he took a deep breath, then, before he could change his mind, he dipped his pinky finger into the darkness before pulling it out instantly.

Looking at his small finger, Gabriel noted that nothing happened to it. Hell, he didn’t even feel it when his finger was submerged into the darkness.

Smiling triumphantly, he reabsorbed the box into a card, then took off the ring containing his armor and put that too into a card. Then, taking a deep breath, he fused the two of them together.

To his relief, the card still had the silver border and the same name: 1 x Reinforced Shifting Shadow Stalker Armor.

Pulling the ring out of the card, he placed it on his finger, and, pulling the mental trigger, he was instantly enveloped by the newly created armor that still remembered the last color scheme he had set up.

He spent a minute confirming that everything was the same before he went searching for the changes.n

It didn’t take him long to find a small box-shaped icon on his HUD, next to it a number: 0%.

Resisting the urge to let out an evil laugh, he walked over to one of the lesser drones, placed his hand that originally had the ring on it, and tried to will it to be stored.

To his surprise, it vanished without any issues, and the number changed from 0 to 1%.

He rubbed his hands together.

“Now this is much better,” then he gasped. “Oh! Robbing people will become much easier!”

Giggling a little, he willed the armor to transform back into the ring and tried to summon the drone onto the table. It appeared.

There was no number he could see, or any way to feel how full the storage was, but it was nice to see he could use it without fully transforming into his armor.

After that, he rushed through his apartment, storing all sorts of important things in the ring, including a change of clothes, food, water, and anything that could incriminate him.

Finished with playing around, he returned to the living room, relieved and giddy at the same time.

“Let’s finish this!”