Chapter 36 – Ark Reactor
After Grum's note, I hardly slept.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw lines.
Not the Academy's crooked arrows and half-hearted diagrams, but proper schematics—rings, coils, potential differences. Old symbols from a world that ran on numbers instead of mana.
Even.
That had been my name then.
Even had tried to build a star in a box.
He'd called it an Ark reactor, because it sounded cooler than "very small, very angry furnace." It had fit in both hands, produced power without fuel once it started… and almost killed him twice when the containment spiked.
It had been barely stable, horribly inefficient, and still miraculous.
Here, sprawled on an Academy bed with a dwarven claymore against the wall, I realised something simple:
I didn't need a star.
I just needed a circuit.
***
The next day's lectures blurred.
Batteries, I knew, were handled.
The cells in my hilt already did what they were supposed to:
- One for vibration.
- One for holding the mono-edge.
- One for reinforcement.
Each had a single command, each was absurdly efficient at that command, and each sucked ambient mana back in when left alone. I'd already tested it—leave a drained cell on my desk, come back after lunch, and its runes glowed again without me lifting a finger.
They didn't need a reactor babysitting them.
So what was the Ark for?
I stared at a blank page while the instructor droned about historical fortifications.
Claymore. Spine. Guard. Grip. Pommel.
The design was simple on the surface: long blade, cross-guard, two-handed hilt, round pommel for balance.
Everything exotic sat above my hands—future-alloy spine, battery slots, mana channels.
The pommel was still just… a counterweight.
Dead metal.
Wasted space.
I tapped the page with my quill.
Every time blades clashed in training, sparks jumped where steel met steel.
Old-world me had built machines to *harvest* that kind of thing.
What if the sword didn't just cut?
What if it bit back through whatever touched it?
From the tip to just above my hands, the claymore was one long piece of metal, with the alloy spine running through it. A perfect path.
I sketched:
Pommel → spine → tip → edge → back along spine → pommel.
A loop.
Not a charger.
A high-voltage ring.
I added a line under it.
*Ark: field generator.*
That felt right.
***
After class, instead of going to the library, I headed for the maintenance workshop behind the Sword campus.
The place smelled of oil, sweat, and hot iron—better than incense.
Most students were there to fix bent cross-guards and complain about chipped practice swords. I slipped past them to the scrap bin at the back.
Broken pommels. Cracked guards. Old tangs.
I dug until I found a round steel pommel roughly the size of my claymore's—solid, threaded, heavy.
Perfect.
I borrowed a small vice, a hand drill, and a set of fine chisels from the rack.
"Working on something?" the half-asleep assistant in the corner asked.
"Balancing," I said. "Sword's a bit handle-heavy."
He grunted and went back to pretending to read.
I clamped the pommel, marked a circle on the back, and started hollowing.
Steel didn't care that I'd seen furnaces hot enough to melt it like wax. Here it was just an old, stubborn lump. The chisel chewed slowly, shaving curls of metal that glittered on the bench.
Bit by bit, solid became shell.
When the walls were thick enough to survive a beating but thin enough to make room inside, I stopped.
Next: a core.
Even's Ark had needed exotic materials and precise fabrication. I didn't have those. I didn't need them.
This wasn't a power plant for a city.
This was a taser for a sword.
I rifled through the rejected focus stones in the supply cabinet. Imperfect crystals, miscuts, cloudy rejects the Staff campus didn't want.
I picked one about the size of my thumb, cloudy white with a faint blue vein.
"You're not the star," I told it. "You're just the anchor."
I wrapped it in fine copper wire—tight coils along its length, then another coil crossing the first at a right angle. Two loops, two planes, like the simplest possible three-dimensional cage.
Even's hands had done this a hundred times.
Erynd's were smaller, but they remembered.
Back at the pommel, I carved two shallow grooves along the inside of the hollow shell, following the curve, one above the other. Channels for the wire and for mana both.
The crystal went in the middle, held with a smear of resin and a spot of solder, wire ends laid carefully into the grooves.
Now came the words.
Not long spells.
Just three instructions, scratched into the inner surface in a tight circle around the grooves:
*Pull. Loop. Discharge.*
Pull mana in. Loop it around the core. Discharge along the path I gave it and *only* along that path.
No storage. No surge.
Just a running current.
I cupped the half-finished Ark in my hands and let a trickle of aura touch the wired stone.
At first, nothing.
Then something *leaned*.
Not hard.
Just a faint pressure, like a very small black hole with manners opening in my palms.
The air around the pommel thickened.
Mana from the room slid toward it in a thin flow, wrapped twice around the core following the copper, then tried to go somewhere.
I gave it a way out.
With my thumb, I traced a line from the inner grooves up through where the tang would sit—an invisible channel leading into the alloy spine of the sword.
Mana took it.
Looped.
Settled.
I pulled my aura back and watched.
The Ark kept going.
Slowly.
Steadily.
Drinking ambient mana in a thin thread, spinning it around the core, sending a constant low-pressure stream up the imaginary tang line.
I took a mostly-dead practice crystal and set it beside the pommel.
After a minute, the faintest hint of colour crept back into the crystal's edge.
Not dramatic.
But the important part wasn't the recharge.
It was the *cost*.
Back on Earth, I remembered a figure from some government report: roughly three hundred thousand kilowatt-hours to cover a thousand people's needs for a chunk of time. Heating, lights, cooking, all of it.
A small town's heartbeat.
I did a quick mental comparison—what this tiny Ark was putting out in current terms, versus how much mana it was sipping from the air and me combined.
The numbers lined up like a bad joke.
"Mana to power ratio…" I murmured. "About one to four hundred."
Spend one unit of mana, get the old world equivalent of four hundred units of electrical work.
Insane.
My old Ark would have thrown a fit and melted something for half that efficiency.
Here, mana changed the rules.
If the Staff campus ever realised what that meant, they'd lose their minds.
I palmed the pommel.
"Congratulations," I said quietly. "You're officially stupidly effective."
The assistant looked up.
"You say something?" he asked.
"Just talking to my mistakes," I said.
He shrugged and went back to his book.
***
That night, in my room, the claymore waited.
I unscrewed the original solid pommel from the tang, setting it aside. Without it, the sword felt wrong—nose-heavy, unfinished.
"Temporary," I told it.
I threaded the Ark pommel onto the tang instead.
The threads protested a little—scrap steel and dwarven work weren't born for each other—but resin and careful pressure convinced them to cooperate. When the new pommel seated against the end of the grip, I sealed the junction with more resin and a tight leather ring.
Balance.
I lifted the sword.
The weight changed.
Heavier at the base now, but in a way that made the long blade want to pivot, not droop. The alloy spine hummed softly as the Ark's loop found it—like a barely audible note vibrating under my skin.
I set the claymore down across two chairs, then took a piece of chalk and marked a thin line along the spine and edges where I wanted the current to travel.
Tip to just above the guard.
No further.
Not through the grip.
Back in the workshop, I'd carefully etched micro-grooves along those chalk lines with a fine file. The future alloy took them well, almost *eagerly*.
Now, with Ark humming at the base, the grooves lit faintly to my aura-sense—preferred paths.
Circuit:
Pommel core → up the tang into the spine → along the spine to the tip → split along both edges back down → return through the inner spine.
Everything between my hands and the blade had channels.
Everything under my hands did not.
The grip itself was wrapped in thick leather and a layer of treated cloth I'd "borrowed" from the insulation stockpile. Under that, when I held the hilt, I wrapped my fingers in a thin aura sheath out of habit—the same trick I used to keep blisters away during long training sessions.
Insulation outside.
No channels inside.
The current had no reason to go through me.
Anyone else trying to copy this without understanding why would be in for a very educational experience.
Time to test.
I took a spare practice sword—bare metal, no aura, no enchantments—and held it in my left hand, point down.
With my right, I laid the claymore across the chairs, edge up.
"Alright," I murmured. "On."
I whispered a trigger rune down the hilt to the Ark.
The hum in the pommel sharpened.
Mana flowed from the air into the core, looped, and then poured up the spine.
The etched grooves along the blade tingled.
I brought the practice sword down in a light tap against the claymore's edge.
A sharp blue-white arc snapped between them with a crack like a small branch breaking.
The practice sword flew out of my hand.
My fingers spasmed, muscles locking for a second before control returned. The smell of ozone bit the air.
I stared at my stinging hand.
"That," I said aloud, flexing my fingers, "would have been a broken grip and a numb arm in a real fight."
I checked the Ark.
Still humming. Still sipping mana in that same slow, steady trickle.
The mana cost, compared to the effect, was ridiculous.
Electricity like that, old-world, would have chewed through a power bank in seconds. Here, the Ark hadn't even warmed up.
One small loop of mana.
Four hundred units of pain.
I ran the numbers again in my head.
Three hundred thousand kilowatt-hours to feed a thousand residents.
With this Ark's conversion, that town's worth of old-world power output would cost the mana equivalent of a few serious spells. Maybe less.
If I ever scaled this up, cities would stop worrying about coal forever.
I wasn't going to scale it up.
Not yet.
Right now, it only had one job:
Make anything that touched my blade regret it.
I turned the circuit off, feeling the current bleed away into the air as the Ark went back to idle sip mode.
The etchings dimmed.
I set both swords aside and flexed my hand again.
"Note," I muttered. "Don't test on yourself next time."
Still, it was worth it.
Batteries to handle vibration, mono-edge, and reinforcement.
Ark to turn the claymore into a live wire from tip to guard, whenever I wanted.
Anyone who grabbed the blade, parried too long with bare metal, or tried to grapple in close without aura protection was going to learn about old-world voltage in a very painful, very fast way.
And thanks to the efficiency, the mana cost to keep that field humming in a fight would be… negligible.
One unit in.
Four hundred units of hurt out.
Insanely effective.
I rested the flat of the claymore against my shoulder and looked at the faint marks along its edge.
A sword with a heart that wasn't just steel or mana, but a small, looping piece of my previous life's insanity.
"Ark," I said quietly, "welcome to Lumia."
The hum in the pommel kept time with my pulse.
Good enough.