Monroe was working on the building of the company they had rented the battery from. Ever since they had arrived at the location in Fort Collins a couple of hours earlier, he had been working. They were looking at a two-day break in the city while he finished working on everything.

  Trace, in the meantime, would be going over everything in the RV with a fine-tooth comb. The bed and sheets had been removed for cleaning, and then a second round of cleaning. Everything they needed from Black Betty was transferred over now that it was cleaned.

  After inspecting the work Monroe had done before, the company had decided to let them keep the battery pack as long as he finished working on the building.

  Once they were back in Denver, Monroe would take it to his mechanic friend and get all the damage repaired. In the meantime, they were simply worried about the inside being clean, so they weren’t close to all that filth.

  Once that was done, Trace took to exploring the city. He sold off the raider equipment and saw what else the place had to offer compared to Denver. Which wasn’t much. Due to their relatively close distance from each other, their offerings were more or less exactly the same.

  The prices on a few items were slightly cheaper by a few credits, due to corporations being located there. However, that was really it.

  He considered using the ‘Overload’ due to how much time he had alone, but decided to put it off until they were back in New Denver. Sticking with the original plan was the smarter move on this occasion.

  That said, he did decide to perform a different sort of upgrade. Enough time had passed that he could safely go through another knowledge upgrade package. The last time around he had chosen ‘Technical Ability+’ and didn’t regret it in the slightest. It had helped immensely. This time, however, he was looking at the other menu options much more closely.

  Trace wanted to explore what else the system could do for him. It had already changed his life so much, and he had only barely begun to scratch the surface of its capabilities.

  He began with the options in ‘Body’. There were several pages of selections there alone. The main issue was that outside of the knowledge packets, they mainly seemed geared towards increasing the abilities of the user’s cyberware. The nanites helped the natural body stay healthy, and they even optimized it to a degree, as he had already experienced. What they didn’t do was turn you into a superhuman. That was the realm of the extremely rare and expensive atomites.

  Nanites were small at the size of a nanometer, or larger depending on their construction. Atomites, on the other hand, were the size of an atom because that is what they were, programmed atoms that combined with other atoms to perform a task. Their size allowed them to do things that normal nanites weren’t generally capable of, such as making permanent changes to the body or other materials.

  He quickly ran into a different sort of problem doing this. There were too many options!

  In the end, he chose one that did have a physical effect, but because of the limited area it covered, the cost was somewhat reasonable. He went with the option to ‘Smooth Nerves’ on his right arm. In the future, he would probably do the same upgrade on his neck and eyes as well.

  Unlike how long it took to upgrade his entire augmented arm, since it was only doing the nerves, the process only took fifteen minutes.

  When it was done, his control over the arm had been upgraded from pre-pubescent midget status to something in the realm of stable. It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was fracking close. The arm now resembled something he might have had in his teens. It was moving closer to what he had in his adult body, but there were a few subtle differences that prevented it from being one hundred percent. Despite that, it was worlds better than before, and even without the ‘Overload’ he would do back in Denver, it was now completely usable.

  Trace did a few quick exercises with the hand and arm, feeling how steady it was compared to before. Yes, this was much better. He couldn’t wait to get back and redo the hack job he had done on the soldering for the railgun.

  The only other thing he did once they reached the city was send off messages to Ko and Stick-Point. Both of whom had sent messages to him while they were out of network range.

  Now that he was finally starting to get back to normal, he was excited to get back to work. The small jobs they had been doing were more infuriating than enjoyable. He had finally moved past those small-time jobs, only to get forcefully thrust back to them while he recovered.

  If he ever got his hands on the neck of that edger who had hit him!

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  It didn’t matter that Stick-Point said justice had been served. What about his justice? His arm?

  It was better to concentrate on things that he could do, and not the items he couldn’t. Like the message from Ko, which mentioned that Pushman had finished his training as a job broker. He was working out of his apartment as the new tier one in the area. That meant when Trace got back, he would be taking jobs from the man.

  Maybe he should think about returning some of his stuff to him when they returned?

  Now that the man was open for business, Trace drafted a message to him. It detailed the corporation he wanted information on, Siren’s Rush, along with a light explanation of why. He kept Ko’s name out of it. Only mentioning that they had hurt someone close to him, in a similar manner to how Sekmore had hurt his sister. He wanted details on the corporation and a detailed plan on how to hurt them.

  Trace had always planned on going after the corporation that had hurt Ko, but he was also aware of his own weaknesses. He was a former street-meat kid, with the only schooling he had been provided coming from teaching modules. Not that they were bad or anything. It was just that his mind didn’t work in plans and details the way that Pushman’s seemed to.

  He might be able to kludge his way through putting together a terrible setup. If the other man was willing, then that wouldn’t be necessary, and he was going to use him for everything he was worth.

  Sending the message off, he opened his HUD and began working through the enhanced teaching modules. That is what he did for the remaining undisturbed time they were in the city.

  Monroe was able to work for a full day and a night, before getting noticed by the corporations who were in charge of the welders in the city.

  The former welder’s union sent a single warning to Monroe, telling him that he needed to stop what he was doing and remove all the work he had already completed. His response was that he was an edger and that as someone who wasn’t even a member of their city, he was not under their purview.

  Not surprisingly, that response didn’t go over that well.

  Watching the man who had delivered the warning hurry off, Monroe cursed his mouth. He began gathering up his equipment and shook Trace out of his learning simulation.

  They either needed to leave right then or prepare to fight. This wasn’t their city; they weren’t the least bit familiar with these corporations and what they were capable of. Not that they knew that information back in Denver either, as Vinna-Kwoi had demonstrated before.

  The shop there would get people to defend themselves, and they could always lie about how much Monroe had managed to actually get done. Both things that they were more than prepared to do. Everyone hated the corporations and wanted a reason to fight back against their security squads. Well, they had just been given a reason, and people, even those not involved, weren’t going to just let it go.

  They had accidentally sparked an insurrection during their stay in Fort Collins.

  Both knew how it would inevitably end, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t contribute in their own way.

  Trace grabbed the railgun from the backseat of his car and climbed to the top of a nearby abandoned building. He flicked the power setting back up to max, single fire mode and laid down on the dirty roof. The towering megastructures that belonged to the various corporations in the city all loomed ahead of him. Several older-style skyscrapers stood in their midst; those were his targets.

  Despite how much damage the railgun spike had caused the vehicles before, he held little hope of it doing anything similar to the building. Nor did he truly want it to. The destruction it would cause at that point would be on another level, and the loss of life would be incalculable.

  At this distance, with the relatively small spike, the shots should be fairly localized. At least, that was his hope.

  Upping the magnification in his eyes, he raised the barrel a couple of inches and fired. He was glad he had remembered to wear hearing protection this time, as the sound of explosive judgement went off only inches from his ear.

  A moment later, the spike passed through the reinforced glass of the window, tore through the ceiling at an angle, and then vanished into the sky. There was no awe-inspiring implosion of damage at this distance. It was still impressive in its own right, just less so than what he had been hoping for.

  Trace had been hoping for something that would reduce the floor to rubble and distract the corporation. All he had gotten instead was the world’s strongest sniper shot instead.

  Not that he was going to let that stop him from firing off a few more.

  Each boom from the gun as it sent metal projectiles at speeds and forces that threatened to liquefy whatever was being fired brought him great joy. The railgun was just so much fun to fire, and a large part of that was exactly because of how absurdly strong it was.

  Eight shots, even with the revamped heatsinks on the wireless energy-receiving units, that was all they could withstand. The new control boards sparked and fizzled inside the casing, and then it lost all power. He had fired it too quickly and too often and overheated it. Something that the original owner had come closer to doing before, but he had actually managed.

  In the future, he would need to either pay very close attention to how often he fired the gun. Maybe even put a temperature sensor on the inside of the unit. Or he needed to figure out a better heat-sink design. Likely both.

  For the time being though, the railgun was back to being a glorified hunk of useless metal.

  He hadn’t done tons of damage, but scoring those shots on the top floor of their building would probably still help to keep them busy.

  Monroe was waiting in the semi when he came down and hopped inside the car.

  A moment later, they were driving through the streets of the city, heading toward the border as if nothing was wrong. Their time in the city had been interesting, but both agreed that it was probably for the best if they didn’t come back for a while.

  Behind them, the area around the shop gradually devolved into a warzone that took over that entire section of the city. The corporations who had originally threatened them hadn’t been able to send as many people as they first intended. Some maniac had attacked each of their buildings, destroying the top floors, and killing several of the top officials in their corporations. By the time they got around to heading over to the shop, things had devolved to the point where all corpo security teams had been removed from the area.

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