“ you show me the blueprints of your arm?” she asked, expeg a simple no. To her surprise, Sauer reached up aached the limb. He tossed it over to Krahe and sat down, leaning on his remaining arm.

  One of its external access panels mercifully tained a miniature toolset for servig and small repairs — something she had made use of many times in her early years. She began dismantling the prosthetid found something that at once did and did not make se was clear that its internals were being filled in from her memory, but the structure worked. It was as if, the more she unravelled the prosthetic limb, its underlying cept took form from what she knew of cyberics, as if it desired to exist. She tried to will it to float, so that she might get a better look at it in 3D space, but no such ve phenomenon took pce. She had to boriously dismantle and reassemble the limb several times before she felt she had a workable grasp of its structure.

  The knowledge she gained only reaffirmed what she had already suspected, but it also gave her a way to solve that issue. The problem was a ck of thrusters — the Left Arm of obog as it was now simply couldn’t dired focus thauma in the number of dires required, with the responsiveness and the precision required. Krahe’s mind turowards obog’s Mystic Wisdom, keeping in mind that the Left Arm’s system readout had stated it could undergo autonomous evolution. Even if this wouldn’t work, it would feel amiss to not try.

  Her question bounced back with an answer: It could be done — but she would o ritualistically carry out the external alteration within her mental realm.

  “You wao carve my arm open, is that it?” she mused.

  The modification was ceptually simple: she would just add the requisite number of Wound-like Grins across the entire limb. Opening them all ain and keeping them open each time she wao use the method would be too taxing, so she inteo create perma pces for them and adjust the limb’s inner flow of thauma to facilitate their funality, mimig the design of Sauer’s arm. Were it not for her experience using the simplified movemehod against Semzar, she would have left this for after she woke up.

  “Alright. Let’s give backstreet butchery a try,” she said, tossing the reassembled prosthetic back to Sauer. She proceeded to expin the underlying idea behind what she wao do with the Left Arm, and, not questioning it for a moment, Sauer readily assisted her, holding her arm steady and carving away at the spots she couldn’t reach.

  The pain was curious to say the least — because it wasn’t pain. It was itg. It itched like hell, yet also radiated a sensatiowee and static, of the sort one would feel after ing into a warm interior from freezing cold. More importantly, however, it worked. After the first slot was finished, her arm pulled back together, and though it wasn’t visible, she could feel how much easier opening a maw would be in that spot, like it was already there, just beh the surface. Thus, they pressed on.

  When they were nearly doh the process, Krahe started hearing an music again.

  Then, the voices.

  “itive pressure spiking...tissue hyperactivity… Left arm. Yes, again. …rearranging itself,” Firminus said.

  “And the system?” Fidelia asked.

  “No issues,” Firminus replied.

  “Good. Aristedes, ready for iion,” Fidelia said. The music ged, the an rising to a cresdo, and as it did, the door of Sauer’s hut swung open. But nobody walked out.

  “...too deep. Up to… now,” Casus said. The musid with it, the outside voices, faded pletely.

  “They are waiting for you,” Sauer said matter-of-factly, tinuing to carve away at her arm. There were only two spots left, both out of her reach. It was a matter of waiting, and as she waited, Krahe distracted herself from the itg by mulling over what the movemehod ought to be named. Eventually, she just asked: “What do I call it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Not my pake that decision,” came the exact response she had expected. Engram-Sauer did, after all, sider himself as less than even a ghost. Naming the method was on her.

  Knowing that the real Sauer disliked the idea of overly fanciful names for teiques or stances, Krahe thought baes of teiques she knew and tried to e up with ohat was straightforward.

  Aimpoint Evasion. tra-Targeting Acrobatics. Multiphinking. Sauer-style Form 16 Footwork. The 73 Sensor-disabling Arts. Sauer-style Sinanju Jointlock Grappling. Hyper-universalist CQC for Short Bdes. Bd-style Radiation Bster bat. These, she khese, she was familiar with. All of these fell uhe umbrel of Sector 7 Style, and so did tless others.

  She recalled five different teiques built just around the unian Dawn G-Model Railgun. Seven more designed for revolvers. Her mind ran through tless teiques that had been incorporated into Sector 7 Style. She was only taially aware of their names, properties, and termeasures, but had ruly learhe vast majority of them.

  In the end, rather than trying to incorporate wordpy she decided on “Afterburner Enhanced-arm Mobility Method”, or “Afterburner” for short. Just like with “Wandrei Faust” and German, she went out of her way to name “Afterburner” in English, refusing to let herself tra. The reason behind the name was simple: It would enhance her existing movement options in exge for additioropy overhead, much like an afterburner allora speed in exge fher fuel ption. She couldn’t help but think of the stupid names Sauer would mention when disparaging the naming schemes of other martial arts.

  “It’s finished,” Sauer said. Krahe stood up, stretg. She turned around, but in Sauer’s pce, there was only the prosthetic left arm, suspended in mid-air, its meical structure floating apart and fraying out of existence before her very eyes. In moments, it was gone. In its st twitch, the arm let go of the dagger, and it went sliding across the nuclear gss, ing to a rest at Krahe’s feet.

  Taking up the dagger, she tered herself and began the baselia’s dagger-adjusted variant.

  And it worked.

  It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it worked. Krahe stabbed the dagger into a crack at the spot where engram-Sauer vanished, and made her way to his hut. She had never seen ihis would have been an exercise in futility if that had been her goal. But as she grasped the doorhandle, she khere was nothi for her to do here. There was no point to going back to Sanctuary — or rather, she was already here. This crater was the remnants of Sanctuary. To pretend otherwise was delusional… And she wasn’t sure she would be willing to leave if she actually went to her memory of that pce.

  Thus, she opehe door, stepped through, and woke up.

  Akaso