Seras awoke once more to complete darkness, but instead of an eerily quiet room in an empty city her ears were filled with a blood-curdling scream.


    It was the kind of scream to make your hair stand on end and turn white. It was the kind of scream horror actors wished they could emulate just a piece of. It was the kind of scream to wake the dead and drive Seras mad. “Just shut up already, I’m awake Godsdammit!”


    She looked around the cave and noticed the soft plushy feel beneath her. Probably the only reason she survived the fall. It felt like the world’s shaggiest carpet.


    Seras noticed a stiffness in her neck and realized that her had had clamped down on the wound leaking the black oil-like blood of her metal body. She slowly moved her hand away, and let out a sigh of relief as no more of her vital fluids spurted out, though her fingers were now coated in the stuff.


    Getting this shit out was going to be a nightmare.


    Speaking of fingers, why could she only feel half of them?


    Seras looked down and saw the glowing hand on the ground, it had broken off her forearm about halfway down and was only connected by a single nerve-wire. She looked up and saw the pale face of the healer girl in the light of her arm.


    Seras met her eyes and saw her shaking. “alright, I’m about to do something. I need you to not scream, okay?” Seras asked the girl.


    “What?” she whispered.


    “No. More. Screaming.” Seras said slowly.


    The girl nodded.


    Seras turned on the rest of her glowing blue lights.


    The girl almost yelped but put a hand to her mouth to cover the noise.


    “Good,” Seras said as she returned her gaze to her arm.


    She tried to send it a command and it twitched feebly. She tried to get it to close, instead it shook and only the pinky curled in. Not good.


    Seras thought about repairing it, but the moment she did a pompt appeared.


    Auto repair cannot repair Biolite arm because Biolite arm has been deemed unsalvageable. Reconnect or remove Biolite arm.


    Warning removing arm will result in permanently losing the limb


    Not good indeed. If Seras were back on Ruin then she would call the arm a dud and scrap it. But there were no mechanics on this stupid world, all it had was vast magical power, living gods, and clean air.


    The fact that it mentioned reconnecting it gave Seras hope. Back in the Vestal gateway astral space where Seras had been reborn her arm had been bent out of place by the tunnel charger. She had to bend it back into place for it to work.


    This was not the first time Seras had wondered how she would do more complex repairs, and in her endless hours in the saddle she had come up with a couple of ideas.


    She held up her finger and channeled her first essence ability through it to get a better look at the break, then when she realized how dumb that was she turned her finger of and pulled a mana lamp out of her storage space. She fed it a lesser spirit coin and aimed it at her arm.


    What a waste of an essence.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    She saw where things had been snapped in half by her rough fall and was once again thankful the ground wasn’t stone.


    As she saw the damage a part of her mind began to whirl as she used her outworlder ability Blueprinting software.


    At first it had seemed like her most useless ability, even less handy than net connection on a world with no net. That was until she had begun designing her first gun, before she began using it to draw up magic circles in her head, before she realized it could be used to examine the damage in her arm and began plotting out a way to repair it.


    Now it was the quiet unsung hero propelling her forward. She wondered if Net connection could do the same if Knowledge would just give her permission.


    The second ability at play in this was her metal essence ability, shape metal. It straightened the bent metal, it could be used to solder the wires together, and even force the nerve wire to retract until the two halves of the arm had come back together. She then tied it all together with a splint and tried to use her ability once again.


    Auto repair on right arm had been enabled. Time to full repair 864 hours and two minutes.


    Over a month for a full repair! That was the largest yet.


    Seras checked the bronze ranked monster cores in her storage space and grimaced. She had burned through everything during that fight, even with the healer girl.


    Speaking of which, “you know its rude to stare.” Seras groused.


    The girl flinched, “sorry, its just, what are you?”


    Seras rolled her eyes as leaned up and cradled her arm. “The pinnacle of engineering, now can you make a sling?”


    The girl flinched, “oh right sorry, is, is your arm really alright?”


    “No, its gonna take a whole danm month to repair. But without monster cores I can’t speed that up. Help me secure my arm so it doesn''t come apart, I’ll give you some gauze.”


    “Er, right, one second.” The girl said as she stepped around Seras and began to tie up her arm. “So, is it an essence ability that made your arms metal?”


    Seras quirked an eyebrow, “Do you know a lot of essences that make people metal?”


    “No, but there’s all sorts of essences out there. More than I could name and I’ve studied a lot of them.”


    “Fair enough, and there is supposedly a cyborg essence, but that requires the death essence.”


    She paused, “you have a restricted essence?”


    Seras had expected her to become afraid or nervous by the comment, instead the girl’s voice became low and dangerous. She felt a shiver crawl up her spine.


    “No, that’s just something Knowledge told me. I became a cyborg the old-fashioned way, excluding some outworlder shenanigans.”


    “What''s that mean?”


    “What shananigans, did that not translate…”


    “No, the out worlder part. What''s that mean?”


    Seras was surprised, everyone she had met so far had an idea of what outworlders were. “It means I’m from another world.”


    “Like… another world, like the moons?”


    Seras couldn’t help but laugh, “No I’m not from one of your moons, do people even live up there?”


    “I’ve heard of diamond ranks who’ve been there, but no, not that I know of. So are you from one of the planets beyond the moons, I’ve read about those.”


    Seras snorted another laugh. “Okay, I think you’re missing a few key details. Listen up, right now you are on Pallimustus, a verdant green dirt ball with two moons. This planet is revolving around the sun, as are other planets. Asteroids, comets, planetoids, moons, rocky planets, gas giants, ice giants, and maybe even another verdant world. Its unlikely but not impossible. That’s your solar system, all held together by the suns gravity.”


    “I don’t what gravity means, but I’m with you so far, astronomers have been using magic telescopes for centuries now. But I think you left out a few magical objects out  there.”


    “Magic space rocks,” Seras mused, “gonna have to look into that. Anyways, that’s what you usually find in a solar system. Lots and lots of space rocks, now I want you to imagine that every star in the night sky, and the millions of other stars you cant see also have some variety of those objects.”


    Her eyes went wide. “You, your telling that every star is a sun?”


    “More like the sun is just a star, but yeah. They come in a lot of varieties, some bigger, some smaller, some colder, some so large they collapsed in on them into an infinite all devouring void, others the just explode. We’re looking at a scale so out outrageously large that the only measurement worth using is the speed of light. Back home a single lightyear  was about twelve trillion kilometers, keeping in mind that our years were slightly longer than here. The nearest star to my home was 9.5 light years away, the next nearest star was about 13 lightyears in the other directions.”


    “So you’re, your from another star system. By the gods how did you even get here.”


    Seras held up a hand “we’re not done yet. Now stars aren’t just randomly scattered about, they form clusters and those clusters make up disk like formations if you zoom out far enough. That’s called a galaxy. Mine was about forty-thousand lightyears across with some twenty billion stars, and it was a small one. Most other galaxies are around three-hundred thousand lightyears across with millions of lightyears in between them.”


    Her eyes continued to get wider and wider, Seras grinned to herself, she had never had this chance to freak out the others.


    “Now, zoom out even further and you’ll find that these galaxies form clusters of their own. And clusters form clusters of their own.  I think people on my world have identified about two-trillion in the observable universe, with likely more that we just aren’t seeing. Now at some point that ends, maybe. Maybe a universe is infinite, maybe theres a hard barrier you cant pass, or maybe it just a trully blank void stretching into infinity. We didn’t know. We were still dedating whether or there could be other universe. I however know for certain that there are other universes because I got shunted out of mine and into yours.”


    “You, you, how?”


    “Don’t know for sure, I was in my world’s outer orbit, floating outside a space station, slowly dying in space. The station in question was working with strange extradimensional energy, now that I’ve been able to study magic, I think they were somehow thinning the barrier between our universe and the astral, this great infinite realm of pure magic and no physical reality. They used this to artificially create the conditions to form an essence, which I was sent to steal. Something went wrong, and I think they somehow fully punctured the dimensional barrier. I got sucked into the hole, my physical body ceased to exist, and my soul was left to ‘float’ through the astral until I somehow found my way to Pallimustus. This part of your world is more susceptible to astral anomalies, and can even let in stray souls from the astral without a summoning gone wrong. My soul reentered a physical reality it used local ambient magic to remake my body based on my soul’s own interpretation of what I was. Meaning I was remade with all my cybernetic alterations since they are so core to my identity.”


    Seras stared at the girls dumbfounded expression and nodded in self-satisfaction. “You really haven’t heard of us, we’re apparently pretty common around these parts.