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Stane's sincerity arrived before Kade did.
When he got back to the apartment, a courier was waiting by the front door with two black briefcases. Identical to the one Tony had given him. Kade didn't need to open them to know what was inside.
Palladium. Twenty-four blocks. Twice what Tony had provided.
The message was clear: whatever Tony can give you, I'll double it.
Kade accepted the briefcases with a warm smile and asked the courier to relay a message: "Tell Mr. Stane I appreciate the gesture. But I'll need more palladium. R&D burns through materials fast."
He fully intended to bleed Obadiah Stane dry. The man was going to prison — or worse — within weeks. Everything he had would be seized or frozen. Might as well redirect as much of it as possible before the walls closed in.
Kade carried the briefcases down to the basement.
And stopped.
"You've got to be kidding me."
The basement's half-window — a small glass panel set into the upper wall for ventilation and light — had been smashed in. The frame was bent outward, warped wide enough for an adult to squeeze through.
His basement had been broken into.
There was almost nothing worth stealing down here. A bare room, no furniture, no electronics. Except for one thing: the Energy Activator he'd built the night before. A fist-sized hexagonal crystal of perfect, luminous blue — no visible metal, no circuitry. It looked exactly like a flawless sapphire.
And it was gone.
Some opportunistic thief had crawled through the window, spotted what looked like an enormous gemstone sitting on a shelf, and grabbed it on the off chance it was real. Thieves never left empty-handed — that was universal, not just a Hell's Kitchen tradition.
Kade tossed Violet into the air. "Find me that thief!"
Violet transformed mid-flight — watch to armored miniature in a blur of purple-black metal — executed a perfect backflip, and landed in a combat-ready crouch on the basement floor. Even as an intelligence specialist, her physical capabilities were impressive.
The landing was flawless. What came next was not.
"I'm sorry, Commander." Violet straightened up and clasped her hands behind her back. "There are no cameras installed in this basement. I have no data on what happened."
Kade stared at her.
Right. Violet was a hacker. Not a forensic investigator. Without digital feeds, she was as blind as anyone else.
"Fine. I'll deal with it myself."
First things first. The palladium wasn't going to sit around waiting to be stolen too. Kade burned through his AllSpark energy and converted twenty of the new blocks into two more Energy Activators.
[Energy Activators owned: x3. AllSpark energy capacity increased by 3,000. Recovery rate: 4/sec.]
[AllSpark Energy (Stage 1): 1,234/4,000. Recovery rate: 4/sec.]
The stolen Activator was still registering in his system — still contributing to his capacity total. Whatever distance limitation the AllSpark had, the thief hadn't exceeded it yet. Small comfort. He still needed to recover the device.
But as the energy cap crossed four thousand, a new entry appeared in the tech tree:
[Tactical Optics — Cost: 800 AllSpark energy. Base material: Military-grade optical device. Functions: Data overlay visual system. When paired with Sensory Gauntlets, enables gaze-lock auto-targeting. Gaze-lock consumes 1 AllSpark energy per second while active.]
"It's a set bonus?"
Kade pulled up the Sensory Gauntlets' specs — and sure enough, a new line had been appended to the description:
[...When paired with Tactical Optics, enables gaze-lock auto-targeting.]
That line hadn't been there before. The AllSpark only revealed synergies between equipment once both components were unlocked. Which meant the Pulse Pistol probably had its own pairing — something Kade hadn't discovered yet because the corresponding tech was still locked.
One problem: the Tactical Optics required a military-grade optical device as a base. Kade didn't have one.
"Violet — does the AllSpark's Secondary Modification have to use the exact base material specified? Can I substitute something close? A regular pair of glasses, maybe?"
"Commander, the AllSpark is the source of our life force, but it isn't omnipotent." Violet shifted into lecture mode. "Its energy functions more as an enhancement — amplifying and transforming the existing capabilities of a mechanical base. That's why my specialization is data intrusion and intelligence analysis. The watch I was created from was already a sophisticated surveillance device."
"So if I activated a wrench, would I get a repair-specialist robot?"
"Commander, please don't experiment recklessly. Activation requires what's called an energy circuit — a functional electronic pathway within the base object. Without one, the AllSpark energy has nothing to work with."
"Energy circuit? What's that?"
Violet hesitated. "I apologize, Commander. That information is classified within the AllSpark's deeper architecture. My access level isn't high enough to retrieve the details." She paused. "However, I would strongly recommend activating a technology-specialist unit as soon as possible. A research-focused Cybertronian could help you utilize the AllSpark far more efficiently than I can."
"Research-focused... so I'd need something like a supercomputer? The kind they use in labs for simulation and modeling?"
Kade thought it through. Those machines were enormous — the processing cores alone filled entire warehouses. If activating Violet's watch had cost 768 energy, a supercomputer would probably require more than his current capacity could handle. And machines like that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, locked away in government labs and corporate research facilities.
The AllSpark wasn't making this easy. Whoever — or whatever — had granted him this power clearly didn't intend for the ride to be comfortable.
He dug through the AllSpark's information architecture for a while longer but found nothing new. The system was deliberately opaque. Answers came when the AllSpark decided to give them, not when Kade went looking.
HONK. HONK. HONK. HONK.
A car horn blasted through the neighborhood with the subtlety of an air raid siren — loud enough to rattle windows and probably stop a few elderly hearts.
Upstairs, Mrs. Cardenas threw open her window and unleashed a torrent of heavily accented English that could have peeled paint off a battleship. The woman had lungs like a drill sergeant.
Violet's head perked up. She started toward the broken window to investigate.
"Don't bother," Kade said, rubbing his temples. "I sent Blitz to pick up a set of military binoculars. He's not exactly the subtle type."
For every 500 Powerstones a bonus chapter.