Turns out that Aki had been right about the dificulty of teaching magic to someone, specially being a sorcerer trying to explain wizardry. It took one week for Elizabeth to make a functioning lighter that required no spark and such, instead writing an enchantment for detection of fuel and ignition through a small mana crystal he'd produced.
It was not something proportional to the size of an actual lighter, nor was it effective in the usage of mana, but it worked, so it was most certainly something completely unthinkable for someone that didn't even know mana existed seven days ago, but certainly not enough.
Ferris was actually a 'warlock', which was a tipe of wizard, so he wasn't as hopeless in explaining general runic structuring and gramatic, but he quite literally knew jack shit of how to create stuff, his whole arsenal filled with rituals to cause massive change to enviroments, deteriorate something or someone, even a few to affect luck too, but those required specific ingredients and such. He minored in poisons and venoms usage however, so Aki had been able to help him derivate something like a rudimentary general reinforcement rune.
From there, however, the mad scientist pretty much took off and started derivating several things through logical deductions neither of them were able to follow as she used complex mathemathical formulae they simply didn't have time to learn.
Maybe if she didn't have Aki then she'd have used a veritable mountain of corpses to fuel her new obsession, but with him giving her better and better batteries, there was simply no need, though he'd likely have to teach her about biological matter conversion in the future either way.
The biggest problem from there on however, was neither the nanobots nor the increasing need for energy to fuel the experiments, the generators on the bunker allowed for the creation of a positive cicle of energy when coupled with a Talented magi, so they'd figured a routine to keep that going quite quickly, but the fact that there was simply no one to experiment on.
While Aki would be up for getting tatoos on his bones any other time, he honestly didn't have the time, energy or even mental stability nescessary for passing all the experiments with his own body, while Ferris would just straight up die.
Elizabeth imediatly asked for a diverse etnic group with the minimum possible modifications however, not bothering with the look she got when she was told that there'd only be males with a form similar to Aki's. He'd get her some of the materials that composed her mods for her own enhancement if they got the time.
When he left their hidding spot, the young man then directed himself to the biggest and most luxurious buildings he could find on the city, infiltrating, hacking and downloading more and more terabites of information on the production of mods and robotic units of all kinds, the program he used for such coming from his new scientist, who caried the thing around everywhere out of precaution, though he had already gotten the stuff from her apartment either way.
It wasn't even that she'd invented it, just stolen the program after copying it from somewhere she shouldn't have. The thing was so effective that only after he'd cleaned five military factories did people actually send high level assailants for him, the frozen alarms finally being noticed or whatever the program did with the dozens of places he'd raided.
The fight was actually quite nice, two bruisers with exo-suits allowing for one samurai and one boxer to reach above inhuman levels of speed and power (B rank), a keen sniper that constantly shot his joints and even his heart once, a specialist that laid several snares and bombs through the desert while remaining mostly camouflaged and a hacker that kept trying to invade his mind while coordinating the whole assault.
Aki was already at a level that he could clean the floor with their faces without breaking a sweat, but his inability to focus wholy on the fight made things much harder, specially because the bots kept trying new tricks to reconstruct his body while he was a it, making him almost kill the test subjects in multiple ocassions.
Actually taking them back to the bunker was much harder since he had to lift the four present there, but first he had to remove any and all kill switches from their bodies, which ment he had to literally regrow each and every organ and nerves to make the fuckers normal humans again. While dealing with the targeted missiles and aircrafts that kept trying to attack his location the whole fifteen minutes he took to do everything.
On the bright side, he ended up not needing to waltz through an army of loud ass droids with all those sirens again. Someone had likely decided they'd already invested too much money into this since they couldn't just take out the real heavy weaponry on a populated zone despite the political power the corporate businesses could wield.
Well, they couldn't unless he showed them a real reason to, and Aki much prefered to not be a corpse oozing ozone and molten 'whatever polution was in the air'.
While only the old man and woman who had come at him phisically were good test subjects for his intentions, the whole thing was quite useless since the female was human still, so he just kept everyone but the experiment alive for him to play with.
The bunker was big enough for him to do that much, and he could only grow so much from metitation. He was a sorcerer after all, bullshiting and luck were the ways he got his real powerups.
*****
"*************************."
He could not understand the words, but Ferris could tell this was a chant. He refused to look though, the screams were terrifying, so he much prefered to keep his distance.
While he understood that there wasn't any such mechanic that made chanting some lines empower a speel or the other, unless they were lines activating diferent parts of a spell work/ritual, which was a diferent story altogether, it was hard to imagine what kind of monstrosity would actually come out of a proper ranked sorcerer going all out.
Aki had been weakened all the time he'd known him , none of his spells were properly cast because part of his intent had always been at neutralizing the pain and disconfort of having his body constantly modified as he fought back.
But what if that didn't matter anymore?
He had not seen the result. Although he and the bots seemed to be fighting a constant war of attrition as both got more and more used to each other, there'd not been any respite even as he lost or won several bouts for control.
When he snapped at the grumbling young man after spending so much time cooped up´near him, he'd blanched. Instead of any punishment though, he'd simply said it was a good idea to start trying to chant magic since it'd help with his concentration to be able to have something guide his energy instead of manually doing it every time.
He'd aparently completely discarded the idea of chanting since entering the game and then forgoten about it. Ferris at first thought that ment he could try and seem more usefull by teaching his techniques on the matter, however Aki seemed to somehow be even more proficient than him because he'd aparently maxed out singing, which now that he thought about it seemed pretty useful for anything that'd use voice and sound based cues thanks to the modifications the trancendent level would make.
First he cast a fireball by saying it's name, before ciclying through water, earth, air, light and dark. Then he shouted 'dimentional slicer' while swinging his arm horizontly, which was obviously a misfire since nothing happened. That'd been about when he decided to offer his help, but before he could utter a word, a 'command' had been issued.
He needed to open a slash fifty centimeters long, two tall and twenty deep on the steel alloy wall by momentarily bending himself into an extremely fine blade.
His confused body had obviously failed to follow such an order, but the same could not be said for space itself. From there on, he refused to try as much remenbering the scary smile as he saw the success of his actions.
Much of Aki's time that week had been spent on making and memorising scripts as he charged and discharged his mana, and now he was testing whatever horrors his mind had concocted on the prisioners. From what he'd gleamed, his ability wasn't much better than a human master, which is to say that it'd not even neared the limit of a SSS rank inteligence, but the power behind his incantations was the real deal, because while he didn't want to, it was hard for his magic inclined body to simply ignore the explosions, distortions and energy discharges in general.
"Worm, get here and shove your energy into this." He obeyed. Elizabeth was still a mortal, but so was he right now, nevermind that she was meaner than all his girlfriends through his life combined. Obviously those weren't the only reasons though.
His act couldn't even fool those around him now, and without anything holding him together, fear was eating him alive. Working as an apprentice/subordinate helped... *BANG*
The sound came from upstairs. The sirens had long since been turned down, had someone tried to temper with them or not. He'd confined himself to the first three levels so he could avoid Aki, his training, charging and whatever else he decided to do after he stopped looking. An army was much less terrifying than him.
The hits continued, but he was already walking.
His usual arsenal wasn't here, but the amount of rare grade equipment he'd received on a constant rate more than made up for it. His vest was even fucking legendary. Enchanted back and forth through the whole process of it's making.
Even as he reached the vault door, the thing was being pounded ritmically by what seemed to be a technological ariet. He didn't bother with waiting, hitting the opening button. Guns out, he shot through the small breach. They were homing anyway. Would seek any source of heat above a certain point.
She'd made the cardrige compliment the bullets, the things somehow absorbing the commands. It was ingenious, and he would honestly be unable to create anything even slightly similar were he asked to do something of the sort. He wasn't either a fighter or a crafter though, so he was never expected to though.
There were only a hundred twenty bullets however, and he'd just used twenty four before the door was even open. It smelled of blood though, so at least it must've done something. He needed to deal with whatever robot they brought though.
*Sheen*
He ignored the bullets coming at him, even if his face seemed umprotected it was anything but, and tosed the granages he carried around, giving them time to do their job before he dashed in. The long ass slab of metal they gave him was exactly for these situations, since he could not actually deal with non-organic enemies without proper preparation. He had neither the buff body, tragic backstory or even the spiky hair to look the part, but he still felt like a manga character when he swung the seemingly edgeless thing and still cut through combat droids.
With most of his attributes back at their best and his skills in an usable state, this much was easy for him even without his equipment. The problem was that even while mowing through the screaming agents and the hulking masses of steel sent to deal with the bunker, he could not understand what could actually the system want to show them with this dungeon if his new boss could already get rid of atribute and skill restrictions before he even became a proper god. The wait terrified him just as much as knowing that same monster was watching his perfomance.