Chapter 45: Hurk the Hacker

Sam and Garlan ran through the sewers under Nexus City, eventually coming to a stop next to a brick wall. The gnome tapped it a few times, and the bricks magically parted to reveal a hallway. He motioned Sam to follow and they headed deeper in, the bricks sliding back into place behind them.

The corridor had several more brick barriers like the first one, until eventually they came to an iron vault door with inscribed runes. It reminded Sam of his father’s Vault back in Luminary’s Landing.

Garlan pressed his hand to the door, and it slid open like a wheel, revealing a laboratory inside. They stepped through the doorway, and the vault closed behind them. Sam took a moment to look around the room - there were multiple tables covered in open grimoires, parchment sheets laid out with blueprints and alchemical formulas, glass containers of various sizes filled with liquids of many different colors, pieces of metal and machine parts, and a variety of tools.

High bookshelves lined most of the walls, except for a corner near the door that was filled with stacks of wooden crates. A hallway off the main room led to a storage room and living quarters.

There was also a corner in the back of the lab where a tall automaton of some sort was standing, hunched forward. Its body was made of greenish-bronze metal plating, and its head looked like a helmet from a suit of armor with two black orbs in the eye sockets. The bottom half of the helmet was a separate piece that looked like a jaw.

"What’s that?" Sam asked, pointing to it.

"This is our secret weapon," Garlan said with a grin. He opened a panel in its back, pushed a few buttons inside, and then closed the panel. A moment later, the automaton’s black eyes lit up green and it stood straight, moving its head around. "Say hello to Hurk!"

"Oh shit!" Sam said, impressed. He waved at it. "Hi! My name is Sam."

"My name is Hurk!" it replied in a mechanized voice, its jaw moving as it spoke. "Oh, wait, Professor Ersa already said that. Sorry, I’m still new to, you know, being a thing."

"Isn’t he amazing?" Garlan asked, clearly pleased with his work.

Sam nodded. "He sure is! So, what did you have in mind for using him?"

"Barbossa has his own army of similar automatons," Garlan revealed. "He stole my designs to make them. So I built Hurk with the ability to hack into the other automatons and make them fight against Barbossa."

"So I guess you could call him Hurk the Hacker!" Sam said with a grin.

"I like that!" Hurk said happily. "I am Hurk the Hacker!"

"Fabulous!" Garlan said, then walked over to one of his cabinets and grabbed a bottle of purple liquid, handing it to Sam. "This elixir will make you good as new."

"I’m trusting that is true," Sam said as he pulled out the cork and chugged the potion. An instant later, he felt himself return to full strength, his Mana rapidly refilling. "Wow, that actually worked really well!"

"Of course it did," Garlan said with a grin. "I am the most brilliant man in the Unseelie Blue, after all."

The gnome changed out of the prisoner’s tunic he was in, and then shrugged at Sam. "Sorry, I have nothing that would fit you."

"That’s okay," he waved it off. "I’ll just grab something from an abandoned home when we head back up to the street level."

They left the lab and walked through the sewers towards the Chancellor’s Manor, popping up topside periodically until they found clothing that would fit Sam. When they were directly under the Manor, they discussed the plan of action.

"Okay, so first, Hurk will hack into the other automatons, and use their eyes to see where everyone is up there," Garlan explained. "And then head straight for Barbossa."

"Can’t we just have the automatons up there attack him?" Sam asked.

Garlan shook his head. "If we do that, then he’ll teleport away. We want to keep the automatons acting normal until we can get up there and I can draw alchemy circles to prevent him from teleporting. Then we can go balls to the walls."

Sam nodded. "Okay, sounds good."

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NOTE: The below situation has changed, please read the Author’s Thoughts section.

Hello everyone! So, I have some unfortunate news to share. I can no longer deny that this story is on a steep downward decline, and it likely will never earn enough to even reach a PayPal payout. I feel that I made a huge mistake by including the Yuri scenes, and that it turned away a lot of potential paying readers.

At this point, I don’t think there is any way to save it. I want to give those of you who read this far a proper ending, so in the upcoming Chapters, I will be including some aspects that I was saving for later, including a conclusion to the situation with the Kyuubikuza and Queen Maeve.

Then, after they get back to Braska and Valanta joins the harem, I will write four one-on-one smut Chapters, where Sam has a solo sex scene with Calista, Lazula, Gabrielle, and Valanta. And then after that, they will sail off into the sunset, bringing an end to the story.

Unfortunately, I will not be able to continue it beyond that due to my own mistakes making in a failed book. But I appreciate every one of you that took the time to read the story and engage with the characters.

In place of this, I am writing two new books. One is called My Storm Dragon System, and will be mostly a non-smut story focusing on action and monster slaying. The other is called Black Market Alchemist, which will be an organized crime/harem story with no yuri.

In Black Market Alchemist, a nerdy guy named Lucky is bullied by his stepfamily and peers at university. So he creates a special potion that turns him into a cool dude named Lucien, who has the power to use psychic magic to control his stepmother, stepsisters, stepaunts, stepcousins, female classmates at school, and even his female professors, turning them all into his harem. He also creates a temp version of the potion that he sells on the black market, building a criminal empire.

I hope those of you who read this far will find some enjoyment in the new stories, and again, thank you for being fans of my tales. I appreciate you all.