Unknown:

  “Give that a try.” Link yelled from down the hall. With a hope and a prayer, I flipped the breakers on the panel back on and waited. Electricity flowed through the ancient system and into the even older detector apparatus.

  It was one of those things that was built with parts no one even produced anymore. We are talking technology that is both too archaic and too advanced for any company to manufacture.

  Which was odd because magic should have been able to replicate any process the old world had used. But no. Something about the material composition was off…or something. I didn’t quite understand it, and I really didn’t need to. That was the job of those making the parts we used to repair the city's infrastructure.

  It was practically a thankless job with shitty hours and a complete lack of resources to get the work done. Yet I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Not when I got to see the world from up here.

  A sharp pop pulled my attention from the sun as it lifted off from the mountains in the distance. My eyes looked up just in time to watch a second capacitor fizzle and splutter before finally hissing its last breath.

  With a groan, I flipped the system back off as I called back to Link. “The capacitors are toast.”

  “Dry?”

  “It would be the only thing that makes sense.” My mana snaked its way into the two dead capacitors to check them. Sure enough, they were dry.

  “You know none of this would have been an issue if the damned council simply gave us that backup powersupply you asked for last year.” Link walked by me as he moved to his bag to grab a few tools.

  “And you know why they didn’t.”

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  “Yeah, yeah.” He handed me a soldering tool as he spoke in a haughty voice that sounded nothing like our council representative. “‘There is no room in the budget for what might happen.’”

  I laughed. “You have to admit, the chances of the entire city losing both mana and electrical power at the same time was really unlikely.”

  “Yet it happened.” After I removed the old cap, he passed me one of the ones we had managed to salvage last year. “But, seriously, why even fix this thing?”

  “It is supposed to detect earthquakes.”

  “Since when do we need to worry about those?”

  “They added it back when the city was first built. Probably something to do with tectonics or some such. Whatever the case, the system has just been sitting here.” I tossed the second dead cap to the side. “As such, some scientist is hoping to use it to detect underground monster activity.”

  “Do you think it will work?”

  “That is above my pay grade. And why should I care?” A tendril of mana probed the other caps to find that there was one more that needed replacement. “We get paid to fix and keep everything running. Nothing more.”

  As the last cap was installed into the system, I gestured for him to step back. With a flick of the hand, the system slowly powered up. Various parts lit up as various relays clicked over and they initialized. When nothing more happened, I declared the mess fixed.

  Link asked a question as we packed everything up. “If they are meant to detect earthquakes, why are they on top of the wall?”

  It took me a minute to recall what my first manager had said when I asked him that same question. “Because the wall moves more than the ground as a result of the distance it has from said ground. Coupled with the other sensors across the wall and the system can detect even the smallest vibration. It then filters out random noise to find what is an earthquake and what isn’t.”

  That last part was what I assumed the scientists was going to change. And hopefully it worked, as I didn’t think we could survive such an attack a second time. Not if the monsters happened to also attack the walls at the same time.

  As we moved toward our small team room, we heard cheering from the people in the control room. That cheering died down as something started to beep at a rapidly increasing rate. By the time it was a single long noise, the people inside were screaming in hysterics.

  Worried that someone was hurt or otherwise, I rushed the last fifty feet to find that every one of them had broken down. And I understood why. Sitting in the middle of the room was a massive holographic table. On it sat the city. Beneath it, a swarm of red dots slowly made their way upward while others appeared to take their place.