Outrun - Cyberpunk LitRPG

I started shaping the parts as soon as I got into my apartment. It was a bit risky sending sparks and fire everywhere, so I moved my workstation into the kitchen. Slightly less flammable, but still not quite safe. I’d just have to be mindful of the fire hazard. And it's not like this would be a common situation, but I really needed to get this done.

The blade part itself was almost done outside of fixing up the joints to attach to the heating elements. Oh, and the blade actually needed to have an edge sharp enough to cut. It didn’t need to be the sharpest thing ever since the heat part of the blade would easily let it slice through stuff, but it did need to be as good as I could get it with what I had.

I pulled the blade free of its wrapping from the metal company and set up my grinder. It was a hand tool, so it wasn’t exactly the best machine to use for what I wanted, but it would do for now. I rigged up a mount for it using several of the gun parts stacked together and some old boxes in a jury-rigged vice grip of sorts. Then I flicked it on. The grinder whirled into action, the squeal of machinery echoing through my apartment. It was a bit shaky, but I fixed that by bolting it into place.

I grabbed my handheld radio and put in earbuds, drowning out the screeches of the metal under old-world jazz. The smooth trills of trumpets and brassy blasts of trombones soothed my soul as I returned to work. I also threw on some thick gloves, tossed on my mask so I wouldn’t be breathing in metal dust, and tied my long hair into a ponytail.

Before doing anything, I checked through my notes just in case I was forgetting something. Nothing stood out. I ran the edge side of the blade through the grinder, carefully managing my pressure and grip to have a consistent grind across the surface. Sparks flew, though not as many as I would expect, as the Ti-Cube blade ran through the grinder. I pulled it out, the metal barely even deformed past the heat treating.

I sighed and flipped it over, running it through the grinder again. And again. And again. I repeated the process, the songs blaring into my ears blended together as the shape of the blade slowly came into view. I had called it a blade for a while, but it was really just a block of curved metal with some parts sticking out the back when I first got it.

After hours of grueling work, the blade fully looked like a blade. Or at least as close as I wanted to get it without swapping over to a finer grit grinding disk. Before doing that, I went over the blade slowly and evened it out to have one consistent shape and edge. The ridges from where I messed up were dropped down to one fairly flat blade.

I changed the grinder head, swapping it for a finer grit before going over it slowly. I worked the blade, getting it to a sharper edge. It wasn’t paper thin by the time I stopped, but I did test it on a cardboard box. It easily sliced through the thing. Not the most impressive, but it was good enough for me. If Torren wanted a better sword, he’d have to go actually buy one, not have me make a scuffed one.

I took off my gear, wiped the sweat from my brow, and took apart the grinding fixture I put up. Next came getting the rest of the blade to the right shape. My basic design had two sheets of metal sandwiching the heating and electrical elements to act as support for the structure and to protect the relatively fragile electronics.

I traced the shape across two plates of steel, carefully drawing what I wanted the shape to be. It was the back end of the blade, so it was curved as well though quite a bit wider. I also drew spots for several brackets that would help hold the entire thing together.

It took a bit of finagling to get set up, but I managed to get my plasma torch hooked up onto my metal work table and grounded. Since I didn’t want to cut through my table, I hung the plates of steel off the side.

I threw my gear back on and then picked up the small gun-looking plasma torch. As soon as I pulled the trigger, an arc of electricity shot out onto the metal, turning to hot plasma in mere nanoseconds as the air compressor kicked on. The plasma easily cut through the metal as if it wasn’t even there.

Tech had, thankfully, been quite thorough in its teachings, so the torch was something I’d already used in the learning space. I wasn’t a master at it, and my hands were a bit shaky as I traced the outline on the metal, but I wasn’t inexperienced. Molten metal blasted downward, splattering my kitchen’s tile in quickly dimming specks of brilliant orange.

I carefully cut the first piece out, having to pause and flip the piece around on my table halfway through, then moved on to the next after making sure nothing caught fire. As I started cutting the second piece, it dawned on me that I probably should’ve stacked them together and cut them at the same time so they’d end up more uniform. It was too late for that though, so I steadily cut out the second piece and the brackets.

I flicked off the plasma torch and eyed my handiwork. They weren’t beautiful by any means, but I had the rough shape of the back half of the blade mostly done now. I unplugged the plasma cutter and swept up the bits of metal and shavings everywhere, taking some extra time to take a drink from my canteen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have water set and drank more of Jack’s Sun Kicker. It didn’t work quite as well at hydration, so I had to actually get water from the tap like a plebian. Thankfully, the apartment had rather clean water, unlike my place at the Ryu Container Yard. It wasn’t as good as the water from the canteen, but it wasn't absolutely horrible.

I took a brief break and then got back to it, running my grinder on the edges of the steel to even out any of the roughness from my cutting. It took a long time to go around every piece and get them smooth. Err, about as smooth as I could. There were some spots where my shaky hands took off a bit too much with the torch, but I had to leave those so I wouldn't be taking off too much metal.

Next, I got my new drill and popped three holes through both parts, making them just wide enough to run a bolt through them. I slotted everything together, sliding the Ti-Cube blade onto the mounting brackets of the steel, and laid it all out.

The blade fit perfectly into the gap of the hilt. I drilled a hole through the tang of the two pieces, along with a metal spacer, and ran a bolt through the hilt of the katana. The tang for the thermal katana was quite small compared to how they used to do it in the old days thanks to needing space in the hilt for the electronics. It still wasn’t a thermal katana yet, but it actually looked like it could do some damage once I put it all together.

For the next several hours, I wired the capacitor bank and the battery that originally came with the blade up the gap between the two steel layers. It was a pain in the rear, especially considering the high voltage I was working with. Or maybe I should say literally. I got my fingers on some sharp edges a few times, which was just great.

The Thermal Conversion Module was thankfully rather easy to hook up. It was small, and as long as I put it between the current and the heating elements, it should work. Oh, and I had to wire it onto the actual blade itself, but that wasn’t an issue. The wires were meant to resist insanely high heat, so I didn’t have to worry about the module melting.

It took even longer to get the actual heating bits done. I wrapped the coils around the blade’s connection points and set up the finished circuits so they would run through the blade. The resistance of the blade to the electrical currents would then generate heat. The Thermal Conversion Module would help, majorly increasing the efficacy while stabilizing the blade with the heat.

I finished the internals and then sandwiched them between the two steel sheets. From there, I ran three bolts through the blade to hold it all together, each bolt having a bracket to help hold it together. The connection points to the Ti-Cube blade were the weakest links. Somehow I overlooked the fact the blade was held together purely through the indirect pressure of the bolts. Something to fix on my next iteration of the blade.

For now, though, this was just a test to make sure everything worked more than anything. I hit the small switch on the original Katana hilt, causing a small red bulb just under the hilt wrapping to glow red. I waited a moment for the electricity to start working through the heating elements. Two. Three…

I flicked it off after nothing happened and cracked open the blade, glad I decided to go with something easily disassembled. As it turns out, I shorted the circuit out, accidentally grounding it to an exposed wire.

After disconnecting the power supply, a rather nifty rechargeable battery about the size of my fist, I fixed the issue and visually ran back through the blade, finding one other spot at the final heating element where I similarly screwed up.

I rescrewed the bolts, fixing them back up. This time, the light turned on, quickly followed by the blade starting to glow. The heat spread out from the connection points into the rest of the katana blade as the entire thing turned a dim orange after several seconds. The heat remained, growing brighter and brighter for several minutes.

Then something popped in the back half of the blade. The entire thing went into sparks, followed by a buzzing vibration before I could switch the thing off. I had to wait for it to cool down before starting work on the thing again.

This time, when I opened the blade and hilt back up, smoke poured out from the circuit. It took me several minutes looking through the various parts before I realized the katana blade got so hot it melted the rubber casing off of one of the wires, shorting the entire thing. One of the capacitors barely saved the rest of the hilt’s internals from being hit by the backlash but at the sacrifice of itself.

I tossed the blade parts onto my desk and leaned back against one of the kitchen counters. This was getting more and more expensive as time passed. I had some ideas on how better to get the blade set up, but none of them were exactly cheap. On top of that, I’d have to go buy a new capacitor tomorrow. Joy.

First and foremost I could use some kind of ceramic instead of metal for the back half of the blade, which would help the heat feeding back somewhat. My other idea was to incorporate a circuit board and thermometer into the design to control the output of the heating elements.

Both had their pros and cons. The ceramic would be annoying to get set up, especially considering its relatively brittle nature unless I splurged on some specialty kinds or cermets. I had some ideas to get in the right shape, but they were just ideas. Ceramics were only briefly touched in the interface.

The thermometer would be the most difficult to set up out of the two, though probably the cheapest. It would be annoying to figure out how to get it all to mesh together properly, but the biggest issue was I would be regulating the heat output of the katana, effectively weakening its damage potential.

To be fair though, with the insane amount of strength Torren could wield, it didn’t really matter if I turned down the heat a bit. And it's not like it would weaken the blade too much. It would still be a katana heated up to the point of glowing.

Cleaning up my kitchenette slightly, I headed back to my living room and started to do some exercises. Nothing fancy, just some bodyweight exercises, but it was better than nothing. Exercising before bed was something I wanted to get into a habit of, especially considering all muscle fatigue would be healed as I slept.

I moved until my muscles started to burn, then a bit past that before heading to the shower and then bed. The whole time, thoughts of the katana and how to get it working were on my mind.