"Yes… Not just fluctuations," Rhona clarified.
"I'm talking feedback loops—dangerous ones. The kind that can cause a reactor to overclock itself into a meltdown… The worst part? It's intermittent. We've seen the same output under identical conditions—sometimes stable, sometimes not."
She brought up a live feed from one of the monitoring bays. AEGIS-03 stood motionless in the testing bay. But its core pulsed unevenly. Instead of the expected rhythmic hum, its energy output blipped and surged, almost like it was… resisting calibration.
Shane wasn't sure if it was due to the newly introduced Mana Stones that he obtained in the pocket dimension or the Fairy Realm.
Shane's eyes narrowed. "This wasn't happening in the simulations."
"No, it wasn't," Rhona agreed grimly. "Which is why I dug into the integration layers. Remember the new device, the stabilizer, that the elves created and used to bridge the Mana into our more human-standard circuitry?"
"Yeah, what about it?"
