Another crucial development within Nana's advancements involved combat armor. What began as a pragmatic solution to Liam's problem—his inability to help Joel outside the shelter without revealing his identity—had evolved far beyond that initial need. The armor ceased to be a simple reinforced disguise and became a high-value project.

  The success of the level-one armor marked the starting point. It was functional, easy to use, and capable of simulating the energy profile of an average mystic warrior. And from the moment it proved its viability, Nana focused her efforts on raising the bar.

  Increasing power wasn't a real challenge for her. It was enough to integrate better materials, optimize the internal energy channels, and expand the storage capacity. The structural improvements were a technical, not a conceptual, issue. The real obstacle was the reliability of the final product.

  The armor's primary mission remained the same: to conceal the wearer's identity. To transform him, in the eyes of any outside observer, into just another mystical warrior. However, tests under extreme conditions did not yield the best results.

  When the prototypes were subjected to severe impacts or cumulative damage, the energy cloaking function began to fail with alarming frequency. Sometimes, a seemingly minor fracture at a critical point was enough to completely destabilize the entire system. The energy flow lost coherence, and the illusion shattered.

  The armor could still function as defensive or offensive equipment, but if the cloaking collapsed, the entire initial purpose was nullified.

  Nana tried conventional solutions. She added redundancies to the energy channels and installed emergency systems that took over when the primary ones failed. The design became safer in theory, but the cost was evident: increased weight, bulk, and energy consumption, which significantly reduced agility and mobility.

  Neither Joel nor Liam were satisfied with the result. Armor that sacrificed too much for excessive safety was unacceptable in real combat.

  That's when Nana changed her approach. Inspired in part by some science fiction books and films from Joel's personal collection, she began to explore a radical alternative. Instead of designing armor full of passive redundancies, why not create one that could repair itself? A system capable of self-diagnosing, detecting structural failures the instant they occur, and dynamically redistributing energy to undamaged areas. Armor that doesn't depend on remaining intact, but actively adapts to damage.

  The concept implied something akin to a complex algorithm or, quite simply, an operational intelligence integrated into the system. However, putting it into practice was another matter entirely. On Earth, specifically in more modern times, similar solutions relied on processors, electronic sensors, and sophisticated computer networks. Here, the technological foundation was magic, with very few things remotely similar. All beyond their reach.

  While Joel had access to a fair amount of modern technological equipment, the integration of computational logic and magic was uncharted territory. But Nana possessed a unique advantage, allowing her to bypass the development of artificial intelligence from scratch. She had her clones.

  The small metallic copies that worked tirelessly in the industrial workshop were not mere automated tools. Each contained a fraction of her analytical capacity, enough to make autonomous decisions within defined parameters. Nana decided to use one of these clones as the logical core of the armor.

  Since Ashoka resumed his journey through Joel's spirit world, the process of creating new copies of Nana was abruptly halted. The monk's absence meant not only the loss of invaluable technical assistance, but also the loss of someone who had facilitated the precise fragmentation of her spirit.

  However, during each previous procedure, Nana had observed, sensed, and memorized the process in detail, understanding in broad strokes how it should be done. And since she had a certain obsession with being able to do everything herself, especially when it involved something so directly connected to her, she decided to try it alone. Even though Joel wasn't entirely in agreement.

  What she managed to extract wasn't a fragment like those produced by Ashoka's work, but at least they were functional and stable enough to maintain normal cognitive complexity.

  Thanks to this, Joel carved new statues using those fragments as spiritual cores. The result was noticeably more limited clones, both in capacity and size. Some were so small they fit in the palm of a hand, tiny metallic figures with unlit eyes that, when activated, seemed to awaken with a minimal but real spark.

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  These reduced clones lacked many of the functions and the wide sensory range of their predecessors, but they retained something essential: the ability to perceive, interpret basic stimuli, and execute instructions. Their senses were sufficiently developed to perform the minimum range of actions necessary for the project.

  Nana then designed a suit of armor whose core would be one of these small clones. Furthermore, to reduce its burden even more, she made a radical decision: to isolate many of its senses.

  She discovered that by selectively suppressing the clone's sight, smell, and touch, the available cognitive capacity increased significantly. It was like shutting down unnecessary processes in a machine to free up processing resources. The metaphor wasn't accidental. She was literally transforming fragments of herself into tiny organic processors, designed to execute specific functions with astonishing efficiency.

  For the first working prototype of the smart armor, she left the clone with only the ability to hear and speak. In theory, the user could issue verbal commands, executing the armor's multiple functions, requesting internal diagnostics, or activating emergency protocols. The clone would interpret the command, translate it into its own logic system developed by Nana, and execute the corresponding response in real time.

  Joel, with a smile he rarely displayed when discussing technical matters, ended up nicknaming the system "his own Jarvis," apparently in reference to a superhero movie he kept in his personal collection.

  Of course, the process was far from perfect. The interface between the clone and the armor proved to be a monumental challenge. There were energy interferences that caused erratic responses. On more than one occasion, the clone became overwhelmed by poorly filtered information, entering states of paralysis that completely disabled the armor. Conflicts also arose between the wearer's verbal commands and the automatic self-preservation protocols programmed by Nana.

  But none of those problems were insurmountable. Iteration after iteration, adjustment after adjustment, the system began to stabilize. Nana refined her algorithms, optimized data interpretation, and drew heavily on computer programming to improve certain functions.

  And then something unexpected happened. As the clones were better utilized, as the language became more sophisticated and the functions more complex, the armor began to behave as something more than a tool. It not only reacted and executed its functions, but it also anticipated them, even suggesting the most efficient actions, given the conditions it faced. Sometimes it was hard not to feel that the armor was… alive.

  But the clones soon demonstrated that their usefulness extended far beyond serving as logical cores for armor.

  The revelation came almost by accident, during one of the many testing sessions that Nana and Joel conducted in the workshop, where they were testing the latest modifications to the new armor. He was the one who raised a question that had gone unnoticed until then.

  "Will it be possible to control the clones outside the shelter?"

  From the day Nana awakened her consciousness, they both knew one immutable truth: she could not leave the domains of the refuge. The statue was not independent; it was an avatar intrinsically linked to the wooden house Joel had built years before. Shelter and statue shared the same energy and needed each other to function. Separating them would mean stripping her of her power and immediately reducing her to an inert sculpture.

  The only exception was the complex procedure by which Nana could encapsulate the sanctuary within herself using spatial magic, granting her the ability to move freely.

  But the clones, despite being controllable by Nana and capable of functioning with her power… were not, in principle, part of the shelter, but rather fragments that no longer belonged to the original body.

  The question, posed aloud, took on unexpected weight. When they began using the clones as armor cores, they had already verified that these continued to function even outside the sanctuary's perimeter. They executed their automated routines flawlessly, as long as the armor had power.

  However, they had never attempted something simpler, yet more audacious: having Nana control them directly from a distance. It was a mystery no one had felt the urgency to solve. Until that moment.

  The test was immediate and direct. Joel took one of the clones, the one being controlled by Nana, and walked beyond the invisible boundaries that marked the refuge's domain. And the instant the clone crossed the threshold, direct control vanished. Nana's connection broke with brutal clarity, and the small statue automatically reverted to its autonomous mode, executing only the pre-programmed instructions.

  The result was disappointing. Nana couldn't extend her will beyond her domain. However, when she examined the residual link more closely, she discovered something she hadn't expected to find. The connection hadn't disappeared completely. It persisted as a tenuous, almost imperceptible thread, insufficient to control movements or directly influence, but enough to transmit simple impulses. A primitive form of communication.

  Furthermore, if she concentrated her energy and somehow forced the link, she could even fleetingly access the clone's senses, specifically sight and hearing. Nothing stable or particularly comfortable… but undeniably real.

  The true magnitude of the discovery was revealed when Joel decided to test its potential reach, traveling with one of the clones to the far east of the nation, hundreds of kilometers from the shelter. Incredibly, the connection held at that distance, with no apparent loss of quality.

  This completely transformed the shelter's capabilities. Now, a direct communication channel existed between it and any location Joel, or anyone else, took one of the statues to.

  However, the most significant discovery was yet to come. While analyzing the potential magical abilities of her clones, Nana realized they retained a weak but stable dimensional capacity. They certainly couldn't open portals on their own, but they could do something more modest, like establishing a dimensional anchor.

  With careful adjustments to the clones' configuration, Nana managed to make one of them, with a simple command, fix its spatial position as a stable coordinate. A reference point she could easily recognize from the shelter. And from there, Nana could easily open a portal directly to the clone's location.

  When Joel understood the implications, he couldn't help but think of the enormous possibilities. As long as he carried one of the clones with him, he could return to the shelter whenever he wanted. Regardless of distance, terrain, or borders, a simple command was all it took for Nana to activate the portal from the shelter.

  Furthermore, he could scatter anchors in strategic locations, literally eliminating travel time to many distant places. However, from his perspective, the best possible use was the ability to escape any dangerous location, provided there were no countermeasures against the portals.

  He would then become a pseudo-dimensional walker.