Nano mage 3 an isekai ga.., p.1
Nano Mage 3: An Isekai Gamelit Magic series, page 1
NANO MAGE 3
D. LEVESQUE
CONTENTS
Info
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
About the Author
Where to find me
LitRPG
Elemental Summoner
Chapter 1- Elemental Summoner
Nano Mage 3
By D. Levesque
Edited by: Stoham Baginbott
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Copyright © 2020 by D. Levesque
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CHAPTER ONE
“Are you sure that’s Lidmore?” I asked the worried faces around me.
“I’ve never been to Lidmore before,” Fiona said.
Mika shook her head as well. “I’m not well-traveled, so I can’t say.”
We all look over at Bolandar, who is frowning down at the small town. And I’m being generous with that term.
The place was a pigsty. There were boarded-up homes. Houses that had fallen from disrepair and just, well, garbage all over the place. I don’t mean garbage bags, like we see on space stations or even on my old ship. I meant discarded clothing, furniture, and other things that begged not to be looked at too closely.
“The last time I was here, I was a young boy. I don’t remember it being in this much of a state,” he answered with a sneer. “But, it is a backwater town near the border. If I remember, it’s actually the only city that is less than a day’s walk from the border to The Wilds.”
“I meant to ask. Does the entire border surround your country?”
Bolandar is the one to nod. “Yes. Except where it meets the oceans. But that’s another issue.”
“What? Your oceans?” I asked, perplexed.
Bolandar didn’t answer but simply stared at me until he shrugged.
“I forget you aren’t from this world. The oceans here are wild with sea monsters and are impassible. Not many live near the oceans because of the monsters that come out randomly.”
“So, they can bypass the barrier by going by the ocean?”
“Oh no.” He laughed. “The monsters from the ocean are on another level compared to those behind The Wilds.”
“Oh? How so?” I asked, intrigued by what he meant.
“The monsters in the ocean are stronger, bigger, and more extreme. Thank the gods that they cannot survive on land for long. But long enough that if you are within a mile or so from the ocean, they will attack you. If they feel they desire to. The one time I saw a monster from behind The Wilds try to circumvent the barrier by going through the water, it was torn apart the instant it stepped into the water. It was gruesome,” he added, visibly shivering.
“All right. So no such thing as boats that go on the ocean?” I inquired.
All three of them looked at me as if I was daft. Which based on the description of this world’s oceans, it sounds like the ocean is a no-man’s land. Or water, in this case. I guess there are no ocean-going vessels here. What kind of monsters are in the oceans, I wondered? Large octopi the size of spaceships? Sharks bigger than a whale? A Kraken or two?
“All right, so good to know. No putting a toe into the ocean.”
“Not unless you wish to die.” Mika snorted.
“What do you think is happening down there?” I reminded them we had been talking about Lidmore.
“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Bolandar said. “When you said that the leaders of the Society of Monster Hunters was sending you out here because of the monster situation, I didn’t expect to see squaller. This town should be making a ton of gold from those monster cores.”
“The king,” Mika suddenly growled with such hatred and fury that it made Bolandar look at her in surprise. “It has to be him. He’s always been against what the Society of Monster Hunters stands for. He would rather take the money that normally is paid out for those monster cores for his own use.”
“You think that’s what the king,” I said, almost slipping and saying your dad. “is doing is stopping the funding for those cores? And the town is paying for it?”
“It makes sense,” Fiona nodded slowly, taking in the town again. “A town’s lifeblood is gold. If you take that away, it will slowly die. And that town looks like it’s on its last leg. This close to the border, I would say a lot of the gold came from the selling of those monster cores, which caused those monster hunters to buy items and such from the town, which was the reason for its prosperity.”
“So the town has been slowly dying. From what your dad said, Fiona, this has been happening since the king’s father’s time.”
She nodded in agreement.
“That’s correct. The king’s father was the first one to begin the reversal of paying monster hunters for monster cores. Yet, if you are caught with one and don’t sell it cheaply to the local crafters who turn it into mild healing potions or attunements for weapons, you are charged. However, that started with the current king. He has laid a heavy 25 percent tax on each one that is sold.”
“Ouch,” Bolandar said. “Yeah, I’ve been able to sell them on the underground market. But it’s getting harder and harder. That’s why I had five of them. Well, four. I got the fifth one about a week before you found me, almost dead.”
“Yeah. When I found one and came into Fiona’s village, it wasn’t long before I suddenly had the king’s men trying to arrest me.”
“We barely got out of there,” Fiona growled. “If it wasn’t for Lita cutting a hole in the wall of my room, we would have been arrested, and who knows what would have happened to us.”
“Most likely death,” Mika snarled. “The king, or more likely the king’s men who run the city, would not have been happy to hear that you got a monster core and so close to a major trade village such as hers.”
“Oh, what village are you from?” Bolandar asked Fiona curiously.
She turned to him and replied, “I’m from Monshore.”
“Wait, Monshore. Isn’t that where the leaderof the Monster Hunter Society, hmm. Thorp Inomod is from?”
“That’s my dad,” she replied with a massive grin.
“Your dad?” he exclaimed in amazement. “That man scares the crap out of me. And you married his daughter?” he stared at me in newfound respect. “He didn’t kill you?”
I laughed at him. “No. Though when I first met him, I thought he was going to. Though, if anything, when I met Fiona, she was bound for the bordellos.”
He turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow. “Someone as good-looking as you couldn’t get someone to marry you?”
She squared her shoulders, but I saw she blushed at the compliment.
“I wasn’t about to let some old geezer marry me. When someone stood in the way of Zach and me getting married, my dad took exception to it, and let’s just say it was allowed.”
Bolandar snickered. “I would have loved to have seen that. Brutal practice. I don’t know why the king lets it go on. It’s nothing but demeaning to women who are not of royalty. It’s a barbaric practice. It will not help our people in the long run. If anything, it will bring us down.”
The entire time that Bolandar was speaking, Mika was staring at him with wide eyes. You just got her on her good side, Bolandar, my friend. Keep it up.
I pointed back down at the town.
“We need to talk to someone down there. However, I’m worried we might set off an alarm, and the king’s men will try something if there are any in town.”
“Oh, I can tell you there are,” Bolandar supplied. “No way that the king will abandon a town.”
“Taxes,” Mika explained as I had a confused look on my face.
Bolandar concurred with her, “Taxes. They still get some. Now, how many soldiers there are is another thing. I would say there is a small squad down there with a tax collector.”
“I guess we will wait until nightfall and go down. Lita, care to go in your ball form and scout?”
She nodded, and suddenly her wolf form flowed into qui cksilver, and almost instantly, she was in her silvery ball form.
“I’ll check things out and come back near nightfall. Where will you be?”
I looked back the way we had come. “I would say we can go back to the grove of trees we saw. The ones with the fork in the road. Though, we will stay off the road. We will go to the right and go deeper into the woods. About a mile or so.”
“All right. I will use my wolf form to find you if I can’t find you.”
“Sounds good. Fuck, I wish you had a tracker function in you to find me no matter what. What’s the point of having nanobots if I can’t use them for that?”
“A future project.” She laughed. “For now. Let me go check.”
And without fanfare, she fazes out of view. Though I know that she’s simply using the nanobots to show whatever is behind her to us. It was just an optical illusion. Whatever it was, it worked.
While Algron made it so that she couldn’t hurt anyone in that form, she could still use it to scout for us. Which was handy as fuck.
“Let’s go back and set up a camp. No fire, though,” I suggested. “We are close to Lidmore, and the last thing I need is for us to be found before we know what is going on.”
“Good idea,” Mika said. “We can have supper from your bag. Any more sauce?”
“Fucking hell,” I chortled. “I need to make more. I’m out of tomatoes. I have some stew left.”
“Yeah.” She scowled. “We need to get more tomatoes.”
“Agreed.” Fiona nodded quickly in agreement. “All the tomatoes we can find.”
Bolandar snickered and laughed, but when the girls glared at him, he coughed and nodded. “Yes. We need tomatoes.”
Once back at the grove, I headed deeper into the woods in the direction I had mentioned to Lita. I walked what, according to my map, felt like a mile and looked around.
It was mostly trees, but it was great cover. No one could see us from the road. We had hit the road that brought us here about ten hours ago. We followed it instead of walking in the woods. It made travel faster. I wish the fucking map had shown the road, though, but even walking on it, it didn’t show up.
It just showed us as walking in the woods. I guess the map wasn’t perfect. It showed the village of Lidmore, now that I saw it. But no roads going to or from it. Odd.
I simply sat with my back against a tree, and the rest did the same. Fiona sat next to me. Bolandar sat against a tree facing me, and I noticed that Mika sat next to him. Not quite touching.
I passed out bowls of hot stew, spoons, and bread that was still warm.
Bolandar shook his head in bemusement. “I could get used to this.”
“Yeah,” I chuckled. “It’s been pretty useful. I need to ask Lita how she’s doing with the mana situation for me to access my spatial space.”
“What do you think it will be like?” Fiona asked, taking a spoonful of her stew.
“Well, if it’s like where Algron took me, it will be a room that is all gray.”
“But didn’t she say that yours is a space that is 25 miles by 25 miles?” she reminded me.
“Oh, right,” I confirmed. “Then I have no clue. Maybe we will see the far walls, even if they are 25 miles away, as gray like that room.”
She shrugged. “I guess we wait until we get into it. Can you give me a mug of ale to go with this?”
I shook my head apologetically. “We need to keep our heads in case something happens. I can give you watered-down wine if you want or water.”
Sighing, she nodded. “You’re right. I’ll take water. I’ll keep my mind clear.”
“I’ll take water as well,” Mika sighed sadly.
“Guess I’ll do the same,” Bolandar said just as sadly.
“But,” I added. “Once we have a proper camp and we know what is going on, I will bring out the good stuff.”
“The stuff from Algron,” Fiona asked, hopeful.
“Yes. But, one mug each. That stuff is irreplaceable,” I warned. “I want to keep that stuff as long as I can. But, one mug should be all right.”
“I’ll pass,” Bolandar told me. “If I get what you’re saying about the nanobots, I won’t get a benefit from that stuff. Yet.”
“Hmm. I’m not sure,” I said, thinking about it. “But if you want to wait, I can give you yours another day.”
“Deal,” he nodded quickly.
Then we got quiet, eating our stew and waiting for Lita to come back. We didn’t do a fire, as I had stated to Lita, so when it started to get dark, we just sat around with the night sounds starting up. It was getting colder out, so it would have been nice for a fire, but instead, I took out blankets, and we all covered ourselves with them, making sure our weapons were at the ready and easily accessible.
CHAPTER TWO
It was past midnight before Lita returned. I had taken the first shift for guard duty. Everyone was already asleep in their bedrolls. No fire tonight, so it was pretty dark out.
All I knew was suddenly, I was alone, and the next instant, I had a silvery ball in front of me, making me jerk in surprise.
“Fucking hell.” I almost shout in fear, but instead it came out as a loud whisper. “Lita, what the fuck.”
“Sorry, forgot you don’t see well at night,” she replies sheepishly.
Instantly, she flowed into her wolf form.
“Bone, please,” she said without preamble.
I chuckled and reached into my bag and brought one out for her, and threw it at her. She caught it deftly.
“What took so long?” I muttered, not to wake the others.
“It’s a mess in there,” she replied, gnawing her bone. She looked up. “Zach. It’s bad in there. They are killing each other. No one cares for anyone anymore. And Zach? I didn’t find one child in the entire town.”
“What?” I asked with a frown. “None?”
“None. And I can’t find out what happened to them since I can’t ask questions and I didn’t overhear anyone talk about it. But, what I did hear, if I were human like you, would send shivers down my spine. Actually, I just got a shiver down my wolf’s spine.”
“Christ, what’s happened down there,” I wondered out loud. “I don’t think Thorp knew.”
“I would highly doubt it, based on the intel he gave us. He said the village should still be thriving, if somewhat down on their luck, because of the king’s views on monster hunters. I wish there was a way to let him know,” she sighed.
I growled lowly, “I know. This world’s lack of long-distance communication is hard to get used to, having come from a realm where talking to someone millions of lights years apart was normal, even if there were some delays as it went through relays.”
“What should we do?” she asked me pensively, looking back toward the town of Lidmore.
“Honest, I think we should talk to everyone first. As they are asleep, let them sleep. We can discuss it in the morning.”
She nodded and went back to her bone but muttered around it, “That would be best.”
I nodded in agreement. I took a mug of watered-down ale out of my spatial bag and sipped it slowly, enjoying the cold taste of it. It wasn’t as good, or even close, to Algron’s ale, but it was still decent stuff. This was from the inn where Fiona’s mother, Lilintia, worked at. It was their best stuff, according to Thorp. Though, as I had told the girls, I didn’t want to get drunk, so watered down it was.
“So how does it work for that 50,000 mana points to open a doorway, I assume, to my spatial space?” I asked Lita quietly.
This was a good time to ask, since the rest of my group was asleep, and honestly, while I didn’t mind sharing information, some things I would not mind keeping to myself. As they say, knowledge is power.
