Magicraft master a mass.., p.2
MagiCraft Master: A Mass Isekai LitRPG, page 2
“Recount the number pi as far as you can remember.”
Logan hated doing what his father wanted, but he was curious. He thought about pi, and it came to him as easily as his father’s name. He recounted thirty-two digits before his father held out a hand.
“How do you like it?” Malcolm asked with mounting excitement.
Logan lifted a finger. “Don’t,” he said quietly. “Not yet. You did a fucked up thing.”
“Did I?” Malcolm asked, a hint colder. “The way I see it, I made you into something magnificent.”
Logan suppressed a significant flare of anger. He reached for his beer to buy time.
“Here’s a thought,” Logan said as he cracked the can open. “How about just letting me be my own person?”
“What about taking some responsibility?” Malcolm snapped.
“No thanks,” Logan said and took a swig. “It never made you a better person.”
“Never made—” He controlled himself. He breathed in and out once. Logan smirked.
“Do you know why I’m the richest person on this planet, Logan?”
“Because you’re a ruthless son of a bitch?”
He showed another hint of a smile. “Because I provide the most value. I am the most valuable human.”
Logan scoffed.
“You can deny it,” Malcolm said. “But that is what the world tells me when I look at my company’s stock price.”
“Oh, I deny it,” Logan snapped, then tapped at his forehead and let out a bitter laugh. “Most valuable, my ass. How many cobalt-mining pseudo-slaves died for this thing? How many blistered hands of child workers sleeping on some factory floor touched these circuits, Father?”
“Don’t be a fool. The world is not a fair place.”
“Because of people like you!”
Malcolm’s expression darkened. “You talk of compassion, but none of your charities last for a year.”
“Because you cut the funding,” Logan said.
“After you ignore my advice on how to make them self-sustaining.”
“They’re called charities,” Logan said. “Not businesses.”
“You’re such a child,” Malcolm scoffed. “To think my son couldn’t even float a revenue of one million for a year …”
“I didn’t have the means to—”
“Well now you do!” Malcolm snapped. “Four hundred billion parameters! Specialized in vector calculus, algebra, trigonometry, and a dozen other branches of mathematics, thermodynamics, circuit theory, avionics, data structure … Need I go on?”
“I feel like you almost got a point across before you ran out of breath,” Logan said and took a swig.
“I would have given you the goddamn world to hold in your palm. Every advantage conceivable. Connections. Money. I gave you all this and you’ve still done nothing with it. This implant is my last-ditch effort. We ran out of time. You left me no choice.”
“You really don’t see it, do you?” Logan said, trying to contain a snarl. “You didn’t put a computer in my brain for me. You did it for you.”
“I did it for grander reasons than my own ambitions, or I would have had it implanted in myself,” Malcolm said, quietly this time. “Whatever happens once the timer runs out, you will be ready. Even for a total rebuilding of humanity, if necessary. I made you better.”
“I am—” Logan said slowly, punctuating every trembling word, “—not a project for you to improve on.”
Malcolm said nothing to that, only sneered and sipped on his whiskey.
“What are you two fighting about this time?” Freya emerged from the elevator wearing a white summer dress, looking as amazing as ever.
“I was just telling him what a great father he is,” Logan said, smiling.
“I need another drink,” Malcolm muttered and went to fix himself another whiskey.
“Thanks for the beer, Frey.” Logan said and saluted.
“That wasn’t me, actually. Your dad got it for you.”
Suddenly the taste became a shade more bitter. Did his father have goons checking his garbage? There was a 71.25 percent chance of that, rough estimate. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Wait … seventy-one what?
“Are you feeling okay?” Freya asked as she sat on the bed. There were massive bags under her eyes.
Logan needed a moment to snap out of it. “Yeah … Just a throb at the back of my head. Looks like they kept me asleep for a few days.”
“They did, yeah,” she said and gave him a tired smile. “I can finally get some sleep. Wanna fly somewhere tomorrow, like— oh, never mind.”
Logan turned to look where Freya was gazing. He sighed and downed the rest of his beer. A dozen people got out of the glass elevator by the other side of the pool. They each had either a suit or lab coat on, and all but the goons had a clipboard.
Great …
“Gentlemen,” Malcolm greeted the group. “Good of you to come on such short notice.”
Two of the suited goons remained at the elevator while the rest of them occupied a corner of the patio. Logan recognized the young agent, standing stiff and all-important two yards away.
The tired scientists formed a conclave around Logan’s bed. Malcolm made a gesture to let one of the men speak. He was bespectacled, his lab coat covered with cat hair.
The man leaned in closer to Logan, arranging his stethoscope. Oof, he even smelled of cats. This was Dr. Rosenberg, his father’s personal physician.
It took a while for Dr. Rosenberg to get his measurements. Blood pressure, iris with the diameter-measuring flashlight, the works. After the good doctor had acquired a few vials of Logan’s blood, he took a few steps back.
The next in line was a woman in her late fifties, lips painted brilliant red, as if to distract people from the fact she was aging. “I would like to ask you about your verbal acumen, if that is alright?”
Still angry, Logan gave his father a tired look. He considered picking another fight.
“Indulge me, just for once,” Malcolm said.
Logan scoffed and shook his head in disbelief. He snapped his fingers. “Hey, goon! Balmer, was it?”
The young agent turned from his place, looking at Logan, eyebrows visible from behind the sunglasses. His voice was kept even by a heavy dose of discipline. “Yes?”
“That’s ‘Yes, young Master’ to you, by the way,” Logan said and waved the empty beer bottle in his hand. “Be a good little lamb and bring me another one of these.”
The young agent was indignant. “I didn’t graduate the top of my class to—”
“Balmer,” the gooniest goon said sharply.
Logan grinned. “Sounds like you’re perfectly qualified for this job, then.”
Logan assumed Agent Balmer was probably a great shot with a glock but he was pretty bad at repressing a scowl. He would need more practice if he was going to work for Malcolm Specter. The young man actually even looked at his boss questioningly, but Logan’s dad just waved a hand. Agent Balmer bowed stiffly and started stomping across the patio.
“So,” the older woman said impatiently, “verbal acumen?”
Logan never got to answer. Because at that moment the sky ripped open. A great black gash appeared in midair and the wind immediately started howling at a high pitch as furniture and people started lifting off the ground.
“W-what?” Malcolm asked, more outraged than scared. All the scientists, on the other hand, were definitely scared. They screamed as they were lifted off their feet.
[3 days, 2 hours, 29 minutes]
[0 days, 0 hours, 1 minute]
Logan started laughing. “Don’t you get it? It was a trick. They didn’t want us hunkering down. Oh, that’s clever!”
“Logan!” Freya yelled and tried to reach him, but she flew past him, flailing in the air.
“Frey!” Logan called out. “Be brave. I’ll find you! We’ll get through this!”
And with that, Logan was sucked into the rift, and all sensation of light, sound, and touch was gone.
CHAPTER 3
Logan found himself floating in nothingness. Darkness enveloped him. He was weightless and blind, but suddenly he could hear two voices talking.
“Would you look at that?” one voice said, high pitched, excited, and somehow … electrical.
“What in Six Hells is it?” the other one said; it was a lower tone but fast and also buzzing with electricity.
“Some device. Pretty advanced for a human,” the first one said.
“Well, shut it off. There are rules.”
“I can’t.”
“What?” the second one asked, the low register taking on an alarmed tone.
“It’s embedded in this one’s brain. It’d kill him if I remove it.”
“Oh great … Do we take it to the higher-ups?”
“You really want to do that?” the first one asked.
“No …”
“Let me just see what this thing— Oh no …”
“That bad, huh?”
“It’s bad,” the first one said and sighed. “This is like a … sapient memory bank.”
“It’s self-aware?”
“Well, it sure is now that we ran the protocol,” the first one muttered. “This is gonna do weird things to the System.”
“Old gods.” The second one sighed heavily. “I am not putting this in my report.”
“Me neither, but we can’t leave this thing as it is. He’ll develop too fast.”
“Aren’t we looking for problem solvers?” the second one asked.
“You know how it is,” the first one reminded him. “If he builds a mega-city in a month, Levemoth will destroy them.”
Logan wondered idly how he could even understand these beings. They didn’t sound remotely human. He could feel some faint prodding in his head, a light pressure with twinges. Logan figured it should have hurt but it just didn’t.
“Can you remove the knowledge?” the second voice asked.
“I have to try,” the first one said distractedly as it apparently prodded around in Logan’s head. “But the knowledge matrix is delicate. If we lobotomize a candidate, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“If you lobotomize a candidate, you mean?”
“Shut up. I need to focus. Okay … circuitry, mechanics … guns, huh? Well unless he figures some stuff out, those won’t do much … Damn it!”
“What is it?” the second one asked, slightly alarmed.
“I can’t remove any of this or it will mess with the general logic facility. If I just chop off half of what it knows, it’s going to go insane.”
“So, what’s the plan?”
“I just need to lock them.”
“Lock them?” the second one asked. “That would mean you’d give it a class!”
“I know what it means!” the first one hissed. “Any better ideas?”
There was a moment of silence.
“No.”
“I’ll just give it [Engineer]. I’ll lock stuff like circuitry and explosives in the mid-tier.”
“You’re just going to give it a class? Right from the get-go? You sure that’s a good idea?”
“What am I supposed to make of this?” the first voice snapped. “A sentient computer inside a human brain? I’m winging it. Speaking of which … Oops.”
“Oops?” The second voice was alarmed. “What do you mean oops?!”
“Fiddling with the memory matrix might have touched the technology more than intended.”
“Anything serious?”
“It’s going to distract the candidate more than intended, that’s for sure.”
“Shit!” the second voice whispered. “I just got a ping. They’re asking what’s taking so long. They’re sending a tier-three admin.”
“Shit. Well, this is gonna have to do,” the first voice said. “We’ll just put him—”
“There’s no time! We have six seconds. Just toss him somewhere!”
“I can’t—”
“NOW!”
Logan found himself lying on the smooth, slightly damp floor of a cave. Well, after a cursory look it actually appeared not to be a cave, but more of a … dungeon?
Dim blue light illuminated the corners and seams of the roof and floor where the walls connected, like ropes of LED Christmas lights. Logan got up and investigated further. The room exhibited clear deliberate craftsmanship with its smooth stone walls and mathematical angles.
89.72 degrees. That’s extreme precision. Wait, what?
Oh right, the AI. A part of Logan hoped his father had landed face-first into this world. What the hell had even happened? Someone or something had teleported him here. And there had been those two guys discussing … what? It was all bleary and dreamlike. The more Logan thought about the two people talking, the less he remembered. Something about the AI …
[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix … 1% completion]
“That’s … interesting,” Logan muttered to himself. That had been like a thought in his mind, but it had its own voice. A monotone, mechanical intonation that cut through the chatter, completely unlike his own inner voice.
All of this was certainly interesting. He had been sucked into another place. And that dream— No, not a dream. A memory. They had said he was a “candidate.” What did that mean? What did any of this mean?
Well, I’ve got enough questions now. Let’s find some answers.
Logan got up. Through force of habit, he glanced down at his wrist. His obscenely expensive white smartwatch was still there. The screen was black.
Not like I really need to know when it’s time for afternoon tea right now.
He looked around. There wasn’t anything interesting in the room. Nothing he could use at least, just rubble on the floor from a wall cracked an eternity ago.
The crack on the otherwise smooth wall was enough to attract Logan’s attention, however. He looked at it and saw a mural of intricate craftsmanship depicting a crowd of people standing on a hillside, looking at a mountain half covered in bright white clouds. Beside the mountain, seeming to guard it, was a beast. It was blue and black, almost as large as the mountain, with a great maw like that of a whale, with thousands of tiny black teeth. A hundred eyes looking in every direction covered its head underneath a cradle of horns, white as a full moon. The creature’s body was obscured by a dark storm cloud, raining black rain upon a great city, caught up in smoke, flame, and desolation.
“Jesus, I hope that’s a metaphor,” Logan muttered to himself. But a word echoed in his mind. Levemoth.
Now Logan had more questions and no answers. Not exactly the position he wanted to be in. He needed to think clearly.
Get out of this place, find shelter, water, food, and Freya.
That was as good a plan as any. Logan noticed a doorway on the other side of the room. The door itself had been half-decayed by time and was now mostly rubble on the ground and a chunk hanging off a hinge. The blue light coming from that other room was brighter, so Logan went toward it.
It turned out to be an octagonal atrium with a high ceiling and seven other doorways leading to other rooms. More beautiful murals adorned these walls, lit up by a giant floating crystal in the middle of the room. It pulsed and hummed.
“This …” Logan muttered. “I’m not on Earth anymore, am I? This is … Is it magic?”
Floating could of course be achieved by superconductivity, magnetism, or a steady propulsion.
Wait, how did I … ?
[Reconfiguring Neural Matrix … 2% completion]
But this didn’t feel like technology. As the floating crystal pulsed, Logan could feel it inside his body like a second heartbeat. It engaged a sense Logan never knew he had. This wasn’t magnetism; this wasn’t the sensation of pressure on his skin. This was energy.
Logan took a few tentative steps closer to the crystal. There was a pressure to it, but it was gentle. Upon the ground were flecks and shards, as if chipped and eroded from the glowing blue crystal. They also glowed, albeit faintly. Logan fell to a knee and picked one of them up.
Even as small as the chip of crystal was, there was definitely power within it. It was heavier than you’d think. It had a similar heft to a lithium battery. But the energy within it wasn’t similar in nature at all. Logan sensed richness and urgency within it. The crystal chip basically yelled “USE ME!” to Logan.
He didn’t know what to make of it, but he brought it between his thumb and index finger to eye level. It looked like the chip had movement within it. Like it was alive somehow. Then the strangest thing happened. A small box of text appeared next to the crystal.
[F-grade Numa Crystal, 100%]
What the … ?
Logan picked up another one of those crystals and the exact same text appeared in midair. He tried blinking and moving his head. It still stayed above the little glowing crystal. It was only when he moved his hand that the text vanished.
Interesting …
Logan didn’t know what the hell these things were, but his intuition told him that they were good. And with that thought guiding him, he decided on a new order of business. Shelter, food, water, strange magic crystals, then find Freya. And with that he started stuffing his pockets with the little chips.
He found a handful of the F-grade variants, which made his pockets bulge. But there was also a bigger chunk further away from the crystal, the size of a baby’s fist. Rather satisfied with his find, Logan picked it up.
[E-grade Numa Crystal, 72%]
What does that percentage mean? Is it a charge? Where’s an instruction manual when I need it? Hey, AI, got a theory?
The genie or whatever it was in his mind had no answer. Logan figured it was most likely a charge, but why he was seeing it like this was anybody’s guess.
He looked around a bit more in the dim blue light and found a few more chips while clutching the E-grade crystal. Logan only stopped when he saw something stirring in the corner of his vision. A lumbering movement and a heavy breath. He froze and listened.
There was a rumbling growl and suddenly Logan made out two blue oval eyes attached to a large, indiscernible shape in the shadows. They seemed predatory and somehow … greedy.
“Fuck.”
