“It’s the tenth fucking time he’s died, Isoko!”
Isoko laughed, saying, “You should get an implant!”
It had taken Mark twenty minutes to find out where he was out in the wilds and then another hour to get back to the northern gates to Memphi, and then ten minutes to query the local Skywatch kiosk, to make sure that there weren’t more mirror monkeys out there. There were none; Mark had gotten them all. A trip to Slayer HQ allowed Mark to clear the quest and get paid, and then he had a long ride on a tram to get home. He had gotten home well after dark, but Isoko was up late in the living room, watching mandatory training videos.
And now Mark was showered and wearing night clothes and feeling comfortable in his new home.
After the ordeal with the demon and Wolf Bayou, Mark had moved into the ‘guest house’ on the side of Uncle Alexandro and Uncle Gabriel’s main property. The main house was all lights and shadow, hidden far beyond a leafless forest outside of the glass doors of the living room. That place over there was three stories tall and made for rich people and secured as normal measures could secure it. This house here was a single story, with four bedrooms, a pair of offices, and a great kitchen and living room. It was decidedly less secure than the main house, but Eliot made some additions to the security here, so it wasn’t that bad.
This place was much more comfortable, and less intrusive than living there at that big house, because this was the home that Mark had thought was his uncles’ house years ago, back under Curtain Protocol, back when Mom and Dad had brought Mark with them to Memphi, to see his uncles and the city. And now Mark lived here, with his two friends, and teammates. It was nice. Comfortable.
Mark didn’t have to worry about his uncles getting caught in the crossfire here, in this house, if some sort of killer went after him, or, more likely, when that damned dragon Addavein showed up again. The dragon was probably still ‘napping’, but he had been napping for a handful of months now, and he should be waking up soon, if he wasn’t awake already.
Addavein was probably already awake, according to Inquisitor Lola and David, and the Church of Freyala. Addavein was probably doing sneaky shit out there, where people couldn’t see him.
So much sneaky shit, no doubt.
Mark plopped down onto the couch across from Isoko, glancing at the video playing on the screen, as he said, “I don’t want an implant, Isoko. Implants are rife for security concerns. That technospider we fought two weeks ago would have been a nightmare if I had had an implant.”
Isoko winced. “Oh yeah. Forgot about that one…” She paused. She asked, “You could get a custom housing for Quark?”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “A what?”
“Hold on,” Isoko said, as she picked up her phone and flicked around on a search engine. “I forget what it’s called exactly— Ah!” She turned the phone toward Mark. “A housing! It still goes under the skin, but as soon as it’s touched by tech-based monsters then they usually disintegrate rather than mutate.”
Mark looked at the screen and read aloud, “ ‘AI housing’.” The picture was of a needle-like thing with a bunch of protrusions that looked flexible, so it wasn’t really a needle at all. It went under the skin, usually on the right side of the back, or on the backside of a leg, or under the skin of the forearm. Mark leaned back. “It’s still an implant, Isoko.”
Isoko nodded. “Yeah. But these ones are mostly bio-implants. They play really well with tactile telekinesis, so a lot of brawnies get them. You should be able to do TT eventually, even if you can’t right now.”
Mark frowned, shaking his head a little. “Maybe if I can TT eventually, then I’ll do that, but nope.”
Isoko shrugged. “Your issue is kinda an edge case, but ‘AI housing’ comes in a lot of flavors.”
“I’ve never heard of the term ‘house’ before?”
“I meant to tell you about it the other day, when Quark got chunked the last time…” Isoko glanced behind Mark. “Eliot knows more, though.”
Mark felt Eliot walking down the hallway behind him. The guy had been sleeping, but he woke up when Mark had started making noise in the house.
“AI housing is a pretty broad term,” Eliot said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he walked into sight. He plopped down onto the seat to the side of the living room, yawning. “Good hunt?”
Mark smiled. Eliot was ‘burning the candle at both ends’, as Uncle Alexandro had said. Mark said, “It was a very good hunt. I had to kill about 50 versions of myself that didn’t know how to use my Powers at all, and simply couldn’t in most ways, and then one accomplished version that actually knew how to fly around with kinesis and shrug off most wounds. The queen’s Mirror Reality Power was a lot stronger than the progeny, and she wasn’t committed at all to the fight. She was sandbagging. Waiting for me to mess up. I think she let me clip off her leg, and then she tried to capitalize on that wound to pursue for real, but I turned it on her and chopped up something that looked like me for a good five minutes. She didn’t die until I turned her to gore, though. The babies died a lot easier than that.”
Isoko listened, nodding.
Eliot said, “Freaky fucking monster. What rank was it?”
“High Yellow,” Mark said. “A few more solo-kills like that and I’ll get my Green Slayer badge, but you both need to come with me when you can so you can get into Green with me.”
“Can’t get into Green without another sapient monster incursion,” Eliot said, “And those are all taken care of by others out there.”
“I’ll be able to go back out with you again in two days,” Isoko said.
Mark smiled. He nodded.
After coming back from Wolf Bayou, Mark and Isoko had spent some time in the Slayer organization, running a few different quests for goldleaf and ranking up. Making a successful trip to Wolf Bayou had been enough to get them both to High Red, but it was the work of a month of contracts and kills to get into Orange, and then High Orange, which is when they were killing dangerous monsters instead of the rote kills in the Red levels. Both of them had reached High Yellow after not too much longer, which is when Isoko decided to expand her capabilities with her hover license, and Mark had decided to go for a soloist Slayer rating.
Mark was practically a ‘rich man’ because of those bigger kills and continual work, with each Yellow mission netting him another 1,500 goldleaf, or even 2,500 for today’s special mission. In these last few months, Mark had already made more money than Dad and the guys had made fishing for an entire year. It was humbling, and kinda sad in a weird way. He wanted to give money to his parents, but they were dead.
… But anyway. Mark had made 90k goldleaf since he started hunting monsters outside of Memphi, but he had spent most of that already. He was still ‘rich’ compared to a normal person, but even 100k gold leaf was nothing for a high-level warrior, where artifacts and good weapons could run at least that much for a single piece of a proper tool kit, and Mark was becoming a soloist, so he’d need to be more outfitted than most. Uncle Alexandro had helped out with an underarmor webweave, but the oversuit Mark had gotten made had cost him most of his money already, just in materials alone, and it was already outdated. His spear was just a normal spear, too, but one treated with alchemical silver. Mark wanted to buy a real spear made of real mithril, that he could cap off with his adamantium, but such an expense was going to run him 250k goldleaf. Too much!
And yet, spending money was the only way he could ever advance to Purple rank, to become a Dragon Slayer.
And Mark was going to be a Dragon Slayer.
He had already decided that half a year ago, when he came out of the Tutorial and found that there was an unwanted dragon in his life. Mark was going to come to blows against Addavein… eventually.
Probably.
… Even if Addavein was not Addashield…
Or, more realistically, if not Addavein, then Mark was going to come to blows against some other dragon. Mark was the ‘brother of the dragon’ now, and whatever he had been before had been wiped out when Addavein chose this route, which meant that Mark needed to be on a dragon’s level, or else he and those he loved would certainly die due to forces way, way out of their control.
Eliot yawned, then pulled back the yawn and said, “You’ll get Green soon enough.” He brightened a bit, waking up some more as he said, “Any good high-tier AI housing will cost 50k goldleaf, but you’re gonna need someone to organize everything for you when we go to Daihoon, and Quark can do that, so you’re gonna have to spend the money, Mark.”
“Nooo!” Mark complained, lightly, feeling his stomach drop. He wanted so many different things, and he didn’t have enough money to get them all. “I’m so close to being able to afford a hoverbelt!”
Isoko snorted.
Eliot grinned. “Sell some adaman—”
“No,” Mark solidly declared. “It’s my adamantium.”
Isoko laughed and Eliot grinned.
Mark had about 720 grams of adamantium right now, and he had only made another 10 grams of adamantium himself, naturally, in the last few months. Mark’s full assortment of adamantium was about the size of three fingers, and it was all he could do to stretch it as far as he could go, to give himself enough weaponry to really dominate a battlefield. Mark had tried growing adamantium from his body, since he was a farm for the stuff, just like Addavein, but no matter what sorts of experiments Mark tried in that direction he never managed to ‘force’ his body to produce more adamantium.
He was working on it!
Eliot continued, “Quark isn’t even a True AI, so he’s always going to be vulnerable to every little bit of tech disturbance anyone can muster at all, but if you get him some real housing he could survive… for a little while, anyway. But you’re a frontliner. AI helpers tend to survive when they’re on the backline. You’re always gonna have a problem keeping Quark alive.”
Mark sighed.
Eliot added, “Whatever you do, you should not get an implant. Bio or otherwise. They’re just not safe.”
Isoko arched an eyebrow, asking, “They’re not? Even if Mark manages TT?”
Eliot waved a hand, as though that said everything he needed to say. He was still tired, it seemed. And then he realized he needed to use his words, so he said, “They’re a foreign body inside the body. If you can Tactile Telekinesis it, then you’re probably safe—”
“Which is what I was going to do,” Isoko said, nodding.
“But Mark can’t TT, so internally-housed AIs are a no-go. Flat out, straight up.”
Mark went, “Bah. I’m working on it! Haven’t made any progress, though.”
Eliot cut to the heart of the matter, saying, “There’s gonna be so much money rolling in when you’re working the settlement, you know. Until then, I’ll continue to make phones for Quark. That’s not a problem.”
“I had to wander around for 20 minutes to figure out that I was heading in the wrong direction today. The mirror monkey queen was out in the middle of absolutely nowhere.”
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
Eliot shrugged. “You don’t have to work that hard right now, and the discounts are gonna be big when we get set up. Save the energy!”
Mark rolled his eyes. “That monkey already killed two teams and was threatening a monster wave. It had filled up two burrows with eggs, and it was working on a third. I need Quark’s assistance… quite a lot, actually.”
Maybe Mark needed to spend some more money. How much did he have in the bank right now, though? Should have been… 12k? After today? Mark would check his balance later.
Eliot shrugged.
“Did you manage to get the blanket discount yet?” Isoko asked Eliot. She had asked that question a few times already these past months. She only asked again because Eliot’s answer changed each time.
“Not yet,” Eliot said. “Fireforge is still giving me the runaround. You’d think with me building them state of the art facilities for free that they’d be more than willing to give a true, lifelong discount. I’m gonna be building shit for them for five years, after all. But they have guilds that are making demands of them and all that shit.” Eliot rolled his eyes. “As though they hadn’t already given lifelong discounts to all the noble families and House Valen, too.”
House Valen was the main noble house that was organizing most of the settlement project. Aurora Valen was the General of the Settlement, and she was an incredibly strong Telekinetic and Telepath. A bi-Talent, really, in the Arch and Mind directions.
Isoko clicked her tongue. “That Artificer’s Guild…” She had complaints, but it was old ground to say those complaints again. “I know they give out lifetime discounts. Grandma has an Obsidian Card. House Valen has one, too. What more do they want other than citywide support?”
Eliot said, “Wandering Sage has an Obsidian Card because she’s proven herself.”
“I just need to kill some dragons, then, eh?” Isoko asked, rolling her eyes.
Eliot’s eyes widened in surprise, as he remembered something. “Oh!” Eliot said, “That’s another thing that happened today. Contribution points! Aurora and Iliandra managed to finalize that whole contribution system today. It’s gonna be better than Aluatha Empire-standard settlement contribution points, too, based on the premise that we really are making a twin city and we really are going to be opening portals and shipping between Daihoon and Earth here at Memphi.” He added, “A lot of people still don’t believe that’s what we’re aiming for, but the General and the Ambassador managed to finally convince the major actors today.”
General Aurora Valen of House Valen was only one of the major heads of the settlement project. Ambassador Iliandra Snowstepper of the Aluatha Empire was the other major player spearheading the creation of the settlement beyond the Veil, on the Daihoon-side of Memphi. Mark had met Iliandra a few times, but not for very long. Mark had met both of them, briefly, but only in a professional ‘how do you do’ sort of way. Eliot was the one truly moving in those circles, since he was the one who would be building almost all of the city, mostly by himself.
Eliot said, “So you can get an Obsidian Card out of the Artificer’s Guild for some astronomical amount of points. I wasn’t able to secure any sort of blanket discount for us three, but Aurora knew about it, and she manage to expand the point system so that— Well. There’s a lot. The short of it is that you and Mark can run your missions like normal, and whatever money you make also creates points at the same time. Something like 1 goldleaf to 1 point. But if you spend that money in the city on any of the guilds then you also make points at the same rate.” Eliot waved a hand, covering a lot of ground with that small gesture, as he said, “There’s an anti-abuse system, of course. Monster hunters can make points getting paid, and also paying others, up to the amount that they have already gotten on record as getting paid by the settlement. Everyone else can only make something like 500 points per day, max, spending money on the guilds in the settlement… It’s complicated. They spent four hours on this stuff.”
Mark sat back on the couch, taking that all in, and then instantly asking, “What can we buy with points?”
Isoko asked, “How long is this point system staying active?”
“A lot of stuff, and for 1 year. We should be ready to open a portal between worlds by then. The first time we do that is when the point discount system begins to taper off, because when we’re successful then the entire world is going to want to be involved. So you have a year to get a million points to buy an Obsidian Card, which gets you a lifetime 25% discount at any Artificer Guild shop.”
He needed to make 500k and then spend 500k? Holy shit, that was a lot to make in a year. Could he even do that? He had made 90k in 3-ish months, and he was out there doing work all the time. There were only so many missions to go around at his level, after all, and they were snatched up when they appeared.
Mark breathed deep. “A million points.”
Isoko grinned. “We can do that! For a 25% lifetime discount? Fuck yeah we can do that.”
Mark had a sudden thought that made him jolt.
Eliot and Isoko looked at him.
Mark asked, “Can we buy magic lessons with points? I want to know… about a lot, really.”
Months ago, when that demon Leash had come after Mark, he had said some very interesting things that Mark was still coming to terms with. The demon had spoken of adamantium being crystallized mana, and Mark had asked most people he knew about what that could mean, and none of them had known anything at all.
Inquisitor Lola had carefully informed Mark that perhaps he shouldn’t put too much stock in the words of demons, since this demon, Leash, had specifically targeted Mark in order to… create a destabilization? Or something like that? Lola wasn’t sure. Considering that the demon had spoken about Mark turning Addavein back into Addashield and his demon Kanda, and also about elves and resurrection magics, Mark was highly inclined to accept Lola’s suggestion to ignore the demon.
But Mark wanted to know about the crystallized mana thing, and he needed to talk to a mage to learn more about magic, but mages of all sorts were all contracted with each other and their superiors to not allow magical secrets into common understanding. Mark had hit a brick wall when it came to finding real answers about magic.
Eliot wasn’t sure as he said, “I think that mage lessons are… on offer? I’m not sure. I’ll have to review the list... And the list is still fluctuating. If you want mage lessons I could ask about that?”
Isoko said, “I can’t imagine they’d allow magical secrets out of the Guilds. Those guys are bound by laws larger than money, aren’t they?”
Eliot shrugged.
But Mark said, “Well I want magic lessons. I’m sure Addavein will come at me with knowledge about all of that shit eventually, and I want to know if that whole interaction is going to be… an issue, or whatever it could be.”
Was Addavein going to learn about what the demon Leash had told Mark, and would he view talk of turning himself back into Addashield and Kanda as… as a threat? A promise of destruction? Would he want to kill Mark right then and there?
There were a lot of issues about all of that stuff and Mark was still untangling those issues in his mind, so he wasn’t really sure where to even begin to tease apart what Leash was trying to accomplish with his bombshell of information.
There was a very good chance that Addavein would just laugh off Leash’s words, claiming them completely demonic and untrustworthy… Which would probably be the best outcome.
Mark needed multiple sources of information about all of that; that’s all he really knew right now.
Eliot nodded solemnly. “I’ll ask in that direction.”
Isoko asked, “I’d like to learn some magic, too… if I can. But maybe just a flying spell, if they have one…” She scrunched her lips. “If such a thing is even possible?” She asked, “Do you think flying spells exist, at all? Or are all flying spells just creative applications of Powers?”
Eliot readily said, “I have no idea.”
Mark said, “Flying spells have to exist. Addashield never filled the air with the sound of helicopter blades when he flew.”
“Magic is supposed to be super complicated,” Isoko said. “That’s all I really know.”
Eliot said, “I know that it takes a mage a year to learn a new spell and five years to begin to use it properly.”
“Is it just an astral body graft?” Mark asked, “Like the Chosen System? With a god grafting on a new ‘limb’ to the body? But the wizard makes the limb themselves, instead of having it granted? I know that traditional mages often end up with pseudo Powers that don’t work as well as the real thing.”
Isoko hummed. “It could be!”
Eliot shrugged. He asked Isoko, “When is your big exam?”
“Not until next week. I got…”
They chatted for a while about a bunch of stuff.
Mark felt all warm and fuzzy, sitting there on the couch, chuckling about Isoko telling a story about her turning Full Platinum and promptly flipping the hovercar with her extra weight, and then Eliot talked about building metal furnaces for processing ores of all types. Mark talked about monsters he killed, telling Isoko and Eliot that they should come out with him tomorrow, but they were busy, which was understandable.
Eventually Mark turned in, laying down on a nice bed under nice covers. Dawn was just a few hours away, but that was fine. Mark had no monsters to kill tomorrow, and everyone else had other work to do, so they weren’t going to go on a tour of the woods yet. Maybe in a week or two they’d go as a team, back into the woods to kill monsters together. To make the world a safer, kinder place.
Quark’s silver light glowed on the desk in his room, on his computer where his main body lay when Mark wasn’t taking him out for a hunt and inevitably getting him accidentally trashed…
“Security status, Quark,” Mark asked.
Mark couldn’t feel anything out there, outside of the house, but Quark had access to a bunch of Eliot-created systems that could scan differently than Mark could scan.
Quark pinged awake, said, “Scanning,” and then fell silent for a few seconds, before saying, “Readout clear. Nothing larger than a mouse within 100 meters of the house, and nothing on the horizon pointed this way. Misters Alexandro and Gabriel Careed’s house is similarly secure.”
Mark smiled a little. His unionsense told him the same thing.
Mark fell asleep softly, drifting off into dreamland.
He woke several hours later, the light of the noon sun falling onto a white world—
Mark did a double take, waking up all the way.
“Snow?!”
The world was white with freshly fallen snow, and Mark had never seen it in person. Not really.
He hopped right out of bed and rushed into the yard, barefoot, shirtless, and feeling free. It was cold and snow crunched under his bare feet and the wind chilled his body, but it was a good sort of chill and Mark had a tier 5 Body, so he could withstand snow for as long as he wanted. Mark laughed as he kicked the snow, and then he used some cups of thin adamantium to make a pair of scoops, to make a snowball.
Mark tossed the snowball in his hands, smiling the whole time.
It was magical.
And it was still snowing, just a little bit!
The sky was overcast and Eliot and Isoko weren’t home, so they were probably at the settlement staging zone or the hovercar testing center, so Mark was all alone again today. He didn’t mind. He had his own stuff to do.
But first things first.
He built a snowman.
And then he went back inside the house, took a warm shower and got ready to go out. He grabbed a fresh phone for Quark to inhabit, and he spent a half hour querying ideas to solve Quark’s dying-all-the-time issue. Quark helped, and soon, Mark had some good directions to explore.
A short while later Mark left the house and headed for the tram.
He was going to solve this AI housing issue. Quark was too useful, and Mark was beginning to see that, based on current trends, if Mark didn’t do something, he should expect Quark to simply not be there for the second half of any trip into the field. And that seemed intolerable.