The next afternoon I entered my apartment and collapsed on the couch. Wan had met me at the gym that morning and we had spent the next four hours going through every piece of workout equipment in the place. And once I was done and could barely move, he dragged me into the Martial Arts training room at the back of the building and made me spar with him for over an hour, an hour which I spent mostly getting thrown, pinned, or knocked unconscious. Wan insisted that with my HP and SP recovery as high as it was he wasn’t pushing me too far, but both had gotten to level 5 as we trained, with my Martial Arts and Dodging getting to 5 as well. Once I explained to him how the levels of my paradigm worked he informed me that when my Martial Arts got to level 8 he would teach me a specific style, but as they would be tier 1 skills based on the tier 0 skill Martial Arts, he didn’t think I was ready yet. He only let me go after promising to meet him there the next morning as well. He usually took a week off after big jobs, and he planned on using that entire week to whip me into shape.
By the time I had gotten home my energy had fully recovered and the soreness in my muscles was completely gone, but the stress had gotten to me. How was I supposed to deal with the constant torture of this routine? I almost felt sorry for all of the RPG characters I had put through several hour long grinding sessions in the past. I now knew how they felt, minus the need to actually risk my life. When you thought about it that way, Wan was going easy on me.
I got up and ate something, then decided to meditate to clear my head. As I didn’t really need to work on my nanites this time, I tried the one Wan had shown me. Maybe what had happened was a fluke? Sure enough, a minute later I was running to the toilet. Strangely, though, I got an alert that my Endurance had increased to 15 from the meditation. Apparently, I had picked up another two points in it through exercise. May that meditation was good for something other than a colon cleanse, then.
Once I was done I went back to the couch. ‘Hey, Vera. Is there any way I can train my skills faster? I need to get strong even faster, now.’
‘Actually, there are two ways to do so with your paradigm. One would be to fully log in to the System, so that it can process your memories for bonus XP, which I don’t think you want to do yet.’ I shook my head and she continued. ‘The second is for you to choose a class. That would mean choosing which path you want to develop along. The more restrictive the path, the stronger the talent I can give you for it, so the faster you will learn, but the less broad your abilities will be.’
I remembered that this was a special trait of the Role Playing paradigm I had chosen. ‘Fine, show me my options.’ Ten minutes later I had selected one.
After selecting that, I made sure to turn all of my recovery abilities to System control until I figured out how to use them myself. Sure, they wouldn’t grow, but that’s better than not being able to recover.
After that I told a million nanites to gather in the palm of my hand. The flood of data I received overwhelmed me, and I started to lose control of them. By the time I could even collate the data well enough to control the swarm I had bled nine million of them away. Now that I had control, however, I could make them do things.
Seeing them as a swarm I manipulated their shape. First a donut, then a helix, then the helix started spinning. Within a few hours I believed I was capable of making them produce effects, so I tried. I remembered that light was produced when electrons dropped from a higher shell to a lower one in an atom. How could I replicate that? I went through the functions of the nanites that they told me about and saw that they were able to transfer energy to atoms in specific amounts. So I ordered one of them to give a molecule of nitrogen near it just enough energy to make the electrons jump orbits. Once it reported that it was successful, and that the process had produced a photon, I ordered it to do so to any nitrogen molecules in the area that weren’t already excited. A dim blue glow appeared in my hand, visible only because I had turned the lights out, so I ordered the million or so remaining nanites to do the same. The area of light grew bright, and I snapped my eyes closed and stopped giving the nanites orders. Despite the fact that I was seeing spots from the rapid change in brightness, I saw that I had gained the skill “Light Magic” at level 1 and that Nanite Manipulation had went up to level 3. I had found a “save orders” function while learning the system, so I save it under the name “Flash”, and it was added as a skill.
Interesting. I can make new skills, and unlike those I download they start off perfectly adapted to me. They won’t cause problems if I download other abilities later.
I thought back to an ability I had gotten over a week ago but never used, Virtual Armor. If I remembered correctly, it worked by sending out nanites to to intersect incoming attacks, pushing back against them. The best point to start at would probably be to learn to push against objects. I sat a glass on the coffee table in front of me, then pulled out a million nanites and ordered them to run into the mug. The mug, however, immediately exploded. As the nanites pushed too hard in one place, it was essentially the same as shooting it. They were spaced out enough that it wasn’t quite that bad, but I wouldn’t be able to move objects that way. Because it would be dangerous to try to duplicate a gunshot in my apartment, I decided to work on the movement variety for now. I pulled out another million nanites, noticing that I was down to having only 2 MP left due to a lack of energy left in my Nexus. These I told to wrap around a piece of the coffee mug. Once they were around the fragment, I told the ones on the bottom to push on it slightly. I slowly increased the pressure until it lifted off the table. After that I changed to the pressure on it so that it traveled in different directions. Once I could move it in all six directions and rotate it at will, I saved the skill as “Telekinesis”. Once it appeared on my skill list I noticed that it had appeared at level 3, instead of level one like a normal skill.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
‘A little help here, Vera?’
‘You learned to use it well enough that it was the equivalent of a level 3 skill even before you created the skill.’
‘So, that’s possible? I didn’t know you could make skills like that. So if I was good enough with it, I could create a skill directly at level 10?’
‘Theoretically, but it is unlikely you would know everything about how to do something before experiencing it first hand.’
Now that I knew how to move things with my nanites I figured I knew enough to try to duplicate Virtual Armor. Thinking about it, I knew I would need to have a way to detect incoming attacks and calculate their trajectory, have the nanites send that information to the nanites near my skin, and then have the ones near my skin go out to intercept it. They could redirect or block it, but either way as long as I didn’t apply too much force and shatter the incoming object, turning it to shrapnel, I could stop or lessen the attack. I worked on the last part first. I set several objects on the table in front of me, a baseball, a book, an apple, and a glass. The book and baseball would be able to take a decent blow, but the apple would be damaged with a moderate amount of force and the glass would break even more easily. I arranged the nanites into the 2d form of the object and started impacting them with increasing amounts of force. Thirty minutes later, after pulling the nanites back into me several times for a recharge, I was able to shove the objects with enough force to launch them from the table and, with the exception of the glass which shattered on impact with the floor, the objects weren’t damaged significantly by the shove.
I saved this technique as “Shove,” telling it to automatically adjust the strength based on how fragile the object was based on the calibration I had done earlier, and saw that it was at level 4. According to Vera, the automatic adjustment was what put it at that level.
I next set up the detection field. This technique was far simpler than Shove. All I had to do was to send nanites out into a cloud around me and have them send back all of the data that they collected on the area around me to my brain. After setting up a few filters to keep the sheer amount of data from overloading my brain, I saved it as “Detection Field” which started as a level 4 ability. This ability was able to give me basic biometric data about anyone that came within one meter of me, feed me atmospheric data like temperature, humidity, and relative gas pressures, as well as inform me of any object larger than a grain of sand that entered the area, automatically calculating its trajectory. The last one required me to turn down the sensitivity quite a bit, but prevented a splitting headache, as all of the objects from molecules of gas to pollen to viruses and bacteria were blocked from the data. It would inform me if it detected a relative increase in the levels of viruses, bacteria, and the like in the area, but it would be a line item in a spreadsheet and not a detailed analysis of all of those psuedo-lifeforms like before. Once my brain adjusted to the data, I could increase the sensitivity or add additional detection criteria and increase the level of the skill.
Once I had saved it, all I had to do was link “Detection Field” to “Shove” by putting a million nanites on the surface of my skin and having the field send the data to them, ordering them to respond with “shove” if it detected an incoming attack.
Nice. Now that I had completed it, I would be safe. I left the Detection Field and Virtual Armor running, telling them to return to me and recharge if they needed to do so, and took a nap. All of that work had exhausted me. When I woke up some time after dark, I ate supper then played with my nanites some more, ordering them to bump into molecules to add to or subtract from their vibration or to ionize the local air. I saved these as “Heat”, “Cool”, and “Shock” respectively, all at level 1 because I hadn’t put much work into them. Tired of all that I had done that night I decided to call off the training for the day and turned on WebFlix to watch my favorite cyberpunk anime, Ghosts Within Shells.
The next day the training with Wan went a bit better. While the workout routine was made just as hard by him increasing the weight I had to deal with, once we got into the training room things were different. The first time Wan landed a punch he stopped and looked at his hand. “What was that?” he asked. “It felt like I was punching wood. It didn’t hurt, but it didn’t feel like I could do any damage.”
I closed the door to the room and turned up the radio in the room, then quietly told him about developing the Virtual Armor technique last night.
“Interesting. I have something similar, which toughens my skin to prevent damage from attacks.”
“Is that why punching you feels like hitting a punching bag?”
“Pretty much. Though I do wonder what hitting an actual punching bag would feel like to you now.”
He walked over to the one in the room and I hit it as hard as I could. The impact felt strange, though, like I was wearing thick gloves. “Apparently it interprets me trying to hit something as an incoming attack and tried to mitigate the damage. Should I turn it off?”
“Not necessarily. It might actually make you hit a bit harder. I’d keep it on for now.”
We finished up the day with another hour of sparring, with me taking far less damage and only being knocked out once from a throw. Due to being able to stay in the fight longer, my Martial Arts and Dodge skills went up to 7 each, with me even gaining two levels of parry from knocking his blows aside, but my HP recovery and SP recovery barely got any XP. That last was probably due to the fact that they were System-controlled nanite based skills. I said goodbye to Wan and started my run home. I had done far more than 100 situps, 100 pushups, and 100 squats at the gym, so all I needed to complete my daily quest was a 10km run, and my house was just over 11 from the gym.
On my way home I got too focused on the run, though. So when I saw that an area of the sidewalk was blocked off due to having the concrete repoured, instead of going around it I jumped off of the bus stop bench just before it, grabbed a limb of a tree in the middle of the concrete patch, and swung over it, not breaking the run.