Michael Thundercock looked proudly at his creation. In order to become an archmage a magician had to create an artifact capable of combining two schools of magic and he was actually proficient at three.
Astral magic, Space magic and Electric magic. On the table laid the controller that would allow him to combine astral and space magic, endowing a person with the ability to scry far away places while in astral form, and transport themselves to the same place.
Unlike traditional teleporting, this would eliminate the need to leave a marker on the other side, or to use coordinates that could be easily altered by shields and other easy anti-teleport defenses, instead the scout would simply find the place themselves in spirit form. This opened them to attacks by astral and psychic power, but it was an acceptable trade-off in order to eliminate the uncertainty of teleportation.
Simply put, a failure in astral magic would leave a person with mental damage, while a failure with teleportation would leave the pieces of their bodies in different places at the same time.
His invention was a capsule capable of enveloping his whole body, a rectangular prism as tall and wide as the height of a person and as long as a bed and a half. A series of tubes and crystals connected it to a console full of switches and dials, which he was currently installing on the inside.
There was always the possibility of astral magic going wrong, and leaving his spirit stranded at the edge of the world, thats why Michael was adamant about including a series of survival systems on the inside. Nutritional sap from the driads at the forbidden forest. Forbidden by his mom, who never liked him hanging out with suspicious women, healing elixir made from king slime’s plasma and dragon’s blood, the medicinal plant, not the actual dragons.
A massage bed to keep his body toned, or so said the ladies from the.. ahem, special massage parlor where he got it from. An elemental system to keep himself warm with fire magic, well ventilated with air magic, cleaned with water and earth magic to make the capsule sturdy just in case his enemies decided to attack him while he was scouting them in advance.
For Michael was no fool, no doubt his enemies would be readying themselves to strike at him before he could complete his work. And surely they would still be trying to kill him after that, so he had to be ready, and kill them first if the chance presented itself.
The laws of Castia Kingdom declared an archmage as full blown court nobility, and gave them access to all kinds of legal benefits and protections. Something the other two archmages would not allow if they could.
For he had dreams of elevating his family’s station, maybe marry a noble girl, get some knighthoods for his brothers and cousins, live the noble life and establish a new house.
Michael had chosen this path because those snobs at the academy would rage, and say electric magic was not a proper school, but merely a branch based on overcharging energy. A sort of brute force attack based on the ability to condense magic.
And they may be right, for all his finesse and control Michael had found little uses for electricity outside of combat, but his family legacy made him call himself an electric High Mage, if only in the privacy of his home.
Thinking of home Michael set his artifact aside and went to the kitchen. From the oven a fragrant aroma emerged, a soft taste of white meat.
Born as a humble farmer, Michael had a big weakness towards thunderhen meat, the main production of the family farm. To honor his roots he always had the coldbox stuffed with the thunderhens and thundereggs sent from home, plus the occasional whole thundercock for his crafting.
The male of the thunderbird species produced fine plumage, capable of transmitting electricity in wide arcs, and the breeding of champion specimens gave his family their name.
During the previous Ice Giants invasion, Michael rose to prominence by the use of electric darts, fashioned from the bones and feathers of the best thundercocks his family had ever produced.
On a string on his neck hung his very first dart, made from the beak and feathers of Hugh, the first thundercock he raised from the egg to the grave. Dead while fending off an attack from the local fire foxes.
It was also his most used dart, and the merits and wealth he accumulated during the ice invasion afforded him the resources to delve into the research of space and astral magic.
His main method of fighting consisted on using the astral to sense enemies, and once located he would engage and strike with a volley of electric darts. Those which landed would casue damage, while the ones that failed to connect would pierce into the ground and become markers for his teleportation ability.
The Lighting Striker, they called him, and many believed he actually used the electricity as a medium to transport himself.
Throwing darts and transport to them with lightning?
Absolute nonsense!
But Michael had a need to prove those snobs that his family legacy was worth something, and to set aside this urge had been the main problem when researching his artifact.
A combination of space and electricity that allows you to drop thunderstrikes on any enemy!
A combination of electricity and astral that can trace people’s minds by sensing their brains' electric activity!
They were nice ideas but too impractical to implement. The power of thunder would collapse any portal they tried to use, and the brain’s electricity was too weak to be sensed from afar, it was much easier to simply track a mind via psychic waves, or to use regular teleportation and then rain down thunder on his enemies.
If it ain’t broke dont fix it.
Begrudgingly, Michael had set aside his family pride and developed his scouting capsule, but that didnt meant he could not add a personal and completely unnecessary touch to it. The artifact had wheels and could actually be moved like a magical carriage, using thunder to ram into enemies.
A literal thunderstrike.
Michael finished his roasted thunderhen and completed his capsule, the artifact buzzing into life.
Before entering Michael double checked all the defenses and power sources of his magician’s tower and found everything in working order, then raised his shields and alarms and got into the capsule.
*****
Dor De Dormantis sat on his scrying table, carved with runes and energy conduits capable of improving the ability of his crystal ball. The upstart’s tower visible inside the glass.
The tower lit up into a flow of magic and Dor knew Michael had set up his defenses.
This was his archmage artifact, a scrying ball capable of detecting magic flows at a distance. The plebeian’s tower may be impervious to magical spying, but an experimented magician could infer his activities from the flow of materials, and the energy output.
“He is all armored up” Dor said to his companion, if Dormantis was a very tall and skiny individual Kon De Kontakerous offered contrast by being fat and muscled, the pair sporting large bushy beards. Both archmages had clashed on the past and subconsciously played into their physiques as a way to declare their enmity, but the arrival of new High Mages changed things and forced them into a unified front.
The crown’s budget for archmages never changed unless it was time of war, meaning they would have to share their resources with a third party. This alone was egregious enough to justify an alliance, but if succeeding Michael would have access to restricted resources required for their own advancement. And a lot of political weight to pave the way for more plebeians.
Its not that they cared that much about rank, as the ability to manipulate magic was a very solid indication of power. But having a bigger pool of aspirants meant they may see even more archmages on the future, which would thin their resources even more.
After all, magicians born from nobility would sooner or later forego the path of magic in order to mess with the local politics of whatever faction their families belonged to. While plebeian magicians with talent often had no other way of power than to aim for the position of high mages or archmages.
They were not even particularly angry at Michael for rising to power, but for not becoming an archmage during the Ice War. Had he obtained the title then, the crown would have been forced to increase the national budget to accommodate a third archmage.
But no, the boy had to go and use regular magic on battle, lighting magic of all things. It was an unexplored branch barely recognized, and it had to be developed on the go in order to use it for the archmage artifact.
Had he focused on his astral and space affinities he could have developed his artifact in time for things to have worked up perfectly for the three of them.
But no, he had to get thundercocky.
Speaking of which, the two archmages were munching on a roasted thunderhen, one of the many things they had been curious about while spying Michael’s supplies. In a sense it was a shame they had to turn on the boy, but both old men had a need for a supply or dragon’s blood (the monster, not the medicinal plant) to extend their lifespan, and the resources required to refine the life elixir were too scarce and restricted by the crown.
The royals would simply not give the archmages that much freedom with resources of that level, for fear of a coup. Thus both of them had been slowly but surely accruing materials, under the disguise of requiring them for other projects over the decades.
They were totally staging a coup tho, the royals were right on denying them total freedom.
Five years before Michael arrived, both magicians had already set aside their differences, and realized they were actually planning the same. To take down the royals and instate a magocracy, a country dedicated to discover the secrets of the universe.. so they could harvest all the benefits from such research.
They were totally giving their own set of benefits to the plebeians tho, they both understood the need to keep a happy and productive industrial base. And had slowly but surely turned the magical academy into a training place for bureaucrats and researchers.
Their graduates became the paper pushers of the kingdom, trained to use low level artifacts for everyday use, and had a high chance of supporting them once they took over. And the army’s healers and artillerists were also their former graduates, they would surely appreciate the rise in status.
With the archmages themselves as military might and the bureaucracy not trying to take them down, they were confident on holding the country with a tight grip for a year, the minimum time required for any rebellion to die of hunger, and for the people to see the benefits of their rule.
But Michael threatened to hog the resources they were already hogging for themselves, delaying the project at such a crucial moment. The life elixir and their new archmage armaments, the very thing required to complete their military prowess.
Thus, they studied him while he worked on his artifact, and his desire to marry a princess sealed his fate.
Why could he not be a normal cocky and powerful youth?
A regular archmage of that age would had the power too high up his head, and could be easily convinced to join a coup. But this boy was too mature for his age and wanted to do great things inside the system, instead of the perpetual young dream of overturning it.
And well, they were simply not willing to share the power.
Whatever, they were not actually going to kill him, just to temporarily take him down. If he survived, that is.
Their observations found the boy was doing some kind of astral magic, and that was a field on which many people lost themselves while traveling in spirit form.
Once Dor confirmed the tower was locked by its own defenses Kon used his own archmage artifacts to surround it. Kon De Kontakerous was a specialist of force magic and air magic, his artifact a device capable of locking itself into place on the air, or to strike with enormous power.
The artifact was actually several spheres that could work in formation. With Don’s expertise on magical flow they set up a spherical perimeter of artifacts around the tower. That would disrupt any magic projected from the inside, forcing it to flow outside.
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In theory this would keep Michael’s astral form outside his body until he died, but he could have countermeasures against that. So they would simply invade the tower while he was strapped outside.
The magical sensor detected a flow of astral magic trying to re-enter the tower, nice.
Enemy or not, Michael was almost an archmage and his tower would surely have enough research material for them to make an artifact themselves. Because of this they were unwilling to destroy the traps and shields on fear of ruining the research and proototypes they may encounter, so they set up to dismantle the defenses the slow way.
It would take them a few months, or maybe a year, but with the life elixir on the way they had plenty of time
*****
Michael exited his tower in astral form and congratulated himself for the functionality.
Astral magic was a branch that mixed psychic power, soul magic and energy manipulation. It was not very understood but it was widely accepted that one’s mental fortitude could affect the ability to transverse the astral.
This made it very unreliable for something like scouting, because the body’s form and the environment would be altered by the traveller’s mental shenanigans. Giving a very incomplete and biased picture of whatever they encountered.
But his capsule filtered the mind pollution by using the body as a base for the astral construct, making his vision really accurate. Using the body as a base for a mental discipline, he couldn’t help to feel smug at his resourcefulness.
Astral travel was akin to making a secondary soul to host the mind, and then sending it around to do stuff.
Michael exited the tower and flew around, delighted on how the buildings and trees of his estate looked the same as he saw them with his physical eyes. That is, until he found the old geezers on a far away building several estates away.
Dor De Dormantis and Kon De Kontakerous, Michael had their names memorized from the way they loved to repeat them whenever they showed up. Michael found them by following a bunch of flying artifacts that set up camp around his tower, and after confirming their identities Michael flew back to activate his non-passive defenses.
He suspected he was screwed when he could not enter back into his tower. Somehow they repelled him despite being in astral form. Then Michael tried to teleport his body to the outside and found the communication interrupted. Somehow the connection was not cut, but blocked. Maybe because he was not dead?
Michael went to the base of his tower, towards the cache of magic crystals and magical formations he used to power up the place. The astral combined several types of energies in unknown ways, but it was general knowledge that it was very hard to affect anything non-astral.
But energy was energy, and Michael hoped he could piggyback into the magic flow from the ground to the top.
Making an effort to adjust his perception he managed to see the magic being extracted from the ground and slowly flowing upwards. He squeezed himself into the ground and let the magic flow carry him, but upon reaching the area covered by the enemy spheres his astral form was ejected from the tower.
So they knew, somehow the spheres were attuned to reject astral constructs like his current form and not magic in general. But he did manage to squeeze himself into the magic flow, that was a way he could use.
Over the next day Michael repeated the process hundreds of times, annoyed to see the two fossils arriving to examinate his defenses.
Joke’s on them, his tower was designed to use enemy attacks and incorporate their magic into their flow. The addition of those spheres would made his tower even more sturdy. Thats how he was trying to enter, by pretending to be an invading power the tower would redirect into the energy containers.
He kept failing and being expelled by the enemy spheres, but every try got him closer to his goal.
Right now he had almost memorized how to make a circuit from the base to the top, entering and being expelled almost like a projectile.
A few hundred more tries and he would be able to make a hole at the top of this energy flow. And once he did it the tower would detect this change and make it permanent, as he designed it to mess with enemy aretifacts.
It was nothing fancy, just a “If the enemy’s magic flow changes by our interference, keep it changed.” And the tower detected its own energy flows as a favourable interference.
Another day and he finally made it, the top of the tower opened a little window, not enough for his soul to pass but he could brute force his entry if he had enough power, or complete another hundreds of circuits and made the entrance wider.
“Something is weird” Doir said and his companion raised an eyebrow to signify his curiosity “The tower forced our artifacts to stay locked in, but they magic flow has moved a little at the top. I wonder if the boy is trying to get inside”
“I do assume you have a contingency for that” Kon said without much worry. Magicians were very prepared people.
“Of course i do” said Dor, and he increased the power of his astral-repelling distortion. It would damage the artifacts on the long run, but it was more than enough to deal with temporary problems.
Michael’s astral form flowed again from the ground to the top of his tower, when a very intense distortion squeezed him outside the magic flow.
This time the power was too great and he could not keep his astral form stable, he became a ball of energy that shoot upwards, as if fired from a cannon.
With his form distorted his capsule activated the contingency measures and tried to teleport the astral form back into the capsule, but the distortion from the enemy artifacts mangled the teleportation. The whole tower flashed and the enemy artifacts malfunctioned, their energies getting stuck to the tower for good, and increasing its defensive power.
The two archmages had to ran away when the magic destabilized and the tower flashed with lightining.
As for Michael, his astral form was teleported outside the planet, flowing into the reincarnation circle as if he was a soul.
*****
Planet Earth, year 2222.
Jon Jonson stared at his monitor at a loss, the bosses told him to patch that glitch that made the game open accounts out of nowhere. The first five years they left if there because it boosted the numbers and made them look better in front of the investors, but the game was finally picking up and they wanted more accurate data, to chart events to keep the players engaged.
The account glitch simply popped up from one server to another, creating random players that did nothing and were deleted after a while by the admins. Jon was tasked with solving it but he had no idea of how to do it.
Previously, the company had hired “HR specialists” to “boost productivity,” and they rearranged the place, taking the programmers away from their areas of expertise and dumping them wherever they felt like. Once done, the specialist left and the company field workers had to re-learn the skills required for their new areas.
Seriously, if not for the recent downfall of the Five Great Dictatorships, and their influx of new users to the internet, the game would have folded by now. But the executives assumed the number of users grew up because of their reorganizations and happily gave themselves a big bonus.
Jon was fed up with it, and many other developers shared the feeling, so he was mostly wasting time and pretending to look at the code while browsing the internet and trading SVM stocks, or “savimgs.”
It was more like gambling, trying to find a heavy asteroid to bet on.
But mostly he spent his time playing traditional videogames, the kind he could easily switch from whenever his bosses patrolled the area.
Another hour and another round of the bosses checking if everything was running efficiently. Jon deleted a big chunk of code without trying to understand the documentation left on it, and ran the server again.
It worked, the test server stopped producing new accounts after the first one. In his experience this kind of miracle solution was best isolated, so other programs couldn’t access it by mistake and ruin it. Jon looked for an area that no one would mess with, one of the many pockets inside the mountain’s stone they created just for that purpose, and loaded the test server into the main server.
The main engine dictated that every place should be connected to give the players a feeling of exploration, by procedurally generating tons of nooks and crannies and placing random loot at the end. The developers solved this by creating small caves with tunnels, filled with wind force towards the outside, and then covering the place with a rock illusion. This made it impossible to enter while still connecting the caves to the game.
The method was called “Mystery Egg Glitch Encapsulation,” or MEGE. Anyway, Jon megged the new character and called it a day, then spent a few minutes checking if it was liable to cause any problems, but the avatar just twitched like a burning bug, so he returned to his games.
*****
Michael arrived in astral form to a new planet, all disorientation gone after spending an unknown time floating inside a stream of energy. To his astral senses the new world was a place devoid of magic, other than souls and astral energy. Strange, tall buildings stood in the city he arrived on. Lights everywhere and an intense buzzing similar to his tower could be felt from the entire place.
Obviously the natives switched to another form of energy, due to the lack of ambient magic. But fascinating as it was, Michael had to look for a way to preserve his astral form that away from his capsule. He could feel the connection to his capsule, which had his full body and soul keeping the connection to his mind. Maybe he could force the activation of the emergency retrieving system, and open a teleport back home, this would drain all of the tower’s energy, but there was a danger of the interference still running on reserve power, and denying him access to his body.
If he failed he would be left in a weakened state, and without the power of his capsule and tower to draw from. He had to find a way to strengthen his astral form, only then he would feel confident on surviving the return trip.
Astral magic was a product of mind power, if he could attack himself to a place or artifact of reverence, maybe he could begin to harvest mental energy.
Michael flew around the place, marveling at the number of amenities available to the common population, and was both shocked and delighted to discover it all ran on lighting power.
It was however, a much controlled version of the lighting he knew. All this time of research, and the answer was not to increase the power of thunder, but to decrease it!
Michael reasoned that following the threads of energy would led him to important places, and he found himself arriving to even stranger machines. They were big and squared, some redirected lightning into the houses and others carried only the minimum traces of power.
If the energy source they used was stronger it would be so violent to control, thus Michael decided to follow the delicate flows back to their source.
He spent a week trying to understand this society, and was terribly shocked to see they had capsules very much like his own, but sleeker and devoid of defenses.
Unfortunately he could not read the screens of their artifacts, as all energy looked as a flat sheet of electricity to his astral senses. but he could make some guesses about the nature of the machinery.
Michael followed the lightning back to the source and arrived at a gigantic machine, as big as a building ten stories high and half as wide. It operated on delicate energy, but the concentration was so intense that half of the building was dedicated to a cooling system, to keep the machine from melting.
Instead of using magical materials resistant to heat they simply cooled them on the fly. So ingenious!
Michael examined the machine without managing to understand a bit of it. But realized he should try with the capsules they had on the building. He arrived to the room holding them and fused with it, trying to activate it as if it was his own capsule, but using subtle lightning instead of magic. His astral form was incapable of large displays of energy, but that actually helped him when working with such level of subtlety.
It worked.
The capsule sucked Michael’s astral form and he appeared on a platform inside a void, strange stars of bright colors floated on the distance, spinning. And in front of him, in the middle of the platform floated a message.
Welcome to Realms Online.
Michael had no idea what to do of the situation.
He walked around the platform and was shocked to see the world floating on the distance at his left, and to his right another world, this one surrounded by spinning discs of energy, many of which merged into the planet.
Was this a capsule to explore other worlds?
His own status as a prodigy was not much, when plenty of citizens had access to artifacts of the same level.
That moment completely shattered any of Michael’s pride, to think that such civilization existed, capable of massively exploring other worlds in astral form!
Welcome to Realms Online.
Michael bowed in a greeting to the strange message.
Please select a username.
A name?
“Thundercock” he said.
Name already in use.
Please add a modifier.
“Are there other breeders of thunderbirds on this world?”
It made sense to have thunderbird farmers on a world full of lighting.
“How many of us could it be in here?” he asked to himself.
500 users with the name Thundercock.
“Those are a lot.”
Please select a username.
“Michael Thundercock.”
Creating account.
Verification required.
Please introduce an e-mail/Social network ID.
...
...
Admin log-in override.
Account verified.
Please choose an avatar.
Admin log-in override.
Automatic avatar generation.
Biometric avatar generated.
Login in.
Please select a starting city:
-Astral Archipelago
-Forest Fortress
-Hail Halls
-...
Admin override...
Megging in process...
The platform vanished and he was hurled towards the other world. His new form crashed into a mountain and kept diving in, until he stopped at a small cavern.
Welcome to Realms Online!
Finish the tutorial and visit a guild to select your class
Or try your hand at discovering a hidden class!
What?
Michael had no idea to what exactly happened, but when he tried to move his body spasmed like a fish out of water, who just happened to get a seizure at the same time.
It took him close to an hour to adjust to his new form, he was no longer an astral projection but a solid entity. Michael tried to feel the connection to his capsule but he was too weak, and he had so many questions.
How exactly had he been bestowed a new body?
Where was this world?
Would he had to open a portal back to the first world, and then back home?
Would he still be able to harvest mental energy?
There was no point on asking without trying to find more information. Michael observed his surroundings, he was inside a cavern and a tunnel high up directed outside, Michael climbed, and once he stepped on the tunnel a powerful force pushed him outside. He crossed a rock illusion, and arrived inside a larger tunnel as tall as a cathedral hall, daylight illuminated the place from the distance on the tunnel.
When he tried to enter back he found a force pushing him outside. Michael concluded this places to be arrival points protected from whatever threats this place offered.
“The message said i should complete the tutorial” he said to himself.
Welcome to the tutorial.
Kill an enemy to gain your first level.
Gain five levels to unlock the class system.
You can dismiss the tutorial on the status screen.
Of course, with a whole society dedicated to astral exploration there would be a lack of proper teachers, as they would be busy exploring the astral themselves. Obviously they developed certain tools to help the newcomers, like this... spiritual assistant?
“But how do i access this status thing?”
Michael Thundercock
Level 0
-Inventory
-Class (Locked)
-Equipment
-Settings
Even stranded on an unknown land, away from his body, away from his resources, merely a mental construct, Michael couldn’t help to feel excited about the unknown and the adventure. Specially knowing there was a whole society behind this.
To see such marvels!
To have companions as avid of greatness as himself!
He went out of the tunnels and into the daylight, ready for everything