In this world, there’s nothing more unfair than magic.
“Mana conductivity: 29% Fail.”
The machine announced, crushing any hope Lucas had in becoming a mage.
Mana conductivity is the measurement used to find out how well a person or anything could handle and use magic. Any result below fifty percent was considered a failure and had no talent for magic since simply shaping mana to form spells would be too much of a challenge, and in some cases, cause accidents.
“Mana capacity: 14 Fail.”
Another measurement important for mages, mana capacity. Without any mana to shape, spells won’t activate. But hearing him fail in that category as well hardly mattered when he already failed the first. A lack in mana capacity could be changed using elixirs and artifacts, but failing the first test already meant failing as a mage.
Lucas robotically left the testing room. With his dreams of becoming a mage shattered, he no longer knew what to do. All his life, Lucas dedicated his life to preparing to be a mage. He studied magic circles, runes, enchantments, and many more materials related to magic.
Why did he strive for something that there wasn’t a guarantee?
Because Lucas had the ability to see mana circuits. An invisible path where mana travels as magic is being activated. Normally, having any form of special ability related to mana guaranteed a person becoming a mage, but clearly that wasn’t truly the case.
The moment he got home, Lucas fell to his knees in despair.
“Lucas!” his mother, Valeri ran to his side in concern. “What happened?! Are you okay?!”
Valeri was a mature woman with short black hair and eyes. She was wearing a casual green shirt and blue jeans.
Lucas looked up to her with tear in his eyes. “I failed. I let you down.”
Across the room, his younger sister looked at him with disdain before disappearing up the stairs.
The Atican family had graciously adopted him when he had lost his parents when he was a child. Despite being a single mother of two daughters, Valeri took him in and cared for him like her own child. Because of this, Lucas vowed to repay her after becoming a mage, making sure she would live a life of luxury.
But that dream was shattered when he failed the mage aptitude test.
“It’s alright,” Valeri tried comforting him. “There’s still a lot of things you can do.”
Despites her efforts to comfort him, Lucas knew very well the difference between the future of a mage and a random person. Only five percent of the world’s population had the talent to be mages and within that five percent, only ten percent become globally recognized.
But instead of competing within that five percent, he was in the ninety-five percent that were powerless in a magical world.
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A tan woman with short spiky black hair stood across the counter from Lucas. She was wearing a white tank top under some coveralls.
Despite still being depressed about his dream being crushed, Lucas decided to look for a job under his mother’s recommendation.
“You want to apply for a job at my workshop?” the owner of the shop raised an eyebrow as she gave Lucas a once over.
He was quite fit and stood at exactly six feet tall. He had well-kept black hair and sharp black eyes. Though, even with slightly above-average looks, he would barely stand out in a crowd.
“Artifact maintenance huh,” the shopkeeper rubbed her chin in thought. “Alright. I’ll give you a chance,” she grabbed something from under the counter and revealed it to be a cannon. “Try fixing this bad boy,” the shopkeeper grinned.
Lucas nodded and examined the cannon. Artifacts were items made with the combination of science and magic.
The artifact presented to him was a cannon designed to fire a ball of fire that detonates upon impact. Using his ability to see the mana circuits, Lucas found the enchantment that forms the magic circle for the spell. The mana circuits were connected to two runic symbols. One on the trigger that activates the enchantment and one before the barrel that gathers mana for the spell.
With his ability, it didn’t take Lucas long to find the problem with the artifact. Mana circuits are a two-way path. The path leading to the rune on the trigger was severed, so the rune would activate the enchantment, but couldn’t finish the process of the activation.
“Can I borrow your mana circuit tracer?”
The shopkeeper handed Lucas the tool. He proceeded to trace the mana circuit connecting the enchantment and the rune, making sure the mana had a clear path. In order to test it, they loaded the cannon with a mana stone in the compartment where the charging rune was placed.
Lucas smiled as he watched the mana traveled through mana circuits without any issue.
“I’m done,” he told the shopkeeper.
The shopkeeper grabbed the hand cannon and placed it on a machine with a magic circle carved on top of it. The machine began to glow, appraising the hand cannon. When the machine displayed the results, the shopkeeper whistled in praise. “71% mana conductivity. You actually made it better,” she held out her hand. “Residential card.”
Lucas pulled out his wallet and showed the shopkeeper his Residential card, a form of identification that acts as proof that a person is a legal resident of the sector.
“Lucas Atican? Are you Valeri’s kid?” the shopkeeper asked.
“You know my mother?”
“She’s nice, so she’s pretty well-known in the area. Didn’t know she had a son though.”
“I’m adopted.”
“Still would have heard about a local adopting a kid,” the shopkeeper commented. “You probably don’t go out much huh.”
Lucas just scratched the back of his head. It was true that he barely left the house and often just took care of the chores at home while the others did the ones involving going outside.
“You at least seem fit enough to work, so you’ll be useful. You can call me Agatha,” the shopkeeper said. “I’ll pay you 500 credits a week and you can take commissions if you think you can handle it.”
Lucas smiled. “Thank you,” he bowed.
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“You start tomorrow kid.”
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Working at the workshop managed to keep him distracted and take his mind away from the recent loss of his dream, and it also made use of the knowledge he worked hard to learn.
However, it still didn’t change that he was now directionless.
“You alright kid?” Agatha asked as she entered the backroom, behind her, a small cart followed behind her despite nobody pushing it. “You seem distracted.”
“It’s nothing boss. I was just thinking about something,” Lucas answered. “What’s that?”
Lucas pointed to the cart that suddenly sprouted arms that began unloading the materials on it.
“This? It’s a golem. Never seen one before?” Agatha raised an eyebrow.
Lucas shook his head. Golems were probably the most sought-after artifacts in this world of magic. They can take any form, an exact replica of a human, animal, and even random objects like the cart in front of him.
Despite their fame, this was the first time Lucas had ever seen one. Probably because of how expensive they were, it was rare to see them in the poor neighborhood he lived in.
“Did you make it yourself, boss?” Lucas asked.
Agatha snorted. “If I could make a golem, my shop wouldn’t be in this market area. It's just here to deliver supplies.”
Once the golem finished unloading everything, it left by itself.
“Besides, you need an actual mage to make a golem. Don’t even get me started on the materials needed,” Agatha kept rambling as she left the backroom, making Lucas sweat drop.
With the distraction gone, he turned back to the artifact he was repairing. It resembled a helix sphere with each ring of the sphere having runic symbols and was about the size of a regular basketball. It was an item he received as payment from a commission. Agatha said he got scammed since she’d never seen an artifact like it before, but Lucas held some hope.
For one, the artifact was covered in mana circuits, making Lucas believe it was used a power source. And any artifact used as a power source had a powerful mana stone inside it. Even if it was drained empty, he could still sell it as a jewel.
It took a lot of effort disassembling the artifact and setting aside every part so he could study the runes later, but Lucas finally reached the compartment for the mana stone.
Opening the compartment, Lucas found a purple stone with an emblem of a knight’s helmet. It looks nothing like a mana stone, instead, it resembled a monster core.
This prompted Lucas to do some research. Monster cores with emblems only come from named monsters or monster lords, powerful monsters that could wipe out cities, literal living calamities. And if somehow what he has in hands was real, Lucas was going to flip.
Going off of the emblem on the core, Lucas looked up any monster lord that resembled a medieval knight and had a lot of purple in its color pallet. Thanks to the internet, it didn’t take long for him to find what he was looking for.
The monster was named Percival. Information about its abilities were restricted, but it said that it used dark elemental magic and wielded both a sword and a lance in combat. It destroyed three cities in the northern sector before it was finally defeated by an undisclosed seven-star mage.
“Why wouldn’t they want to take credit for defeating a monster lord?” Lucas muttered as he read the article.
Despite going through the article multiple times, Lucas couldn’t find an image of its monster core, so he couldn’t confirm if what he had was even real.
With a sigh, he just gave up and packed up his things to head home. On his way back, he spotted the guy that paid using the artifact with the monster core inside it. A normal person would approach the guy and ask where he got it, but Lucas was allergic to optional socializing and decided to walk away. But before he could turn away, he witnessed the man get snagged into a van that immediately drove off.
“...”
Lucas rushed back home.
“How was work today?” Valeri asked as Lucas arrived.
Lucas didn’t know how to say that he might have gotten a monster lord’s core and witnessed a customer get kidnapped, so he decided to give a bland answer. “Same as the last few days.”
“You can still go to a university,” Valeri stated.
Lucas shook his head. “We don’t have the money for that. If I work, I can at least help with the expenses.”
Valeri wanted to argue against him, but it was clear that they were tight on money. With her eldest daughter already in the university, it would be hard to finance Lucas as well. Still, she wanted to at least send him to a college.
“I’ll just work,” Lucas said. “There’s nothing else I can do for all of you anyway,” Lucas smiled before heading up to his room.
Once he reached his room, Lucas just plopped down on his bed.
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“Where’s the core?” Luna asked the bloody man in front of her that was strapped to a chair.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man cried out.
Luna landed a swift kick to the man’s gut. “Don’t lie to me. The last traces of the runic seals ended with you!”
“I’m telling the truth! I never had something like a core!”
Luna gritted her teeth and swung her leg, the man’s head exploded from the force of her kick. Blood painted one side of the room red as the man’s headless body dropped to the floor.
It was hard enough that they didn’t know what they were looking for other than it was some kind of core, but now, they even lost the signal they were tracking.
“Ugh! You made a mess,” Tyson complained as he entered the room. “Did you even bother asking about anything he came in contact with recently?”
“What’s the point of that? The mana trail ended with him,” Luna stated. “He was the last person touching the core with the seals still active.”
Tyson sighed. “Asking him about where he had been recently would have helped,” he grumbled. “It’s not like we can turn this whole place upside down.”
Luna didn’t grace him with a response and just huffed.
“At least we know it’s in the market area,” Tyson muttered and left the room.
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“Payday!” Agatha yelled as she entered the backroom of the workshop.
She slammed five blue bills on his workbench, each bill worth a hundred credits each.
Lucas picked up the money. “Thank you.”
“Keep up the good work kid! With how fast and good you fix artifacts. I could even charge some extra,” Agatha gave him a thumbs up. “Keep it up and you’ll get a raise,” Agatha cackled.
Lucas wondered if she was joking.
Hopefully she wasn’t.
Getting back to work, Lucas had to fix a cooling artifact. While he was fixing it, he heard the sound of the workshop’s entrance door open as the bells chimed. The conversation between the customer and boss caught his attention.
“Did someone with a core visit this shop?” the customer asked.
The voice was somewhat feminine, but it was clearly a man’s voice. Lucas couldn’t be sure since he was in the backroom, but he believed his guess was accurate.
“A core? This is a workshop pal. We’re not allowed to deal in monster cores,” the boss replied. “Nobody came here with one though if you’re just asking that.”
“It should resemble a runic battery covered in seals,” the customer pressed, and it seemed boss showed a reaction. “Someone did come here with one,” the man’s tone seemed certain.
“Yeah. A guy came here to have his artifact fixed and tried to sells us something that looked like a runic battery.”
“Is it here?” the man quickly asked.
“Nah. It looked completely drained when he brough it here. Buying an empty battery is worthless, so I refused.”
“So he just left?” the man didn’t seem convinced.
“After getting his artifact and paying he left.”
“Do you know anything about the man?”
The man kept pressing about the man who gave him the core and Lucas wondered why the boss was hiding the fact that Lucas received the battery as payment.
“The man, not a lot. But I know he hangs around a guy that’s pretty famous for being a junkyard diver, Devin is the name I think.”
“I see. Thank you for the information,” the man replied and a moment later, the sound of the entrance door opening chimed again.
Another moment later, boss entered the back room. “Pack up and head home,” Boss suddenly said as she began packing herself.
“Why? What happened?” Lucas asked in concern.
“Just do it kid. If you want to live, you have to get out of this place,” Boss said in a rush. “The Viper runners just showed up.”
“The what?”
“They’re bad people kid,” Boss revealed as she began grabbing all the valuable materials in the backroom and packing them into her sub-space bag. “Criminals working as mercenaries,” she revealed.
“Why didn’t we just give them the core? You know I had it,” Lucas suggested. “They might leave once they get it.”
“Sure, after destroying the whole market!” Boss yelled. “It doesn’t matter kid. Whether they find it or not, they’re going to destroy this place. It’s better if they don’t get it.”
Lucas was about to say something more, but chose to keep his mouth shut and just listened to his boss. He grabbed his bag and packed all the parts of the core he disassembled and headed home.