I fired off beam after beam into the crowd of monsters, killing them one after another. It felt like I was trying to empty a lake using my hands, every beam I fired would kill one of them, but there were so many more to take its place that it seemed like I wasn’t making any progress. However looking at the Forced Task I could see that I was indeed making progress.

[Forced Task: Get rid of 1,000,000 points worth of hostile entities]

[22,487/1,000,000]

I definitely hadn’t killed over 20 thousand monsters, so it looked like each monster had its own point value assigned to it. I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend every second killing monsters, but, although I was making good progress, I wasn’t fast enough. The spell I had cobbled together was definitely excessive for killing most of these monsters, and I knew that I could kill more of them faster with a better spell. I could try and modify the spell I was using even more, but the sun was going down fast, and the light was growing dimmer by the second. I didn’t think I would be able to modify the spell much more in the time I had left.

If I was more confident in my combat abilities, then I would probably find some way to keep fighting, but my combat experience is almost nothing compared to the amount of time I’ve lived up to this point. I took another look at the crowd of monsters in the building and decided to get away from here before it was too late.

Although the sunlight, and therefore radiation, was still present, I had already healed from the previous radiation damage I had received after spending over an hour in the shop, but it looked like I would have to endure some more if I wanted to get away from these monsters before they could come after me. Walking out of the dark shop, and into the dimming sunlight, I couldn’t feel anything different, but I knew that the radiation was definitely present since the monsters still didn’t dare to follow me.

I ran down the street at a steady pace and used a spell to get rid of my smell, sound, and visual traces; the monsters might be able to use some other kind of tracking method, but these were the most basic precautions I could take when running or hiding from something.

I ran towards a part of the city that looked to be a residential area, it had more apartment buildings than actual houses though. I wasn’t so sure that I would be able to outrun some of the monsters I saw within the store, but if I could get onto the tops of those buildings then I might be able to hop from roof to roof with some magic in order to avoid the monsters. This was just a rudimentary plan though, I wasn’t so sure how smart these monsters were, and if they were smart enough to crowd onto the surrounding buildings, as well as the one I was on, then it would be troublesome to say the least.

As I ran I tried out some of the new controls of Mental Operator, just a little bit, in order to try and familiarize myself with them. So far I hadn’t really found much out, even with all of my free time on level 4 when I fiddled with the controls, but I had at least found out what a few of the controls were for, including the first control I had messed with. Funnily enough that first control was actually focus, or at least focus related in some way. When I turned it all the way up I just happened to start thinking about numbers first, and couldn’t stop thinking about that one thing after that, so much so that I had even stopped breathing. It was a frightening first experience, but anything in excess could be bad, and that first test had definitely been excessive.

Some of the other controls I had figured out during my time fiddling with different controls were mostly mundane things, things like recognizing visual patterns and shapes, understanding large numbers, and differentiating between different kinds of the same color; these weren’t that useful to me, but at least I had pinned down a few more controls. However there was one control that I had come across that had caught my attention. I didn’t know exactly what it did, but I had a guess. Through my tests with this control I realized that it had something to do with recognizing abnormalities or anomalies. The more ‘power’ I put into this control the more I started to be able to differentiate between the incongruent and inconsistent things around me; things like cracks in the sidewalks, the changes in my breathing, and even anomalies in my spells.

This ‘anomaly recognition’ control, as I had named it, was somewhat annoying because it made me notice all of the little inconsistencies around me, so I didn’t really like to turn up this control for the most part, but I decided to turn it up while I was running through the city. I was in a foreign, and hostile, environment, so being able to recognize even the smallest anomaly would probably be helpful right now.

Immediately I was bombarded by everything wrong around me, and it was a lot. Tiny shifts of movement from the inside of the buildings, almost imperceptible uniform tracks on the sidewalks and not the streets, tiny lights on cameras turning on with the setting of the sun, and the sound of movement coming from the direction of the far away shop I had just left. I could tell that, although the sky was darkening, the city was coming to life.

The fact that there are working lights means that there is something still powering this dead city. Whatever it is, it is definitely valuable. I knew that a city couldn’t have nothing of value in it, even if it is an old and abandoned city.

I reached a large intersection in the street, and noticed monsters pouring out of the nearby buildings and immediately looking straight in my direction. Looking back, in the direction I had come from, monsters were pouring out of the buildings and moving towards the places I had passed. Looking ahead of me nothing was exiting the buildings in the direction I was headed, and looking to the sides, the streets perpendicular to me were the same. Only in the path behind me, and the buildings in my immediate vicinity had monsters pouring out of them.

Okay then, it looks like these monsters were designed to hunt something I’m not currently hiding, I wonder what it is that’s drawing them to me. I mean I’m not giving off any visuals, smells, or sounds, so what else could it be?

My mind accelerated to try and figure it out. I might not be so confident in combat, but concealment was one of my specialties. I immediately denied almost every sense I could think of just based on the extreme variety of monsters coming after me, some had eyes, others didn’t, some had ears, others didn’t, so on and so forth. Whatever it was that they were using to track me had to be magical in nature, and the only thing I could think of that would be able to be tracked by every one of these monsters, was my mana, and if that was the case, then I was in trouble.

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For most people, monsters that tracked through sensing mana weren’t that big of a threat, they would just have to be mindful of their mana use and they would be fine. However I was not most people, I had a Magical Physique, and having a Magical Physique meant that the barrier between my Mana Nebula and my body had been breached and I would constantly be leaking mana. For others with Magical Physiques this wouldn’t be too big of a deal, but my mana cells generated 800% more mana than others did. In my current situation that meant that I would attract monsters from much farther away than others would. This distance would lessen depending on how full my mana reserves were, but currently they were near full capacity.

It was not looking good for me.

Seeing that my concealment spells weren’t going to be helping much, I decided to not renew them when they wore off. After all, I would be needing my mana to fight off these hordes of monsters, and hiding wasn’t working anyways.

Running away wouldn’t do much good for me either, that would just gather a bigger crowd. I would have to make my stand in one of the nearby buildings instead of my original plan.

My mind decelerated back to normal, and I turned towards the nearest building that looked at least somewhat defensible. I just hoped that my mana would last long enough to take care of the horde coming for me.

-M-713-

[Electromagnetic interference levels decreasing to negligible levels: Begin start up sequence.]

M-713 identified the routine changes to the outside environment as all of the sensors began to start up and all of the things that were unusable during the solar period became functional once again. Cameras, sensors, and bots all came online and waited for further instructions as they sent back all of their gathered data to the mainframe system.

The mainframe system received all of the data and didn’t find anything within its parameters that needed to be done, so it just waited, like it always did.

M-713 on the other hand, which was currently linked to the mainframe system, noticed something unusual. It started to analyze a certain section of the city where the [Allowed] were seemingly agitated by something and were converging towards a seemingly random building. Normally the [Allowed] didn’t move around and stayed where they were safe during the solar period. The [Allowed] only really moved whenever a [Not Allowed] was nearby.

M-713 recognized the repeating pattern of [Allowed] going after [Not Allowed] and started to scan for the [Not Allowed] that must be somewhere in the vicinity. But M-713 didn’t find the [Not Allowed], it only found some light beams on top of one of the buildings that were deleting the [Allowed] that were converging towards a spot on the roof.

M-713 had come across a situation like this before, that is a situation where ‘light beams were deleting the [Allowed].’ However no matter how much M-713 scanned the surroundings it was unable to find any [Not Allowed].

Since it failed to find any [Not Allowed] anywhere, it went back to scanning the city and making sure the [Priority] was protected.

After a while the [Allowed] that were swarming towards the building were all deleted and M-713 still failed to find any [Not Allowed] anywhere nearby. M-713 was about to stop its focused scanning when it caught something appearing on the roof. M-713 immediately sent out multiple different identifiers, and they all came back with [Not Allowed].

M-713 connected to the mainframe system and sent the necessary codes to get the mainframe system to delete the [Not Allowed] from the city. M-713 had to protect the [Priority], and it had found that letting the mainframe system take care of any [Not Allowed]s usually gave the best results. However the mainframe system didn’t share the same views as M-713 and had to be constantly fed the necessary codes and information, otherwise the mainframe system would completely ignore any [Not Allowed]s.

M-713 continued to observe the [Not Allowed] as it went around the roof. Some of the corpses of the deleted [Allowed] seemingly disappeared when the [Not Allowed] touched them. M-713 logged the anomaly and increased the danger level of this [Not Allowed] to maximum, if it could make things it touched disappear then it could make the [Priority] disappear in the same way.

It had been a long time since M-713 had recognized such a high danger level [Not Allowed]. It booted up its body and got ready to protect the [Priority] with its large metal frame and weapons. It had to siphon off enough mana from the [Priority] to fill its weapon reserves, but it was necessary in order to defend it. If the mainframe system couldn’t deal with this [Not Allowed] then M-713 would have to take care of it itself.

-Radiant-

My mana reserves were far from ideal, with them being less than 10% at the moment. Though, maybe they were ideal, since I wouldn’t be drawing in monsters from as large of a radius.

Over the course of my long drawn out battle with the monsters, I had continued to refine my radiation beam spell, to the point that I had significantly decreased how much mana and time I spent killing the various monsters. Piles of corpses and radiation destroyed monster materials were now scattered around the flat roof. The amount of monsters had thinned to its last dregs, and it allowed me to relax a little as I went about cleaning up the last of the living monsters. Once all of the monsters were dead I folded my arms and checked my progress on the Forced Task.

[Forced Task: Get rid of 1,000,000 points worth of hostile entities]

[147,543/1,000,000]

It’s only been around 3 hours since I arrived on this floor and I’m already almost 15% done with my grinding task. I don’t know If I should be happy or sad right now.

I looked around at all the different kinds of corpses around me. Well, after grinding monsters in games usually comes the loot right? I guess I should collect what loot is left after my beams destroyed everything they hit.

I began to walk towards the nearest interesting corpse when my concealment spells finally ran out. Immediately a sense of wrongness lit up in my surroundings. I hadn’t tuned down the anomaly detection control with Mental Operator, so I was still hyper aware of any changes to my surroundings. It felt like I was suddenly being watched by the city itself, and not in a comforting way.

I had noticed a lot of small changes during my battle with the monsters, but it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was now. It felt like I was OCD and someone had just come into the room and messed everything up.

I decided that I should probably turn back on my concealment spells and get out of here as soon as possible.

Well, I’ve already been detected anyway. I’ll collect my loot first and get out of here afterwards, I’m sure staying here for a bit longer and looting things won’t make that much of a difference.

I went towards the nearest corpse I wanted to collect and stored it inside my Internal World, not knowing what kind of trouble that action had brought upon me.