(Heaven’s Key, Warehouse By The Dock)

[https://i.imgur.com/EJwrXyP.png]

> Yo! I need a gas mask to get the drones! Get it for me from some vendor! Thx!

I ignored the message from my other self as I am in a tense situation. Rifle at the ready, I slowly make my way forward past lines of metal storage crates. They are mostly red, but some are blue and green, with most of them having some metal dents for easier handling by the machines.

As I move past them at a walking pace, slowly I am followed by a gray fog. In its passage, the metal objects are eaten away as if being stripped of their matter. They are being desynthesized in slow motion.

We, me and my enemy, are some distance from the docks. The seas in the distance are covered by the same telltale fog following me. There are no sounds of seagulls, but I can hear the roiling waves.

Wearing my signature red dress, I bet I stick out like a sore spot as I make my careful steady steps forward the center. The strategy I took at the start of the match was to sprint towards the center, but then I switched to slow deliberate steps as I got closer. Since the center is an advantageous position given the environmental hazard, I’ve assumed my opponent would try the same thing.

Right now I am carefully scanning the background for any signs of the enemy. For any little change. I trust in the eyes that this body came with.

I don’t see that I am already in the sniper scope of my enemy’s rifle. She must have spotted me first somehow. And out of my line of sight, she popped out of the window of a heavy iron machine and took aim with her rifle just as I emerged beyond a crate obscuring her from me. I didn’t see or hear her pull the trigger. She came out, took aim and pressed the trigger in only half a second.

I couldn’t hear the supersonic bullet. The only thing I saw was a brief flash despite the daylight. That was enough. Immediately dropped to the ground from my tensed stance. As I did so, I turned my aim towards where the flash came from. The bullet whizzing above me at high velocity, I spotted her leaning her rifle against the ledge of a window, 300 meters away. In this very small amount of time before I hit the ground, I took aim and fired directly at her head. The bullet flew out, and struck through her forehead, blasting out the other side of her skull.

At that point I impacted the ground which unbalanced me for a moment.

My opponent wasn’t that weak to be done in by a mere headshot and immediately took aim and fired again. At the same time I fired again myself. Our two bullets closely passed each other as they soared through the sky and struck true.

Her bullet struck me through between the brows, hit my brain core and blasted it out of my skull. It rolled across the ground to come to a stop a few feet away out of my body.

My bullet struck her between the brows and knocked her own brain core out of her head in a similar manner.

At that point, I realized I had lost and resigned. My opponent was closer to the center and I did not have any drones I could use to move my own core closer to it. I bet my opponent did have something she could use to reattach her own core to the body or move mine into the fog to be disassembled.

I have no regrets at this loss, that second shot she made was an amazing one. I didn’t think she'd be able to recover and fire at my weak point accurately from this distance.

I still have a lot to learn.

(Heaven’s Key, Morty’s Domain, Lightning Wild League Lounge #1)

[https://i.imgur.com/En6gHfw.png]

The place had various wooden benches and tables set up, as well as a bar on one end. There were a bunch of rough looking guys and good looking women here, sporting weapons. I look out of place in my magical girl kind of outfit here, while they all have a military look. Soon enough, I am accosted by my opponent.

“You!!!” Inglene pointed her finger at me. About the same size as me, in military fatigues, she had fluffy blonde hair reaching past her shoulders and a sharp blue gaze that was now directed in a glare. Her pretty face was tense in anger at me.

“What is it, Ing?! You lost?” Some of the guys teased her. She glowered at them.

“Maybe I will next time!” Then she turned to me again. “How did you dodge that first shot? And how could you possibly land the second one from that position?! Tell me!” She ordered me.

“Ehehe…” I smile bashfully. “My mind simply works fast. I saw the flash and had like a quarter of a second to dodge after that.”

“Really?” Inglene’s jaw dropped at this.

“Yeah. Had you used a laser weapon, you’d have definitely gotten me.” I told her. “Well, you still won anyway. How about we get a drink to celebrate it?” I offer her.

“Mhhh…fine. At what rate are you running your mind, anyway?” She asked me.

This was one of the noteworthy changes I’ve made to the game. Since the humans have all died in their worlds before entering this game, I took the chance to get rid of their fleshy brains and granted them the rank 7 brain cores. Otherwise, none of them would be any competition to me.

“It’s a secret.” I smiled cutely at her.

Humans can in fact improve their processing rate in this game, but when they do so, they do it in short durations, like when they need to take aim. That is how Inglene made such an accurate shot despite being surprised. She probably increased it by 100x just for the duration of combat and had the time to carefully take aim despite how quickly it happened.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

I can’t possibly tell anybody that I am using the 100x billion fold rate the entire time. Nobody would believe me to begin with, and such an otherworldly thought speed would out me immediately as a non-human.

“You minx. I’ll lazor you next time, you hear me.” Inglene jokes.

“I’ll get some drones so you can’t get the drop on me.” I replied, deadpan.

“Over here.” One of the rough guys waves his hand at Inglene.

I got an idea for a gift for Inglene. It takes me only a little time while we are walking to a table, but I make and test a little program that could speed up time for the user automatically when an unexpected event, like a flash, or some kind of danger happens.

I mail it to her, with an explanation on how to use it. This earns me a grateful look from her. I push my fingers to my lips and go shss. She nods.

She warmed up to me after that.

(Eloe POV - Heaven’s Key, Eloe’s Domain, Work Room)

[https://i.imgur.com/27sfBg0.png]

I finish writing up the assignment for Euclid, and check it over to make sure that I did not give her any unnecessary data that would allow her a deeper glimpse at the whole machine, in this case an assault drone. I only want her to work on the power conductance aspects of the machine. A lot of work went into it already, and I’d be happy with any fractional improvement she could come up with. It would improve my odds in the Heaven’s Key tournament.

I have an agreement with various people, as well as Morty to allow me to access their records.

I went over Euclid’s records. During the day she challenged 4 people. I bring up the relevant images.

(TODO Image: A buff black man, Largo in fact, getting his brain core blown out of his skull from a close range shot by Euclid’s handgun. They were both reaching for the guns at their holsters and Euclid was faster.)

(TODO Image: A heavily armored man, clutching his bleeding groin in front of Euclid who has her rifle pointed at his head.)

(TODO Image: A high speed lunge by Euclid who is wearing heavy metal combat gloves with long spikes on them. She looks like a blur as her right first strikes towards her opponent while her left fist restrains the assault rifle of the man in military fatigues. It fires pointlessly into the ground away from them.)

(TODO Image: Euclid and her opponent's brain cores are flying out of their skulls at the simultaneous hit.)

She did the smart thing of challenging some low ranked meatheads before moving up to stronger opponents. She nearly won against Inglene who is a rank 7 despite being caught off guard by the ambush. In Inglene’s records I could see that she had access to scouting drones. In large maps with plenty of hiding spots like the one Euclid was on, that will always give her opponent a large advantage. Inglene also had the superior weapon for the engagement.

At close range, Euclid seems to be unbeatable even against opponents who have much greater physical strength than her.

My eyes haven’t failed me. I got the sense that Euclid was special somehow and I am getting my answer now. There is no chance of her dropping out of the Great Game at her level of power anymore.

Well, Euclid, you wanted a challenge, so let’s see how you deal with this.

As I think that, I sent her the assignment, not expecting much.

If she can improve the design by a fraction of a % that would be good enough to make her my apprentice.

(Heaven’s Key, Euclid’s Domain, Atelier)

[https://i.imgur.com/uGF3ufL.png]

I repurposed the main room of my domain into an atelier, so there were various painting setups and canvases throughout, but right now I was seated at a spacious drawing desk with pencil in hand. I used to hate art back when I was a human, but now that my memory is much better, I can overlay the visual image across the canvas and just have to drag my pencil across it. This would have been completely impossible before, but now it is very easy for me.

It actually makes art fun as the main difficulty becomes imagining interesting things instead of struggling where to put the strokes.

Though, right now I am not drawing anything particularly interesting, instead I am recalling the image of Eloe during our date and enshrining her beauty for posterity. It is just something I wanted to do as I am falling in love with her.

As I put the last line down, I get mail from her.

> Hi, Euclid, congrats on your good performance in the LW League. I’ve been keeping tabs on you. As you requested, here is something I’ve been working on. It is an assault drone I’ve been using. I’ve replaced most of the components with dummies. Your job will be to optimize the power consumption. I’ve attached the data as well as the testing harness.

I took a look.

(TODO Image: Blueprint of a medium sized drone, roughly 30-50cm in various dimensions. It is elongated with a barrel at the front end as well as sensors on various parts of the body as well as wings and thrusters on its back.)

It looks pretty cool.

> To help you on this, I’ve included some of the books on drone construction and subjects related to it. In total it should be around 30-40 thousand pages. If you are serious about being my apprentice you’ll have to master this material. Both for the sake of completing your assignment and because I will be quizzing you later on.

I take a look at the data. I do not even bother studying it directly, instead I make use of a program that I’ve made previously to prepare unstructured documents into representations that my memory system itself uses. Then I made use of another program, quite similar to the memory distiller I am using for memory merging, and pushed it all into my memory via supervised learning.

I look inwards and see that I can now visualize the entirety of the contents of the books as if I had been studying them for years directly.

It took me less than a minute to go through the process.

I’ll have to try making use of this knowledge to really turn it into understanding, but it will never leave my memory from here on out. I should already be decent at using the information to think.

> To be honest, studying and mastering all of this will take you years and decades, so I am not placing a time limit. Just take your time. We do not have to worry about aging, nor will you have to worry about dropping out of the Great Game at your level of power. A decade is nothing here. 120 HK tourneys will pass before you blink. The universe is not going to end all of a sudden.

She is encouraging me, but at the same time doesn’t have high expectations of me.

> I’ve had people wanting to be my apprentices in the past. I’ve sent them similar assignments, only for all of them to get filtered by how mentally demanding the work is. My response to such complaints is that this is something every high ranking player has to go through. If you want to just rely on your body, I won’t go far beyond rank 10. Though even that is enough to have a good life in this place. To go higher, you need to rely on the power of machines. They are the ones who should be doing the fighting. The ideal battle is the one where you sit back, far away from any danger, while your army does the work in the background.

> The real battle in the HK tournament matches is before they begin. It is the thinking you do in your own time.

The message ends here.

I lean back in my chair, close my eyes and spend a few minutes reviewing all the data. Then I come back and open them.

Right. First, let me do a memory merge.

“I am on it, Eua.” I hear the cute voice of my controller. It is her job to manage this. I wait for just a moment and become a new being soon after. New memories of my other fork are at my disposal. I sent her the gas mask earlier, and while she didn’t clear F1 yet, she did clear the other two levels, getting some new bodies as well as utility items, including a gas mask.

The structure of those two levels were similar to the first one, except one was placed in a pure desert and the other in a rocky place. Both were easy to clear by baiting the bots and using smoke to move past them. The mask did make it easier to move through the smoke on the desert level so it is not like I completely wasted my LW League points buying it.

At any rate, I’ll stop drawing for the time being and dedicate myself to Eloe’s assignment.

I get up from my seat and change subdomains to my bedroom one.