The chapter title says it all. I was given this precious opportunity, so I needed to think of the cheapest, most broken BS ability out there. I'm talking on the level of the Thanus meme. And by 'cheap', I meant that I wanted a healthy balance between 'economically cheap' and ‘gag shounen-level OP’.
Some people complain when characters get OP powers, but guess what? This is real life for me, and this is my story—what you call a ‘power fantasy’, I call ‘home-court advantage’.
I am the author. If I'm not broken in my own world, then I wrote it wrong. If you disagree, you're wrong.
Why should I care if my powers are fair? I want to live! If the easiest way to do that is with some ridiculous spamming weapon that any bozo with a brain can use, then all the better.
That being said, despite my best efforts to come up with a ridiculously broken ability, all of my submissions were rejected by the system.
Infinite Skill Creation Tickets?
Rejected.
Omnipotence?
Rejected.
Chronomancy?
Rejected.
Invulnerability?
Rejected.
And so on. More specifically, I got messages like this:
Skill: Infinite Skill Creation Tickets is not allowed.
Trait: Omnipotence requires 100,000 story relevance points.
Skill: Chronomancy requires 12,000 story relevance points.
Trait: Invulnerability requires 72,500 story relevance points.
Since I only had an effective balance of 2,000 points, I needed to get creative. After a few minutes of thought, I decided to try and copy just one of the main character’s OP abilities:
Trait: Infinite Sword Energy requires 54,750 story relevance points.
Trait: Infinite Mana requires 85,500 story relevance points.
Weapon Art: World Severing Blade requires 31,250 story relevance points.
…
So, uh… in hindsight, I may have made him a little too strong. The main villains, like Demon Queen Selena, were a lot stronger than him, though, so it worked out. Kind of…
Anyway, I didn’t have enough SRP (story relevance points) to create even one of his abilities. Every character in the main cast was stacked, though Thaddeus was undeniably the strongest by a huge margin. If I could take just one of those abilities…
Wait.
I typed in another skill and prayed that it would work.
Skill: Ability Thief requires 35,000 story relevance points.
Hmm…
Skill: Copy requires 10,000 story relevance points.
Oh, that was a lot closer to my budget than any of the other broken abilities. Copy was a more restricted version of Ability Thief, and it was cheaper as a result. What if I added some different penalties and adjusted it a little bit…?
Ability Request Accepted. Would you like to spend (1) ability creation ticket to create the Passive Skill: Ability Thief (Restricted)?
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. Though this skill would be difficult to use in the short term, it was a surefire way to become one of the strongest people in this world.
*Passive Skill: Ability Thief (Restricted) has been created.*
I quickly opened my status and checked the new skill:
=Ability Thief (Restricted)=
-Passive Skill-
[Low Rank] [Proficiency: 0%]
The user may steal an ability from a target.
Restrictions:
* Only one ability may be stolen per target.
* The target must willfully give their ability to the Ability Thief.
* This skill cannot be controlled by the Ability Thief. It will automatically activate when the conditions have been met.
* Only a limited number of abilities may be stolen at once.
* Current Limit: 0/5
* If the limit is exceeded, one ability must be discarded permanently. Abilities cannot be returned to their original owner except through the death of the Ability Thief or through the use of another ability.
* Racial traits/characteristics and abilities that permanently modify the body cannot be stolen.
* The target must be living at the time the skill is taken.
* The stolen abilities will be returned to the original owner upon the Ability Thief’s death.
* This does not apply to abilities that have been discarded due to exceeding the ability limit.
* Divine Abilities cannot be stolen unless the Ability Thief attains a higher level of divinity than the target.
===================
This would do, for now. It would be a little harder to get started since the only ability I could rely on was Rule of Cool, but all I needed to do was convince a single person in this world to give me their ability and I could start the ball rolling. Alternatively, I could accumulate enough SRP to buy another ability.
With that taken care of, I needed to take stock of my current situation. Somehow, Retconning the Demon Queen to approach humans diplomatically resulted in humans having a non-hostile relationship with both aliens and demons. I wasn’t too sure if cyborgs were in this world or not, but it seemed likely since the other two apocalyptic enemies were here.
My phone had access to the internet, so I started scrolling through news sites and web forums to figure out what the biggest changes were. It didn’t take me long to find a few article titles that painted a picture of what happened:
United Humanity Council aims for a peace summit with the Demon Queen! - April 2040
Breaking News: Demon Queen agrees to hold peace talks! - May 2040
A shocking conclusion! UHC agrees to allow demons to attend Horizon Academy as exchange students! What does this mean for the future of humanity? - June 2040
Demon Queen demands the aliens cease hostilities with humans! The Supreme Leader agrees to a virtual conference with humanity! June 2040
UHC negotiates a ceasefire agreement with the aliens! Extraterrestrial exchange students are to attend Horizon Academy in August! - July 2040
“...”
Just… okay then. I knew my Retcon skill was overpowered when I first saw it, but this was just ridiculous. Fortunately, it seemed like the UHC had things in hand. As a mere Horizon cadet, I had nowhere near enough influence to affect major events without another use of Retcon. Not yet, at least.
With some of my questions answered, I decided to let the overarching plot be for now and focus on the here and now. I needed to steal my first ability before classes start next week.
And I already knew what ability I wanted:
Magic Bomber.
I designed a ‘villain’ of sorts that operated in the background for the first few arcs called the Magic Bomber, named after his skill. He lured cadets and children from the city into isolated areas and blew them up. The Magic Bomber was just a minor villain that Thaddeus had to uncover clues about over the first thirty chapters or so. When he finally decided to catch the villain, it took him two weeks of investigating to track the Magic Bomber down and capture him.
However, I already knew who the Magic Bomber was, assuming that not much changed about him. Since he mostly operated off-screen and was promptly killed when Thaddeus discovered him, I never got the chance to reveal why the Magic Bomber was blowing up students and children, but I did write about it in my notes. Maybe because I never figured out how to deliver his backstory without pure narrative exposition, he wasn’t a very popular villain with my readers. All the comments just complained that he was ‘boring’ and ‘unoriginal’.
Now, how was I going to convince a crazy bombing terrorist to give me his skill willingly?
***
My destination was the warehouse district on the south side of Horizon City. The district was placed in the south so it would be equidistant from the spaceport in the east and the shipping yard in the west. Was this actually the most optimal place in terms of logistics? No idea, but I wrote it that way ‘cause it felt logical.
Horizon City saw trade from all over the world, and possibly from other worlds now that the demons and aliens were negotiating with humanity. This man-made island in the Atlantic Ocean could only be accessed via plane, boat, spaceship, tearing holes in the dimensional fabric holding our reality together, and, of course, teleport gates constructed by the Kingdom of Science and Progress.
Looking at a map of the world, I learned that somehow all four drafts that I wrote got mashed together. The 2nd draft was originally a high-fantasy world with two empires vying for control when aliens, demons, and the mysterious treaders attacked. During the story, the Kingdom of Science and Progress created cyborgs.
In terms of the current world, the Kingdom of Science and Progress exists roughly where Canada used to be, while the Western Empire replaced Europe, the Middle East, and parts of West Asia, and the Eastern Empire replaced the rest of Asia.
The 3rd draft of my story was more of a contemporary, urban fantasy set on Earth. When I removed the cyborgs, aliens, and treaders, I changed all the countries into fictional versions of real-world countries like the USA, China, and so on. These changes persisted into the 4th draft.
In the current world, the USA exists beneath the Kingdom of Science and Progress, and the whole of Africa seems to be much the same as before, though I never did anything with Africa because I didn’t know much about the place and didn’t want to offend anyone. Mexico seemed to undergo some dramatic changes, though I haven’t investigated much into those yet.
The whole of South America was replaced with the Icelands from my 2nd draft and Australia was renamed ‘Austria’, for some reason.
Why were all these changes important? Because I had no idea how they would affect the story. The Eastern and Western Empires were at odds with each other, but they established a temporary truce when the demons, aliens, cyborgs, and treaders attacked. However, the current situation seemed to be moving toward peace, so it was very possible that hostilities could start between the two empires again within my lifetime.
On the other hand, the treaders never attacked this world for some reason. I never got far enough in the story to reveal why the treaders were enemies to my readers, so my notes were pretty sparse on the subject, but I did know why they were so aggressive before.
Did something change in the Severed Plane?
It would be a very long time before I had the chance to go there, and it was impossible to get information out of treaders. Something about that situation made me feel nervous, and I was the kind of person that trusted my intuition.
As for the cyborgs, they were still technically hostile but they agreed to send a few students to Horizon Academy alongside the aliens and demons. The Kingdom of Science and Progress (KSP).
The Magic Bomber was a citizen of the KSP, though he was more of an exile than anything else. While I couldn’t be certain that he was still the first villain of the story, he was almost certainly still around since the agreement to allow cyborgs to attend Horizon Academy as exchange students only happened a few days ago.
I just needed to find him…
“Let’s go get me a new skill.”
That’s right. That massive, 500-word monologue was basically a summary of why I found myself leaving campus once again.
As I walked through Horizon City, I greedily soaked in the sites I daydreamed about endlessly for five years of my life. Some of the details were a little hazy since I had been deliberately avoiding the story for the last two years, but everything basically matched how I remembered it. The city was filled with thousands of cadets, American soldiers who were off-duty at the moment, and, of course, tourists. The modern military-look kinda clashed with the medieval fashion carried by merchants and nobles from both the Eastern and the Western Empires.
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How should I describe it? Imagine an American Navy soldier standing side-by-side with Julius Caesar and Queen Victoria, then throw in some drab peasants in the background and a few American tourists, complete with cameras and Karens. Now replicate the image a thousand times across a panoramic view with some mild variations in clothing color and style. Then take all these people and place them in a modern city with skyscrapers, flying cars, spaceships, and the occasional dimensional rift, and bam, you have now imagined Horizon City.
Making my way through the crowded streets toward the warehouse district, I mentally compiled all the information I knew about the Magic Bomber.
-Blonde hair (dyed), dark complexion, super-villain mustache (also dyed), and 5’5’’ in height.
-Works for the KSP (2nd draft) or some unknown terrorist organization (3rd/4th draft).
-Has the Magic Bomber trait and several explosive spells. Can cause small explosions using mana.
-Has three hideouts. Primarily uses the hideout in Warehouse C-04.
-Uses various manipulation tactics to attract children and cadets to isolated areas before blowing them up. I never wrote a scene of him manipulating a student, so I honestly wasn’t sure how he did it.
I… admittedly didn’t know very much, but the most important parts were that I knew where his hideouts were, I knew what he looked like, and I had an idea of how to trick him into giving me his Magic Bomber trait.
The warehouse district was one of those places that were really busy sometimes, and really empty at other times. When large shipments were moving, there were all sorts of workers here with equipment used to carry the cargo containers, but it seemed like not much of that was going on right now since I didn’t pass too many people. I did have to pass a security checkpoint to get it, but they immediately waved me through when I showed them my Horizon cadet badge.
Was that the most secure form of identification? Absolutely not. Did it make sense that everybody trusted my identity for owning this badge? Sort of. I wrote some BS about how Horizon badges couldn’t be forged or stolen, but I never figured out how that part worked mechanically, so I just put it in and hoped the readers wouldn’t challenge it.
They did, and it pissed me off. So I kept it in the story out of spite.
Fortunately, it came in handy now as any person who questioned why I was here immediately let me go when they saw my badge. Making my way over to Warehouse C-04, I calmly knocked on the front door.
After a short pause, a deep, manly voice asked, “Name?”
“Agent-007.”
“Purpose?”
“To overcome the curse of flesh and ascend to mechanical perfection.”
“Resonance?”
“Obviously.”
“You may enter.”
The door swung open, revealing a poorly lit interior. Without hesitation, I confidently strode through the door and turned to face the Magic Bomber. He looked exactly how I expected: short, with blonde hair, a supervillain mustache, and a dark complexion.
He raised a strange rod-like device and pushed a button to activate it. Pointing the rod at me, he waited until it beeped, confirming that the test was successful.
“A machine resonance of 1…” he said. “That’s low for a field operative. What brings you out here, comrade?”
“The Machine Father willed it so. I am to work alongside you, Agent-192, and assist you in completing your mission here.”
“I see…”
He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and I smirked as a hint of doubt crossed his eyes. That much was expected. He hadn’t been told yet that an ‘Agent-007’ would be here to help him.
Rather, he normally wouldn’t learn about Agent-007 until Thursday and the aforementioned terrorist wouldn’t arrive for another two weeks or so. However, the order had been issued, so if he contacted HQ to confirm, they would tell him that an Agent-007 had indeed been deployed here.
“Give me a moment,” the Magic Bomber requested. He walked a few steps away and pulled out a device that I knew was used for encrypted communications. While he confirmed my identity with HQ, I looked around the warehouse while lightly humming to myself.
It was too dark inside to see very far, as only my immediate surroundings were lit by a magic lantern—a mana-powered device similar to an omnidirectional flashlight. There was a bedroll poorly hidden in a crevice between two storage containers and a fresh grilled cheese sandwich cooling on a paper plate resting on a wooden crate.
Ignoring the muffled conversation behind me, I snatched the grilled cheese sandwich and tore it in half. Taking a bite of one half while returning the other to the plate, I searched for any weapons or explosives.
As far as my untrained eyes could tell, there were none.
After finishing half the sandwich, I was licking my buttery fingers when the Magic Bomber strolled over with an annoyed expression.
“All clear?” I checked while brushing a few scattered breadcrumbs from my shirt.
“Clear,” he affirmed before glancing at the other half of the sandwich on his plate. Rolling his eyes, he plopped down in a lawn chair and began to eat his portion.
Leaning against a nearby cargo container, I waited for him to finish eating before saying, “So what’s going on here, boss?”
He wiped his fingers with a napkin. “I will brief you on my current progress later. For now, tell me about your skills.”
“Prophecy, mostly,” I replied while twirling my finger in my ear like I saw some villains do on TV once. Pulling out some earwax, I flicked it aside. “I can see bits and pieces of the future, though I don’t always understand what I see.”
He snorted. “Very funny. So what’s your real power?”
“Jade Stoner, Gary Hubert, Hemlock Gordoki, and Kim Youngmin.”
The Magic Bomber stiffened. “How…?”
“Those are your first four targets. I see you luring them into a warehouse on August 24th; however, I am unclear on the method you will use to get them there.”
Since his targets were entirely up to his own discretion at this point, he and I were the only people in the world that knew that those cadets were destined to die. He had no choice but to believe that my ability showed me that information.
“Okay, I believe you,” he said. “And your vision sets my mind at ease, as it means that I will succeed.”
“Yup,” I replied while trying to sound disinterested.
He folded his fingers underneath his chin while resting his elbows on the armrests of his lawn chair. “I see why you were sent. Despite your low machine resonance, your ability is surely a blessing from the Machine Father.”
“It sure is.”
“Indeed.”
I crossed my arms. “So, bring me up to date.”
He sighed and rose to his feet. Motioning for me to follow him, he said “I will teach you.”
Hiding a smirk, I followed the Magic Bomber deeper into the warehouse.
***
As I mentioned before, I was an author and I wrote web fiction. For five years, I devoted myself to the craft and subjected myself to the whims of internet strangers who were exceedingly vocal in their anonymity. I pretended that I wasn't bothered when FantomRake told me my characters were unbearable and made my story unreadable. I smiled and said 'thank you for the advice' when LinuxMasterRace advised me to 'stop copying [XYZ] and write something original for once.'
Admittedly, I was slightly grateful—I’d never heard of those authors or stories, so their accusations gave me new reading material. Groundless as their accusations were, it was just further evidence for the claim that every story has already been written.
I was a trash author, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t care. I poured my heart and soul into the story, living and breathing my characters even while I was dreaming. While all characters arguably fall into one of two categories—either a subset of an author’s personality or a trope—I took pride in the fact that my characters made perfect sense to me. There was one absolute rule that I never broke:
No villain shall ever serve exclusively as a plot device.
On the surface, this didn’t always seem to be the case, but my notes contained detailed information about every ‘villain’, including their motivations, their activities, and how they would interface with the plot. A consequence of this was that there were only a handful of major villains in my story, but it also meant that I knew each of them very well.
In the case of the Magic Bomber, he was one of the shallower characters that I wrote, as he appeared early in my writing career. He was a patriotic exile turned terrorist infiltrator. His backstory was about 2000 words long, but the TLDR version is that he lost his ability to psychically resonate with machinery in an accident. Since the KSP espoused a type of ethnic superiority, though focused less on culture or physical features and more on the existence of the machine resonance stat, he no longer qualified to live as a citizen of their kingdom. Though he was exiled, he was thoroughly brainwashed to believe that humans who could resonate with machinery were truly a superior species.
As for why he was in Horizon City trying to blow up students and military children? Because Horizon was the present and the future. Despite their claims of biological superiority, the KSP couldn’t fight the heroes. With every new generation of heroes introduced to the world, the demons, cyborgs, aliens, and treaders began to lose territory, or so it went in my 2nd draft.
“Agent-007, what are you doing?”
The Magic Bomber’s voice broke me out of my trance. I was so busy delivering an expository monologue that I didn’t realize we had stopped. For some unknown amount of time, I had been staring blankly at him, and he seemed confused.
“You seem distracted,” he observed.
“More thoughtful and introspective, I would say.”
“Thoughtful is good. Distracted is bad. If you get yourself caught, you’ll bring the whole damn Association down on us like a pack of hungry wolves.”
“I can focus,” I assured him.
He raised an eyebrow. “Is that so? What was I just telling you about before we arrived here?”
Here? I took a moment to study our new surroundings. He had led me somewhere else in the warehouse. The light from our magic lantern was blocked by towering stacks of cargo containers and pallets of plastic-wrapped products, making it difficult to see far in the warehouse, at least when looking at the ground level. Looking above the stacks of crates revealed a ceiling and walls, and as a person who prides himself on not being blind, I figured out that I was near a corner on the opposite side from the entrance.
“You were telling me about the guys sneaking about outside, right?”
It was technically a guess, though I happened to know that people were looking for him around this time. I really hoped they still were, as they were an important part of my plan to scam this guy out of his unique ability.
“...”
He sighed while rolling his eyes, which told me that I had guessed wrong.
“You mean the fleshbags? No, I was saying that you owe me a new sandwich.”
“A sandwich?”
“Because you ate mine!”
“Oh right, I did do that.”
Since I only ate half the sandwich, I wasn’t sure why he was so mad. Was I supposed to eat the whole thing, then?
“Where am I supposed to get another grilled cheese sandwich to replace it?” I asked. “I don’t see any bread or cheese around here.”
“That’s because I made it using the last of my emergency rations,” he muttered darkly. His stomach rumbled. “I haven’t eaten much in days; can’t get anything here without a military badge or a cadet’s license.”
“Let’s get on with the plan, then, so we can get outta here and find something good to eat,” I suggested.
“I would if I could,” he said. “Didn’t HQ brief you on the situation? They know my face.”
There it was. Receiving confirmation that the details matched the setting I wrote, I was able to proceed with my plan with a little more confidence.
“I know the situation, which is why I’m suggesting we continue the plan. They don’t know that I am here, and, more importantly, they don’t know what I can do.”
The Magic Bomber nodded slowly, a hesitant look on his face. “While that may be true, I don’t know what you can do either.”
“I can borrow abilities to impersonate people,” I said. “There are some restrictions, but the gist is that you can temporarily transfer one of your abilities to me, and I can use it to cause confusion and stuff. They know who you are, so they won’t be looking for little ol’ me when I come in blasting with the big guns.”
“...I don’t use guns.”
I rolled my eyes. “I know. It was an idiom, not a metaphor.”
His eyebrow twitched. “So you’re saying you want me to ‘lend’ you my Magic Bomber ability and you’ll walk right past the Heroes and blow up the targets?”
“That is one possible approach, yes.”
He pulled a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and snapped his fingers to trigger a small explosion just far enough from the end to light it. While he smoked, he drummed his fingers anxiously against a nearby cargo crate. After releasing three black puffs of nasty-smelling smoke, he said, “That’s a big ask. I’ve never heard of a power that borrows skills before. If I can’t use my signature skill and I get caught, my neck will be dangling faster than a customer service rep with crippling depression, eight kids, an abusive spouse, and a gambling addiction.”
“That was oddly specific.”
“If we’re going to make this work, we need to do a test run. You borrow my ability here, where it's safe, and show me what you can do. If you can convince me, I’ll give your plan a shot.”
“While I’m down for that, ‘here’ might not be the best place,” I pointed out. “Why don’t we hit the ridges near the coast? I can toss a few big ones into the water. Should dull the sound and maybe we can catch a few fish while we’re at it.”
He gave me a weird look. “You want to use explosions to fish?”
“Why not? What’s the worst that can happen?”
***
Despite the mid-to-late afternoon hour, it wasn’t all that hard to sneak out of the warehouse district and approach the ridges on the southern edge of the island. Since the island was manmade, the cliffs were smooth and had a metallic sheen. The high elevation was the first barrier to sea monsters—the only place small and medium-sized sea monsters could crawl into Horizon from was the northern coastline, where the docks were. Every other edge of the island was elevated to reduce the number of danger zones as much as possible. This resulted in Horizon having somewhat of a bowl shape with a single flat section. The Academy was located exactly in the geographic center of the bowl on a hill that let the building’s foundation rest higher than the rim of the island.
We approached one such edge of the island, protected only by a single waist-high guardrail. A circular path followed the guardrail in a near-complete circuit of the island as many people liked to come here for various reasons, whether to enjoy the ocean breeze or perhaps to jog with a nice view. Waiting for a few chatting cadets to pass by, the Magic Bomber and I leaned against the railing and looked over the ocean below. Seafoam gathered against the sleek wall, the tenacious will of nature ceaselessly weathering the constructs of man. A few artificially placed rocks lined the bottom to aid in creating a fantastical, ‘natural’ view. Like so many others, I looked out over the scenic view, turning my chin up so that the sheer wall was hidden and the view looked entirely natural.
“Ah, the marvels of technology,” the Magic Bomber breathed as he leaned over the railing and ran his hand over the smooth surface of the wall. “It is a shame they tried to mask this metallic beauty…”
“Yeah,” I replied, trying to sound wistful. “Anyway, we should get on with this.”
“Right, right. How does your power work?”
“I need you to close your eyes and transfer your power to me. One of the restrictions on my skill is that I can only borrow skills from people who willingly let me borrow them. They have to seriously be okay with letting me use the skill.”
“That is a rather difficult condition,” he observed. “I am amazed you have survived for so long with such a difficult-to-use ability.”
“It is what it is,” I replied with a shrug. “I get by better by relying on sacred machines, but we can’t use any for this operation.”
“Of course. Well then, shall we get to it?”
The Magic Bomber closed his eyes.
You have stolen Trait: Magic Bomber.
A message appeared in front of my eyes and I hid a smile. The former Magic Bomber’s eyelids fluttered. Biting his lip while furrowing his brow, he said, “This doesn’t feel right…”
I threw an arm around his shoulder and said, “Right, right. There was one other component to my story that I forgot to mention.”
He opened his eyes wide with alarm and started to recoil, but before he could move far, I stepped behind him and shoved with all of my might. With a shout, the Magic Bomber flipped over the railing and dived toward the artificial rocks below. A few moments later, I peered over the edge at the bloody mess and smiled.
“First skill acquired, and first arc cleared.”
Another message appeared in front of my eyes.
You have significantly altered the main story.
+100 SRP.