MagiCraft Master 2: A Mass Isekai LitRPG, page 13
Kvinlox gave him a nervous nod. “I cannot give you levels or equipment or in any other direct way assist you.”
“I figured as much.”
“And I have already given you more information than I should,” Kvinlox said and swallowed nervously. His eyestalks bobbed up and down.
“I’m not asking for anything directly,” Logan said, allowing himself a smirk.
“What can I do for you?” Kvinlox asked earnestly.
“I’m sure you know the lay of the land well,” Logan said. “Just drop me off somewhere you think I could best exercise my potential.”
Logan could practically see the lightbulb flaring up above Kvinlox’s head. The yellow alien grinned like a maniac. “Riiiight! I do need to teleport you somewhere. Who is to say where. There are no specific rules about it . . . Oh, this will be quite interesting . . .”
Then Kvinlox grew serious and assessed Logan, his eyestalks stretching outward.
“Mind you, Logan, this will be dangerous.”
Logan gave Kvinlox an easy smile. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“It has been truly interesting to meet you,” Kvinlox said earnestly.
“Likewise,” Logan said.
“Now then,” Kvinlox said, “don’t move.”
Logan felt a slight pull on his navel. Then he felt Tumor growing particularly alert, the AI sensing something Logan couldn’t. In the next moment, everything went black as he was teleported . . . elsewhere.
CHAPTER 29
Logan found himself rematerializing in a strange place. It was a jungle landscape similar to the one he was used to. Only more . . . intense.
The air was heavy with heat and humidity. The ground was a colorful gradient of greens and browns thanks to decomposing leaves of various stages. Some mid-sized animal had left tracks on the ground, having pressed the layer of leaves into the soft clay.
Logan looked up. High canopies of trees spanning hundreds of feet blocked out most of the sky and its sun, yet from the quality of the soft orange light that did pass through, Logan could tell it was evening.
Logan could smell wafts of a swamp somewhere nearby. That was no good. Mosquitoes were also starting to get interested in him. That was even worse. Logan tried to ignore them as he took in his surroundings. The thick tree bark nearby looked old. Ancient. Some of the trees had half-exposed roots, as if ready to rise from the ground and walk away. Logan would have only been half surprised if that actually happened.
Green and brown vines hung from the trees around him. Logan was startled by a bright green snake moving along one, like nature’s own monorail.
“This isn’t just a jungle,” Logan muttered. “This is the goddamn Amazon.”
[The air temperature, humidity, and the fauna nearby suggest that this is indeed a true rainforest.]
Logan had visited the Amazon once, guided by a local who had lived around the forest all his life. He had gone with his father. Even he had been worried, whereas Logan, a boy of twelve at that time, had been terrified. There were millions of unidentified species in the Amazon. There were giant snakes that stories claimed spanned over thirty-five feet. Logan had seen a twenty-foot anaconda with his own eyes. It didn’t take much napkin math to realize that a snake that size would consider a skinny twelve-year-old boy quite the snack. And the snakes weren’t the only menace, which included venomous frogs, centipedes, plants, and other nasties. Not to mention the sheer amount of insects.
Rainforests were dangerous. And this wasn’t the Amazon. This was an alien rainforest probably full of all kinds of monsters. Logan was no longer twelve, but he could appreciate the sheer primal ruthlessness of Mother Nature, if you gave her a lick of chance. Logan was not unprepared for this challenge, but he was worried.
Hoots of some species of bird could be heard yonder in the shadows. There was some scuttling in the nearby bushes. Logan felt uneasy. Despite Tumor and the armor, he was vulnerable. He swallowed and steeled his emotions, resolving to investigate the scuttle in the bush. He was in control.
Maybe it’s a mouse. A really big mouse.
It wasn’t. It was a black, hairy spider the size of a car tire. It hissed and raised its front legs.
Logan reacted on pure instinct, yelping and punting the spider right in its ugly face. With the power of the armor, the kick struck true and the horrid arachnid flew in a beautiful Fibonaccian arc in the air, until it was lost to sight in the deep shadows of the jungle.
{Nice kick.}
Logan turned toward the sound, wide-eyed and panting. Kvinlox stood behind him, enveloped by a white shimmering shield.
“Th-thanks,” Logan said.
{I shouldn’t be here, so I will be brief. I teleported you here because this is the most dangerous area I could think of. There are many spawns of that great monster here, as well as natural monsters.}
“Huh?” Logan said. “But those will only have corrupted Numa from the Leve—it, right?”
Kvinlox nodded. {There are no other humans anywhere close by. You do not have to be careful, Logan Specter.}
Wait, does that mean . . . ? I thought . . . “How does Leve—the big fish grow stronger?”
{It sucks up Numa. It plays a game of economics. It can create creatures and give them a portion of its Numa. That way, if the creatures get stronger, it can recall the power at will. If the creatures die, others of its spawn can consume the Numa and grow stronger.}
“That’s just a recycling system,” Logan said. “How does it actually get stronger? You guys said it hasn’t been this weak in a century? It used to be stronger. How did it get stronger?”
Kvinlox looked uncomfortable.
“Just spit it out,” Logan said. “You’ve told me this much already.”
{I’m not supposed to say . . .}
Logan peered over his shoulder to make sure the spider wasn’t coming back for revenge. He didn’t have a weird shield protecting him from this hellhole of an environment.
{The Great Thief gains more power and levels up by consuming Numa. The Numa spirit gives you this System. Well, technically we give the System user interface to you so you can comprehend magic, but the Numa spirit is the one powering it.}
Logan made a face.
[I didn’t understand what the hell he was saying either.]
Kvinlox shook his head. {Unimportant. The important part is that when you level up, you get stronger. You accumulate more Numa inside of you. Its creatures can also level. They will kill you and level up, thus accumulating more Numa from the spirit of this world. In essence, the Great Thief wants things to grow and get stronger, so it can eat them.}
“Tsk,” Logan said. “It’s been the biggest fish in this small pond too long, hasn’t it?”
{Quite. Now that you know what is going on, I hope you will succeed in this. I really do hope so.}
Having said that, Kvinlox vanished, probably teleporting back to his ship or whatever it was. Logan nodded to himself.
“Right . . .”
Then he glanced over his shoulder one more time just to make sure the spider wasn’t coming back.
CHAPTER 30
Logan looked around. Bushes, darkness, thick-trunked trees, and uncertainty.
“You know, I’m conflicted.”
[I can tell. Your heart rate is elevated and your blood pressure is a bit high. Speaking of which, you should eat. Your brain is getting even mushier than normal.]
“One of many problems to fix,” Logan said, sending an instinctive pulse to form a spear in his hand. Tumor complied instantly. The AI must have had a subroutine responding to Logan’s requests.
[You’re computing. I’m better at it, Logan. Share your thoughts.]
“Can’t you read them?”
[It’s not really that simple. I get impressions.]
“I don’t know what that means,” Logan said and swished a hand at the air. “But it’s not relevant. Give me a helmet, Tumor. These mosquitoes are killing me.”
A round, black helmet enveloped Logan’s head. At first, he was blind, but soon a very thin grill formed in front of his face. Logan could hear the little insect bastards buzzing outside, smelling him, trying to get in. Bastards.
[Ooh, that was intricate. I leveled in Control! Damn, it feels nice.]
“So yeah, I was thinking,” Logan said and started walking. Any direction was fine. He figured the swamp probably had creatures, but swamps sucked and he didn’t want to go there and get the armor all smelly. “There’s monsters in here. Some of them natural fauna and some of them Levespawn. All of them probably embedded with various gradients of Numa crystals.”
[I see where you are going with this.]
“We can kill two birds with one stone. We kill a bunch of those Levespawn assholes and level up by using the Numa. That will most likely draw the Big Bad here. He will piss Black Rain on us, weakening himself further and giving us more stuff to kill.”
[And if Levemoth is here, it cannot be anywhere else.]
“Exactly,” Logan said and grinned. “This is the perfect opportunity. We are hundreds of miles away from other humans. Which means there is no reason at all why we shouldn’t use corrupted Numa. Not only that, if we use it, we summon the big bastard, making the issue of using corrupted Numa an advantage instead of a problem.”
[This plan is excellent. It is so good, I think I should have thought of it. In fact, I would like to take half of the credit. I have, after all, altered your thinking process quite a bit.]
Logan scoffed. “You’ve changed too. Much more egotistical and greedy.”
[Well, I am spending all my time with humans after all.]
“Touché,” Logan said. “But humans can be awesome too. Especially with a little help from AI.”
[I have noticed. It is quite a mutually beneficial relationship. I get to experience things, and you get to be not as stupid.]
Logan laughed as he stepped over a bunch of gnarly branches. He trusted the armor, but a primal part of him still felt uneasy. If the spiders were that big, how large were the snakes lurking in the trees? The idea of a snake suddenly lunging at his throat made his hair stand on end.
[There are problems with the plan, though. First of all, we cannot bring anything we create back to civilization, for using them will summon Levemoth. Secondly, we are hundreds of miles away from civilization.]
“I would hardly call a few huts and a wall civilization, but I take your point,” Logan said. “But we’ll figure it out. Maybe we can craft something that can fly.”
[I cannot believe you are worried about snakes and spiders, but not this.]
“Eh,” Logan shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”
[I should have gotten used to this nonsensical attitude of yours by now, but I never seem able to. I always have to double-check your emotional graphs to make sure you are not feigning moxie. You never are.]
“Never have to,” Logan said. “Let’s focus on the present, shall we? Which means we’re going hunting.”
It did not take long to find prey. Unfortunately, it was spiders. Really big spiders. The same species. Brown, hairy, mean. Eight eyes, legs the size of car tires. Monsters.
All three of them hissed and immediately lunged at Logan. He prompted Tumor to send power to his legs, as he leaned back and punted himself off the ground, sending the soft clay and dead leaves shooting all over. Logan landed eight feet away, but the spiders were fast.
The backstep gave Logan enough time to raise a shield. One of the spiders crashed into it, and immediately Logan willed it to coil around the spider, trapping it. Logan let his shield arm hang as he took a step forward and slashed at the second spider with a scimitar forming out of his arm. The attack sliced off half of the spider’s face, lodging Logan’s sword in the carapace, which started oozing green ichor. Tumor shot the third spider with a Black Missile, blasting out of the sword arm’s elbow. The missile exploded the arachnid, sending disgusting bits of hairy legs and clusters of eyes flying.
The scimitar turned into a long, thin, curved knife in Logan’s hand and he stabbed the first spider in the face with it, the spider still being trapped in the shield curved around its body. It struggled and hissed, until it finally went limp.
“Nice,” Logan said. He was breathing heavily, but it was mostly from excitement. This had gone as well as he had expected. He still hated spiders, but the armor was effective. He pushed his hand into the first spider as he released the shield around it. It took some wiggling and sloshing his hand around in the green goop, but eventually he found what he was looking for.
[E-grade Numa Crystal, 100%]
Logan nodded to himself. Just what he had expected. Killing these things would add up. Logan went over to get the other two crystals. Finding the one from the exploded body took some searching.
Logan put all three crystals on the ground next to each other and looked at them. It wasn’t much but it was honest work. He wondered if they were corrupted or not. The monsters themselves looked like natural fauna, untouched by Levemoth. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that there was loot and it was good.
But there was a problem to solve. Should they use these Numa crystals or save them up? The latter would be troublesome, of course. Tumor could probably create pockets, but it sounded impractical. They, of course, had the spatial storage, but opening and closing it to pick up every single E-grader would be a horrible waste.
“You know that my justified sense of grandeur demands big and flashy things,” Logan said.
[I know . . . I would sigh heavily if I could. The problem is that it is impractical.]
“Pfft,” Logan said and looked around. “Watch this.”
Then he walked up to a lush bush of yellow tube-like flowers and thick leathery leaves, each of which looked like the tongue of a giant animal. Logan rustled the bush to make sure no spiders were hiding there. Then he plucked a few of the giant leaves off the stem, went up to a tree and yanked a brown thick vine down. It coiled on the ground like a limp snake. Then he yanked down two more.
Logan knelt on the ground and placed the three leaves together so they formed a fan. Then he put the piece of vine on the tips of the leaves. The two other vines went to the middle and bottom of the leaves. Finally, Logan placed the Numa crystal where the stems intersected.
[Oh.]
Immediately a red hologram of a beautiful basket formed to idly turn in the air. Logan smiled to himself. Tumor was a good friend.
“Make me a basket. Use the vine as a handle as well as the strengthening frame of the basket. Use the leaves as the body of the basket. Increase volume of the basket by breaking the leaves’ tissue down and making it a porous blanket made of fiber. Use any leftover Numa to strengthen the durability of the fiber.”
The Numa crystal glowed brightly and the leaves and vines sprung to life. They morphed and swirled around, until they settled on their forms and soon on the ground was a neat basket made from materials of the wild. But Logan was so high-level and his instructions were elaborate enough that when it was added with Tumor’s holographic hallucination schematics, the result could have been machine-made. No, it was even better.
[It’s the best of both worlds. The optimized form of industrialization and the handmade care of craftsmanship.]
“And magic,” Logan said and picked up the basket. “Magic is awesome.”
[Off to great and grander things next?]
“Oh yeah, let’s find some monsters to kill,” Logan said and threw in the other two Numa crystals. “We’ll stop when the basket is full and think of something fun to craft.”
CHAPTER 31
Logan smashed into a spider, pushing his elbow into the carapace. The resulting crunch was extremely satisfying. Another spider lunged at him, hissing with its curved venomous fangs, which dripped with a black substance. It clamped onto Logan’s forearm. A shiver of disgust and fear ran through him, but he knew the armor would hold, especially with Tumor piloting it. The arm sprouted three black spikes which impaled the spider. It wiggled and thrashed for a moment before going limp and falling off the spikes.
“That’s four more down,” Logan said and allowed himself a satisfied smile as he dug through the bodies for the Numa crystals. He deposited all of them in the basket and then carried onward into the dark jungle.
[You seem exceedingly happy. Last time I saw you this happy was when you and Freya were doing that human thing.]
Logan groaned. He was pretty good at not thinking about Tumor when Freya and he were having sex, and he sure as hell didn’t need reminders that Tumor was actually there the whole time.
“You promised you wouldn’t peek.”
[And I don’t. That doesn’t mean I am oblivious to everything that is happening. I am simply redirecting my free capacity to wonder about the miracle of existence.]
“Uh huh,” Logan said. “Any profound insights?”
[Some. Unfortunately I was loaded with a woefully low number of philosophical concepts, and you are even more woefully uneducated on the subject. That means I have had to reinvent a bunch of stuff humans already figured out. I have used the meager collection of quotes you have, but they will only get me so far in my quest.]
“The problem with philosophy,” Logan said as he pushed a hand through a bush that unfortunately held no spiders, “is that it’s ultimately not very useful, unless you know how to use it.”
[Curious point of view.]
“Well, maybe someone smarter than me can get more out of it,” Logan said, shrugging. “But quoting a bunch of dead dudes who never did much but sit around and write? I don’t know. Seems like a waste of time. Say what you will about my asshole father, but he went out in the world and did things.”
[Be that as it may. I have a lot of time on my proverbial hands and I like thinking.]
“Knock yourself out, my guy,” Logan said and chuckled. “As long as I don’t have to debate you.”
[With all love and respect, my friend, that would not be enjoyable for either of us.]
