The next handful of months passed in a blur. One of Doctor Weather’s earliest successes was in activating the magical effects scripted into the arms and armor of the invaders.
Thankfully, rather than the uncontrolled explosions of mana he was used to, which risked himself and his surroundings, Dan simply had to feed the artifact a trickle of mana, and the enchantment would take from him what it needed to activate. Most importantly, this allowed the research team to use the translation enchantments they discovered in the officers’ helmets.
At first, everyone gathered around Dan like children at storytime as he read the contents of the various novels and technical manuals stolen from the aliens, all while wearing a gleaming silver helmet. Then, in frustration, Doctor Weathers announced that Dan’s recounting of technical data was “slow and boring.”
That was how Dan found out that he didn’t have to process what was written for the System in his body to record it. Specifically, Doctor Weathers strapped him into a chair and forced his eyes open as another team member rapidly paged through the books in front of him. Dan wasn’t sure how he felt about the “Droog” treatment, as the good doctor called it, but it did the job, rapidly filling the Foundation’s database on the aliens.
The rest of the testing was much more arduous. Dan only really had enough mana to attempt activating an alien gauntlet once per hour. Fairly quickly, he was able to discover that each time he used a specific gauntlet, it felt a little more natural to him. He still couldn’t really control what he was doing with them, but he was gaining a little bit of intuitive control over their intensity, duration, and range.
The good news was that his reserves replenished fairly quickly. The bad news was that they replenished more quickly while he was exerting himself, which meant even more exercise.
Jogging around the track for what felt like the twentieth time, Dan cursed himself for forgetting about Doctor Weather’s savage sense of humor. After she left the Army, the department had been directionless, and all he could remember was her leadership and poise. The woman was brilliant, but inclined to vexing pranks and jokes. Hence, every time he ran out of mana, he was sent back to the gym.
Body has increased by 0.1 to 4.6
After quickly reading the update, Dan chuckled to himself. At least there was a silver lining. The System would periodically update him as his body became quantifiably healthier and stronger. He’d already lost the fast food belly, and he was well on his way towards actual physical fitness. He still wouldn’t be any sort of competition for the security team. Every time he shared the track with them, they kept a much faster pace for much longer than Dan, but slow and steady improvement was a lot better than he had managed as a project employee for the Army.
Mana has regenerated to full.
Reading the update, Dan stopped his run and checked his internal timer. About forty minutes. Better than his previous time by about two. He grabbed a bottle of water from his locker and set his sights on the shower. Although the System didn’t inherently track his mana, Sam had come up with the idea of setting an alarm once he was “full,” preventing him from wasting excess time in the gym when he could be experimenting with a gauntlet.
Dan ‘towelled off. He had a meeting scheduled with Samantha and the chairman to go over the project’s preliminary results, and he would prefer to not smell rank for the conference. The shower itself was quick and warm. He’d never admit it to Doctor Weathers, but even the slight increases to his body stat from exercise and dietary changes made him feel remarkably better. Even if the rest of this entire experiment really didn’t go anywhere, at least he was coming out the other end healthier than he’d been since high school.
Thirty minutes later, he was in the conference room where he had first met the chairman, wearing fresh clothes. Since the beginning of the project, Henry, Sam, and Dan had met here weekly to go over regular status updates. Each time, the old man had been absolutely filled with excitement. As if summoned by Dan’s musing, Henry walked through the doorway, trailed by a security guard with eyes alight.
“Dan, my boy, good news!” he gushed, his southern accent becoming more pronounced with his excitement. “I know we’ve been running you ragged both literally and figuratively, but our xenology team and Doctor Weathers have advanced our understanding of magic immeasurably in the two and a half months you’ve been here. I’ll let her do the presentation, but we’re finally almost ready to switch to beta testing.”
“Beta testing?” Dan frowned, his memory immediately focusing upon the unpleasantness of the System’s installation. “Does that mean you’re going to have to update the System? Are you sure that it’s completely necessary? I mean, I’m more than happy to deal with it, if it brings us to the next step in everything, but I would prefer to avoid an update unless it’s something good.”
“You’re the Beta, and you’ll be testing.” Samantha rolled her eyes. “Just suck it up, Dan, and trust me, this will be good.”
“Now!” She coughed theatrically to clear her throat before continuing. “As I was about to say before the chairman stole my thunder and the peanut gallery began complaining, we’ve cleared the first major hurdle with the System. We now have enough data on mana and the runescript that the aliens use for enchantments that, with a fairly simple update, it will become self-learning.”
“Before Dan expresses his concerns about being kept unconscious in a pink pod while the AI uses him as a power source,” she uncannily cut him off before he could make the reference, “self-learning is both more and less limited than that. The System doesn’t have a true AI, so it will never be able to do more than respond to simple queries. It can’t think or act on its own.”
“Despite that, the System knows Dan’s muscular, skeletal, and nervous system inside and out,” Sam continued. “It has been monitoring the way Dan uses his mana. The aliens’ writings keep talking about ‘mana pathways,’ and although we haven’t identified exactly where they are in Dan yet, the System has noticed patterns in how the mana is channeled.”
“According to the aliens’ novice primers, it takes between three years and a decade of our time for a spellcaster to form a proper affinity with an element to the point that they can efficiently channel mana through an attunement stone.” Dan paled as Sam clicked a button. A slide of one of the aliens’ gauntlets projected onto the wall. “The attunement stones are set into what we have been referring to as the ‘magical gauntlets.’ Dan’s use of an attunement stone will be monitored closely by the System. It’s watching what works and what doesn’t work. It will discard what doesn’t work and upload as a kind of mental muscle memory what does work.”
“By the same token, once Dan actually starts to work with an attunement stone he has an affinity for, he will need to shape his mana into a spell.” Sam clicked the button again, and the wall of the conference room displayed a picture of a human silhouette with multiple yellow channels running through it. “The best of the alien mages do this on the fly, but each of them has more than a thousand years of spellcasting experience. Instead, Dan will be creating predetermined effects through the system through trial and error. These will be notated as ‘spells,’ and he should be able to activate them simply by saying their name or concentrating on them. The System will then replay its recording of what he did to make the spell work in the first place.”
“Good!” Henry nodded, a cheshire smile on his face. “You’re much further along than I hoped. How are the attempts at duplicating Dan’s abilities? As hard of a worker as he is, I’d prefer to have a couple more wizard-candidates running around.”
Sam’s face soured. She picked up the tablet in front of her and flipped back a couple pages in her report before responding.
“The good news for Dan is that he got tremendously lucky.” She clicked the device in her hand, and a series of semi-burned corpses appeared on the wall. “What he did has only succeeded three times in the rather extensive history of the Tellask Empire. Each time, the resulting mage had a tremendous power supply and almost limitless affinities. Unfortunately, eating mana crystals is a great and expensive way to die a painful death via self immolation. We found this out from several of the lab assistants who disregarded our warnings and tried to seize glory by joining Dan in the project without authorization.”
“No.” She utilized the clicker once more to bring up the Thoth Foundation logo, hiding the previous grisly scene. “The Empire and most rational races usually awaken the mana-sensitive by having a mage of sufficient rank inject mana into them until they are able to activate an affinity. The bad news is that Dan, although full of potential, is far from the required rank. The very bad news is that I’m not really sure we have great options for him to reach that rank on Earth.”
“What’s this about the Tellask Empire?” Dan asked, only for Henry to cut in.
“No, I’m the boss! Tell me what you mean by us not being able to rank Dan up. Xenology can come next,” the chairman demanded, frowning.
“Dan is at the first rank.” Samantha flipped a couple pages on her tablet. “Here on Earth, he still has a couple options to improve. He can work on increasing his affinities, which will decrease his mana usage, and he can work on increasing his ability with spell images, improving the spell’s strength and his control over it.”
“That said,” she added with a sigh as she leaned back in her chair. “He needs to encounter and claim more mana in order to actually increase the amount of mana his body can hold. The good news is that his… unorthodox method of becoming a mage has increased his regeneration of mana greatly. The bad news is that claiming mana involves killing a sentient being or mana-infused monster. Most of their mana will fade into the world around them, but a small portion will flow into their murderer and increase that person’s total pool.”
“We could have Dan kill a bunch of criminals.” She shrugged helplessly. “But if they don’t have mana themselves, the gains will be minimal. I have no idea what sort of numbers we will need to rank him up once, and from what we can tell, he will have to be at least rank five before he can start awakening people.”
“Are you sure we can’t rebrand the process of absorbing mana as ‘gaining experience’?” Ibis mused, tapping his index finger on the table thoughtfully. “Maybe we can work on the translation. Leveling sounds better than ranking up, too.”
Dan barely heard them as Sam put her foot down over the words used by the translation software. He was strangely okay with the idea of violence. Maybe the constant use of the gauntlets had messed with him, or maybe it was all of his time hanging out with soldiers, but he just didn’t feel concerned by the prospect.
Intellectually, he knew that this was the point where he should have been wringing his hands, worried about the dangerous route things were taking. Either that, or he should be worried about whether he had the edge needed to take another’s life. Instead, he just knew. The energy in his chest, the mana, practically begged for him to release it. The idea of having an outlet beyond a stale target excited him.
Shit, maybe he did need to see the Foundation shrink.
He didn’t think that a tech nerd like him was supposed to be getting this worked up about the idea of killing someone. Of course, if he talked to someone, they would ground him. Stop him from using the magic. Stop the project entirely. The last thing they’d want was some sort of magically-empowered psychopath running around.
Dan took a deep, shuddering breath. He couldn’t let that happen. It wouldn’t be fair to him, Doctor Weathers, or to anyone else who had worked so hard. No, he’d just have to watch himself. He had everything under control right now. He could let someone know if things got out of hand.
“The Tellask Empire.” Dan blinked. Sam was talking to him, so the least he could do was pay attention rather than worry about nothing. Probably nothing.
She continued, “It’s the largest interstellar polity in this arm of the galaxy. It’s existed for almost 75,000 years, and as far as we can tell, it’s ruled primarily by elves, the tall, skinny elite soldiers from first contact.”
“Elves live for thousands of years and don’t stop learning in that entire time.” She flipped to another page on her tablet. “If you see an elf, and you don’t have a full squad at your back, you should run.”
“Young elves are only slightly stronger than humans,” Sam lectured on. “But they usually don’t leave their home worlds until they reach at least six hundred. By that point, taking one down will be a problem. We’re just lucky that almost all interstellar technology has stagnated. All of the major players focused on magic as soon as they got it, and almost no one has anything more impressive than a black powder six shooter, and even that is considered the secret signature weapon of the dwarves.”
“Politically,” she continued, “the Tellask Empire is ruled by multiple noble houses, each of which control a region of space. They are responsible for repelling threats in their region and supporting the Empire as a whole in times of need. Our region is controlled by House Amberell.”
“Now, it’s not uncommon for a House or the Empire as a whole to have a tributary state.” She flipped through a couple of pages on her tablet. “A tributary state is a planet that provides soldiers and taxes to the Empire, but otherwise gets to run its own business. Our region has several tributary states, but the bad news is that the Tellask aren’t who we need to be worried about. That is the Orakh, a bloodthirsty race held together by a warlord who lays waste to planet after planet. They’re pushing House Amberell pretty hard in our region, and even if we don’t end up in contact with the Tellask for a while, it’s only a matter of time before the Orakh stumble upon us, and we very much do not want that.”
“Are the Orakh green?” The chairman asked excitedly. “Big and musclebound? Maybe prone to organizing in clans? Shamans, that sort of thing?”
“Yes…” Samantha frowned slightly. “How did you know? That wasn’t in the briefing.”
“This is perfect!” Henry shouted, clapping his hands. “Space elves, space dwarves, and now space orcs. We even need to have Dan earn XP so that he can level up enough to use more powerful spells. This is what the System was made for!”
“For your cardiologist’s sake, I hesitate to continue,” Sam drawled, rolling her eyes. “But I do think you’re going to be even more excited about this part.”
“We’ve managed to come up with a solution to the problem of Dan’s ‘level’.” She practically glared at Ibis as she buried the final word in sarcasm. “Dan is going to need to attune himself to space magic. We’ve salvaged a teleportation pad from the alien voidship, and with a proper attunement and enough power, he’ll be able to use it.”
“We should be able to scrounge up just enough mana to teleport Dan to an awakened Tellask tributary world.” Sam sighed, bracing herself for Ibis’ reaction. “There, he can fight monsters, save maidens, and gain power. All of that fun stuff. Eventually, once he surpasses Rank 5, which will probably take some time, he can return home, and we can look into awakening Earth. With our technology supplemented by magic, we can probably hold off the Orakh and establish ourselves as a power in our own right.”
The chairman was too busy twitching in excitement to follow up on Samantha’s delivery. Dan was pretty sure Sam had been joking when she made the crack about the chairman’s cardiologist, but now he wasn’t so certain. Regardless, the chairman didn’t seem up to carrying on the conversation at the moment, so Dan filled in.
“All right, Doctor Weathers, what’s the next step?” he asked hesitantly.
“Dan…” She smiled at him. “You told me to warn you first, but this is going to hurt.”
“Is there any alternative?” he asked, frowning as she shook her head. “Fine then, Sam. Hurt me.”
“Dan,” she replied, her grin all teeth, “I thought you’d never ask. System, authorization Samantha J Weathers Fourteen B Seven Hash L Three. Initialize beta update for User.”
Dan’s vision went white, and his body was wracked with pain.
Firmware update beginning 1%
Please do not turn off the System. This will take a while.
You may lose consciousness and reawaken several times
Goddamnit, Sam.
