The Gamer Chapter 1427 – Thorough Grinding 18 – Technology (Patreon)


‘I should consider Intellect after I get Endurance to 500,’ John thought. He was getting his Endurance up to have more HP. By all means, his MP was a secondary HP bar. Arguably, John should have pivoted to Intellect the moment he got the Creator Puppet. Every point in Intellect not only increased his MP, but it also provided more Strength to the golem. An increase that was direly needed to swing Inkaryl more effectively. The mace was wieldable, but it was still heavy as hell.

The reason why John did not change priorities was simply that he wanted to get Endurance to 500 for the Stat related Perks he would get for that. Plus, it was nice to have more of the resource whose only purpose was keeping him alive. MP had so many alternative uses. Toggling Particle Skin on and off as it was useful was a basic tactic to conserve mana. In that sense, his HP bar could also be viewed as an extension of his MP bar.

After assigning his Stat Points, John stared at the window for a little bit longer. He still hadn’t resolved which Class to invest in next. He had reduced the number of potential targets down to Space Protector and Harem Gamer. To finish either of these Classes felt like it would yield a proper result.

The question between them broke down to how quickly he thought Lee was improving. Space Protector granted him occasional access to powerful time dilation via the Overclock. Inevitably, Lee would surpass that and provide it to him on will. Harem Gamer could provide tools to accelerate that development. So, what would he rather do: get better at something he would be eclipsed in eventually or gamble on that eclipsing happening sooner?

‘I guess it’s pretty obvious, put like that,’ John thought and opened Harem Gamer. Between himself and his haremettes, his haremettes would win out most times.


He was immediately rewarded. Currently, the system related level ups for his haremettes were bottlenecked by the limited amount of levels he got to bestow each month. This applied both to combat haremettes, who shared dungeon EXP with him, and non-combat haremettes, who only had Experience of Love to rely on. If he didn’t have to worry about the latter category anymore, that would free them up to benefit so much more from it.

The alternatives were interesting though. The Greatest Couch less so than the Advanced Harem Comms. Yes, getting the Couch everywhere they went would be nice, but not nice enough to spend a Perk on it. It certainly did not compare to having a voice chat available anywhere they went, one that couldn’t be meddled with.

In basically any other situation, John would have picked it. However, with text chat already available, as well as phones and Comm Crystals existing, Lover’s Share provided the greater benefit. There was no telling what his haremettes could accomplish if he got their levels higher. Crafters of extremely high levels could have outsized influences. All they needed was one breakthrough innovation and suddenly the entire world changed.

Also, with higher Stats came a level of security. Even if Hailey did not acquire a single proper combat spell, if she was at level 1000, she would have the required Strength and Endurance, to ward off any assassination or abduction attempt. It would take so many resources to take even the weakest of his harem anywhere against their will that it would be impossible to do covertly. A great ease for John’s paranoia.

Selection made, John dropped an ocular screenshot of the Perks in the Harem Comms and told everyone what had just happened. The news was met with the expected degree of excitement. ‘Now if only I could get a way to power level haremettes through sex.’

He lingered on those thoughts. Deliberately repeated them in his mind. Wished for them dearly so that Gaia or the subconscious part of himself responsible for shaping future Perks would listen. If he made the correct choices, he would be given what he wanted. Such was the blessing of his Innate Ability.

With that affair sorted, John decided to do another one of his check-ups. It was the 16th day of the grinding session. ‘It’s been a couple of days since I checked on Hailey,’ he thought. Same could be said for Delicia, but the smug maid was currently busy helping Claire with housework. For once, housework was not a euphemism, they were actually cleaning.

Hailey’s workshop had been placed outside the building, after a recent incident had many of the haremettes complain about the smell of hot iron. Although there was no fire hazard, welding indoors had some other side effects people weren’t a fan of. Hailey had rolled her eyes, but obliged when Gnome and Magoi had put a new side building together for her.

John approached it carefully. It was always wise to tread carefully around places of experimentation and the enigma engineer had neither the senses to hear him coming nor the defences to stay unharmed if anything went awry.

His carefulness was vindicated, when he opened the door and found Hailey fiddling with an apparatus that he could only describe as fantastical. Several adjustable arms held small crystals that channelled light into larger crystals. The intensified refractions were all aimed at an object in the centre.

Hailey was standing next to it all. The sleeves of her coverall were tied around her waist, keeping it securely around her legs while her upper half was exposed. A leather top hugged her breasts tightly, and that was as much as it hid. It was another one of those pieces that she had bought from Eliana’s provider, complete with the ring at the front that served as the clasp.

John knew that from a glance at her back alone. Quietly, he closed the door behind himself, and followed Hailey’s motions. Sweat pearled down her skin, while she bowed over a terminal. Several cords connected its exposed insides to the laser machine. Parts of its casing were still scattered about a different workbench. The display seemed to have been one of the tablets the Gamer had provided her.

“Ya gotta be kiddin’ me,” she grumbled and slapped the side of the self-made machine. With a groan, she grabbed a wrench. Slowly, she turned a nub that stuck out of a corner of one of the arms. The angle of the laser changed, consequently shifting the refraction and the point of impact.

“Everything good?” John asked, after Hailey had taken a step away. The country gal turned around, her dirty blonde hair cascading with an intensity that demanded an immediate brush back. Once she realized it was him, the surprise immediately left her body.

“Bett’r now that you’re ‘ere, sugar.” Those few words made John’s heart soar. She strut over to him, her oil-stained work boots clacking on the concrete floor. Covered in machine oil and sweat, she was an image for the gods. Well, John was not sure how the gods felt about mechanically inclined tomboys, but he most certainly felt positively about them.

“Don’t you have to watch that?” John asked, while Hailey wrapped her arms around his neck.

Now that she had stepped away, he could see what all the lasers were focused on. A box of metal, no deeper than four centimetres, maybe a dozen long and half that wide. The top was open. The sides bore the marks of magical etching. The material where the laser had travelled seemed to have been neither seared nor melted – rather, it had been changed into a darker metal altogether.

Hailey half turned her head, then turned back to him. “It’ll be fine, I’m testin’ somethin’,” she turned her attention back to him. “By the by, did ya hear from Emrik recently?”

The Gamer was immediately suspicious. “No, but I know him, why?”

“’Cause he contacted me. Wants to talk some more, both about last time and about potential work.” Hailey scratched John under the chin. “Haven’t responded yet – the man thinks the sun rises just to hear ‘im crow.”

Each up and down of her index finger sent a tingle of raw happiness down his spine. “I don’t think arrogance is one of his vices.”

“He’s a politician.”

“So am I.”

“And you’re so modest, hon’.”

“…Touché.” John pushed her hand aside, only to claim her lips. The salt on her lips mingled with the sweetness of her saliva. There was still a slight note of peppermint under the intense smell of hot iron in her hair. “Will you respond?”

“Dunno.” Hailey undid her hug and turned back to her experiment. She put some commands into the terminal, then groaned again when one of the arms refused to move. Using the wrench, she manually adjusted again. “Kinda stuck between two ideas right now. One hand, I do like bein’ my own gal, but I also like being yours.” She plopped down on a stool. “And I don’t like guys that move around my man to talk to me.” Her stare demanded a reaction.

“For all the bad things I can say about Emrik, I do trust him not to pull anything unbecoming.” John scratched the back of his head. “How do I put this delicately… he’s happily married to a woman that’s pretty average – exceptionally dull looking by Abyssal standards.” He took two steps forwards, until he towered above the sitting Hailey. He bent over her and protectively ran a hand through her hair. It was a bit sticky. He didn’t mind. “If I couldn’t trust him in that regard, I’d be taking action. Everyone has to respect who my girls are.”

Hailey leaned into his hand and grinned. “Ain’t nothin’ more attractive than a man who guards his property.”

“Nothing more attractive than a woman who cares for hers either,” John responded.

“I’ll keep lookin’ out for ya… Speakin’ of that,” Hailey drawled and gestured towards the ongoing experiment. John took half a step back to get another look at it. The lasers had moved on slightly, etching more runes into the side. “Ya know why artifice is terr’ble?”

“It’s hard to produce, hard to repair, and breaks easily,” John summarized the lesson he had gotten from Scarlett on the matter.

“And why’s that?”

“Artifice requires both a power core and enchanted materials to work in tandem.” He laughed when he spotted Hailey’s disappointed expression. “Were you looking forward to finally explaining something to me?”

“I’ll get ya at some point,” Hailey promised. “Anyway, so I was readin’ up on simultaneous placement theory…” She paused, giving John an opportunity to ask.

He didn’t need to. It was a pretty simple and proven theory that runes had higher connectivity if they were placed closer together not just in space but also in time. It was a smaller of the many reasons why enchanted items were rarely upgraded after their creation and – if they were – those upgrades usually replaced any runes that were part of a set.

Hailey tutted and continued, “…and got thinkin’ on whether I could create runes that could be transferred between surfaces.”

“Like, have pieces that can be slotted into any surface?” John asked, looking at the box that was gradually getting modified. It could easily slot into any kind of base created for it, like a RAM stick on a motherboard.

“For a start,” Hailey responded. “Just havin’ switchable runes ain’t fixin’ the problems of artifice. I’d just introduce one more part that could break by havin’ the runes on an attached piece instead of being part of the integrated energy circuits.” She got up and walked and marched to another one of the workbenches. “Here, this should show ya what I mean.”

Hailey held up a revolver. It was crude in its shape, much of the outside was scratched by sandpaper and other rough grinding utensils. Besides the lack of aesthetic refinement, it was clearly a working firearm. With a strong tap, Hailey exposed the cylinder. Six bullets dropped into her hand and were put in an ammunition box. Only after inspecting the gun thoroughly, did she slot the cylinder back into place. She pointed the barrel at John.

“Imagine this here gun is a piece of artifice,” Hailey drawled. “There’s a mana crystal in the grip, chargin’ any bullet fired. The energy is shaped by runes inside the cylinder and down the barrel, with the finishin’ touches at the muzzle. Ya have all of these runes that get worn down by the operation. If ya have a misfire, ya can throw away the entire thing. What y’all tried before is to put some of the runes on the bullets instead of the cylinder. The circuit is completed when the hammer hits the bullet and the kind of circuit changed by the inscription on the bullet.” Hailey pulled the trigger a couple of times. Each empty click was accompanied by her naming another element. “Water bullet, lightnin’, fire, rock – ya get the point.”

“And all that did was introduce another piece into it all,” John said, if only to signal he was listening. “The bullet can still be damaged itself and it won’t matter if it’s on a separate piece if the barrel breaks. The entire rest of the gun is required to finish the circuit.”

“And why go through all of that if ya can just use arcano-tech or enchantments? Just use the mana crystal in the handle for a simpler operation that doesn’t break that easily or enchant it so most of the runes are etched right into the magical matrix of the material. They’re safe there. Better to lose the fancy stuff and some power if ya can keep shootin’ the gun.” Hailey made the cylinder spin with her thumb. It rattled, until the stopping mechanisms proved stronger than the momentum. The bullet slots remained perfectly aligned with the barrel. “What if ya applied new runes to the gun each time ya shot, though? What if I could smooth-out and re-apply the runes on an object each time they got activated?”

“You think that is possible?” John took a few steps away from the lasers. The heat was bearable, given the enchantments of his suit and his Perks, but he did not enjoy it too much.

Hailey grinned and picked up another self-made gun off the table. Without a single word, she pointed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. No boom. A click of the hammer. John followed the bullet upwards. It spiralled beautifully, blue tendrils of energy travelling out from its tip and growing longer as it ascended. When it hit the ceiling, it drilled a hole straight through and disappeared into the sky above.

“What did you just shoot?” the Gamer asked, inspecting the hole. Its rim was scarily smooth, as if there never had been any wall there to start with. Considering it was solid rock, that was beyond impressive.

The gun in Hailey’s hands glowed green and began to hover. The second part was a manifestation not of its own properties but of Hailey’s magic taking it apart. Tightly joined parts drifted in the air, until the shape of the gun was barely recognizable between its disparate segments. The enigma engineer made room on the table and placed the parts down, before her limited magic could run out.

“Steel bullet, 4mm. When the hammer hit the casin’, it sent a shock through the base circuit that wrote the runes on the inside of the cylinder and the barrel that spread just a bit faster than the bullet. Kinda like a railgun creates a magnetic pulse only in front of the projectile, ya know?” Hailey inspected the gun. “It gave the muzzle a sound suppression enchantment, the length of the barrel steeps the bullet in disintegratin’ energy, and the power surge from the mana crystal gives it the additional punchin’ power.” She picked up what looked like a plain piece of greyish white crystal. “Totally busted the energy source tho… alongside most stuff… ‘Nother failure.”

John wrinkled his forehead and looked at the ceiling. That kind of punching power widely distributed would somewhat ease the difference in power so painfully common in the Abyss. Not to mention the vast military applications. “Have you showed it to Scarlett yet?”

________________________________________________________________________

“HOW?!” Scarlett ripped her eyes off the gun only for long enough to scream that single word, before bowing back over the reassembled gun. Even if it was still broken, the proof of concept was etched into the surface of the metal. “How…?” she mumbled, quietly this time. The mecha-tendrils she used to inspect the firearm wiggled to give her different angles. “You just solved the Density Paradox – how the fuck did you do that?”

““Density Paradox?”” John and Hailey asked in unison.

“Runes have better synergy the closer they are together in space and time, that’s as far as enchantment goes.” Scarlett’s voice was quiet, her lips moving almost absent-mindedly. “It becomes progressively harder to place more runes in the same area, that’s where enchanters distinguish themselves. However, when you have physical runes, that changes. A structure that transfers energy through magical script reaches a maximum where density helps and past that it no longer works. An unorthodox behaviour, like water being densest before freezing.” The technomancer paused. “That’s what everyone fucking thought at least.”

“Sounds like y’all didn’t realize ya had a circuit situation instead,” Hailey stated.

In computer development, the primary way things got more powerful was by downsizing circuits and then adding more of them. The difficulty in that task was insulating the individual pathways in the hardware despite the ever-shrinking distance between them. It only took a few stray electrons to ruin the computation.

It appeared Hailey had just proven that the paradox between magical and physical runes was only one of other people not realizing that they had not been insulating their runes properly.

“But how?!” Scarlett ran her hands through her hair repeatedly, until they just stayed and clawed at her scalp.

“You’re ruining your gorgeous hair.” John softly tugged at her wrists, trying to get her to lower her arms.

“I don’t need hair, I need fucking answers!” Scarlett exclaimed, staring at a piece of paper where a mechanical extension of her will was replicating the runes within the gun.

There was a pattern to it all. A vague awareness that there was a logic that was being followed. That being said, even John’s erudite mind could not understand where that logic started, where it went, and where it ended. To him, every new line added just added to an overlapping cascade. It didn’t help that he had barely any idea about the reading of runes. He might as well have looked at hieroglyphs that were written in winding paths in a three-dimensional pattern on a cave wall.

“Explain this,” Scarlett demanded. Hailey started to, but she wasn’t three sentences in before Scarlett got the confused look of someone that did not follow at all. Furious, she turned to John. “Nia… call Nia, right the fuck now.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

Nia was rubbing her temples, as if she had to fight the worst headache in her life. “No,” she stated and began to turn around.

Scarlett caught her by the wrist. “What do you mean: no?” she asked, having reclaimed her usual calm in the minutes between asking for Nia and the pariah arriving.

Staring back, Nia’s ice blue eyes gave away just as little of her thoughts as the, by now almost entirely black, page of transcribed runes did about the workings of the gun. “I’m not spending the next thirty years deciphering that.”

“It ain’t that complicated,” Hailey stated.

“Yes, it is.” Nia pulled her wrist free. “You caught the blue butterflies in a comfy cage. I don’t know how.”

“Great.” Scarlett reached for her breast pocket and pulled out her box of cigarettes. She looked at them for a few seconds, then put them away. Instead, she reached into her personal dimension pocket and pulled out something that looked several times fancier – and stronger. She lit up one of those. The spiders on the walls skittered away. “The reality bending, magic reading and nullifying blank says she’ll need 30 years to decipher something created by the engineer who ignores rules she doesn’t agree with. This will keep me up at night.” Scarlett took a deep huff. The smoke had a sweet, narcotic smell. “You’ve officially built something I can’t even try to comprehend anymore, good job.” She turned her gaze to John. “It also means this technology is limited. Even if it’s almost as sturdy as enchantments, flexible, and disconnected from one’s own magical talent, the only person that can build and repair them stands right there.”

“I actually prefer it that way.” John picked up the gun. “It’s nice knowing there’s barely any risk of these leaking outside.” He showed Hailey a smile, and she gave a proud grin back.

The door to the living room flew open. “Scarlett, you can’t smoke indoors!” Claire shouted across the room.

“Piss off, I am having an existential crisis!”