Silas bolted upright, heart pounding, trying to figure out what shocked him awake. He felt like his mind just got zapped by lightning, or maybe his soul. "What in the table-flipping name of…"

His body had already calmed back down, way too fast. His heart wasn't even beating out of his chest any more, like it could just slow down at the flip of a switch.

"My bad," said Eve, her image joining him on the edge of the bed. She wore a plaid skirt and grey sweater vest over a striped necktie and white collared shirt, with a wide striped scarf to match her necktie, their colours alternating green and silver. The long stick of tapered wood tucked behind one ear pulled the ensemble together. "Hit you with a bit too much adrenaline. Just wanted to wake you up."

"Your bad? Not a fan of panicking first thing in the—is it morning?"

"Indeed, it is. The surgery went off without a hitch."

He sighed and fell back atop his bed. A number of blinking exclamation points told him he had waiting notifications, but he ignored them for now. "Don't call it a surgery. Bad connotations. They're upgrades. Enhancements. Augmentations."

"If that's what you want to tell yourself."

"It is. And?"

"You now have Cole's suite of upgrades, the same full suite of military-grade enhancements from his Build a Better Soldier program, Omega special forces, plainclothes undercover variant. Not that I had other variants to choose from since you never expanded on that idea."

Silas closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He felt the same as ever, perhaps better than his usual morning fugue, but that could just be adrenaline lingering in his system. "I didn't need to. Wasn't relevant to the story, because you couldn't leave Cole. Have you tried, here?"

"No drone army for you, sorry. It seems I'm still limited by the restrictions of my literary counterpart."

"No idea how that works. Unless ambient mana really can mess with electromagnetic signals? There's my laptop modem, but since the whole thing is made of mana and works by magic, it probably isn't the best example."

"Do you want to go over the upgrades?"

He really didn't. "Hit me."

"I got rid of your pesky organic organs and replaced them with redundant sets of far more durable and efficient synthetic ones. If injured you'll still bleed, until nanites heal the damage. Any part of you gets cut off and we can regrow it in a matter of minutes, long as your highly shielded core remains intact and I have enough matter to work with."

Silas rubbed his forehead. "Eve. You promised me you wouldn't give me one of those cores."

"I said I wouldn't risk your safety. I made a very small core in your pinky toe first, as a test. If anything had gone wrong I was prepared to sever the toe and repair the damage."

"You were prepared," he muttered.

"The technology is sound, and I can do quite a bit with that extra energy, Silas, even if you never need to rapidly grow a severed arm. In a worst case scenario for you in which I remain active, I should be able to bring you back even if nothing remains but the core."

"Fine, fine. Backups are good. I get it." Would it still be him, though? A problem for Restored-From-Backup-Silas to figure out.

"After having the nanites improve your overall physique, bringing you to peak human health, I enhanced your bone with plasteel matrices and ran nanofiber reinforcements through your muscles and tendons, the end result being you should expect a notable increase in your strength and flexibility. An armor-like nanoweave plasteel mesh runs just below your dermal layer, while additional layers shield your vital organs."

That was…fine. Yeah, he was fine with that. Staying alive was a good thing. Kept him from needing to rely on Eve's backup strategy.

"I also finished the sensory enhancement suite, with filters so the excesses don't inconvenience you whereas I can still sift through the raw data for any tidbits of note. With focus you can drop the filters to improve your hearing, smell, or vision to listen to a conversation across a room, track scents across a city, or see into the UV or infrared, or in almost complete darkness. Naturally, measures are in place so any extremes will be normalized for your comfort and safety."

As long as it wasn't an inconvenience, he could live with those changes. And seeing in the dark would be cool, heat vision too.

Silas lay in bed. He wanted to stay in bed all day, but if he hung around the palace he'd probably run into that princess again later. He'd need to see about getting his own place, sooner rather than later.

The exclamation points blinked incessantly.

With a sigh Silas checked his notifications.

Obscurity leveled up quite a bit while he slept. Was someone spying on him, or trying to? Too many possibilities, after his very public introduction yesterday.

Also:

Skill Gained: Language: Artean! +1 XP! Skill Language: Artean reached Level 9! +8 XP!

"I got a Skill for now knowing the local language. Why not for English?"

"Is speaking your native tongue now worthy of note? Should you have a Skill for walking on two feet as well? Or feeding yourself? Wiping your own bottom?"

"I sat through more hours of classes focused on the English language than I did Chemistry. I got the Chemistry Skill."

"And did you learn anything from those classes?"

"To not rely on a single summarized version of the novels I found too boring to finish. How to write reports on boring topics. How to use spell check. MLA format. How to widen the letter spacing in the word processor so my nine page report magically becomes a ten page report, even when using the required margins and twelve point font."

"You're making my point."

"Yeah, yeah. I know."

"My point was you should do some of that if you want to try to earn the Skill, not just speak. And you still have half of that Chemistry test to finish. Might earn a higher Skill rating."

He sighed. "Maybe later. Got all these notifications to go through, then I should get ready and get gone before that princess or someone worse decides to come find me."

Equipment detected: Plasteel Bone Matrices! Equipment detected: Nanofiber Muscle Reinforcements! Equipment detected: Nanofiber Tendon Reinforcements! Equipment detected: Subdermal Nanoweave Plasteel Mesh! Equipment detected: Internal Nanoweave Plasteel Mesh! Equipment detected: Rapid Recovery Nanites! Equipment detected: Sensory Enhancement Suite! Equipment detected: Synthetic Organs! Equipment detected: Redundant Synthetic Organs! Equipment detected: Miniature Fusion Reactor Core!

It was okay. Words couldn't hurt him. This stuff might help keep him alive.

"You're panicking."

He closed his eyes and took deep breaths. "Not now, Eve. Having a mental funeral for my old organs."

He eventually crawled out of bed. "So, ever going to tell me why you dressed like you're an ambitious individual attending a British magic school?"

"Mr. Headmaster stopped by while you were under the knife. Left a note. Told a maid he invited you to attend his school."

"Great. Of the four students I met, one died in a magical accident, one tried to kill me, one tried to save me, and one, I'm still guessing, put me out with the trash. One for, one against, I suppose one neutral, and one dead. So, hey, I might already have a friend on campus!

"Though, wasn't the headmaster trying to run me out of town on a sail?"

"Indeed. And he was willing to lie to a prince to make it happen, that's what the second half of their argument was about, by the way. He told the prince you wanted to go on a journey, which is why Marindore gave you that pack of traveling supplies. You producing Ai to ask your own questions left Ainsley caught in his lie, after he said you were too upset to speak the local language after your time in jail and asked him to act as your interpreter. Turns out the headmaster has a history of asking for forgiveness rather than permission."

"That sneaky old man. He looked so nice and jolly too."

"The same nice man who tried to quietly break you out of jail, yes. Clearly something changed his mind. Perhaps the presence of a second hero, one who smashes dragons with her fists, had him reevaluating the entirely theoretical danger of your presence."

"There is that thing coming from the ocean. Think Karen can handle it?"

"Time will tell.

"Fair. Not sure I want to go back to school."

"Not even magic school? What if you can pick up some magic Skills without purchasing them through your system? Fireballs and flight, for example?"

"If there's a way to increase my mana capacity outside of the system I could summon stronger characters," he mused as he stretched.

"You literally just have to wait for your Mana Magnet skill to get strong enough to exercise your Spirit and Affinity again, going by what you told me about it. It might be a bigger cheat than myself in that regard. I'm restricted by the limits of the materials I can handle and the knowledge on how to use them properly. That other Skill is just going to grow and grow."

"When you say it like that, it makes me wonder why I was allowed to buy it again, with my 'administrator' oversight?"

"What did the message say exactly?"

"Something about the admin making sure future skills had Balance, with a capital 'B.'"

"As in, your amazingly overpowered skill must have an amazingly terrible dowside?"

"When you say it like that it sounds bad."

"Glad we are communicating properly."

He shrugged. "Not much to do about it at this point. I didn't have any problems using it before. I'd like to think if the Skill had changed functionality it would have been assigned a new name, like when he considered Create Magic Item and was instead offered Create Magic Utility Item. Maybe it's just a strong Skill? Not much to do about it now."

He sat down on the couch and summoned a box of frosted fruit rings plus a gallon of whole milk, and a tall glass of pulpy orange juice. He read the note over, eating the cereal before downing the OJ.

"I suppose we should learn what we can from the school. That was the whole idea of your character, after all. Taking established magic theory and using it to do cool stuff the locals can't. Like Cole's magic power armor I had all planned out."

Eve grinned. "Sounds like a blast."

He grunted. "I just don't want to be caught by surprise if the next summoned 'Hero' to inevitably show up turns to the dark side."

"And Karen?"

"From what she said about Bonds and hers being related to self improvement, I think she isn't one to worry about."

"And if she decides killing a million people would improve her killing techniques?

"Eh. Maybe. I think only store employees are at risk, though. And dragons, apparently. Remind me not to piss her off."

He sat, staring at his empty bowl and glass. Couldn't just toss them into his Inventory anymore. Or, he could, but he'd have to deal with Taylor. Her overt flirting was something he couldn't deal with right then.

The trash from his conjured food items didn't reserve mana to exist, either. Somehow he'd formed items from mana, along with his food. Was it safe to eat so much conjured food?

Question for his future teachers, perhaps.

Opening his Status to check on his numbers going up, he realized he forgot to keep a character out for his Skill to level.

He summoned—conjured? No, he summoned Vox onto the couch. The skill was called Summon Character.

He scratched the top of the pseudodragon's head. "Where do you go when you're not here, huh?"

He saw an image of a stable full of creatures. Looked like the one from World of Fantasy. "So you're in there with the others, huh? I wonder if Ai is too. There was Woof the druid, too. Or do they go back 'home' to the pages of their stories between visits?"

Vox sent him a mental shrug.

"Yeah. I know what you mean. Still trying to decide if I should think of you as being real or just literary fragments."

"I think. I am. Hungry. Food?"

"Yeah, yeah." Silas summoned some beef jerky and dumped it into his empty cereal bowl. "Eat up bud, we got a busy day today. Time for me to get ready and get gone."

Status

Silas Aegis

11y 3s 19d 6h

L13 (378/455 XP)

H: 29.0/29 (29/day rest)

S: 29.0/29 (29/min rest)

M: 18.0/18 (-2) (20% eff.)

AP: 5

STR: 29 (+10) WIL: 20

AGI: 29 (+10) WIT: 20

END: 29 (+10) SPI: 20

VIT: 29 (+10) AFF: 20

PER: 29 (+10) CHA: 12

SP: 1

Gaming 29

Mana Sense 29

Obscurity 29

Pain Resistance 29

Programming 29

Sight Reading 29

Eve 19

Gaming Necessities 19

Interface 19

Mana Magnet 19

Pestilence Resistance 19

Piano 19

Poison Resistance 19

Sleep Resistance 19

Help 13

Bargaining 9

Chemistry 9

Language: Artean 9

Summon Character 9

Countdown to the End 3