They went at each other for a few more rounds, most of the time ending in B’s dagger stopping short of Mimic’s eyes, neck, and other vital areas.

“Am I missing out on something? This is unreal.” Mimic backed away from yet another lost encounter.

She panted as she wiped the sweat off her forehead “Experiences, we don’t really differ in strength or reaction speed, I spent a lot more time on this in the past simulations than you, and I have access to the memories of our past encounters.”

“I gotta get my memories back soon then” Mimic shakingly raised his sword up “Again?”

Her inner brows twitched “Um, Sure.” She answered softly, but soon switched back to her normal tone“Last one.” she said with the usual flat tone.

In the following weeks they practically parted ways despite living under the same roof, only sitting down together after dinner to do a short status update as well as some dueling afterwards. Mimic became familiar with the natives, often hanging around the docking area checking what they brought in, sometimes even tried to sneak into an empty cart just to see if they would take him out. He is often called upon to disarm or cleanse some items found in the battlefield after some of the villagers figure out the rare attribute he possesses, as well as why their lantern keeps dying even after filling it with mana just the other day. As for his tasks, the language part was coming along nicely, everyday communications are somewhat doable, mostly sticking towards simple sentences and common words and hoping that the person he’s talking to has some idea of what he is trying to get across.

Primus basically bounded himself to the bed, only leaving for the occasional walk, food, and restrooms, sometimes murmuring in the middle of the night. Though B told him to keep a normal sleep schedule so that the brain would function properly in the long run, yet no one has really been able to verify that he took the advice. In the span of a few weeks he went from a software engineer from his past life, to now, according to him “The Monarch Of Technology.” However, considering they are living with people that just discovered iron not so long ago such isn’t really a high bar. Mimic once expressed his concern regarding the mental stability of Primus directly to him, to which Primus responded with “You Dare Question My Powers? Mortal?” That is when he knew everything was fine.

As for B no one really saw her around, they just noticed that recently the smell of charred wood and explosion sound echoed throughout the mountains a lot more frequent than a few weeks ago. Some crossbows went missing, along with arrows, magic crystals, salt, wine, ropes, and some actual swords and armors scavenged from the battlefield. She often returns to the house covered in ashes, mud stuck in her fingers, sometimes missing an eyebrow or some hair. As for the few times Mimic actually saw her, she was around the smithy handing over some parchment paper and a few jars of wine, which was probably stolen, in exchange for a few weird components such as gears, round metal disk, and even some hollow metal tubing with hexagon shaped hollow. Or she was hanging around with the hunting group, often asking them about their hunt and listening to their epic encounters.

“By the way, Mimic.” B said as she knocks the sword out of his hands yet again “How’s our public relationship going?”

“Not too bad, attempted to convince them to raid a convoy, ended up cracking the whole group up.” Mimic tossed a wooden dagger her way for distraction, then charged at her with an additional one in hand, cracking her defence, and stopping right before the dagger made contact with her throat.

“So your plan?” She said as she wiped the sweat off her forehead, tossing the sword she knocked off back to Primus

He catched it mid air, tucked the daggers back into his waistbands, then prepared for the next round “I mean, the hunting-dudes seem easy enough to convince. Might give them a try, I don’t know, this body is too young for a lot of activities. How’s your stuff going? I see your eyebrow growing back.”

“It’s good, I would need them to make us a mana powered engine, it’s just a few cylinders with some weak explosion runes carved in the interior, now I just have to make sure they go off in the same order, then we can hook it up to something and see if it works.”

Mimic shrugged, gave her an approving look, then shouted towards Primus“Primus!” He paused for a second, recognizing his mistake, cleared his throat, then called again“I mean….hem, THE MONARCH OF TECHNOLOGY, GRACE US WITH YOUR INFINITE KNOWLEDGE?”

“I said just call me Primus, I was in a bad spot after reading for 14 hours that day. You are a dick you know that?”

“Yes, my lord.” He bowed as a wooden spoon hit his head

“I need a computer, and more info on magics. Read all the stuff I can in the dataset, all the computer science, some bio tech, and some robotics. Learned how to clone bodies and not neuter them or their descendants, how to make human-like robots. In short, assuming I get a computer and a few volunteers, I could crack, well cheese the shit out of ageing by just cloning and swapping bodies every now and then. By the way, any of you notice the note at the end of each tech entry?” He walked up and took the sword from Mimic’s hand

“Shit” Mimic closed his eyes and let out a long sigh, rubbing his temple

“What did you find?” B paused the dule then went for a cup of water

“Well, it’s a long list, but the important ones are that: Assuming this is year one, our life expectancy is now 200 years, immunity drops off on year 125, and there are a total of 98 replicas on this planet, half B, half C. Oh, and the wristband is a storage device, if we manage to find a way to read those, we get our whole dataset back. There is also some weird gibberish, it feels like someone put a madlib in there, I can write it down if you want.” He looked towards B

“Fucking hell, 100?” Mimic buried his head into his head “Why even bother with that much?”

“I don’t know.” Primus shrugged “Pass me a dagger and let’s start shall we?”

“Sure, you are going to get rekt though.” Mimic chuckled as he hands it over

“What are you other than some dagger tossing clown?” Primus taunted as he gave the dagger a few swings.

“Well, a clown that’s about to whoop your ass.” He said as he put tosses away the dagger in his hand “Poke me once, and you win.” Mimic said as he backed up with a smug on his face

“Fine, on three.”

“You have 1 minute.” He said as he got into striking position.

“One….” Mimic said slowly, his eyes fixated on Primus.

“Three!” Primus called out, dashing towards him.

“You fuck.” Mimic cried out as he swiftly opened the front door, dashing and disappearing in the partying crowd, only returning after the time was up.

“Get styled on you fucking pleb.” He laughed as he pushed open the door.

“Bruh you can’t just run away from a duel like that.” Primus greeted him with a light stab in the back

“Well apparently I can, I just did, and I’ll fucking do it again.” He glanced at the whole room and asked “What’s wrong with 100B? The fifty replica problem?”

“Well, that and something else. The notes that Cthulhu’s ball left only declared that there are 50 of each, and are of the same age. Meaning… you know…” He gestured vaguely

“We kill every same age children we come across?” Mimic said with a slightly serious tone

“No! We are not PubGing every 5 year old on this planet. It means that there is a chance that some dude just landed in a very wealthy position, and we could get outscaled.”

“Didn’t she account for that before? We had a long ass meeting just for that didn’t we?” He frowned as he looked at yet another plan B’s been working on

“I did, but I assumed there were only something like 5 or 10 of us running around, which don’t get me wrong is still too much. But this is insanity.”

“So just speed up the schedule? Or should we just walk out there…” Mimic said as he pointed towards the door

“We are not slaughtering children, what is your first instinct as a parent when you hear someone is killing children? You protect and hide them. Killing them does us no good.” B muttered

“So now what?” Mimic sat down across from B “Ditch the sneaky peaky plan and just go for a whole kingdom takeover?”

“Yep, we get access to more manpower, and we would have a semi functional shelter instead of a hut in the woods, as well as an army that we could train.” B replied

“And what if one of us comes around just soon after we take over, trashing the place and starting a war against us?” Primus asked

“Same result as if we just stay here and use the old plan, probably get outscaled and rolled over" Mimic replied grin on his face

“We could just disband and not do any of this if any of you don’t want to, there are 50 more people waiting to fill in the spot.” B reminded them

Seeing no one answered, Mimic asked“So, who’s going to start bribing the dudes? I mean, we don’t really have money just floating around, however, we might be able to get them hooked on drugs, assuming we have them, I don’t know, maybe they are into children or something? It would be a lot easier for us if they are into childrens”

“How exactly did you just hop from bribe with money, all the way down to yeah let’s offer ourselves as bait in just one sentence?” Primus sighed

“Well...I don’t know, for shits and giggles?”

“Right, new plan. Mimic, act like you are just another 100C wandering around, taking kingdoms, make as much noise as you can, you need to cover up our existence. Primus, get off the research for now and stay besides Mimic, if he dies you take over, I’ll cover the same area.”

“Oh I’m going to die, real fast.”

“No, we 100Bs don’t really care if 100Cs are running around so you are safe from that. You might even get a few alliances from the other 100B. Even if a 100B or 100C decides to do something frisky, we can probably spot it, well, hopefully spot it. I’m confedent”

“That’s definitely a lie, but sure why not.” He turned to Primus “Right, we raiding a convoy next week”

“You and what army?” Primus asked

“You see, those empty crystals have a tendency to suck mana out of whatever object it comes into contact, kind of like us, but it has a limit. Anyways, all we have to do is make sure it touches either the animal that is pulling the cart, or the person on the cart, then we can just use that as a magic source and blow stuff up." Mimic said with a huge smile on his face “We are doing the good ol 'stealthy berserker approach.”

“That sounds a little bit suspicious, there’s a catch somewhere isn’t there?”Primus frowned

“Well yes, empty mana crystals don’t just stay empty, we will have to hold on to it so that it doesn't just start sucking mana out of the air or whatever. So we would have to be fairly close to the explosion.”

“Fairly as in?”

Mimic thought for a short while “As you might get some hearing impairment if the explosion goes off and you aren’t wearing protection.”

“Oh…”Primus quickly searched the dataset “Oh no.”

“Don’t worry.” Mimic said confidently, patting him on the back“You will return with all limbs and fingers attached, and glorious booty”

“And how sure are you that this would work and what happens if it doesn't?" Primus asked specticly

“Well, we are going alone, hopefully. I would say it’s about a 60 to 70 percent success rate with maybe…” He pouted his mouth as he gave it a deeper thought “Let’s say 50% death rate if we completely butcher the run, nothing too bad. We do this correctly, our words would carry a lot more weight when we speak around here, that’s what we need.”

Primus shook his head in disbelief“You have a serious gambeling problem."

“It’s only a problem if I lose." Mimic gave him a wink, fingerguns in hand "If it really comes down, I’ll prioritise your life, don’t worry” He patted Primus on the back one last time then headed towards B

"I hate myself." Primus said quietly

“B! I’m going to need some things made by the blacksmith.”

“Why don’t you just go ask him?”

“Last time I went over, I extinguished his furnace.” He chuckled awkwardly. “He is fairly, shall we say, defensive when I show up.”

“You want guns? Just a warning, it has no rifling and might jam and such. I wouldn’t really rely on those.”

“You got shotguns then? Those work well, the bullets are easy to make, and it doesn't rely on rifling.”

“Might as well use a cannon eh?” Primus said

“We could, but then I can’t aim, you probably can’t as well, and we need the vehicles attached so that we can move those back here.” Mimic replied, turning his attention back towards B “How much time?”

“Why not just put claymores around? I doubt they would have known, let alone expect those. Just need piece of metal and a lot of metal balls and such, slap an explosion rune at the back of it and we are good to go, doesn't hurt the cargo, kills the person, and probably won’t even hurt us if we are behind it.” Primus sighed as he laid onto his bed.

“That’s…” Mimic stuttered. “Holly shit I’m here thinking of a way to prevent blowing up the cart, my man doing the 500 IQ strats over there. We are just going to need small metal parts then, nails, marbles, whatever.”

“Sure, give me a day or two.”