“Luke? You doing alright? You’ve been staring at that wall for a while,” Agent Brown hesitantly said.

  The question made Luke shake himself out of his reverie. “Just in shock, I guess. Vanessa broke up with me.” He hadn’t meant to say that, but the words just tumbled out.

  Agent Brown tsked. “I’m sorry. I thought that might happen when I talked to her last week. I’m sorry, man.” An awkward silence followed. “Do you want to talk about it? Or maybe distract yourself with some spy gear?”

  Luke looked up. “I could use a distraction. Are you handing out camera pens and laser cufflinks?”

  “Oh, that’d be cool. No, I’m just going to give you a modem. Come see,” he said and led them back to his office.

  He pulled out a metal brick with thick rubber corners and plopped it on the table. It had a green screen with white letters. There was a small mechanical keyboard below the screen.

  “This looks like something out of Fallout, not spy gear,” Luke said dubiously.

  “That’s pretty close. What we have here is something with sixties era tech and an internet modem that’s slower than dialup. You remember dialup?” When Luke shook his head Agent Brown continued, “I guess you were too young. Loading up a webpage used to take like a half hour. Anyway, the reason this is cool is that it works on Kalibutan. You can access a version of the internet on this baby.”

  “That’s kind of cool. How does it work? I thought mana interfered with electromagnetic signals.”

  “It does, but we’ve figured it out now. I don’t know the details but the techies said something about resonance and atmospheric refraction. Basically, we use a lot more power and we can only use certain frequencies, but we can send a signal all across Kalibutan now.”

  “Huh. That’s good, I guess. Nice to be able to phone home. What makes it spy tech?”

  “This is a Trojan horse.” Agent Brown tapped the brick. “We’ve actually got way better tech now, but we’re sending this with you so that their counterintelligence thinks this is the best we have. Their spies will see you using it, and think we are still stuck in the sixties.”

  Luke shrugged. “I guess. You said it’s a Trojan horse. Is it loaded with a magic computer virus?”

  “No, but that’s a cool idea. We can see and change what info is available on it. If you let their spies steal it from you, we’ll be able to feed them disinformation.”

  “Ok, so my job will be to be seen using this janky brick and be careless about where I leave it?”

  “Yep. SPEAR’s actual infiltration agent will do the real spy work, your job will to be have some fun with tech you didn’t know existed until just now.”

  Luke nodded and scooped up the metal brick. “Yeah, alright. I can do that. I’ll take the elf servant too. She can take Vanessa’s place.”

  At this point, he was just agreeing to get the conversation over. On another day he might fight against doing what the SPEAR leadership wanted. He felt numb and couldn’t bring himself to care.

  “Sounds good. The bosses will be happy to hear it. I’ll send you a text with the details for the helicopter and how to meet up with our elf asset.”

  Luke headed out, walking towards his headquarters. Habit had him walking towards the Monster Jaeger warehouse, but halfway there, he changed his mind. He sent his friend and business partner Allen a text, telling him he was taking the rest of the day off. Then he changed direction and started walking home. Thankfully, that was a much shorter walk than it had been before.

  While working on arranging a place for the Kalibutan refugees to stay, he had stumbled upon the fact that the real estate around the Norfolk Complex was fairly cheap. Most people didn’t want to live near the portal to another world and the potential danger that represented.

  Luke had snatched up a nice house close to the complex, a two story family home with a furnished basement. He wouldn’t have spent the money if it wasn’t for the secondary benefit the house provided. The natural mana diffusion from the portal reached this house and kept his mana topped off. Now that he was level twenty, he felt parched when he was in a mana dry area.

  When he got to the edge of the Norfolk complex, there was a twenty foot tall chainlink fence with barbed wire on the top. It was partially a security measure since the complex was a restricted area. The real reason the fence was so tall was to keep monsters in. The portal on the Kalibutan side was regularly attacked by monsters, people from Earth were always concerned about monsters getting through like what happened in China.

  After making sure his buff was active, Luke jumped right over the fence. His strength and dexterity made clearing the twenty foot height trivial.

  Once he got home, he plopped onto his couch and pulled out his phone. He figured doomscrolling on his phone was an appropriate response to his girlfriend breaking up with him because the sight of him triggered her PTSD.

  Some time later, Jinx wandered into the living room. She was pretty big these days, but had stopped growing when she reached the size of a full grown panther. It was kind of weird seeing a housecat that large, but Luke was used to it now. She hopped onto the couch.

  “Do you need something, Jinx? Are we out of food already? I keep telling you, the food at home is supposed to be just for snacks. You need monster flesh for your regular diet.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Although Jinx couldn’t talk, she understood him perfectly and answered with a shake of her head. She stared at him intently and tilted her head.

  “What is it then?” Luke said with a sigh, preparing himself to get up. Moving felt like a monumental task right now, but he would do it for her.

  Jinx surprised him by licking his hand. Then she slid forward and put her head on his lap. He started petting her out of habit. She purred, a deep rumbling sound, and snuggled in closer. He kept petting her and put down his phone. Tension he didn’t realize he had slowly released. He relaxed into the couch and closed his eyes.

  “Thanks Jinx. I really needed this,” Luke said as a tear dripped down his face.

  ???

  With a flick of his wrist, Luke finished the last inscription on his Mark VI armor, the one he had nicknamed Black Mamba. It was finally done. He had been working on this mech off and on since his last one was destroyed in the fight against Lord Edobar. This set was finally something he could be proud of.

  The outer layer was all black, using the Umbra Mantis’ furry chitin for its stealth properties. Its frame was the biggest yet, fifteen feet tall. It had a redesigned waist to help with mobility and running. Arms and legs were fitted with redundant actuator pistons for enhanced strength. He hadn’t found anything tougher than Rock Beetle wing casings, so that served as his armor layers.

  For weapons, he had improved on his air rifle spell throwers using the community input on his website, WikiRunes. They had helped him double the range of his spell rifles and add resonance to his elemental attacks. That meant when he shot Acid, Lightning, or Fire attacks, the impact would burrow the element deeper into the monster before it exploded.

  Resonance didn’t apply to his final spell rifle because it wasn’t elemental based. The WikiRunes community had added an Adept Fracture rune to the public database, and Luke pounced on it. He used it along with a series of boosting runes to create an armor piercing spell. It wasn’t instantaneous, but the fracture spell was the only thing that could get through Rock Beetle wing casings in one shot. His other weapons required multiple shots to work their way through the tough chitin.

  The only thing that would have made him happier is if the railgun project had succeeded. An international group of backyard scientists and runewrights had been working together to use lightning magic to accelerate a spell using magnetic fields. The principal was sound, it should work for the same reason his neodymium balls grabbed spells and pulled them along. Unfortunately, the group hadn’t had any success yet.

  His arsenal was rounded out with an Ice Hammer and a Resonating Chainsword. He had been practicing sword forms in case he needed them, but he rarely got into melee range with monsters. The recent experience with the Umbral Mantis was a rare exception. Normally he just fired from a distance and brought the monsters down before they could get close.

  The final improvement to his Mark VI power armor was inspired by Russian nesting dolls. He knew that his larger mech would probably be too big in certain situations, including the city they were visiting soon. So he built a smaller, svelte set of power armor within the bigger set. It looked like a cross between Iron Man and a Medieval Knight. It gave him an extra layer of protection and let him hide his humanity. He would get fewer stares as an eccentric elf than a human in the Empire’s capital city.

  He climbed into the red and black set of inner armor, before climbing into the larger black set. Once fully loaded up, he walked to the portal building. He didn’t feel like fighting monsters today, the shock of losing his girlfriend yesterday had made him listless. But the new suit needed testing before they headed out on the trip tomorrow morning. In addition, a dangerous monster had spawned near the estate village of Bona Urbo.

  Monster Jaeger employees had spotted a Chaos Bear. As per guidelines, they had immediately retreated so more experienced hunters could tackle the unpredictable beast. Bumblebee or Sandwich could handle it with proper support, but since Luke was going out anyway, he assigned himself the mission.

  There was a short delay in the portal room. After he had carefully navigated the winding corridors leading up to the large room, the Marines in the room startled at his sudden appearance. The Umbral Mantis chitin also made his footsteps quieter so they hadn’t heard him coming. They briefly turned their gun emplacements in his direction before realizing who it was. They were used to strange new mech designs at this point.

  What caused the delay was the guard stationed directly at the portal. He held up his hand in front of Luke. Which was pretty brave because if Luke hadn’t been paying attention, the guard would have gotten knocked to the ground or injured when his huge legs swung forward.

  Luke stopped himself just in time and said, “What?”

  “Your mech is too big. We can’t have you bumping into the sides of the corridor. The magic can take small impacts, but your big behemoth there might distablize the connection.

  Luke had known exactly how big the corridor was when designing his mech but he made an exaggerated show of measuring his fifteen foot high head and the twenty foot tall gate. It was twelve feet wide and he had plenty of clearance there too. “Looks fine to me.”

  “All the same, sir. We need you to be careful. I’m going to ask you to crouch down and shuffle sideways through the portal.”

  Luke leaned down. All the way down so his faceplate was almost touching the guard’s head. “No.”

  The guard sputtered but Luke stepped around him and through the portal. As he expected, he didn’t touch the walls or ceiling and made it to Kalibutan without incident. The power-tripping guard would probably go tattle to his superior, but Luke doubted he would have any trouble. The ‘policy’ was clearly made up so there was no reason to follow it.

  He ignored the orc guard’s startled reactions and started jogging down the northern path. Every so often he would throw a pair of portals onto the trees in front of him and shorten his journey by a few hundred feet. It didn’t save much time, but the practice helped him make the move more instinctual so he could use it in battle. As he ran he also attempted to place the doors on the ground or at an angle. So far, the skill refused to form on anything but vertical services, but he knew that sometimes skills could be stretched.

  He didn’t have success with changing the skill, but he did find his target. A trail of strangely devastated landscape lead northwest of the village and into the dense forest nearby. Charred tree trunks led to melted bushes and puddles of water. He briefly lost the trail before he realized that there was too much underbrush. Some of them must have been duplicated by the monster’s magic.

  Eventually he found the enormous bear lumbering between a pair of redwood-like trees. The monster was huge, twice as big as his own enormous form. Luke didn’t hesitate to attack. He fired a pair of acid bolts at the Chaos Bear, followed by a large fireball.

  The monster looked up just before impact. It made a high pitched screech and disappeared and reappeared. It looked like it was glitching like a bad program, but in real life. The disappearances were timed with the attacks, each shot missing the monster’s huge form. The ground sizzled and the trees burnt, but the monster was unharmed. The bear turned and roared, sparkly confetti spewing from its mouth.

  It glitched again, this time appearing twenty feet closer to Luke, then galloping forward with ground eating strides. He gulped and lowered his center of gravity. This fight might be a bit harder than expected.