Gliding through the forest at the head of the caravan was surprisingly quiet. The truck’s hover runes were silent and floating above the muddy pathway was as soundless as you could get.

  The marshland around them had buzzing insects and rustling grasses. There were mangrove trees in the distance, but there weren't any tall plants nearby. The dirt road was raised slightly from the surrounding area, providing a stable and occasionally dry path for carts to drive across. Brackish water lay still on either side of the path, an opaque chartreuse with green bushes and grasses poking up from the toxic looking water. Pops of red appeared sporadically, a flower with softly buzzing petals.

  Luke leaned forward and rested his arms on the roof of the hover truck. It hadn’t taken him long to realize that he couldn’t defend the convoy from inside the cab. He needed to be able to respond with all of his arsenal instantly, not waiting to climb out first. He had moved the tarp in the truck bed and climbed into his second layer of power armor, the mech he called Black Mamba.

  A few monsters had attacked them once they left the safe zone around the farming estate, a Gray Slug and a troop of Sand Imps. Luke had killed them without stopping. He didn’t bother to collect their cores either. They were tier one monsters and this trip would net them dozens of tier three and above monster cores.

  Three hours later and Luke was really wishing he had brought Angela along. Her Reaper class would be perfect for this trip. Monsters were attacking every ten minutes or so and they had left dozens of cores behind by now. She could have harvested the cores without slowing down and they would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars richer.

  There was a reason they weren’t stopping though. It would slow them down, but that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason they hurried across the landscape was that if they stayed put too long, they would attract the titans that live around here. Even if they survived that encounter, they would be further slowed. Reluctantly, Luke had agreed not to stop for any core less than tier three.

  A stand of grasses up ahead moved against the wind briefly and Luke sat up. He scanned the area with his visor’s mana vision and saw a faint blob of magic nearby. It could be a particularly magical plant, or a monster waiting to ambush them as they passed by. He raised his right arm and started charging his plasma bolt. It was much slower and weaker than his regular spell rifles, but it didn’t use up his limited magnet ammunition.

  Before he fired, he checked the surrounding area for other targets. It was difficult to tell if there were any. The bushes and grasses around this area were all mana dense. This must be near a ley line or mana spring or whatever they had here. It wasn’t until he searched farther out that he was able to tell which blobs of mana were monsters and which were plants.

  They were all monsters.

  As he looked farther out he had realized the swamp grasses were naturally devoid of mana. All the splotches of mana around him underneath the water must belong to monsters. They were surrounding the caravan on all sides up and down the road.

  Luke canceled the plasma bolts charging in their tubes. Their best bet was to hope that none of the monsters saw them and they glided on by. He held his breath and they kept hovering forward. He turned around to make sure none of them were sneaking up on the caravan.

  They were.

  A dozen monsters were creeping down the road, running silently behind the final hovercart, the wooden one housing the widow and her children. They were nine foot tall fish-like humanoids with long spines running down their backs. The dark green monsters were creeping along in the bright morning light, but magic made them look like they were in deep shade.

  He decided to call them Shadow Fishmen. Out here there weren’t any humans translating Elvish names into English, so he could call them whatever he wanted. That thought raced through his mind and then he refocused on the present.

  Luke immediately fired his spell rifles. They were already close to the widow and her kids, so he couldn’t risk a fireball, or splatter from an acid shot. He used lightning and fracture runes. They arced through the air along the sides of the caravan. The guards and a few of the children saw the spells and shouted in surprise.

  Before the spells landed, Luke focused and pushed more than half his mana pool into Summon Vehicle. As the lightning spell hit two monsters and the fracture spell pulped a third, mana streamed from him and split in two. An M10 Booker tank formed on either side of the hover carts in Luke’s signature colors, gray with violet highlights. They were facing downrange with the majority of monsters in front of them.

  The tank might seem like a bad matchup for swarms of monsters since the main gun moved slowly and fired one round every twelve seconds. However, the Booker came with two independently rotating machine guns atop its turret and that should be more than enough to handle these marsh monsters.

  As the summoned vehicles formed, Shadow Fishmen leapt out of the waters on both sides of the dirt path. Sickly yellow water sluiced off their dark green scales as the monsters landed directly in front of the hover carts. Their shadow magic activated and they started to fade into the background.

  Luke threw a Machine Soul into each of the tanks and yelled, “Kill the Shadow Fishmen.”

  The summoned Bookers immediately started firing their machine guns and center cannon. The whip cracks of dozens of rounds of ammunition filled the air. It was oppressively loud, and would have been deafening if the tanks had been real. Without gunpowder, the only sound was the bullets breaking the sound barrier.

  The gray and violet summoned ammunition streaked across the intervening space. It pierced the fishman’s scales and sent out a spray of red blood, like a violent flower blooming. The round disintegrated back into wisps of magic, but hundreds of bullets followed.

  The assembled monsters didn’t get a chance to raise their claws before they were riddled with holes. Blood sprayed, monsters and men screamed, and twenty monsters died within three seconds. They fell to the ground one after another, like their strings had been cut.

  Shadow Fishmen behind the tanks had mostly flinched back at the sudden influx of oppressive sound. Some of them had stronger constitutions and shook off their shock and attacked. A half dozen leapt onto the gray and violet tanks, attempting to avenge their fallen. The machine guns spun and shot some of them point blank, sending brain matter splattering across the summoned armor. Luke assisted his tanks by firing a few lightning shots at the monsters the guns couldn’t reach.

  The turrets spun, firing in a wide arc around itself. When their turrets were pointed backwards, the main cannons fired again, the summoned rounds blasting through five monsters at once. The tank on the right finally accumulated too much damage and was unsummoned. Four Shadow Fishmen fell to the ground. Luke blasted them away with a large fireball.

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  Fifteen seconds after the attack began about fifty monsters were dead. The children in the final hover cart were crying and holding on to their mother. The remaining tank fell silent. Luke scanned the area with his mana vision again. This time there weren’t any particularly magical plants. The swamp was clear.

  The System of the World agreed with him and gave him the level up notice that only appeared after the fight was over. It was a particularly nice level up, too. Now that he had a skill above level twenty, his class could level up again. It would probably happen after the next fight.

  “No need to worry, all the monsters are dead,” Luke called out to the kids.

  They quickly stopped crying, but he wasn’t sure if that was just because the human was yelling at them. He decided not to try and befriend them right now. Maybe later, when he wasn’t wearing his scary armor.

  “Bosa, before we start moving again, use all your threads to collect as many cores as you can, as quickly as you can.” Luke said.

  The rule Momoh had given him was to not stop for low level cores, but they were already stopped.

  The chubby elf himself was ignoring Luke, deep in discussion with the elf to his left. They were talking politics and hadn’t flinched when the monsters were mowed down. His nephew had a different reaction.

  “Excuse me. Some of us are trying to relax. Could you use quieter skills next time?” Imohi said from the rear hover cart. He hadn’t even sat up from where he was laying on pillows.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I’m a low leveled human. There isn’t a lot I can do about how loud my skills are. Maybe when it’s your turn to protect the caravan, you can show me how it’s done,” Luke said with a grin in his voice.

  The provisional lord had only brought along Seneschal Cormac for defense. The orc had a fantastic Mana Maestro class, but it was never quiet, he basically played music every time he attacked. If Imohi wanted to be quiet, he would have to assist in attacking the monsters himself. Which, as an aristocrat was a social faux pas. They were supposed to have power but not use it.

  Imohi grumbled something about idiot humans but didn’t say anything loud enough to continue the conversation.

  Less than sixty seconds later, Luke tapped the roof of their hover truck to get them moving again. As much as he wanted as many cores as possible, they couldn’t stay put for long after that loud attack. Bosa had eighteen thread wrapped cores that she floated over to the truck bed and they got moving again. Luke checked and they were all tier two cores. Those sixty seconds of harvesting would probably earn them $200K when they returned to Earth.

  The next hour was quiet and Luke decided to do something he had been avoiding. He launched one of his magic drones and sent it ahead to scout out the way.

  Up until now he had been wanting to save his Machine Soul resource since he only had six of them and needed them so Summon Vehicle was really useful. But the ambush made him change his mind. He had used two souls because it had been a surprise, and he might not have needed to use any of them if he had been prepared for them.

  He sent the flying camera ahead with instructions to send him video if it saw any monsters ahead. Hopefully that would allow him to be more efficient with his resources. Not only did he wish he hadn’t spent so many Machine Souls, he had also spent more than half his mana on monsters so low tiered that he couldn’t even level up by killing them.

  Thankfully, the mana situation should resolve itself soon. Every passing mile increased the mana density and made his mana regeneration faster. Instead of taking a few hours to refill his pool, it would probably only take an hour and a half now.

  They passed out of the worst of the swamp a few minutes later. The ground was still soggy and filled with ponds but there were more and more trees. Thirty minutes later, his drone sent him a picture of large lumbering monsters walking across the road. They were cow sized platypus monsters.

  They had duck bills, clawed feet, poison spurs, and a beaver-like tail. Their only non-platypus aspect were the enormous fangs jutting out of their lower bills. The monsters rooted about in the nearby stream, muddying up the water. There were eight of them, three of which stood directly in their path.

  Luke leaned down and whispered for Bosa to slow down. The monsters hadn’t seen them yet as they were just out of sight around the bend. As soon as their hover truck peeked around the corner and he spotted them in the distance, Luke tried something he had been practicing over the last few days.

  His Vortex Door skill was level twelve now and much more flexible than before. Instead of just creating gateways he could walk through, the skill could be used as a precision portal. He focused hard and created a three foot wide portal atop the truck roof in front of him. He pointed ahead and created its pair directly underneath the biggest Fanged Platypus.

  He used his body to shield the portal from prying eyes behind himself and stuck his chainsword through the portal in front of him and activated it. The blade sprung to life and dug deep into the monster’s neck. The spinning teeth pulled themselves along, tearing through the flesh with a high pitched whine. Blood fountained out of the wound and sprayed up through his portal. Gravity on his side pulled it back down and kept him from being soaked.

  As soon as the first monster was dead, Luke moved the portal to the next monster. The beasts were just starting to react to the sound and were looking around in anger. Luke plunged his chainsword through the next portal and activated the enchantment once more. This time the Fanged Platypuses were on guard this time and noticed the strange portal below their second in command. They were too slow to react before Luke gutted that monster, but his third portal was noticed as it formed.

  Unfortunately for them, their instinct was to rush forward and slam their feet onto the black portal. Luke cut off a pair of feet before one of them brushed the side of the Vortex Door portal and dispelled it.

  Now that the jig was up, Luke stopped using the portal and activated his spell rifles. The fire and acid balls fell from the sky, killing three more monsters. There were only two left by the time they realized the distant floating thing was the source of their problems. Luke took them out with a pair of fracture bolts.

  He told Bosa to collect a core, but he didn’t have high hopes about the quality of their cores. He hadn’t leveled up yet and that was the key signal for whether or not the core would be worth their time.

  To his surprise, the core was a tier three one. Perhaps they had some magical talent that they hadn’t been able to bring to bear since he had killed them from afar. Bosa was able to collect two more cores before they hovered past the bodies.

  The next group of monsters was only fifteen minutes later. They had been deeper in the forest but had sensed his magic drone somehow. They raced over and leapt into the air in an attempt to take it out of the sky.

  The Machine Soul piloting the drone was able to avoid the attack by shooting up into the sky. Luke was treated to a close up video of the next monster’s sharp claws and needle teeth. When they were running towards the drone, his first thought was velociraptors. But as they came closer he realized they had more in common with cassowary birds. They had long needles instead of feathers. The Porcupine Cassowary pack flocked together to observe the flying contraption for a moment or two.

  Luke was formulating a plan to take them out, but they didn’t wait for him to come up with something good. Three of them stretched their wings out and flapped as one. Dozens of steel-like needles filled the sky. The drone tried to avoid the shot, but they had filled the sky, cutting off any retreat.

  His drone was pierced an instant later and fell out of the sky. Luke was concerned. The latest version of his magic drones only had hover runes and a camera to cut down on expenses. But the underside was made up of Stone Beetle carapace. That was the strongest defense he had access to, and they had pincushioned it from a hundred feet away.