David woke up feeling surprisingly well-rested. First thing, he flicked open the system menu and checked his stats. His eyebrows shot up—level ten already. Not bad. He stretched, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and decided to take a quick walk around the perimeter.
The early air was cool and silent, broken only by the low mechanical hum of patrol units. He passed the robots stationed at key points, scanning for trouble. To his satisfaction, everything was in order (apart from a couple of incidents with the friendly fire). They had handled the night flawlessly. It was almost too easy—like logging into a game and finding the grind already done for you.
Of course, there was no reward screen waiting for him, no glowing skill tree or shiny new ability to pick and no sudden wings sprouting from his back. Just the flat, unromantic reality of survival.
With the perimeter secure and no monsters demanding his personal attention, David felt the itch to be productive elsewhere. His mind drifted back to unfinished work. The robotics department still held opportunities waiting to be unlocked. With a quiet nod to himself, he turned his steps toward the lab, already thinking about his next task.
David spent the rest of the day setting up new robots and teaching them how to handle the arsenal he had hauled back. Shotguns, pistols, rifles—anything the gun store had offered was now finding its way into mechanical hands. The only exception was a Desert Eagle he quietly claimed for himself. "Perks of being the boss," he muttered, spinning it once before holstering it. A small sigh escaped him as he glanced at the empty racks. No grenade launchers. Shame. That would’ve been fun.
Two days passed in this rhythm. Training, tweaking, fixing. He was half a commander, half a software engineer, patching holes both in code and in combat drills. His robots had an unfortunate habit of opening fire straight through each other whenever a monster appeared, treating allies as nothing more than inconvenient obstacles. The result was a mechanical version of friendly fire chaos.
After hours of head-scratching, David dug into the software and found an unexpected solution. Buried inside the codebase was a function labeled play_with_children. Apparently, someone had once designed these robots to toss balls back and forth in a kid-friendly mode. With a bit of repurposing, David borrowed parts of the algorithm, adapting the trajectory awareness meant for a game of catch. The effect was immediate. Robots stopped turning their allies into collateral damage and began actually coordinating their lines of fire.
After distributing the last of the firearms and setting up a few ammo supply points around the complex, David found himself at a loss. The immediate tasks were done, the perimeter was secure, and for once, he wasn’t being rushed by snarling monsters. He still had plenty of robots standing idle, and time was on his side—the larger panther-like creatures hadn’t even started spawning yet. That meant he could experiment.
He leaned back in his chair, chewing on the end of a pen. “Okay, so what can I do with a bunch of spare robots before the apocalypse party cranks up a notch?” The answer came almost too easily: harvesting. Those crystalline cores inside the hound-monsters were too valuable to leave lying around.
The trick was getting the robots to understand the task. Luckily, all the hounds were exact carbon copies of each other. That simplified things. Whatever system had shoved him into this dome and into the time loop clearly didn’t believe in biodiversity—it just kept spitting out clones.
David smirked as he scrolled through the SDK, digging into obscure subroutines. And there it was: a routine for “beef butchering.” He almost laughed himself out of his chair. “Wow… if the world hadn’t ended, our company could’ve made a killing selling these things.”
He patched the routine in, adjusted a few parameters, and set the first batch of robots loose on a hound corpse. To his delight, they went about their work with unsettling precision, slicing through hide and muscle until they retrieved the glittering crystal core. One held it up like a prize while the others efficiently stacked the leftover remains. Darkly efficient.
The last step was obvious: collection. Teaching the robots to gather the carcasses themselves was even simpler than the butchering process. Within the hour, David had a neat little production line going—robots dragging corpses to a staging area, others processing the remains, and yet more placing the extracted crystals into bins.
He rubbed his hands together, grinning.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
All David had to do was rinse cores off and consume them. The more crystals he absorbed, the stronger his magical core became, and that meant a higher chance of breaking free from the dome in this very iteration.
One crystal… then another… ten… thirty…
Mana Perception skill leveled up.
David let out a shaky laugh. “Thank god they dissolve into mana particles. If they actually sat in my stomach, I’d have exploded by now.”
The hours slipped by, filled with the rhythmic cycle of robots delivering cores and David devouring them. His veins tingled, his body humming like a wire stretched too tight.
Finally, a message pulsed through his perception:
You have improved your magical core: Rank F → F+
Progress, nice. David gritted his teeth and swallowed another core. And another. And another hundred.
Mana Perception skill leveled up.
By the time he staggered to his feet, the sun was already setting behind the horizon. His head throbbed, his core buzzing like a furnace, dammit can he get a heartburn from those cores? “Break time,” he muttered, rubbing his temples. Too much mana at once. He turned toward his office where he made himself a place for sleep, leaving the robots to stand guard, and collapsed into bed. Sleep claimed him almost instantly.
David woke up feeling oddly refreshed, though his body hummed with leftover energy from yesterday’s crystal binge. On his way down to the lobby, he absently toyed with his newly strengthened Mana Perception, now at level eight, and prodded at his magical core. It had grown—enough space for another lightning bolt.
But it was the perception that fascinated him most. With a little focus, he could now see the mana channels inside his body with startling clarity, fine streams running beneath his skin like glowing rivers. The air itself shimmered with motes of energy, countless flecks drifting about like plankton in some vast, invisible ocean. Mana wasn’t alive—he knew that—but the way it ebbed and swirled, moving according to unseen rules, gave the illusion of life. He couldn’t see it everywhere though. Beyond the monsters and away from himself, the world looked… empty.
He turned a corner toward the lobby, where he had instructed the robots to pile up the harvested crystals. Something glowed faintly through the wall ahead. His brows drew together. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
Stepping into the lobby, the answer struck him like a hammer. A mound of softly pulsing crystals filled the room, stacked nearly to the ceiling, casting fractured light across the tiles. His obedient robots stood around the heap in rigid silence, motionless sentinels guarding a treasure hoard.
“Ah, crap…” David muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “Maybe… just maybe, I should’ve put them on pause overnight.”
David quickly realized that the robots had only stopped working because the small dog-monsters had finally run out. Which meant, of course, that the pile of crystals waiting for him in the lobby wasn’t going to shrink on its own. The thought of sitting there, sucking down mana cores like some deranged vacuum cleaner, wasn’t exactly appealing. So, to buy himself a little more time, he decided to train his robots on the larger hounds instead.
That’s when the trouble started. The blood of the bigger hounds turned out to be far more acidic than their smaller cousins. The robots’ synthetic hands began to hiss and corrode the moment they touched the blood, a couple of dogs and the fingers would melt completely and merge together.
The solution, as always, involved another field trip. Sliding the VR headset back on, he directly piloted one of the robots out toward the nearest convenience store. Of course, he didn’t just grab the industrial safety gear he needed—oh no. The shopping cart also clinked with bottles of soda, chip bags, and a packet of cookies that would survive nuclear winter. When the robot trudged back with the haul, David tore into a bag of snacks while unpacking the actual prize: a stack of thick rubber gloves designed for handling industrial solvents.
Outfitting the robots with the gloves wasn’t elegant—he tore through a few dozen just trying to slip them over clumsy mechanical fingers—but eventually, the process worked. The next wave of units marched out with their new protective gear.
As David sent the robots back to work he lowered himself onto the floor in front of the mountain of glowing crystals they had piled up. He stared at it for a moment, sighed, and muttered, “Oh boy… this is going to be a long day.”
He picked up the first crystals, cleaned it, ate it and felt it dissolve into threads of energy. Then another. And another… ten… twenty…
Mana Perception skill leveled up.
You have improved your magical core: Rank F+ → E-
David blinked at the floating text and chuckled. “Oh, so we’ve moved on to a new letter. I was half-afraid it was just going to keep stacking plus signs forever.”
He rolled his shoulders and glanced inward. His magical core looked a bit larger now, more space in his ‘mana tank,’ though nothing fancy like new spells or powers. Just capacity. Still, he couldn’t complain.
“Okay, back to it,” he grumbled, reaching for the next glowing shard.
One Hundred Twenty One... One Hundred Forty... One Hundred Sixty...
The numbers climbed, his movements mechanical. Sweat clung to his forehead as if he were hauling bricks instead of mana. At some point he muttered under his breath, “Damn, I feel like a robot myself…”
And then he pressed on, the pile shrinking ever so slowly as the day dragged forward.
