4 The Present

THE PRESENT

"Malcolm, you're going to be late," Lucinda's voice calls upstairs to me from the kitchen, rousing me from where I tried to hide under my blankets. I usually spent most of my time sleeping or exercising, anyway, but once or twice a month I would have to go out for work. I really did not like my job.

Up until a few months ago I was living in a special academy for underage Protectors undergoing education and training. The academy was small and only had a couple hundred student from all over the country with varying ages, but it was heavily government funded and oriented around the portals and what came out of them. While there, I learned everything the world knew about the portals even as they learned it.

On top of this I spent every other day in physical conditioning or combat training based around both firearms and even most forms of martial arts.

At the academy, I lived, ate, shit, and breathed on a tightly packed schedule designed to turn us into a future generation of warriors to protect the country. Most of us were partial to physical abilities with increased strengths and physiques based on our energy levels but some of us received particular education based on special powers and abilities granted to them. I, however, had some of the lowest energy scores in the academy and thus focused on my basic studies and combat training.

When I first entered the academy I was tested in a larger machine to check my energy levels. Since people on the internet were referring to the numerical energy values as magic or mana points because of the things it allowed people to do, the whole world started referring to energy levels as MP. My initial MP was only seventeen but after a year-and-a-half at the academy undergoing special training and even some experimentation my MP had only risen to under thirty.

In the academy, people whose MP climbed naturally were selectively favored while people like me who could only gain MP based on exposure or experiments were given much less attention.

The different MP levels were even graded based on ranges. Under one hundred MP was and F grade, between one and two hundred was E, between two and three hundred was D, between three and five hundred was C, five to seven hundred was B, seven hundred to a thousand was rank A, and over a thousand was reserved for S class like a video game. To compare the energy levels of people, monsters, and portals, the average D ranked portal had signatures over a thousand MP and low-intelligence monsters ranging between two and five hundred MP.

The highest spiking portal ever recorded had a peak of over six thousand MP with intelligent humanoids and monsters ranging from C to A in grades. Because there was only one monster with an mana level over a thousand, the portal was given an A grade. It is speculated an S grade portal would have a peak of around ten thousand with no monsters under A.

As the lowest grade of Protector available with less than forty MP, I had already fought in four different portals at the ripe young age of sixteen. The job paid pretty well even though I was working through the government and not a private group, well enough that I could be living on my own. However, I did not want to be alone and when I was offered to stay with the lady agent who took care of me before I decided to enlist through the academy I quickly accepted the offer.

Admitting defeat to the government programs that I was a part of which dictated how I was allowed to live my life now that I was an F rank Protector, I sigh tiredly and get up out of bed to dress up. Normally I would just wear shorts and a plain shirt around the house. Now, though, I dressed up in sweat pants and a turtleneck sweater.

Over this ugly outfit I soon put on a thick, formfitting rubber suit. The rubber suit was about an inch thick and had roughly a hundred MP after being made with chemicals and materials synthesized from things brought through the portals. Most E rank monsters had bullet-resistant bodies but this suit was specially made with alternating layers of almost microscopic honeycombs to increase its natural impact absorption.

This suit could stop almost any small arms gunfire and even hold most basic rifle rounds. A twenty-gauge slug could still tear through it, but if it hit an F rank body like mine somewhere muscular like the chest or abdomen it would not go more than an inch or two deep. Even with this suit on I was still no finished suiting up.

Over the Protector's proto-suit- which was originally a prototype armor to increase the efficiency of common soldiers- I put on a large coat of thick leather that had even more MP than the suit. The leather was made from the hide of an E-grade alpha wolf which was already pretty tough to modern weapons. After being treated with MP-enriched chemicals, the original reading of one-thirty-two rose to over one-fifty

To cover my lower body I fastened a pair of similar leather chaps woven thickly with padding about my legs before finally getting to my weapons. Around my waist went a broad leather belt sporting a large three-barreled revolver with a matching triple-slotted chamber. Each chamber could hold a single 10mm brass ball-point bullet and the enlarged hammer had several sets of pins on it for striking the backs of three bullets at a time.

The gun alone weighed almost fifteen pounds when fully loaded but the brass was made with MP-enriched metals to give it greater resistance to natural armors while the powder was made with glycerin from broken down monster fats. The average MP of one of my bullets was twenty-five while the powder was usually around thirty upon ignition. These aspects gave my bullets more than enough stopping power to punch through an E-grade alpha wolf like the one that changed my life.

On the opposite side of my body from the gun was a thick and heavy saber of sorts made from enriched alloys and metals taken from the humanoid monsters that came from gates. While there were over a dozen different recorded 'intelligent species' all of them seemed to be as technologically advanced as the Dark Ages with similar mannerisms. Their metals were good, though, and naturally rich in mana that increased their effectiveness against the portal creatures.

In one inner pocket of my coat went a set of three speed-loaders for my revolvers while on the opposite side were several empty sheaths I now filled with foot-long throwing knives. While the gun and saber were standard issue for Protectors of my grade and rank the knives and some other toys were weapons I had to acquire myself. Because of this, I could only afford knives with similar MP levels to the powder grains in my bullets.

Because I had chosen to live with a 'friend' to avoid the costs of life early on, I spent all of the money I made on my first two assignments increasing my arsenal of weapons. Despite the amount involved, though, I was only able to afford five large throwing knives and a single-edged two-handed sword whose belt I now fastened over my chest and shoulders outside my coat.

The sword was what took up most of my money with its mana level of almost on hundred points but it was made with defensive purposes in mind more than offensive. The sword was machine worked from different steels, the core of which was an iron-titanium alloy while the outer two layers were matching tungsten carbide steel. Even without its MP the sword with an inch thick spine was capable of blocking and deflecting both rifle rounds and shotgun slugs. For a short time.

With its MP a matching sword that had been made as a test product could sustain fifty 5.56mm NATO rounds before breaking and several volleys of multiple shotguns shooting at its broad side.

At the end of the test a lead twelve-gauge slug was fired at the cutting edge of the test sword by a professional marksman and the slug cleaved itself in two with only some chipping on the blade. Between the test sword and the actual weapon that I had to pay for, fifteen thousand dollars was more than worth the increased firepower. Now I just needed a bigger gun.

Because of my low mana levels the highest portals that I could be assigned to were F and E ranks, which meant the strongest monsters there would only be in the D ranks. These were literally just low-level mobs like you would see in video games. Either large animals or small monsters with physical abilities greater than the average person's.

Many of them were even given names from popular games and mythology when appropriate, such as the top three most common types of F and E rank monsters. Goblins, slimes, and spiders. All three of them came in a few variations in the lower portals which, like video games, was usually based on their size and weapons.

Plain goblins usually wielded wood and stone weapons like clubs and hammers and were only around four feet tall. In F rank portals there would usually only be a couple of taller five-foot 'hobgoblins' who wielded spears and larger clubs. F and E rank portals also almost always lead to enclosed environments like a mountainous valley or caves so the humanoid monsters rarely had metal equipment.

Slimes were one of the reasons why the standard issue Protector Revolver was a three-barreled weapon. They had amorphous bodies covered in a tissue of dried gelatin from the constant secretions of its organic-reactive acids. Most of the time the folds in the bodies of the smaller slimes would be focused on the rear and give them the appearance of snails.

However, slimes were known to grow to any sizes and have inconsistent limbs from the various large folds on their bodies. In my past assignments and training, I had only dealt with goblins and slimes because they were relatively easy to capture. The only way to really kill them, though, was to destroy or remove their 'cores'.

However, the assignment I was given three days ago explicitly warned about the presence of both spiders and slimes in an E grade portal.

The lowest estimated MP levels of the creatures on the other side were at seventy-five. After four assignments worth of combative exposure to mana, I was only a little over forty. It would still be roughly a dozen assignments before I would effectively enter E rank.

"You're going… fully dressed?" Lucinda asks curiously when I finally come downstairs, knowing the big sword I was wearing equaled a carefully balanced twenty pounds.

"They're picking me up in a truck and it takes so long to put all of this on that I decided to do it now," I reply with only half of a lie, trying to explain why I was upstairs for so long while fastening the arm guards of two thin woven leather gauntlets.

Lucinda seemed to be pretty focused on the gauntlets as I took my seat at the kitchen table, probably looking at the sets of three long canine teeth needles that were stitched between the knuckles of the gauntlets. After almost knocking a drink over on the table, she finished setting out the eggs and toast and bacon that she had been cooking.

"How are you feeling?" She asks suddenly, taking her seat quickly on the opposite side of the table to drink the water she had almost knocked over. "I know your last dungeon was grade E but the slime variant creating the others was almost D ranked and you guys lost the tankers. You might not talk about it but I still get to read all the reports as your current guardian."

I had often been asked questions like this for the past two years and after finally 'opening up' to people I had come up with a prize-winning answer any time I was bothered by somebody. "People died, the living have to keep living, it sucked, the end," I said before I even stopped to think about it.

When I did stop to think about it in the ensuing silence, I remembered I had been a bit of a loner at the academy and decided to say, "The team leader wanted to preserve their cores for more contribution points, which involved bleeding out their bodies, so anyone who didn't wear their proto-suit were already in trouble. Which included our leader and main tanker. When it came time to fight the boss, they were already festering in their mesh suits and drained half the strength of the healer. If I didn't take the shot to destroy its core after they got slammed, more people would have been hurt or dead."

Nodding her head in understanding, she says, "As you know, I used to go where the portals re-stabilized and help clean up, so I've seen my fair share… of the shit. People make bad called for even good reasons. But, this party's leader is a girl and the healer so you know they'll play it safe in this upper E rank dungeon."

"You always say dungeons and parties," I say with a slight shake of my head, thinking of the video games I used to play right up until 'my first exposure'. "At least make it sound professional."

"I don't want to hear that from somebody who is barely more than half my age," she argues with a mock glare while putting just an egg yolk on some toast and busting it before adding bacon. After that she lightly buttered and salted another piece of toast while saying, "But, for the record, my boss is a nerd who makes it sound so professional that even I started saying it."

If the government higher up were saying parties like life was a video game, I no longer had any room to argue even though the academy put emphasis on teams and other synonyms. However, try as they might, a tanker was a tanker and damage dealers were damage dealers while healers and magic users were mages. It simply WAS.

A few minutes later there came a honk from outside and Lucinda briefly dismissed, "Go deal some damage, kid."

Outside at the end of the driveway waited a large and expensive looking truck in which sat five people in the extended cab while two others were suited up in the back already. I honestly felt pretty good about not being the only person in full regalia in the back of a pick-up truck.

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