Chapter 3: 3: Jump Into Battle?

My legs moved automatically as if I were on a journey that I had made every day for the past 10 years and somehow just instinctively knew where to go. I figured that it was BB nudging me in the right direction, that or the body I was now inhabiting used to belong to someone else and I was riding off their muscle memory. I chose to believe it was the first of the two options, I didn't want to think that my arrival in this universe had been at the expense of another sentient being. Either way, I seemed to know where I was going for this supposed Guard Initiate showdown.

I didn't get to see much of the city from inside the Guard complex. While I could see out over the walls from my room, which was a glass skyscraper like seemingly every other building in the city, the cast walls of the skywalk I was on kept my views of the wider world to a minimum. That didn't mean there wasn't a lot for my simple human brain to try and avoid gawking at, though.

As I passed from the enclosed hallway out into a main central plaza it took all I had to just keep walking, acting as if I belonged there like any other lifeform. Vehicles flew overhead, not quite spaceships or shuttles but not quite flying cars either. They had no obvious signs of propulsion and just seemed to glide through the air unaided, they were clearly the result of some magic and technology hybrid that I hadn't learned about yet.

While the Magitech was cool, and don't get me wrong it totally was, the life forms walking around the plaza were even cooler. Some of them were quadrupedal, walking around on four legs with torsos that jutted out of their bodies like a centaur. Some squelched about on tentacles, their many legs waving across the ground in such intricate patterns that I couldn't help but wonder how they didn't simply trip up. Others weren't even walking at all. They hovered around on what I could only assume were attuned clouds of pure magical energy. They just sat, smiled, and let the glittering cloud of magical gas glide them to where they wanted to be. There were beings with three arms, beings with four arms, and beings with no arms at all. The plaza was a cornucopia of species. I swallowed thickly. The plaza was a cornucopia of species that all looked incredibly physically strong.

That thought brought an internal snort from BB. <Oh yes, they all look so physically impressive,> the AI drawled, <But didn't you register what I meant when I said you were a literal manna factory? The levels of power in here that are circulating probably haven't been seen in this quadrant since the birth of the stars we're orbiting around if that!>

I was still working on how to process that little fact. After BB had told me that my body was in fact now an expansive factory of manna production, churning out levels of energy that a star would be jealous of, I'd had the AI explain what that would actually mean for me going forward. It was a mixed bag.

For a start, a BB unit was never programmed to work with the levels of energy that my body was capable of wielding, so at least for a little while we wouldn't be able to access a lot of that power. If we uncapped my limiters now and expended all my energy it would be similar to overfilling a water balloon, I would go pop and everything around me would get soaked in magical energy which would be bad.

Second of all, for the most part, using Manna to make Magic happen was actually a pretty fine and delicate thing. You needed to synch up with the magitech that you were using to get the desired effects, you and your BB were meant to work together to make magic. The cars, for example. You didn't just force manna into them to make them fly, you had to delicately weave it through the machinery to get it working the right way. I had absolutely zero experience when it came to working with manna, so my magic would look a bit like a three-year-old's very first drawing. It would be unrefined and it would be just a little bit dangerous.

That didn't mean I was going to be weak, though. According to the BB unit in my head, based on raw power output, I was still sitting somewhere in the top 5% of the people I would be competing against in the tournament. That was all well and good, but it definitely didn't mean it would be easy. Raw power would be all well and good for the times I needed it, but when you compare raw power to the skill that these other magic users would have gained from years of practice? I was feeling a little bit out of my depth.

But BB had already thought up at least a little bit of a solution for that. Displayed in the bottom right of my vision was a small digital readout that the BB was projecting onto my retina. The readout gave me the following information:

[LEVEL: 3]

[HP: 300/300]

[MANNA RESERVE 1000/1000]

[ABILITIES: ENERGY BEAM - FIRE A RAW BLAST OF MANNA AT YOUR OPPONENTS FOR DEVESTATING EFFECTS]

[SKILLS: MANNA FACTORY - YOUR BODY IS A MANNA GENERATION FACTORY, GIVING YOU OVERWHELING STRENGTH AND POWER

CORONA SHIELD - YOUR MANNA IS SO STRONG THAT IT CREATES A POWERFUL PHYSICAL BARRIER AROUND YOUR SKIN IN COMBAT DRAINING 1 MANNA EVERY 2 SECONDS

PHYSICAL BOOST - YOUR MANNA WEAVES THROUGHOUT YOUR PHYSICAL BODY, GRANTING YOU INCREASED SPEED, STRENGTH AND DURABILITY IN COMBAT DRAINING 1 MANNA EVERY MINUTE]

<Hey don't worry, when you're getting your face bashed in by a manna construct and you're firing off your flashy laser hands, I'm sure you'll definitely get the judges attention!> BB snarked.

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I gave the AI the mental equivalent of an eye roll. I knew he'd be a bit of an asshole, I'd always been a bit of a cocky asshole back on Earth, but I'd also pledged to not be that guy any more in my new life. Look where it had gotten me. When I had been hit by that truck and sent into the Chasm, the void creature or whatever it had been had told me that all the things I had done up until that point had basically amounted to nothing, and with a bit of thought on the subject, the creatures had to have been right.

I had been unemployed, my grades in school had been the result of chronic coasting and were nowhere near as high as they should have been, and my friends had all slowly drifted away from me on account of my toxic personality. Sure, I had been a bit of a cocky asshole, but had there been anything of substance to back that cockiness up? No, no there hadn't, and in the long run, it hadn't served me well at all. I wanted a change of pace, even if I was going to be constantly reminded of how I'd been in the past by an annoying wisecracking AI.

<Yeah, we'll see how long that lasts buddy.>

By this point, I'd managed to pass through the entire main plaza without freaking out at the wide array of alien sorcerers roaming through the grounds of the Guard complex and had passed back into the building proper. I strode through a wide, tall, ornate door and into a hall lined with chairs of various different configurations. Most of them were already filled, so I made an immediate beeline for the first seat the looked like it was in a vaguely human shape.

A blur burst past me, leaving a rush of wind in its wake, and sped up onto the stage that been laid out in front of the rows of chairs. The blur, which had to have been moving at almost a hundred miles an hour, happened to be a woman and was the first person that actually had a basic human body shape. Two legs, two arms and a head apparently wasn't as popular of a configuration on this world as it was on my own. She clearly wasn't a human, though. Her hair had been brushed behind two pointed ears, and her eyes glowed very slightly in a vivid green.

"So then," she said, her hands clasped behind her back and a smirk on her face. "You lot are what the Guard recruits have sent me this cycle? You lot are supposed to be the great hope of the Nexus, protecting us all from the everpresent threat of Null Space invasion?" She chuckled, a harsh and mirthless laugh as if she was disgusted merely by the sight of us.

<Don't worry too much, this is basically Lara's whole shtick,> BB reassured me. <She loves to rile up the new recruits a little before starting the first round of the tournament.>

"Honestly, the level of power in these things goes down cycle on cycle. I keep saying that we should hold back a cycle or too… really build up on some talent, but oh well, here we are, guess there's always a need for cannon fodder in the corps," She remarked offhandedly.

If her goal was to pump up the people sitting before her, she was doing a pretty good job. I had only just got here, I barely knew who the Guard was and what Null Space invaders were, and I already wanted a chance to jump into battle so I could prove that I wasn't as weak as she was implying.

<Jump into battle? Oh please, the neurochemistry and hormones in here have a much more jump into her pants kind of vibe,> BB said.

Okay, yeah, so sue me she was kind of cute. You can't blame a guy for being just a little attracted to the confident girl with cool super-speed powers and an almost sort of Australian accent, even if she wasn't technically the same species as me. I'm sure that it was a pretty common occurrence on a planet with such a wide and varied set of life forms living on it.

<Whatever helps you sleep at night, buddy."

"So, here's what's gonna happen," she said, breaking me out of my internal conversation. "I'm gonna head out onto the training grounds. If you can make it that far, then we'll see about getting some sort of a tournament going so the rest of you hotheads can prove your worth or whatever. Just remember, the squadron leaders are all going to have their eyes glued to the feeds. Winning the tournament is a start, but it's secondary to impressing them. Even the lifeform who comes out on top isn't necessarily going to be chosen to join the Guard, it's the squadron leaders that do the picking."

Then she was gone, disappeared out of a door around the back of the stage just as quickly as she had arrived on it. The instant she disappeared a heavy thudding sound began. It sounded as if the footsteps of something very big and very angry had begun walking toward the hall that we were all sitting around in.

<I mean, you're not wrong, that's exactly what's happening.> BB said, a note of amusement in his mental tone.

Well, that sounded dangerous, and it was probably part of the first test. Before any of us could react the top of the halls had been torn off, massive metal fingers carved their way through the stones of the building and tossed it away. Before us stood a gigantic robot, weapons systems bristling across every surface.

The Grand Entry Tournament had begun!

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