Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Seven - Lux

When I got home, I decided to be productive. I was still feeling a little crampy and gross, but it wasn't as bad as the day before, and I had more energy. Maybe being a D-ranker had more upsides than I'd initially realized?

Anyway! The evening was a good time to train.

I first went through a full rotation of spellwork practice, using up all of the magical energy I had blasting Shadow Bolts in the backyard, then spending the rest of the evening playing guitar... also in the backyard. It was a little embarrassing to have random neighbours, some of whom I only vaguely recognize, see me plucking away on my old electric, but I figured that I'd have to play before people at some point.

Maybe I could start learning how to sing at the same time?

That would require learning how to sing, though.

Other than a few one-woman concerts held in my shower, or singing along to some classics on the radio, I'd never really dived deep into singing. Wait... I think I'd done a show as a kid in elementary school? I was pretty sure that didn't count.

In any case, I was putting in more hours per week practicing on the guitar than some professionals, I bet. That didn't suddenly make me one, however. How many hours had I accumulated in the last month? Fifty? Sixty hours of practice? That was good 'get the basics down' time, but it wasn't nearly enough for any degree of mastery.

The next loop I tried Grasping Growth, using up the spell until the backyard looked like a poorly tamed jungle. Then I did French practice.

I actually asked around, and discovered that not one of my neighbours spoke a lick of French. Someone spoke Italian, I had a few Spanish, one German, a smattering of Asian languages, and a couple of Hindi and some who spoke other, less common languages, but no French.

Too bad. It would have made practice easier to have someone to bounce off of.

So the next loop, after burning all of my magical energy on Grasping Growth--this time going slower and really feeling out the spell, I wanted to have it be pretty efficient, and just casting it as hard as possible wouldn't help with that--I then spent the evening looking for a teacher online.

I actually found one. Some sites had AI training software to learn languages with, but I was worried that I'd learn some bullshit. So I dug deeper and found an insanely expensive course for like, C-suit corpo types who wanted to learn a language fast.

That course included one-on-one training with a native speaker. It cost several thousand dollars a month, but money meant nothing, so I got it and ended up in a video call with a sixty-something year old man sitting in his home off in France.

We had a conversation.

It wasn't good. I was a stuttering, uncertain mess, fumbling over words, forgetting half of the vocabulary I'd learned, and generally probably sucked more than most of the people he trained.

Still, he was patient with me and I liked the lesson for the hour and a half it lasted.

I did the same thing the next loop, though that time I started training Nutrition. The next was Restore Stamina, and the next Exhaust Senses. Not spells I was using very often, but I figured that if the spell was in my toolbox, I might as well have a decent idea of how it worked.

At the moment, I was still not sure what other spells to pick up. I figured I was ready for a few more Level Two spells, however. Stuff like Grasping Growth, only more... potent.

Maybe some variation on Shadow Bolt? The one I had delivered a weak punch's worth of energy at a decent speed. Having something with more oomph to it could give me a flexible combat spell.

Seeing Becky and Mizu fight with overwhelmingly powerful magic, either given to them from an innate ability or from learned spells, was making me a little envious.

Just a little.

I spent the before-last loop playing guitar in my room while idly listening to the news. I had a sockless foot next to my mouse and would sometimes turn the scrollwheel down to go to the next auto-play video.

There wasn't much that interested me, but there was a lot

. Fortress ENE alone generated plenty of news, and then there was the rest of the country and the world. I sat up and listened more attentively to a story about a Peruvian fortress city being hit particularly hard by a breach until a pair of A-rankers showed up and blasted a large part of the city apart to quench the breach.

An estimated three thousand dead over a forty-eight hour period. It wasn't even the top news story at the moment.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

Had Fortress ENE's breach made international news at all? Had we hit three thousand dead?

Probably. I could remember a large chunk of the city being on fire. That was maybe not even the breach's fault. When people were running away in a panic, it was only natural that they'd sometimes cause other, unrelated accidents.

I found some guy online, on one of the bigger video-sharing sites, who had an hour and a half long breakdown of the entire situation.

It was hard to focus on playing while I watched, but I tried.

My last loop of the evening was spent suffering through some basic exercise in my room. Burpees and situps and pushups until I was a sweaty mess. I cast some basic spells, mostly See Darkness and Nutrition, over and over again to almost-drain my magical energy. There were some things that said that draining and regaining one's energy was a somewhat efficient way to work on one's magical reserves, like a sort of muscle.

It was lame, but the shower after was nice, even if I ended up using even my expanded hot-water reserves and ended up getting splashed by cold water by the end.

I slept like a babe.

The next morning, I got up early, wasted the hour I'd gained in the morning cuddling up to Mister Couchtop and doomscrolling on my phone, then I rushed through getting dressed and darted off for work.

Work was lame.

We had more training, but it was mostly non-physical stuff. The most exercise I got was taking the stairs instead of the elevators. Some of it was vaguely useful. Codes and alerts to call out, how to use some of the radios and more specialized equipment, a whole hour about putting on PPE and environmental protection in case we ever had to handle a portal world filled with toxic gases or enemies that used aerosolized attacks.

Boring, but not useless to know.

How would Fran and I handle something like that? We had masks as part of our costumes, but... yeah, it wasn't everything. We had a lot of exposed skin. But that was necessary. How would people think that we were hot as hell if we didn't show a bit of skin?

That reminded me. I sent a quick text to Jane, asking her if she could arrange for a few more costumes in a similar style and promising her pay. Then I sent her a censored image of Becky and told her to find something that might fit someone with those proportions.

Jane seemed halfway between amused and annoyed, which was a good sign, I figured.

The most interesting thing in the day happened almost as soon as five o' clock rolled around and I set a new Save. The goal was to just keep an eye out on that gala, in case Fran needed help.

I was just stepping out of the office when I heard a ring.

Pausing by the threshold, I picked up my phone and stared. Orchid Lux. Huh?

"Hello," I said as I answered.

A young man was on the other side of the call. "Hello. I'm a representative of Orchid Lux's Private VIP services. We were made aware that you had some interest in some of our products as well as our private cyberware installation services."

"Oh! Yes, uh, you caught me with my... you caught me at a good time, actually. Give me one moment? I'm moving into a parking garage."

"Of course. In the meantime, please be advised that this call isn't being recorded, and we suggest that you keep personal information to a minimum. Orchid Lux's Private VIP services are second to none because of how guarded we keep our client's privileged information."

Nice corpo speak, there.

I climbed to the top of the parking garage, then told the rep to go on. "So, what do you offer?"

"We can install any of our mainline products, and even some of our competitors' cyberware, all while keeping extremely discreet. Did you have your eyes set on any particular model?"

"Uh," I replied. "Not just yet. How much does this service cost?"

"Our Private VIP services aren't inexpensive, understandably. We have certified surgery teams under oath, using specialized censoring cyberware that ensures that no identifying information about you or what cyberware you've equipped will leave the surgical suit. We have transportation, privately, to and from the suit, as well as back to a desired location for private convalescence. I see here that your operational budget is... one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the moment. Prepaid."

I felt my mouth go dry. How much? "Who prepaid that?" I asked.

"I'm not at liberty to know."

Well... shit. "So, uh... do you have a catalogue?"

***