David rubbed his face.
But once the world stopped swaying, he opened his status window to check it again:
Name: David
Level: 19
Magical Core: A+
Abilities:
- Sleep Resistance (Lvl. 9)
- Pain Resistance (Lvl. 7)
- Rage (Lvl. 8)
- Mana Perception (Lvl. 11)
- Overcharge (Lvl. 10)
- Multicast (Lvl. 10)
Attributes:
- [Major Law of Electricity]
- [Major Law of Fire]
- [Major Law of Ice]
- [Major Law of Clay]
- [Major Law of Water]
- [Major Law of Darkness]
- [Major Law of Steel]
He exhaled. This was it. The ceiling. The wall. The immutable brick of cosmic nonsense he'd smashed his head against for what felt like a thousand loops.
His core refused to grow. No matter how much mana he force-fed it, no matter how many crystals he crunched into fuel, the thing sat at A+.
He had tried everything.
Every law he possessed—thrown at the monster in every combination he could think of.
A homemade gauss cannon that should’ve violated several national treaties.
Dozens of iterations pushing [Physical Enchantment] until his body screamed.
A hundred improvised strategies, a hundred failures.
And in the end? Still trapped. Still dying. Still waking up in the same damned bed.
David stared at the status screen until the letters blurred.
David wiped away his tears, pushed himself up from the plastic chair and wandered toward the rooftop door. His break was over. Time to get back to "work."
Descending the stairs and stepping into the office floor, he gave a casual nod toward Kevin. Not the real Kevin—Kevin had vanished months ago—but the robot wearing Kevin's shirt, Kevin's badge. The costume didn’t convince anyone, least of all David, but it made the place feel less empty. Less wrong.
"Morning, Kev," David muttered.
The robot swiveled its head a few degrees, acknowledged him with a pre-programmed beep, and returned to pretending to work. David sat down at his desk. Today’s assignment: traffic management. An entire city of self-driving cars, none containing a single living soul, all dutifully clogging intersections exactly the way humans once did. And he still had to babysit the system.
By the time he returned home, the sun was dipping behind the dome’s artificial horizon. David nodded to his neighbor—Robot Dave—who wore a large cowboy hat because David had programmed him to. It helped the evenings feel less empty.
He collapsed into bed the moment he walked through the door and fell asleep almost instantly.
The next morning, David stepped outside into the uncanny suburb. The "people" were busy with their morning routines: a jogger gliding past with perfectly synchronized footfalls, a robot pushing a stroller with a toddler-sized doll inside, the lawn-mowing unit tidily trimming the grass.
The lawn mower paused, turned its helmet-like head, and waved.
David waved back. "Morning."
Then the universe reminded him where he lived.
A dog-shaped monster vaulted over a nearby fence with a guttural hiss.
Instant stillness.
Every robot-neighbor stopped mid-task. Robot Dave drew his pistol from the holster on his hip. The lawn-mowing unit reached behind its back and produced a compact SMG. The stroller-pushing robot pulled a shotgun out of the stroller.
A heartbeat of silence. David covered his ears.
Then—
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK! A synchronized volley lit up the cul-de-sac.
The creature jerked, twitched, and collapsed in a smoldering heap. Without hesitation, the robots holstered their weapons, returned them to compartments, or gently placed them back into strollers. Then each resumed its routine as if nothing had happened.
David yawned.
He got into his car and started toward the office. On the way he pulled into the drive-through of a fast-food place. The line consisted entirely of vehicles that were driven by humanoid robots, none of them ordering anything. They simply idled forward because routine demanded it.
When his turn came, a robot dressed in the uniform of the long-gone barista leaned out of the window and handed him a cup.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
"Thank you," David said.
The robot beeped and nodded.
He drove the familiar road toward the office. The sky was pale, the kind that promised nothing in particular, and David found comfort in that neutrality. Near the office building he stepped out of the car, closed the door with a soft thud, and caught sight of Kevin getting out of his own truck a few spaces away.
David lifted a hand in greeting. Kevin waved back and beeped in return.
Then David pushed through the glass doors and entered the building. A long, heavy day waited inside—fine-tuning the behavior of the "citizens" after work hours, adjusting parameters, smoothing out routines. Artificial life requires very real effort.
A few more days slipped by, and once again David found himself on the rooftop. It was windy today. He drank—again—not for pleasure but for erasure. Anything to quiet his mind.
Down below, robots walked the streets of his counterfeit city, mimicking townsfolk with eerie precision. From a distance it looked real, almost comforting. But David knew better. It was just another way to hide from the truth creeping toward him.
That he would die.
He exhaled shakily, pushed himself to his feet, and began to walk.
He walked and walked. Any normal man would have collapsed hours ago, but his enhanced body refused to fail. It carried him forward, an obedient machine dragging its unwilling soul along.
Eventually he reached the edge of the dome—the shimmering, impenetrable wall sealing his world like a glass display.
David approached it, staring at his own distorted reflection on the curved surface. Then, without a word, he lowered his head and began tapping it against the barrier.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
Pointless. Everything is pointless.
Evening settled in, cooling the air around him. Neither he nor the dome carried so much as a scratch from his efforts. A few monsters had wandered close during the day, snarling, ready to pounce. But with his [Physical Enchantment] at level ten, David didn’t even need to take them seriously; they were annoyances, not threats.
He turned his head to the right, scanning the horizon. The land was flat enough to see for miles, and there—about ten kilometers away—lay the military base where he’d once scavenged those Javelins. The dome had narrowed considerably and now the base was on its edge
Beyond the base stretched nothing but empty desert.
David stared at it for a long moment.
Then he decided to walk there.
David walked through the night at a slow pace. By the time he passed the military base, dawn was already staining the horizon in pale orange. Beyond the last fence and concrete wall, the world opened into a classic desert—cacti, cracked soil, and an endless stretch of sand that shimmered like powdered glass.
The sun began to heat the surroundings almost immediately. David felt it press against his skin. Something behind the dome’s illusion that probably was not his sun was burning him. He decided this would be the way he ended the iteration. No monsters, no violence, no desperate fight—just the “sun”.
He picked a spot that looked almost picturesque, a little clearing between the cacti, where the sand lay smooth and untouched. Standing there, he spread his arms out to the sides like a man greeting an old friend. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, directing his face toward the rising sun.
He could see the light even through his eyelids—golden spot that left afterimages in his vision.
Minutes passed. Then half an hour. Then an hour.
The heat sank deep into him, a slow, steady burn. If I didn’t resurrect in the same old body every time, he thought, I’d probably have the best tan of my life.
The sun kept pouring into him. The warmth became a weight, the weight became a pressure, and the pressure became something deeper—like the light itself was seeping under his skin, threading into muscle and bone.
He felt it clearly: sunlight being absorbed, not just heating him. Was he dying?
A soft chime echoed in the back of his mind.
New Attribute Learned: [Law of Minor Light]
David let out a weak, humorless laugh.
"Oh"
David flicked a few sun-gleams from his fingertips, idle tricks born from his newly learned law. The tiny rays danced across the sand without enthusiasm, as if even light itself shared his mood. One of them hopped onto a distant cactus, clinging briefly to the thorns before dissolving.
The new law did BRIGHTEN his mood. Heh. But only briefly.
"Great," he muttered. "Can’t even die in the classic way."
He dusted off his clothes, preparing to trudge back toward the office and the hollow routine that passed for life. But then—
He paused.
The cactuses around him formed an odd pattern, a perfect ring of absence where none grew. Not natural. Not random. Like someone had spilled industrial pesticide in a tidy radius.
David nudged the ground with his boot. The top layer seemed fine, loose sand and dust as expected. So he switched to his other sense.
[Mana Perception].
The world shifted. Multiple laws lit the sands in muted outlines—except for one spot directly underfoot, glowing with a dense, unmistakable signature.
Iron.
A lot of it.
"Well, hello," David whispered, crouching. "What are you doing down there?" It wasn’t a rock. Not natural ore. It looked like… a hatch.
Slowly, he lifted his eyes and glanced toward the distant military base—the same one where he’d scavenged the Javelins.
A grin tugged at his lips, slow and sharp.
David shifted his gaze to his own feet and pushed his mana perception outward like a widening ripple. The desert around him blurred into a haze of signatures—heat, minerals, and other laws—until something strange tugged at the edge of his awareness.
"Huh… what are you?" he murmured.
A long, dense shape beneath the ground. Metallic. Hollow. Unmistakably… phallic.
David blinked, then snorted.
A rocket. That’s a rocket. Of course it is.
His grin spread wider across his face, almost childlike in its purity. With a spark of anticipation curling through his chest, he activated his [Major Law of Metal]. Power rushed from his core, sharpening, coiling, latching onto the iron-rich mass beneath him. He reached for the hidden hatch.
He began to PULL!
"Oof—okay, okay, that’s not a giant jar of pickles… that’s a hatch…" he muttered, adjusting the angle of force.
Metal groaned beneath his will. Dust rippled outward. Something deep underground shuddered.
Then—
CLANK—GRRRRK—
The hatch split open. The two halves slid apart like some giant creature jaws, and David—still gripping the energy threads—was dragged a whole meter sideways, riding one of the doors until it smacked against its stop.
He barely noticed. His eyes were locked downward.
There it was.
A missile.
Not a Javelin-sized toy. Not something you shoulder-fire and hope doesn’t explode in your face.
No. This thing was massive, easily a hundred times larger than what he’d fired before—an underground titan of white metal.
He stepped forward, breath catching, and let his gaze drift along its polished casing. Every line, every rivet, every reinforcing plate—he devoured it with his eyes, like a starving engineer at an all-you-can-eat apocalypse buffet.
His smile didn’t fade. If anything, it sharpened—until he saw it.
A black trefoil painted neatly on the side, enclosed in a yellow circle.
The radiation symbol.
His smile changed. It twisted into something more sinister.