by R H Nolan
FUTURE MAGE
R.H. Nolan
A Post-Apocalyptic LitRPG Series
Copyright © 2019 by R.H. Nolan
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
1
The glaring sun was never a welcome sight when Max opened his eyes. It was hot and harsh and unwelcome, but that was all anyone had anymore. At least in the Wastelands.
The metal hut he shared with his mom and younger brother Kier didn’t have a front door. Their home didn’t even have separate rooms—just one small, cramped space between precariously balanced scraps of sheet metal and whatever else they could find to prop up the walls.
Privacy was the last thing a Scavenger could afford, and Max was just one of thousands living in the shanty town outside Neo Angeles.
Sitting up slowly, Max blinked against the orange-red brightness outside. In the distance, the giant metal fortress-city of Neo Angeles rose like a massive pillar of shadow against the morning sun. He could only see half of it through the open doorway of his family’s hut.
The rest of his daily view never changed much, either. Endless miles of desert stretched in every direction, peppered with the carcasses of spaceships that had crashed half a century ago.
Human spaceships only, though. The Bugs’ ships had either disintegrated on impact, or long ago been scavenged for their alien technology.
Max had only heard stories muttered by weathered, half-crazed, desert-beaten men old enough to be his grandfather, but he figured things used to be a lot different than they were now.
Still, he had a hard time imagining any other life but this. The thought of going through his daily existence without his implant was especially strange to consider.
His life stats hovered in the top right corner of his vision—faintly illuminated blue script that always detailed his vital signs, day or night, whether he was thinking about them or not.
The implant connected to his nervous system, delivering the stats where he could always see them—so he could never forget how tired, hungry, and stressed he was.
HEALTH: 890/1000 (89%)
Core: 500/500
Secondary: 230/300
Nourishment: 60/100
Sleep: 100/100
STRENGTH:89/100
STAMINA: 187/220
Physical: 85/100
Psych: 102/120
AGILITY: 94/110
Speed: 43/50
React/Dodge: 51/60
Each of the major categories—Health, Strength, Stamina, and Agility—had subcategories attached to them. Most of the time he only looked at the main numbers.
Today his numbers were a little lower than usual. He hadn’t eaten since late morning the day before because most of what he’d brought back yesterday had gone to Kier and their mom.
Max was the strongest of all three of them, and the healthiest, too. That didn’t make finding enough to feed his family any less of a challenge, though.
It didn’t always used to be this way, just the three of them. Max’s dad had taken care of them the best he could in the Wastelands, but that was seven years ago. His dad was dead now, and Max had been responsible for his mom and brother since he was ten.
They used to be City Dwellers themselves—Max and his parents. Then they’d all been cast out of the city for some political reason no one would ever explain to him. His mom had had to brave the Wastelands, pregnant with Kier, and give birth to her youngest son as a Scavenger.
Maybe Max had been too young to hear the entire truth before he was left as the family breadwinner, but when his father died, so did the opportunity to learn anything else. Max’s mom refused to talk about their former life in Neo Angeles. It took a few years, but Max finally stopped asking, too.
A groan from behind him pulled him out of his thoughts.
Max looked over and saw movement under the thin blankets his nine-year-old brother shared with their mom. Then Kier sat up and blinked against sun spilling through the hut’s open doorway.
The kid didn’t have to say a thing for Max to know how awful he felt. Kier’s eyes rimmed with dark circles would have made it obvious even without Max’s implant picking up his brother’s life stats.
Kier’s Health hovered in green lettering over his head, bobbing as the kid rubbed his eyes with clenched fists. Kier was at 79% this morning, even after a night of sleep.
A pale hand reached up from the covers to gently rub Kier’s arm, and Max looked at their mom. Though he couldn’t see her face yet, her Health hovered in green over her head. 74%.
Max was guessing his mom had been giving Kier some of her own food too over the last few days. She was always sacrificing herself like that.
Some days, Max wished the implants didn’t link everyone’s stats and share them like a hive of open information. But implants were necessary for survival. They were the only thing that could purge human bodies of the ever-present radiation. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough to stave off cancer.
Max had never faced down a Chaotik—yet—but even that cannibalistic tribe of insane Scavengers couldn’t exist out here without them.
The choice for every new parent was to get their child an implant, or watch them die a slow and painful death by cancer and radiation poisoning. The tribe’s healers took implants from the dead and put them into newborns, just so they could go on living.
There were some advantages, though, besides merely staying alive.
The stats helped a little when Max went to find food. He could easily pick out the Bloodletters with the lowest overall Health, who were more desperate and more likely to make a trade for less.
And the visible numbers helped him avoid thieves and cutthroats in the Wastelands, hiding behind wrecked ships or in the alleys of the scrap-metal shanty towns. Even when he didn’t see their bodies, their Health still flashed out at him from the shadows.
The implant could even do scans of other creatures—like Sandwalkers—and come up with a rough approximation of their current Health. Not very helpful unless you were planning to kill them, which Max never did. He just got out of there as fast as possible.
So yes, being able to see everyone else’s Health made it easier to avoid trouble. But when it came down to watching his family suffer, he wished he could just shut out all those glowing numbers and forget about them for a while.
Max had asked his dad once if there was any way to turn the numbers off. His dad had told him that everyone, even the city dwellers, were connected by their implants and always showed at least their Health numbers at all times. Other stats were shareable too, if someone wanted to share.
His dad said that the intention had been good—so that people could tell when someone else was suffering and help them—but out in the Waste
lands, it was a constant reminder of how miserable everyone was.
And for the worst of humanity, it had turned into a way to find out who the weakest were and prey on them.
Max’s little brother definitely qualified as one of the weakest. Kier’s implant hadn’t worked right, and both of his legs had been taken by cancer.
When Kier was five, the healers had given them a choice: amputate both legs just above the knee, or let the sickness spread and kill him. They chose amputation.
The rough, stiff robotic legs Kier had now probably weren’t much better than no legs at all. He could barely walk with them, even with the crutch he used every day.
Their mom had had the same problem after Kier was born, except the radiation sickness had taken her left arm instead. Her robotic arm was only a little better quality than Kier’s legs, and that was solely because Max’s dad had still been alive to help them pay for a better one.
Mom’s metal hand thumped against the sandy floor of their hut as she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, her dark hair matted with years of grime. She met Max’s gaze and offered a smile that looked even weaker than her stats could indicate.
“Get any sleep?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got enough,” Max replied.
Kier’s stomach suddenly rumbled with hunger.
The sound haunted Max. It had been weeks since he’d managed to bring back enough food and water for all three of them. The last seven days, he’d been going out to the Heap for longer and longer hours, only to return with less and less food.
Now things were looking pretty desperate—maybe the most desperate they’d been since Dad had died.
“I better get out there,” Max said as he reached over and grabbed his pair of repulsor skates.
Max didn’t have robotic arms or legs like Kier and his mom, but he had his skates. They were probably the single most valuable thing anyone owned in the Wastelands, and they were his.
His father had made them especially for Max before they had been forced out of Neo Angeles and into the Wastelands. Dad had been a top scientist in incorporating Earth’s growing knowledge of Bug technology—scavenged from alien shipwrecks—into anything and everything for which it might be useful.
After they’d entered the Wastelands, his father had taught him how to keep the skates working and in good repair. They strapped onto and could adjust to the size of any boot, so Max had been able to keep wearing them from the time he was seven years old.
As far as he knew, these skates were the only item in the Wastelands that used repulsor technology. The magnetic fields on the bottom allowed him to hover an inch over metal or sand, and his dad had synced them to Max’s implant so he could control them with a thought. On, off, backwards, forwards, sideways—the skates reacted instantly to Max’s mental commands.
When his mother saw him pull on the skates, she murmured, “Max, I need you to be careful.”
Max stood and powered on the skates with a thought. “I always am, Mom.”
“I know. But two more Peacewinds went missing in the last week alone.”
The Peacewinds were the tribe Max’s family had joined when they were exiled. As their name suggested, they practiced nonviolence.
Completely unlike the Bloodletters, who claimed the Heap as their own and charged a fee to pick through the mountains of trash that tumbled out of Neo Angeles every day, or to take a canteen of water that dripped from the city’s vents and water systems.
If Max had grown up as a Bloodletter, someone would have killed him in his sleep to get his skates.
The Bloodletters were brutes… and the cannibalistic Chaotix were even worse.
“Whatever’s happening, I don’t want you to find yourself caught up in it,” Mom said.
“I won’t. I’ll outrun it. I’m the only Peacewind with a pair of skates, after all,” Max joked.
That brought a tired smile from Kier, who stared at the dull, dusty metal strapped beneath Max’s shoes.
Peacewinds had been disappearing from their shanty town at an increasing rate over the last few months, which had everyone in a heightened state of caution and anxious wariness.
Most likely, Chaotix or Sandwalkers were picking off stragglers who strayed too far from the settlement, but Max wasn’t about to say that out loud. It wouldn’t have made his mom feel any better, knowing their people were getting eaten by cannibals or… well, whatever the Sandwalkers were now. They could hardly be considered human anymore.
Their mom looked up at Max, her gray eyes desperate. “Please be careful.”
Max’s smile faded, and he nodded. “I promise. I’ll be back before it rains.”
Their dad had always said the same thing before he went out to get them food and water—I’ll be back before it rains.
Max had always thought it was a funny joke when he was younger. After all, it had rained maybe twice since they’d been in the Wastelands.
But after his dad died and the sole responsibility of providing fell on Max’s shoulders, the words had taken on new meaning.
It was impossible to know how long it would take to find food, water, clothing, or metal scraps for building and tinkering—or when anyone would ever come back home.
Sometimes they didn’t.
The day Max’s dad died was one of the few days he forgot to say, I’ll be back before it rains.
So Max said it whenever he left, no matter what.
2
The minute Max left the darkened shelter of their home and emerged into the morning sunlight, it felt at least ten degrees hotter. There was never any way to tell the actual temperature beyond how chapped his lips got, how much he sweated beneath his tattered long-sleeved shirt, canvas jacket, and cargo pants with more holes than pockets.
He’d made the mistake a few times of staying out in the pounding heat long enough for his implant to flash a warning in his vision when his Health dropped precariously. Since then, Max had learned his limits with the heat and how long he could safely be out in it at any given time of day. Mornings were still cooler than midday, at least.
The dark-tinted goggles around his neck were there pretty much all the time; taking them off even to sleep seemed a foolish thing to do. Even in the Peacewind shanty town, where people were generally trustworthy and predictable, there was always a chance of some desperate kid sneaking around somewhere to steal something.
In the Wastelands, anything not guarded closely or on one’s person was pretty much fair game.
And without the goggles, the repulsor skates were nearly useless. His eyes would have been scratched all to hell as he skated through one of the constant dust devils that raged across the Wastelands.
Not only that, but he needed the dark tint to help him navigate the landscape. Without the goggles, he would have gone blind from the sun glinting off the desert, then tripped over an obstacle and broken his neck.
Max pulled the goggles up from around his neck and fitted them over his eyes before turning east towards the rising sun.
In a split second, Max was racing above the baked, gritty sand toward the monolithic pillar of Neo Angeles. Though he could have just straightened his knees and stood inside the repulsor skates while they whisked him over the ground, he preferred to move in them as if they had wheels instead and needed his body’s force behind their momentum.
His dad had taught him how to skate with rollerblades when he was young—more of a preparation for using the repulsor skates than anything else. No one had time or space for what his dad called a roller rink in the old world. Back then, there’d even been skating rinks, his dad had said—an entire room lined with ice and kept frozen all the time. Max couldn’t even fathom it. But he liked the way skates moved, and he wondered if two sharp blades slicing through ice felt anything like two magnetic fields repelling a sea of sand below him.
Even at this speed, it took him until the sun rose over the top of Neo Angeles’ two-hundred-foot outer wall before h
e could clearly make out the Heap. The goggles were meant mostly to keep the sand and the blazing glare of sunlight reflected on it out of his eyes, but it didn’t hurt that he could still look at the huge metal wall and the quickly approaching Heap at its base without blinding himself. It also made scoping out the Bloodletters a lot easier.
The Heap was their territory. While the Peacewinds believed in offering everything they had, however little, to whoever was in need, the Bloodletters existed in brutality, mercilessly taking whatever they could from anyone who wasn’t strong enough to stop them. That included their own people.
Every time Max ventured out here, there were always women and children at the Heap, combing through the huge mounds of trash, food scraps, and general refuse tossed from the gently sloping outer wall twice a week.
More than once, he’d seen women whipped and beaten in front of their own children for pocketing a bit of food without first turning it over to the men who all but enslaved them. Max knew better than to intervene—the Bloodletter males would have killed him, or made it worse on the women if he escaped—but the sight always made a hot rage burn in his belly.
The men were all huge, muscular brutes, and mostly spent their time patrolling the Heap. They oversaw the women and children, and traded with Peacewinds for food and water.
Max slowed down about a dozen yards from the closest patrolling Bloodletters, then turned off his skates and dropped the last inch to the ground. Sure, they made odd-looking shoes, but he wasn’t about to head right into the Heap flaunting the best piece of working technology in the Wastelands right under their noses.
