Luca DR

Edge of apocalypse 50

Stealing the core of a building and replacing it with an AI built on a GPT-4 model – developed and fine tuned in less than two days – proved to be a monumental task. Taking the physical thing out of its socket and plugging the AI in its place was the easy part, easier than Samantha expected. What would not be easy now was leaving the Quadrangle without raising any alarms, all the while carrying a crystalline sphere as large as a human head and weighing at least thirty kilos.

The AI ...

Edge of apocalypse 49

When Albert’s mother returned home, he was so immersed in his attempts to make the spell work and make it into a skill that he didn’t even hear her. She had to come all the way up to his room, knock on the door and yell his name for him to finally notice her.

“I almost have it,” he said, explaining to her the idea behind the spell he was trying to make.

“I remember Lloyd talking about it the other day. It is not going to be easy to make but once you have it, it’s defin...

Edge of apocalypse 48

Albert returned from a morning spent at the village of Elvenhome, back to the ‘real’ world. It wasn’t like Elvenhome was not a real place, but compared to the bleak gloom of his house, it felt like he had spent the whole morning in a fairy tale. Doing nothing but basking in the sun, walking around in nature, chatting and eating with Elves around a cozy campfire. Not thinking about magic or the system for a while. Not obsessing over what happened and worrying about its consequences.

Edge of apocalypse 47

Albert sat on the side of his bed, dangling his legs and waiting. His mother told him that she would soon take him to the Quadrangle, making use of the small window of time she managed to buy before the HDF intervened to reclaim ownership of the place. The idea was to get a teleportation point for him inside the facility so that he could access it in the future, and the best moment to take someone who had no right to be there was now.

His phone rang, a text message telling him that it w...

Edge of apocalypse 46

It was a sleep of no dreams. Or at least, no dreams that Albert could remember. Which meant no nightmares either, a very good thing considering that what happened prior to going to sleep should have triggered some of the most unsettling and vivid scenarios ever.

When Albert woke up, all he could feel was a pounding headache that beat like a drum inside his head, a thirst so bad it felt unquenchable, and the aching of every single muscle of his body. He reflexively looked at his arms, an...

Edge of apocalypse 45

Albert’s face contorted and twisted, his teeth ground and his voice almost spilled out in a scream as the pain of the gem exploding in his hand coursed through him like liquid fire. It burnt and the shards were hot and cold at the same time, the raw mana impossible to tame, as time itself threatened to break apart. He didn’t know, he couldn’t know at the time, but what he witnessed there was the making and breaking of countless timelines that didn’t even have time to fully come into b...

Edge of apocalypse 44

“Cool thing, that system you have.” A voice echoed from afar. “I wonder if I can extract it from you the same way I stole all the memories from your mother’s head before I left her to die.”

Albert’s heartbeat was like a drum. The tunnel, already small and humid, shrunk around him.

“I’m going to be unstoppable with it, you know? No, of course you wouldn’t know. You’re just a silly little boy playing with things you don’t understand.”

The voice...

Edge of apocalypse 43

Albert listened his mother’s voice on the phone, trying to hear the voice on the other side as well but failing, all the while his expression grew increasingly worried. He thought about what not having the gem meant in the grand scheme of things. It was, and they all knew it, a possibility none of them had planned for. Which was bad, especially because his grandpa had even warned him in the past about the dangers of tying something as powerful as time travel to a small item that was so easy...

Edge of apocalypse 42

[Temporary timeline, possible future.]

The portal shimmered. On the other side was the access route to the CARF, operated by unmanned machines and subroutines that not even Samantha knew what they were really there for, or who put them there in the first place. Still, the family lingered on the known side of the portal for only the least amount of time necessary before taking the plunge, deciding not to waste any rewindable time when they were this close to their target...

Edge of apocalypse 41

Burst of chapters incoming! I finally got around to proofing and fixing up to chapter 50 ^^

Enjoy

41 – Too Easy

There were many ways to access the CARF. Some of them were proper, controlled and regulated, while others were less conventional and reserved only for situations that needed them. Others still were totally secret, known only to a handful of people. The one that the Cromwell-Grassman family decided to use, which was deemed the safest, required them to go through...

Magnus Thorne 07

07 – Pistols and dust

The streets of Neverexia were wide, the dusty dirt road baked by the sun, dry and hot. At the sides of the wide street, the porches of houses made of wood hid plush living rooms from sight, even though I could see hints of them through the folded curtains full of decades old dust that had gathered there.

Yes. Dust, at least inside the houses, was a staple of the city. There was something with the style of their internal décor that just begged for dust to...

Magnus Thorne 06

06 – Cowboy underland

Fuck systems. Fuck who has them. Fuck all of them. They get the easy life, except since everyone has a system, their life isn’t really any easier. They all get second chances. They all get manufactured fortunate encounters. They all get to be just that much better, but again, since everyone is one step up thanks to their systems, nobody is.

Guess who’s the only person who suffers from this? Me. The only single soul on this godforsaken planet without a...

Edge of Apocalypse 40

40 – Planning for Time

Albert looked at the notification from the System hovering, as usual, in the air before his eyes. It always took on different shapes and styles, making letters appear out of pure light at times, while at other times it manipulated the perception of what was already there to make itself blend with the place. This time, it was like an old VHS tape, with flickering text that was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

He could redeem the rewards f...

Magnus Thorne 05

05 – Neverexia

[TLC 1-1-1 Reached.]

[Refinement 1 Reached.]

The accomplishment should have made me feel elated, but I barely had the strength to keep my eyes from shutting as I lay slumped against the wall.

I am very familiar with the concept of portals. In fact, the stronger I grew the more I used them for travel. When you can simply summon a portal through whichever shenanigans you find to be fit in the moment, to go wherever you...

Edge of apocalypse 39

39 – On the same page

“What is the HDF?” Asked Albert.

The clock ticked. There was, hidden in some part of everyone’s mind – be it more at the forefront or more hidden away depending on the person – this sense that they were wasting time here. Yet, they also knew that they could not rush to save Albert’s friend before having resolved all their issues, especially when their opponent was a psion capable of manipulating their minds and their emotions.

Instead, S...

Magnus Thorne 04

04 – Dwarves

Crouching, I slowly made my way towards the dwarves in the distance. The lights of their settlement were clearly visible now, at the far end of an underground room that was so big to have weather and mist hiding its ceiling from view.

“Greetings,” I said, approaching a lone dwarf who was carrying an empty wheelbarrow after a trip back to the city. “I am Magnus Lazarus Thorne. May I ask you where the fuck the exit of this place is?”

The dwarf didn’t...

38 – Tense talks

[New Quest: Peer at the Leviathan.]

• Ask your mother about the HDF.
• Reward: Prototype teleportation device.

Albert waited outside, standing in the cold air of the night while his grandfather and his mother talked inside. He could not hear what they were saying, nor did he find himself wanting to, despite his burning curiosity. He was still recovering from the latest tw...

Magnus Thorne 03

03 – TLC and Refinement

Both TLC and Refinement are surprisingly easy and intuitive to understand. For me, at least. I will try to explain them to you so that you can understand how magic works in this world. Without such classification, which is nothing more than a label that I put on things, trust me that it would be quite confusing. People have all sorts of systems, and skills can vary wildly between them.

It also helps to mention that sometimes abilities are quite weird an...

Magnus Thorne 02

02 – Killing monsters

Having absorbed the power of the cage meant that I could explore the hidden secrets of magic once more, but unfortunately I was still mostly a mortal.

A loud growl made me think of a monster at first, then I realized it was my own stomach. It’s not like the cage, which held me in suspended animation with limited brain function, cared enough about me to feed me and hydrate me sufficiently. A hassle. I would have to spend my last two charges of Power on s...

Magnus Thorne 01

New novel, fresh out of the oven! It's still pending approval on RR, which means that it's going to be a while before it goes public. Also, worry not, releases of the other fic will not slow nor stop!

***

The first time it happened I was about to die. I had been thirteen at the time, barely a year after the day of the Ceremony that forever changed my life. Chester, the biggest of the bullies in the little clique that had come to gravitate around him, was holding me by the...

37 – Confrontation

[Quest: Leviathan Unveiled complete.]

[You can choose one quest to autocomplete.]

“Delay that, please. I can’t think about it right now.”

[Understood.]

Huh? Did the system…

No. He could definitely not process it right now.

[New Quest: Leviathan Diversion I]

“Delay, pleeeease!”

Then his phon...

36 – Disastrous Circumstances

[Time nexus event triggered by Subject: Albert Grassman.]

[Regressive timeline detected.]

[Aborting emergency quest…]

[Restructuring…]

[New Quest: Leviathan Sleeps.]

• Quest: Avoid the trigger event for Leviathan Stirs.
• Reward:

[Recursive tim...