Save Scumming - Surviving the System Apocalypse - Chapter One

Still very much open to C&C! Also, I need to start on today's SCS chapter, not play with this shiny new idea~!

Chapter One

It was widely accepted that magic was complicated.

It was one of those ‘no duh’ kind of facts that people just took for granted because it was so obvious. Rain is wet, fire is hot, magic is complicated.

Nonetheless, there were some things that were counter-intuitive. I spun my chair around and leaned in over my shitty old laptop. It was the one that had carried me through college, and it had been dated even before I bought it. 

I had... replaced it, a few months ago. Or a few months from now? It had started freezing up more and more often. The operating system had gone out of date, and a new one only came with a monthly subscription plan and couldn’t even run on this old machine’s specs.

I made a mental note to start saving up.

Oh, and hadn’t there been a big data leak two weeks from now? 

I blinked, trying to refocus. So much of what I knew was now foreknowledge. Maybe. If I wasn’t just losing my mind.

It was so strange to just sit here though, the normalcy of it all was jarring.

I took a deep breath, and my laptop eventually booted up and accepted my pin. I hadn’t even changed that with the new one, reusing the same password across multiple devices because I was just not that smart. 

But anyway... magic and counter-intuitive logic. There was something about it that tickled my brain, something I’d learned more recently while talking to Louise.

I paused. Louise would still be alive, wouldn’t she? I felt my insides twist and turn, something churning within me. A feeling of deep, unfulfilled regret, almost palpable it was so strong.

I pushed it down and opened Magi-pedia, the world’s foremost source of almost-correct information about magic. It was one of those sites that were operated by volunteers and the information was often sourced dubiously.

Still, it had been accurate before. If D-rankers made up one percent of the population, then there had to be millions of them who also happened to be chronically online. Some of them had to be willing to drop intel onto the net. 

I found a page on upranking. That was the process people went through to climb from rank to rank. The ranking system was mostly artificial, it served as a way for the government and corps to keep tabs on people and how relatively powerful they were.

But there were some actual parallels, things that almost always happened when someone grew in strength.

Unsurprisingly, the upranking page was popular, and the section about going from rank E to D was especially so.

In the progression of magical development, Rank D is widely regarded as the most challenging to attain. While higher ranks demand greater time and resources, their advancement generally follows a steady trajectory tied to natural maturation and continued practice. The transition from Rank E to Rank D, by contrast, is often abrupt and spontaneous. It typically occurs only after extended periods of magical (mana) cultivation or personal growth and is frequently triggered by moments of intense emotional upheaval.

I nodded along as I read. Moments of emotional upheaval? Check and double-check. Heck, I’d triple check it, just to be safe. Seeing my city burn, being part of the vanguard, given a pea-shooter and told to protect people even less prepared for combat than I was. Being injured repeatedly and pulling back over and over. The great betrayal.

A lot of people, now that I thought about it, had climbed out of rank E and into D in those few days. It made sense, I supposed. 

I scrolled a little more, finding the section I was looking for. It had a subtle, bland subheading. ‘Power expressions.’

Upon reaching Rank D, most individuals attuned to magic will acquire a new ability. While these abilities generally fall within broad thematic categories, their specific manifestations tend to be highly individual. Notably, this initial ability emerges alongside an innate, intuitive understanding of its function and application.

I worked my jaw. Was that what it was? 

I touched my torso, just under my sternum and between my breasts. There was something there. I had some amount of magic as an E-ranker. All of us at that rank did. It made us a little healthier, though not by much. 

Becoming an E-ranker from being normal was even possible, just by spending enough time in a mana-rich environment. That’s probably how I’d transitioned. 

But this feeling? This was new. A core. A core had formed in me, and with it, a trigger to a new ability. Or rather, to my first ability.

“Okay,” I said.

I stood up with a bounce. 

I had always been an underachiever. I wouldn't deny it. Some of that had been an extreme and well-honed talent for ignoring one problem by focusing on another.

At that moment, I had a whole new problem to focus on and I was going to use it to the hilt. But... that didn’t mean I had to be inefficient about it. I needed to take notes. Write down everything I knew and remembered now, before things started to slip away from me.

I didn’t exactly have too many free notebooks sitting around, and I didn’t trust foreknowledge to my crappy old laptop.

I shook my head. Power testing first... but not in my office, or my living room.

Moving back to the kitchen, I picked a jacket off the back of the couch, then grabbed the bags on the floor where I’d left them. I had been going out for groceries, right? I checked my fridge and winced. Yeah, I needed a bit of everything. 

God, how weird was it to be worried about something as mundane as groceries. 

“Bye Couchtop,” I said as I unlocked the door.

“Meow,” Mister Coughtop replied from his comfy spot atop a pile of freshly folded laundry.

I slipped out, then made my way downstairs, using the stairs. It was annoying to discover that I was out of breath by the bottom. Had I been this out of shape? It was only a few months, but working with Luna Corp meant carrying heavy items back and forth all day, and there had been some very basic combat training as well. 

At some point I’d gotten a little stronger than I was now, as my baseline civilian self. I made yet another mental note to start working out. Being D-ranked (if I truly was) would guarantee a healthy and fit body, but that didn’t mean that that healthy and fit body had muscles and wasn’t overweight.

The grocery was only a block over. I stepped out of the apartment and was glad that I’d grabbed a coat. The sky was a nice, overcast grey, the air stank of hydrocarbons, and someone was blasting ghetto-pop from their car’s up-tuned loudspeakers in the empty lot by the nearest corner.

The streets of this part of Fortress ENE were never clean. There had been efforts made to spruce the place up, but there was only so much that could be done. The roads were too narrow for good walkability, and the city never cared much for busses.

The other apartments around mine were all squeezed in. Ten-floor buildings with barred windows on the lower floors, sometimes with parking lots next to them. 

Billboards often hung off the upper floors and off the sides of streetlamps. 

I glanced at the nearest ad, just hanging off the side of a bus stop that hadn’t been in service since I’d moved in. Hyper!Mart -- Stock up or Starve! 10% off all Synthmeat 40 this week only!

“Urgh,” I muttered as I started to walk. I wasn’t too worried about violence. Fortress ENE might have been a corporate shithole, but safety was important here. People carried, but rarely used. There was a fine line there. 

One of the buildings next to mine was a multi-level parking garage. I slipped into it, then rose up three floors. I knew, from experience, that no one liked to park in the topmost level, and the cameras there didn’t work well. 

People didn’t shoot each other, but stealing someone’s wheels? That was more common.

I found a spot next to a van resting on cinderblocks, away from any cameras and any onlookers, set down my empty grocery bags, then took in a deep breath. Alone, and in a not-very-flammable space. 

Focusing down at the core within me, I tried to get a feel for it, for its shape and dimensions and its weird, wriggly nature. 

There were, at my feel, two ‘triggers’ on the core.

One felt like it was inaccessible, hidden, or maybe waiting for something. The other was primed, ready to be pulled.

I pulled.

I felt my core shudder, and a slight shiver as mana raced through me, and... nothing. Nothing happened. No explosion, no fireballs, no glowing skin or anything else.

The one thing that did happen was the other trigger flicking ‘off,’ even as the one I pulled was locked in place.

“What the hell,” I muttered.

I walked around the place, ran on the spot, jumped. Nothing felt different. So it wasn’t a physical enhancement. My magic didn’t feel any more responsive either. So... what? 

Shaking my head, I pulled the second trigg--

I was standing next to the van, ten feet to the left and facing the other way. No vertigo, no sense of motion, I just was.

The two triggers had reset to how they’d been... no, no that wasn’t right. The first trigger was still depressed, and the second was ready to be pulled again.

Had I teleported?

Frowning, I looked at the time, something niggling at the back of my head.

I pulled the second trigg--

Back to facing ahead again... And the clock was back a minute.

“Oh,” I said as realization hit me.

***