A World in the Palm of my Hands: A LitRPG Apocalypse

“We’ll take it.”

“Fantastic!” Aglith then signaled for the half demon carrying the toy to step forward. The cambion arrived in front of Noah and Mark as they somewhat reluctantly took out all their mana stones. Noah then grabbed the toy and immediately started using his skills on it, hoping to glean all the information they needed to build a larger version of the floating toy.

Aglith then looked at Talal and Aurora and asked. “How about you two? Do you see anything that has caught your eyes?”

“No.”

“Nothing that I can afford, I don’t think.” Aurora said as she glanced at a couple of items that were obviously tier three and above.

“That is unfortunate.” He then clapped and, as if on cue, the half demons carrying the items all disappeared into the magic wagon. “It has been a pleasure doing business with you, but I think it is time for us to move on. Time is gold and all that. Haha!”

“Will you be coming back anytime soon?” Mark asked. “I would like to buy some stuff off of you in the future when we have more money.”

“Ah, unfortunately, the only reason we are here is because this is where the portal we used dropped us off. We usually only do trade in high population density areas.” He smiled apologetically. Then he pulled out a small bead and stepped forward to give it to Mark. “This bead is one piece of a pair. It will tell you if we are within ten kilometers of each other, so if ever you are in any population centers, make sure to give it a glance.”

“Okay, we appreciate it.”

With that, Aglith and Gakun went inside the wagon. It then started floating off the ground as it reached what Mark estimated as at least a hundred feet in the air and then it shot off at mind numbing speeds. It looked as if it had just disappeared from sight.

“Well, this has certainly been an eventful day.” Mark remarked as he watched the wagon fly off into the distance.

“Yup! Now let's get back to the apartment building so I can start analyzing this toy in earnest.” Noah replied as he looked closely at the toy.

And so, they all got back on Talal’s back and flew off towards their home.

Back at his apartment, Noah fiddled with the toy and used his skills to analyze it repeatedly. It was made of intricate rune circuits, all mana etched of course, that from what he gathered were all designed to make it fly. There were even some minor spatial runes that boggled his mind. After a preliminary examination of the toy, he brought the remote control out of his artifact and activated it. He watched the toy fly around the room at dizzying speeds. “It’s probably faster than me, even with my movement spell. Probably even faster than Mark at his top speed.” He thought as he admired the toy.

He then made it land on his hand, activated his skill [Analyze] and pumped all of his mana into it. A flood of information streamed into his brain as he absorbed all the necessary information on the toy’s inner workings. All of the runes needed, the patterns in which they were arranged, and even the amount of mana required to etch said runes on the toy. This brought an issue to light, he didn’t have enough mana. He did some math and in order to scale up the mana etching to the size that would fit all of them, it would take at the very least five hundred thousand mana.

“Shit, this is going to take a while.” He thought as he calculated the amount of time needed to finish a project like this. “Well, as with everything, getting stronger is the answer.” So, he put away the toy and got up. He went to Mark’s room and told him about the ridiculous amount of mana needed to imitate the toy.

“So, was buying it a waste then?”

“Well, no. With my subclass as a factor, all I’d need is a couple of levels and a few hours a day… okay, maybe a lot of levels, but you get the idea. Just get stronger and all that.”

“Okay, let’s go find us a dungeon.”

They went outside and picked the opposite direction from the orc encampment and ran. After a couple of minutes of running, Noah activated his radar and found a massive red dot in the direction of the closest mountain. “Looks like it might be on top of that mountain.” Noah said as he pointed toward it. “Let’s go.”

When they arrived at the site, they saw a flaming ball floating in the middle of a scorched clearing of trees. Noah analyzed it and discovered that it was a mid-tier one dungeon, which was obviously of the fire element.

“Hmmm. I’m gonna have to prepare some spells. I don’t have enough water or ice spells to fight fire type enemies.” So, Noah sat down in a meditative position and started spellcrafting. The first thing he thought of was ice armor. After all, with how the previous dungeons were, it would definitely be an environment of fire or something similar.

So, Noah surrounded himself with water first, soaking his clothes, then froze it. This resulted in a skin tight layer of ice which kept him from moving. He mentally face palmed as he couldn’t do it physically because this was exactly the problem he encountered with the first version of earth armor. So he deactivated the spell and started over. First, he separated the armor into pieces that needed joints and ones that didn’t to make it more manageable. This resulted in a more flexible armor he could move in. “Damn it’s cold. Don’t know what I was expecting, but damn.” He thought.

He did a fist pump but then started shivering. “Damn it’s cold. Don’t know what I was expecting, but damn.” He thought. “Guess we’ll just have to power through. Better cold than dead.”

With the armor out of the way, it was time to move on to the attack spells. After all, he already had [Tread Coldly] for crowd control and with fire aspected enemies, it was sure to be more effective and might also double as an AOE attack spell depending on the enemies. But as he was shivering from the cold ice armor, he had a thought. “Can’t I just put the ice armor over my stone armor?” He immediately deactivated his ice armor and cast stone armor, then ice armor right after.

Noah celebrated with a little dance, then continued on with spellcrafting. He had a few ideas for ice spells, like the classic ice spear, ice bullet, ice spike and ice wall and of course, ice tomb. But there was one spell he was excited about and he called it, icicle storm. It was basically just conjuring a bunch of icicles and throwing them at an area. It was his imitation of a hail storm but with sharp, pointy ice sticks instead of just regular old ice rocks falling out of the sky.

He also made a few water spells just in case ice spells were ineffective for some reason namely, water whip, water bullet and water jet to drown out any flames.

With all the preparation done, Noah got up and headed for the dungeon with Mark. He cast [Ice-Stone Armor] on both of them and topped them off on [Enhance] which reminded him of cultivation. “Need to buy more information packets on that.” He thought. Then they entered the dungeon and opened their eyes to a hellscape of flames coming out of the ground, though with greenery off into the distance, which confused them.

“Well, that’s certainly new.” Mark said.

“Yeah, but the rewards are really juicy.”

Mark looked around and wondered why they hadn’t been attacked yet. “Hey, use your radar and find those imps for us. I kind of have a bad feeling about this one.”

“On it.” Noah said, then activated his radar only to not find the tens of red dots he was expecting but instead found two big red dots at the edge of his map. “Yeah, I have a bad feeling about this too. There are two big guys over in that direction, and they seem to be the only ones in the area.” He said. “You should probably activate all your buffs before we go there.”

“Already done. Let’s go.”

Together, they walked cautiously toward their enemies and a few minutes later saw them, not on the ground like they were expecting, but in the sky. Noah immediately cast [Analyze] on them and swallowed when he saw their levels.

“Looks like they killed all the other imps and evolved.” Mark remarked as he looked at the two flying imps holding flaming spears.

Suddenly, the two imps turned toward them and screeched. Fire bolts rained down on Noah and Mark as the imps flew closer to them. Mark easily dodged all the projectiles and ran to close the distance between him and the imps with sword and shield in hand. Noah, on the other hand just stood still and formed a mana shield around him, blocking the fire bolts. He then retaliated with his own spell [Icicle Storm] but a fire shield appeared in front of the imps and melted them before they could even get close. “Hmmm. This isn’t going to work. What about I just hose them down with water jet?” He thought as he cast water jet.

This proved more effective as the fire shields were extinguished and continued on to push back imp number one. But that was it. It only pushed it back. So, Noah followed it up with another volley of icicles… that barely damaged it but did manage to puncture holes into its wings. This made it fall to the ground where Mark was waiting to swing at it with his sword. But, out of nowhere, imp number two flew fast, intercepted Mark, parried his sword and deflected it. It conjured a jet of fire behind Mark, going through his ice armor. “GAHHH!” Mark screamed as the fire burned him.

“Mark! Hold it steady!” Noah shouted as he conjured some ice bullets and aimed for imp number two’s wings. Mark rushed to grab the imp’s spear as it was the closest thing to him. But he didn’t expect the sheer strength that the imp possessed and was pulled closer to it instead, where it bit into his stone helmet. Thankfully, the stone helmet resisted the bite and broke the imp’s teeth. It screeched and was about to fly off when Noah’s ice bullets arrived and punctured holes into its wings.

With both imps on the ground, Noah cast [Stone Tomb] on them, but it was too slow in forming and the imps broke the stone that just formed on their legs. This brief pause gave Mark the opportunity to swing his sword at imp number two, which managed to cut off its spear wielding arm as it dodged at the last second. Then, it opened its mouth and a jet of blue fire came out all aimed at Mark. “FUCK. THAT HURTS” He screamed as he panicked and jumped with all the power in his legs.

Seeing that Mark was clear of the imps, Noah cast [Tread Coldly] and [Ice Tomb] simultaneously on them. Then he cast two explosive spears and mentally threw them at the immobilized imps, successfully piercing their chests. “Detonate”

BOOM

BOOM