Machine Mage: An Isekai LitRPG by J. Drude

Author:J. Drude [Drude, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Published: 2026-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

It went on and on, little drops of Damage that compounded on one another until …

River Pairfish defeated.

You have been awarded 0 Experience points. (1 base, -1 Level)

Well, that’s what I got for making ammunition that crawled like bugs. Now the thing was stuck inside a fish down at the bottom of the river trying to claw its way out. I did feel a little guilty for killing the fish, though, thinking back to the ancient wretchwyrm I’d slain in a similar fashion. That was a rough way to go, and the least I could do was eat what I killed.

Note to self: Add a cleaning function to the next iteration of the magazine-loader station. There’s gonna be blood.

When nighttime finally came, I was well and truly done with experimenting with crawling ammo, and I had the metaphorical scars to show for it. The actual cuts healed quickly after I finally let the offending bullet go. Apparently, I had not programmed them to recognize their daddy, and trying to hold them back from their objective with a closed fist was not wise.

Never doing that again. Those legs are sharp.

I flexed my palm and worked my fingers, remembering the itchy, burning sensation of a tiny robot trying to slice into my tender flesh.

The next iteration was definitely going to have a friend-or-foe ID system.

With so many conditions I was putting into these things, the power and time investment was getting increasingly ridiculous. My batteries would need to charge overtime if I wanted to mass-produce these little suckers. As a consequence, if I created a bigger battery with faster collectors, I’d need to watch said battery like a hawk to shut it down before it could overcharge and have an explosive meltdown.

If I, say, let a casting bowl work overnight producing my new smart-ammo with a new, beefed-up battery array and didn’t feed it enough metal to keep it working until morning, I could come back to a bomb sitting right next to a lot of hard, metal projectiles that were practically built to be shrapnel.

Breaking the Volatility/Collect cycle turned out to be harder than I would have liked, though. I had to connect the Volatile cube to the whole thing with Shape to get it to work, and I couldn’t Shape it out of the thing once it was saturated with enough Volatility. My Spatial Storage tended to treat the Volatile center of the battery and the collector arms as one singular object once they all had the same energy flowing through them, too.

What I needed was a way to detect how charged a battery was. Once I could do that, I could just Automate a cutoff on the Volatility refresher plate. I could probably do the same thing with a counting system, giving a maximum number of times to refresh the spell, but what if I was in an extended battle? The battery would last longer this way but not indefinitely.

A hand slapped my chest, halting me before I could take another step.

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