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

Noah spread out his [Mana Sense] to get a feel for how many people were gathered. “Hmmm… Close to six hundred now. What do I do with these people?” He furrowed his brows in contemplation at the question that everyone wanted an answer to.

“What’s got you so serious?”

Mark’s voice came from behind him as he was deep in thought. He turned around to face his cousin. “I was just thinking about what we’re going to do with these people. We can’t just abandon them after all.” He paused and manipulated the surrounding air in a spherical shape to remain still, effectively not letting any sound through. “You think it’s worth it to reveal that?”

“You mean…”

“Yeah. I don’t see any other way to transport this many people safely and at a decent speed.”

It was Mark’s turn to furrow his brows as he thought of the implications. They knew that the artifact chose its owner and couldn’t be stolen or forced to change hands, but the other people didn’t know that. If they revealed its existence to everyone here, it would only invite greed.

Of course, they weren’t really afraid of people coming after them. No one here was strong enough to fight them after all, but trouble was trouble. They didn’t want to have to hurt, or worse, kill anyone, just because they got greedy.

Mark sighed and massaged his temples. “If you’re going to ask me what I want to do, I’d say fuck it and reveal it.” He looked at the hundreds of people around them, who were now all staring at them. Some people looked at them with hope in their eyes, especially the remaining children. The adults, though, looked at them with mixed feelings. “Because you’re right, we can’t abandon them. And with their numbers, they won’t be able to defend this place.”

“Yeah…” Noah could feel a headache coming on, so he followed Mark’s footsteps in massaging his own temples.

A half hour later, the number of people gathered around reached over a thousand people. A quick check on his radar with a thousand mana pumped into it and he saw that everyone who survived was already here.

So he called out to Eleanor’s group and said that it was about time that they talk.

“Noah!” Eleanor called out with a strained smile on her face and a still depressed Rosa beside her. Surprisingly, there was another woman accompanying them this time.

“Sophie!” Mark ran ahead to meet them, making Noah realize that the other woman was actually someone they knew. Only there was a difference now. She was one arm short, with the same depressed look on her face as Rosa.

“Eleanor, I see you’ve gathered everyone that’s interacted with us before.”

“Ah yes. The people thought that it would smooth things over a bit and help make you comfortable.”

“Right. Well, I’ll be straight with you. We’re planning on leaving in a week and heading back to our base a few days' travel from here.”

“I… Can’t you stay? We won’t be able to…” Her words trailed off as dread took over.

“Let me finish. We plan on taking everyone with us.”

“What? Really?” Eleanor asked in disbelief. “But how? There may not be as many people as before, but there’s still over a thousand of us left. Not to mention that we’re not all as high leveled as you guys. Wouldn’t it be dangerous?”

“Yes… But that’s only if we traveled the normal way.” Noah said as he closed his eyes and thought. “Fuck it.”

“What other way is there? Can you teleport us out of here or something? Wouldn’t staying here be easier?”

“Or something. As much as I’d love to just snap my fingers and spirit you guys away, I’m not powerful enough for that… yet.” Noah said helplessly. “But I have a powerful artifact that’s perfect for something like this. And no, staying will not be easier. This place is too big for one, and second, there’s too few people to keep it all running.”

She thought about everything that Noah said. “I’ll need to talk with everyone before I can make a decision.”

“Sure, take your time.”

With that, Noah looked on as Rosa and Eleanor ran back to the group of people, leaving Sophie behind with Mark.

It took an hour of discussion and arguing before Eleanor came back with the good news that they’d all agreed to go with them.

Noah clapped and said. “Good. You won’t regret it. Tell everyone to gather anything that they think is important. Clothes, food, books, water, generators, guns, ammo, any and all seeds you can find, fuel and any working vehicles around, everything they can think of that might be even remotely important. Bring them all here. I’ll take care of transportation.” He smiled. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

A week later, Noah looked at the several new piles of stuff. The people did a good job and packed everything in cardboard boxes with labels on them. Despite it all, there were two things that excited him more than everything else: seeds and scrap metal.

The seeds were for his artifact, which was still relatively barren. He’d been buying seeds of all kinds from the store, of course, but it was a slow process. The store didn’t really give much description for them aside from ‘this is from X planet’ and buying them just to cast [Analyze] on them would be too expensive. At least with these Earth-seeds, he knew what he was getting into.

The metal, on the other hand, was for his manipulation practice and for his mana etching practice. Although he’d been practicing on wood and stone, it felt like the mana wasn’t really conducting well and moved like it was wading through the thickest mud.

He picked up a piece of fairly good quality metal roughly a foot across and tried to manipulate the mana inside it. When nothing happened, he tried a different method; he flooded it with his mana.

Already, he felt his mana move faster and smoother than ever before, leagues above regular wood and stone. And after it was practically bursting with mana, he activated [Mana Manipulation] again, finally making it move.

“Uhuh. I’m the best!” Noah celebrated a little before reining himself in and focusing back on the task at hand. He carefully shaped and stretched the piece of metal into the shape of a two-pronged fork. After that, he conjured some stone to serve as the handle and etched a basic lightning rune into the two prongs.

“Moment of truth.”

He slowly injected mana into the runes and watched as a small arc of lightning flew from both prongs and met in the middle, creating small but audible buzzing sounds.

“YES! Now let’s kick it up a notch!”

Having said that, he injected fifty mana all at once and caused the runes to overload and shoot off small arcs of lightning in every direction.

“Ah. Maybe I’m not the best?” He said self-deprecatingly. “Hmmm. Let’s try slotting in a mana stone next.”

So, he manipulated the metal into having space for a mana stone under the stone handle. It kind of looked like a slot for a battery, complete with the thin, bendable metal that keeps batteries in place. Next, he added a regulator rune on the shaft that would keep the flow of mana from the stone in check. “Wouldn’t want a second overload now, would we?” Lastly, he redid the lightning runes.

Bzzzzzzzzt

The instant he finished the lighting runes, the little glorified taser came to life. He watched as it continuously buzzed for a bit over a minute and then petered out. “Yeah, I need to put in a switch or a button of some kind.”

“Snort!”

Noah turned around to the sight of Lily riding Emeri with the rest of the piglets behind them.

“What’s that?” Lily asked while pointing at the lightning fork.

“This, Lily, is the magic taser 1.0!” Noah proudly proclaimed.

“But can’t you shoot lightning out of your hands already? Why make it?” She cocked her head to the side and asked innocently.

“Uhhh… It was the first thing that came to mind?” He said, unsure of the why himself. “Anyway, let’s go find Eleanor and find out where they got this scrap metal from.”

“Okay!”

He put away all the scrap metal in his artifact and walked off in the direction of the closest person. They asked around for the place where Eleanor was and headed there. Turns out she was at one of the local libraries, helping with the packing.

When they got there, they were just about to finish up loading all the boxes of books on a massive flatbed truck with Eleanor writing something on her clipboard. Noah walked up to her and traded some small talk before asking where they got all the scrap metal.

“Oh those? You don’t need to worry about that. We’ll handle it and deliver it all to the usual spot.” She paused. “I’ve been meaning to ask about that actually… where are you putting it all away?”

“Like I said, I’ve got a powerful artifact.” He grinned. “Besides, you’ll find out later anyway. No fun ruining the surprise.”

“Right… Well, we’ll finish up here and get everything delivered before the sun sets.”

“Got it, and good work.”

He went back to the delivery place and waited for the last of the items to arrive by truck. And while he sat there patiently, he checked his status.

He nodded at his status screen, satisfied. He and Mark hadn’t been idle while the people gathered the stuff. They had been delving dungeons throughout the week that they were here, only ensuring that one of them was always here to defend the people just in case something went wrong.

When they reached level ninety-nine, though, they discovered that they couldn’t level up any more and whenever they did manage to get any experience at all while maxed out, all they saw was a notification pop up.

So, they went to the shop and purchased a fairly expensive information packet detailing the process of forming a core. The class evolutions that would be offered upon tiering up would highly depend on the type and quality of the formed core.

Of course, the process itself was fairly simple, at least for him. All he needed to do was condense mana into a ball and make it spin. With that method, Mark had already tiered up and was just waiting for him to do the same, but there was one complication… actually, multiple complications.

“Well… fuck…”