An one line prompt.

“You defeated a High Forest Shadow Spirit! You leveled up!”

‘OK, status… screen?’

A black screen written white shows details about myself, or at least it was supposed to. My name and race shows as ‘?’, my stats are on the 3 digits but if that’s good or bad or even accurate I have no idea. The skill slider is empty as well as the magic one.

There seems to be many points in the experience bar. I'm level 50 right now but I began with a high level right? I couldn't have leveled all that at once? This screen is very problematic but most importantly.

‘Outsider… huh.’

I have a modifier written in parentheses that declares me an annoyance. Its bright red, I feel this is pejorative or… its as if the system doesn't want me here.

‘OK there was something I always wanted to try. We are still connected to home right?’

Yeah. Free WiFi is everywhere here.

‘Great, ask Essay to hack into this.’

Oh! That's such great idea! What if we are detected by the administrator or something?

‘That's why we are asking Essay. Even if they trace it back to her, what can they do?’

It can't be so simple, we are connected to the same network she will use to access the system.

‘Such a worry wart. If they can hack into our network to see the connected machines and their location, we might as well join them as labor golems. What use is our superior technology if we can't use it?’

SA-02. We have detected something. We are connected with an information system, it presents inaccurate details about our condition. I would like to request a network scan and infiltration.

“HU-01, how did you end up on this planet? How did you power the array? Send a report on your condition. What priority is your request, 10 or a 100 years from now?”

‘At least she learned to use commas and speech pauses.’

SA-02. Are you aware of the existence of Erebus? I'm sending a report on my situation. Could you not hurry up the scan a little? It would be really useful right now, a great deal of information would be easily accessed and my success chances increased..

“Yes, of course.”

This answer was towards my question about big head, radio silence over my request. Is there a lag? Since she knows about big head she understands it was him right? Anyways, hey, let's eat that log.

‘Tastes like cane sugar without the juice.’

Maybe she just doesn't care. I should have asked for it in 10 years time, I would at least get it.

“Network detected. A framework for information distribution. First attempt to grant you the highest access privileges of the information system successful. Other frameworks detected. Attempts at granting the highest privilege failed, moderator status granted. Sending detailed report on the recommended locations for building and launching spacecraft with the least environmental hazards. Please proceed with the craft of cargo delivery rockets as the highest priority. A drone pod will arrive in a month to help with the procedures.”

“SPACE PROGRAM IS HERE!!!”

Wait, wait that was too much! Now they can trace back directly to us! I knew it, this was a mistake!

“HAHAHAHA”

Don't laugh! This is serious!

‘Yeah, maybe. But nothing happened right?’

Dramatic pause where i sincerely believed a portal would open and I would be cut down by a sword. I should be struck with lightning anytime now. Any second.

‘Being struck with lightning would charge us up.’

Hahaha… yeah.

‘All we have to do is harvest as many magic forests as we can, get our space agency running and get out right?’

…

‘Now that we can see the status of everything else, run another scan and I will get us more potatoes.’

“Making me be afraid of being turned into a monster and having eaten tree babies. Overreacting weeb.”

I murmur under my breath in relief. The magic potatoes were just a type of magic crystal. Plenty of magic beasts have them.

‘Plenty of food you mean.’

Yeah, I guess magic beasts are killable? It doesn’t count as animal abuse, does it? We are hunting them for food. Not our own, but our family’s.

‘Will you ever stop trying to guilt me into being a scarecrow? These things are people eating monsters, god dammit.’

OK, OK. Sorry. But we aren’t all that different from them.

‘Do we have an inventory?’

Uh. No. There’s space magic that can generate personal spaces, but they require crafted utensils to be held without a large waste of mana. We have neither.

‘You say we have neither, but we can turn anything into a magic item right? Isn’t moderator privileges in the system the same as a god?’

We are vulnerable. You looked up the gods too, they can kill us with a thought.

‘I also saw that they have HP. I was worried they might be galactic gods like our big head, but aren’t all of those here just mundane gods? Fertility, earth, fire, light, war, duel, magic, knowledge, these are all generic as can be. I don’t think their influence goes past this planet.’

Yeah, but no. Moderator status is equivalent to a demigod blessed with favor. A candidate for ascension that shares their parent’s authority as an assistant or secretary. We can make changes like they do except for the granting of status or blessings, but we can’t erase that we changed things.

The act of change might alert the knowledge or the magic god. From them, the others will pile up on us. Also, any god may look into the state of the world, and if they see a blade of grass turning into a magic ring out of nowhere, we are done.

‘We were granted all these privileges already right? They can even see Essay’s attempt at making us gods, so it’s going to happen eventually.’

I’ve been looking through the world logs, but her actions are nowhere on them. Master hacker nee-chan gave me a scare for life but it’s all good.

‘Oh, you can make sense of all that child writing? If she did it, she can do it again. Let’s ask her to remove from the log that we made a spatial ring.’

Ah, yeah I could do that.

SA-02. We are going to use our moderator status to change an object so it can facilitate logistics. Can you watch and erase the log on that as soon as it appears.

“Yes, however, erasing the log will alert the administrators, is that already within consideration?”

‘Such a bummer.’

SA-02. How did your granting me moderator privilege not appear in the log, can you do the same for this?

“I changed your privileges directly myself. I did not make a request, no records were generated. I changed the structure itself, not it’s running environment. Any change to the running environment will be registered.”

You heard it.

‘Then we shouldn’t draw attention to ourselves, yeah. This is boring.’

We can know the status and position of everything around the world how is this boring.

SA-02. Never mind, thanks.

‘Yeah, about that, now I’m pissed. We are not having anything to do with the demons except open hostility.’

I see what you mean… it’s not that different from Earth for the other races either.

‘What do we do now? Go around killing these guys?’

Yeah, sounds good to me.

‘Where’s the closest demon pit?’

Deep in a mountain range with an active volcano, there’s an underground passage they use to move slaves in.

‘Great… How long until we get there?’

About a month running west.

‘... Without stopping?’

? What are you waiting for?

‘So, if we go with that, how long is it going to take to wipe them out the planet?’

…

‘Thing 2?’

I’m not thing 2, I’m thing 1. You’re thing 2.

“THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE!”

‘Ahhh… got a little hot headed there. What’s the holdup? It’s over seven thousand km away, when we get there, can we just run them over like we did in this forest or are they trouble?’

Well, hmm… If we engage in a series of planned raids-

‘We won’t ever wipe them out, right? Just mess with them.’

Well, yeah.

‘That’s why I asked you in the first place… why did you say it sounds good?’

Because it does, and we both wanna do it. We gotta do something.

‘But that’s not the- How long until we power home with the magic crystals?’

If we can send as many magic crystals as there were in this forest home every month, It should take a century to get all systems kick started, while the solar cells would provide running power. We would still need to get the harvesting missions active on the gas giants to have it fully operational.

‘‘K, then we need to figure out how to harvest that much energy every day. So according to the map… we should head, hmm, to the nearest forest and then-’  

There’s a dwarven city that is close to a dungeon and on the way to the second closest launch area. It’s also close to the pod.

‘That doesn’t look so close to me.’

I meant close to the way there, we will get to the pod before we reach the city. We should also try to clean these two dungeons on the way. See if we can find some loot to help us carry magic crystals.

‘What’s in the drone pod? I can’t see it.’

One mining, one cargo, three constructor, two light and one heavy security drones are on their way. They will be powered by us, only the launch had a cost back home. It seems all this access to the system thing is thanks to Essay noticing our battery is loaded.

‘It’s also good that this invasion thing is just starting and there are no orcs here, if this was already a grimdark world I would not be able to take it.’

Take it over? I think we could actually.

‘No, no. I meant all the edgy plot lines and over the top suffering. By the way, are we here to take over this world? Or just to harvest some crystals and fuel then beat it?’

I haven’t thought of that really, but since the gods can’t do their job we should take over right? We can establish actual order here, not just pretend we have control and fight for scraps of power.

‘It sure needs an actual capable manager and leader. Essay can take care of this maybe? Or a SA-03, if there is one. Can the constructor drones build other drones?’

Yeah, maybe she can. No, the droids can’t replicate, but they can build the facilities that do. That takes long, and the droids will be low quality.

‘Low quality compared to those made in a monster factory. We can try making golems instead, they belong in the system and maybe they can even level up and improve after we slapped them together with whatever we could find.’

If we are going to just throw ideas we won’t stop, but that sounds great. We can send them towards demon incursions or bandit camps and all that. Let’s get going.

‘You can predict them? The demon incursions?’

Sort of. Just like the gods here, I can just listen in on the meetings and read the plans of the higher ups. As long as they don’t change their minds, I pretty much predicted it.

I whistle while I pick up the leftover log and lay it over my shoulder.

‘So, not only real time map data, but also listening in on our enemies’ conversation. That’s one hell of a tactical advantage.’

So, not really. I still need the processing capacities of the servers back home to understand all this in real time. I can only do searches for now, and it might take a while depending on what i’m looking for.

‘So, what CAN we do?’

We can’t change attributes of living things, blessing and things like that. We could, but shouldn’t change the nature of things as they are right now in the world, like making magic rings out of grass. We can’t abuse the mana system to brute force spells out, that can break a lot of stuff and the gods would be alerted to us not respecting rules even they have follow and probably be immediately hostile..

‘What CAN we do?’

We can walk around, and live off nature and the things it gives us. Other than that, i can look at any part of the world like a reality tv show. It only gives a small range of vision and I have to borrow processing power from home to do this. After we get most servers online I can

‘So this is a matrix huh, we’ll get this rolling. Hail Big Brother.’

This is not a matrix, and I’m not going to take control of the lives of the people here. The gods are the ones doing that, I’m getting rid of them. The people will be free to do what they want as long as it doesn’t hurt others.

‘Are you sure I have to carry this on my shoulder for two thousand kilometers?’

We could use a river to float on the log for a good half of the way, but if we are attacked by a magic beast and discharge to escape it, everything there floats up dead.

‘Poor wide-eyed folks, can’t you try to control it?’

I’m not using magic, I’m getting rid of energy from our battery. Once it leaves our body it goes where it wants. You could try to make a cart or a carpet of leafs to lay it on and pull along.

‘Hmm… Can’t you read all the books on space magic of the world come up with your own theory and make us a personal space that doesn’t require a huge waste of mana?’

…

‘Can you?’

I just did that, sorry, I still don’t understand how much I can do. I had to request from Essay some processors, she refused until she read the data I needed help with. We now have a dedicated server running through theories of magic brah! By the look of it all this magic thing only works on this planet, thankfully, there would be no universe otherwise.

Dropping down the log and rolling my shoulder, I’m smiling again.

‘Great! Where’s the entry to the space?’

Well huh, complete violations of the laws of physics make for quite a complex problem to solve. The books refer to magic, mana and life as blessings from the gods even though the gods themselves are only alive because of it. The living in this world just use magic, they don’t know how it works much more than a beast knows how its stomach works.

Before I can do something that violates not only nature, but the violation itself, I need to understand how could all this happen in the first place and it will take a while for that to happen…

‘We are the camera! Send as much data on mana as we can. Since we could hack into this, mana might just be a bunch of nanites or something! We have microscopes for eyes! I don’t wanna run with this on my back!’

… Nanites?

‘I don’t mean actual nanites, but you know, small semi sentient particles that interact with atoms or whatever.’

I’m so stupid, but such a genius.

‘They-they are?’

No, but Essay is sending another pod with actual nanites, they are just as good as mana as long as we power them. No flashy magic like meteor shower but we can shoot air blades and fireballs forever. Since mana is a power source, I redirected the servers to figure out how to power the nanites with the mana on the air.

“ROBOT MAGIC OVERPOWERED!!! PLEASE DON’T NERF!!!”