Automata Superior

I was reborn into a fantasy world as a magic robot?! Book 4

It’s easy to think that when you have an insane amount of mana, light years beyond anything else in the world, that it’ll last forever. You build things that draw enough power to cripple a city for generations like it’s no big deal.

Before you know it, you’ve built a 60 foot colossus of a super robot, complete with rocket punch, because you thought that would be the coolest way to take on a mecha dragon that was attacking people.

Before we get to the super robot, let me backup a bit. I had forged an understanding with the crown prince of the Empire, Prince Milliardo. He knew something was going weird in the Empire and suspected that it had something to do with the rise of The Factory and the lies they were selling people about the true nature of Automata. He would investigate things on his end in the Empire while I would dig around The Factory directly.

The guy running the show for The Factory, a Lord Jhaix, was supposedly a visionary with a never ending supply of ideas and innovations in the field of Automata. Jhaix ended up being a summoned hero from Earth, though I have no way of knowing if it was the same Earth that I was from. According to Prince Milliardo’s younger sister, Princess Relena, the Holy Kingdom of Jamnasia would summon heroes from another world for the express purpose of attacking their country. Jamnasia was supposedly a country of human supremacists and viewed the Empire as a “land of demons” that needed to be purged. Pretty much the typical “good guys” in most fantasy games.

Princess Relena had been mortally wounded in an attempt on Prince Milliardo’s life. The attack had come from a supporter of the Prince’s cousin, Marquess Rau LeCreuset. The Marquess is actually older than Prince Milliardo by many years as was the Emperor’s brother that sired him. Many of the nobles in the imperial court felt that Rau would be a better fit for the throne than Milliardo.

Imperial politics aside, in order to save the life of the Princess, I had bound her soul to an Automata soul core and built a fancy new body for her. She even had advanced [Cloak] abilities that allowed her to cast an illusion over herself to pass for her old organic body.

The princess wasn’t the only one to get an advanced, new body. I lost my wolfkin pretender shell, Carnivac, as well as my minibot Shrapnel on an infiltration mission in The Factory. I built Carnivac a stand-alone body that was pretty much ninja-death incarnate, while Shrapnel got a little beetle ninja body along with two more bug ninja minibots named BombShell and KickBack. IronHide also got an entirely new, stand alone, body after his was lost fighting against the aforementioned massive and overpowered mecha dragon.

I happened to be at the imperial castle when the dragon attacked, after escorting the princess home with her new body. Get this, the mecha dragon ended up being a creation of Lord Jhaix and he was using it to attack the Empire as well as neighboring countries while flying each other’s colors to spark them into going to war. Not only did I lose IronHide, but my best friend, Elita literally pulled me out of the dragon’s jaws, only to be crushed in my place.

My shop bots, Ram and Rom, also got new bodies that can combine into an Amazon Automata, though they built the new bodies themselves because they wanted to. Which brings me to an interesting development. When I first started using proxy bodies, I directly controlled them like puppets. Then I learned how to spin up a background process that more or less cloned my consciousness as a subRoutine that handled the control of the given body. All of the subRoutines still operate within my head, connecting to the bodies remotely, but the more use they got apart from my direct control, the more autonomous they became.

It’s gotten to the point where they are each nearly different people with their own personalities that used mine as a starting point. I still have access to what each one experiences and thinks and can take direct control if I want, but it feels like they are steadily becoming their own people. In my mind there is a virtual room for each of them as well as a common area known as the HeadSpace where they have a weekly game night and lounge around when they aren’t actively in the remote body.

They have started regarding each other as siblings and I’ll often see their conversations with each other as chat logs in my mind. For the most part I find it amusing, though it weirds me out when they think of me as their father.

Where was I? Oh right, a dragon was attacking people. So after the attack, Prince Milliardo gave me this amazing workshop called the AutoForge that had any possible material or tool you would want as well as assistants by way of the professor of artificary and his grad students from the country’s magic university. It was with their help that I built a new armor for myself called Convoy, and new body for IronHide that Convoy could combine with, HeadMaster style; and a gigantic flying battleship called GodBomber that could transform into the previously mentioned 60 foot tall super robot. As you might imagine, Magnum Convoy-- oh that’s the combined form of IronHide and Convoy-- would also combine with GodBomber, though this time PowerMaster style. I called the combination God Armor Convoy, because of course I did.

In the end, I was able to beat the dragon up with God Armor Convoy, though Jhaix accidentally ended up killing himself shortly after the fight. The God Armor had basically cost a lifetime’s worth of mana per second to operate, not counting the extra power required for weapons or special moves. As you might imagine, I more or less burned through whatever reserves of my mana I had left.

After the fight, I was nearly drained of power and with my current recovery abilities, it would take me about two years to fully recover; assuming that I sat like a statue and didn’t power anything else of course.

Milliardo had dangled the carrot of freeing the Automata from slavery if I helped him to deal with the dragon, so when I was summoned to an audience with the Emperor, I thought it might be along those lines. When we knelt before his majesty, Milliardo was accused of treason, Relena was exposed as being an Automata, and I was declared to be a summoned hero for Jamnasia that had been converted so that I could assassinate the Emperor.

It all kinda went south, and in the end a necromancer named Quintess was revealed to have possibly murdered the Emperor some time back and was pretending he was still alive via a spell called [Corpse Puppet]. We had learned that Quintess was in league with Jhaix so he was likely working for Jamnasia to destroy the nation from within.

Milliardo had killed Quintess in a pretty major gamble, which released the spell and returned his father to being a corpse instead of looking like a living person. After that, everything really went to hell as the court nobles started fighting each other over which faction would be able to claim the throne.

Milliardo ordered me to take the princess away and to keep her safe so I had run off with her, but then I didn’t know what to do. My mana recovery was only slightly above the requirements for powering up all my proxies so I couldn’t use them if I wanted to save up for something big. I also felt like we should get out of the city, though I lacked any means of transport and Automata were still considered magic tools, not people.

I try to be a fairly upbeat sorta guy, but I’ll be honest here... Up until this point I largely felt like I was playing a game and that I could be as cavalier as I wanted, reasonably confident that I could deal with whatever came my way even if I got beat up here and there. But play time was over, I’d have to think carefully and seriously about things, and maybe I wasn’t the robot-people’s hero I liked to play at.