Machine Mage: An Isekai LitRPG, page 1
Machine Mage
In My Defense Book Two
J. Drude
To Lily and Jude
You’re not old enough to read these yet,
but I still want you to know Dad loves you very much.
Maybe someday I’ll have the words to express just how much.
I’ll keep trying.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2026 by Jonathan Pampell
Cover design by Diana Franco Campos
ISBN: 978-1-0394-9744-3
Published in 2026 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumentertainment.com
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE Force Some Honesty
CHAPTER TWO See the Future
CHAPTER THREE Break the Machine
CHAPTER FOUR Clear the Way
CHAPTER FIVE Eat a Curse
CHAPTER SIX Break the Machine
CHAPTER SEVEN Show Some Humanity
CHAPTER EIGHT Take the Streets
CHAPTER NINE Seal the Breach
CHAPTER TEN Make Things Worse
CHAPTER ELEVEN Jump in Front
CHAPTER TWELVE Control the Field
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Be the Bait
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Learn to Breathe
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Dodge a Bullet
CHAPTER SIXTEEN Put It Together
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Do for Others
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Wake and Make
CHAPTER NINETEEN Exceed My Grasp
CHAPTER TWENTY Bring My Friends
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Don’t Get Caught
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Don’t Be Fooled
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Climb Any Mountain
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Choose My Battles
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Make the Call
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Strike Back Hard
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Buy Some Time
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Do the Unexpected
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Run Some Tests
CHAPTER THIRTY Find Common Ground
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Flip the Table
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Confront My Doubts
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE See Old Friends
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Go Off-Path
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE Get Called Out
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Expose the Truth
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Be Anywhere Else
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Make a Promise
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Ride to Ruin
CHAPTER FORTY Machine Mage
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Slay the Dragon
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Say Goodbye
EPILOGUE Dad
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prologue
Hey guys,
If you’re reading this letter, something’s probably happened to me. Either I’m hurt or I’m dead or I forgot to pick this thing back up after we won. If it’s the third, then definitely stop reading and burn this immediately.
And if I’m just hurt, isn’t it a little early to go picking through my things, especially if you’re being so thorough as to look inside the spare turret barrel under the cot? You found it, though. Good on you, I guess. Consider a career in law enforcement or as a foster parent or something.
But I’m guessing the real reason you’re here is because I’m dead.
Okay, since I’m dead, let’s get this out of the way: I’m not from this planet. I’m not even from this universe. And, as those of you thinking ahead will have probably guessed, I’m not a monk, either.
I’m human.
I was dumped on Ralqir a few months ago as a sort of crash course in how to be an Exotic or what you guys call a “practitioner.” I woke up in a forest somewhere south of here with no idea where I was or what I was doing, but the monsters that lived in that neck of the woods sure knew what to do with me. I was hunted, driven like an animal, and all I could do was run.
Until I fell into the not-so-tender care of the Stone Heart goblins, that is. Once they, shall we say, “took me in,” they put me to work and gave me an opportunity to practice my new Exotic mojo, but my problems followed me there, too. My monsters became the goblins’ monsters, and most of my captors were killed. Despite how the Stone Hearts had treated me, I still feel bad about that.
Once I escaped my cell, I fell in with a traveling group of Miur led by a nobleman named Traylo Jassin. He was on his way to Eclipse and took an interest in me after finding me on the side of the road. While I was grateful for the ride, I once again got the distinct impression my attendance was mandatory. Jassin’s the one who gave me the monk cover story, by the way. He knew I wasn’t what I said I was, and he didn’t want the guards at the gate asking questions.
Don’t take this as my trying to put any blame on the man. I lied to you all about being part of your church. There’s no getting around that. I just thought you should know what brought me here.
After that, you probably know the rest. The Church asked me to get to the bottom of the plague, and—if there was nothing else to be done—purge the infected. I met up with you guys, and we all got stuck in the Undercity together while the world went to hell. Now I’m just trying to put things right.
As of right now, while I write this, we’re gearing up to go out into the city to rescue those folks at the western gate.
Trix, you’re probably working with our interns on food and ammo production. You’re great with people, by the way, and we won’t have been able to pull this off without you. I hope you know that.
Sissa and Samila, you’re mending your armor. In fact, I can see you right now across the room as I write this. Did you know that you both bite your bottom lips when you’re concentrating? Well, you do. You’re both the head and the heart of our little team, and it gives me some comfort to spend these last moments of calm with the two of you here.
Geddon, I have no idea where you are as I write this, but you said you had something to take care of before the battle. The sisters tell me you’re probably monopolizing a bathroom somewhere, grooming your mane, picking your teeth, and flexing in the mirror. You’re gearing up for what you believe to be your final battle. I hope my plan to save your life doesn’t inconvenience you overly much.
Yes, I plan to save all of your lives. I know it sounds presumptuous, but I do.
The odds aren’t looking particularly good, the way I see them. The plague has infected most of the city now, so everyone who used to live here is either now dead, one of them, or both. I never asked any of you about Eclipse’s former population, but if I had to guess, I’d have put it in the hundreds of thousands. That’s a lot, considering there’s only five of us.
I have a trump card, though. The infected—the Scourge—they hate me. Seriously. They hate me with such a fiery passion it would rival your sun for intensity. Whenever they catch a whiff of me, they fly into a fury. I’m counting on that to make my little plan work.
No, I didn’t plan to die, Sissa. Despite what you may have thought of me, I didn’t have a death wish. I was just trying to give you all the best chance I could give.
I hope you all made it. You’re good people, and your home needs you right now.
Ryan Kotes - Alien
Letter, recovered in year 1308 TB amid the ruins of the ancient city of Eclipse by the Order of Reclamation, Third Expedition
CHAPTER ONE
Force Some Honesty
My eyes fluttered open, the dream I’d just been having dissolving into wisps and vague impressions of motion and color that my conscious mind didn’t have the language to understand. Now that it was gone, I felt an emptiness like I’d forgotten something important.
I was in a plain room constructed of the Spire’s characteristic smooth stone, windowless and undecorated. It was small, just enough space to stand up and take two short steps before running into a wall or three steps out of the door near the foot of the bed, which creaked and cracked as I shifted my weight.
Given how heavy I was, I wondered if I would now have to be extra careful about where I slept for the rest of my life. Hammocks were definitely out, as were most cots. Those things weren’t made for a guy as heavy as I was, or, more accurately, as dense. My metal parts, combined with a high Body score, seemed to have given me all the problems of an Olympic strongman without a proportional size adjustment. I’d probably end up sleeping on the floor more often than not. At least I wouldn’t feel sore afterward with my Exotic-level recovery.
The sheets scratched and crackled as I sat upright. They peeled away from my skin and clothes—clothes I didn’t recognize—to reveal patches of the otherwise-white sheets that were brown with dried blood and yellowed with dried sweat.
I reached up to rub the gunk out of my eyes, surprised to find a bandage over one of them and a big bundle of white cloth tied to my scalp. There were a lot of bandages all over me, actually, from head to toe, including a big one that wrapped all the way around my stomach. All of them were now more rust-colored than their original bright-white. The sheer amount … Was I really that hurt?
I thought back to the battle, remembering vivid flashes of violence and snarling faces. My body didn’t feel cold like it used to, but I shivered nonetheless.
Thoughts mercifully turning back to the now, I gingerly peeled off the bandage around my wrist to find clear, unblemished skin underneath. Exotic healing was no joke.
I’m never going to get used to this, am I? Maybe if I ever do, that’s when I should start worrying.
Just then, a whiff of something savory hit me, which I tracked to two bowls sitting on a table next to the head of my bed. No steam came off them, and a quick check with my fingers told me they’d been there for some time. My stomach gurgled, regardless. I took up the first bowl and grabbed a spoon with a shaky hand.
I must have been in here for a good while, considering how hungry I was and the dryness of my mouth, not to mention how weak I felt. How long had I been out?
It was so quiet and still. I wouldn’t say I missed the sound of the guns, but their absence did trigger an unease in me that was hard to pin down, a sort of unsettled feeling akin to my first few days on Ralqir, when I had to acclimate to its strange atmosphere and the fact that its air didn’t move as I was used to back home.
If there weren’t any guns firing now, what was holding back the Scourge?
The guards, probably. My friends. They shouldn’t have had to, though. They couldn’t heal like I could. They didn’t have a System repairing their body until it was good as new even if they were ripped apart.
I frowned into my bowl.
That was what had been bothering me. If my guns weren’t working, I wasn’t helping. The Scourge-Touched were coming, and others were doing the fighting for me. That would not do in the slightest. The longer I stood still, the higher the chance someone else had to pay the price in my place.
Still, the soup was delicious—some kind of salty vegetable blend with dark broth and chunks of some kind of starch that I couldn’t quite identify as potato. Too gritty.
I’d fully cleaned the bowl before I knew it, and I was on to the next one. As I’d become accustomed to doing when I was idle nowadays, I opened up my status screen to check on things and was immediately bombarded with notifications. They stacked one on top of the other, each seeming to blink in and out of the foreground of my vision like they were vying to be the first in line for my attention, but all they were doing was threatening to make me go cross-eyed. With a thought, I cleared them all away and started filtering by category.
Level Up!
You are now Level 16.
Max HP +10
Max MP +10
+1 Attribute point.
Achievements awarded this Level:
Spirit of the Warrior: You gained 51% of your Experience this Level from defeated foes as a non-combat Class. [+3 spirit]
Doing Your Part: Some of your creations have been used against agents of the Scourge. [+200% Experience awarded for new designs next Level]
Ambitious: You have defeated a foe above your Level. [+1 to lowest Level Ability]
Rift Hunter: You gained 51% of your Experience this Level from Nemesis-tagged foes. [+1 to all Attributes]
Reversal: You gained 100% of your Experience this Level from Nemesis-tagged foes. [+3 to highest Attribute]
Mass Slaughter: You have defeated more than 1,000 foes this Level. Combat-related Abilities and Skills gain power 50% faster for the next Level. [ERROR: Ability:Volatility:class_mismatch]
My Level-Up notifications, though numerous, weren’t surprising, but seeing all of my achievements laid out like this felt so strange and humbling. They all looked generally akin to one another, with the exception of Level 11, which had labels like Big Spender, Inventor, Soulful, and the like. That made sense, given all the time I had spent in the lab during that Level. The rest were all fighting-flavored.
Reversal was a new achievement, and it was understandable that I hadn’t gotten that one up until this point. Gaining 100 percent of a Level just from fighting a specific type of monster just wasn’t normally achievable at my level of skill and with my Class’s limitations. It probably wasn’t feasible for even the combat Classes.
The achievement itself was what people referred to as a “snowball condition,” where a small victory quickly turned into a series of larger and larger victories over time. The fact that my highest Attribute was Spirit made leveraging the influx of points more difficult, though. It was a weird Stat, and I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. I imagined if Body had been my highest Stat during the fight, the bonuses could have kept me going for a long time as the Levels rolled in, increasing my HP and giving me little Endurance boosts on into forever.
Of course, if I were a Body guy or a combat Class, I probably wouldn’t have had so much Experience flowing in as I had in the first place. Yesterday’s fight had been a culmination of a lot of time, preparation, and experimentation—stuff I couldn’t have done if I weren’t what I was. Automation was a powerful thing, something I’d do well to remember when I felt like whining over having gotten a non-combat Class.
I checked my character sheet to see what had changed and, upon reading it, I nearly fell out of the bed.
Ryan Kotes - Level 16 (?) Animator (Uncommon)
Type: Artificer (Common) Abilities: Shape 9 (Transmute) Devouring Grasp 5(?)
Class: Animator (Uncommon) Consume 5 (?) Volatility 3
Core: Engine (Unique) Iron Grip 4 Imbue 4
HP: 220/220 Trigger 4 Automate +4
MP: 186/186 Tempered Channels 3 Knife in the Dark 22 (?)
Attributes: Skills: Climbing 7 Unarmed Combat 5 (?)
Body: 40 Running 5 (?) Stealth (Gray Man) 11
Mind: 33 Conduit 5 (?) Split Mind 9
Spirit: 77 Spear 4 Deception 5 (?)
Disguise 1 Sword 6 (?)
Pistol 4
Affinities: Goblinoid F Limestone E
Iron E Cobalt E
Steel F+ Deep Lead E
Magnesium F Nickel E
Free Attribute points: 0 Mendau Wood D Copper F
***Spirit: 77***
My Spirit Stat had doubled overnight. That was—I had no idea what.
The other Stats had climbed significantly, as well. I let my eyes travel down the screen, looking over the values. I had a number of question marks on the page now, with milestones reached in lots of Skills and Abilities, and their associated prompts seemed to jump out at me when I gave them even the slightest bit of attention. I ignored them, though. I just wanted to get the big picture right now.
***Knife in the Dark: 22***
What the actual hell?
Knife in the Dark had been something like … three? … maybe? Before yesterday, that Ability had been one of my lowest, but now it was far and away the largest value in its category. The last time I’d used it I—Constance, forgive me for being an idiot.
The whole point of taking Knife in the Dark was to conduct an experiment. I wanted to see how much “me” my turrets retained when I Automated them, since they were essentially using a ton of my mana. The verbiage on the ability boiled down to, “If a target isn’t paying direct attention to you, do bonus damage,” and I’d wanted to see exactly what that meant. My first test had been on the wretchwyrm under the city, but I hadn’t been in a position to think about it after it happened. There’d just been too much going on, what with me poisoned and breathing from an air tank in funky sewer water and all.
I went back to check the logs from yesterday.
Scourge-Touched Undead takes 18 Damage. (15 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus) (Piercing)
Scourge-Touched Undead takes 21 Damage. (18 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus) (Piercing)
Scourge-Touched Goblin takes 15 Damage. (12 base, 3 Knife in the Dark bonus) (Piercing)
The amount of messages just like this could have filled entire volumes. My head spun at the sheer amount of it.
Every time my turret had shot a monster, I had been using Knife in the Dark and getting the bonus Damage. It was no wonder the Ability had leveled up so quickly. I had eight turrets out there putting holes in the Scourge. Each magazine held about 900 rounds, 900 attacks, not to mention those emplacements with extra magazines and someone to feed them …
That meant I had to have used Knife in the Dark at least ten thousand times in the span of a few hours, and the System counted each and every one of them as progress toward the next Level. That was, in a word, ridiculous.
