George Knows Best [Mud Wizard LitRPG]

The golden terror of the plains, George Almighty, he of the golden statue and bright flame, had almost come to a miserable end at the prolegs of winged, spiked caterpillars. Without Bob's timely assistance, the dog would most assuredly have been turned into a melted puddle of fur and teeth.

Whatever George's second ability was, it appeared to have limited combat potential. That or the dog hadn't quite figured out how to use it. Bob wondered how the faithful in the city would take the news. "Sorry chaps, your god just got himself liquified by a swarm of inch-long creepy-crawlies; better luck next year." They probably wouldn't take it well. Religious wars have been fought over less.

In short, George was squishy. He was all offense and utility, no D. Bob had Harry. Sharp-eyed, bendy-body Harry, capable of semiautonomous defensive manoeuvres. George had a big heart and a red tongue. Good, admirable attributes, but they didn't keep back daggers and fangs and poisons and the like.

However, George was the wielder of the magical backpack. And the magical backpack had defensive potential in spades. George could snap things in or out of the air at will. Say, for example, just off the top of Bob's head, a brick wall right before a hailstorm of needles impacted its owner's back. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.

But tragically George was a dog. And moreover, a golden retriever. He began every interaction with hopeless naivety and a good will that warmed the heart. George was the first to trust, the last to doubt. From George's perspective, those caterpillars had had honorable, play-oriented intentions. Innocent until proven guilty. But in the system world, you typically only get to be wrong once. Bob needed a way to protect his Georgie-boy.

Shielding via preprepared defensive structure was a non-starter. George hated dropping things he was holding. And there was no good way to tell George what exactly to drop. The roofed wall section or the unroofed. The paper sliding door or the six-inch bunker steel. Bob remembered running after a giant slime as the dog dowsed him in puddle water and threw raupenflieger pus at him.

However, what if George popped the attack itself out of the air? The dog's targeting method appeared to be more conceptual than concrete. In other words, it didn't work like Bob's authority; it was system assisted.

Observe how the dog had extracted all the needles from Bob's back. He hadn't individually focused on each needle—there had been hundreds. The dog had used some kind of categorial definition: "needles stuck in Bob's back" etc... Notice further that the pop had not affected the needles on the ground around them.

Yes, it was time for another Bob and George training session. Part two in educating your dog on how to survive the apocalypse. Bob whipped them a little underground practice space. Nobody wants to be disturbed while they're working.

George was stationed on one side and Bob on the other.

"Ok George. Catch"

Bob threw a handful of mud at the dog. The dog repositioned himself, eyes on the mud. He made a last minute adjustment, looking good... The dog's jaw snapped out and the mud splashed against his face. He gave a sad, confused look and whined from the back of his throat.

"No George, I meant catch it with your bag."

Bob tried a couple more times and George didn't catch on. System stats had certainly improved his coordination though. The dog got himself square under each and every mud ball. By rights he should have caught them all. But, after all, the point was not to catch things in your mouth. That was about the most self-destructive behavior imaginable in a post-apocalypse world. Here boy, catch the bomb. Good boy.

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Repeated mud splatterings were taking their toll on the dog's psyche. He was getting mildly discouraged and would even shoot injured looks in Bob's direction now and again ("I trust you again and again and again, and every time...").

Bob shook his head. They were going nowhere. A complete breakdown of human-canine communication channels. Bob was an idiot for imagining D rank would have given the dog a bit more language power. How could Bob explain that George was supposed to catch the ball with his backpack and not his teeth? If only there was some universal symbol or sound, some way of representing the backpack that even the dog would understand...

Bob slapped himself on the head. The answer, as usual, was right in front of his eyes.

"Okay, George. Let's go again."

Bob shaped a mud ball. Bob gently tossed the mud ball.

"Catch... pop!"

George's eyes lit up. Pop! The mud ball vanished. He'd done it. Bob rushed off to congratulate the dog. Head rubs and delicious treats and many, many "good boys."

"George, can you drop it?"

Pop—the mud ball came out and plopped straight down to the ground. Where had all the momentum gone? Momentum is supposed to be conserved. So much for Bob's secret plan of stealing enemy attacks and firing them back at those same enemies. How did George's backpack work? This all called for a spot of MQA. Magic has its rules after all. Hat on, boys.

Several hours of experimentation, a short lunch break, and a very tired dog later, Bob had made a number of discoveries.

First, the mana output required for picking up stationary objects was proportional to the object's mass. That made sense, given that mass is the measure of inertia, the degree to which an object resists forces. However, the backpack was frighteningly efficient (or the dog's mana reserves were off the chart), because George had no trouble scooping away huge quantities of stone and mud without noticeable mana fatigue.

Second, praise Newton, momentum was conserved. Of course, without a mana meter or some equivalent, it was difficult to get precise values. But the dog's mana outlay roughly corresponding to a target's momentum (holding mass constant). Bob had been able to see the dog visibly tire when he was forced to catch-pop many fast moving objects in succession.

Third, praise the System, mana was conserved. In addition, to cancelling out momentum, the backpack had to cancel out any mana in the target. The difficulty ramped up sharply when Bob started powering his mud balls with mana. This was probably the reason why the dog couldn't carry living objects.

This phenomenon squared with the explanation of mana Bob had extracted from Xenophon. According to the researcher, all mana originated in world cores. A world core produced a colorless, ambient mana, which living beings absorbed and refined it into their own, unique colored mana. Colored mana couldn't mix. So George's mana had to overwhelm Bob's mana before he could store a charged mud ball. And to carry a living object, he would have to cancel out the totality of their mana, which was probably impossible and would almost certainly kill them.

The long and short of it was that George's new spell would be excellent at protecting against small, non-magical things like shrapnel. Solid at protecting against larger objects (with higher momentum) and only okay at guarding from magical attacks. It would work alright, but it would be trading mana for mana. Better than getting fried but sacrificing a good chunk of the dog's own mana in the process.

And system be praised. The catch-pop command was something the dog could do without a long and unwieldy command sequence. Probably because of the obvious trigger of having something hurtling at you. That was sufficient context to figure out what was going.

Bob rubbed his hands. It was time for a rematch. A one-sided, slap down, fear-me rematch. Those stupid, porcupine caterpillars wouldn't know what hit them. They were the perfect early-leveling monster. Easy to find, thanks to their bright colors. Concentrated and numerous, thanks to their gregarious lifestyle. And with a catch-pop capable dog at Bob's side, entirely harmless.

Let the Stachelflieger massacre begin.