I'm fighting the evil mega-corps and secret villains of this world, but hooking up the MC with his harem is the real challenge! 5 (Overpowered Isekai CYOA / Gakuen Toshi Asterisk)
"Morning Claudia, hraaaaarrhh, sorry. Didn't get much sleep last night."
I greeted my partner as she entered the training room.
It was a very late night, no thanks to Claudia's busy schedule, half an hour spent rolling down Mount Everest and attending a hastily arranged conference between several practitioners of magic on how to deal with a certain Neo-Nazi demon summoning cult back on Terra Omega.
Damn it Hitler! Why did you have to make the Wolfenstein premise real for me?!
Leave the Nazi Zombies where they belong, in my memories.
"Good morning to you as well, Lucas. Hee hee, I wonder… could I be the reason why you didn't sleep much?"
Claudia's obviously fake bashful expression still brought up the memories of last night to the forefront of my mind.
Under normal circumstances I certainly would have spent some time fantasizing over having her at my mercy, but I was honestly too mentally exhausted (from the sheer ridiculousness of Nazi Zombies) and worried over my chuuni final boss speech last night to think about her.
"Hardly. If anything, it's the IEF's and everyone else's fault for keeping you busy till late at night." I chose a different answer to Claudia's insinuations.
"Oh my, this is the first time I've seen you too shy to admit your healthy male interests."
"While I certainly dwelt on the matters of men I assure you that thoughts of a certain pretty lady were not a significant factor in keeping me awake-"
"Boo… now you're starting to speak like a storybook character just to deny it. You wound me."
"Sure doesn't seem like it."
"After leaving me in the dead of night, out of breath and begging for more-" "Only the first part was true." "-you didn't stay around to hear the continuation. Well…"
Claudia paused and covered her mouth, yawning softly, now that I've taken a closer look it seems like I wasn't the only person that didn't get much sleep last night.
"I suppose I should apologize for keeping you awake, Claudia?" I grinned widely.
"Yes, you should do so. It would be the polite thing to do. My thoughts were of you throughout the night, especially after an emergency missive was sent out to me by Galaxy about two hours after you left."
"I don't see why I would be to blame for that."
"Well, this shouldn't be repeated outside of this secure environment-"
"Is this one of those company secrets at the 'I could tell you but I would have to kill you' tier? If so, I don't think I should be hearing it."
I had a bad feeling about this. The time would certainly fit.
"It's relevant to you after all, I believe you should hear it. It's about how an armored being stopped a war in the middle-east without casualties by unleashing an unheard amount of mana-"
I knew it!
By the time Claudia finished the broad strokes of her briefing that included various far-fetched theories about me being the cause of the Invertia, the final enemy of humanity and other things I had plastered a look of utter disbelief on my face in an attempt to avert suspicion.
"T-that sounds like it's way above what a student should hear."
"But not above what someone with your wishes wouldn't be interested in. If say, this being was indeed the enemy of all humanity, then perhaps you could use your wish at the end of the Festa to have all the IEF's collaborate on defeating it. Honest collaboration for the survival of the world seems like a good first step to making the world a better place, and you could be the one to make the first push."
Glad to remember that Claudia recalled my anti mega-corp stance and how I wanted to change the world. In all honesty, however, I'm very grateful for her thoughts on the matter.
After all, she just saved me a lot of time thinking up a way to salvage my accidental 'final boss demon king' act. I didn't want the mega-corps to have free-reign in this world, neither did I want it to return to a world where national interests took precedence, especially with so many countries in existence (more than pre-WW1) that operate with (or are influenced by) IEF influenced socio-economic and political ideologies.
Looking at the state of the world right now, I really, really did not want to see countries having free-reign to gobble up as much power as they could if the IEF's were to be toppled suddenly.
Uniting the world in one fashion or another can be the first step to achieve the most peaceful transition to a new world order as realistically possible. I still have to work out the details, however.
"It's a good idea… though I can't help but think that any wish I make will be a Monkey's Paw with the IEF's interpretation of the matter." I shrugged, "In any case, I'll stick with helping you out for now. Maybe I can pass on my wish to you so you can make a double-wish?"
"Oh, that is very thoughtful of you. I will keep that in consideration as well."
"Great. But uh, I believe we went off-topic quite a bit. I don't see how reading a world-changing report like that has to do with me keeping you up at night."
She looked at me with a knowing look, and said, "I stand by my statement."
I could have chosen to continue my oblivious act, but it was pretty clear that this was a continuation of our indirect acknowledgement of knowing each other's secrets again.
"Very well. I guess we should leave it at that, for now. Unless you're planning to tell me your wish or something."
"Oh dear. You're right, we really should be getting on with our training."
Claudia smoothly changed the topic and I went along with her, showing her the exosuit I was wearing underneath that should bring me up to par with a below average Genestella in physical capabilities, then my array of melee and ranged weapons.
"Since we don't have much time why don't we focus on traditional melee combat? I'll use this custom Lux of mine."
"A sound idea." Claudia ignited her twin blades of green and red, Pandora, and said, "Feel free to begin at any time."
I shoved my special Manadyte alloy, high-frequency blade to the corner along with the rest of my equipment, leaving me with my double-bladed proto-lightsaber.
Unlike normal Lux's the core of this weapon is made out of Urm-Manadyte instead of normal or synthetic Manadyte, more specifically, I duplicated various Urm-Manadyte cores from Orga Luxes and other powerful IEF assets, then grind them into tiny bits before reforging them through the sheer power of my mana.
There was a slight sentience within the core I made, however, it's largely muted. I'm guessing it's due to the fact that I rarely ever use such weapons or, from the little impressions I've been getting, outright terrified of me and my power.
Not that I really cared about that. Unless it manifests as a sword waifu or something like that then I honestly had little interest in it as anything other than a power source.
And what a power source it is! I dare say the amount of power within my refined Urm-Manadyte core is greater than any of its natural 'siblings'.
This meant that if I really wanted to, my weapon could power up enough to burn right through the other mana-powered Lux weapons, but that kind of weapon would be deemed to dangerous or too powerful to others (and not entertaining to the IEF's, which means they'll bend the rules to confiscate it or bar it from being used).
Hence, at most, I will be making it just a bit more powerful than my opponent's weapons in order to slowly break their weapons or 'overload' it to break right through their guard at the last moment.
"Let's do this then. Orianne, play the track."
"Orianne?"
"My AI assistant."
As Duel of the Fates began to play out from the device left at the corner along with my other equipment, I held out my dual-bladed "Lux" and ignited one side of the blade, timing it along with the music, then activated the other blade right on cue.
Claudia quirked an eyebrow at my weapon of choice, "An uncommon one, to be sure-"
I didn't wait for her to finish and activated the hidden repulsion device on the soles of my feet just as I leaped at her, boosting my speed to even greater heights. At the same time, I triggered the miniature sonic weapon on my wrist, that unleashed a disorientating screech with the intention of preventing her from reacting appropriately to my airborne strike.
Right before my disarming strike was about to land, I caught her flicker of surprise suddenly morphing into calm, at the last split second, she blocked my attack.
Not that it did her any good as I disarmed her in a matter of strikes after that.
Even so, her in-combat decision-making skills are praise worthy, considering that she managed to activate her pre-cognition within the sole second she had to react while I used a few tricks of mine to throw off her concentration.
Her twin blades fell to the ground behind her just as I struck her with my weapon on the "training" settings.
"Guh…!"
"Not bad for someone holding back."
"Lucas you… I thought you said you were only using melee weapons?"
"A miniature speaker is hardly a weapon, nor is an extra speed booster on my feet a weapon. From a certain point of view, what I said was true."
To my relief, Claudia took it all in good spirit, although I get the impression that she's laughing about an in-joke that only she knew about, "I suppose so. Though, even without those surprises, isn't your speed much greater than the average Genestella?"
"Halfway there. Part of it is because I can mentally lift the limits of the suit in order to increase its power and speed for brief bursts, of course, I can't do that for long as it damages the suit. The other half of it is because I eliminated a lot of wasted movements, you know, stereotypical martial arts story reasons."
My explanation was accepted easily and we continued to battle.
Though Claudia's battle prowess was definitely a cut above the stepping stone high ranker during my first day and many other students my brief "limit breaks" and much higher skill levels allowed me to win every exchange.
"I'm not entirely sure you will improve if you keep holding back on your precog."
"That is a fair point, unfortunately, such a view only holds because of the misinformation strategy I used to hide the limits of my abilities."
"I figured that the information wouldn't be accurate, but I get the feeling the accuracy level is a lot lower than I can possibly expect."
"Perhaps. It is assumed that it can see up to 300 seconds into the future. However, my little darling's 300 seconds is actually stocked, meaning that if I used 10 seconds, then I would be left with 290 seconds to see the future with."
Claudia casually trusted me with information on her abilities, which is to be expected, considering that I unveiled a good amount of my 'standard' arsenal at the moment.
"However, as the future changes along with my actions, it is difficult to see the results of an attack while there is greater utility in using it to defend against attacks that I wouldn't normally be capable of defending against. Furthermore… one second can only be gained back in about three days."
"Holy shit that's actually a really shitty design."
"Oh, like you wouldn't believe…"
Her pained smile suggested there was much more to that.
Given how much information she had of me, I'm very sure that her current precognition limits in combat were separate from whatever visions of the future she uses to gather information. And somehow… I get the feeling it isn't very pleasant. Maybe she gets headaches like those Thinkers do in those fanfics that pop up everywhere?
Claudia continued, "Well, you know what they say. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. I've learnt to live with it."
I shook my head, not liking her defeatist tone one bit.
"Surely there's an Orga Lux with some compatibility that you can trade that off for. And for the record, I never liked that saying. Instead, I prefer this one. 'When Life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make Life take the lemons back! Get mad! You don't want those damn lemons, what the hell are you supposed to do with these? Demand to see Life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Claudia Enfield lemons! And do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn Life's house down! With the lemons! I'm gonna get to my lab to invent a combustible lemon that burns Life's house down!'"
Claudia took one look at my very convincing manic look and burst out laughing, "Haha! Oh, Lucas, I don't believe that saying belongs anywhere outside of that game of yours. What was it called… oh yes, Portal."
I did remake Portal for digital distribution here along with Kirby and other games when I didn't see it in this world. To my surprise, it seemed like Claudia had seriously done her research on me, to the point where she tried out or read about the details of the games I 'launched' here.
"Thank you for your patronage. Point is, I don't think you should be giving up just like that. You pretty much have access to the school's stores of Orga Luxes, surely there are other weapons you are compatible with?"
"Mmm, that is true. However, I still plan to wring out as much use of this little darling as much as I can…"
Before I could respond to that she suddenly attacked me, as if to change the topic and... prevent me from convincing her to change her mind.
I guess there's only so many secrets she's willing to part with each day, I will accept this for now, but if things go too far then I'll start pushing her.
The rest of our school day passed by rather uneventfully, until Claudia brought me to the secure facility for Orga Lux compatibility testing.
"Right, I don't have much expectations for this, so I'm just going to touch everything and see what happens. Is that okay?" I gave my suggestion to Claudia, making it sound as if I just wanted to get everything over with.
"Of course Lucas, go right ahead~" She replied with an indulgent tone and a knowing wink.
It felt as if Claudia was an accomplice to my little scheme, and happily used her authority to get the staff working there to let me test everything in a quick manner.
The staff became much more agreeable when they wanted to get it over with just as quickly after seeing my near-zero compatibility scores, as a result of my invisible, second-layer of skin-like glove, forcing such a result while I duplicated those items without them knowing.
A week had gone by since then, Claudia and I both improved in personal combat (mostly Claudia) and teamplay together. I managed to make my main Urm-Manadyte cores even more powerful by crushing the newly copied Orga Lux cores into a new form together with it then refining them to an even denser form through sheer magical power.
Claudia "convinced" me to sneak into her room a couple more times, as before, I didn't go too far since there were still walls between us, secrets that we wanted to keep for now.
I used those chances to introduce her to Star Wars, after she watched those movies, she started to see some of my quotes for what they were (memes) and my double-bladed 'lightsaber' for the passion project it was.
After that, she started sharing some of her own interests with me. She had very little time to pick up more time-consuming hobbies, what time she had she spent on keeping up with fashion and reading the 'classics' of this world.
There were some that I didn't really recognize due to me ignoring certain cultural and fashion trends of this world in favor of the familiar Terra Omega. On the other hand, I very much recognized Shakespeare's works among Claudia's fine collection.
Romeo and Juliet being one of her favorites worries me a lot, it even got me to start looking for signs of her being foolishly impulsive or overly romantic to the point of wanting to commit double-suicide.
One day, just as I finally got to getting a new video game, an addition to the Final Fantasy series for 'launch' (*cough* remake and redistribution) and was preparing to stream an announcement to my surprising amount of followers online… Claudia decided to enter my room for once.
She managed to completely disable the alarms to my room, as expected of Student Council President privileges abuse of power.
"Hello Lucas, are you busy?"
"Claudia! Yes, I'm kind of in the middle of something. Oh great, you set the chat off with your appearance. Do you realize how crazy these guys go when they see a pretty girl on screen?"
The comments really started to get out of hand since Claudia invaded my room. Shouldn't this reflect badly on her position? Oh wait, the rules are meant to be broken, especially when it's an absurdly powerful student council in an anime world.
"Good evening everyone. I'm Lucas's partner~"
"I feel like my product launch has just been hijacked."
"Hmm…" Claudia took a look at the view count and smiled, "Lucas, why don't we turn this into a Q&A session? If I recall correctly, you haven't streamed in a long time since coming to Asterisk. It would be good to keep everyone updated."
That wasn't really a bad idea since it would help keep interest in my products, which means more sales, meaning more money for my 'research budget', charity work and various investments into 'Social Enterprises' that I've been doing to help the community and the world (publicly).
And also… I'm pretty sure that Claudia had ulterior motives in mind, I may as well let her play her hand and see what happens.
"That's a great idea Claudia. Let me try to sort out the most asked questions and…"
Claudia sat right next to me and quickly grabbed my arm, pressing her breasts against them even more blatantly than usual.
The top questions quickly changed to that of a more personal nature rather than the more 'safe' questions that I could have answered.
… Might as well just go along with it.
We went through a slew of questions as I tried to (futilely) turn the focus to the game I wanted to 'launch'. Eventually, I started talking about why I decided to come to Asterisk, emphasizing my special scholarship which Claudia shamelessly (albeit politely) mentions she has a hand in.
Then the questions went on to asking about the Festa and our wishes.
"To be honest I don't really have a wish I want granted. So I thought of giving my wish to Claudia since it sounded like she had a need for it. She still hasn't told me what it was though but we're good friends and I trust her a lot."
It was customary in Asterisk for the press not to look too deeply into contestants' rewards for winning the Festa, in other words, their wishes granted by the IEFs. After all, unless the relevant party had themselves divulged it, such questions risked upsetting the foundations themselves.
But this was an online stream with a different, albeit still a very large audience. In addition to that, I wasn't planning to state my real desires to the public at all… wait, but what if Claudia…!
"Heh-heh, let's see…," Claudia said with a small laugh. "This does seem like a good opportunity." She paused there, her shoulders trembling, as if holding herself back to let the tension build for a moment. "I wonder whether you've all heard of Professor Ladislav Bartošik? Oh no, that's unlikely. Most would know him for Orga Lux research and that he was missing for several years now but the truth is that he's presently in custody due to his involvement with the Jade Twilight Incident. My wish is to meet with him and have a little talk."
My research had indicated that there wasn't a person on the island who didn't know that mentioning the Jade Twilight Incident was taboo in Asterisk. No one could have forgotten about the incident, of course, but people had to be especially careful when touching on the topic.
It was basically the Magneto and Brotherhood of Mutants equivalent of a terrorist attack based on Genestella supremacy.
Well, it failed quite spectacularly, however, there were a lot of suspicious going-ons about that incident. Come to think of it… this could be a lead into tracking down the main bad guys of this story.
I should check that out, and by that, I mean get Orianne to start working on it.
"There's a secret that only the professor knows the answer to. I want him to share it with me. With Lucas by my side, I'm certain of achieving that little wish of mine. " Claudia continued before giving a slight smile to the viewers.
Just as she finished her words there was a sudden "service disruption" to the platform I was using to stream my video.
"... So… are we public enemy No.1 on the IEF list yet?"
"Not yet. Maybe. We'll see. It was as good a time as I could hope for." Claudia answered with an enigmatic smile rising to her lips.
By the end of the morning there was an 'anonymous' rumor spread across the city about the limitations of Claudia's Orga Lux containing the exact content that she had revealed to me a week ago.
I also had to push Claudia out of the way from a third-party attack as we fended off a mob of students 'trying their luck' to defeat Claudia now that they think she isn't as unbeatable as her reputation suggests.
It looks like we're at the stage where people are trying to get us out of the competition.
Well congratulations Claudia. Now what's the next step of your master plan?