Chapter 102: Der Panther

Something was … off about this journey. And Derek was not talking about the increase in acceleration from [Dance Across the Universe].

Normally, traveling in FTL was restful. Oh, it was also fairly monotonous, but short of an utterly titanic navigation mistake ending with them accidentally stumbling deep enough into a gravity well to get yanked out of the [Alcubierre Bubble], you were pretty much untouchable.

Wake up, have breakfast, potentially clean up a mess when one of his “culinary experiments” failed to work out, do some light maintenance or exercise or read a good book, lunch, something else to pass the time, though he was more likely to be able to do something enjoyable after getting the “work” out of the way in the morning, dinner, a game night or something in the evening if they hadn’t gotten together during the day.

Monotonous, admittedly, and limited to the single ship, but nice.

Right now, however, Derek felt caged.

The Bastard had gone after his home, and he desperately wanted to punch the guy in the throat … and then kick him in whichever part of his alien physiology was the most sensitive.

He couldn’t.

Because they weren’t there yet. And at this point, Derek was starting to be amazed that he hadn’t worn a groove into the damn floor yet with how he was pacing.

And preparation-wise … the Dragonfly might be a warship, but even warships were not invulnerable, and he was reaching a point in his personal power where he could do some serious damage to a ship. Especially from the inside.

So personal training was limited, and ship improvement wasn’t within any of their ability to do right now.

And the simulations were semi-crap at the moment, when what they really needed was starship combat practice …

I need more aces up my sleeve, he thought.

And in this situation, that was referring to one specific thing. Abusing the hell out of [Aspect Integration] and his Magebreaker Specter Aspect.

The fundamental issue was that he’d run out of easily transformable things.

Filling the “hollow” organs within himself, namely lungs and digestive tract, with the foggy portion of the Magebreaker Specter’s body, which wouldn’t actually take up any space, and then he’d filled those with [Blink Bolts] to unleash as a massive shotgun blast of magic missiles. But that wouldn’t really work for anything beyond the weak spells he currently had in there; what this required was something he could turn into crystal.

His fingernails had been an easy choice there, but also the only easy choice.

For a brief moment, he considered using his teeth, but having teeth made of crystal and stuffed with magic felt like a great way to accidentally blow off his head when one broke on a cherry pit or the like.

Beyond that … there was a reason why the fleshy parts of his body were flesh, not bone, transforming those could easily interfere with his muscles’ function.

Which meant he needed bone or the like. But that tended to be pretty far beneath the skin, and the “blink” portion of [Blink Bolt] only worked on the kinds of simple spells he already had enough of.

An option he certainly had was to add a new body part, like wings or a tail, and then transform that. But that felt weird. An entirely new body part, even with [Shapeshifter’s Acrobatics] … nah.

Oh, sure, it was possible; his sisters both had wings from their Valkyrie race, and they were lethal with those things, but Derek wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to get anywhere close to that level of mastery anytime soon.

Plus, they could retract their wings; that was how that worked for them. Derek would be manually adding and removing the wings each and every time, so if he put pre-cast spells into them, he’d be walking around with them out all the damn time.

Derek dragged his right hand down his face, feeling the bones beneath his skin pressing against his skull … shit. It was an option, but a genuinely horrifying one.

Transforming his bones and casting through his flesh, somehow, was genuinely batshit insane. And yet … it was certainly exactly the kind of extreme trick he’d literally just decided the situation called for.

But he still needed to make sure the crystalline bones didn’t break and blow off his hand.

Normally, that would have involved sheathing it in bone, hoping a thin layer of the material that was meant to be there, Stat-reinforced no less, would do the trick.

However, he now had something entirely new. The Aspect of the Cessid Battleship, and all wonderful materials within.

Metal was kinda shit for regular [Aspect Integration]; it neither really scaled with his Stats, nor was it particularly impressive overall; however, the ship did have certain fascinating alloys reinforcing certain key structures.

And unlike dragon bone, it wasn’t, well, bone, but metal, and as such, had several properties the material presently making up his knuckles did not, most importantly being that it worked perfectly well as wires.

So, turn most of the bones in his fingers into crystal, reinforce them with metal, and hope the pain of ripping his hands to pieces didn’t knock him out when he actually used the spells?

Okay, new idea: turn the fleshy part of his hands into a Poltergeist’s ectoplasm, to fire the spells more easily, with the nerves just above the wrist being turned into their eldritch equivalent, which I know don’t transfer pain. Then … hope I remember to use that template before throwing the spells?

I mean, it’s insane, but also … what isn’t right now?

And now, several rounds of practice to perfect things.

***

Drip.

Derek watched the crimson drop fall off the tip of his middle finger, splattering across the floor of the infirmary.

Drip.

A new drop traced its way down his arm from somewhere higher up the limb, racing towards the floor as though it were being timed.

Drip.

Derek finally roused himself, sitting up straighter as cleaning magic scoured the remaining blood from both his skin and the infirmary itself.

He raised his right hand towards his face, carefully studying it. Mere moments ago, it had been split open to unleash the spells within, which had been … highly unpleasant despite the precautions he’d taken. Even with the flesh in the spell’s path being ectoplasm, the adjacent human muscle and sinew had still torn.

This was a decidedly “break glass in case of emergency” trick, he mused as he turned the flesh transparent to grant direct sight at the orange crystal beneath. However … it was also one hell of a trump card, wasn’t it?

Okay, next?

There were a few options, but in the end, he went back to playing with [Spatial Detonation], using it only on tiny motes of dust that would have minimal explosive force no matter what.

However, there were some hard limits as to how far he could push this particular spell. Because he wasn’t actually “pushing” on the atoms, merely removing the space between them. Once they were touching, that was it.

And, while the electron orbits around the core of an atom were technically mostly empty, they were so in the same way the space taken up by a spinning airplane propeller was mostly air. Things were whipping around so quickly that actually entering the area wasn’t possible without making one hell of a mess.

When he hit that limit a week in, that was that … as far as his own development went.

He did, however, have an entire ship full of freshly obsolete explosive munitions that he could enchant with the newest version of the spell.

It would be boring, monotonous, and take forever. But it’d also be productive. And that sounded exactly like what he needed right now.

With a grin slowly sneaking its way back onto his face, Derek made his way down to the storage room with the spare railgun rounds first.

***

A week later, Derek found himself holding his first Level 20 [Skill], though sadly, [Enchanting] itself had stalled out at 19.

Even so, the second threshold was a pretty big deal, as it was the first time the bonus was adapted to the user’s performance.

Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation (legendary, Level 20)

Gain massively increased spatial manipulation ability, as well as the ability to push certain rules.

…

After countless instances where the user has delved deep into the mysteries of spacetime and the eldritch while also wielding the related phenomenon of gravity, this Skill has evolved to affect and enhance gravity manipulation to the same degree as space.

It was in absolutely no way where he’d expected the [Skill] to go, but Derek would admit he certainly had been relying on gravity a whole lot. That would be something interesting to play around with when they were out of FTL, and he could experiment outside his still very breakable starship.

However, fucking with the gravity to the same degree he’d been with space … the grin that idea put on his face was nothing less than savage.

And even aboard the Dragonfly, there were still certain things he could do that weren’t inherently destructive.

For example, he could simply … cancel gravity beneath him with a thought … ow.

Derek rubbed his forehead where it had slammed into the bulkhead when a sudden vanishing of the attractive force underfoot while walking had seen him launch himself into the wall.

Right, shouldn’t have done that while walking …

Seriously, the spell cast impossibly quickly now, and he’d have to get used to it before using it in combat, but ultimately, there was a different use case he wanted to look into. Namely, screwing over the other guy.

Off to the exercise room!

Really, it was just another storage room with heavily reinforced bulkheads, but the adjacent compartments held various pieces of gear they might want. Usually, when he used it, that meant several evenmore heavily enchanted armored plates. But even then, he never used his strongest spells.

And the only thing that’d have qualified, gravity-wise, would have been actually crushing an enemy, but people even at his Level took a lot of crushing to even be inconvenienced.

Raw force was not the way to go with gravity manipulation, obviously.

And the way he’d been using it to date, simply using the [Gravity Field] spell to pull his enemies towards the ground, could also only do so much.

No, what he needed was something that kept them on their toes, that they couldn’t simply analyze and adapt to. A fluctuating gravity field that could pull an enemy every which way, adapting to an enemy’s stance by pulling them past their own center of gravity, eternally stopping them from getting their feet under them.

It’d be a complicated piece of spellcraft to make, but that was more a matter of the number of moving parts than anything else. The concept was pretty basic.

Beyond that, it was merely a matter of time.

Derek wasn’t entirely sure how long it had been when he finished; it had to have been at least six hours, but it could easily have been a hell of a lot longer.

Gravetic Circus (spell)

For all that one can say about …

However, that was when Ye-in walked in the door, and he stopped reading.

And there was only a single question in his mind from the moment he saw her.

“What are you wearing?”

“Modified Force Recon Marine armor,” she replied with a grin, gesturing at the futuristic-looking slab of metal encasing her, overlaid with the spectral scale mail she was currently projecting from her soulbound item. “We got to requisition stuff from the Navy stores, remember?”

Okay, that made sense, but …

“And why?”

“Remember when we were stuck on the Astron homeworld?”

Derek nodded. “Us, and two thousand Navy personnel and Marines against an entire planet’s worth of monsters. Why?”

“I got a good look at how the Marines fight,” Ye-in explained. “Heavy armor, magitech weapons. And I got to thinking: why don’t I make modern weapons with [Arsenal Switch]?”

“And you need modern armor to provide the circuits and the like,” Derek surmised. “That’s really cool.”

“I mean, I’m going to need something custom to use it properly, but there wasn’t time for that. And this,” she gestured down at herself. “Is pretty darn perfect.”

Then, Ye-in looked at the twisting mess of magic and gravity hanging in the middle of the compartment that would make it utterly impossible for anyone inside to avoid faceplanting.

“So, would you consider this spell battlefield-ready?” she asked.

Obviously, there was a reason for that question, especially considering the expression on her face, but saying “no” simply because he suspected she’d realized something he’d missed would be childish.

So he nodded … then she punched the spell, and it snapped out of existence.

“How did you …” Derek began, then facepalmed. “I made it too complicated, didn’t I?”

Her only reply was a flat stare. Ye-in held that for several long seconds, then sighed.

“It was basically solid. Anything that could hurt an intangible object would damage this, and any kind of damage is going to break a spell that complicated.”

Right. When Derek had been learning to cast and control spells, she’d been learning to fight magic casters even without being able to use spells herself.

So, big bad complicated spell with enough mana in it to be subject to disruption by anything that contained enough mana to interact with it, bad.

A spell with all the above issues that could also not afford to take any kind of damage, worse. Much, much, worse.

And he should have seen that comi- … nope, actually, there was nothing to “see coming” here. It was a fundamental aspect of how spells functioned. Forgetting that for the sake of making the spell function was just plain dumb.

Cursing himself even as he felt his face begin to grow warm, Derek erased the spell from his character sheet.

“Thank you for that,” he said, already turning back towards the center of the room when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you okay? You seem a little more … intense than usual.”

And while she was too polite to say it aloud, Derek heard the unspoken “and for you, that’s saying something” loud and clear.

He shrugged. What was there to say?

“Shitty situation is shitty, makes me feel shitty?”

Talk about pointless …

But even though he hadn’t actually said anything, there was understanding in her eyes as she nodded. And then she wrapped him in her arms.

“Wha- …” he began, only to be cut off by an immediate “Shh!”

So he hugged her back.

Derek wasn’t entirely sure how long they stood like that, barely registering the door opening and closing immediately afterwards, Atticus’ whispered “sorry” so faint he was half-certain he’d imagined it …

Then she released him, putting her hands on his shoulders instead.

“Really, are you okay?”

Derek shrugged again. “As okay as I can be. I mean, I’m pissed, but it’s not like we aren’t doing what we should be.”

Then, Ye-in sighed.

“Yeah, me too.” She gave him another brief hug.

“Thank you,” Derek said when they were once again standing apart, then headed towards the door. “I’ll get out of your hair now; I have to get back to the drawing board anyway.”

“Good luck,” she called after him before the door closed between them, and he quickly reached the bridge.

Alright, back to basics now. How did this work?

Gravity was a twist in space-time as the result of objects of mass, though only those of significant heft mattered outside of laboratories or certain small-scale high-fidelity manufacturing processes. Its strength also fell off based on distance, but its influence theoretically covered the entire universe, albeit not in any way that mattered.

That was bitch-basic physics.

Ergo, mass and distance, and the latter was something Derek had grown increasingly adept at monkeying with.

He began to smirk once more, the first idea coming to him almost immediately.

Because gravity “radiated” outwards, he could use magic to “block” the effect. Or enhance it, the way [Gravity Field] did. He didn’t need to surround the enemy in the spell; he just had to put the spell between his opponent and the nearest source of gravity, and fluctuate what was already present. Perhaps even shifting the angle at which it pulled?

Not as far as he could if he wrapped his enemy in magic, but still a little …

And he needed to strip down the effect as far as he possibly could. Make the spell as simple as was feasible, so simple that the only reason it functioned at all was [Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation].

Even then, the spell was complicated in terms of overall infrastructure, but not in concept, and he’d made a lot of the spell already, even if that variant had been utter dogshit for any practical application.

It took a few more hours, but eventually, it was done.

Grand Disruption (spell)

Gravity is one of those things people just take for granted (at least if they live on a planet’s surface).

It’s there, it’s constant, and the brain subconsciously adapts to its existence and perfects its response … which is why the creator of this spell will be cursed by melee fighters until the end of time. Or they would, were this spell not almost impossible to use without a specific supporting Skill presently only held by said creator.

Within ten meters of the caster, gravity will fluctuate wildly, in/decreasing by a factor of up to five, and shifting its direction by up to ten degrees. This effect will not affect the caster or any projectiles originating from them.

Cost: 50 mana per second

Perfect.

Of course, any mage worth their salt would notice and be able to counterspell it in a heartbeat, but he hadn’t created this spell to deal with mages; now had he?

Derek began to cackle. That’d do.