Chapter 71: Grounded Engagement

All around the Dragonfly, space was on fire as the enemy fodder burned.

The creature had first looked like a simple blob of jelly, one that had been splattered across space by the first shot that struck it.

And then each and every single drop of the resultant spray had then transformed into a disgusting abomination of bone and sinew … each wearing one of their faces, creating a grotesque swarm that thankfully burned away under their point defense.

Derek winced as something bounced off the ship’s hull, the sound transmitting much more easily to his position on the outside of the armor plating.

Yeah, they were dying, but there were a lot of them.

Curses swallowed by vacuum, Derek cracked the door of his “safe room,” granting himself a direct line of sight at the monster currently scrabbling against the hull metal with bone spikes while wearing a darkly twisted replica of his own face as a mask.

And it was currently heading for one of the point defense turrets, which would have to turn nearly a hundred and eighty degrees and fire against the hull to burn it away.

In an instant, his hand snapped up, and an [Anima Bolt] blew the creature back into space in pieces, each of which was rapidly being eaten by the corrosive effect of the [Skill].

Now if only he could have charged the elemental cannon with that, rather than raw hellfire …

All around him, more and more of the disturbing creatures burst apart, yet even those “merely” melted into plasma seemed to dissolve away into nothing. And the “ding” of a confirmed kill was still absent …

***

The creature hadn’t been hurt by being reduced to stew by a railgun round, and it certainly wasn’t being damaged when the shards it had been turned into were obliterated.

Lasers vaporized grotesques, particle beams turned them into vanishing irradiated sludge, yet the only thing that saw them actually be burned away rather than vanish had been his [Anima Beam] and all the deleterious effects baked into the [Skill] by his Aspects.

After spending a mere couple of seconds thinking about it, Derek took control of the focus cannon he was lying next to, a ray of jet-black flame lighting entire seconds of space alight, white edges barely outlining the raging inferno that would otherwise have been utterly invisible.

For the very first time, the swarm seemed to begin to lighten, yet failed to vanish …

And then, for reasons that were entirely beyond Derek, the main railgun fired once more, the round coming apart as it struck something his personal sensor feed failed to convey, then vanished in a blast of energy indicating it was one of the enchanted rounds they’d purchased at Freedom.

That, finally, earned a kill notification, some hunch of one of his friends having put an end to the creature, which was apparently called an “Abhorrent Hive” and ended up being “only” Level 70.

Jesus. Did Levels mean nothing with these things?

Either way, Derek began to pour more mana into the weapon overhead to replace the energy he’d used up, then popped a mana jelly into his mouth.

These things were basically just jelly beans that were larger on the inside and filled with mana potion … also expensive, in highly limited supply, and impossible to store in any of his standard storage devices without destroying everything inside.

But drawing on the ship’s emergency supplies felt appropriate given the situation.

***

A massive chunk seemed to be taken out of the planet ahead as something manifested, and for a single heart-stopping moment, it seemed as though the world were literally coming apart around what could only possibly be a second World Boss.

It was only the fact that the planet didn’t seem to be coming apart that gave away that lie to that idea, and only that.

A small glint of light was the only evidence of the surveillance drone getting chucked out into space, in an attempt to triangulate the approaching creature’s distance, as the on-board sensors clearly weren’t up to the task.

This thing wouldn’t even let them know how far away it wa- … the ship trembled as something gouged a massive chunk out of the Dragonfly’s bow, and for a heartstopping moment, Derek thought they might have lost one or even both their primaries before the sensors reported the strike had just barely missed crippling them.

So it was little surprise that Derek’s cheekbones rattled with the transmitted sound of barked, almost panicked, instructions.

“Emergency measure, the one straight ahead!” Ye-in yelled, not needing to clarify just what she was referring to. There was only one thing that qualified as the “oh shit button” that she was clearly asking for was the metal cylinder lying by his feet.

A chunk of purified uranium, wrapped in carefully calibrated high explosives, drenched in prepared hellfire that Derek had poured into the now literally hellish device.

Above, the universe spun nauseatingly, star-speckled sky twisting, the Dragonfly’s inertial dampeners deluding his inner ear into thinking it wasn’t the ship that was turning, even though that was exactly what was happening.

So Derek removed the offending organ, using [Aspect Integration] to override that part of his physiology with an inner lump of ectoplasm. Somehow, that worked.

Leaning forward, he hurled the nuke down towards the ship’s stern … only to go flying after it as the main engines engaged at full thrust, pushing in their direction of flight and thus slowing the ship, giving their little present time to get clear.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Derek felt his heart leap into his throat for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with his fall as he followed the WMD into the maw of the eldritch nightmare.

When the line was fully extended and the harness cut into his flesh, the pain merely put a grin on Derek’s face as he took a second to give the creature the finger before hauling himself back up to the little cubby that was supposed to keep him safe even out here.

Supposed. To.

All the new dents and scratches and tears and burn marks that Derek passed certainly gave lie to the illusion of protection the box had provided.

And as he pulled himself back under the scant cover he was provided, behind him, the mouth of hell bloomed open, black flames seemingly swallowing the planet and stars beyond as they were hurled across the void by the fury of the nuclear blast hotter than any of the distant suns twinkling in the dark.

Derek was imagining the burn of radiation searing his cells, the sensation of DNA coming apart under a bombardment of lethal energy, any awareness of the fact that they were already well outside the safe radius blotted out by the sight spread out before him.

And that was just their own little one-kiloton weapon, a “firecracker” by the standards of military ordnance.

Another kill notification dinged, a brief check revealing that not only had they won that particular skirmish, but the monster had even provided a few scraps of XP, the enchantments and handcrafted nature of the weapon apparently elevating it out of the category of “environmental hazard.”

The dark star of hellfire swiftly began to burn out, reduced to mere sparks by the time the Dragonfly flew through, the ship twisting in place as momentum carried it onwards, railgun roaring anytime an enemy crossed its bow. Black bars of hellfire burned through space, ashing anything that dared to stand against them, autocannons hurling enchanted spears of metal into the bodies of enemies until they ran dry, anything even remotely “normal” in composition melting like ice cubes in the Sahara as lasers tore them to pieces.

Even as they reached the furthest eddies of the atmosphere, air resistance beginning to become a factor, the firing continued, weapons fire turning visible in the trails they left in the air.

As the trembling of the Dragonfly around him began to grow worse and worse, Derek felt forced to seal his hidey-hole. He might be able to handle space, and could handle the atmosphere of this particular planet, but the transition between the two was … rough. Turbulent. And hot.

The various sensors and antennae could retract, the door handles could be covered with a suitably aerodynamic, well, covers, and even the guns could rotate into a position that minimized drag.

All the various tears and holes in the hull, metal shards jutting out into the airflow … couldn’t.

Contrails of plasma lit up the sky of a planet that had been torn away from its sun, torn-off chunks of hull and technology flying off and burning up in the air, leaving the ship to practically tumble towards the surface amidst a shower of shooting stars, twisting around to point its main engine towards the surface to begin the deceleration process in earnest even as entire vessel fought to go spinning off.

The magic Atticus used to enhance the vessel’s performance began to grow stronger, edging into the visible spectrum, forcing the main engines to remain pointed straight down as they rode the pillar of plasma shooting out of the Dragonfly’s stern.

Derek found himself quite glad he’d sealed himself in, the metal separating him from the outside growing heated even with all the thermal insulation/dispersal enchantments baked into it to counter enemy lasers.

Around him, the ship twisted once more, the ship’s underside angled towards the ground as the metal legs the ship would be standing upon extended.

Once more, they’d chosen a rocky plateau to rest upon, though calling what happened next a “landing” was overselling things quite a bit. A “crash that doesn’t break the landing gear” would have been Derek’s phrasing, save for the fact that it was quite a bit better than any of them could have expected, considering the state of the ship.

And as the sensors began to once more scan the skies, they came back with the single most relieving message they possibly could have: no pursuit.

Phew …

For the briefest of instances, the ship sat there, still shaking but still somehow coming to a stop … but a panicked flight did not an opportunity for a proper survey make. And yet, the entire rock face crumbling away underneath them was most certainly one of the worse outcomes that might have come about.

Derek mashed the door-opening button so hard he broke a finger, then kicked the cover as it was opening too slowly and hurled himself skyward, grasping the air and holding on as the ship began to roll away, an errant gun barrel smacking into his ankle with bone-breaking force.

He hung there, bone radiation from his injuries, watching the ship tumble several hundred meters.

They have to be okay, right? The inside is protected from the kind of acceleration that could induce outright spagettification, this is nothing by compari- …

“Derek, are you okay?”

For some reason, he found himself nearly as relieved to finally not be “hearing” via the bone induction headset as he was to hear Ye-in’s slightly breathless voice in the first place.

“I’m fine,” he replied. “What about you guys? That looked rough.”

“We’re good, but …”

In lieu of a proper explanation, Ye-in simply changed a couple of settings on her seat’s microphone to send him the audio of Mimi’s cussing.

As Derek had already surmised based on watching the tumble, they’d lost most of the things on the outside of the armor. The exterior hull was more than capable of handling the ship’s weight being dropped a couple of meters at a time in normal planetary gravity, but nothing on it could possibly shrug off being crushed between that kind of mass and the ground underneath.

He released his grasp on spacetime and let himself fall, [Lifesurge] banishing his injuries before he landed, making his way after the ship. Mercifully, the Dragonfly had at least landed within a few degrees of right-side-up, but it still looked rough as hell.

“The doors look clear, but can you open them?” Derek asked. If the doorframes were bent, the others would be trapped in there, while he was stuck out here, and that wouldn’t be fun for anyone even without the inhabitants coming into play.

Actually … “And what about the floodlights?”

Derek could still see just fine; [Aspect Integration] combined with any of the spaceborne monsters whose Aspects he held meant that a place without enough light to see (that wasn’t in a cave) straight up did not exist for him, but if they had to go by flashlights or magical light orbs, this would be a pain for everyone else.

In lieu of a verbal response, several lights flickered on along the hull, half of them only casting a sad, dim little shine on the surroundings, others were scattered across a wide area by shattered lenses, but at least it was enough to see by for a normal person.

When Derek reached the airlock, he tried to open it, but it just wound up stuck, futilitely strugling to push past a metal shard that had gotten wedged between it and the frame.

“Yeah, that one’s busted,” Ye-in said from overhead, causing Derek to jump at her sudden appearance. “Other one works, though.”

“Did you manage to see how many monsters are in the area?”

Unfortunately, Ye-in just shook her head.

“We only know they’re around. Mimi’s putting together basic turrets to help keep them off us.”

Which also explained why she was already out here, she was getting ready to fight off monsters that could not have possibly missed their “landing.”

Originally, the Dragonfly’s onboard weapons would have been able to fend off the bitch-basic critters in the area, but those were currently so much scrap metal, plastered across the mountainside behind them.

Derek jumped into the air and once again hung himself from the empty air to start planning where to place the weapons. You know, calculate the rate at which the air would attenuate energy weapons, factor in the rate at which railgun rounds would drop, and so on, and so forth …

But when intentions met reality, reality tended to win.

And at just that moment, it had done so by sending a wave of beasts towards them, which was cresting the horizon at just that moment ...