Chapter 74: Repairs

Derek woke to an ungodly stench and a bed whose bedding would have had to be burnt, had it not been for his access to magic.

Honestly, even then, the temptation to torch the whole lot was strong. There was something about knowing they’d been this soiled that wouldn’t go away no matter what magics he wielded.

Cursing his past self for choosing to apply level-ups and their associated gains over getting clean, Derek stripped out of his armor and shoved it into the rarely-used laundry basket. It would require serious effort to make it wearable again.

Then, he put on some sweatpants and a basic shirt to tide him over while he got a spare combat outfit from the armory.

Yet once that was done, rather than heading straight out, he found himself drawn to the kitchen instead. Actually cooking felt rude, though, so he wound up walking out with an entire plate of magically thawed frozen Gimbap rolls. They were practically wrist-thick, vegetables and pickles in rice wrapped in seaweed, and something he’d grown to like while he’d been living in Seoul.

After a brief moment of hesitation, he grabbed a second plate before heading out, steeling himself to drop one or even both the instant something attacked, but nothing of the sort occurred.

Instead, the instant he was outside, Atticus was in front of him, looking down at the plates.

“One of those for me?”

In lieu of an answer, Derek handed one over.

“So, how are we handling this?”

Atticus shrugged, then pointed at his mouth and cheeks that were already bulging like that of a chipmunk, causing Derek to chuckle while he waited for an answer to become possible.

“Someone has to stay out here to make sure nothing sneaks up on us until we get the sensors fixed. The girls went to bed a while ago, and I don’t think you’ll see them for a couple of hours.” Atticus interrupted himself with a wide yawn, then stepped past Derek and patted him on his back. “Long as you stay outside, shouldn’t matter what you do.”

“G’night,” Derek replied. And while his friend vanished into the Dragonfly, he settled in on the roof of the ship with his food.

There was a bit of a mess up here, tools and spare parts scattered about the place, clear leftovers from Mimi’s ongoing efforts to fix things. After looking around and seeing that two more turrets had been set up before he’d woken up, it became clear she’d spent perhaps thirty minutes at most up here, then she’d gone to bed.

And there was even a note … Derek grimaced as he tried to read it. Brilliant as she was, the engineer had handwriting that would make your average doctor’s scrawl look like the finest calligraphy by comparison.

Yet with context and honestly more focus than he should have spent in the current situation, he was able to decipher it as being repair instructions for him, instructions that literally boiled down to “make it so the damage never happened.” No redesigns, no lack of spare parts or raw materials forcing hard decisions, just “if it was there then, it needs to be put there now.”

Consciously scanning the Dragonfly with [Starship Upkeep], Derek decided to tackle the easy stuff. They were guaranteed to be within his abilities to deal with, and even if mistakes happened, they’d be easier to undo than if he shorted out a sensor array or something. Mimi handling anything liable to explode felt like the optimal division of labor.

And so, he began, channeling mana into his regeneration as it regenerated to continue restoring his arm, the emergency prosthetic opening up around the returned limb.

The process, well, both processes, were oddly soothing. Feeling the worst injury he’d suffered to date melt away under his power while the ship came back to life beneath his hands. Torn shards of metal neatly shaved off by glowing neon kabar, charred wires and burned insulation stripped clean out, swiftly replaced by shiny metal and power conduits so new they squeaked whenever he accidentally rubbed them across something.

Parts he left open for inspection when he wasn’t entirely sure whether or not it was completely done, but to be honest, the likelihood of even one of those needing further revisions was low. Or Derek just sucked at this. Though if he had, chances were one of his previous repairs would have long-since failed catastrophically. Still, considering the breadth of the repairs, a little caution felt more than prudent.

Eventually, he paused, the arm having regrown to the point where it edged up against the prosthetic’s hand, which couldn’t expand, so he took it off and waited to get back use of his fingers.

Derek took that as his opportunity to start looking around from atop the ship. Properly look around, not just keep an eye out for anything sneaking up on him.

The battlefield still looked pretty bad, covered in craters and scorchmarks, most of which was on him, admittedly, and there were countless stains all over the place, yet the thing that most stood out to him was the fact that it didn’t smell.

Spilled blood and viscera should have stunk. Spilled blood and viscera that had been lying out and about for hours should have made for a level of stench that counted as a chemical weapon, even with how cold this planet had become after being removed from its star.

Derek shrugged. Certainly seemed like collecting the Aspects that just had to be lying out there would be a lot more pleasant than he’d expected. Perhaps the eldritch nature of their enemies was finally proving beneficial?

He glanced down at the ship underneath him. Honestly, he had maybe half an hour’s worth of work left with the stuff presently lying out and about. Running into the ship to grab more parts would leave the field unwatched, of course. Though he did connect his phone to the fabricators and made them print up whatever they could with the raw materials they had on hand.

All that done, though, Derek lightly hopped off the Dragonfly and began to walk around the ship in ever-expanding circles. The most basic search pattern in the world.

It didn’t take long to find the first one, an orb of flickering shadow that did its best to blend in with the mess covering the ground, but these efforts just made him chuckle as he picked it up. The Aspect belonged to something called a “Phased Gestalt,” which Derek eventually remembered was the name of the almost untouchable ball of writhing limbs.

But that turned out to only be the first of many. The first few he’d simply stuck in his pockets, but those swiftly started to bulge like the cheeks of a gluttonous hamster and got in the way, so he started stuffing them into his spatial ring the way he should have from the start. It had been soooo satisfying to feel them there, though …

Eh, he supposed he’d wind up with a nice pile to stare at later instead.

Once he was around half an hour into the process, though, he heard the airlock opening and decided that was his cue to head back.

“So, you’ve been busy,” Atticus called out with his signature cheer. “You need anything?”

Derek shrugged. “I’ve got some parts that just finished printing in the machine shop, if you feel up to playing gopher.”

“Sure.”

While his friend headed off to do just that, Derek decided it was time to use what he’d been collecting.

From then on, which Aspects to slot didn’t really matter; all he needed was something he could stack his Aspect of the Abnormal Hunter on, which he’d already taken out.

Derek wound up selecting a couple they had the most duplicates of and slotted them, gaining fifteen points to Agility in the process, then slapped the recently removed one back in.

That process also netted him ten free Stat points for filling those slots for the first time, which he threw into Magic Power before reading the descriptions of the new [Skills].

Inescapable Hunt (epic)

Activating this Skill will fix the distance between its user and target in place; whenever said target attempts to escape, the user will be dragged along unless they choose to prevent that, while automatically avoiding all obstacles that can be.

Cost: 50 mana per minute

Traumatic Hunt (epic)

This Skill ensured that attacks of an eldritch nature will directly erode the target’s willpower and potentially even sanity.

Cost: 20 mana per minute

Neither of these [Skills] were ones he was going to use particularly often; the first one in particular was going to be very niche, but they would be helpful.

Granted, not letting enemies get away was something more suited to a melee combatant, and for the moment, his only eldritch attack was the claws of the Abnormal Hunter manifested through [Aspect Integration]; both of those were things he could work on. No, would work on.

It was at this point that Atticus returned, planting a sizeable crate onto the rock next to the airlock.

“By the way, if you have the open slots, you might find something cool here,” Derek offered, gesturing to the neat piles of various eldritch Aspects covering the top of the ship.

“Wow. Did you fight a whole second army?” Atticus asked, his eyebrows raised so high Derek found himself wondering whether or not “unnaturally mobile eyebrows” were something granted by his race.

The thought was actually nowhere near as dumb as it sounded. Atticus wasn’t a High Human; he had some kind of hybrid race of his parents that granted powers related to magic and shadow. And wasn’t the ability to exaggerate emotion kinda a rouge-y sort of thing?

While Atticus picked through the pile, Derek cast a telekinetic spell and floated the crate of spare parts up to himself and started to work again. After a couple of minutes of consideration, he decided to focus on sensors. They had four laser turrets on perimeter watch; adding more guns was unlikely to be all that helpful, especially considering the bevy of creatures that were fundamentally immune to these kinds of weapons.

Instead, getting the sensors up and running could give them the advanced warning to get properly prepared, and that was much more likely to save the day.

As he worked, he felt his thoughts drift. He was only here because of a trump card he’d set up months ago. That felt like a sign to start seriously digging into the potential of that ability once again.

The basics of his trick were, well, basic. Create the mist-like body of the Magebreaker Specter in the hollow space within his lungs, where it didn’t displace any actual tissue but also failed to obstruct airflow due to its ephemeral nature, then anchor pre-cast spells in there that could teleport out of his torso to avoid inadvertently eviscerating himself when he used them.

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Simple in creation, but also simple in effect. Something harder-hitting might be needed … but it wasn’t like he could replace other parts of his body with mist. And using the creature’s heart-crystal would just leave him with a hard chunk of material somewhere it had no business being.

Not to mention that teleporting a more powerful spell out of himself would be considerably harder. Which meant running around with a chunk of skin and underlying muscle tissue transformed into orange crystal.

Yeah, nope.

Derek glanced down at his hand, trying to imagine what it would be like to have parts of the appendage transformed into immobile rock. Then he stared at it. And then he used said hand to smack his own forehead.

What was hard, immobile, and already on the outer layer of his body?

Fingernails.

Now, were they perfect? Nope. For one, they were too small to hold overly powerful spells. Also, they were kinda obvious? Not that there were many humans liable to recognize the body of a monster found in an alien summoning list, but even blind people were liable to realize there was something hinky going on, and there weren’t very many of those left, given the existence of magical healing.

Derek glanced down at his new fingertips. It was a solid “trick” he’d figured out, but the bright orange spots were just plain garish, on top of being noticeable.

Hm.

He hadn’t actually seen either Mimi or Ye-in wear nail polish, but they might still have some. Or at least have enough information on the matter to help him avoid the easy pitfalls. Worst case scenario, boring ol’ paint might do the trick. They certainly had some of that on the ship.

Of course, either of those was liable to be blown off the moment he used whatever spell he anchored to a given fingernail, but that would be more than worth it.

Question was, what kind of spell to use?

Derek cast an [Anima Bolt] into his left thumb. Tried, at any rate. Several times.

And then he facepalmed again. [Anima Bolt] might be strong, and easily his go-to attack alongside [Spatial Detonation], but it wasn’t a spell. In many situations, that was actually an advantage, inuring it to counterspell and even the very anti-magic creature whose abilities he was presently playing around with, but right now, it stunk.

As for his self-made spell, it required careful aiming. Too careful. As he’d figured out with his existing pre-cast spells, this trick worked best when picking a direction and then discharging the spell thataways. Not something that worked well when you were dealing with an effect whose targetting process involved a careful selection of a section of matter.

Unfortunate.

Do I have to do all of these now, though? Derek wondered. Not like I can’t change these at the drop of a hat …

After thinking it over for a couple of minutes, he shrugged and went with more basic spells. A couple of overcharged [Magic Missiles], two [Fireballs], three charges of [Magic Shield], one [Shockwave], and, finally, two [Cone of Force].

Direct attack, area attack, defensive magic, and three measures to buy him breathing room and personal space.

When he got some breathing room, he’d either learn or create more suitable spells. Or, perhaps …

“Hey, where did you already search?” Atticus called out, interrupting his train of thought.

“Around the ship …” Derek replied, not entirely sure how to adequately convey the exact area without wasting a ridiculous amount of time before slapping his forehead yet again and reestablishing the party, drawing a rough approximation of his search area around them.

Using [Knightly Discipline] still felt weird, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been the last time.

Then, he returned his attention to the ship and felt a grin slowly stretch his face. Stepping up to a chaotic mess and turning it into something that worked, knowing that every time he scooted up to a new disaster area, he’d leave behind a section that gleamed like new, it might not be exciting, complex, or send his heart pounding, but by God was it satisfying.

So engrossed was he in his work that he barely took notice of Mimi’s arrival until she tapped him on the shoulder.

“Thanks for getting things ready,” she said.

“… But now the situation calls for a gopher, not a second engineer?” Derek asked, earning himself a small, clearly false pout.

“Not what I said. I just think we should coordinate.”

“I get things ready, you put in the machinery,” Derek suggested, gesturing at what he’d already done.

She nodded happily, then promptly turned to start installing everything that could be installed, though that soon ended and instead saw her busily run in and out of the ship to bring all the freshly assembled sensors out. Clearly, she’d had the same thought he had and agreed that detecting threats was the priority at the moment.

Ye-in woke up eventually too, coming out looking like she’d gotten blasted in the face by a firehose filled with swamp water. Drawbacks of not having a [Class] that made it possible to learn spells: no utility magic.

Derek wisely chose not to comment on either that or her appearance, instead removing the last remnants of last night’s conflict with a thought and a gesture, then they proceeded to exchange a few pleasantries, just to make sure the other wasn’t that hung up on the chaos they’d only barely survived.

Then, she joined Atticus in scrounging the battlefield for loot, while he went back to fixing the ship with Mimi.

“What are our spare parts looking like?” Derek asked.

She didn’t answer immediately, instead chewing on her lower lip for a couple of seconds, an action that immediately made his stomach drop.

“Not … not great. We can fix the ship now, and we should be able to make a few more basic repairs the next time it gets banged up, but if this keeps up, we’ll be flying home in a blind, toothless, airless tin can,” she said, ears drooping.

“We can fix this though,” Derek repeated. Honestly, them having to choose not only the order in which they fixed things, but what to leave damaged until they could find somewhere to resupply had been his real worry.

And then, they went back to work, the cosmetic damage having almost entirely disappeared by the time they reached late afternoon, as dictated by the ship’s clock, the star-filled yet sunless sky overhead perpetually unchanging.

Until they were interrupted. Again.

Mimi stared at the tablet lying on the hull before her, flashing warnings, with her head cocked to the side. “Are you malfunctioning? There’s nothing there.”

And that might very well be the case. Newly built, freshly installed, not-calibrated sensors weren’t exactly the most reliable. Unless there was something they could only detect traces of. Something they weren’t designed to handle.

Or …

Derek’s head snapped around so fast he half-expected to fracture his spine as he tried to find the creature that had set off every alarm his mind had. Yet the only thing he seemed to be able to confirm was that the creature was able to perfectly dodge his eyes …

“Nope. We’re not doing this,” he announced flatly, leaping towards where he thought the creature was hiding. And then he stood there, back to where he believed the likely highly-lethal creature was to be located, mentally counting down. And then he unleashed the same shotgun blast of [Blink Bolts] that had saved his life not even twelve hours ago, reducing the Many-Angled Assassin to bloody chunks behind him.

“Apparently, monsters just spawn in this place.”

He hadn’t shouted the sentence, but he had spoken loudly enough for the others to hear. He still raised his voice for the next part, though.

“Alright, no one leaves the ship alone, and if we’re not out here, someone always needs to be watching the sensors.”

And with that said, he trudged back to the ship, hopped back up onto it, and let himself drop back down on his ass, doing nothing but thinking.

This place was breaking all the rules, and not in the usual “eldritch is weird” way.

Summoned monsters going unkilled would eventually summon more creatures. Dungeons summoned creatures within themselves when there weren’t any people inside, though those creatures could then not trigger the [System’s] autonomous summoning process.

Except … except they weren’t looking at either of those. The monster had just appeared in place without anything that could explain it. Unless it was the planet itself summoning. Which would explain the monster distribution across its surface somewhat. The wrecked mountainside on the exact opposite side of this world was the “high-Level zone.” In the meantime, they were as far from that as possible and had commensurately weaker enemies. And apparently, clearing out an area would see it start to be repopulated.

Which, once again, shouldn’t be possible. Yet it was happening. All of which meant there were two options: either “The Error” had broken [System] in some way, or they were dealing with a heretofore unknown facet of autonomous summoning.

Derek really hoped it was the latter, because if it was the former, they might all be screwed. And in this case, “all” could very easily wind up referring to every sapient species in the universe that had even remotely become reliant upon the [System].

Unfortunately, it wasn’t like he was in a position to really find out, one way or another.

Gun to his head, Derek would have guessed a World Boss “winning” would result in them transforming a world into something that could, in fact, spawn monsters, or that The Error in particular had that ability, but proving either would require a degree of testing that wasn’t exactly feasible, if it was possible at all.

Because Derek had a sinking feeling that whichever people had The Error on their summoning list … they weren’t around anymore. And he’d been doing so well in his efforts to ignore the implications of their surroundings …

A shiver went through him.

Yep, I’m not sleeping tonight, he thought, not entirely sure whether that would be due to the thought of what had happened to this world, or how easily it could have been Earth whose ashes alien explorers were picking through.

***

The next “day” wound up being quite a bit more tedious. Rather than fixing the exterior of the ship, the goal for the day was getting the Dragonfly back up on her actual landing gear.

And that wound up being quite the process, with Mimi having to recalculate things every time the ship shifted, all in a thankfully successful effort at not making the situation even worse.

First they had to make sure there was a physical path to the bottom of the ship.

Then they had to warp space to make said path large enough to actually access the landing gear.

And check whether or not undoing the warp while the rebuilt landing gear was rebuilt would pull the bow and stern, which would still be resting on the mountain at that point, off the mountain, or if they’d rip the ship in half.

Then realize that they needed to repair the landing gear in one go, lest they crush all their progress the instant whoever was keeping the space open ran out of mana.

Which meant they had to go for the easier yet infinitely more time-consuming option of digging out the landing struts, rebuilding them in whatever little nooks they were able to hollow out without the ground crumbling apart, then taking a massive bite out of the ground so that they’d be able to launch once they figured out a way to get out of the system.

That then turned into a massive issue with all the damage they’d done to the ground upon crashing, all the hairline fractures within the rocky plateau that needed to be mended … even with magic, that was a pain.

All in all, by the time he went to bed that day, Derek had ended up sitting around waiting for the next step to be decided upon for at least twelve hours. But they did wind up getting the ship out and ready for launch, for all the good that would do.

***

Yet another ball of tentacles was reduced to ash and dust under the concentrated fury of three lasers while Derek watched from his captain’s chair on the bridge. They’d only gotten half of the Dragonfly’s secondary weapons working again in the past two weeks, but by properly spacing the functional secondaries and programming in some proper firing solutions taking those limitations into account had let them relatively easily take care of the enemies as they spawned in piecemeal.

They’d also discovered a few things, such as the fact that the monsters couldn’t spawn in more than one every two hours within the area they could scan, and never with less than a hundred meters distance between them and the nearest human.

Oh, and automated defense systems gunning down intruders giving XP could be pretty hit or miss, which was annoying.

That made things a lot less bad than they’d initially seemed, but far from safe, which was why they were still stuck in the ship, and always had one person on sensors.

Derek groaned as he twisted in his chair so that he was sitting in it sideways, legs dangling across the armrest.

Seriously, why was not being able to head out suddenly such a problem? They’d spent literally months on the ship with very little issue, but the instant there was a place to go that they were unable to actually explore, their beloved tin can had turned into a jail cell.

And the sheer amount of time he’d spent simply staring at the fabricators, waiting for them to spit out a part he needed because that somehow felt more productive than meaningfully filling the time he’d have to wait anyway … God, it was enough to drive a man insane. Or was it more proof of the fact that he had already lost his tenuous grasp on sanity?

Before his mind could chase that train of thought too far down the rabbit hole, his phone beeped. And then it started shrieking.

“What the hell …” Derek muttered as he pulled out the offending gadget, which was still making a racket that felt appropriate only for the direst of emergencies. It wasn’t showing anything immediately identifiable, beyond a vague blob of something stuck in the ground, clearly standing out against the surrounding rock.

But while it was weird, it wasn’t eldritch weird. Just the usual “sensors detect something they weren’t programmed to identify, and thankfully, the computer is reporting that as is instead of guessing” issue. Which was where he came in. Or any sapient operator, really, capable of making leaps of deductive logic that any computer would simply have to trudge through, brute force all the way.

So he swiftly found himself staring not at a mishapen blob of “unidentifiable nonsense,” but something rather more familiar. Sure, it wasn’t built exactly in any of the ways humans would have dealt with the situation, and the materials used weren’t actually concrete and steel, but neither of those facts changed what the sensors had found, not even ten kilometers from the site of their (crash)landing.

A bunker. One constructed in a way no human, or member of any other known race. On a world that had shown no other sign of habitation, save the monsters running about. A refuge, placed as far from the center of that mess as one could physically get without leaving the planet, without leaving the world and winding up in the crosshairs of the World Boss above.

This was … well, it could be a lot of things.

A source of information.

An armory filled with alien weaponry.

Actual aliens … which would leave them with a first contact situation that precisely none of them were prepared to handle beyond the very basic training they’d gotten before setting out, and their experience at not acting like an idiot tourist, which they’d gained on Chimera station.

Should be fine, right?