Chapter 76: Epitaph of a People

Two days later, the sea of paper was still up to Derek’s hips, and that was with everything they’d already scanned having been moved out into the hall in neat stacks.

And seeing the motion of the paper being the only sign of progress was goddamn depressing.

Take paper, run phone over paper, put paper outside the room, rinse and repeat.

Mimi was putting together a high-resolution automated scanner, but that’d take a couple more hours still, and given a choice between doing nothing and manually scanning, Derek chose advancing the process of understanding the language so that they could finally start to make headway towards uncovering just what had happened here.

Not the bunker, mind you, that had been pretty easy to figure out. Last refuge on the planet, last survivors of a dying race, World Boss overhead that injured you if you so much as looked at it … yeah, everyone had gone a little crazy towards the end. Even the workaholic they now all agreed had been preparing for the eventuality that they’d be discovered by alien explorers hadn’t exactly been acting “sane” by the standards of any known sapient species.

DING!

Derek jumped as his phone chimed, head slamming into the ceiling with a resounding smack before he fell back down, belly-flopping into the as-of-yet unscanned piles moments later.

Damnit, he groaned. Haven’t had that happen in a while.

He looked at his phone, only to realize he was looking at his bare palm. Sighing, he spent the next few seconds digging his phone out from under the papers.

Only to promptly drop it once again when he read the message written there.

The first message had been translated. Well, “message.” The sentence that had been written in blood in the very first room they’d found.

It’s real. It’s coming. We’re all going to die.

Derek had already guessed something like that was what they’d been looking at, but it was an entirely different thing to have it confirmed. For a couple of seconds, he tried to imagine it, being in that room, bleeding out, endlessly scrawling a message of doom on the walls … and then desperately tried to get rid of that train of thought.

It didn’t work, and by the time he finally resigned himself to the fact that he’d be having nightmares about that, he was no longer alone in the depths of the bunker, and Ye-in was waving her phone under his nose, moving the screen too quickly for him to read anything, so he grabbed it and held it fast as his eyes flashed across it.

“See? It was a language primer!” she announced with a massive grin that Derek didn’t even have to see to know it existed.

“Personally, I think the margins are more interesting,” he replied, gesturing at a small addendum at the bottom.

Assuming this paper has not been moved, and a miracle has not occurred, the person reading this is the child of a foreign world, discovering the graveyard that ours has been reduced to, and they are looking at everything I have managed to print out prior to my death.

Use this information. Learn about the history of my people. Avoid our mistakes.

If you are to take away anything from what happened to us, learn about the monster that did this to us.

The Book of Altosh contains the story of The Error; if you wish to know the true depth of our foolishness, consult it. There are several copies to be found within the refuge.

That felt like advice worth following, so Derek gave back Ye-in’s phone and typed “Book of Altosh” into the search bar on his own, hoping that he wouldn’t have to deal with any weird issues where the same term was translated differently in different places.

The worry turned out to have been for nothing, though, as his phone “happily” returned several results. Little over half were references to it in other documents; two more were abridged versions that reminded him of pocket bibles and therefore seemed like the inferior choice, but there were two more books, fundamentally identical save for minor cosmetic differences, the size and weight of an encyclopedia. Which, for a species as small as the presently-unnamed locals, made them hefty books indeed.

Which, once again, made Derek think of a holy book, especially given the impression the smaller variant had given him.

Rather than immediately doing a word search, he decided to read the first few pages to check what kind of book he was dealing with. It did certainly read like a holy text of some kind, starting with an index, swiftly followed by the creation story, and as it turned out, he didn’t even have to use the search function. For there it was, on the second page of the actual story.

… And so, the world came into being, beneath Altosh’s protective hands, rising from the primordial chaos, formed by his will.

But within the heart of creation, a stubborn nodule of that chaos yet remains, a divine error that refuses to return to its true home, nor join the reality it has chosen as its new place of living …

Now, that might just be a coincidence, after all, “error” was a regular word with meanings beyond being the name of the World Boss overhead, but it felt connected.

“A divine error” mentioned in the earliest passage of the holy book becoming a World Boss known as “The Divine Error” would have fit with how the [System] seemed to create them, taking ideas from mythology and creating titanic, world-ending monstrosities around them.

The Leviathan. The Behemoth. Literally Satan. A few other creatures that were part of various creation myths, playing the role of the antagonist. And some others that seemed to have mostly been chosen at random, yet quickly turned out to be appropriately terrifying once you learned just what had inspired them.

But what was The Error in the stories? Derek read further, but was met with a more standard “well, then all these things were created” kind of lines, each explaining the various aspects of the world in exhausting detail, until he eventually pulled up the search function anyway.

As expected, the term “error” was relatively widely spread throughout the document, only some of which were actually referring to the creature. However, the computer also attached a note after a couple of seconds, stating that not every instance of the word was the same in the original text, but rather that the distinction between the creature and the concept was difficult to convey in the translated version, which was why it would color-code them.

If Derek told it to, which he did. Immediately.

That quickly led him to several entries that were actually relevant, starting with several “devil’s temptation” style parables, and eventually ending with a climactic battle that was basically a scaled-down variant of the Book of Revelation.

No book with seven seals being opened by the Lamb of God, each one heralding another stage of the end times, no apocalyptic beasts representing the devil, the antichrist, and the false prophet, no grand sanctuary with walls made from gold and precious stones.

No, these people’s apocalypse was, at least from the perspective of an outsider, a comedy of errors. Though Derek was pretty certain that with the right cultural knowledge, each of the events described would have been harrowing. At least up until around halfway through, which was when things really got apocalyptic.

Even the tiniest flaws in creation rent open into gaping wounds in the fabric of reality, every opportunity for something to go wrong resulting in utter disaster, each of those little mistakes one made on the daily spiraling into a personal armageddon for whichever poor bastard failed to live up to the impossible standard that was perfection.

Of course, in the end, things went well, the Book of Altosh’s eponymous deity fixing things and slaying The Error, utterly erasing it from reality, and restoring that which the faithful had lost … assuming they’d kept the faith, that was.

“I think this thing was their equivalent of the devil. What kind of idiot summons something like that?” Derek finally asked.

“I mean, didn’t the UN summon Lucifer?” Ye-in replied.

That was actually true. The Lord of Hell, Prince of the Sin of Pride, was a World Boss and had been summoned once. Only once. Never again.

Not because the World Boss had been overly dangerous, mind you, but because the loot had been, in a word, ass.

Granted, Paris looked fantastic after the World Item Pride’s Prerogative had been applied to it, ensuring its ability to keep the title of “most beautiful city in the world” in perpetuity, but that wasn’t quiteworth fighting the likes of, well, Lucifer for.

Initially, the plan had been to discuss which city to empower, because there was no way anyone was going to be willing to fight the monster again. And then the person who’d been awarded the item by the [System] had decided to beautify his hometown in a fit of pique. And then released the transcripts of the discussion to easily and thoroughly redirect any hurt feelings at the politicians that had driven him to madness, rather than himself.

And the World Boss itself hadn’t one of the more “puzzle-focussed” enemies that had clear weaknesses that could be exploited in future fights.

A shining titan of light and alabaster skin, wielding lances of incandescent energy that slowly mutated into a monstrous feral beast as it took damage and the veneer of pride and things to be proud of was stripped away, revealing the true face of what most of humanity still considered the embodiment of evil.

It was pretty thematic, though; there was that.

To Derek, the line “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven” had always sounded like a polite rephrasing of “I don’t care what state the world is in, as long as I am in charge.”

Either way …

“We humans might have summoned our entire list of World Bosses, but we didn’t start with a literal apocalypse monster by choice,” Derek finally decided.

They had started with the Leviathan, which was present in the Book of Revelation as well, but that had been the action of a cult of idiots who’d decided the world was already fucked, so they might as well end humanity themselves and get something out of it through some kind of twisted demonic bargain.

“Do you know how our alien allies did things?” she asked.

“I think the Koinians started seventy years after the [System] initialized and basically threw their entire military into the effort, and the Assai summoned one where it’d drop into a star to start with,” he said. “The Dromon left theirs alone; they’ve never had tribes with the combined mana capacity to summon one, and after they lost an entire continent to regular monsters, I don’t think there was any big drive to pick a fight with something as nasty as a World Boss.”

“Ha!” Ye-in declared, finger stabbing down onto the screen of her phone.

“Very informative, thank you,” Derek replied acerbically.

“Sorry,” she sighed, turning to him. “They summoned that thing forty years after the Initialization. They’d probably have been fine if they’d summoned a different one.”

Derek didn’t even have to say something. She sent him the pages in question, which were labeled as “mistakes to avoid” by their own chapter heading, and “apocalypse” by the computer. Charming.

This, too, was written in the same dry, summarizing tone of the rest of the “historical” texts, but had margins absolutely overflowing with scribbled text. Far too many of those were curses and condemnations of either the monster or the people who’d summoned it.

All in all, it had apparently been an utter disaster, even if there was one thing that he found weird …

“Okay, it says here that The Error blocks teleportation, but we teleported around just fine, didn’t we?” Derek asked, glaring down at the device in his hand, as though a stern expression would magically change objective reality.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard you say more than once how glad you were that [Fast Forward] isn’t a teleportation [Skill],” Ye-in reminded him.

Derek nearly facepalmed at that, cutting himself off before the wind generated by the motion could send the papers scattering.

But yes, the main thing that had fucked over these people was the fact that it stopped any attempts at teleportation dead, blocking easy force concentration, which had prevented anyone from bringing the kind of strength to bear that it would take to hurt a World Boss.

The Error had indeed been summoned on the exact opposite side of the planet from where he was presently standing, face to face with the entirety of the force the species, whose name he still hadn’t seen written down anywhere, had been able to muster.

But then, the World Boss had promptly fucked off to outer space, while nuclear fire licked its proverbial heels. And for one local day, that had been all she wrote.

Yet by the time a new dawn had risen, the largest city in the world had been reduced to a warped hellscape only home to the dead and those praying for death.

And without teleportation, even [System]-granted transportation methods were too slow to respond before the monster returned to the cosmos once again.

It was … there was something distinctly, fundamentally disturbing seeing a monster that strong using tactics meant to be employed by the weaker side in a conflict.

Because guerrilla strategies, hit-and-run tactics, all revolved around one thing: attacking in a place while holding more power than the enemy could muster in that location. And there were situations with a more extreme power imbalance than a goddamn World Boss going after … well, honestly, any point that the main force wasn’t gathering.

The “World Boss battle” had been a slow-motion apocalypse of city after city being obliterated by its power, slaughtering all the defenders, especially the powerhouses that might have given the monster real trouble, had they gathered in sufficient numbers.

By the time there were so few “targets” left that adequately guarding them might have been possible, well, so many of the world’s strongest had run off to protect their homes and families that there simply weren’t enough strong people left.

The impulse was understandable; anyone who thought otherwise was a heartless sociopath, but that did little to change the fact that this had allowed for a defeat in detail, which was what had ultimately doomed the locals.

It was only at this point that Derek reached the part of the story that revealed that the locals had, indeed, had a space navy. The reason the text had waited until now to mention that fact was that it’d been worse than useless.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Space. Was. Big. And that caused all sorts of issues, such as the fact that it took ages to get anywhere, a fact that was normally gotten around with either one’s species’ long-range FTL method, or one of the bevy of Warp-type [Skills] for short-range travel, both of which The Error had shut down, while the creature itself could appear right on top of individual ships and tear them to shreds before anyone else could even think to react.

Which would already have been bad enough, had it not been for an additional power that no one had seen coming, namely, the fact the space The Error teleported past was disrupted for several minutes after its “passing,” reality itself would be splintered, and anything that found itself blundering into this field would find part of itself passing along one side of a given spatial crack, and and a second along the other, shorn apart by an impossibly sharp blade.

Half the locals’ battleships had died within this zone of death without any warning, and any chance of the navy being able to contribute went with them.

Though Derek’s takeaway was something entirely different: spatial blades existed. It was possible to cut through, at the bare minimum, enchanted metal, using spatial magic. Oh, sure, it had been a World Boss that had done it, not a mortal magic user, but it could be done. And knowing that was the first step towards learning to do it yourself …

Even though everything in his fingers just itched to run off and get right on that, Derek decided to stay put and keep reading.

After that, things had, somehow, gotten even worse.

The locals had managed to figure out that the World Boss wouldn’t actively go after communities of fewer than one thousand individuals, which had resulted in the shattered remnants of civilization spreading out even more, but the superhuman capabilities of the individuals had made it more survivable than your typical post-apocalypse.

And then the planet had started to change. Terraforming beneath the sheer, raw, unadulterated power of The Error, and becoming something that actively spawned new eldritch monsters. From that point onwards, doing nothing had no longer been an option, yet any chance at killing the World Boss had fled long ago.

Thus, the rest of the local civilization had been swallowed by the eldritch tide, until only this final bunker had remained. A bunker whose fate had been summed up by a single sentence.

‘And then the food ran out.’

Succinct, self-explanatory, and above all, depressing.

Beyond that, most of what the pages showed was basic overviews of history, the sort of generalized information one would be taught in school, lacking the sort of nuance historians spent their lives arguing over. And wasn’t the thought that that was most likely all that remained of these people’s past depressing as hell?

But giving it at least a cursory pass still felt important. Meaningful. And it was weirdly engrossing despite the fact that Derek found himself having to cross-reference something every other paragraph.

In fact, he didn’t even realize that Atticus had shown up until he spoke up.

“Hey, we can change the standard translation, right?” the other man asked. “Like, give the system an alternate phrasing that means the same thing but has different implications?”

“Should be possible,” Derek said, putting his own phone down. “What do you want to change?”

“Apparently, the computer thinks these guys are called ’Starspawn,’ because they gave themselves a poetic name,” Atticus explained, then paused and gave Derek a sideways look. “You don’t know why that’s a problem, right?”

“I mean, anything with ‘spawn’ in it sounds kinda disrespectful,” Derek admitted. “That’s not the issue, is it?”

Atticus shook his head. “They’re mostly assholish aliens from the Cthulu mythos.”

“Ouch,” Derek winced. “Children of the Stars, maybe?”

“Sounds a bit juvenile, doesn’t it?” Ye-in threw in. “Maybe something based on the Latin or Ancient Greek words for ‘star.’”

“‘Astron’?” Derek suggested. “Basically the same word as ‘astra,’ but it doesn’t have a lot of derivatives in Western languages.”

“If it’s still an actual word, and you didn’t make that up, naming them after a word for star that doesn’t get used anymore feels right.” Atticus finally. “’Starspawn’ was just the computer trying to shorten ‘born of the stars, inhabiting mortal shells, yet of the stars nevertheless, burning brightly, swiftly changing, those descending from the stars down upon the planet.’”

“Let’s program in ‘Astron’ as the standard translation, but make sure there’s an unmissable warning next to it. We don’t want anyone coming away from reading the translation without knowing about the original version,” Derek decided.

They continued to dig deeper into the pile, scanning page after page, until Derek found something that brought him up short. More notes in the margins, but the handwriting was noticeably different. There was every chance that this was merely a case of someone showing up with one piece of information that they’d wanted to share and then leaving, or that this was merely the first of the notes this person had written he’d come across, but something told him this was important.

So he slipped the page ahead in the translation queue, yet when he saw what it said in English, his grip tightened so much that he nearly crushed his phone. A single word slipped from his lips. Not eloquent, not appropriate, but it certainly did a fine job of conveying his feelings on the matter.

“Shit.”

And then the first tears began to well up in the corners of his eyes as he continued to read.

I am writing this to ensure that the person spending her last days leaving this record receives the credit she deserves, as I know she will not spend the single second it would take to sign her name.

Mage Shimin of the Almor School is who needs to be remembered. Whoever finds this, share her story.

If you are a student of the arcane, her spellbooks are under her bed, first room on the right from the main entrance. She would want someone to continue her research.

Should anything come of our efforts, let it be her work coming to fruition. Let it be this knowledge she is spending her last days to preserve, achieving something worthwhile.

And kill that fucking monster, if you can. Do not sacrifice yourself for the sake of a dead planet and a dead people. Do not let that thing claim any more victims.

With respect,

Nobody

Post Scriptum: Should you arrive at a time where bodies remain, proceed in whatever way you deem “appropriate.” Our beliefs are too varied and complex to convey here. I refuse to believe this is a world in which the gods will refuse to accept a good faith effort, even with all that has happened.

“Shit!” Derek swore again, louder this time, attempting to rouse enough anger to drown out the tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

This was … if anything from this collection had to be preserved, it was this page. If only one piece from the entire history of a people needed to be known far and wide, it was the name of the one who had given her life to preserve it. He …

Actually … he paused, sighed, and hung his head. It seemed he’d have to listen to his paranoia before going through with that. Because there were far too many humans whom he could imagine writing their name under someone else’s work so they could make history in their stead. Humanity’s past was certainly littered with those kinds of fuckers. The idea that a person could fake a note like that even as their race was going extinct was repulsive, yet all too possible …

So he’d have the note authenticated, and only then spread the word of the great mage whose last days had been spent preserving information that would only ever be helpful to sapient beings from the stars, beings she couldn’t possibly have known existed at the time.

“Where are we burying them, then? Are we burying them?” Ye-in asked. “The note said to do what we should do, what we think is best, but …”

…. What the hell was best in this situation?

“It shouldn’t be here,” Derek decided, after a mere five seconds of contemplation. “These people’s home was turned into a hellscape, burying them here feels … it’s just wrong. And we can’t just put them in a lab either, no matter how much the science community is going to whine at us.”

They’d get the scans the four of them had taken, and those should be enough for any decent person, but decency had a bad habit of going out the window when fame was on the line.

“Find a place we can protect, then make it a ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’ type place,” Ye-in suggested.

“Somewhere it won’t get desecrated by scientists,” Derek added.

“And how are we going to get them there?” Atticus threw in. “This place has been too cold for decomposition since The Error took it on a cosmic joyride, but we can’t take them on the ship … can we?”

“That’s what the morgue is for,” Derek said.

“We have a morgue?”

“There’s a piece of the freezer designed to be partitioned off for a reason,” Derek explained.

“How partitioned off?” Atticus pressed, voicing a concern that Derek himself had had the moment he’d heard about it.

“Hermetically sealed,” he explained. “Let’s just be glad that, unlike on a submarine, we don’t have to actually empty the freezer and can separate off a morgue.”

Atticus’ reply to that piece of information was utterly deadpan.

“They used to put their dead. In the freezer. The food freezer.”

The shiver that wracked his body might have come off as performative to someone who didn’t really know him, but Derek was fairly certain his friend had thought through the entirety of the implications that had and was, understandably, not a fan of any of those mental images.

“Correct,” Dere said. “A lot of them didn’t have the space for their crew to all have a bed; the sailors would have to hotbunk. Of course they wouldn’t have the space for an entire morgue.”

“Still gross.”

“And I’m not going to argue with you on that point,” Derek admitted.

After that, actually transporting the bodies wasn’t difficult or problematic, beyond the general feeling of “ick” of handling the corpses of sapient beings that had died in incredibly horrific ways. How they wound up stacked like cordwood in the morgue certainly didn’t help afterwards.

They also wound up moving the scanned books and documents into the ship, then returned to emplace freshly-made copies, carved into steel, into the bunker, just in case the originals were destroyed along with their ship.

Several copies, in fact, only one of which was in the Astron language. The others were in one of the primary languages of each of the other known alien species.

Just in case …

And then, the waiting began. Because if one thing had become abundantly clear, it was how fucked they all were if they didn’t get help.

***

Space before Derek rippled and dust was sent skittering about the place as his spell puffed away fruitlessly into nothingness. Even the dust he’d scattered before him to better see what was happening hadn’t actually been moved; it was simply looking like it had been repositioned before the spatial fluctuations were still calming down.

He’d been at this for eight. Freaking. Days. And gotten absolutely nowhere.

Seriously. How the hell was The Error doing this? It was a damn eldritch nightmare, sure, but it … Derek facepalmed. He couldn’t outright become something like that, not without losing himself, but perhaps coming at the problem from a different direction might be a good idea?

With a thought, he pulled out his Abnormal Hunter Aspect and slapped it back in, having replaced [Inescapable Hunt] with [Eldritch Claws].

Eldritch Claws (epic)

Unleash claws from the tips of your fingers capable of phasing through armor and striking any creature, even one normally incapable of being hurt by physical weaponry.

Cost: 10 mana per strike

Granted, the [Skill] was not only made superfluous by him having [Aspect Integration], it was actually inferior to him simply manifesting the eldritch weaponry on his body because it actively cost him mana. But unlike a simple capability he had, a [Skill] was subject to [Skill Fusion].

And, once again, [Spellcasting] would have to be sacrificed …

The result was [Eldritch Infusion], which let him empower spells with the rule-breaking idea that was the Eldritch, a concept unified only by the idea of lawless bullshit.

He tried that out for several hours afterwards.

Calling what happened a shitshow was an insult to shitshows. Surprise, surprise, [Eldritch Infusion] didn’t make spells strong; it made them weird.

Gravity spells created a “pulse” instead, as though the ground “burped,” throwing things around, making a mess but also lacking any of the predictability that was the advantage of normal gravity manipulation as he used it.

Cold spells fucked with motion and/friction in a seemingly random manner, but always creating something weaker than the intended spell.

And fire turned out to be more of a catalyst instead, effectively increasing the ground’s corrosion with the oxygen in the atmosphere, “destroying” it in the least-efficient way possible.

It was cool. It was useless on the face of it. And, above all, it was a proof of concept. He could change the fundamental basics of how certain spells worked by taking advantage of eldritch weirdness.

Now, Derek needed a spell or [Skill] for the idea of “far cutting” he could force into the mess, either via [Skill Fusion] or as a spell he could build upon.

[Far Strike] would have been perfect, but he’d only had that for less than a minute before he’d combined it with every other weapon-boosting [Skill] Isaac had taught him to make [Variable Weapon Empowerment].

Creating a spell based on it, however … one couldn’t copy all [Skills] with magic. Or even most of them. But something as simple as a projected edge was practically the perfect example for one that could be recreated. And it was easy.

As such, not even half an hour later, Derek was staring at the floor several meters from him, all scratched up by the tip of a blade, all without him having taken even a single step in that direction.

A flick of his finger, and a new scratch appeared, perfectly tracing the line along which he was pointing.

It was more expensive than [Far Strike], less powerful, and overall useless as anything save a party trick. But once again, it did what he needed it to.

Trying to use [Eldritch Infusion] on that made one hell of a mess, however, and eldritch spatial manipulation was just plain weird. Not bad-weird, not absurd-weird, just … confusing.

Eventually, Derek decided to take the risk to fuse it with [Superior Arcane Spatial Manipulation], winding up with [Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation] instead, whose description hadn’t changed in any way save the name. And trying to warp space normally didn’t blow up in his face …

Phew. Had he broken the [Skill], it’d have taken him weeks if not months to earn it back.

Now, let’s see if all this actually worked …

That particular train of thought was cut off by an immense jawn. Honestly, if spatial cutting worked, the first thing he’d chop in half could easily be him, if he cast it now. But tomorrow was another day, wasn’t it?

***

A week later, Derek had found an approach that at least theoretically worked.

Cast the spell variant of [Far Strike], wrap it in spatial compression to try and send it in the gap between atoms, then drive it all forward by that eldritch spark that broke all the rules, to allow spatial magic to tear open a physical object.

The theory seemed sound.

The practice was an unholy mess that would have killed him a thousand times over if it weren’t for the fact that he still hadn’t entirely cracked the code of letting spatial magic cut.

***

Derek was so deep in concentration that he almost missed the appearance of a small ball of writing limbs that appeared out of nowhere and lunged at him.

Almost.

He’d have barely had enough time to react even if he hadn’t been deeply focused on doing something else, but with the entirety of his concentration required to keep the wildly unstable spell construct intact?

Forgetaboutit.

What he could do, however, was take all that he had created, the unstable mess of reality bent and twisted until it screamed, and shove it straight into the creature’s face.

So that was exactly what he did. And something clicked.

For a brief moment, nothing seemed to happen. The creature continued its lunge towards his chest, and Derek’s hands began to move up, the world seemingly having slowed down to a crawl as he brought his hands up to try and bat the monster away, scales already crawling up his forearms, the durable hide of a dragon beginning to be superimposed upon his fragile human flesh …

The “ding” of a confirmed kill filled his head a split second before the kill note blocked his vision and he felt something splatter against his chest.

He waved the kill note away before ever reading it, staring down at the corpse of the monster, split neatly in half by an invisible, impossibly sharp blade, whose origin would have been impossible to determine, were it not for the feeling of incredible strangeness that had settled within his mind.

The spell he’d been trying to create had settled. And he could tell that any attempt at changing it would be met with utter failure… for now, at least.

But for all that it had clearly become fixed in a way that made no sense, taken a form other than what he’d wanted it to, it had worked. And that was what mattered.

Spatial Divide (spell)

This working of magic was forged by a true madman. Or a genius. Certainly someone straddling the line between the two.

Formed from impossibly fine spatial control and eldritch energies, this spell divides the victim by blowing open the space between their constituent atoms along a single line until atomic binding energies fail and their internal organs are let out to get some air.

This effect is a direct contest between the caster’s mana pool and the target’s magical impact upon the world, causing it to become exceedingly expensive against even moderately powerful opponents.

Cost: 10 points of mana multiplied by the target’s combined Stats

That was … as far as proofs of concept went, it was incredible. In terms of real-world applications, however, he’d just made the world’s most inefficient noobstomper. Useless against anyone and anyone save people so much weaker than him that even trying to lose might prove difficult.

And using it would cost him just about every drop of mana, far more than literally any other method he had for dealing with enemies that wasn’t him overcharging [Spatial Detonation] or [Spatial Collapse] to the point of absurdity.

Not to mention that it seemingly couldn’t be used against objects at all.

Yet none of those points could dim Derek’s enthusiasm one iota. The alarms that started blaring in that instant, on the other hand …

He shot to his feet and sprinted over to the Dragonfly, the shield already flaring to full power. When he’d first managed to establish it, the oblong blob of energy that wrapped the ship had been so wispy and fragile that a sneeze probably could have torn straight through it.

However, “establishing” had only been the start of it, a seed that could be made to bloom into what it was now, a shimmering field of incandescent energy that would not only increase their survivability by a lot, but also allow them to take hits that he and Mimi wouldn’t have to clean up after.

Of course, boosting it to that degree, its current maximum, had taken hours upon hours of him channeling the entirety of his mana regeneration into it; it certainly wasn’t going to be possible to set that up mid-combat, but seeing that barrier up and running put the grin back on his face as he commanded it to part and let him in.

That lasted right up until he got to the bridge and saw what had set off the alert. New ships had arrived in the warp bubble two and a half minutes ago; it had simply taken that long for the light showcasing their arrival to cross the intervening distance of two and a half light-minutes.

And with that kind of delay between something happening and them being able to see it, there was every chance those ships were already gone. Because a minute earlier, they’d seen The Error break its normal pattern and teleport off to elsewhere.

It hadn’t made sense then, but now that they knew there were more people present for it to go after …