Chapter 78: Inner Battle

If reading the historical records of The Error’s battle, no, campaign against the Astrons had been bad, watching it dismantle an entire division of human capital ships was a goddamn nightmare.

Derek swallowed to moisten his inexplicably dry throat, unleashed an entire laundry list of curses and cuss words just to get them out of his system, only to lean back in his chair with one fuuuuuuuuck as he dragged his hands down his face.

“We don’t know how much of our first transmission they managed to keep during the evacuation, so I’m going to resend that, and give them everything we have on safe landing spots and where we fought our way through the swarm. And that there are a whole lot more monsters on the surface that’ll go after them the second they touch down. Then … we need to figure out which parts of our emergency kits we need …”

***

It took them all five days to prepare for the arrival of the escape pods, at least the ones that could land nearby without triggering an attack.

Well, to be entirely truthful, working together, it had only taken three and a half. The rest had just been … honestly, “make-work” was probably too kind a description. It had simply felt like being entirely done after less than half the time available was pure laziness.

Though arguably doing something so unproductive to make himself feel better was just plain idiotic. At least Derek realized what he was doing, rather than needing to have someone pound his head with a (hopefully) metaphorical brick.

Because they really had gotten everything done pretty quickly, so quickly that it didn’t quite feel right to call it done. And all that really came down to one thing: [Scholar of War] was finally working as advertised… no, that wasn’t entirely true, it had been working just fine the entire time, it was just that all the previous times he’d needed it, Derek had been in rather novel situations, at least compared to the history that the [Skill] connected him to.

Asking “how do I beat an alien autonomous murder spacecraft that’s both larger and way more advanced than my ship” had earned him an answer that boiled down to a more polite version of “I dunno, you figure it out,” due to a lack of historical advice to give.

And aside from some light nudges derived from general anti-air firing patterns, it also hadn’t really been helpful when fighting off the eldritch swarm that still hung overhead.

But setting up to receive those who had escaped a destroyed vessel, creating a temporary camp, priming logistics? Those were all things with thousands of years of history behind them, and even though Derek had never outright memorized any of that, the information was right there whenever he needed it, and things just flowed from there.

That included the fact that he was being ridiculous with all his makework, a fact that he’d managed to ignore almost entirely for those wasted thirty-six hours.

However, even with all that done, simply sitting down, shutting up, and waiting wasn’t an acceptable way to spend his time, leaving Derek forced to find something to do.

As for that was, he’d decided to see if [Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation] would let him get around the issue of not being able to put a storage item inside another storage item.

After all, you could put a storage item, such as his rings, inside a spatially warped area, such as many of the Dragonfly’s non-residential compartments. Freezer, spare parts storage, even the fuel tanks, not that Derek was liable to ever actually enter one of those.

You just could not stick a closed pocket dimension, like what you found in storage rings, or the potion jelly beans he’d used so many of, into another storage ring.

To be honest, his main goal were those potion jelly beans, or, more specifically, being able to carry them in his ring.

So he’d carefully left his main and backup storage rings behind in his quarters, grabbed a few cheap, generic, basic rings in the armory to play around with. It wasn’t like they didn’t have a genuinely shocking number of the things.

What he didn’t have was potion jelly beans to waste, which was why he’d found himself making do with homemade alternatives: gummy bears, water, a syringe, and a highly temporary enchantment that allowed each of the things to hold nearly a hundred mililiters with nary a bulge.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

And then he started trying to stick those into the rings and watched the pocket dimensions spit them back out, shredded on the molecular level.

Derek even managed to get one of the rings to explode… somehow. He might have been more interested in the scientific implications of that mess if he hadn’t been wearing the ring at the time, but that was a lesson he hadn’t had to be taught twice.

Especially with all the time wasted trying to grow his fingers back.

He kept trying a couple more times using just “brute force,” aka the eldritch component of his [Skill], but that was clearly not going to do the trick. His ability, at least, did not seem to have any outright rule-breaking capabilities.

Bending, yes. But breaking? Outright putting himself and his creations above them? He’d probably need a [Skill] that was a lot more eldritch than simply having the term in its name. And anything that fully ran on the chaotic clusterfuck that was the eldritch was almost certainly useless for his purposes.

So he switched approaches, trying to somehow meld the pocket dimensions.

That … that felt semi-productive, but was prone to breaking the rings, until he found himself forced to start trying to make his own. Hell, it was even a way to train up [Enchanting]! And as it was at Level 9 when he started, he swiftly hit the first threshold.

Enchanting (uncommon, Level 10)

Give items supernatural effects.

…

This Skill will now show the user whether a failed enchantment was impossible from the start, they made a mistake, or it was the material being enchanted that failed.

Cost: too variable to offer a range

Warning: the efficiency of enchantments upon a given object scales inversely with their complexity

It would make many things far easier if he ever tried to make anything crazy on his own, but his present issue persisted. Putting one pocket dimension into another simply wasn’t working.

And neither were his other strategies.

Building a Russian nesting doll of pocket dimensions.

Folding the pocket dimension in a style built after the Klein bottle, a shape that was headache-inducing enough when you did not have to visualize it while casting exceedingly complicated spells.

Reinforcing the pocket dimension around the gummi bear like an oyster sealing off a particularly irritating grain of sand.

And many more besides that. He only really got two things out of it: ways that did nothing, and ways to produce more or less spectacular explosions. And yet, that was a form of progress. Every new idiotic idea that he forced himself to try and implement leveled the [Skills] involved. And eventually, he hit a threshold on a second [Skill].

Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation (legendary, Level 10)

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

…

Now, it also enhances the ability to create spells and enchantments on the basis of this Skill.

It had been that which finally pushed him over the edge into being able to achieve his goals. Or it was the start, at least.

Better rings, more stable gummy bears, and a whole lot of new nonsense to pull. Which he did.

Until one of the gummy bears suddenly vanished, entirely pulled into the pocket dimension … and then, having suddenly lost its physical anchor, the dimension popped, and the gummy bear promptly blew, splattering Derek’s face with water and jelly chunks.

It made a mess, as per usual, but this turned out to be a useful mess. Well, sort of. He could move the dimension, separately from the jelly that physically anchored it.

As for how he could move it … that took a while to figure out. It was possible to disconnect it and move it around, but it would only exist while he actively kept it stable, and the jelly exploded the instant it was forced to contain all that water by physical means alone.

That eventually got solved by him warping the space within them while he played around with the dimension itself.

And, in theory, recombining the two should be possible. Once again, the practice was considerably trickier, and spilled so much water that Derek wound up having to change locations after slipping on the resultant mess.

That gave him an idea. Separate out the pocket dimension as the potion jelly went into the storage device, then add it back when you took it back out. Of course, that required the storage device to actually keep its contents in absolute stasis, rather than simply reducing the decay of items within to the bare minimum. Power saving, and all that.

Point was, making a ring like that was easy.

As was making a second when he broke that one. And a whole bunch more after the second likewise shuffled off this mortal coil.

Then creating a new ring that could actually anchor the “orphan” pocket dimensions on their exterior took all night.

And by the time he finally managed to create the enchantment necessary to re-link it to the jelly when he took it back out of storage, his time was almost up, forcing him to head back to the Dragonfly, leaving behind a graveyard of shattered rings and massacred confections.

Then he just left the remaining water-filled gummy bears on the kitchen table. Might be funny to see someone bite into one and have it burst as the pocket dimension released all its water.

But now that they were a mere six hours from meeting the survivors from the destroyed flotilla… perhaps rest and relaxation, aka “lazing about,” was the most productive use of his time at just that moment.