Chapter 79: Death from Above

“And how quickly do you think we’ll be able to make the switch?” the navy rear admiral asked from the main viewscreen.

The quality of the feed wasn’t great, but it was good enough for Derek to see that the man had some kind of orange fibers clinging to much of his uniform, though the orange cat held fast in the arms of a sailor in the far corner of the escape pod left him believing he knew just how that had happened.

“There won’t be any delay on our end. We can launch as soon as you’re aboard, and you can be on the bridge before we’re anywhere near the zone of engagement. The Dragonfly’s a small ship,” Derek replied.

As for what they were discussing? It was a plan that had to be made relatively last minute, with a mere three hours left on the clock, because they’d both realized the landing zones might need some orbital fire support, and the only vessel capable of providing that even theoretically was his own.

With a little over two thousand survivors, they needed to spread out to avoid calling The Error down on their heads, and no one knew how many regular monsters that many people would attract.

But the main issue was the distance between camps. Two hundred kilometers. A distance specifically chosen to make mutual support effectively impossible.

Which looked like a truly terrible idea on the face of it, and in many ways, it was … but even after going through all available historical documents, twice, and a thorough scan of those same documents via the computer just in case all four of them had somehow gotten brain damage, they had no concrete idea as to how close different settlements had to be to count as “one” for the purpose of population.

And since any group larger than a thousand would call down the World Boss they had quite definitively learned they couldn’t beat with their current resources … they’d have to err on the side of caution and deal with the consequences, whatever they may be.

Hence, the idea: bring a bunch of naval personnel with the appropriate [Skill]set aboard, and use their abilities to help them exist “safely” in orbit, and use the railgun to blow apart any large concentrations of monsters.

Speaking of …

Mimi popped her head in through the bridge’s door.

“I ran out of the ceramic, but got two hundred rounds ready. And another fifty to enchant.”

Because they had to make rounds that would work for orbital bombardment and not burn up in the atmosphere. There was a ceramic coating whose formula they’d been provided by Rear Admiral Naiser that could solve that issue, but it required materials they didn’t have very big stocks of, simply because they weren’t needed in very many things.

And enchanting them was doable but tedious. And, more importantly, slow.

She dropped the crate down by Derek’s feet, then ran back out to mess around with the ship’s systems some more.

He simply grabbed the rounds one by one, and gave them the same magic that increased the survivability of hull armor against enemy lasers. Basic, but it’d do the trick.

“Can we get a rundown of your total armament?” one of the men in the back of the escape pod asked.

“The Dragonfly is an armed freighter with a spinal railgun and ultrarelativistic particle beam, twelve secondary turrets, evenly split between lasers and particle beams, thirty-two lasers for point defense, and four temporary additions to deal with eldritch opponents. Two autocannons and two elemental focus cannons charged with hellfire, none of which can be reloaded without going outside. The spinal weapons are enhanced by a spatial magic array that can shorten the distance between them and a target by up to a light second,” Derek rattled off.

“Whoa. Who’d you have to kill to get this ship?” a woman wearing the insignia of a lieutenant-commander asked.

Derek nearly answered “my brother,” only to stop and reconsider as he thought about what kind of answer might be better suited to the question that had actually been asked.

“Time,” he said flatly. “Working my ass off until I started out with a legendary [Class]. And … in the end, my brother gave the ship to me.”

Failing to mention the family connection would have been disingenuous in the extreme, as much as everything within Derek had wanted him to claim he’d done it all himself. To avoid admitting, to himself as much as the navy crew, how lucky he’d been in terms of just which family he’d been born into.

“This ship is considered an ‘armed exploration vessel,’ correct?” the admiral asked.

“And occasionally a freighter,” Derek replied.

“A freighter …” the admiral’s tone was dry, tinged with more humor than Derek would have thought he’d have been able to muster, had he been in the other man’s place. “I guess that explains why your Dragonfly has enough guns to eat a navy destroyer for breakfast and a spatial array on your spinal weaponry that’s practically purpose-built to ambush a capital ship from outside of energy weapon range.”

That, at least, had an easy answer.

“It was designed by people in my brother’s employ, sharing his sensibilities. And he’s a self-proclaimed ‘professional paranoid.’” Derek shrugged. “Away from civilization, that means having the firepower to defend yourself.”

“And in civilization, that means getting looked at sideways by every lawman, navy officer, and civilian with access to the bare minimum of sensors,” Naiser suggested.

“Isn’t that what IFF is for?” Derek asked

“To be honest, at this point, fame might be a better shield,” Naiser suggested, looking down at something out of the camera’s field of view, before finally returning his attention to the conversation at hand. “Now, how many workstations do you have available?”

“Two spares on the bridge, and we can rig up some more in a couple of the empty compartments. Call it …” Dere trailed off, trying to think it over. “At least six, potentially as many as twelve. We’ll definitely have space to carry sixteen people. I’d suggest we plan on bringing that many; that way, we’ll have enough for anything we can cobble together, and no one gets left behind when the Dragonfly takes off.”

That was the other issue. Assuming Naiser’s escape pod touched down first, as was the plan, anyone who didn’t take to the air upon Derek’s ship would be on their own for a while, exposed to any of the monsters that might spawn before everyone else arrived.

And when the group of seven hundred that would set up around the Astron bunker touched down, who knew from what distance they’d draw into the planet’s current inhabitants.

“That just leaves one more thing to clear up: applicable [Skills] …”

The conversation continued on like that for a while. But ultimately, nothing that was discussed changed what they had to do …

***

The fundamental issue with this whole affair was moving people from the escape pods to the ship. Normally, it could have been done in a snap, via personnel management [Skills] that were in ready supply in the military, but The Error would not allow them even that degree of teleportation.

As such, they’d have to do this the old-fashioned way, by waiting. Atticus had decided to be helpful by using temporary paint to draw a path from the airlock to where their “new crew” would be heading, and Mimi had reprogrammed a lot of the computers in the spare rooms to act as secondary consoles, each linked to a specific turret, allowing them to receive the entirety of the benefits the sailor in question could grant.

The Dragonfly did not have a secondary control center the way most navy ships have; she was so small that anything that wiped out the bridge was unlikely to leave behind a ship in need of controlling.

However, one in a million shots still happened, and as such, there was a degree of redundancy built into the ship.

Derek found himself tapping his foot impatiently as he watched the main screen, which was presently displaying the feed from an exterior camera, showing the two escape pods flying ahead of the pack, maybe a minute from landing. Those two contained the people who’d be joining them.

He reached out for his coffee cup and downed half, choosing to take advantage of his last chance for a while to drink, then replaced it in the little lockbox built into the wall to contain anything liable to spill.

A split-second later, the screen vanished behind a spray of brown liquid as the coffee swallowed the expletive that tried to escape his mouth as he saw someone stand on top of the escape pod, hurling magic at any monster that came even remotely close.

Obviously, they were using a [Skill] to do that; anyone ignoring the wind whipping about, the heat generated by the friction, and the wild pitching of their chosen “mount” with raw Stats alone would have been unmissable in the battle against the World Boss; that kind of raw power would likely have resulted in a different outcome altogether. But it was still a sight to behold … once Derek had banished the coffee with a casual spell.

Around him, the ship thrummed with power, every capacitor full, every system locked down and ready for combat, save the doors the navy guys would be passing through, and every gun a mere press of a button away from unleashing cataclysmic energy at their target.

Derek’s eyes remained fixed on the screen, watching as the escape pods hammered into the ground hard enough that, for a brief moment, he thought they’d both crashed.

And then the hatches burst open, and the people inside stormed out at speeds that left half of them little more than blurs to him as they flashed across the intervening distance and boarded the Dragonfly, and the exterior doors slammed shut a moment afterwards.

“GO!” Derek ordered, and his starship began to rise, just as the rear admiral he’d been talking to stood in the doorway.

Derek pointed at a console and the man dropped into it, then turned to fix him with a clearly performative stern look.

“As per the emergency provision of the Alpha Centauri Space Exploration Treaty, I am drafting this ship for the duration of this opperation.”

And the moment the final syllable left Rear Admiral Naiser’s lips, power flowed out of him, and the Dragonfly began to roar with power as she shot skyward, escape pods raining down around her.

***

Master Sergeant Ramirez hurled himself out of the escape pod as it slowed, going from “leaving behind trails of plasma, friction setting the atmosphere alight” to a mere supersonic velocity, and it was continuing to decelerate, leaving him falling far faster than it, the distance opening even before he triggered [Meteoric Descent].

It was as though a gigantic finger were pressing down on his back, forcing him through the still quite thin atmosphere, past even the point where wind resistance should have matched the force of gravity pulling downwards. And the world dissolved into a haze of fire and flame as the air around him heated up to unreasonable levels.

He certainly couldn’t see what was happening around him. But he did have an altitude indicator in the corner of his armor’s HUD, and that was all he needed, even as Ramirez was forced to squint against the brightness shining through the faceplate, even as it began to try and keep out the glare, while the numbers grew larger to be easier to see.

Three seconds till impact.

Two.

One.

Kaboom.

At the very same millisecond that the tip of Ramirez’s armored boots touched the rocky surface of the planet, he came to a dead stop. No deceleration, no sudden impact, no nothing. All that kinetic energy had been eaten by [Meteoric Descent] and sent blasting outwards, shredding anything and everything around him, monsters included, leaving behind a perfectly smooth circle in the stone for the escape pods to land on, thirty seconds from now.

He hefted his rifle as he slowly spun in place, eyes raking across his surroundings, watching for any creature that had been near enough to take note of his arrival, yet been too distant to be wrecked by said arrival.

But a ton of heavily enchanted metal and ceramics wrapped around nearly one hundred kilograms of pissed-off marine moving at almost hypersonic speed gave his [Skill] a lot of energy to play with.

A monster crested the newly-created plateau in the distance, likely having been sheltered just beneath where [Meteoric Descent] had razed the hilltop.

… It promptly collapsed into a heap as a slug from his rifle tore through it, though the word “rifle” was hardly an adequate descriptor of the portable artillery piece resting on his arms. A railgun whose recoil could send even him, one ton of armor and all, flying. At least when fired at full power.

The next slug slid home in the gun without a sound, yet the motion made the entire weapon noticeably vibrate.

Ramirez ignored the familiar sensation, instead pouring energy into the round that eagerly drank up the elemental forces it had been built to channel, while his suit’s reactors topped up the railgun’s capacitors.

And then, he fired again, this time not even bothering to wait until the creature became visible, phasing through the rock to become solid only a split-second before impact with the monster itself.

Something approached from behind. Ramirez didn’t even bother stopping his scan of the horizon.

The escape pods overhead could see the creature, and his fellow marines in said pods could see the sensors. And as such, he knew where his foe was down to the millimeter.

He jabbed his rifle behind him, locked down several joints to ensure the supremely awkward firing angle wouldn’t cause any issues, and fired.

A moment later, the kill notification and the sound of the creature’s guts splattering across the rock confirmed there wouldn’t be any more issues. From it, at least.

And then, Ramirez began to run; the ground trembled beneath his armor-shod boots, not that there was a single thing alive in the surrounding area that didn’t already know he was there.

Someone inexperienced might have mistaken Ramirez’s speed as being the result of him wearing power armor. And twenty Levels earlier, they’d even have been right … but he’d long since surpassed the point where power armor could support him. Hell, at his current level of power, it’d have been a hindrance, the artificial muscles weaker than his, and so slow that any rapid motion on his part would have torn them to pieces the first time he entered combat.

The space marine build combined durability and offense in one armor-clad juggernaut, Aspects and elemental [Skills] capable of fuelling the railgun rounds to provide any of a hundred different effects, almost as customizable as many mage spells.

It was a bit expensive on the material front … but that was worked just fine when it was the navy footing the bill.

More and more monstrosities crawled into view, some bizarre abominations that could scarcely be perceived, let alone described, others “mere” alien animals that nevertheless screamed danger … it didn’t matter what they were, they died all the same. The muzzle of the rifle swept across the distant scenery, and anytime it crossed the location of an enemy, it spat out a length of metal that embodied death and destruction; the weapon’s chamber swiftly refilled with another round, bathed in supernatural energies bent on annihilation.

Something new exploded from the ground beside him, having “wisely” chosen the path of stealth … all that achieved was to put it within easy stomping range, Ramirez’s armored boot winding up embedded several centimeters within the rock as he crushed it.

And then the crushed remnants slithered out from under his foot, parting around each of the trio of bullets he fired at it without visible damage, and lunged at his face.

Ramirez leaped back, stone exploding both where he left the ground and where he impacted, left hand leaving the barrel of his gun to flash down to his waist and rip out his combat knife.

Golden light flickered around the kabar, and the monster skittered away, only a small mark on its skin.

It seems the others aren’t quite close enough for [Esprit de Corps] to override its abilities.

As such, rather than trying to fight a monster he could not presently meaningfully hurt, he ran. Straight at the next opponent that wasn’t going to prove uncooperative.

For ten seconds, distance was the name of the game. That was how long it would take for the others to close the distance.

And when the monster lunged at him this time, it was met by the blade of a kabar that looked like nothing so much as a beam of sunlight, the combat knife practically possessing its own halo as it plunged into the creature’s gut.

[Esprit de Corps] in action.

There were three things an outstanding military unit needed:

People trained so well they acted on instinct, never winding up having to think or getting stuck inside of their own heads in the middle of combat.

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Those same people still being capable of independent thought when it was needed, especially when the officers had died or were otherwise unavailable.

And finally … a unit that had the first two and believed itself to be the best, most likely was oneof the best. That unity, that certainty of morale, the esprit de corps that had given its name to the signature [Skill] of the [Marine] …

One marine was a perfectly capable soldier.

Even and especially under the [System], a group of them was unstoppable.

And that was when the rest of the escape pods slammed into the ground behind him, striking with enough force that any even remotely normal human inside would have been turned into strawberry jam, inertial dampening magic or not.

The tempo of the fight shifted the instant his fellow marines spilled from the landed escape pods.

Magical communication via the party made coordinating as easy as breathing, fields of fire easily directed to cover their surroundings, the more magically inclined among their number beginning to cast spells, indicating where they’d be raising fortifications, towers carrying the heavy weapons specialists who had stepped upon the markers skywards …

Twelve seconds. That was how long it took for the last monster to be reduced to a blood-soaked heap, and their group of survivors to be safely nestled within a fortress of stone that the mages were already starting to ward and enchant.

And, at the same time, the single senior engineer who’d been among their group of escape pods was already starting to dismantle the craft. In an hour or so, the first turrets would be going up on the wall.

***

With one person on each of the Dragonfly’s secondaries, the guns had gained half again their old power, and a similar range enhancement.

Point defense was now being coordinated by a trio of lieutenants who’d set up in the kitchen, the fridge display having somehow been reworked to allow for that, though they apparently also had to babysit the ship’s cat, who was apparently a right bastard in the wrong circumstances.

And one poor bastard had gone to engineering and was presently being tyrannized by Mimi.

Every aspect of the starship had been boosted in some way, and every weapon was going to be utilized to the greatest possible extent.

“[Tactical Network],” Naiser intoned, causing a new [System] window to appear in Derek’s face.

Would you like to join a party with Rear Admiral Jayden Wulfric Naiser?

Y/N

Derek chose to actively ignore the middle name revealed by the pop-up; his own wasn’t exactly better, then clicked “yes.”

And the very instant he did so, things became oh so very clear.

You have entered into a party.

Party members:

- Jayden Wulfric Naiser (Party Leader)

- Derek Ambrosius Thoma (you)

- Ye-in Nan

- Wilhelmina Rosenkreuz

- Atticus Shaw

…

You are afforded the following buffs:

- Tracking: you are aware of your party members’ location so long as they are within ten kilometers of your location, and/or aboard a ship within the same tactical network

- XP Share: you are awarded XP in accordance with your contribution to the fight; monsters slain count towards the XP limit in proportion to the contribution

- Tactical Coordination: when aboard a starship, you gain awareness of where all vessels in your formation are traveling, where they have clear sensory information and where there are gaps, as well as current weapon orientations/firing arcs

- Sensory Support: your mind is slightly expanded, massively reducing the potential for sensory overload, and granting a degree of supernatural multitasking

The information hit him like a bolt from the blue, leaving him attempting to blink away spots that he only belatedly realized existed purely in his mind.

And several more seconds beyond that, he began to figure out what was what.

Part of his mind seemed stuck in the realm of the imagination, painting a mental image of the space beyond, of how things were unfolding outside the Dragonfly’s hull, and how those things were being affected by the actions of the people within.

Yet the instant he came to that realization, a conduit seemed to have been unlocked, and Naiser began sending orders.

And as the last vestiges of atmosphere dropped away, the Dragonfly’s guns truly began to sing.

Monsters vanished, empowered lasers leaving lesser eldritch beings to burn up like moths that had flown into a blowtorch, sledgehammers of charged particles smashing into monsters while moving at velocities far closer to the speed of light than anything ever should have, and the “dings” of confirmed kills quickly transformed into a continuous tone that automatically quieted down before it could begin to impact his abilities to hear the other people on the bridge with him.

However, there was one place they weren’t shooting: straight ahead, where they were heading. Derek was about to say something, the part of his brain insisting there had to be a reason for that slowly being overridden by his desire to, you know, not die …

He felt the [Skill] activating a second before it did, the name ringing out in his subconscious, the admiral’s battlefield control [Skill] bending the universe to his will.

[Incandescent Nebula]!

And the world ahead dissolved in a wave of plasma and destructive intent, the buzz of kill confirmations briefly spiking into something that made him wince … perhaps that particular setting had been a mistake, but it wasn’t one he could attend to at just that moment.

“We’re high enough,” Atticus reported, the report that would have been perfectly fine under normal circumstances drawing winces from everyone else on the bridge. As did the following action of firing thrusters to flip the ship, given that he hadn’t announced it. But that was fine … the Party had still communicated his intentions, and they had enough clear space around themselves that all the shots the action fouled weren’t going to be an issue.

Normally, this would be where they’d find themselves a nice geostationary orbit to sit in while they dropped rocks, but unfortunately, the camps were near the south pole of the planet, and sitting still relative to the surface by matching the rotation of the ground below was only really possible at or near the equator.

Instead, they’d be flying away from the planet for a bit, moving backwards to keep the Dragonfly’s spinal weaponry aligned on their target.

From up here, it was as though they were watching ants, tens of thousands of red dots moving across the surface of the planet, swarming, bearing down upon just three tiny enclaves of humanity scattered across the surface, each alight with energy weapons and spellfire, and doing an excellent job of fending off those monsters.

Yet if the people down there had shared Derek’s top-down view of the situation … they most likely would have despaired. For their presence was effectively dragging what amounted to most of the planet down on their heads.

Derek had no idea whether it was a matter of levels, numbers, or some combination of the two, but there was not a single monster on the scopes that was not making its way towards the south pole.

And by the very nature of distance, and the planet’s existence as a sphere, that meant that with every passing hour, the number of creatures actively attacking would grow exponentially, even as their levels climbed; the monsters that came from further out originating closer to the site of The Error’s summoning, and the horrors found there, both in distance and Level.

For a brief instant, the image of the planet on the main viewscreen flashed red as someone foolishly decided to try and mark the locations of all monsters, immediately undone as the person responsible came to the same realization.

Then, new symbols manifested, likewise red but in a different shade, one closer to burgundy than crimson. Target designations, emplaced both in the ship’s systems and the Party, rings of bright red warning signs practically infecting the planet in Derek’s mind.

And then, the entire ship trembled as the first round left the barrel, its location painted in by the display for a brief instant before the fiery trail it left in the atmosphere made the artificial highlighting more than superfluous.

Five seconds later, a second shot left the barrel. Thrusters fired, the bow minutely realigned, and a third shot went out, five seconds after the second.

Another surge of confirmed kills echoed in his ears just as they got into position for the fourth, a massive eruption of dust and debris that just barely failed to form into a mushroom cloud blooming upon the surface, three trails of fire marking the locations of future cataclysms.

There was no reason to stop, even slow down, however. They had more monsters to kill, munitions to burn, and with the planet already torn away from its star, there was no need to worry about an environmental impact or even a nuclear winter.

Derek found himself taking a couple of seconds to make sure he wasn’t about to be needed, then went into his settings to make some changes, namely, to change the tone for a mass kill notification from an overwhelming barrage of dings to a … well, another “ding” sound, but at a sufficiently distinct one that he’d be easily able to distinguish the pair.

Not that he was ever likely to find himself in a situation where that’d be ambiguous. It should be pretty fucking obvious whether he’d killed a single creature, or so many creatures that the combined “dings” would have been overwhelming.

Round after round rained down, drawing flaming streaks into the atmosphere, highlighted against the dust beginning to form vast grey blankets.

Derek glanced down at the ammo counter. They’d burned through around half of the available bombardment projectiles, but that was only counting the ones modified to be fired through the atmosphere.

They had another hundred ready, and could make more. And even when they ran out of those and spare material, nothing was easier to make than a railgun round. You needed a base plate of metal to conduct electricity between the two rails of the weapon, and that was all. Hell, even the kitchen garbage would be a viable projectile if it had a suitably sized metal baseplate, assuming they had a way to keep it from disintegrating the moment the confines of the railgun’s barrel weren’t holding it together.

Of course, that was when Derek heard Naiser give an order to those down below that they should search for easily accessible veins of metal. Any metal, really.

As such, he tried to settle back into his chair. It was weird having other people on the ship, never mind the bridge.

Yet, at the same time, even if he hadn’t seen much beyond the initial skirmish with orbiting beasties that had gotten too close, it had also been a glimpse at what the ship could be. What it could achieve when crewed by high-Level individuals, rather than ones who were still children by the modern day’s way of thinking.

That wasn’t just power that could be grasped; it was power that lay on his path. Part of his mind just wanted to drift off, to get caught up in that dream … but even though the current operation was proceeding without much input on his part, or even maneuvers beyond the station keeping, he didn’t seem to be needed.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the masses below would not be content to simply let them “drop rocks” on their heads. Not uncontested, at least.

Something suddenly lunged at them, manifesting out of nowhere as it clawed its way into reality, their ship’s secondaries taking a split-second to take aim before proceeding to drown the creature in energy fire. Yet … well, parts of it were flaking away, but the shapeless, house-sized beast lunging for them should have been torn to pieces.

It was only then that its approximate Level finally realized. The Level cap. Level 200. Or at least near enough that Derek could not tell the difference.

The Dragonfly spun like a top as Atticus twisted her to bring the main gun to bear on the beast instead.

A railgun round hammered into the monster’s … uh … whatever you called the place where it seemed a creature your brain refused to fully render had its face, the projectile suddenly slowing, giving the impression of phantasmal blood spilling in its wake.

And then the ultrarelativistic electron beam fired. A ray of electrons accelerated to such ludicrous speeds that relativistic warping of reality, as the very universe itself twisted due to projectiles flying at velocities so close to the speed of light, capable of maintaining its cohesion for far longer than it realistically should have, for time did not pass as quickly for it …

It was an absurd weapon to pack aboard a vessel the size of a destroyer, especially upon something that technically wasn’t a warship, but there was one more thing that took it from “dangerously powerful” to “annihilates all it touches.”

Derek’s [Fractal Beams].

The particle beam hammered into the creature, tore clean through it, and came out at a decidedly unnatural but not unexpected angle, instead flashing at the nearby corpse of another monster, a reasonably intact one. That was vaporized in an instant, leaving behind most of the energy unspent, and the force of his [Skill] taking it and reflecting it in a new direction.

Of course, [Fractal Beams] was limited in that it couldn’t simply redirect a given energy beam in the direction it had come from, so he couldn’t keep pinging it between two objects … except when both were so close to each other that the small difference in angle did not matter. And while the first corpse had been vaporized, the planet’s orbitals were littered with all sorts of crap, ranging from more monster corpses to debris that was most likely the remnants of the Astron navy.

So the next time the beam tore back out of the big fucking monster, it sought out a new target. That one was too far away to be deflected right back, so the beam pinged off half a dozen small bits of orbital debris before coming back around.

The settings Derek had given the [Skill] had been simple: send the beam back into the big fucker no matter what it takes, until every erg of energy possible had been dumped into their foe.

Extradimensional Horror (Lv. 199) has been slain. 2,000 XP gained (7,500 XP base distributed across 20 people as per their contributions)

“HAH!” Derek exclaimed, only to shrink in on himself when he realized his outburst had been a tad over the top.

“That one must have come from the high-level zone,” Naiser surmised. “Can you repeat that?”

“Ten minutes to regenerate mana, and I need something to bounce the beam off,” Derek rattled off immediately.

“I’ll get the next one if it shows up in that time,” Naiser ordered.

But nothing wound up happening, save for an eventual retreat as munitions ran low and creatures from further off in the void seemed to start to take an interest.

***

“Captain Thoma, I think something’s wrong with the sensors.”

Derek glanced up from his bowl of cereal to see one of the navy folk standing in the doorway, a lieutenant he hadn’t talked to yet, and the man’s nametag was missing, consumed by fire along with the part of the uniform it had once been pinned to.

“Which sensors?” he asked.

“The internal mana regulation controllers,” the lieutenant asked.

Derek was about to ask for further clarification when he got it anyway.

“All of them are saying there’s ten percent more ambient mana available than there should be, and eleven percent more than the ship uses. And it’s not a miscalibration as far as Ms. Rosenkreuz or I can tell.”

It took Derek a moment to remember that was Mimi’s last name, as he’d heard it used … basically never, but beyond that, it was a weird mystery. What had they …

He nearly facepalmed, only stopping himself when he realized how that’d be interpreted.

“I have a [Skill] that leveled. I should have shared that information. The sensors are working fine.”

“Thank you, captain.”

And just like that, the lieutenant was gone again, leaving Derek to slowly start to grin.

What he’d just said wasn’t a lie, exactly; [Vessel of Legend] had leveled, but that particular [Skill] did not boost the mana his ship’s enchantments could draw upon based on its own Level. It did so based on the amount of crazy shit he did, and the bombardment campaign definitely counted as “crazy.”

Adding new enchantments to take full advantage of the windfall would take a shipyard, but even so, Derek had a feeling it’d be a fight to get the grin back off his face; it’d simply feel inappropriate around the navy personnel, who’d only just escaped death.

***

Derek found himself sitting in his captain’s chair, trying to choose how to spend the wealth of XP that had poured in during the bombardment effort. A sizable portion of their kills had been attributed to “environmental causes,” and the XP for many of the others had been slashed down to basically nothing.

But they’d dropped enough rocks that it would have counted as an outright war crime on any habitable world, enough to permanently damage, if not outright destroy, the biosphere across a quarter of a planet, if there’d been any left in the first place.

Even drips and drabs of single-digit XP amounts could compound if you committed a sufficiently large massacre.

Bumping himself up to Level 50, the next Evolution threshold, was the obvious choice, netting himself 50 more Stat Points, which he promptly threw into Magic Regeneration, and 10 more [Skill] points.

Then there was one more thing to do: buy the two last [Skill] from [Stellar Captain] that had been on his wishlist.

Smuggler’s Pocket (legendary)

The law oh so rarely has considerations for what is required to save the world. Or galaxy. Or even the whole damn universe, though, hopefully, no threat of such a scale will ever materialize. Also, just in general, the law can be quite a buzzkill when it comes to things of a more entertaining nature. So any even remotely free-spirited individual should have a place to keep things they don’t want Johnny Law running off with.

As such, Smuggler’s Pocket combines the best of a well-built smuggling vehicle and good-old sleight of hand, creating a functionally undetectable additional storage space on your ship that its captain can freely access from anywhere in the universe, both withdrawing and depositing.

This pocket will be created by spatial magic and have a physical presence upon the ship, but cannot be accessed without permission.

The size of the pocket will amount to twenty percent of the ship’s total available storage.

Should the ship be destroyed, the pocket will remain withdrawal-only until a new ship is acquired. Any free storage at the time of the destruction will automatically absorb items and equipment from the vessel, in descending order of importance as per the subconscious of this Skill’s user.

Cost: 10 mana per liter of volume summoned or stored

Note: only “normally” man-portable objects can be summoned outside the ship

It was a simple utility [Skill] … but it was a damn good one.

For starters, the Dragonfly had been built with such a downright absurd amount of storage space that twenty percent of that was more than he’d ever realistically need.

Then there was the fact that they could keep all sorts of illegal and/or questionable shit in there, and chances were it’d stay under the radar unless they ran up against someone truly focused on detection. And even that would only last until the [Skill] leveled a bit.

Now, of course, Derek wasn’t planning on becoming a smuggler or the like anytime soon, but as they’d found out with the enchanted railgun rounds they’d picked up at Freedom, even just carrying certain things would already get them some annoying attention.

And, finally, the fact that it saved gear in the event of the ship’s destruction would be crucial and almost certainly life-saving when worst came to worst.

All that wasn’t even mentioning all the games that could be played with a nearly unrestricted inventory ability not linked to any piece of gear that could easily be targeted by an opponent.

But it was this next [Skill] that would break the balance entirely over its knee once it really got going.

Starship Aspect (legendary)

As a Stellar Captain, chances are, a decent chunk of your fights will not be with monsters but other starships, challenging their respective captains to a duel of wit, tactics, and preparedness. So, if others’ starships are your monsters, why shouldn’t you be rewarded appropriately?

This Skill will grant its user Aspects based on defeated enemy starships, each offering specific, semi-unique Skills based on the standout attributes of the vessel they are taken from, as well as appropriate Stat boosts, just like normal Aspects.

You will be able to fit four Aspects into a single slot if they are stacked from smallest to largest and originate from different ship types.

This Skill is not retroactive.

See notes on acquisition criteria?

In essence, it needed to be a real battle, and while the other guy could surrender, Derek couldn’t just fire a warning shot, then ask someone to surrender for just two seconds, “so my [Skill] can reward me.” Making someone surrender counted as a victory, but convincing someone to roll over at no cost to themselves by explaining his reasoning wouldn’t fly.

It was the sort of distinction that was very easy to explain but hard to quantify, one of those “that makes sense but how the fuck are you going to write that into law” kind of issues … which was why the full list of “acquisition criteria” was something like twenty thousand words long despite being able to be summed up with a bare handful of sentences.

Although, in actuality, perhaps it could be summarized by three words, and three words only: No. Playing. Games.

Which was annoying, because playing games was one of Derek’s favorite pastimes.

So, now it was time to evolve his [Class], right? Time to … he paused. His [Skill Fusion] would let him pull all sorts of stunts, and getting improvements now, rather than after the Evolution, could only help, right?

That was when he had one final idea: trying to get his own Party [Skill] to some approximation of what Naiser had had.

[Knightly Discipline] had exactly one upside, and that was that it had been free, having come from Isaac.

Now, granted, free was hard to beat, gift horse and all that, but upgrading [Skills] acquired in ways other than spending points was what his build was all about.

And [Scholar of War] certainly felt like something he could combine with it. The [Skill] was largely useless for his purposes; it was strong but didn’t help him in the novel situations he kept finding himself in, but perhaps when combined with a more active [Skill], he might get something more useable?

Granted, there was little guarantee of a favorable result, but he could afford to lose what he was risking. So why not take a leap of faith?

Alright, eyes closed, deep breath, just go ahead and do it, you coward …and here. We. GO!

Scholarly Admiral (legendary)

This Skill is the combination of countless hours of study, representing deep insight into the Art of War and allows its holder to easily analyze enemy tactics and strategies, as well as instantly spot any weaknesses that even remotely resemble anything historical, immediately offering up all relevant information … to start with.

It then takes that experience and refines it into actionable information, vacuuming up any and all experience in combat the user gains and transforming it into actionable/useable information/skills.

And then, finally, it allows the user to form a Party that can be guided by the full breadth of knowledge held by them.

By default, this Party encompasses the entirety of their ship/the formation under their command, supporting communication, regulating XP sharing, and coordinating fire.

Nice. Instinct told him that the [Skill’s] rarity was more a reflection of the knowledge portion, rather than the Party function, and he’d have to play with it a bit more to truly figure things out, but all in all, it felt useful.

That done, however … time to get his next [Class]!