Chapter 84: The Spoils

The Reward Levels are listed below; however, there are some specifics that need to be shared ahead of time:

1. Body Pieces refer to 1/4 cubic meter of Proto-Existential Flesh, whose properties are varied and partially random

2. World Boss Aspects must be stacked atop a compatible Aspect, but can override previous Skills if so desired, allowing their recipients to customize how they use their rewards.

3. Regardless of how many people hold each rank of reward, only a maximum of 15 Aspects will be handed out.

4. Level Boosts are not immediate; their recipients will receive them and trigger them whenever they choose to (they will trigger automatically if doing so would push their recipient to the maximum Level of 200).

Infinitesimal: Those who participated but failed to reach any higher reward tiers will receive 100,000 XP

Minor: Those who participated in the battle and contributed will receive 200,000 XP.

Small: Those who participated in a way that would be noted as being above average in reports will receive 500,000 XP, half a body piece (own choice), and have a 0.1% chance of receiving an Aspect.

Sufficient: Those who have done enough that a million like them together would have been able to beat the World Boss will receive 1,000,000 XP, 1 body piece, and have a 1% chance of receiving an Aspect

Significant: This tier requires one to single-handedly affect the battle in some way, be it by briefly restraining the foe so others may land a solid hit, or landing a significant hit on their own. As such, they will be boosted by 1 Level or 2,000,000 XP, whichever is more, gain 3 body pieces, and have a 10% chance of getting an Aspect.

Massive: Those who will go down in the history books as having helped slay The Error are going to be boosted by a full five Levels, receive an Aspect of The Error, and 5 body pieces.

Decisive: This is a rank that can only be held by a single person per battle.

In this battle, this person was one Kenta Miyazaki, whose forces tore the monster apart while his power turned it into a sitting duck.

As such, he will receive a boost of 10 Levels, an Aspect of The Error, 25 body pieces, and the World Item [Ban Hammer].

This is an item that can, temporarily, remove anyone from the playing field.

Miyazaki had gotten the World Item, no surprises there.

Annoyingly, frustratingly, the [System] took some time to reveal Derek’s own rank. Oh, it was only a couple of seconds, but by God, was it cruel. And judging by the groans going around, he was not the only one who felt like that.

Congratulations, Derek Thoma! You have made a massive difference in the battle against The Error and lived to tell the tale!

Due to your accomplishments, you gain the ability to increase your Level by 5 at a point in time of your choosing; however, it will automatically trigger upon hitting Level 195.

One Aspect of The Error has been deposited in your Personal Storage.

Five The Error parts will be deposited in your Personal Storage, which will temporarily expand to hold them should the space not suffice.

A massive grin split Derek’s face, and he ruthlessly suppressed the urge to apply those Levels right the hell now.

Because depending on when he used them, they could be worth either a hundred and fifty thousand, or something to the tune of twenty million. And while XP in general wasn’t impossible to gather in vast amounts, “millions” would still be a pain to collect.

As for the monster pieces, he had no earthly idea what to do with those … but it wouldn’t be hard getting a master craftsman’s advice on that. World Boss materials were rare enough that you’d typically get them worked on for free, for the sake of the crafter’s progress, and the crafters would even, on occasion, supposedly, “fight” for the honor … but that was probably just rumors that had gotten very exaggerated.

Whatever “Proto-existential Flesh” was, it sounded powerful, versatile, and thoroughly eldritch. Not something he’d be screwing around with without the proper expertise on hand.

However, for all else he’d gotten, the piece de resistance was and would always be the Aspect.

Aspect of The Error:

This is the distilled essence of what makes The Error an existential threat to any planet it spawns upon, being almost impossible to properly injure

Requirements for Activation:

100,000 XP

Open Aspect Slot

Grants:

+100 Magic Power

+50 Magic Regeneration

One of the following Skills:

Telefrag

Eldritch Manifestation

Energy Reflection

Moment of Immortality

Progressive Invulnerability

Mwahahahahaha!

[Moment of Immortality] was pretty much exactly what it said on the tin, an emergency life-saving measure that meant there were very few attacks that could kill him before he could trigger [Lifesurge], and an absolute no-brainer to grab.

[Progressive Invulnerability], on the other hand, was a seriously weird [Skill] that massively, if temporarily, increased your resistance to any attack, relative to the portion of your body the attack destroyed. And it did so at a truly terrible conversion rate.

Yet it was also pretty damn overpowered, because every World Boss Aspect offered it, and it stacked with itself, rapidly growing in power until you could survive a nuclear blast of effectively any strength by pointing your arm at it and letting it burn up first, rendering the rest of you immune for more than long enough for the rest of it to harmlessly wash over you. And then, you just regrew the arm. Easy as pie.

Of course, that also required you to grab it on every single one of the incredibly rare and valuable Aspects, and it’d be a wasted slot until it snowballed into something worthwhile, or …. or you could have had [Chimera] as your first Evolution [Class] and simply reset the chosen [Skills] anytime you damn well pleased.

As for the rest … [Telefrag] let him teleport into things and people and cause them to explode to make way unless they were tough enough to resist, so now all he needed was to buy a teleport [Skill] from his [Class]. [Energy Reflection] let him suck incoming energy attacks into a miniature “black hole” and throw them back at the enemy, at least assuming he could trigger it in time. And [Eldritch Manifestation] was an infinitely more flexible variant of [Eldritch Claws], which would severely improve his melee game.

… All of that would have to wait until he could scrounge together the 100,000 XP needed to slot the darn thing, unfortunately. Just to think, if he’d gotten one of the lesser rewards, he’d actually have been better off, level-wise … but then he might not have gotten the Aspect.

Derek held the baseball-sized sphere of roiling rainbow energy against his chest as he grinned, only belatedly realizing that the comms officer was trying to get his attention. And that he had no idea how many of the increasingly stern calls of “Captain!” he’d missed.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he apologized. “I was … preoccupied.”

“We’ve gotten new orders; we are to wait for the support ships to arrive and receive support with our repairs, then you are transferred to the independent exploratory ship Dragonfly. However, he would like a personal meeting once things are more settled.”

Aka, you are dismissed, and don’t have to stay on top of everything a goddamn battlecruiser needs.

As for the meeting … that could mean a lot of things, only some of them bad. No use in worrying at this point.

More orders went out in the command network, dispatching eighteen battleships to the planet itself, with orders to scan for any remaining structures, then glass literally everything else, thereby wiping out the monsters that covered the world.

It was a genuinely terrifying sight to behold, as three divisions of battleships fell towards the planet, sterns pointing towards their direction as they decelerated … and not giving a single flying fuck about the swarm of lesser monsters bearing down on them.

Anything that got within a light-second would explode into a spray of plasma as lasers tore them to shreds. There wasn’t even any variance, no mad scramble to track something that had come in behind a much more dangerous threat.

No, anything that crossed an invisible line in space would see its insides become its outsides in an instant, even several of the eldritch creatures that Derek could have sworn were utterly immune to energy weapons being torn apart by the concentrated fire of the battleships.

Short of a World Boss, one of a handful of very specific Raid Bosses, an S-Ranker, or another battleship, there was nothing that could stop one of these behemoths … and humanity had two hundred of them.

Watching this, it was almost possible to believe that the Core of humanity’s space was genuinely untouchable. At least until he remembered that they were hardly the only sapient species capable of building space-capable warships. That wasn’t such a great thought.

Derek tore his eyes away from the screen as his brother approached.

“I haven’t really gotten a chance to ask yet,” Isaac began. “What are you planning on doing with the alien bodies in the Dragonfly’s morgue?”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“We found a note asking us to bury them, and that whatever would be acceptable for us would work for them. The going idea was some kind of ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’ kind of deal, make a monument to their species as a whole. But that’s going to have to wait until we have a place that’s not going to get torn open by scientists the moment I turn my back.”

“Do it on Olympus Mons, on the exterior slopes, one centimeter on our side of the property line. It’ll be accessible to the public, but I’ll have an excuse to sic the attack librarians on anyone who tries something?”

“Attack librarians?” Derek asked, suddenly very confused.

Isaac dropped his voice into a conspiratorial whisper. “Lawyers.”

Derek couldn’t suppress the snort of laughter that escaped him, despite the heaviness of the topic.

And a single glance at the corrupted world was enough to thoroughly pull down the mood.

“That could have been us, couldn’t it?”

“Easily,” Isaac said flatly. “But only the humanity of my day. Nowadays, we’re too dispersed, too prepared. Doesn’t stop us from pulling dumb shit on the regular; we just survive it.”

“Here’s how I heard it: humans to aliens what marines are to the rest of humanity. We do the craziest, dumbest shit, inexplicably survive the experience, and somehow wind up the better for it,” Naiser interjected from where he was sitting, right next to Derek.

Isaac threw his head back and burst out in a roar of entirely unexpected laughter, even as on the screens behind him, a world began to burn …

***

Twenty-four hours later, the Intractable had been joined by the newly arrived naval auxilary Just Nuisance, while two more, called Wojtek and Sergeant Reckless, respectively, were tending to the damaged battleships.

And they’d once again been called to join a conference.

This one was of the virtual variety, with Derek taking part from the admiral’s office with Isaac and Rear Admiral Naiser.

Having all four walls turn into screens showing the conference room was a decent substitute, but hardly a good one.

“The monsters on the planetary surface are respawning,” Miyazaki said flatly. “The space around the Astron homeworld remains clear, but the planet’s ability to spawn monsters is now confirmed to be linked to the planet itself, which will likely continue until the planet itself is destroyed.”

Shit. Burning the surface off one was doable, if not to say shockingly easy. Destroying a planet, on the other hand …

“Put a gravity array in its path. Send it into whatever star is will require the least effort.” Captain Barinov suggested, his Russian accent somehow making the concept sound almost … basic. Easy to achieve and perfectly normal to do.

“No, we need to study this place,” Isaac declared, voice firmer than Derek had ever heard from him. “We know for a fact that an abandoned world filled with monsters can spawn a World Boss. We now also know that a place that was conquered by a World Boss will spawn an endless parade of its own monsters.

“If these monsters can spawn their own World Boss, that makes every fallen planet a World Boss factory, and in my opinion, that is something we should figure out one way or the other before we run into the next one blind.”

“Then we should figure that out with something that isn’t The Error,” Captain Smythe declared, leveling a truly venomous glare at the scientist.

“If I recall correctly, generated World Bosses form in stages,” Derek announced, inadvertently drawing the woman’s ire onto himself. “All we’d need is a good sensor network covering the planet, find it while it’s still a Field Boss, and then drop a big rock on it from orbit.”

“We’re still likely looking at decades of observation,” Naiser objected. “And we’re likely going to have to send a fleet to guard this place.”

“It’d be a shit posting, but could be a relatively safe one,” Smythe admitted, the subtext of a very juvenile “not it” far more obvious than she’d likely intended it to be. Not that Derek could blame her, watching a planet for months on end and waiting for it to spit out something nasty sounded like an endless parade of discipline problems and nothing else.

The arguing continued, but in the end, it boiled down to a solution that really could have been created in under a minute: kick the issue upstairs.

That swiftly resulted in pretty much everyone, Derek included, getting kicked from the conference while the admirals and Isaac talked to … someone. The Fleet Admiral and “unspecified” politicians.

In the end, “claim the planet” and “wait for something to happen” were what it wound up boiling down to, with the secondary goal of turning the place into a hunting resort once the initial question had been answered. Or something.

Having been thrown out like a misbehaving cat hadn’t really left Derek in a good position to figure out what was what. The fact that Isaac had snagged him for “special training” immediately afterwards certainly hadn’t helped.

***

Thirty-six hours later, Derek found himself on his knees, on the surface of the planet, variously colored bloodstains covering every inch of his armor. Most of it was his own, in varying stages of dryness.

Isaac. Was. Insane.

And yet … a massive Cheshire-cat grin stretched Derek’s face as he stared skywards.

Or, more specifically, at the XP counter hanging there.

100,009 XP. Nine more than he needed to slot his very first World Boss Aspect.

“Did you get it?” his older brother asked. His armor was still pristine, and his part of the XP farming had consisted solely of coming in to save Derek when he was about to die. One and a half days of hunting down freshly respawned monsters had been rough, lucrative, and sure asshit not something Derek would have attempted all on his own.

Not trusting himself to be able to speak without coughing up some of the blood that healing a torn lung had failed to remove, Derek simply nodded, pulled the Aspect from his [Smuggler’s Pocket], and smashed it against his chest while pouring all his accumulated XP into forcing the incandescently glowing orb into his status sheet, forcing it to give up its power.

Moment of Immortality (legendary)

What kind of monster can have its guts hanging out, be bleeding from countless arterial wounds, and still be fighting? One with this Skill, that’s what.

Moment of Immortality activates automatically when it is needed, granting the user the ability to survive with massive blood loss and without a complete set of internal organs. In fact, few things short of being pulverized will be able to kill the Skill user while it is active, but it is by no means a perfect defense.

Moment of Immortality lasts for twenty seconds and can only be activated two times every 168 hours.

Multiple Aspects that grant Moment of Immortality can be slotted, with a maximum of three instances being possible to hold.

A powerful ability that became truly overpowered when paired with Derek’s own [Lifesurge].

Telefrag (legendary)

Destructively create space for yourself, should a teleportation leave you overlapping with another object and/or person.

Particularly magical, durable, or damage-resistant targets may block this effect, forcing you to appear in the nearest available location, up to a hundred meters distant.

Cost: cost for teleport + 500 mana

In essence, it gave any teleportation [Skills] he picked up the rating of lethality: yes.

It’d take a bit longer for him to get the relevant teleportation ability, but that shouldn’t be too much longer.

Energy Reflection (legendary)

Manifest a medicine ball-sized “black hole” to absorb energy attacks sent your way and unleash it at a target of your choosing.

Failing to actively release the stored energy prior to cancelation will cause it to be unleashed in every direction save yours.

Cost: 750 mana per second to absorb, 500 mana to direct release

All in all, this [Skill] was the most likely to wind up replaced by [Progressive Invulnerability] … and it was still broken as fuck. Especially when paired with [Danger Radar] and its ability to warn him with enough lead time to guarantee him the ability to react when ambushed.

Not that that was a perfect [Skill]; if it had been, he wouldn’t have needed Isaac to direct his jumps, but the two would still pair very nicely.

Which brought him to the final [Skill].

Eldritch Manifestation (legendary)

Manifest eldritch limbs upon your own body under your control, capable of reaching much further than their size should alone, phasing through other objects, and overall breaking all rules governing the function of “normal!” limbs.

You may also achieve the same effect by sheathing your biological limbs in eldritch energies.

Cost: 200 mana per seconds

And this one was mostly a matter of maintaining some continuity with [Eldritch Claws], so he wouldn’t break [Superior Eldritch Spatial Manipulation].

Not that this [Skill] didn’t have a truly absurd degree of potential all its own.

And that was when Derek’s phone rang, announcing a message from Perseus.

“Admiral Miyazaki is asking you to stop by his office at your earliest convenience.”

Aka right the hell now, when translated from military speak. And Isaac made a “go ahead” gesture.

“Tell him I’ll be over as soon as I can manage,” Derek said.

[Personnel Transfer] has been initiated to move you to the battleship Perseus.

Would you like to contest this transfer?

Right. Those worked now, and they didn’t have to be saved for an imminent battle against a World Boss.

Obviously, he’d be accepting that, finding himself standing in one of the cleanest portions of the ship he’d ever seen, in the filthiest condition he’d ever been in.

“Do you want to go to the infirmary before you drop dead on the admiral’s carpet?”

Derek turned to face a young man whom he knew to be Miyazaki’s aide, but not his name.

“I’m fine,” he said, blood dripping from his lips almost immediately, seeming to give lie to that statement. Triggering [Phantom Armor], he quickly swept the wrecked armor away, replacing it with the last outfit the [Skill] held … t-shirt and sweatpants. Hardly appropriate, but compared to an armor that could certainly be considered a biohazard, considering all the crap that covered it, the comfortable outfit was better.

He then spent his emergency mana reserve to cast one final instant of [Lifesurge], and used a cleaning spell to strip as much dirt and grime from his body as possible.

“I might need a more appropriate outfit, though,” Derek suggested.

The aide looked him up and down, then shrugged. “I could get you a uniform without insignia if you want, but the admiral won’t mind you being in comfortable clothes.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Derek shrugged. He still felt it was weird to be wearing something like this to meet an admiral.

And with that, the door slid open to reveal an office decidedly clear of any carpet.

“Come in, Captain Thoma, and make a seat.”

Also, Admiral Miyazaki was indeed fine with the outfit … or at least capable of faking it so well that Derek couldn’t tell. So he sat down in the chair in front of the admiral’s desk, taking a brief instant to take in the admiral’s office itself.

Specifically, the “I love me wall” behind the man, which all but overflowed with medals, commendations, and a section the size of the room’s door made up entirely of warship commissioning seals, starting with a rather cute insect for a ship by the name of Glowworm, and ending on the Perseus’, a rather basic image of a young man in a loincloth, sword in one hand, the head of Medusa dangling from the other, held from a single serpentine hair.

“Now, I don’t know if you were aware of this, but it’s a navy tradition that anyone who commands a given ship, or uses it as their flagship, is given a copy of the ship’s commissioning seal to carry with them to their future commands.”

For a brief instant, Derek thought that Miyazaki was commenting on his own distraction, but the admiral was already sliding a small plaque across the desk, giving lie to that idea.

Derek had to suppress a grin as he saw what Intractable’s seal actually looked like. A billy goat standing on a stone bridge across a creek, front legs firmly planted on the railing, head lowered defiantly as it glared at something right next to the viewer.

It was a symbol he’d seen several times aboard Intractable, but never really noticed. It was … well, not cute, exactly, but certainly something in that direction. And he’d treasure it forever.

“Thank you,” Derek said, inclining his head as he pushed it into [Smuggler’s Pocket].

“Next, I have an official commendation for you, regarding your actions here,” Miyazaki announced, sliding a USB stick across the table.

“Now, unfortunately, experience tells me I have to stress this: I’m not giving you a get out of jail free card. It is a fast pass to a trial or hearing, if you find yourself in trouble. It’s a character witness on speed dial if someone takes umbrage to your ship’s armament. It’s a direct line to the Naval HQ on Mercury, should that be required. But if you do, in fact, break the law, this won’t shield you from the consequences.”

“People let it go to their heads?” Derek guessed.

“You have no idea,” the admiral sighed, pulling up a very old-fashioned spiral notepad and pen, and sliding the pair across the table.

“All that being said, though, I do have one request to make,” Miyazaki finally said. “Intractable. Your brief time in command has left her significantly empowered, in a way that is normally only possible thanks to the builder’s or commanding officer’s [Skills]. High command is willing to let you keep most of your secrets, but we do need to know how to avoid breaking the enhancement.”

Honestly, Derek had been expecting something much worse.

“That’s fair,” he decided, picking up the pen and paper, thinking about what to write for a couple of seconds, then setting them back down. “But I’m not entirely sure I can give you everything you need; the [Skill] description isn’t as clear as it maybe should be. In essence, as long as there is a degree of continuity, the enhancement is going to stay around. Upgrading, expanding, repairing, rebuilding — most of that will likely be fine. Melting her down and turning the metal into a battleship almost certainly won’t be. Everything else is going to need to be experimentally discovered.”

“It’s a start,” the admiral said. “And all I could have expected.”

He stood, Derek rising to his feet in response on instinct alone. And then Miyazaki held out his hand.

“It’s been a pleasure, Captain Thoma. I wish you good luck in your future endeavors, a pleasant journey home, and may we meet under less chaotic circumstances.”

“Likewise,” Derek replied, shaking the proffered hand.