chapter 198

How had I forgotten how exhausting shopping can be? While the first recommendation FH gave me let me find skills that should fit with what Lola wanted, everyone else’s seemed more difficult to find.

Most popular and bigger shops seemed to be geared towards more standard builds. This meant it was time to change tactics. If the builds my crew members wanted weren’t available in popular shops, it was time to go off the beaten path.

The forums of this station’s web were truly wonderful, so it didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. On the other side of the station, there was a shopping district that seemed to be known for having all kinds of unusual skills, and a lot of them.

I refused to take any public transport. It sounded like a bad idea, even with my immunity deals with Dukes. My 6th sense backed up that conclusion, as each time I thought about it, I got a bad feeling from that skill.

As soon as I made it to the shopping district described in the forums, it was instantly obvious, as the whole vibe changed. No longer were there fancy shops with their personal assistants, refreshments, and skills hidden behind fancy glass cases.

There were no large display windows to look through here. There were the weird shop names that were way too long, but here they didn’t even describe what was inside the shops. It was like every shop sold everything, like this entire place was made up of flea markets or thrift shops.

Mentally preparing myself for what was to come, I started going from shop to shop. There were no protective glasses here; you could already hear the stones call from outside the shop, and with me being able to hear not just mine, but my crew members’ as well, it was hard to keep my mind from being hit with the biggest migraine ever.

In the shop, in one of the dusty corners where you could actually see how many people had been here by simply seeing how many different footprints were on the dusty floor, I heard a lot of stones calling for Dean.

I zeroed in on one particular one almost immediately. Its name was Weight from Motion. It was so similar to his innate ability, Strength from Motion. That one was definitely coming with me. I also found Flowing Footwork and Fast Moving for his speed affinity. There were also, for his sword affinity, Fast Strikes and Flowing Strikes.

That should allow him to quickly get to anywhere he wanted to go and allow him to fight in close combat while not getting hit himself. With the sword I made him, he should be a true terror. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything here for his disempowerment affinity.

That was unfortunately all this shop offered. Three shops down, most likely a couple of hundred to go. Hopefully, I will finish this before the auction.

Two hours had gone by when I made my next significant discovery. It felt like hitting a gold mine.

Sam was going to be extremely dangerous with his hard light rifle, and I was certainly going to make him even more guns like that. We could have gone with quite a standard build, but he wanted to leverage his innate ability the most amongst everyone else.

Wall Skip was one of the most powerful innate abilities I had heard of, as it allowed him to make his projectiles pass through walls, armour or even people. But it wasn’t only attacks that he could make pass through anything; he himself could move through anything as well.

The more powerful the material, the harder that was, so something to help with that would be extremely useful. Another problem was that he needed to know how much he needed to skip a particular attack to get it through whatever he wanted it to skip.

Exit Wound sounded like a skill that would make the exit wound of a shot more devastating. What it actually seemed to do was give you a brief glimpse of when, how, and where your shot was going to hit. Kind of like my 6th sense giving me a prediction of where danger was coming from, but it would do the opposite.

That sounded exactly like what he needed. Cover Denial was a guns affinity skill. It gave you a general boost, and it was stacking. Whenever you managed to hit someone who was behind or protected by something, you could buff yourself. Something I never expected this type of affinity to be able to give.

This should work perfectly with Wall Skip, allowing Sam to extremely easily strengthen himself. To help with that, there was also Suppression Shot, so whenever he hit something, he gave a debuff to the enemy that made them panic more easily and overall be shakier.

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It should even limit how far they could move, simply by making them hesitate and stumble more often. Once again, it should be extremely synergistic with his build.

Another skill here was simply called Magic Shot, which was an overall boost to every projectile you shot. That should help all shots penetrate deeper against high-end materials. A more expensive skill, and one that was more prominently displayed, was called Wall Burst.

It went counter to Sam’s current build idea, as it took the penetrative power of a shot and turned it into something that could damage a larger area. While this would be useful, I wondered how it would interact with his innate ability. Definitely something that we should test out, and it would be a useful skill even if it didn’t have some overpowered interaction.

On the other side of this wonderful shop were skills that should help with his mobility affinity and his desire to move constantly and never get pinned down. Momentum Aim gave him a boost whenever he was moving and shooting and would make his aim unnaturally steady.

Unpinned Advantage once again gave him boosts if he couldn’t be tied down to one location. This should work well with his build, but it will require someone trying to hold him in place or restrict him in any other way.

The last skill that seemed extremely useful was Phase Motion. Another skill that was a bit more expensive than the others. It’s a weaker variant of his innate ability, but it worked a bit differently, which means that the effects should stack. It should allow him to move even better through high-end materials.

The deeper I went into the shopping district, the more specialised some of the shops got. Here, I finally found skills for Dean’s disempowerment affinity. There were so many different kinds of skills that would fit, but Dean wanted ones that could stack.

I only found one, but two others seemed incredibly useful. Weakening Cut would allow him to constantly stack a general debuff, weakening everything about his opponent. You would need to stack it a lot of times before it truly started to show effect, but it should be quite good for his fighting style.

Disrupting Strike seemed to be a short-lived stun, but with the number of times he should be hitting, he could possibly stun-lock his opponent until they’re dead. The last one was Velocity’s Liability. Finding this one was extremely important and should fix one of his weaknesses.

His innate ability, Strength from Motion, was that it continued to strengthen him the more he used it. The problem was that his body would eventually start giving out. The boost did strengthen the body as well, but it could not keep up with the strength gained in other areas. His body would literally tear itself apart if he kept it going for too long.

Now, if he stopped channelling it, he would revert back to the start and would need to begin building the boost up from the beginning. This skill, Velocity’s Liability, seemed to be able to exchange that built-up boost for a devastating attack.

Fortunately, I looked around more in the shop and found another similar skill, but this time it was a stacking debuff. Velocity’s Debt would allow each strike to apply a stack of a slowing effect on whoever was hit.

Once again, at the start, this debuff barely did anything, but the more stacks you had, the greater the effect became. They could only be applied with a melee attack, which fit him perfectly.

Unexpectedly, soon after, I found two skills that were perfect for FH and were something high up on our problems-to-solve list. Thermal Sink would allow FH not only to move heat around faster but also to have a specific spot where it could concentrate a lot of heat. That alone would help us plenty, but the next skill brought everything together.

Radiant Thrust seemed to have been an overlooked skill, as I only found it because I heard its call. It had fallen behind one of the many shelves. The shop owner was so surprised that he gave me a 50% discount. This skill would allow us to boost our engines by exchanging the heat inside our ship for extra thrust.

While a magic-tech heat exchanger would still be useful, it no longer was required for us to be able to stay longer in a fight. Next, I found more useful skills for FH: Sorted Mind and Data Vault. That should help her handle the larger database we were going to have and make it extremely hard for any skill-based hacker to get to the data we were storing on board.

I was pretty sure that I had now visited over half of the shops in this shopping district. The only thing I wanted to do was go rest on my bed, not thinking about anything. But there were more skills to discover, and I hadn’t found anything to fit Bob.

I had been going down more alleys. That allowed me to find this wonderful shop that seemed to be the answer to all my problems. The skills here were really out there, and most of them I could not hear, but the ones that I could sounded really promising.

The one that sounded the most interesting was Material Shaping Bay. It was a bit more expensive than I would have wanted to pay, but not only was it an inventor-type skill, it let FH make items. There seemed to be a lot of limitations, which is why the skill was only 80 credit coins, but for her, it sounded perfect.

There were even more skills that seemed to synergize with that skill. Onto the list went Swarm Munition Pattern, Swarm Pattern Variants, then Ghost-Mass Payload and Ghost-Mass Variants. Those skills seemed to be able to give more mass to objects, but that mass would disappear over time. Hopefully, it will work with hard light projectiles as well, as that would make them even more devastating.

There was also a Swarm Boost skill that should give a generic boost whenever a group of similar types of objects were doing a similar task. It should be perfect for our drone swarms and perhaps even our combat droids.

The shop also had skills for Bob, and I think I found a really interesting build. I wasn’t sure exactly if it would work or not, but if needed, we could get the required materials to remove all these skills if they didn’t work like he wanted them to.

I got him 10 skills, five for each of his affinities. There were some more that should fit him, but they were way too expensive. Our vault wasn’t looking as healthy as it was at the start of all of this.

This build should give him an incredible boost in defensiveness and allow him to keep our forces supplied and protected. For his Bulwark affinity, I got him Fortress Presence, Anchored Stance, Fortress Manifestation, Bulwark Shell, and Fortress Patterns.

Basically, if he managed to build the different types of fortress patterns from the skill with the same name, those should be magically enhanced, basically making magical fortresses. The skills I got for his supply affinity should synergize extremely well with those skills.

Emergency Stockpile, Damage Distribution, Supply Line, Supply Point, and Storage Connection should allow him to supply a vast theatre of our combat forces. Perhaps this was planning too much into the future, but I had a feeling this was all going to be extremely useful.

All of that also costs quite a lot. After moving on from this shop, I continued to try to find more skills. Eventually, I stumbled upon another skill for FH called Munitions Storage. It was another inventory-type skill. This also brought me below 100 credit coins, which was the agreed-upon stopping point for the current spending spree.

It was now time to head back, distribute all the skill stones to my crew members, and then go to bed. Hopefully, that will help fix this migraine.