chapter 202

We had just cleared the red zone. We still had a bit to go to reach the first FTL current of our journey back to Earth.

The ship was way too quiet right now. It seemed that the mana density of the red zone did influence the side dimension enough to make it feel like we were travelling through something; now it was like clear waters. I did not like it, but fortunately, inside the FTL currents, things won’t be this quiet.

This part of our journey took us 158 days, during which time we covered a bit over 9100 light-years. That distance was hard to understand because it was so damn long, but it didn’t even take us half a year to travel.

The craziest part was that this was the slowest we were going to be moving, and distance-wise, we didn’t even cover 15%. With the current engines, we could travel through regular space and reach other stars, but that would take years, and to cover the distance we had moved, we would need more than 9000 years, although to us it would seem like a lot less time passed.

Pretty sure one of FH’s reports did say that some humans purposely chose to travel through real space so they could sort of time-travel into the future. Most likely, they also had skills or improvements they made to themselves so they would live a lot longer.

During this time, all of us were busy with our skills. The combination of thermal sink and radiant thrust worked as hoped. Now, Forward Horizon’s heat management system was magically enhanced, as this skill allows you, as she explained it, to overlay her skill with the current heat management pathways for greater efficiency and throughput.

Radiant thrust was more useful than we expected. The skill can use heat to give us thrust in the form of a light beam, but we didn’t only have to use heat; she could use basically all forms of energy. This meant that she could take directly from the power core, where fusion was used to constantly generate us power, and use it to move us in any direction.

There were downsides to that. While she could expand that beam of light that made us move from any surface on the outside, that surface did get hot. So, currently, the best place to use it is actually the business end of the engines, where the materials were meant to handle that kind of energy output.

I myself have also been quite busy with many of my skills, all of which are a bit too low rank for my liking. Getting past the journeyman rank is difficult, and I could see why higher-ranked skills would be responsible for the high amount of your combat power.

My resistance skills have been doing the best, mostly because of Lola’s enhanced healing capabilities. This has allowed us all to push harder in training, which has been sorely needed as we have become quite out of practice. It seems that there are negatives to living on a ship.

My own affinities were all now E-ranked, and the power boost from them was addictive. But they were still quite far behind, and that was the same with everyone else as well. Everyone else had only managed to rank up one affinity, with FH being the only one who hadn’t managed it.

While all of us knew about Lola’s new healing skills and mine, none of us knew everything about each other’s new skills, which was why we were currently sitting around the table in our first-ever update meeting about our individual progress.

Each one of us had our status screen displayed so everyone could see. This was going to be a long process as everyone got so many new skills.

“All of you really have let yourselves go. Look at how many novice-ranked skills you all have,” I joked, getting a light slap on my shoulder from Lola.

“It is a bit overwhelming having all of these new skills. While fighting, it seems that I forget some of them, then all of a sudden remember—oh, I could use that—and then mess up my rhythm,” Dean explained.

I could certainly empathise with that, and others seemed to be nodding their heads as well.

“One of the problems I’m having is actually testing out the skills. I don’t want to shoot a hole through the side of the ship,” Sam said, a bit sheepish, as one of his training sessions caused enough damage that we needed to take nearly a day to fix it properly.

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“You ain’t going to be shooting a hole through my armour, but the damage to the inside was annoying,” FH responded, her tone quite light. They had a bit of tension between the two after the incident, but time smoothed that over.

“Thanks to Lola’s efforts with the tech seeds, we have plenty of processing power now to run complex VR simulations. The problem is, as all of you have experienced, it doesn’t quite simulate skills in the right way. There’s something missing.” Bob then looked towards me, waiting a bit before continuing. “But Captain, you mentioned something about fixing that?”

“It’s not exactly fixing it, but I think we could have it fixed as a side benefit.” Everyone’s attention was now fully on me. “But that would be derailing our meeting; we’ll get to that afterwards.”

“Fine, I’ll explain mine then, as far as I understand them at least.” Bob then started speaking as fast as he could. Pretty sure normal humans wouldn’t have been able to follow it.

“All the skills you got me are quite—how to put it nicely—quirky. Fortress patterns, for example, need blueprints of actual fortress-like structures, but they could even be more like watchtowers, which help coordinate building efforts and make them stronger if built in the way it’s in the blueprint.

“I seem to be able to add new blueprints, but they need to be truly comprehensive, and I mean down to the last screw comprehensive. Every other skill seems to be synergetic with every other skill.” He paused then to gather his thoughts.

“I can see the vision and the strength of this build, but I’m not sure of anything, as I simply can’t test things out properly. That’s why I want VR that could actually simulate our skills properly, or landing on some planet filled with monsters would be good enough as well.”

“My pattern skills are different,” FH added. “I don’t seem to be able to add anything to them. I think I’m missing something, but I just haven’t been able to figure out what.”

“The two new inventory skills are quite different from each other. My munitions storage works like the other inventory skills I have. There’s a new room that allows for storage of all types of munitions.”

“The material shaping bay is also a room, a pretty big one as well, with machinery already inside. It seems that I can copy any machine and automate it that I already have on board. They do work a lot slower.”

“Their efficiency sucks,” Bob put it bluntly. “That will probably get better as you rank up, so don’t worry too much. But explain what the problem with the patterns is?”

“The problem is I simply don’t have any.”

That was troublesome. All of us went silent, trying to think of solutions on why that was, when Bob seemed to have a revelation.

“There are some fortress blueprints in our database, but those didn’t trigger anything for my skill. When I designed them myself and truly went down to the last detail, did they appear in my skill.”

“I tried that, but no matter what design I make and how precise, it doesn’t work.”

“No, that wasn’t where I was going. Thinking back on it, they only appeared once I had the thought of using the tech blueprint to build it. I think that’s the key point: you have to use it. For you, it might be that you need to use the skill while using the things that would fit into that pattern skill.”

Immediately, I felt the spike of communication as FH ordered multiple different drone squads—a couple of combat and a few repair—to fully activate.

“It worked. In my swarm pattern variant skill, I now have the drones that have managed to bunch up and make small groups that I guess count as a swarm. Give me a moment.”

After a bit, I felt new presences. They were faint, but looking through the camera systems, I saw ghost images of those drones. FH sent us all the videos of her making ghost versions of the drones that could interact with physical objects.

“That’s amazing,” Sam whispered, staring at the screen. When we were done admiring the videos of what were basically ghost versions of the drones, FH continued explaining her other skills.

“Sorted mind has helped me organise our database to a degree I didn’t think possible, and not only that, the search functions seem to work not only on keywords but also on intent, somehow. It’s weird, but really useful.” All of us agreed on that, as looking up stuff had never been easier.

“To finish it off, data vault seems to have hardened not just my data storage but also my mind. Overall, really excellent skills, Captain.” That made me feel quite good, as I had been worried not just about her skills but others as well.

“Well, all of you have become quite familiar with my healing skills. I even managed to help FH a bit during the incident. That was a nice surprise. Still haven’t been able to use Revival’s Touch, which is a good thing in my opinion. What else?”

“My needle skills seem to be quite effective, although I haven’t quite perfected my new needle-making organs that are going to be in my wrists. Might add some bigger ones to my thighs as well. Same problem as most of you, as I haven’t really been able to test out my combat capabilities inside the ship.”

“You know what would be awesome? If we could find a storage skill that could double as a combat training room,” Sam said suddenly.

“Yes, I have a similar problem, especially with the disempowerment skills. Really haven’t had a chance to test them out, but otherwise the skills seem to work really nice with each other,” Dean added last.

That ended what was our first meeting, as it seemed everyone was pushing to finish fast. Probably shouldn’t have teased them about the VR thing.

“Okay, let’s get to it then, as all of you seem so impatient. I am planning on making three new crew members.” That seemed to shock them all, even though it wasn’t a secret that I would be making more. “These three will hopefully be extremely good at theoretical design work.”

“What, you want to make engineers, and then I would be the one who has to deal with fixing and maintaining the bad designs most engineers make,” Bob said, looking pointedly at me.

“Hey, I consider maintenance when designing things.” He gave me the ‘I guess’ look.

“Anyways, they’re all going to have affinities, which means skill slots. They will be more connected to the ship than the rest of you, with the exception of FH, of course. There are skills that should allow them to make the VR experiences we have not only more accurate but good enough to simulate our skills.”

“Wait, take a step back. Why do we need these crew members, and why do they need to be so heavily focused on design work?” Sam asked, as both Dean and he seemed the most confused out of everyone.

“It’s because eventually we’re going to be upgrading Forward Horizon once again, and not just in small ways. I mean a full rebuild, making her at least one classification bigger.”

Both of them looked at each other and then at me. It took them a bit to truly get what I meant, as it seemed to be a big shock to them. Did they really think that we wouldn’t be going for a bigger ship eventually? Of course, we would be upgrading Forward Horizon, which was going to be harder because it was FH body.