When the lecture ended, he didn’t let them go free. Instead, he started them out on training and test scenarios. These didn’t deal with the specifics of their job but it was a general overview.
Their ships and the ones that Sato was working with were totally different. Sato worked with ships that were based off technology being assisted by the magical tech that they had been given and shared. However, the ships and systems that the players were working with were a fusion of magic and technology.
The people who had built the different systems were their testers. They would watch over them, doing every operation while Sato would watch their actions. He would listen to their communication and watch an interface that showed that the different areas were working.
The testers who had built the components reported to Sato, his questions pulling out and exacting information on each of the trainees’ abilities and strengths.
After every single working run, they would again reappear in front of Sato. He would work through the different sections, talking to the people in there. They would talk about their own actions and the actions of others. This created some tension but with a few words from Sato, this tension fell away. Instead of people challenging one another, saying that the other was worse, they looked to improve their ability individually and as a team. This pulled them all together and made them much stronger as a team.
He would go through the mistakes he heard in communication; he would go through the information that he had been told by the testers. He would pull apart the issues that he saw in the command structure, the ways that the running of the ship had fallen apart. Then he would put this on them to correct.
Afterward, it would be time for more training.
This was to get them familiar with their stations. They were not only thinking of their station; they were working to keep the entire ship as effective as possible.
Sato reviewed working on communication throughout departments, as well as medical care and getting used to being in vacuum. He walked them through damage control; the weapon training they had already worked on through the Mirrors of Communication, so they had a good grasp on it.
He made them decide their rank structure and different warship crews started to form. These people worked together closer and closer, becoming one organism that was part of the ships they crewed.
Once they were finished with Sato’s lectures and information, they were passed to the trainers.
They grilled them again and again, working to get the best out of them. Within their job, they became gods, knowing all and coming to understand everything that was connected to it.
Frank was a weapons officer but he knew how all of the missile tubes worked, the speed that the rounds left his canons, the different rounds and their effect. He knew their rate of fire, how to fix them, optimal firing parameters. He knew as much as the gun crews that kept his cannons operational and the missile techs who looked after the missile firing systems and their payloads.
He came to understand the Mana barriers and shields of the ship as well as the optimum angles to bring his batteries to bear. He used this information to create plots for the ship to move to increase their effectiveness against any enemy forces they might run into.
He looked over the weaknesses in the Jukal shields and armor, their interiors to plan out shots that would have the greatest effect. He worked with the different people under his command to come up with different strategies to fight the Jukal and deal with a variety of possibilities.
This allowed him to get closer to his team and also become an expert in his field.
Their higher levels of Intelligence made it easier for them to memorize the things that they saw. Their high Endurance allowed them to surpass their normal limits, being able to train for twenty hours of the day. Over the space of a week and a half, they were written off on by their testers, confirming that they knew the skills that were needed for their positions. Now some of the trainees were actually pointing out ways to work their stations better.
With their testers signing off on them, they weren’t done. Instead, they had just entered the examination phase.
“Ready the sim,” the captain of the battleship BloodHawk said. Before, they had been doing the simulations with the testers; now they would be operating like a normal ship just on patrol, with the testers watching over them to see how they performed in different environments from a normal day to fighting the enemy. This would look over their practices as they performed maintenance and looked after their ship. This went on for a day and a half, with people sleeping in the simulation in their designated racks.
Frank could have been the captain. He had a certain position, being the first of the players to be woken up. However, he didn’t wish to take on that responsibility. It was clear that the captain trusted him and would come to him with a number of issues. All of the officers worked together to make it as easy as possible on one another.
If something went wrong, they didn’t care about feelings and would tell one another exactly how they’d fucked up. It was harsh, but it made it so that people didn’t mess up a second time. No one wanted to be the ship’s noob.
They had started to get into a rhythm by the second day and were easily dealing with the issues that the different testers were throwing their way.
Still, this time they didn’t spend fighting. Instead, they learned how to better communicate through a standard fleet and fleet groups, which comprised of two or more fleets of ships moving together.
They moved across star systems. The arks and destroyers did atmospheric drops, entering a planet’s atmosphere, landing and coming back up. The battleships worked on establishing portal networks, laying down portals and connecting to them, going through them, actions when entering and leaving them. The missile boats went through transitions in space as well as working through different ways to use their weapons. The ark crews worked to understand the army of automatons they had, resupplying the other ships and fixing their issues.
At first, they were all nervous; their movements were sudden and unsure, leading to a number of problems and issues. However, as time went on, they became smoother. They came to grips with everything; their speed picked up as they moved as a fleet easily, different ships breaking off and joining up seamlessly.
They practiced exiting wormholes into enemy territory and built up methods of what to do when they were going through portals—operation procedures to be tested out.
So it went on. As Emerilia prepared for the war between the Pantheon, the Pandora’s Box Initiative prepared for the war against the Jukal by waking more and more players and building more and more ships.
Frank was told that the portal technology had finally been perfected. A massive assembly line was made within an asteroid, which started to create portals from soul gem constructs. These portals were broken down into sections. They could be deployed by battleships, attaching as they spread outward and creating a portal. They were also stored within the arks in case they needed more upon their travels.
More hulls were laid down to make up the fifth and sixth fleet.
The refinery was growing faster and faster and the materials being pumped out were higher quality than they had predicted.
Now that there were none of the council members looking over the shoulders of Captain Xue and their people, they had asked for the help of the Emerilians to make their base as they lent out their experts and people to work with them to assist on their different projects. They offered different premade items that allowed the Emerilians the ability to work on the more complex systems.
Together, they were a building powerhouse.
The Pandora’s Box Initiative was undergoing a massive expansion.
Frank and the rest of the players going through the Mirror of Communication training only left their ships when it was time for food, logging off and getting food from a cafeteria laid out like the ones on their ships.
They’d eat, return to the Mirrors of Communication and
go about their life as if they were already living on their warships.
Late at night, one of the alarms started to go off all over the ship.
“Two Jukal destroyers and one carrier! Battle stations!” the captain called out.
Frank hadn’t changed out of his clothes; he jumped out of his bed and ran toward the command center. He rushed through armored doors, jumping into his seat as he read the information updates scrolling down the side of his interface.
“They’ve spotted us!” Sensors confirmed.
“Ready for actions,” the captain yelled.
Frank pressed a few buttons that brought all weapons online. The different batteries and missile tubes warmed up. Mana surged through their runic lining.
“Target destroyer one first, then the second and then we’ll go for the carrier,” the captain said, using the classic theory of destroying the smaller ships in order to leave the bigger ship without mobile defenses. This way, they poured all of their fire into one craft, not allowing them time to regain their shields. The other ships could use this time to attack them but they were confident in their shields and defenses in the tests that they had before. They had been shown how strong the battleship’s shields and armor truly were.
“They’re leaping!” Sensors called out.
The Jukal used different drive systems from what humans might. Instead of just having drives that applied constant thrust, mounting higher and higher, they had a two-stage thrust system. One system would mount up speed like the human method of thrust; the other was a system that stored up energy and then shot it all out in one massive push, making the ships surge ahead. To a human, this would have been hell with the changing pressures. The Jukal were used to it and it allowed them to gain incredible speed quickly.
As soon as they had seen the Pandora forces, they had started to leap forward, to try to pin them down. The carrier had started to flush out the Jukal fighters that were even faster and more mobile than the massive ships that made up the Jukal fleet.
The Jukal cannons mounted on the sides, underbelly, and spine of the ship opened fire as they could. Missiles shot out from their different launch points, spreading out in every direction before turning and aiming directly for the Pandora fleet.
Frank didn’t even wait for the orders but activated the defensive measures and opened weapon locks on the weapons.
The captain paused, eyes wide at what was happening.
“Sir!” Frank barked. His voice carried across the command deck.
The captain was stuck up in just how “cool” everything was. With Frank’s words, he snapped back. A red tinge crept up his features as he felt shame at his actions that had lost them precious seconds as the missiles were starting to come into range.
The interceptor modules opened fire and unleashed their rounds. There were no spells to speak of for them to defeat but their weapon systems shredded a number of the incoming missiles.
Here and there, the missile boats were responding, though it was all over the place.
“Concentrate fire! Raise shields! All weapons fire as they come to bear on the targets!” the captain called out. His words passed out to the rest of the fleet as they started to get their shit together.
However, it wasn’t fast enough. The first barrage of missiles landed like a sea of destruction.
They smashed against the ships; their attacks served to make it hard for the sensor modules to see. The second barrage came in as the first cleared, then the third. By that time, the rounds from the Jukal ships were coming down, hitting those in front of the formation that had not yet changed, blocking those that were following behind.
The rounds and the missiles landed in waves. They tried launching different weapons but they were caught up in the destruction of the weapons coming down over them.
Then the Jukal fighters arrived. They were quick and their payloads were strong. They launched missiles in close that wrecked barriers until they started to fail. Different ships lost their shields altogether. The fighters fell on them before they passed the formation of ships. Their speeds were too great to counteract the inertia that threw them forward. They turned to face the fleet, using their leaping ability and their drives; however, it only slowed them slightly as they continued past the fleet.
The Jukal timed it well: their missiles and weapons fell upon the different ships that had been wounded or their shields had been taken down by the fighters.
They were massive, two to three times larger than the ships of the Pandora forces, and they had the weapons and missile tubes to prove it. As they entered the Pandora’s formation, the true fight started.
Frank could finally hit back, slugging it out with the Jukal. Their weapons were powerful but their shields and barriers were weak. Their barriers failed and their armor took a pounding, getting torn apart. Still, Frank called out orders as his crews worked the different guns and missile tubes.
The fight was progressing way too fast for them. As fast as the Jukal were among them, they had passed. Two-thirds of the Pandora fleet had been destroyed or were useless; the rest barely had shields or were deeply damaged but still functional.
The fighting stopped and the area Frank was in turned into a white room with a prompt appearing in his vision.
Quest: Defeat the Jukal Fleet
Failure: Your fleet was destroyed
Simulation End
You have earned: 321,543 EXP
Leave simulation for debriefing lobby?
He accepted the prompt with a heavy expression. He knew they had messed up. They should have been able to defeat the Jukal; instead, they had been thrashed thoroughly.
With it being a simulation, the AI would still give them experience and as they were not dying, they would keep it. However, he and all of the players were at Level 300 already; they needed a truly massive amount of experience in order to increase level.
Thankfully, in space combat using such powerful machines and also working with new technology, the AI was giving them experience boosts. However, these would quickly fall as they got better. This meant they would need to fight in different situations and against harder enemies in order to keep up their experience gain.
The conference room disappeared and he reappeared in a lecture room where a human-looking hologram was waiting. Its body was made from different runes and runic lines. There was a cold, calculating look in its eyes as everyone took their seats.
“You might know me. My name is Jeeves. I am also your instructor over the next little bit. Right now, we will go through your combat footage, look over your issues, the ways that you might improve and then once we are finished, you will return to duty and training.” Jeeves looked to them all. There was no argument in his voice nor did he seem to care.
Frank knew of Jeeves. He was the AI that ran everything for the Pandora’s Box Initiative. He controlled the automatons and he was able to make a number of the runic lines and magical coding that was used in the different machines of the Initiative. He was a power that people knew of but few interacted with. At least that Frank knew. Those who were interested in dealing with research or developing technologies came into contact with Jeeves or a subroutine of his all the time. He was a constant presence that pushed the advancement of the entire Initiative.
“Good. Then we shall begin,” Jeeves said. The lights disappeared from the room and a hologram appeared, showing the Jukal fleet and their own fleet. “We will begin from the start,” Jeeves said as the hologram started, with the Jukal exiting jump space.
***
All of Party Zero were gathered together in Cliff-Hill at Dave and Deia’s home. They had taken a rare moment to get away from their lives and watch what was happening to the flying citadels.
The flying citadels that had come from Goblin Mountain had reached their time for an upgrade.
All but one of the citadels had moved to the ground. Earth and Dark mages had worked to clear out a place for them to land. They were seated into the ground, only the
citadel showing as the soul gem island was hidden underneath.
The timer finally hit zero and the air around the flying citadel in the air started to become distorted.
The citadels on the ground shook as well.
At the same time, walls started to emerge around the citadels. The one that was flying in the air, an impressive metal foundation grew out from the outer walls, extending out through the air before shooting upward and forming into the new outer walls. The now two inner walls became stronger and taller, completely formed from metal and smooth as glass.
The entire citadel grew in size and pushed outward. The castle rose higher and the towers that were at the four different compass points grew thicker. The tower in the center of the castle shot upward; sections pushed out from it, creating two levels and walkways pushing the roof at the top of the tower.
There were now five different towers and heavy walls that stood to make the first wall around the castle and large tower that stood at the peak of the citadel. The second wall had ten towers; there were a total of twenty in the new outer wall that had just formed.
The outer walls and towers were made from stone and metal supports. The middle walls were made from metal and much thicker and robust than before; the same went for the inner walls that had changed from steel to a stronger composite metal.
Across seven of the citadels, except for the one that the Nal had captured for a short while, the different citadels underwent the same changes.
The soul gem construct underneath the floating citadel grew outward, to encompass the new walls that had been created. Dark mages rooted the new walls into the soul gem island.
Even as Dave and Malsour felt the pull to help them, they saw that the magical coding people as well as the mages and engineers had everything under control.
“Looks like we’ll have another advantage when fighting the Pantheon,” Jung Lee said with approval.
Emerilia Series Box Set 5 Page 19