GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2)

by Andries Louws

  A red streak of goop splashes Douglas in the face. He is knocked back as the last remnant of the thawed Reworked fights for its life. Now slightly furious that the bones are still not completely his, Douglas pours mana into the first spell shape that comes to mind. Because he had just cast a whole lot of dephlogistonation spells, the flaming circle is the first one that pops up. The partial Histaff slime being is immediately completely killed when over half of its internal fluids are forcefully drawn into the congregating globule of water. The sphere of water ignites and is launched by Douglas the same moment the last bits of his level-up high let him realize what will happen before it occurs.

  The fireball shoots into the mouth of the being he has just spent hundreds of hours enchanting. This fireball only grows as the overabundance of mana Douglas has pumped into the construct sucks up even more water. Then magically enhanced laws from another universe entirely do their thing, turning this water into an extremely explosive fuel. Now truly panicking, Douglas tries to cancel his spell. Instead of doing the logical thing, like carefully draining the fireball of its unstable and volatile magical essence, he pulls all his mana from the spell shape.

  All the containment fields and fail-safes fail at the same time. Even the explosive force enhancing formation winks out of existence the moment Douglas resolutely recalls the power from the still-forming spell formation. His trusty and temporary mount vanishes into dust in a magical blaze hotter than the surface of the sun, and the skull is thrown backwards with force, flames licking at the diamond and metal coverings.

  It takes Douglas a good few minutes before the gravity of the situation sinks in. He fails to understand what just happened for a while, his denial going strong. Then Douglas becomes mad. He looks around himself, faintly hoping that another victim is available on which he can release his frustrations. The group of over a dozen Reworked that have followed him into the crater are all blackened heaps, his previous fireballs having reduced their solid structures to blackened piles of ash.

  Before he can truly explode, he feels that tugging again. He feels the small pull at the back of his mind, and he feels it is near. Having found a new venue for this completely alien and unfamiliar state of mind, Douglas continues his magical casting rampage. Instead of the cursed, doomed, and bone forsaken fireball spell, he recalls his decalcinate spell. From all around him, rocks start crumbling as they stream into the air. Now working on pure, boneheaded, and unthinking instinct, the skull releases a part of the partially filled spell shape behind him. The explosion of air sends the skull flying towards the infuriating and distracting pull on his mind, thick streams of evaporated rock streaming behind him.

  Looking like a vengeful skull god, a bright blue spell shape forming a halo around his head, Douglas launches himself again. Bursting free from the dust cloud of his landing, he pulls a thin trail of the fine powder behind him as he launches himself forward once more. Somehow, he even manages to stay relatively still, only occasionally tumbling head over heels before righting himself again. Where any other skull-shaped magical caster would be a rapidly spinning mess, Douglas only looks ahead.

  It takes him five jumps to reach the end of the crater, allowing him a glimpse of what’s on the other side of the massive depression. He doesn’t spot a single building, road, nor any Histaff. Not really able to handle his current state of mind in silent stillness, Douglas launches himself forwards again. His mana hand trails behind him, having found that a more suitable tool to keep himself looking forward than the mana intensive miniature corrective decalcinate explosions he used before. Soaring above the landscape on the opposite side of the crater, he now sees endless stretches of dead farmlands. Narrow dirt roads cut through fallow fields, the occasional wrecks of a cabin-less vehicle cluttering the landscape here and there. A few more furious earth to air explosions later, Douglas feels his mana becoming low. He has over fifteen hundred points of mana capacity now, but his current spending guarantees that his pool will run dry sooner rather than later.

  Another few jumps, the soaring skull spots the occasional heaps of red sand covering large swathes of agricultural rows. He sees the occasional building here and there, small crumbling houses interspersed with the massive skeletal frames of long since collapsed barns and silos. The pull on his mind becomes stronger and stronger with each jump, and Douglas’s has managed to blame the pull for all the wrongs in the universe at this point. He doesn't know how he didn’t realize this before, but internally blaming others in the pettiest manner possible is something he is quite good at.

  Convinced that the one responsible for his own stupid overreaction is at the end of this mental pull, Douglas flies on. His consciousness starts slipping by the time the desert has well and truly overtaken the farm fields, and he is barely lucid when he feels the thing that should be killed at all cost over the next dune. Barely able to scrape enough mana together to pull off one last decalcinate spell, Douglas aims. His consciousness fades the moment he triggers the magic.

  Chapter Six – Getting Ahead

  Douglas doesn’t know how to handle himself. He had come to hours ago, yet still, here he lays unmoving. He is still in the same position, face down into the slope of one of the red dunes, and he does not know what to do. He is sure he had been mad before, before all of this. Before his soul got ripped from the afterlife, only to be stapled to a piece of bone the size of a coin.

  The amount of anger he had felt honestly scares him a little. Even the briefest of glimpses of old memories of a life long forgotten tell him of his much-diminished state. The amount of rage that had coursed through his brainless head had been a slight trickle compared to even the most casual of emotions back when he was still a whole human being. Yet it had driven him to seek something to lash out at. Not finding the one directly responsible for his anger - because that was either himself of the being that he had just finished incinerating - he’d latched on to the first outside thing that he came across.

  And now the destination of his mana inefficient journey lies beneath him, accidentally directly under the maniacally blinking blue dot that’s still plaguing his vision. He can’t even sulk in peace, he wryly muses. As the emotions once again start slipping from his head, he starts wondering what he got so mad about. The fire that had been everywhere had surely heated the beast. And the fact that he had only inserted the minimally needed amounts of mana into the magically animated bone beast basically had guaranteed that its interior melted. And if the resilience that everything Histaff has been showing is any clue, the fact that some parts of the thawing beast were still alive should also have been apparent.

  That’s all in the past, though. As is Douglas’s introspective and slightly depressive mood, it turns out. Instead of continuing to mope uselessly, the armored skull decides to listen to what the blue boxes will have to say.

  [ Mathematics III lvl 7 ]

  [ Spell Shape III lvl 21 ]

  [ Mana Control III lvl 21 ]

  [ Arcane Inscribed Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl NaN slain; 243,221,113 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 25 38,067,200/38,067,200 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 26 49,996,800/49,996,800 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 27 67,891,200/67,891,200 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 28 94,028,800/94,028,800 xp earned ]

  [ Spell Shape III lvl 26 ]

  [ Mana Control III lvl 25 ]

  [ Mathematics III lvl 11 ]

  [ Mana Sense III lvl 23 ]

  Pondering these seemingly insignificant few lines, Douglas at least finds the answer to why he had suddenly turned into a magical savant. He earned over two hundred something-something of those ‘xp’ things. And his precious steed had become mighty indeed, before he'd had to blow it up. Yes, that was it. He had made it too powerful, and he had needed to ensure it wouldn’t turn on him. As the last traces of this massive injection of experience points leave the sulking skull, the slightly smarter version of Douglas makes a plan. He has been going a
t things rather haphazardly, he faintly realizes, and he has also realized that going at it alone is a lot more inconvenient than doing things with people.

  Say what you will about Katare; she is the reason why he didn’t burn up in the atmosphere upon entering this planet. In return, she would have died had he not inscribed the spaceship with all three runes he knew. She might have been rather hard to ignore when she was getting annoying again, and she had been immensely annoying, but she had been useful at times. But he had needed a body to properly work together with her. She would not have respected him had he only been a skull, Douglas somehow concludes.

  And then there is the fact that the level gains in Mathematics have been bombarding him with new and interesting ways to do stuff. But that’s completely accidental. There is no way the skull still has enough reasoning left to make such a plan. No way, Douglas tells himself. He just needs to regenerate his entire body before doing anything else. The fact that he is already thinking about ways to improve his control over potential Reworked beasts, ensuring that the tragedy that just played out a few hours ago will never ever happen again is not a priority. He doesn't even dare to think about what possessing one of those gorgeous, amazingly beautiful Histaff Behemoths would be like.

  His slowly dimming mind fades deeper into self-delusion as the skull waits for his bones to regenerate. His much-increased level has made the flow of power coming from his forehead much more potent and vibrant, speeding up his regeneration by many factors. The magical self-repair function built into the soul matrix at the core of his consciousness now has enough power to use some of its more esoteric functions. Partially designed by a layer-bound god, the nanoscopically detailed spell shape in Douglas’s forehead can now process raw matter in a limited capacity. Grains of sand that roll through the glowing bone outline are broken apart and looted for useful elements. Every single atom of calcium and phosphor is taken, as well as the needed ratios of trace elements like magnesium, zinc, and several other metals.

  This speeds up Douglas’s recovery by a rather large amount, and his second vertebrae, his axis, starts reforming before Douglas has review even a single percentage of the information his Mathematics skill can teach him about control logic and binary switches. His upper spine, a few ribs, and the upper parts of his arms are back by the time the partial skeleton has started on field theory. The way mana influences the world as it flows through various patterns and shapes is immensely interesting to the now once again rather slow-witted yet patient skeleton. The fact that he could have made each joint around fifty percent more effective with a simple application of a dynamic mana flow limiter is the least of the lessons he has learned when his pelvis starts to grow back in.

  Days later, Douglas is woken from his studious fervor by a full feeling in his forehead. It’s like the horn encasing the core of his being is full and is about to burst. Mentally blinking the theoretical diagrams and equivalent formulaic functions out of the forefront of his mind, Douglas slowly stands up.

  It takes him an entire minute of befuddled looking around before he realizes that he is now standing. He looks out over the desert from the side of a massive dune, the difference between the valley and the top of the sand wave he is on at least a couple of hundred meters. Becoming aware of his regenerated limbs throws him for a loop, having nearly forgotten how to move the ungainly things. He flops over as he furiously clicks his teeth, noticing that his chompers once again make that satisfying snapping sound. He swears to himself that he will never bite another Histaff bone beast ever again, as it didn't have any effect, and the feeling of grinding his broken teeth across each other was not a positive one.

  Instead of rolling down the dune, the once again whole skeleton just flops down into the sand, his mind still spinning from theoretically designing the best bone beast controlling formation ever. As he mentally stores away the ponderous lessons he has learned from the slow influx of knowledge, tips and hints, Douglas wonders why he is here again. He isn’t asking any existential questions; no, all the new information has simply washed away the magical fast travel decalcinating spree he went on. Probably subconsciously realizing that he shouldn't open that can of worms once again, Douglas looks down towards the first reason he can think off.

  Hidden under meters of sand, something pulls at his mind. And Douglas is completely unsure whether he likes that or not. So, instead of uselessly theorizing about stuff he can't change anyway, the skeleton kneels and starts digging with his bare hands. The effect he has on the majestic dune he is sitting on is nearly nonexistent. Sand keeps rushing in from above as it keeps slipping through his bony hands. He stays at it for longer than he should, and the sun has gone down by the time Douglas concludes that maybe there is a better way than manually digging at it for a couple of months.

  Thinking on what he should do about this entire thing, he remembers that he has been in this situation before. Well, except for the fact that he was the one buried back then, and the solid substance he wanted to go through had been large prefabricated plates of collapsed and crumbling concrete. But apart from those small details, this is the exact same thing after all. Happily grinning at his genius, Douglas calls up the spell shape that turns earth into air. Sitting down again, he studies the mental picture, slowly seeping mana into its center without letting it activate.

  Where he previously just let mana flow into the thing - the equivalent of using a garden hose on a doily - now he coaxes and guides mana into the lines and shapes. Each rune gets a thin and neat application of power instead of his previous power soaked saturation. The telltale blue circle of the spell does flicker into existence now and then, but the slight bits of spilt mana only manifest in a slight distortion in the air instead of a bright blue projected shape. Laying his hand flat against the soft sandy surface, he starts turning sand into air. The transformed particles, now many times bigger, flow through and between his metacarpal bones, gently coalescing back into sand and dust as the magical gasses are taken by the generated breeze.

  Douglas wonders why his vision starts dimming until he realizes that blowing the transformed stream of air into his face causes thin layers of rock to condense inside his eye sockets. Bashing the thin sheets of fused sand free from his armor with his free hand, Douglas shifts his head out of the airflow and cranks up the power. The partially illuminated decalcinate spell shape shimmers into being, only a few lines of runes and flowing connections lit up in use. All the safety measures, containment formations, security fields and limiters are inactive as Douglas does something no other wielder of magic has ever done. The casual ease with which he forces mana to only flow where he wills it is either a stroke of supernatural genius or supernatural stupidity.

  The wind picks up as Douglas truly starts pouring in mana. The disappearing sand is now visible to the naked eye, forming a constantly filling hollow beneath Douglas’s steady palm. Douglas simply keeps increasing the flow of power in order to combat the growing inflow of sand. As a result, the indentation in the dune’s side grows in diameter, allowing more sand to flow. Increasing the power yet again, Douglas looks upwards. He sees at least fifty meters of solid sand towering above him. All of it seems rather eager to slide down, straight under his waiting palm.

  Really wishing he could narrow his eyes at the gravity fed stream of stone particles, Douglas goes full blast. The wind starts howling through his finger bones, and it becomes a struggle to keep his hand close to the lowering surface of the dune. The transformed wind itself starts helping as the gale fights against the increasing flow coming from above. Keeping his head now firmly pointed at the location he feels the pull coming from, Douglas increases the power yet again.

  The stars above are blocked as the magic saturated air starts condensing stone. A fine rain of dust starts swirling through the generated breeze, the small particles only attracting more magically sublimated stone. Douglas is slowly turning a dark red as his entire frame gets covered in layer upon layer of rock. The actual strength of the substanc
e is rather low, though, so Douglas has no problems with moving around, his joints crushing the sediment with ease. Punching his head to get rid of the buildup occasionally, Douglas perseveres, ignoring the total chaos he is causing up above as he sinks deeper and deeper into the sand.

  As a lucky side effect, the stiff breeze coming from under his palm keeps him from being buried while the depositing stone covers the walls of the slowly growing pit with a hard layer. When only a tenth of his mana pool is left, the focusing skeleton sees something in the dark tunnel. He feels the shock of his hand coming into contact with something hard travel up his arm, and he reflexively closes his fingers around the item. His lapse in concentration causes his spell to fizzle out, which immediately stops the gale from blowing. Looking upwards, a certain sharp horn in his hand, Douglas start thinking of how to get out again. The tunnel is ten meters deep at this point and is rapidly filling with the downpour of condensing stone particles.

  Douglas stabs the horn into the wall and hauls himself up using it as a handhold. Layers upon layers of dark red matter are shaken free as he starts climbing the unstable tunnel wall. He utilizes the fact that he weighs almost nothing - the metal plating his skull is a very significant contributor to his weight - perfectly without even knowing it. Instead of marvelling at his wondrous ability to use his proportionally massive amount of bodily strength to climb up the fragile wall, he instead internally grumbles about the downpour of gasified stone. The hole fills up behind him, rapidly filling now that the constant stream of upwards air is gone.

  Emerging from the crumbling hole, the item that has been nagging at the back of his mind since he landed on this planet finally and firmly in hand, he looks around. The ambient light levels have started rising, telling of the breaking dawn. Douglas doesn’t see the sun cresting over the horizon though, as a magically induced dust cloud is blocking his vision. The soft patter of condensed stone falls on his reddening frame, thin layers of red rock settling on metal and bone. His neck creaks and grinds as he looks down at the item in his hand. He sees a dull grey stumpy horn with a blue glow at the bottom, red rust flaking from the jagged underside.