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

by Andries Louws

  She immediately slaps her hands to her mouth. Instead of feeling her fingers on her lips, she feels damp masses of soft tissue flap against her face. Two raw cross-sections of her upper arms partially block her vision, dark blood slowly dripping from the faintly glowing stumps. Then she is dropped to the sand, landing face first into the loose granules again.

  “No.”

  Somehow, she manages to flop onto her back. First, she takes stock of her body, just listening to what the confusing mess of sensations coming into her brain is telling her. She feels her shoulders, and moving her arms does return to her the feeling of her shoulder joints rotating. Twisting her upper back and neck allows her to sense that she somehow has regrown her chest. She immediately feels the wind caressing her rather modest front, as well as the open section of her belly.

  Instead of saying anything further, the skeleton just stands there. Its dark metal skull is pointed directly at her, towering from the red ribcage at an odd angle. Evot stares into those blue pinpricks of fire, refusing to think anything for a while. By the time she regains the sensation in her elbows, she is ready to talk more, but the silence persists. Sometime later, her naval starts itching something fierce, and she sees that the sun has gone down again. Feeling like this is probably as peaceful as it’s going to get, she speaks up. “Hello.”

  The blue flames flicker for a bit, but nothing else happens. “Hello. My name is Evot. What is yours?”

  “Douglas.”

  Ignoring the small flash of memories, she keeps with the conversation. “Hello, Douglas. Nice to meet you. Could you tell me what is going on?”

  “You are too heavy.”

  “I won’t take that comment personally. Where are we?”

  “Evengi.” The skull seems to smile at her a little wider at that answer. Why does she get the feeling the metal-headed skeleton is rather proud of itself at this moment?

  “And where are we going?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Then why were you walking while dragging me along?” No answer. “I don’t think I’m asking for a lot here. Why were you dragging me through the desert?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Instead of rubbing her eyes like she wants to, she only manages to smear thick blood all over her face. She stops rubbing the slowly growing stump of her elbow over her face, letting it drop back to the sand. Looking away from the skeleton, she ponders the facts of life for a few moments. The stars are still as bright as ever, the soft lights burning in the metal eye sockets not enough light pollution to dim the twinkling brilliance high above. The fact that the stars and the galaxy are this visible is yet more proof that it’s very unlikely that there is any form of civilization left on this planet.

  “You are not Katare?”

  A storm of flat memories is unlocked upon hearing that name, and she is unable to ignore them. The flat and grating tone with which the skeleton - she really should start calling him Douglas, she briefly muses - asked that question sounded rather hopeful yet scared. “No,” Evot replies. “I gave you the food on the station.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” The sun rises before Evot has processed the suddenly resurging series of moments imprinted in her mind. She recalls seeing the world through someone else's eyes, locked in her own body as someone else took the wheel. Wondering why she hadn’t recognised the skeleton before, she goes through the entire adventure on the infected space station. The brief surge of anger at remembering the reason why her entire planet got infected by biological superweapon makes her wonder about emotions for a bit.

  Every time she had been in control up there, her face had been missing. Those periods had also been accompanied by the weirdest state of mind she could recall experiencing, and it hadn’t been helped by the fact that she had seen a blackened skull each time she looked into a reflective surface. It had been like life was reduced to just the facts. Like the massive collection of experiences, emotions, feelings, and more that is the sapient condition had been reduced to simple lines on paper. Briefly, her love of her profession surges inside her chest. That state had been as equally wonderful as it had been terrifying. All kinds of medical diagrams she remembers scanning, organising, and studying in her long career flash through her mind’s eye. The conclusion she makes that species are truly addicts of their own brain chemistry is not a happy one.

  “Douglas, what do you want out of life?”

  “Bones.”

  Nodding to herself, keeping her eyes staring at infinity, she chides herself that she should have seen that coming.

  “Blue,” is the sudden and unexpected continuation of the skeleton’s answer.

  “Blue?”

  “Shield a small one.”

  “You want to shield a small one?”

  “Four arms, no legs, metal floating. Blue uniform.”

  She suddenly remembers one of the terrible advertisements that she has seen her entire life. "You want to join that mess?”

  “Blue.”

  Evot goes over her life up to this point. She had a rather normal childhood. Her youth had been a standard affair, something that trillions - if not quadrillions - of sapients on outer rim planets have gone through. Cheap hyper-advanced mass produced goods, even cheaper mass-produced housing, and traditional foods cooked on tools produced half a galaxy away. As much schooling as needed, and not a single lesson more. Seeing spaceships fly through the upper atmosphere while walking on hand-woven reed slippers, the usual stuff.

  Then had followed a rather dumpy life. If there is one positive thing to be said about her career, it is that it was enough to sustain herself and half of her family on juva-treatments. This had made them distinctively middle class. They lived in comfort, but were light years away from the upper crust. Working in a government job tends to have that kind of effect on people. It will allow a family to do better than normal, but not enough to stick out above the masses.

  Then the infection was announced, and everything went to shit. The entire planet devolved from a place that was rather well off for a rim world to a chaotic hellscape in hours. The little military forces present did a fighting retreat, and had probably spent more ammunition fending off panicking civilians than they had shot at actual Histaff amalgamations. By the time the first Reworked had shown up, there had barely been anyone left alive.

  And then there had been the space station debacle. Not having control over her own brain - combined with a sizable impairment to her overall thinking capacity in the form of a surgically implanted consciousness leaving her with little grey matter - left her with half-clear recollections of that time. Like a dream, except the memories are staying in that half-forgotten state instead of fading completely.

  “Okay,” she says more to herself than to her taciturn conversion partner. “There is a planet-dropped base in the capital.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know, hun.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you go find some food instead of asking questions I already told you I don’t know the answer to.” She really should have seen it coming. The next thing she sees is a bony hand flinging sand into her face. “No, I can’t eat sa-” Seeing the skeleton rip off his own fingerbone, the intricate stone hinge shattering into pieces with a blue flash, is enough to shut her up by itself. Douglas doesn’t even need to stuff his distal phalanx into her mouth to prevent her from protesting, so stunned is she.

  Douglas even moves her mouth for her, but nothing really seems to happen. The dryness of her mouth prevents her from swallowing, but doesn’t prevent Douglas from clumsily stuffing more sand into her gullet. Sand dripping from her nose, she tries to struggle against the slowly yet inexorable moving being. Her half-formed arms slapping uselessly against his stone-covered frame, she tries yelling at him to stop. Her muffled shrieks are lost between the endlessly rising dunes as Douglas lovingly holds her mouth closed.

  It takes just an hour of useless feeding and flailing
before Douglas stops trying to make her eat the red silicon dioxide they are struggling in. Coughing the last bits of grit from her throat, her furious tirade is stopped when Douglas stares at his hand. Something about the feeling of the bony hand, the way the faint blue glow keeps getting brighter and brighter snatches up all her attention. Then, with a sudden and blinding flash that leaves her retinas painfully scorched, Douglas holds a yellow stone.

  The moment the skeleton’s mangled hand forces it inside her mouth is the moment the blue dot at the bottom of her vision starts going truly crazy. It had been blinking at her constantly, but at such a tempo and intensity that it was easily ignored. The moment the glow of blue from the stone explodes through her body is the moment it starts screaming at her. Dazed by the sudden violent stream of blue coming from the stone, she asks what the hell it wants.

  [ New rune learned; weakness - strength ]

  [ New rune learned; softness - hardness ]

  [ New rune learned; brittleness - toughness ]

  [ Mana capacity exceeded, NaN/UNKNOWN ]

  [ SOUL ID & REGISTERED ID incompatibility detected ]

  [ Please do not use means outside this frequency’s deities to modify SOUL ID ]

  [ Re-initializing... ]

  [ Remember; FIGHT ENTROPY ]

  The last thing Evot sees before everything goes black is a rather complex and confusing collection of blue boxes.

  [ Name: Evot Gilihezal ]

  [ Race: UNKNOWN ]

  [ Level: NaN (NaN/NaN) ]

  [ Class: None ]

  [ HP: 24/74 ][ HP/h: 0.0038 ]

  [ MP: NaN/150 ][ MP/h: 9 ]

  [ STR: 6 ]

  [ AGI: 11 ]

  [ CON: 9 ]

  [ VIT: 5 ]

  [ INT: 15 ]

  [ WIS: 9 ]

  [ Skeletal Constitution (Human) ERROR ]

  [ Darkvision ]

  [ Universal Language ]

  [ Mana Overload ]

  Chapter Eight – Let Sleeping Histaff Lie

  Douglas is not sure if he can actually feel happiness, but seeing the fruits of his labors like this is pretty great. The woman squirming beneath him is regenerating at a visible pace, her previously faintly glowing limbs shining brightly. He keeps trickling more sand into the wriggling woman's mouth, keeping her down with a hand firmly placed between the two fleshy things at her front. Douglas briefly wonders why they are smaller than the ones Katare had, but his interest in the useless things is quickly lost.

  A grin on his face, he watches as the sand inside her mouth slowly vanishes with small blue flames. She said something about not being able to eat sand, but as Douglas has a bit more experience with the eating of things than this new person that is not Katare, so he’ll just have to teach her patiently. Making the mana stone and putting it in her mouth had been a stroke of brilliance, though. He even learned something new from the entire ordeal.

  [ Mana Stone Production III lvl 22 ]

  Having access to a lot more mana now that his skull is filled with the stuff, he tried putting more juice into the creation process. As a result, his mana pool is now completely empty, and the stone inside the woman’s mouth contains over fourteen hundred mana points, Douglas estimates. Instead of just letting the stone creation process do its thing, he had kept shoving in more and more power before allowing the initial phase of the process to finish. Something had cracked, and he had managed to put a lot more of the blue power into the thing as a result. Also, the small conversation had been a most welcome distraction, but she had kept asking dumb stuff. This had started irritating the armored skull, thus preventing her from nagging at him by force-feeding her to regrow her limbs is a nice side effect.

  The fact that he had stopped being able to climb up the dunes put a damper on his mood. He is sure that he could have crossed the wall of sand by himself, but he is also sure that the hard to ignore feeling would have come back. He would inevitably be drawn to the horn again, and thus the woman that had started growing out of the thing for some reason. The knowledge that the horn is the same one he himself forcefully printed on Katare’s forehead is present in his mind; it just doesn't really occur to the skeleton to think of it.

  All in all, Douglas is feeling pretty great. He lovingly gazes at the thin layer of red covering his bones. The only downside is that he no longer can gaze upon the naked beauty of his bleached limbs, but the knowledge that they are well protected more than makes up for this visual downgrade. Even his status agrees with him, it turns out. Putting some more weight on the slowly regenerating woman, Douglas asks the blue boxes to please show all his status effects.

  [ Name: Douglas ]

  [ Race: Arcane skeleton ]

  [ Level: 30 (404,288/11,929,600) ]

  [ Class: Apprentice Arcanist 0/8, Craftsman 1/4, Labourer 0/4, Fighter 0/4 ]

  [ HP: 1210/1210 ] [ HP/h: 0.486 ]

  [ MP: 25/1531 ] [ MP/h: 101 ]

  [ STR: 10 ]

  [ AGI: 7 ]

  [ CON: 161 ]

  [ VIT: 41 ]

  [ INT: 70 ]

  [ WIS: 101 ]

  [ Arcane Skeletal Constitution (Human) ]

  [ Darkvision ]

  [ Universal Language ]

  [ Mana Reserve; +831 MP ]

  [ Skull Armor; +45 CON ]

  [ Stone Armor; +103 CON ]

  Clacking his teeth in contentment, Douglas muses that things are looking up. He has done some number crunching, and found that the thin film of magically strengthened stone surrounding his body has more than tripled his health. It also increased the amount of time he'll now need to regrow his entire body once again, but the fact that he is sturdier now gives him some hope he will never have to part with his precious bones again. His mana reserve bonus did decrease, for some reason, but Douglas is planning on using his newly found knowledge about mana stones to increase his reserve whenever he has a couple of months to spare anyway.

  The long trek through the red sands has also let him put the loss of his magnificent bone ride into perspective. Pouring more sand into the once again yelling woman’s mouth, Douglas loses himself in fantasizing about building his own bone Reworked. Instead of just taking one of the things for himself, he has come to the conclusion that he can make them himself. His vision had truly been too narrow when he had clad his body in red stone. Instead of using mere sand, he could have been using superior bone all along.

  Shaking his angular head at the foolishness of his old self, Douglas sees that the being that isn’t Katare below him has regrown her arms, and is gripping his stone-covered ulna and radius. Hearing the soft sounds of shifting sands behind him, he briefly wonders what she is planning. Then he is thrown off her, his skeletal limbs flailing wildly as he lands in the red sands. Looking up at the furiously breathing female looming over him, Douglas smiles.

  “You…” Douglas tilts his skull encouragingly at the human. “You bloody butt-faced scoundrel, aargh!” Douglas then watches the woman flail around a bit. She clenches her pale fingers into small fists while waving them around. “You utter coconut! Stop smiling at me. I know you are.”

  Douglas smiles wider. He is amused by watching her dance around some more, noting that her legs end just below her knees. Realizing that his mana is full again, he starts the process of making another mana stone. Something is off, he immediately realizes. Instead of the near instinctual feeling of compressing power that he had before, there is a formation at the edge of his consciousness now. He'd felt the stages of the stone creation and the filling of said stone before, but not to this extent. Noticing that there is something there makes it stand out in his mind, the previously hidden spell shape now glaringly obvious.

  The sudden distraction of finding a completely unknown spell shape in his mind's eye is enough of a distraction for Douglas to forget what he was doing. The slowly gathering power in the palm of his hand thus goes wild, sending a shockwave of pure mana blowing outwards. Douglas is thrown backwards, his hand slamming into his pelvic bones by the sudden release of
force. Stone splinters flying everywhere join the suddenly generated dust cloud in blocking the view. A shrill yell ends with a solid thump as the woman is also thrown away. Douglas doesn't bother standing up, his mind totally occupied by the new magical toy inside his mind.

  Of equal complexity to his attack spells, the mana stone creation spell shape exudes a different air. Instead of inhabiting the material properties of the spell’s changing subject, this formation feels utilitarian and rigid. Instead of the interconnected process of turning one state of matter into another, this spell is more akin to a spiral that can only be traversed one way. Douglas is initially slightly disappointed to see that there will be minimal use of his partial spellcasting abilities here. That sadness is quickly dashed as he sees unknown runes everywhere. The parts he at first had thought mere connecting lines turn out to be minuscule scripts of small symbols.

  The same tugging on his mind that brought him to this dessert in the first place starts again, cutting Douglas’s impromptu studying session short. Finding himself covered in a thick layer of sand, he stands up and starts following the pulling on his mind. He follows the narrow trails of disturbed sand with measured steps, and it takes him but a few hours before he catches up with the maker of said trail.

  “Douglas. Why are you following me?”

  “Pulling.”

  “You feel it too, then. This is one big pile of poop.” Scrunching her nose, the woman looks around with a scowl on her face. Expressly not looking at the skeleton stalking her, she gazes out towards the horizon for a few minutes before starting to walk again.