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

by Andries Louws

  Chapter Fifteen – Companionable Combat

  Instead of slowly emerging from sleep, Evot is immediately wide awake. It doesn’t take her minutes to slowly come back to wakefulness. No, the pressure on her forehead and her open wounds dragging through the dirt take care of that for her. No morning drink or a wake-up shower for the beleaguered woman. Instead, she is dragged across the ground, her naked body slowly being sanded raw.

  “Let me go.” And much to her surprise, she is let go. Smashing face first into the unforgiving dirt is yet another unneeded wake-up call. “Thanks,” she mumbles through bruising lips.

  “No problem.”

  “What happened?”

  “Got lots of xp.”

  “You killed it, then?”

  “We! Shared xp.”

  Evot manages to stand up straight, somehow ignoring the fact that the entire front side of her body is a slowly bleeding abrasion. The channel of warm power flowing to the distantly painful grazes feels stronger, though. The pain is less than she would have expected. Staring at the softly glowing blue skin, she wonders what she has done to be deposited into this purgatory, her only companions a skeleton, biological horrors, and seemingly incompetent mercenaries or soldiers.

  The rhythmic footsteps grow softer, reminding her that she is not alone in this barren wasteland she sees all around. Douglas is steadily marching towards the only thing that is not a barren wasteland, the ruined capital city. Leaving the still steaming pile of Histaff behind her, she casts one last glance at the charred remains of the military base.

  “Xp?” she asks the moment she sees the blue dot at the bottom of her vision.

  [ Histaff Gargantuan lvl 100 slain; 1,000,000,000 xp earned ]

  [ Soulbound Human lvl 1 100 / 100 xp earned ]

  [ Soulbound Human lvl 2 200 / 200 xp earned ]

  [ Soulbound Hu- ]

  Instead of sitting through the entire list, Evot mentally swipes the slowly appearing messages away. There's a time and place for everything, and she is not putting up with this kind of nonsense right now.

  [ … ]

  [ Soulbound Human lvl 30 182,092,800 / 182,092,800 xp earned ]

  [ Congratulations, you have reached Soulbound Human max level ]

  [ Your skills allow you the following options. Please note that Sapient race changes are usually debilitating ]

  [ Human 0/30 ]

  [ Soulbound Elf 0/30 ]

  [ Soul Construct 0/30 ]

  [ Lich 0/30 ]

  [ Arcane Lich 0/30 ]

  [ Histaff Hybrid Human 0/30 ]

  [ Soulbound UNKNOWN alloy core 0/30 ]

  [ Soulbound High Human 0/60 ]

  [ Arcane Human 0/60 ]

  [ Spelltouched Human 0/60 ]

  [ Manatouched Human 0/60 ]

  “Ah, this xp.” Evot stares at the long message for a bit, mechanically walking on autopilot as her vision is once again taken up by the blue boxes. The implications of the messages she is reading are way beyond her at the moment. The realization that she can actually change the core of her being, the flesh she is inhabiting into something else is seriously terrifying. Firmly deciding she has enough on her plate as of this moment, she orders the information away. Something for a future self to worry about, she keeps saying to herself. She nearly trips over her own feet when she is shaken from her daze by another earthquake. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  “The shaking ground.”

  “Those,” replies the skeleton in a near gleeful monotone. Evot follows his pointing digit and sees the mountains move.

  “Of course. Let’s get a move on then! More Gargantuans are coming; that just means we need to not be here when they arrive, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Right.” Evot picks up her pace, overtaking Douglas before starting to sprint. The combination of a potential race change and the Histaff monsters on their heels makes her feel like a small child again, sprinting up the stairs, away from the scary darkness. The sounds of stone covered bone hitting hard ground keeps following her, and Evot sees the grinning skull right behind her when she sneaks a peek. It takes the running duo no time at all before the occasional crumbled wall and decayed house is replaced by tall ruins. Panting like her life depends on it, Evot slows to a jog as she looks behind her again. Not a single mountain is in the same place, and they all seem to have come closer. She also sees a bristling collection of barrels, guns, and launchers starting to peek over the edge of the dry lake, and decides to get a move on.

  “The dropped bases are all at the centre. It should not take us more than a few days of walking. Let's hope the buildings slow those down.”

  Douglas nods along and follows the woman. They quickly walk through crumbling thoroughfares, the few skyscrapers that have not yet fallen towering above them. They clamber across crumbled attractions and walk along the rim of large craters. Evot looks at it all, walking across the decaying husk of her planet’s capital city with mixed feelings in her heart. The once shining jewel that she had so desperately wanted to visit at least once in her life now lies broken and hopelessly dead. Her mind is quick to flit over these dark impressions, as more recent events just won't leave the forefront of her thoughts.

  The picture of Douglas, his curved bones and angular skull sharply painted against the small sun in his hands. The strange desire she keeps having to touch his naked bones, to put her fingers in between his previously floating joints. The fight between the skeleton and Histaff Reworked at the fallen space elevator, spells flung everywhere. The apparent ease with which the artillery based Gargantuan shot that military Ancheevi patrol from the sky. Evot knows that there is no chance that a contingent of the planetary defence force is still operational. If that is an exploratory expedition, why were they so unprepared for the fact that the Histaff were all awake? The only reason that a scouting expedition would have come here would be because someone detected Douglas and her activities, right? The mystery of those black bikes is a pressing one, but the magical matters she has come across just won’t leave the forefront of her mind. Instead of reasoning out the entire possibility space of why those bikes were there, her thoughts keep circling back to magic.

  As they shuffle along yet another precariously balancing behemoth of fragmenting prefabbed concrete, she speaks up. “How are you making your spells so pretty and neat?”

  “Slowly and carefully.”

  Pondering this answer for a while, she starts playing around with magic. She is still in her birthday suit - a fact that she is oddly and strangely numb to - so she has nothing to enchant or embed runes into. Instead, she tries to cast one of the four spells Douglas has shown her. She carefully tries to pour her mana along the runed lines, soaking just enough power into the Calcinate spell to make a needle of earth form from thin air.

  Chuckling at the fact that it does form from air, and the atmosphere seems rather thin at the moment, Evot keeps up her practice as they move closer to the centre of the city.

  [ Spell Shaping lvl 10 ]

  [ Mana Sense lvl 10 ]

  [ Meditation lvl 10 ]

  [ Mana Control lvl 10 ]

  It takes a good few hours of splitting her attention between navigating the rather hostile terrain and her mana control before she sees the last of the relevant skills hit level ten. “They are all level ten and don’t seem to go any further. What now?”

  Douglas stops climbing. Evot properly looks around for the first time in a few hours and sees that they are balancing on top of some form of metal pole that seems to have fallen across a massive ravine. Evot looks up again and sees Douglas staring at her. One bony foot is standing on a firm piece of road while the other hangs over nothing. Evot glances down and sees nothing but a dark and dusty precipice. She looks up again, and sees a skeleton that isn’t moved in the slightest by its precarious position.

  “Class?” asks Douglas as he finishes his halted step.

  Carefully shuffling towards the safety of the highway, Evot tries
not to look down before reaching it. “Class?” she asks.

  [ Class; None (17) ]

  “EEP!” Before she can suffer from the consequences of her misstep, she feels bony hands grasp her wrist. An unyielding grip pulls her up, unceremoniously depositing her to the ground.

  “Scholar.”

  Evot looks around wide-eyed. “What, scholar?”

  [ Scholar class chosen ]

  [ Spell Shaping lvl 10; Scholar 1/4 ]

  [ Mana Control lvl 10; Scholar 2/4 ]

  [ Meditation lvl 10; Scholar 4/4 ]

  [ Spell Shaping lvl 10; Scholar 4/4 ]

  [ Scholar class; all relevant skills are max lvl. Please evolve class or pick a second class ]

  “What the… I have to evolve a cl-” Evot slaps her hands over her mouth. She nearly said the word class out loud again, something that the ever annoying system undoubtedly would see as an opportunity to shove more nonsensical boxes in her face.

  “Arcanist!” Douglas shouts.

  Unable to help herself, she asks the skeleton what he is talking about. “Arcanist, what?”

  [ Associate arcanist; not a complete novice, the associate can cast magic but is not skilled enough to be called an apprentice. Skilled in animating material items through magic, the arcanist brings life to golems, doors, autonomous defences, and other magical constructs through embedded spells and mana stones. Skills; meditation, mana sense, mana control, spell shaping, mana stone production, magical animation. +1 Int, +1 Wis ]

  She stares at the text as a new earthquake stirs up dust and causes the buildings around her to crumble. Evot nods at the latest information. No longer even capable of commenting on the absurdity of it all, she has reverted to the initial days of her previous job, what feels like a lifetime ago now.

  Fresh out of the prep education facility, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, she had arrived at the local government building that hired her on. There, instead of finding the organisational logic she so studiously learned applied to the letter, she found that not even the minimum of regulations was being followed. She'd been promised that the planetary government would be a tightly run ship. Each and every person would know what to do. There would be this haze of productivity over every single civil servant, and things would run like clockwork. The dusty, messy, and corrupt archives of the ancient building she had ended up in - a rather important structure housing a rather important ministry - embodied none of those lofty ideals. Instead, she had fallen into this haze of absorbing information like a sponge, a sort of comatose stupor that nonetheless allowed her to learn at a rapid pace. She had learned of the many organisational techniques that went into the archive, and how they were all only partially applied. That abhorrent and disorganized chaos of legal files and historical records had put her in a very stressed and very absent minded state. This same vacant concentration once again firmly settles over her consciousness as she tries to make sense of the informational chaos. Automatically asking the next question, she looks at Douglas.

  “There are other classes, then?”

  [ Tier 1 classes available: ]

  [ Fighter ]

  [ Official ]

  [ Vendor ]

  [ Tier 2 classes available: ]

  [ Associate Mage ]

  [ Associate Wizard ]

  [ Associate Antimage ]

  [ Associate Arcanist ]

  [ Associate Sublimator ]

  [ Associate Spell Crafter ]

  [ Associate Formationist ]

  [ Associate Spell Weaver ]

  [ Associate Phlogistonator ]

  [ Associate Dephlogistonator ]

  [ Associate Calcinator ]

  [ Associate Decalcinator ]

  [ Associate ERROR Scientist ]

  [ Associate ERROR Researcher ]

  “Yes, I see.” Looking over the large list, there are once again many, many things she wants to comment on. Her mind now fully numb to the illogical way that this is all put together, she decides to just go with the flow for now. “What did you choose?”

  “Biggest skeleton number. And Arcane.”

  “Skeleton number? That’s race, why are you…” The comfortable numbness in her mind tells her to just go with the direction that Douglas suddenly takes the conversation in. “You must have maxed out your racial level then. You then choose your race based on the biggest number, which would have been a better version of a skeleton. That makes sense in a very special way. And then you chose arcane because…”

  The skeleton stares at her for a long while. Evot looks away, taking in her environment before another unasked blue box can block it from her. The ruins had started growing taller a few hours ago, and now they are travelling through a vertical maze of standing and fallen ruins. The beam they just walked across is actually the antenna or flagpole of a sturdy little building leaned up against the pillars of the road they are now standing on.

  “Arcane Skeleton seemed best.”

  “You chose your race based on what seemed best?”

  Another silence. “Easily controlled seemed bad. Expiring the moment I achieved revenge seemed bad.”

  Evot just nods in a tired manner. Filing away that bit of information, she decides to get back to the topic at hand. “And your class?”

  “Arcanist!”

  Evot calls up the information about the Associate Arcanist. Her eyes open wide. “You’ve made yourself an animated… magically animated golem?”

  “Yes.”

  A fire lighting up in her eyes, Evot goes through the list of possible classes that she has access to. She can draw her own quick conclusions from the information accompanying the descriptions. The Mage class seems to be some form of a magical jack-of-all-trades, a myriad of smaller spells at their disposal. The wizard she also dismisses out of hand. Creating larger scale magical works does seem like an attractive proposition, but she will need to get a semi-permanent domicile for that to happen. The Antimage class seems focused on preventing spell disruptions while counter-spelling others. The general lack of magical wizards in the galaxy leaves that class lacking in her eyes.

  Douglas is already an arcanist, and although Evot likes to do tedious work now and then, figuring out engineering challenges never really was her thing. The sublimator class seems based around her original spell, Sublimate, and seems to do little else. The Spell Crafter profession looks rather nice, but that one will not give her a single new skill, as both Spellcraft and Runes are part of the class. Formationist and Spellweaver both allow for the creation of permanent items or structures, something that she has little need of right now. The four phlogiston and calx related spells seem to be more traditional elemental caster classes, something Douglas has well in hand.

  Both the Scientist and Researcher classes are filled with UNKNOWN’s, and the chills she gets from reading those capitalized words is enough for her to stay away. “And Fighter?”

  [ Fighter; the starting point for anyone engaging in the art of war and battle, this class has been the humble beginning for even the most skilled generals, sword saints, archers, war priests, spell knights, and more. Skills; Punching, Footwork, Dodging, Blocking. +Str, +Agi ]

  Before she can fully process this information, she picks it.

  [ New skill learned; Punching lvl 1]

  [ New skill learned; Footwork lvl 1]

  [ Skill Kicking lvl 1 consolidated into Footwork lvl 1 ]

  [ New skill learned; Dodging lvl 1 ]

  [ New skill learned; Blocking lvl 1 ]

  And suddenly, there are people telling her how to kick, stand, walk, punch, and prepare. Looking at the single suitable target she can see, she clenches her fists. Relaxing them right after, as punching with a closed fist is generally a terrible idea, she lowers her stance. Setting one foot at an angle, she angles her body into a semi-aggressive position. The frustration with her general situation combines with this new influx of information, and she throws a punch at the sole source of all her woes. Is it not that accursed skeleton that brought her bac
k? Is it not this infernally dumb piece of armored bone that had wounded her time and time again?

  Opening her fist a fraction of a second before she strikes the stone covered bone, she slaps at his sternum. Stepping in and gliding to the side, she allows a newly learned technique to guide her. Her movements flowing into a quick advance, she ducks under the awkward flail of the bony arm to get her foot behind Douglas’s heel.

  [ Punching lvl 2 ]

  [ Footwork lvl 2 ]

  Her other hand swinging forwards, she strikes the same spot on his chest. The mana flowing from her forehead boils at her movements, the warm glow moving in sync with her dance. Douglas’s other arm coming swinging at her, and she briefly wonders why the skeleton isn’t falling backwards yet. She manages to dodge the stone-clad punch only because she half stumbles over Douglas’s unmoving feet.

  [ Dodging lvl 2 ]

  Rolling into a new attack stance, one she didn’t know a few seconds earlier, she moves back into the brawl.

  [ Rolling lvl 2 ]

  “What are you do-”

  Ignoring all the small voices in her head that it’s a very bad idea, Evot clocks the angular skeleton right in his exposed teeth. Quickly confirming to herself that hitting the stupid bone being above his centre of mass seems to do the trick, she steps in again. She instinctively moves an arm down to her stomach, and before she can wonder why she did so, her forearm snaps in two. She barely sees Douglas’s knee moving back down, his surprise attack very successful, as she twirls around using the momentum gained from the sudden blow. Deciding to learn from him, she uses her good arm to brace herself as she bows low, lashing out with her own foot.

  [ Footwork lvl 3 ]

  Her naked feet hit the skeleton on his hip bone, destabilizing his footing. She moves in quickly, landing a messy slap of her broken arm against his skull. The long forgotten fire of combat now smouldering in her chest, she aims at the skeleton's single weak point, his naked regrown arm. She proceeds to use every single fresh lesson and newly learned trick as she weaves around the stumbling figure. Then, after only a few more minutes of quickly learning and assimilating the stream of data entering her brain, she lands a majestic kick. Using the terrain to her advantage, she leverages her weight and spinning momentum into Douglas, hitting him right in his humerus after jumping down from one of the larger rusting transport vehicles. Her perception speeds up for a single moment as she hears bone creak and splinters break off. Then Douglas loses his arm yet again with a dry snap.