Mirrors redirect short burst laser pulses towards joints and other weak points with unerring precision. Self-sustaining magnetic fields filled with small fragments of a sun are launched towards the biggest threats at a leisurely pace. Their massive explosions light up the horizon with fissioning fireballs seconds after hitting their mountainous targets. All of the massive Histaff below them are wounded in some manner, and are changing their trajectories towards the ship as they stay barely out of reach of the most powerful Histaff artillery. The capital ruins aren’t even visible on the horizon, Fienak thinks, but the slowly moving mountains travel at a deceptive pace. The massive things would have reached the ring of ruins in a day or two, and Team Two will have to move slowly in order to avoid any undue attention from the masses of Histaff.
“A shame we got no black matter or singularity weapons. Would solve this mess without any issues. That damn purge ship will have them, but that hypocrite would never…”
Fienak is almost in too much awe at the sheer destruction going on around her to take note of the seemingly inane comment. She’s heard of those weapons before, and knows that both of the weapon classes are extremely restricted for very good reasons.
“Good shooting, let’s lure this quadrant back a little more before tackling the rest. I levelled up a few times just now.”
Fienak stops gripping the control stick with a death grip as she looks at Solan, not sure how to take his comments. The madness seems to have retreated slightly, and he has stopped mumbling to himself. Whether or not that is a good thing, she had no clue. “Right, sir.” Focusing her mind, she realizes that all that destruction cost them indeed just a single percent of the total power contained inside the ship’s reactor. Blowing all of the power at once would probably crack the planet like an egg. Fienak might be an orphan picked up from the streets, brainwashed in mind breaking simulations for subjective centuries, and might have a rather tenuous grip on her own sense of self. Fienak still doesn’t want to die.
By the time they have rained down hell upon the third quadrant around the capital, the first reports from Team Two start rolling in. Solan’s attention snaps to them immediately, and Fienak also taps into their feeds. She listens with open mouth to the conversation between Kee and the bedraggled naked woman that has identified herself as an Evot Gilihezal. Also, despite not hearing a peep from Team Two this entire time, it is more than obvious that they are having misgivings about all of this. Instead of interrogating her according to protocol, like Solan had commanded them to, they are simply chatting.
Looking at Solan, she sees his small eyes in a bugged out state, bulging and bloodshot. “How… How dare they.”
Looking out the window, Fienak sees that Solan is flying the ships towards the capital at breakneck speed. So far, they have covered three-quarters of the ground around the ring of ruins, causing all the multiple kilometre monsters to chase after them. This means that over half of all the Histaff on the continent are now making a beeline for the ship. The fact that Solan is moving the ship towards the center of the area they have been circling means that they are about to fly over a significant portion of their oversized bony stalkers. And Fienak watches on in horror as a good ten percent of their stalkers unfold into all kinds of new shapes.
The one that looks like someone stacked a lot of knives in a cone opens like a flower, a hundred white and red beings fluttering upwards from its centre. One of the more amorphous ones just explodes, its geometric armor plates all folding open into two wings like a horrific explosion of butterflies. The tank thread version breaks on one end, the upper half launching upwards with speeds that should not be possible. The separate tracks start spewing red mist from one side, zooming towards the ship like missiles.
“SOLAN!”
Fienak is strapped in fairly tightly, and even while struggling with all her might, she can’t quite reach the crazed fat man. Looking at her own screens again, she sees that all of the new Histaff flyers are moving up with speed, every single one of them aiming for their flight path. With rising panic, she concludes that some of the faster ones will intercept the ship. She is paralyzed for a few moments, unable to handle all the new stimuli. She then remembers that she has low-level access to the entire ship, and she quickly diverts all the power she can towards the front shields.
The first Histaff Reworked they collide with is one of the tank track segments. Fienak watches it smash to bits in fascinated slow motion. It must have used up all of its internal material just to reach them, she concludes. The blue shield flares up as the ship barrels through the sudden white cloud of bone dust.
Solan wakes from his fury at having his orders ignored just in time to see a beautiful collection of butterflies smash into the shield. The central cockpit gives an excellent view of the entire spectacle, and Fienak stares in open-mouthed wonder at the myriad of creatures flying towards them.
Solan pulls on the sticks, and he barely avoids a school of knife shaped swordfish. The Reworked get shredded to pieces in the wake of the ship’s turbulence anyway, but at least they didn’t drain the shield with their suicide attacks. Fienak is internally shrieking, but externally smiling now, her face no longer listening to her commands. She remembers some rather daring missions in her many military and mercenary simulations, but this tops them all easily.
Solan pulls the entire ship into a barrel roll while chattering to himself. Fienak is too busy with swiveling the many guns, lasers, and projectors towards the Histaff Reworked that are adjusting their trajectory to really bother with the madman. She manages to pop the sensitive bits of a few more Reworked, causing them to plummet towards the ground in showers of rouge mist and white shards. A few clip the ship’s shield, draining the ship’s plasma engine at a prodigious rate. The men on the ground flash through her mind, and she spares a few seconds to send them a message.
‘Pull out. Mass Histaff activity. - Eflec Spec Fienak’
Solan does another twist, and Fienak watches him with wide open eyes as he starts steering the ship downwards again. “What? Don’t go back in-”
Then the ship’s blue shield flashes into existence, its brightness blinding even through the rapidly dimming windows. Fienak’s chair drops out from under her, and the straps of her harness dig deep grooves into her skin. The tearing sounds of metal and shrieking alloy framework fades as Fienak’s blood is slowly redistributed in the proper manner again. Her sight comes back, and she watches with horror as the miniature hologram of the ship itself is now missing an atmospheric stabiliser. Looking at her scans, she can see the wing flounder towards the ground, now kilometres behind them.
Even Solan seems shook up from that, as he is sending the ship barreling upwards, all of its pivoting thrusters aimed backwards. “What was that? Find out now!”
“Yes, sir!” Fienak snaps. She immediately calls up the logs of the last few seconds, replaying the event that caused the ship to be hit. She watches with open mouth as one of the tank tracks that had remained on the ground was loaded into the wounded long range Histaff with all the guns. The combination of a self-propelling projectile being shot at them at high speeds had surpassed any previous worst-case estimates.
Watching the projectile barrel towards the small vessel twisting through the sky in the holographic replay, she gasps as she watches what happens next. Every single flying Reworked in range of the vessel fires off some form of projectile. Butterflies explode their midsections, causing one wing to soar towards the ship. All of the slow-moving feathered balls explode, a single spike shooting from the resulting mist of feather and goop. The few tank tracks still going upwards release their lower half, the second stage rocket spewing red mist in powerful jets. Swordfish knives just evaporate, their frontmost edges speeding towards the ship. It seems uncoordinated at first, but she sees all of the projectiles hit the shield at the exact same moment. Then, when the shield is under the most strain it probably has ever seen, the launched ground rocket hits. The shield dies in a flash, the small holographic
representation nearly blinding her again. The last bit of shield manages to divert the blunt rocket enough to at least not crack the ship like an egg, she sees. Wide eyes snapping to her side, she sees Solan watching her replay with rapt attention.
“Hold,” she tries speaking. Instead of words, an aching gasp comes from her mouth. She slams her helmet shut in a long forgotten reflex, and her suit is pressurised. “We-”
“Much more, much more. That fucking Histaff is so much more. He told me, you know. I was like, no that is just tech. It’s just tech, ha!” And Solan devolves into giggles.
“SIR! These are not hard vac suits. Please hold for a moment.”
Solan keeps giggling to himself, but at least he eases off the throttle, soft locking the ship to the planet to keep them steady for now. “Thank you,” she replies over the radio. Quickly undoing her belts and standing up, she leaves the fat psycho in the cockpit. She again wonders why this ship was built without a vacuum door between the cargo and crew compartment and the cockpit. Probably another side effect of this being a super rush job, she notes with some pessimistic bitterness.
Walking towards the hatch, she feels that gravity is slightly lighter. Not by a lot, so they are probably not that far up. She inspects the damage that the bike has done when it tore free, and sees that the sealing plate of the attachment point is bent in just the wrong way. Fumbling at their side, she remembers that she doesn’t have a weapon on her. She walks over to the supply closet, takes a standard issue engineer pack from the dispenser and pulls a torch welder free. Setting the beam to metallic, narrow, and shallow, she scans the working area and aims. The glowing piece of metal that prevented the hatch from closing falls towards the ground far below the moment she opens the door slightly. Closing it immediate, she feels the rising pressure that is indicative of a repressurising room.
Popping the face part of her helmet open to prevent the claustrophobic feelings from coming back, Fienak takes a deep breath of rich air and walks back to the cockpit. There, she finds Solan, who is still giggling. Quietly, she sits back down and straps herself in. “Sir?” While waiting for an intelligent response, she watches the scanning data. She silently thanks the warp for the fact that only a secondary scanning array got destroyed in that hit as she keeps watch for new threats.
Six small dots are slowly making their way upwards, their speed slowing as the hoverbikes find less and less air to actuate against. “Sir, please follow this route.”
‘We’ll intercept. Vac seal restored. Follow this route. - Eflec Spec Fienak’
Solan is still a giggling vegetable, so Fienak goes over some of the flight control code.
‘Gods lass, never thought I’d be this thankful to one of your kind. - Sergeant Third Class Kee’
Her frown has barely time to form when another message follows.
‘No, sorry lass! - Sergeant Third Class Kee’
‘That came out wrong. Just the nerves, we saw the fight and that was too close. - Sergeant Third Class Kee’
‘I think private here is going to need new pants. - Tech Spec Jeehon’
‘Me too, to be honest. That scuffle with those knife things was too close. - Sergeant Third Class Kee’
The mercs continue bantering on the comm line, obviously coming down from battle stress and adrenaline. Reviewing their sensor logs, she sees the small team leave the skeleton and woman with haste. Pushing her lips at the call to leave the civs behind, she watches the bikes soar into the sky, only for them to be followed by the mountains that have made it to the flats inside the capitol. Then they are nearly skewered by some of the flying Histaff that had made their way over to them as they moved towards the ship’s location.
Fienak casts one last glance towards the single building at the centre of the capital. A twinge of some negative emotion she has never felt before tugs at her for a second. For just the briefest of moments, she feels like she should really go down there.
Then the reality of her situation sets in, and she forgets the odd impulse. She is stuck inside a battered unregistered spaceship with a partially drained plasma core. Her co-pilot is a warp-mad fat man that is slowly but surely getting ever more insane. And now she had to fly said ship towards the six mercenaries waiting below. And all of them are probably extremely wary of her for her supposed mental instability instead of her giggling copilot. And she has never even flown a hoverboard before.
Fienak sighs deeply and gets to it.
Chapter Twenty-Three – Adoration, Awareness, and Abuse
Evot is gasping and trembling, her entire body shaking in the aftershocks. The cool sheets underneath her tired form feel like silky heaven, and she tries to burrow deeper into the relatively comfortable mattress she is lying on. The discussion she’s had with the base Synthetic Intelligence was legendary, she smiles softly to herself. Basking in the afterglow, she thinks back to a few hours ago, when she finally managed to level all of her class skills to level ten.
From what she understands of the way this weird and inconsistent system works, base classes like Fighter, Scholar, and the newly created Archivist don’t give any bonuses whatsoever. They are simple building blocks, tier one starting points from which new classes can be formed. The system had spluttered a bit, but as its overall effectiveness really seemed to have improved with all the newly soul-bound people walking around the base, she managed to convince it with sufficient effort.
She had based the tier two class which she is now a proud bearer of - the Apprentice Arcane Archivist - on the Archivist and the Scholar class, with a bit of Fighter mixed in. Where else would she get the agility needed to move fast and with dexterity, after all? Looking at her glistening fingers, she can’t help but smile wolfishly at the feeling of improved coordination her entire body now possesses.
The Magical Memory skill she had gained from the class evolution was the true breakthrough, though. Her intelligence is increased slightly, but this just means she has access to more mana, and she thinks she can reach logical conclusions slightly faster now. Remembering every single word she has ever read at the cost of a bit of mana meant that she now has a good chunk of the entire GalaxSec regulations inside her mind. Using these regulations, she drove the SI into a corner, forcing it to let Douglas access the core. He needs to access the core in order to pick up a GalaxSec badge, after all. How else is he going to become a cop, she snickers to herself.
After sending the skeleton on his way, she had read some more before finally realizing that she was bone tired. She browsed around some more, looking for collective labor agreement terms. What she found was pretty generous. Every GalaxSec volunteer is assigned private quarters, a basic stipend, and other amenities. She immediately made use of them, snatching up the room closest to the archive, and pulling her monthly allowance of food, water, clothes, and bedding from their respective dispensers.
She then had a wonderful cleansing shower, dressed herself for the first time in what felt like years, and had a quiet meal. The bland provisions were the most amazing food she had tasted in her entire life. Then the reality of the situation set in, and she broke down into a useless crying heap. Images of her family, of her siblings melting into red goop slowly, of her father crying while apologizing over the phone, half a planet away, bubbled up in her mind. Holding her mother’s hand through the containment sheets, her stern expression as she ordered and commanded Evot to leave her be and save herself. The waves of Histaff limb insects carrying her colleagues off, screaming and kicking without effect. All of the baggage came flooding back, and Evot was helpless in front of the waves of sudden pain, grief, and other random emotions.
From the moment she first saw Douglas plastering red sand on his bones, the stars high above him shining down on them both, she hadn’t been able to relax. At first, it was the sheer horror at the entire situation she found herself in keeping her from really thinking clearly. She was a disembodied head at first, after all. Not an experience she was in any way, shape, or form prepared for. Then there were
the slow realizations, finding out that she was suddenly fifty years into the future, and that the events on the space station she barely remembered actually happened. The ever-present Histaff threat was just another creeping sense of doom after that. The sudden destruction of the Ancheevi military hover bikes and fight with the Histaff Gargantuan were equally too terrifying to really calm down. Underground, she was completely occupied with repairing herself and learning magic. Then the tense trek through the city, followed by another long walk through flat wasteland and the sudden interrogation finished by the bizarre walk through the dead base.
Her tears had dried eventually, and she started feeling warm all over. She had thrown the covers off at this point, pushing the tear-streaked pile of damp towels to the floor. She might not have needed to eat on a technical level before, but only now, with food in her stomach and enough to drink, does her body properly start functioning again. She actually feels her hormones start surging through her body, her stomach digesting the nutritionally ideal food at speed, and her cold blood flowing quicker. It seems that her mana and the system had only been keeping her alive in the most technical sense.
Then another part of her body had started leaking as biological and hormonal processes rebooted, and she had gone from a hysterical crying episode into a furious masturbation session.
All in all, Evot realizes that she is actually quite happy, in a very fucked up way. The half haze of her previous life is nowhere to be seen, not a trace of the sleepy and dusty routine anywhere. Instead, each day so far has brought her terror, adventure, muted pain, body horror, and of course the amazing and wonderful concept known as magic. The fact that the only aspect of her previous life she truly loved – archives and working in archives - is present in spades is just icing on the cake.
Then, suddenly, what feels like a collection of hard marbles lands on her head. Evot freezes as something slowly rustles through her hair. Cracking open an eyelid, she sees a silver skeleton with a dark metal skull grinning down at her, one shiny arm extended towards the top of her head. Evot scrambles backwards, trying to press her back against the wall as fast as she can. She flails for the thin blanket, wrapping it around her naked form with frantic haste. She ignores the spot of wet fabric clinging to her leg while staring at Douglas with wide eyes. “WHAT?”
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 28