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

by Andries Louws

  “Hello!” he belts out, ignoring all the stares he is receiving. He nearly stumbles while walking over to the trio of Shmee and Evot, the combination of his new weight and the steadily shaking floor making him lose balance for a split second. The moment Evot spots him, relief floods her worried face and she speeds over to him.

  “Douglas! Those Histaff Gargantuans are coming closer again. What do we do?”

  Douglas keeps on walking, making a ninety-degree turn towards the ramp going upwards. He efficiently open the flip-up counter and marched through the crowd, who all open a path for him.

  “Wait, no, please Douglas, wait a minute!”

  Not seeing any reason to do as she says, he keeps on walking. At least that explains the growing shocks running through the base. He is plenty familiar with just such earthquakes, as the time he has spent underground, slowly tunneling while using the Sublimate spell has made him intimately familiar with these shocks. He does hesitate for a brief moment after Evot actually tries to physically stop him. His new heft and density turns out to be too much for Evot to stop, and Douglas marches on and upwards. He isn’t sure what he will accomplish by doing this, but something in his gut is telling him that he needs to confront the bone-clad foe that has been hounding him the entire time he has been on this planet.

  Halfway up the ramp, he comes face to face with a sight that seems really familiar and still somehow strange.

  Clicking and chittering, a Histaff Reworked with many wings stops the moment it spots him. Douglas halts, not really sure what to do now. He has met plenty of these things before, both on the space station and on this planet. Nothing like this one, though. All of his previous encounters were with bulky and ground-based Reworked. This one looks to be little more than a central core and thin blades - or wings - of bone.

  Then the shrieking starts. From behind Douglas comes an unholy chorus of terrified yells, primal cries, and general panic. Douglas wonders what the fuss is all about while casting a small Calcinate spell. The quickly forming stone needle sucks in a large amount of air, pulling the lightweight bone beast towards Douglas. It’s immediately thrown backwards, many of its eyes bursting into small fountains of goop as the stone spear slams into its thinly armored midsection. A Dephlogistonate spell shape flashes into being around Douglas’s other hand briefly, sucking out the water from the spilt goop with gusto. Bum rushing the twitching Histaff monster, it’s a rather easy task of setting it on fire with the fireball he has floating in front of his hand. Moving on, Douglas doesn’t even cast a glance backwards as he leaves the still panicking crowd of curious onlookers behind. Evot hurries after him, leaving the two grey beings gaping at the smoking mess that used to be a massively dangerous predator.

  [ Reworked Histaff Flyer lvl 5 slain; 152 xp earned ]

  “Wow, the base scanners did not pick those up at all.” Says Evot. Her voice is only trembling slightly, a hint of excitement audible in her tone. “Hey, let me have this one!”

  Douglas looks at the woman, who seems rather chipper. The uniform she is wearing does look rather fetching, but before he can start feeling jealous of her clothes, she starts casting a spell. If Douglas’s spell shapes are the epitome of neatness and control, hers are prime examples of wobbly-ness and instability. The fireball she throws towards the two Histaff monsters coming at them explodes a metre in front of its target. It douses the duo of bone-feather covered Reworked in fire. Instead of blasting through them like a normal fireball would have, this causes the bone beings to die on fire, bubbling and whistling with escaping steam. Evot looks at him with big eyes and an even bigger smile as they walk past her handiwork.

  Thinking that the trick she pulled was actually a really creative way of casting spells, Douglas splits his single fireball into two tightly controlled Dephlogistonate spell shapes. He repeat’s Evot’s trick on the duo of Histaff coming down the ramp, Douglas’s small fireball exploding just in front of them and covering them in mana fueled fire.

  [ Reworked Histaff Flyer lvl 4 slain; 39 xp earned ]

  [ Reworked Histaff Flyer lvl 6 slain; 183 xp earned ]

  Their path to the entrance of the base is clear of further Histaff, but upon reaching the ground floor lobby, Douglas is greeted with a rather amazing sight. Even when looking at the horizon through the small open silhouette of the GalaxSec base door, he sees at least five Histaff Gargantuans.

  “Oh, sleepers take us all!” Evot sounds both fascinated and hopeless.

  Douglas doesn’t really know what sleepers are, but he sort of agrees with her sentiment anyway.

  “We are boned, right?”

  “I am bones,” is Douglas’s rather indignant reply. Evot might have bones, but she seems to be ashamed of them, or something. Why else would she not show them proudly, as he does? Looking at his metal covered hands, Douglas suddenly realizes that he doesn’t do that either. Before his entire worldview can crumble, Ungud and his girlfriend catch up with them.

  “An hour or three before they hit? Can we get the base going by then?”

  “No. Not even with a team of Brickad Fekston suited engineers.”

  Silence stretches on for a bit as Douglas, Evot, Ungud and the still unnamed female Shmee look at the massive dust cloud generated by the murder mountains coming their way. Then another insectoid Reworked flies through the open door, and Douglas tosses his remaining fireball at it.

  [ Reworked Histaff Flyer lvl 2 slain; 11 xp earned ]

  “Whoops, forgot about that paradigm shift, you know… Nearly forgot about mana.” The general din has lessened at this point, and the last sobbing cries halt the moment Ungud starts talking.

  “Ungud, we need to get with the times,” replies his companion.

  “Yes, we do. You need to pick a grower name already.”

  One wet slap later, she replies with, “Not in front of the non-Shmees, you bully!”

  “Right, we really do have to account for mana, though. Those fireballs are not tech. Histaff is hyper-resistant to ordinary flame.”

  “Agreed. Douglas, we think we have figured out some stuff by now. Ungud here has picked the scholar class, and has learned the-”

  “Not now, please. Douglas, can you…” comes Evot’s hesitating voice.

  “First we need to get the engines going,” chimes in Ungud.

  Douglas thinks that they do a lot of talking while there is casting to be done. Not really paying attention to the conversation, he brings the Piercing Exploding Shot spell shape to the forefront of his mind. Caring more for speed than extreme efficiency, the spell shape Evot designed forms around both his hands, two small suns slowly taking shape. Stepping through the door, Douglas feels like blinking against the bright sunlight. Instead of being allowed to slowly adjust to the brightness levels, a feathery bone creature slams into him. To be precise, Douglas slams through it, the Histaff creature exploding on his unyielding frame. Turns out, the large amounts of metal he has been slathering on himself combined with his new density makes him a lot less susceptible to sudden physical impacts.

  Looking around, Douglas takes stock while bringing his arms up. The GalaxSec base behind him is unchanged, the same dull and tarnished metal that looks like it has suffered a few too many beatings while staying perfectly round somehow. The ground around him is still dusty red, a windswept plane that seems ground down to a perfect level. The skies are no longer their previous sickly green, as they are now filled with Histaff beings. Red and white shapes blot out massive stretches of the sky, the skeleton spotting swarms upon swarms of flying beings.

  “Warp take me… This is why they say to never invade a Histaff planet… They adapt.”

  Beyond the swarms of flying, floating, or gliding Reworked are mountains. The horizon is half slowly moving Histaff Gargantuan, half broken city skyline.

  Douglas swivels his head a full three sixty degrees as he steps further away from the base, dive bombing Histaff splattering against the ground behind him. He then feels a slight hint of regret. He knows that
his Multicasting skill is at level ten, and can’t grow anymore. Internally sighing at the waste, he splits the two Piercing Exploding Shots into four, simply ripping the formed constructs in half without really thinking about it. He then splits those four spell shapes into eight, into sixteen, into thirty-two, and finally into sixty-four before his head starts hurting. Over sixty small lights cast him in a burning glow, his shining metal frame rivalling the partially hidden sun in its brightness and splendor.

  Thinking that this will do for now, he pumps in some more mana into the spells and sends them flying. His Mathematics skill does most of the work of calculating angles and speeds, quickly churning out the vectors needed to hit the Histaff Gargantuans around him. The small stars arc ever upwards as Douglas starts pouring more mana into more spell shapes.

  There is more chatter behind him, and he feels like he should be paying attention. He really doesn’t want to, as there is magic to be cast at those bone abusers. He might have concluded that all bone is good bone earlier, but the willful destruction of all that precious white stuff just rubs him the wrong way.

  Then, before his first artillery barrage even hits, he feels a hand on his ribs. Looking back, he stares into the eyes of Evot, who is looking up at him, baring her soul in her burning eyes.

  “Look, Douglas…” she begins, pulling open a few buttons of her tight blouse. “I’m still very angry about a lot of stuff, and I’m just pushing that down, and not really giving it any attention.” Another button opens under trembling fingers as she rapidly speaks at the skeleton. “It’s festering, and I really should confront myself and you about this.” One hand flicks out, sending a wave of uncoordinated mana at the Piercing Exploding Shot forming around Douglas’s unmoving hand.

  [ Mana Backlash ]

  The spell shape Douglas was pouring mana into shatters. It actually hurts, he finds. The foreign sensation of real pain stuns him for a moment. His eyes are already trained at Evot, and he can’t even look away even if he wanted to as she puts a hand under her blouse.

  “But now is not the time, and now is not the time to start blowing up Histaff. We need to leave, as there is nothing here.” A single tear falls from her eyes. “There is nothing left here.”

  The following image ingrains itself in Douglas’s mind. For some reason, he simply knows that this is a moment he will never forget - one of those key split seconds in time that are fixed in history.

  A score of twenty Mana Hand spells forms around Evot. As she throws the thick stack of blank crystalline papers she pulled from under her blouse into the air, the Shot spells he cast earlier land. Her face is bathed in green light from above, the yellow explosions all around them casting her face in a soft glow. Mana hands as thin as wires snatch the papers in smooth and seamless motions, arranging each one in a spherical grid around her. The shadows cast by the half-translucent paper and the shining blue limbs turn her from a small office lady into a goddess.

  “Ungud,” her voice thunders as the paper whirlwind around her picks up speed. “Go!”

  Douglas is still all kinds of overwhelmed at this development and doesn’t even react as the two grey beings picking him up. The last image he sees of Evot before he’s taken into the base once again is her slaying four flying Histaff Reworked at once. Each one is sliced through with a single piece of paper held on a phantom limb.

  “Sorry about this, as you did bring us back to life, sort of, and we owe this wonderful system and mana to you. But you know, no one fights Histaff, and then if you truly must, only with overwhelming force. So we need to get going, and you’re the only one that has even a chance of getting those engines up and running again!” Both Shmees keep muttering apologies and explanations as they carry Douglas down into the base, back towards the core.

  Chapter Twenty-Six – Redder Tape

  Evot is doing the usual, burying herself in work so she doesn’t have to think about her feelings or her life. Instead of really digging down and getting on top of this ‘having a crush on a flipping magical skeleton’ thing, she is just filing her life away. Sitting in the middle of the archive that has been her professional goal the majority of her life, she lets her magic fly. The only reason she’s got the confidence in being able to control an archive the size of this one is through the class that she was instrumental in creating. Evot has learned a lot of things, and the appearance of the two Shmees has supercharged her learning speed many folds.

  She’d been rather shocked to see two of the notoriously reclusive and anti-social beings show up all of a sudden. The intense discussion, or rather, interrogation, she was subject to had also allowed her to gain some perspective on her situation. She is still none the wiser on why she feels like some foolish schoolgirl around Douglas now that she’s got some food in her belly. Social things are not subjects that you talk with a Shmee about, anyway. The slimy race is renown for their super smarts for computers, science, and logic while being hyper dense when it comes to anything social. The amount of invasive, insulting, and abrasive questions the duo had asked her with a straight face makes her tremble even now. The sheer levels of embarrassment and awkwardness she experienced is enough for her to lose concentration even while remembering it.

  Suddenly, she is surrounded by a flurry of flying paper. She quickly casts her Mana Shield spell - no longer crude after a thorough redesign - and waits for the rather dangerous storm of sharp-edged documents to die down. The few shallow cuts on her face and forearms she got from just such a previous incident still haven’t fully regenerated. Evot takes a deep breath, releasing the Mana Shield and retracting the many, many Mana Hand spells she has been casting. She used to love her job as an archivist, finding joy in bringing order to chaos, but this is something else entirely. Grinning widely, she lets her suppressed notifications come up.

  [ Archival Appraisement III lvl 8 ]

  [ Archival Assessment III lvl 19 ]

  [ Indexing III lvl 15 ]

  [ Magical Memory II lvl 18 ]

  [ Mana Control II lvl 17 ]

  [ Mana Sense II lvl 14 ]

  [ Meditation II lvl 13 ]

  [ Multicasting II lvl 12 ]

  [ Speed Reading III lvl 23 ]

  [ Spell Shaping II lvl 20 ]

  [ Spell Shaping has reached lvl 20; Associate Arcane Archivist 2/10 ]

  Just to bask in it some more, she asks the System to show her status page and class.

  [ Name: Evot Gilihezal ]

  [ Race: Soulbound Human ]

  [ Level: 30 (182.092.800/182.092.800) ]

  [ Class: Associate Arcane Archivist 2/10 ]

  [ HP: 377/377 ] [ HP/h: 0.218 ]

  [ MP: 219/450 ] [ MP/h: 39 ]

  [ STR: 36 ]

  [ AGI: 41 ]

  [ CON: 39 ]

  [ VIT: 35 ]

  [ INT: 45 ]

  [ WIS: 39 ]

  [ Armored Core ]

  [ Darkvision ]

  [ Universal Language ]

  [ Associate Arcane Archivist; Well versed in the archiving arts of collecting, organizing, and controlling records, as well as the magical skills of the scholar, the Associate Arcane Archivist has a mana-fueled grip on their assigned collections. Whether they be documents, artifacts, images, or items, the Archivist knows them best - both their content, where they are stored, and how they should be catalogued and used. Skills; Archival Assessment, Archival Appraisement, Speed Reading, Indexing, Meditation, Mana Sense, Mana control, Spell shaping, Magical Memory, Multicasting. ++INT +WIS +AGI ]

  The class is a result of her own experiments, but only after thoroughly discussing this aspect of the System with Ungud and his girl, does she understand how it all works. Sort of… At the very least, they now have a very good guess as to how this entire thing seems to work. None of it is really scientific or based on a large sample size, but it seems to fit what the blue boxes tell them so far.

  The base classes are indeed simple starting points. Getting more of these tier one classes to their maximum skill levels - meaning, all four re
levant skills maxed out - unlocks more complex classes. She had entertained the idea of creating the most complex and most powerful class ever, but both grey beings had quickly talked her out of it. She'd also been able to choose and create a more generic sounding Archivist class, one that also held all the Fighter skills. She is now thankful that she has chosen not to pick that one, as that would more than likely cause her to get stuck on levelling skills she doesn’t use that often.

  The trio has concluded that there must be some impossible to level ‘Generalist’ class that holds all of the base skills there are. They also theorized that it would give immense stat benefits with all of its skills at their level caps. Then they discussed the price of progress, and the logical conclusions of the duo of brainy Shmees had put some things into perspective.

  The system obviously comes from a place, a universe, that is not like their current galaxy. The way it phrases things, the way it enables sapients to use mana is something completely new; that much is obvious. Its rather shortsighted theories on the material sciences of the universe - based on the ridiculous concepts of phlogiston and calx instead of atoms and elemental particles - makes this abundantly clear. Ungud had spouted some stuff about how magic could have stopped proper science from advancing, but that had all been a little too dry and theoretical for Evot. The female Shmee is pretty good at noticing when people zone out, and kept the discussion on point, much to Evot’s relief.

  They then worked out some ground rules for working with the system. The blue boxes appear more like a reactionary than an actionary system, as Ungud had aptly put it. It seemed, to him, more of an information repository that measures as opposed to a system that sets values and changes individuals accordingly. Instead of giving a strength point and making someone stronger, it merely measures when someone gets stronger. The mana it allows people to siphon and tap into does seem to have all kinds of drastic effects, but there is no proof that this is directly the work of the system.