Douglas smiles. Ten Exploding Shot spells appear around him, the skeleton now pulling hard from the glowing mana stone in his hand. The fact that this stone is glowing fiercely means that the stone at the core isn’t capable of handling the influx of magic. Not really caring about this odd event in the slightest, he just sends his spells flying.
Three Gargantuans are hit by the relatively slow spells, a spiky collection of white needles, a multi-tentacled horror fest, and slowly rolling glob of circles. All three are perfectly fine except for the small hole burned into their plating at first. The small puff of smoke that follows the explosion is also accompanied by a sizable chunk of their bodies disintegrating into water. The rest of the Exploding shots hit either the ground or Reworked, who in turn also dissolve into water and bone plating.
Then, just as Douglas is starting to get blinded by the sheer amount of light coming from the stone in his hand, he hears an ominous creaking. Turning around, he sees a massive limb resting on the top part of the GalaxSec base.
“Good job! Stone is full, get back inside. Starting the launching process now!”
Making more Exploding Shots appear around him, Douglas starts running. He might not know a lot of difficult things, but he can reason out that the base isn't going anywhere with a Histaff Gargantuan lying on top of it. Just as he reasons this out, his words are proven true. On three sides of the stumpy base, plumes of ground explode upwards. The roaring noise made by the explosively starting engines cracking the earth and stone around the base would have blown his eardrums out and turned his organs to mush. If he’d had any, that is. Now Douglas just thinks that the massive amounts of dust exploding into the air and the shaking of his joints slightly annoying. The base lifts from the earth, massive cracks forming in the dried dirt and broken walls, nearly making Douglas lose his footing. The base lifts for a few metres, before the massive limb of bone and slime slams it back down.
Douglas jumps, lands while crouching low, and explodes upwards. His legs shining as brightly as the overloading Mana Stone in his hands, he shoots upwards just as the base’s landing thrusters are giving another boost. What used to be severely undersized and underpowered braking jets are now magically enhanced in a manner that none had seen coming. Instead of barely managing a thrust-to-weight ratio of two, the base now accelerates like a rocket.
Douglas lands on the shaking construct just in time to recognise the Histaff Gargantuan that’s lying on top of the GalaxSec base. It might look different, the central part now a massive limb, but Douglas recognises the bristling array of launchers and barrels nonetheless. Pointing his shining hand forward in a grand gesture, the Shot spells hovering above his head zoom forward. Douglas just looks up at the massive barrel, expecting it to disintegrate into bone and water any second now. His small collection of fireballs burned through the massive white cylinder with ease, leaving perfect little holes behind.
Then nothing really happens. Luckily for Douglas curiosity, he gets to understand why soon enough. A whip-like limb of translucent bone comes out of nowhere, smashing Douglas from the base’s top, sending him flying. He gets to see his Exploding Shots fall to the ground as he soars upwards and the base grows smaller quickly. Each little fireball dutifully explodes, having left two neat holes behind in the massive hollow bone barrel.
“…uhm, Evot?” he hesitatingly speaks into his badge.
“Good job, bonehead! Engines are at nineteen hundred percent and rising! Something is keeping us down, though.”
Douglas just listens to her voice. Then the light coming from the stone in his hand pulls on his attention, and Douglas gets an inspired idea. Here he was, all ready to nobly say goodbye or some nonsense like that. Briefly, the skeleton feels embarrassment. Where did that thought even come from? Even now, a hundred solutions to this simple problem present themselves in his mind. Not all of them are useful by a long shot, so he decides to go for his favourite solution. Excessive use of magic has worked pretty well so far, after all.
The biggest Exploding Piercing Shot spell shape he has ever even dreamt of springs into existence around Douglas. The rotating ring of mana shines around him, his entire frame getting bathed in the magical waste light. Then another sun springs into being, the shine coming from the small piece of hell illuminating everything up to the horizon. Douglas then realizes that he'd been aiming the thing directly at the ground, twists around to see where the Gargantuan that needs to die is located, and lets loose.
Once again, Douglas learns a bitter lesson in the principle of action and reaction. The massive Piercing Exploding Shot spell starts accelerating forwards at speed, spewing massive amounts of magical exhaust fumes from its rear. Douglas’s world goes white as the skeleton is bathed in said exhaust fumes. Then the bright lance of fire winks out, and there is silence for a little while. The orange glow coming from his eye sockets, and skeleton in general, is pretty annoying, but he still manages to see the unfolding spectacle.
Only now does he see that he long-range artillery Histaff Gargantuan is of enormous size. Here and there, he sees patches of plating of a distinctly different style and type, and the skeleton briefly theorizes that multiple Gargantuans must have merged. His large Shot spell has disappeared into the bone covered pile of goo at this point, so Douglas takes a breather for a second. The GalaxSec base is still bravely sending three plumes of dust towards the sky, the earth around it turned into chunks of gravel as it fights to ascend.
Light paints every single barrel, armor plate, complex launching mechanism, and segmented limb in bright contrast. Instead of the ordinary colour scheme where dark red lines contrast the bright white sections of bone plating, now the dark armor is lined by blazing borders of white, yellow, and red. Then the entire Histaff Gargantuan Amalgamation comes apart as a result of the blinding explosion. Like a volcano exploding, seemingly in slow motion but actually blazingly fast. Massive gouts of subsurface scattered illuminated red slime explode outwards, the viscosity of the goo creating long strands. The barrel, the limb holding down the base, doesn’t explode, the massive cylinder just lazily rolling off the base. Armor plating shrapnel zooms past Douglas, who is now falling towards the ground, and he feels like waving at the ascending ship as mana fatigue saps his consciousness slowly.
The stone in his hand exploding with a light that rivals a supernova wakes him up on multiple levels, though. Mana slams into his body, filling up the stone inside his head whether he likes it or not. His bones rattle in the aftershock of the two blasts, the thundering engines of the base only adding to the cacophony. Slamming into the ground is another hard to ignore wake up call.
“WWAAAAAAAAAA, DOUGLAAAAS!”
The scream coming from his badge banishes the last remnants of sleep, and Douglas takes stock of what the heck just happened. He then sees the GalaxSec base emerge from the ground with slow majesty, and decides that all that can come later. He gets out of the small crater his landing caused and starts running, but after only two steps he knows that even his enhanced and shining legs won’t get him back to the base in time. Then the engines start spewing even brighter lances of fire towards the ground, and the ship starts moving even faster.
Well, thinks Douglas. Two can play at that game. Bringing up the spell shape that had allowed him to move at, literally, explosive speeds once before, he starts chucking in mana. The Decalcinate spell shape blinks into being under his feet a split second before the ground explodes into air. Douglas is sent upwards, spinning rapidly. Casting a couple of mana hand spells, he lets them trail behind himself, slowing his manic tumble.
He briefly despairs that by the time he will land, and will thus have access to rock to turn into air again, the ship will be gone. Then another large chunk of bone nearly takes his legs off. Wondering where all of these turbulent hints of emotion are coming from, Douglas just casts his spell again. The sheer amount of debris and dust in the air turns out to be enough to give him another speed boost, and Douglas smacks into the top of the GalaxSec base th
ree calculated casts later.
As the base under him accelerates as it fights to escape from the planet’s gravity well, Douglas sees the dust clouds part. “Hello,” is the first thing that he feels like saying. He hears a relieved sob coming from his badge, but as he is plastered onto the base’s top due to its massive acceleration, he doesn’t really say anything else. Then the actual clouds, mere strips of faint white, part before him, and Douglas sees stars.
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Unfriendly Fire
Fienak releases a deep breath. Her cheeks bulge out as she lets the air squeeze through her lips, sinking down into her seat as she tries to release all the stress she has been enduring. She’s experienced plenty of life-threatening situations in the many, many simulations she has gone through, but something is just different about the real world. Maybe it’s because of imperfections in the sensory replications, or maybe it’s just because she knows that this is real life on a subconscious level. The adrenaline running through her body in the simulations always had a flat texture. None of the sensations from back then are comparable to the hypergrav roller-coaster ride she is going through now.
Her fingers tremble as she pulls away from the controls, the shutdown commands of her hastily hacked together steering routines releasing the autopilot. The latest member of Team Two has just sat down. Their hoverbikes have retracted into the tail end of the spaceship. The retrieval of their remaining forces complete, and the vacuum capability of the ship restored, she should feel some form of closure and accomplishment, right? Instead of continuing to relax, Fienak peers at the fat man calling himself Solan sitting next to her. His manic episode seems to have abated somewhat. Instead of giggling and mumbling to himself, he’s now staring intently at feeds of sensor data. What she sees makes her heart freeze.
“Sir, is that the planet?” she asks with trembling voice. She then notices that her hand is pointing at the many, many red clusters displayed on the holo-map. The small sphere looks like a diseased ball, glowing pustules of red slowly congregating to a handful of bright spots.
“Yes. It’s started its dispersal.”
Fienak has never heard about that term being used in combination with Histaff before, but she can somehow understand what he means with the term.
“It’s this slow because it’s a couple of decades early. Poking the nest, and all that. Time, ripe, ruin, and genetic deterioration wait for no one. Chop, chop.”
“Chop, chop, sir?”
“The purge ship will be here in a couple of days at most. Let’s not have the infection spread any further, shall we? We might be ants, but we can defend our nest at least somewhat competently.”
Fienak is lost again. He made sense for a moment, before talking about stuff that she has no context for. She sees what he starts doing, though. Instead of using the tedious and slow toolbox built into the system, Fienak quickly writes a script or two. Solan blinks at the projections appearing in front of him, the results spewing from Fienak’s code perfectly integrating into his user interface. “Not a total nutcase, I see.”
Ignoring the sheer condescension in his tone, Fienak continues tapping on the holographic keyboards springing up around her. The glowing dots on the planets’ surface all start showing small blue lines. Missiles detach from the ship. The many pods affixed to the outer hull turned out to be mainly high explosive missile storage bay, and now Fienak and Solan work together to set up a blockade with the many small missiles.
“Sir, the few patrol ships in the outer circumstellar belt are escalating their communication levels.”
“What? Are they still here? I thought I scared them off when I received Kat. Put them through. They’re not going to do much, but they can take care of the smallest scraps, I guess.”
As Fienak pages through the ship’s description, she sees that he is largely correct. Where their ship is filled to the brim with powerful weaponry and all kinds of high powered tools, the few self-sufficient patrol ships in the outer system have merely basic beam weapons. Those are fine when the only thing that needs doing is the incineration of the occasional asteroid or ship fragment. When it comes to the veritable swarms of space-faring Histaff that she sees being launched into orbit, their firepower is sorely lacking.
“And the rest of the system, sir? One space station, in particular, seems to be preparing for diaspora.”
“Add it to the list. should have known, should have known. That blue wave was the stuff, you know. Blue screens? Should have known better.”
Grasping her chair tightly now that Solan seems to be slipping back into his mad and rambling self, Fienak throws some more data to his screen. His mumbling stops as he takes in the new content. He works with a certain brilliance when he’s not insane, she must admit. It’s pretty obvious that his knowledge is as vast as it is shallow. She is sure he’s an expert in certain fields, but so far he has only shown her base level knowledge of many professions. The way in which he weaves a standard defensive web around the station tells her he has a base competency in tactics. Incorporating several lines of fire and overlapping fields with the few drones the ship had tells her that he knows the drones make and their capabilities. The thing she can’t help but admire is his poncho for keeping an overview of the situation. Not a single time does the main projector zoom in, the image of the entire battlefield constantly projected in front of him.
“Ma’am, sir, what do we do with this one?”
Fienak turns to the cockpit entrance and sees the new soldier kid hauling Stek’s unmoving carcass. “Just stuff him in a chair for now. And strap back in.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Fienak, keep up. Three bodies show Histaff activity. Get me the details.”
“Yes, sir!” she snaps out. She then adds the Histaff infected moon, wrecked Capital class ship, and space station to the tactical map, setting up a scanning routine that focuses their instruments on the threats one by one.
The battle that follows is abstract and rather boring. Like a slow-motion ballet, dots move across the projection at a glacial pace. A wave of small Histaff explodes from a particularly large Histaff cluster at the equator. The launch vessel barely made orbit and is countered with a precision beam drone Solan put there earlier. A shotgun of smaller creatures from the dark side of the planet is launched at the same time as light side orbital Histaff unfold massive solar sails, avoiding the long-range slugs that Solan and Fienak had shot hours earlier. The large ring station is a relatively easy fix, as the mentally challenged duo of pilots decides to just blow the thing to smithereens. Their limited combat capability forces Fienak to do a thorough structural scan, allowing them to target crucial beams and structural support. The space station slowly breaking up sends tonnes upon tonnes of Histaff slime and bone into space. It freezes rather quickly, and another scan shows that there’s barely anything left that’s capable of maneuvering in the void of space.
The stream of Histaff contamination vectors just doesn’t stop, though. As if the planet destroying infection needed to build some momentum, the number of new creatures entering the void of space increases. Their obvious target goal the next solar system over, both know that letting even a smidgen escape could spell the doom of millions. So the duo perseveres, leaving the small scale clean-up to the ships in the outer regions of the system.
“Ten minutes,” Fienak finally blurts out.
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No, sir! I’m just worried-”
“OF COURSE I CAN SEE THAT IT’S NOT STOPPING! Of course, I can see that in ten minutes, all our efforts will have been in vain. We should just leave, you know. Let other people worry about thi-”
Alarms go off, large red bars of text filling the entire cockpit.
“FINALLY! We really cut it close there, girl.” The grin on Solan’s face is more worrying than reassuring.
“What?” she asks, her mouth falling open seconds later. The Revenge system seems to have a new moon. A sphere hundreds of kilometres in diameter s
uddenly appears halfway into the system, a veritable swarm of small vessels detaching from the enormous thing.
“Let me just call the madman. No, overwrite code… Yes, directly.”
A large bearded face flickered into being. “Solan? Have you finally succumbed to those vices you don’t have? You let yourself go, I see. Or is that the newest fashion now?” The smile on the wrinkled, bearded, and stately face make Fienak feel like hugging the caller.
“Grandmaster, turns out you are right. I retract my accusations.”
Grandmaster smile widens as his booming laughter resounds throughout the entire ship. Fienak can barely hear awestruck whispers of 'the Grandmaster', and 'the Order' coming from the centre compartment. Fienak is once again lost, the lack of common knowledge she seems to be suffering from in certain areas glaring indeed.
"Haha, you younglings at least know when you’ve committed a wrong. That, I like about you, Solan. I don’t like the energy readings from your ship, though. Nor do I like the readings coming from this entire quadrant.”
“No doubt why you are here. We need to talk,” replies Solan, the sanest Fienak has ever seen him.
“Then talk, we shall. Come, let me invite you.” And the face is gone. Fienak feels lesser now. She has the feeling that a core factor of herself just went away, the disappearance of the Grandmaster leaving a hole in her heart.
“Hold on, girl. And no speaking, okay?”
Fienak nods. Fienak then tries to lift her head but finds it rather impossible to do so. She barely manages to twist her head around, peeking at the instrumentation to see what's going on. The moon-size ship grows smaller while simultaneously growing larger. Large chunks are detaching, and she recognizes wedge sized ships bristling with guns and massive constructs with mechanical maws meant for mining. It grows bigger because she can actually see it through the window now, the previously small pinprick growing into a massive wall of metal, crystal, and support structures that fills the entire screen. The telltale groans and shifting of metal items tell her that the ship is caught within the most powerful magnetic beam she has ever even heard about.
GalaxSec: A Sci-Fi LitRPG (Skeleton in Space Book 2) Page 35