by Sean Oswald
“That is exciting and probably a good idea. Preventing the A’snkarnt from being able to gain information from our ship, or worse, control aspects of it, will be critical. As far as the implants, how do you want to proceed next?” Jay asked.
“Just to be clear, Ava and Veronica think that they can replace the programming or software in a few months, which you can provide them with. But given the size of the ship they say that will take decades if not centuries to replace all the hardware. Especially since we don’t even know what all is built into the A’snkarnt metals themselves.
“As for the implants, we would like to do a few more girls before we do yours and we will definitely want to do a few of the fuses before you. But maybe we do twenty girls tomorrow and if there are no hold ups then we do yours the next day,” Huong answered.
“I would be willing to go tomorrow, but I won’t argue with you about it. I know that you all have discussed it already. Hmm, there is something else,” Jay said.
“Yeah, you know how much I love being fused with you, but it makes it hard to surprise you. Spoils the fun half the time,” Huong pouted.
“Given what some of your surprises have been, I’m just as glad to get early warning, but this doesn’t feel like one of those.”
“No, not that kind of fun. The research into the brain surgery necessary to remove the implants as well as the adaptations for the new implants along with some conversations with Trudi have given us more ideas. We really are going to need you to fuse with her because her metalmancy skill seems especially useful.
“I don’t want you to freak out because we aren’t talking about going full cyborg or anything, but we believe it would be possible to merge some technology into our bodies for upgrades,” Huong said.
“What, are we not becoming godlike fast enough for you?” Jay asked with a snort.
Huong rolled over to face him and her bare breasts were now pressed up against his naked chest rather than being in his hands. Jay could only think, “No fair.” Any chance he had of arguing with her had just been cut in half and truthfully, he didn’t care. He was very much the kid in the candy store with a new treat.
“Why should we ignore any path to improvement? We just have to run tests to make sure it won’t interfere with our PSI generation. But just imagine if we could make that crown of yours into a permanent part of you without it being so obvious on your head. And yes, I know you are still wearing it now, because I asked. You are hunky enough on your own but that makes you positively glow,” Huong answered.
Jay shrugged his shoulders. He was used to that particular request. Apparently, it still had quite an effect on the girls. He felt like it was cheating a bit but none of them complained so he had gotten used to wearing it even during naked time. “Okay, your point is well taken. Especially if you could find ways to magnify the stats of everyone else with some implanted tech, just like the crown does for me.”
“That is part of the idea, but we are also experimenting with pulse cannons and other types of weapons that would be directly powered by PSI energy with or without PSI crystal backup batteries. Now everyone has offensive abilities and I know you would feel better if everyone had increased ability to defend themselves. Again, though this project is going to take some time and unless we do a massive time dilation just for that, there is no way we will have it ready by the time that we get to the next leviathan.”
“Okay, so a future project. I do think that getting the implants changed for everyone is priority number one. The secondary priority would be changing out all of the software on this ship to help prevent any hacking attempts from the A’snkarnt,” Jay said.
“Agreed,” Huong said. Then she looked up at him and said, “You know I miss getting time to talk to you. It isn’t your fault, I’m just as busy as you are in my own way, but I don’t have the benefit of being able to manipulate time. It is really nice to remember why I wanted to be with you in first place.”
“I feel the same way. Someday, our enemies will be dust and we will have decades and hopefully far longer to be able to enjoy each other and keep getting to know each other,” Jay said.
“That’s the future, for right now, I just wanna know something,” Huong said. She had that deliciously wicked smile on her face and Jay knew that serious time was over.
“What’s that?” he asked, biting at her bait.
“Well I don’t know that I will keep these things,” she said while lifting her newly enlarged breasts up, so they were practically covering his face. “But at least for right now I wanna know what it feels like to be a big-titted slut getting fucked by her man.”
Jay rolled her over onto her back and grinned down at her. “Oh, is that so?”
“Oh yeah, I’m definitely feeling slutty and look, I have big tits now. But I made a couple of other modifications, they just aren’t as obvious. Gonna have to go exploring if you want to find them,” Huong taunted.
“Oh, I like a challenge. Let me tell you though, there is only one obvious thing that breasts like these call out for…” Jay said.
Huong cut him off and said, “Call them tits.” When he looked at her a bit confused, she added, “Breasts are normally fine, but I want to be naughty today. Today I’m not your loving wife with a teensy, kinky streak. Today I’m your big-titted slut and I wanna see what that feels like. I don’t want you to make love to me. I want you to fuck the shit out of me and enjoy these big fun bags.”
Jay got his own wicked smile. “Well as I was about to say, slut, the one thing that I most want to do with tits like this is feel them squeezed around my cock while I’m fucking them. But if you can’t keep your mouth shut while I’m talking then I may have to stick something in it.”
“Promises, promises,” Huong began taunting again, but couldn’t finish as her mouth was soon quite full.
Chapter 9- Fusing Skills
The next part of his day was set aside for personal training. He began the time by setting up his tempus fugit field. He had a few things he wanted to go through but the first thing he wanted to do was work on his own refinement. His skill levels were much higher now and he wanted to see if he could make any more tweaks to his own body.
The last time he had tried he found that he was operating at the peak efficiency that he could achieve but he had more ideas now. He found that his body surged with far more PSI than the last time that he looked at it. The circulation rate was also increased. His secondary organs were starting to share a portion of the responsibilities performed by his regular organs. So now blood was being pumped not just by one heart but by two.
Interestingly though as he pushed in with his Life Sense or what was now his Evolved Assessment, he found that his body seemed to also be absorbing and using PSI as much as it did blood. Everywhere that blood went circulating nutrients, PSI was also present. He was actually unsure how much of his body was running on what he would have thought of as a natural biological process and how much of it was functioning on PSI.
As he looked at his core, he was struck again by how it appeared that the PSI was actually produced inside of him. He combined his PSI sight, Hyper Accuracy, and Evolved Assessment into one attempt to gain a deeper understanding. Rather than being content with pushing each of the skills to the fifth boost he also tried to weave them together.
Jay focused his will on making them work in complete unity. As he struggled to sync them up completely, he actually stopped looking at his core and started to focus more effort to controlling his skills more fully. That prompted him to activate the skill he had assimilated from Mia. Her Expanded Mind was at a skill level of 493. Other than PSI Crystals it was far and away her most developed skill.
He assumed that she used it repeatedly or more likely on a constant basis. Jay knew both from the fusion and from his discussions with her that it allowed her to open her mind up to knowledge that she didn’t possess. The knowledge had to exist, but she had gained a staggering number of things through this. Her insights had helped A
va, Huong, and the others despite the fact that she wasn’t much of a scientist herself.
That was one of the limitations of the skill. She had a great deal of difficulty passing on alien scientific knowledge even if her head was crammed full of it. Jay made a mental note to make sure that all the fuses working in the science lab considered Assimilating this skill from Mia. If Ava or someone had direct access to A’snkarnt knowledge in her head, she might be able to adapt the systems far more easily and quickly.
For now though, he was focused on trying to learn how to sync up skills. The knowledge that he got was far more touchy feely than he had expected. It was as though there was no actual established knowledge about the process anywhere in the universe. It did however give him a general feel for how to make the skills work together. He was filled with images and impressions of all the evolved humans who had managed to combo any skills together, much of which was ironically his own knowledge already.
Jay tried to apply it though. He sought that perfect frame of mind where they should sync to work in tandem. But then something odd happened. All of the resistance disappeared in an instant and a flashing notification appeared.
Three skills have evolved to form a new skill. Given that one of the skills was already an evolved skill this is now a Master Skill.
Evolved Assessment, PSI Sight, and Hyper Accuracy have evolved into Sensory Precision Mastery. The new skill will have a combined skill level of 75% of each of the skills added up.
That set the skill level to the new skill at 2646 which made it his third-highest skill. Instead of immediately trying it out though, Jay focused on his Expanded Mind skill which he had assimilated from Mia. He now had more knowledge about how to make skills work together but as he focused the skill on the question of how to evolve skills together, he started to piece together what needed to be done.
From there he looked at his skill list to see how he might improve them. The jump in skill level for that ability was crazy and if he could improve some of his other abilities that way it would be well worth this effort. The next ones that hit him were Evolved Telepathy and Evolved Projected Bond.
The telepathy had evolved on its own when he began to be able to read minds. It was a skill that he rarely used because it made him feel dirty in a “you can’t wash your hands often enough” sort of way. It was so invasive. Maybe he was being naive, but he couldn’t help how he felt about it.
The Evolved Projected Bond was a combination of his Sensual Projection and an ability that he had gotten from Mia, that of forming bonds. The interesting thing as he thought about it was that those were all forms of communications. Emotional or with word, temporary or permanent, it was all communication.
So, Jay focused his mind on trying to combine those abilities. It came together easier this time. Maybe because he was doing it for the second time or maybe because the skills had such a common thread. Either way he got the notification telling him that they had been combined into a master skill and that because they were both evolved skills, he gained 100% of the levels in both skills. The new skill was called Telepathic Bonding Mastery and had a level of six hundred twenty-six.
Again it was another leap forward for skills that he had difficult leveling up. Not as impressive as the first combination but still good. It prompted him to look at his other skills and try to envision ways in which they might be merged. At first, he was just coming up blank. Then he saw Evolved Adaptive Speed and Primal Power.
Primal Power was a skill he got from Jessie and allowed him to adapt animal powers to himself although not as much as a physical adaptation as more of an instinctual one. Evolved Adaptive Speed was the most bizarre adaptation he had as it was a combination of his physical speed and an ability that he got from Ava which allowed him to adapt to changes more quickly.
The more he thought about them the more he realized that they were both adaptive abilities. So, what the heck. He tried to push them together using the knowledge he had already gained. This time there was a bit more resistance. Maybe that was because the skills didn’t match as well. Or maybe not.
He calmed himself and realized that intent mattered. That meant that what he believed about something mattered. In this particular instance he lacked confidence about how these skills should work together. It was like he was trying to fit a key into a lock during the middle of winter and his hands were shaking. The key and the lock would fit just fine but he needed to warm his hands first.
Jay breathed deeply and let the feeling of the rightness inherent in what he was doing flow over him. He knew this was a shortcut, but it was also a logical step in improving his abilities’ functionality. As he relaxed, the abilities just naturally meshed together, resulting in a new notification. He now had a new skill called Primal Speed and Adaptation Mastery with a combined skill level of three thousand six hundred and six.
He felt great joy at the victory and after dancing a little dance that was probably best none of his wives had seen him doing, he sat back down and focused again trying to find more skills to combine.
Once again, none of the skills looked like they could be merged properly. Jay tried looking at it every which way but there were just not any logical combinations that followed. Awareness, Precognition, and Iron Will just didn’t mesh, at least not in any way that he saw.
Then another wild idea struck him. Did the combined skills all have to come from one stat group? He just couldn’t remember if any of his evolutions in the past had involved skills from more than one stat. Once he stopped limiting himself to looking at skills within a singular stat, he immediately saw one that looked promising, natural even. But it involved two of his most important skills, so he wanted to try this with something else first.
Iron Will was still important but he was more willing to test the theory with this, so he tried to combine Iron Will with Samantha’s skill Judgment. He calmed his mind and tried to believe that this should work. Since neither skill was already involved, he didn’t get a mastery skill but instead got Evolved Imposing Will as a Kinesis. Now not only could his will protect him but he could also impose it almost like a debuff on others. The skill level was only at twelve hundred and nine but that was mostly because he had not had any occasion to use Judgment up to this point.
Because it worked so well, he went to town on trying combinations. The next he created was Evolved Temporal Sensory Manipulation with a level of seventeen hundred ninety-five. It gave him 75% of both his Temporal Manipulation and Precognition and put it into formation.
Jay’s proficiency with the combinations was growing with each success and he became so confident that he worked to combine skills from three stat groups. Body Modification, Extreme Structural Adaptation, and Evolved Genesis were all skills that affected the body, either his or someone else. What was healing but a form of body modification and the same for the extreme adaptation that he got from Bong-Cha, it was just regeneration on steroids.
Because the one was already an evolved skill, he ended up with Genesis Modification Mastery at a level of twenty-two hundred eighty-three. That more than doubled his Body Modification skill, but most impressive it was a huge jump for his healing skill that had been under two hundred.
After completing that skill evolution, he felt a wave of extreme exhaustion flow over him. It had been a long time since he had been this tired. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and instead soon was lying on the ground snoring away.
He only woke up when Amelia was poking him. He startled awake and was shocked to find that he was surrounded by at least half of his fuses. They all had worried looks on their faces. “What’s wrong” was all that he managed to get out. He didn’t know how they had managed to make it into his Tempus Fugit field. He should have had days to train.
“What’s wrong he asks,” Amelia said, throwing her hands up into the air.
Mia was standing over him and said, “We were waiting when your training time was supposed to be over. You were lying there with your bo
dy twitching. According to your status sheet you leveled up twice during that training session and passed the ninth threshold.”
Jessie said, “What she is leaving out is that whatever pain or struggle you went through was so bad that we could catch bits of it even though you were in a different time flow. It was crazy, I can’t imagine how bad it must have been for you.”
Jay was starting to feel more alert and looked over at Amelia. “Love you, wife, but you should take lessons from CeeCee on how to wake me up.” Then he popped up and playfully moved to use Ava as a shield between him and Amelia.
“Whatever, I was just worried,” Amelia said. Then she softened her tone. “We are just glad you are back but now you need new clothes again.”
Jay chuckled. He had grown another two inches and was now a full eight feet four inches tall. “Okay, well I think it is time for some quiet time. I’m gonna have a meal and play with my kids, after I change of course. All of my fuses are invited, and we need to have a conversation about some things that I discovered today.”