Histaff

by Andries Louws

  Douglas has been learning, after all. One of the things he has learned is that spell shapes don’t need a lot of mana. The first time he ever cast a spell, he poured his entire mana pool into the shape with wild abandon. The spell did form - the dog did get skewered by that earth spike after all - but it cost him a lot of mana, most of which was wasted.

  Douglas now estimates he needs a mere ten or twenty mana points for each fireball. The arcanist stone only needed what Douglas felt to be a couple dozen mana points before it was refilled and saturated. This includes the power that seeped out immediately upon filling the empty magical shell, refilling all the runes he scratched on the outside of the ship. The current situation does not encourage Douglas to check his status page, but he estimates he has room for another half-dozen fireball spells.

  The next wave of bone armoured monsters thus swiftly receives a fireball to the carapace the moment they cluster together in the narrow doorway. The gaping opening stays empty for a few minutes after that, indicating that the bone beasts have a level of intelligence similar to - but probably exceeding - Douglas’. He gingerly peers outside while holding a flaming spell at the ready. The cautiousness of this action is immediately rewarded when a flailing mass of blades and limbs tries snatching the skeleton.

  A hasty step backward and a hastily thrown spell later, Douglas gets a proper glimpse of the state of the cargo bay. For some reason, the reworked and the rare other Histaff beasts have left the bare metal of the cargo bay alone. The ramp is still lowered, as is the landing gear. Just away from the ramp is a roiling mass of white armour plates and bone weapons, the little bit of light inside the ship hangar glinting off sharp edges.

  “HOW LONG?” shouts Douglas.

  “Ten minutes!” is the oddly chipper reply.

  Douglas nods, his forehead horn scraping against the inside of his visor, and steps outside. The white reworked beasts shuffle aside, the tide of smooth and jagged white making way for an as of yet unseen being. A single limb stomps into view. A single segmented foot - red goop dripping from the seams - slams into the hangar floor just in front of the lowered ramp. At least five metres in diameter, the owner of this limb towers above the ship. Even Douglas can deduce that this reworked is different from the others.

  The ship bucks and trembles like it hasn’t before, the foot in front of the cargo hangar lifting off the floor slightly. Douglas feels the mana in the hull fading faster all of a sudden. The weird feeling of his power vanishing from around him makes him worried on a completely selfish level; it feels like his own body is losing power.

  He rushes back to the pilot area, tossing one last fireball through the cargo bay door while stumbling over the trash littered everywhere. He looks at Katare - who has a rather disturbing happy and fascinated expression on her face - while walking over to the mana stone in the floor. He lets more mana seep inside, the sensation of his power flooding the ship feeling oddly rewarding.

  He then looks upwards just in time to see a massive, bone-clad limb smashing into the ceiling, plunging the entire bridge into darkness. Then the holographic walls flash once before red error messages start scrolling along the walls.

  “You didn’t make the sensor array stronger, I guess? Ah well, I can use sonic mapping now. It will attract every single living thing around for kilometres. Let’s make it a proper party!” Katare sounds somewhat unhinged as she types away at the control panels around her. The walls go black for a few seconds before a three-dimensional scan of the ship’s immediate environment shows up.

  Looking around, Douglas almost suspects that the entire ship, all the beasts, and the entire space station turned into translucent glass somehow. Then another barely audible pulse shoots away from the boat, updating the translucent map of the environment.

  “Constant scanning mode - there’s no one around that we can piss off, and this is all rather interesting.” A crooked smile on her face, Katare taps on some more projected buttons before the map surrounding them turns into a constantly strobing and updating light show. The nearly inaudible pulsing sound starts constantly droning, shifting pitch in an oddly melodic manner.

  Douglas looks around in awe, the amount of detail on display allows him a perfect image of the outside world. He looks down and sees the hydroponics area. The large number of reworkeds are all moving in a single direction. Following the stream, he sees them crawling up and out the hole he crawled back out not too long ago. Looking back to the mall, he manages to catch a glimpse of a single reworked furiously savaging the bulkhead separating the mall from the hangar. The wall on the opposite side of the hangar has multiple holes, he sees.

  Looking at the monsters surrounding them, Douglas sees several types. Most beasts are similar to the first one he met, if not smaller. Ten metres in heights seems to be the upper limit for the creatures. The size of the beasts climbing up from the hydroponics area don’t seem to exceed five metres in height, probably due to the relatively low ceiling down there. He has a pretty good view of the masses surrounding the ship, the ghostly outlines of the holographic projection letting him see the station and its occupants inside out. He also sees that all the reworked beasts are backing up from the ship, making an empty circle around it. The smaller infected beasts, rodents, and small limb spiders don’t even dare come near.

  The reason for the breathing room is a rather large problem, though. The beast casually standing on top of the ship - the same one responsible for crushing the sensor array and camera - is the largest yet. The hangar’s ceiling is around a hundred metres high, big enough for the boats and spaceships to fly in and out of the area with some room to spare for other facilities. The massive reworked beast barely fits. Its body is shaped like a cylinder that rests upon six stumpy, tubular legs. One of these legs is trying very hard to crush the vessel, and Douglas feels the mana around him working very hard to combat this attempt.

  Lost in the ethereal sights of the sonic radar projection around him, the skeleton nearly fails to notice that the mana stone is running dry. He shoves mana inside the stone once more, the sensation of his own power rushing to fill the struggling runes as cathartic as ever. Douglas keeps staring at the sights around him as he keeps a trickle of mana going towards the stone. The front of the big reworked monster tilts its head towards the ship. The segmented sphere on a rather stumpy neck stares at the vessel with a couple dozen red eyes. It slowly raises another foot and plants it on the vessel. The blue runes flare up again, doubling in brightness.

  Doubling the stream of mana he pours into the stone, the sitting skeleton decides to see what the blue boxes want to tell him so desperately.

  [ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 31 slain; 1,932,628 xp earned ]

  [ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 25 slain; 712,532 xp earned ]

  [ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 29 slain; 1,017,238 xp earned ]

  [ Reworked Histaff chrysalis lvl 21 slain; 190,428 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 10 51,200/51,200 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 11 76,800/76,800 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 12 128,000/128,000 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 13 204,800/204,800 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 14 332,800/332,800 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 15 537,600/537,600 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 16 870,400/870,400 xp earned ]

  [ Arcane skeleton lvl 17 1,408,000/1,408,000 xp earned ]

  [ Meditation 2 lvl 14 ]

  [ Mana Control 2 lvl 16 ]

  [ Mana Sense 2 lvl 14 ]

  [ Spell Shaping 2 lvl 14 ]

  [ Magical Animation 2 lvl 5 ]

  [ Multi Casting lvl 6 ]

  Douglas is slightly disappointed that all the trouble he just went through only netted him four kills. He was sure he saw more reworked beasts catching fire. The numbers are becoming rather large, Douglas thinks, but then again, one of the ten-metre-high monstrosities probably does have more fighting than–

  [ Basic Math lvl 3 ]


  –two hundred thousand cows. Then again, maybe not? Two hundred thousand cows is a rather abstract concept, and the bone beasts are pretty close, so that might be skewing Douglas’ opinion a bit.

  The skeleton looks around, the engraved ship holding for now. Looking at the workshop his skull armour came from, he sees an odd shape laying on the workbench. The intricately formed figure is showing up in relatively high contrast, the fine details appearing with a much higher brightness than the simple tools in the sonic map. “You want the metal person?”

  Katare jolts as she turns to Douglas, having nearly dozed off as another odd coping mechanism. “What? A metal person? No, I don’t need that one at the moment, why?”

  “How long?”

  “A little under seven minutes left,” is her reply after a quick glance at the readout.

  “I can get it?”

  Katare stares at the sitting skeleton for a long while. She tilts her head back and forth a few times as if weighing pros and cons. A long contemplation period later, she shakes her head. “No need to spend the last few minutes of your dumbass little life hauling stuff that won’t work.”

  “I can make it work.”

  “You can switch my philotic link to a primitive android frame?”

  “No, I can make it move.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but no. Five minutes. Maybe we’ll get off this station after all. Then we will only have a couple hundred years of short jumps, scavenging for fuel, air, water, and foo… and scavenging for fuel to look forward to. Maybe this ship’s previous occupants downloaded something other than the propaganda? Let’s see… This entire computer is filled with Flartanxian flap porn… Right…” Katare tries to make herself small while attempting to avoid contact with the very chair she is sitting on.

  “Look, another.”

  “You’re talkative all of a sudden. Are you alright?” Katare shifts her piercing gaze from the sitting skeleton to the subject he is pointing at. “Great, another.”

  A second behemoth has stepped into the hangar, long blades and barbs tearing long rents into the ceiling and floor. All the ships that weren’t already crushed to bits are obliterated as they are shoved aside.

  “Douglas, you know what?” The addressed skeleton turns his head towards the seated female addressing him. “If we leave here - and that seems less and less likely every second - I might just forgive you. I might not order a galaxy-wide search in order to find and pain-vat all your relatives. That’s how badly I don’t want to be here right now…”

  “Okay,” replies Douglas.

  They both look at the approaching horror. Douglas doubles the steady trickle of mana flowing into the ship through the stone as the reworked stomping on the ship picks up its pace. The approaching competition seems to spur their current attacker on as it starts using three of its six legs in its bashing efforts. Douglas bounces around inside the bridge as the entire vessel is pounded into the floor with each impact.

  “And it’s done. Just as I suspected. That was the engine warmup. This piece of shit can now initiate its starting procedure, and it lacks any form of timer or ready estimate. Ah well, at least I get to die knowing I’ll be the only sapient who has ever seen two reworked behemoths up close. That's… No, that just sucks. Oh warp farked help me. Dad, where are you?” Tears start welling up in Katare’s eyes as she looks from her display to the approaching behemoth.

  Douglas himself wonders whether he should start contemplating death as well. The mana pool in his forehead feels enormously larger than before, as does the amount of mana it generates. This does not deny the fact that he is losing mana fast in his struggle to keep the runes powered.

  A white sword shoots from the approaching behemoth, clattering against the ship’s hull and jerking it around. Its landing legs have long since been reduced to scrap, the impact of the hinged weapon causing it to rock in its steadily deepening crater.

  Douglas manages to right himself from where he smashed into the wall just in time to crash into one of the empty chairs as the two behemoths start some form of territorial fight.

  “Ahaha, they’re fighting over who gets to crush us! Aren’t they a hive mind?” Katare stares at the spectacle with dead fish eyes while chuckling hollowly. Round, white limbs crash into spiked blades, sheets of bone cracking and blobs of red liquid flying everywhere. The cylinder and blade behemoths half-heartedly attack each other for a few rounds before the cylinder beast takes a few steps back.

  The floor trembles as the two massive beasts jockey for position before they settle down and start pounding on the ship. Douglas tries crawling back to the mana stone, hampered as he is thrown around constantly. Sensing that the stone is nearly empty, he makes a desperate lunge. He manages to toss some mana into the ship the moment he is smashed into the sidewall again. The two behemoths are now bashing the ship into the ground, their previous fight forgotten.

  The odd attraction emanating from the ship combined with the fact it just won't break only sends them further into a frenzy. Another minute later, Douglas manages to shove some more mana into the stone, making the runes on the hull flare up once more. Douglas wonders whether he should fix some more of his body but realises he can't spare the mana. He already has to prevent his regenerated power from running into the few battered bones that are still functional, if fractured. Douglas loses track of time even more than usual while stuck inside this loop. Each time he barely manages to reach the stone in the nick of time. He even has to cast his mana hand a few times to reach it before the runes run out of power.

  Then an eternity of being slammed around inside the small bridge later, Katare’s manic and yet depressed laughter cuts off as the panels around her flash green. “And we’re off! Wahaha! I might be an abominable conglomeration of processors, probably cloned flesh, and a random soul, but I guess I won't die today! MUAHAH! Skeleton, keep the strength thing going because this is not a good idea. Here, this should give you some time to top it off. Locking onto surrounding body … Now!”

  Stillness. Douglas suddenly falls to the floor, the vessel around him unmoving. The ethereal spectres on the holo-screen are still smashing the ship with all their might, but it seems to have no effect anymore. Feeling like he should be heaving a great, deep breath right about now, Douglas crawls over to the gem with his single working limb and shoves the last of his mana pool inside the gem. Blue light explodes from the stone, lighting up the runes on the outside.

  “Pretty! If we don’t die, stop being a dick to people. Right, performing a heliocentric lock in… three… two… NOW!”

  The engine at the heart of the ship gives a single lurch before the entire vessel is locked in space. The small and honestly rather weak gravitic engine works on a few simple yet complex principles. The cheaply mass-produced driver locks onto gravity fields and moves around while pushing and pulling on the actual warping of space and time itself. This way, docking with a space station can be as simple as gradually locking your vessel with the minute pull of gravity the station’s physical mass generates, matching velocity and rotation with ease. This, of course, has an effect on the space station, but the sheer difference in mass usually makes this negligible. The crude way the gravity field lock-on mechanism is mass produced means that a relatively advanced controlling computer is needed in order to carefully control the way it is used. Katare just overrode all of these safety features and forced the overworked engine to lock on to the nearest star.

  The ship dodges the latest attack from the cylinder beast and slams through the spiked behemoth. It careens diagonally across the hangar floor, carving a red line through the surrounding reworked monsters. Splinters of bone and red goop go flying everywhere as the vessel's relative velocity with the space station goes from zero to a couple of dozen kilometres a second in a few seconds. It slams into a single ship before piledriving through the offices between the vacuum of space and the hangar. The air inside the hangar barely has time to start rushing through the hull breach before
the ship shoots out of sight, suddenly kilometres away from its long resting place.

  Katare also realises that she really should have checked whether or not the space station is currently located on the prograde or retrograde position of the planet. Smashing through the side of the space station might just be possible, from what she has observed in terms of how strong the ship’s hull is currently. Boring through an entire planet is probably less plausible. Luckily, the white vessel merely slams through the top of the red planet’s atmosphere, leaving a white-hot trail of superheated air in its wake. The ship halts its momentum relative to the sun, which causes the planet to shoot away into the blackness of space with high speed. The incredible changes in velocity didn’t leave the ship unharmed, though.

  The small engine creates a warp like field shaped like the vessel. This means that all the air, walls, support structures, trash, and inhabitants remained relatively still. The outside world did have quite the influence on the vessel, however. The initial deluge of roadkilled reworked smashed all the remaining glass, windows, landing gears, and other external items that were not enhanced by the magical runes. The trip through the hangar offices breached quite a few internal walls. In particular, a high-quality rosewood desk smashed through the front viewing windows, fragmenting while smashing through the door leading to the hallway. It - and all the furniture entering right behind it - peppered the hallway with wood fragments while bursting into the living room door.

  Hurtling through the atmosphere burned all the trash to a crisp as the ship’s interior was filled with ram-heated plasma. This also blew the bridge door free from its hinges, tossed Douglas around some more while pulverizing every single unarmoured bone in his suit and deep-fried Katare’s face off.

  The ship now hangs still in the solar system while the holographic bridge controls shine a rather festive array of warning colours at Katare’s stripped skull. Douglas then flops down on her lap, his formless suit filled with a single alloy covered skull and a lot of white sand. The autopilot starts the simple preprogrammed routine Katare typed in moments before. Douglas rolls over onto Katare’s chest as the grav drive starts pushing against the sun’s deep gravity hole, moving the ship towards the solar system’s edge at an extremely sedate pace.