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Alex pulled his Life back from the two bodies that had been laid out before him, the capy-were-its looking even odder, now that no magic was obscuring them.
He looked at his status and grimaced.
Alex JohnsonHP: 5561/5561 [13545]
Even with his apparently ridiculous recovery of Life, he was still down to less than half of his usual HP, with the max clamped down to match, even if that was slowly relaxing.
He felt a bit of odd percolation within his Life, but decided to just let it do its thing, especially since he was far better off than he’d been only a few minutes earlier. “Thank you, Natasha. That would have been… unideal.”
She shrugged. “Sure thing. So… the jump destination?”
Alex nodded. “I need to eat some more, can we go back to the dining area?”
Natasha hesitated. “Do… do you want to loot them?”
He blinked. “I’d thought they’d already been stripped of anything valuable.”
She shrugged. “The others have been. No weapons, as apparently those are conceptually very hard to hide from the ship’s magical detection systems—not that I understand that distinction given their fangs and claws, but whatever—their armor is a close cousin to our cover-alls, seemingly bent more toward defense, stealth, and infiltration. It’s lesser in other regards.”
He grunted. “And the proportions are all wrong.”
Rather than mocking him, she simply gave him a flat look and said two usually unconnected thoughts. “Science Fiction. Magic.”
Alex placed his palm on his forehead. “Right, right. So, the only thing of value is their suits?”
“Essentially.”
“Didn’t you kill one?”
“Yeah, and Grant the other, but we figured you’d find something crazy and amazing to do with them, then we could benefit when we encounter similar loot.” She gave him a tight-lipped, wide smile that somehow reminded him of the Grinch on the way to steal Christmas.
“That’s… understandable I suppose.” Alex swallowed involuntarily. “Thank you.” He looked down at the corpses, grimacing. “How do I get them off?”
Natasha stepped back and shrugged. “The crazy starts now.”
Alex gave her a flat look, then reached down and gingerly touched the cold material.
As he did so, his sense twitched, picking up tendrils of power within the enemy suit and his own that reached toward one another without connecting, seemingly waiting for… A command?
He looked closer. What would they do?
He was slapped in the face with an entire resort’s worth of tourist destination pamphlets, jerking back and groaning. “So, there are a lot of things I could do.” He tutted, muttering as he perused the magics before him. “Use my health to repair their armor, healing them through a direct connection, draining me or my coverall’s integrity—Oh, that’s grayed out because… dead. What else? What… else… I can pull telemetry, or logs… but I don’t have the permissions for that.” On and on it went until… “Huh… subsume?”
If he was reading the vague, metaphorical pamphlet correctly, he could destroy the other suit—only possible because the wearer was no longer living—and alter his to match that model exactly, or he could destroy it and attempt to pull details from how it differed from his own. When he had enough info, he could modify his suit using the gathered materials and information.
Alex sighed. “How many curse-wrought progression trees will there be to climb?”
He dismissed the complaint, then shrugged. Empowering his cover-all wouldn’t be a bad thing… Then, he grinned.
This first one, he repaired with a bit of his own health, which refilled basically as quickly as he spent it until the alien suit was fully intact once more.
Then, he pulled just the outfit into his Inventory, again, only possible because the creature was dead.
After that was accomplished, he went to the other and gave the command to subsume.
He was presented with a simple set of choices.
Capy-were-it Battlesuit SubsumedReplicateIntegrateInvestigate
So, he could make his suit like this one, add parts of it to his own, or simply try to have his suit learn from it, getting more in the long run, assuming he could find more of the things.
He already had one in Inventory, but that was his backup, as he planned on abusing the wording surrounding his own suit.
He’d lose one suit at the end of the tutorial. If he had more than one, though… His grin grew.
At the very least, maybe I can trade them in for merit in the final store.
He didn’t know if he’d ever see another of these creatures, so he decided to take the safe path. “Integrate.”
His coverall liquified around his contacting hand, and the armor seemed almost to shatter, being drawn into his glove.
A moment later, he felt various parts of the coverall thicken just slightly… and that was it.
It would be marginally more protective going forward.
Alex sighed, unsure what he really expected. “Fair enough.”
He really wanted his coat back in good condition.
That’ll be soon. He pushed himself to his feet, feeling his dadao shift in its sheath on his back. That reminded him of what he’d wanted to test.
With a slight flexing of his Life Manipulation skill, he pulled thirty-two Life from the sword… into himself.
Living(Lineage) Steel Dadao7968/7968 [8000]
Alex JohnsonHP: 6596/6596 [13545]
He grinned. It hadn’t cost him anything more than a bit of mental effort to move the Life, just like it didn’t cost him to shift such around within his body.
It wasn’t much, but he’d just gained another pool of Life, and just a bit more Life regeneration.
…Wait.
Would that mean that his ring would extend to the regeneration of the sword?
He looked down, trying to dig through the magics of the ring. According to the description, it should quintuple his base health regeneration, and if the sword was a part of him…?
He grimaced slightly. No, he could see deeper into the description now. ‘Base’ meant him without gear, and therefore, if it applied to the sword, it would actually remove its separate regeneration entirely, which he didn’t want.
Funnily enough, if he had skills or other means of boosting his health regeneration beyond its base—like the sword—it was possible that the ring might actually restrict him back down to only being able to recover at five times ‘base’.
The more you know, I suppose.
He shook his head, returning his gaze to the two bodies before him.
More than anything, they looked like wild animals, put down after a rampage. One’s chest was caved in from the side, the other had a hole through the side of its head.
In truth, the tableau was sad, given they’d had at least a bit of intelligence about them.
Even so, in the end, they weren’t real, and he and his needed to survive. “Alright, let’s go.”
Natasha gave a tilt to her head. “Don’t want anything from the bodies? If I remember correctly, capybera meat is a delicacy.”
Alex made a face and shook his head. “Not eating anything sapient, no matter how barely they qualify.”
“You might recant later, but I suppose I can understand the sentiment. Still, nothing?”
He shook his head. “No desire to take gory trophies of dubious value.”
“Very well.” She touched each and pulled them into her own Inventory. “I’ll handle them.”
“Thank you.” His glance lingered. “Your Inventory’s bigger?”
“Of course. You’re not the only one working on your skills.”
He chuckled. “Fair enough.”
She gave a tiny smile. “So, you said you’re hungry. Shall I cook for you?”
Alex’s eye twitched. “No… thank you.”
She gave a predatory grin. “Are you sure? There’s quite a few interesting ingredients available.”
He narrowed his gaze at her. “You’re trying to avoid kitchen duty.”
She turned and strode back toward the dining area, not acknowledging his accusation.
Alex sighed and followed in her wake.
Ten minutes later, he was munching on another, self-generated ration bar, trying not to taste it even as the other Initiates discussed their next destination.
It was good practice for Shaped Force Burst, as he determined to only shift the thing with that spell and his mouth.
Juba was there with the Initiates as well, though he’d insisted that he was only an observer.
Audry was apparently still minding the rather rich deposit that Natasha’s skill had found, but she was nearing the point of marginal returns, where it might be better to see if they could find anything else of worth with their remaining time.
Regardless, the Initiates were rather split on where to go next, with two star-systems in the running.
One was noted as a pirate haven with no known base of operations, but it had a pair of ships spotted by long range sensors that matched raids happening in the area.
The other had a habitable planet, and was requesting technical assistance with some bit of colony equipment or other.
Essentially it came down to combat or no combat.
Alex… was actually torn. He was curious to see another planet, but the information made it seem like they wouldn’t be allowed to land. Too much merit to generate the world, however temporarily? Or something else…
On the other hand, he thought it would be useful for his skill growth to fight in their ship, and with the upgrades they’d given the ship, they should be up to the task. That was assuming that the capacities the two ships had shown in the raids they’d conducted were accurate.
The fact that the pair had fled another ship in the Innominate’s weight class indicated that the pirates weren’t confident in such a clash, and since the Innominate was better than the base model…
That seemed like the obvious choice, but Alex didn’t have a dog in the fight.
He had training to do, gear to repair, and skills to practice, and thoughts to avoid.
It had been years since he’d actively avoided thinking about—
He cut off that line of thinking with an internal eye-roll. Repression is a fine first step. It doesn’t lead to bad things at all. Not one bit.
The fact that he was supposed to keep from thinking about his training as well was simply icing on the cake.
He had decided to treat this space voyage as a potentially invaluable training opportunity before the ‘true’ conflict began.
Still, the others clearly wanted every Initiate to be there, so he sat, eating his bar.
He glowered at himself as he contemplated, making sure not to let his mind simply wander where it willed.
This bar was gross, despite him attempting to push it in other directions.
His understanding of the magical language didn’t help as the actual magics involved were entirely not controlled by him. The system put together a scrambled hash of spell-lines that were clearly the result of ‘does this work? No? Modify!’ research methodology, which did work out, but it meant that there was a lot of nonsense in the magic. Moreover, it was so overly intricate that he’d have absolutely no hope of putting it together without the system granted spell.
That’s the key, isn’t it? System granted Spells are useful because they allow you to cast beyond your ability in some way, maybe more than one way. Still, it was odd to feel his magic moving through patterns that literally didn’t change anything about the final result.
It’s like cross-talk in a planning meeting. All the System knows is that the results of the meeting were what it wanted, so it always replicates every part.
Something about that felt right to him and meshed with his growing integration of his understanding of the language.
Something out there was a contractor, hired with power—whether mana or Life or anything else that he knew of—and the spellform was the task description. It might even be correct to call it the standard operating proceedure—SOP—for the task.
Once the System had an SOP that got the job done for an agreed to price, it considered its job done, no matter how much it was over paying or what nonsense was filling the bloated SOP.
Though, Alex didn’t know how such a bloated spellform could still be so cheap… Possibly because the System made spell-lines were so cheap?
Just like a person making an incredibly fine, precise line was hard, but some printer could do fine lines more easily than thick.
He made a face as he swallowed the last of the first bar, then immediately created another, effectively squinting with his sense as he did so, and in the end, he thought that he’d found a reason.
The ‘echo-back’ from the casting was complex and convoluted, but as he understood the base, he could tell something quite interesting.
The casting was incredibly simple compared to the ‘instructions’ given.
It was still complex in the extreme, but not the insanity that the System had bundled to be cast for every ‘Create Rations’ use.
He couldn’t do anything with that information, but there it was.
“Alex?”
Alex jerked slightly, looking up and seeing everyone looking his way. He cleared his throat, taking the newly created ration bar from his mouth and slowly setting it to the side. “Yes?”
Kaylee sighed before clearly repeating a question. “We think that we should go to the planet, and find relatively ‘safe’ jumps for at least another day or so. Then, when you’re a bit more recovered, we should engage in ship clashes. How does that sound?”
Alex almost immediately agreed, but something held him back. “I appreciate that consideration, but I think we’re forgetting something.”
That got some raised eyebrows. Kaylee smiled. “Oh?”
“These are decidedly combat scenarios. Look at this latest jump? We chose to go mining, and while there was some danger in the jump, it looked like we made a good choice.”
Understanding of what he was saying spread through the other Initiates, Grant voicing it for them. “Then the capy-were-its.”
Alex nodded. “I think we can either choose overt danger or covert danger. Everything that looks safe is likely a trap.”
Kaylee smiled widely, and Pilar rolled her eyes, the older woman speaking, “So, he was listening.”
Alex frowned. “What?”
Kaylee shook her head. “No, he’s saying something different than I was, but he has a good point.”
He looked her way. “What did you say?”
“That choosing ‘safe’ paths would have other costs.”
Alex grunted. “Same, same, but different, yeah.”
“So…” John prompted. “You think ship combat?”
Alex shrugged. “Better the enemy you know, right? I imagine there will be curveballs regardless, but at least we’re not inviting oddities into our lives.”
It was clear that no one really wanted to choose, and Alex had a sinking feeling. Ahh, puff-balls.
Kaylee cleared her throat. “All in favor of following Alex’s lead?”
Everyone raised their hands, causing Alex to sigh. They hadn’t voted for an option; they’d voted for him. I just volunteered myself for leadership… again.
He really needed to stop doing that.