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Alex did the equivalent of jumping off the asteroid even as the pirate ships were still arriving, his sense of danger flaring—which was incredibly odd given the distances involved—emphasizing just how much his connection through the ship was enhancing and altering his skill.
It was interesting seeing a jump from the outside for the first time, and even as mana was flaring through the Innominate, Alex found himself momentarily fascinated by what he saw.
One ship seemed to be made of an infinite amount of angel hair pasta, all spooling out of the void, twisting and writhing around itself as it slid together until it clicked into place, and the seams between the various pieces faded from view.
The other hit reality like an angry demon, punching through an invisible layer of nothingness that shattered like breaking glass, the bits fracturing and spinning off into more nothingness, leaving the ship whole and in place all at once.
Alex felt himself dry swallow.
It wasn’t that they’d arrived in different manners, nor that they’d seemed to arrive at the same time despite the two times he’d jumped having radically different arrival windows.
No, it was that the sense of the magics he got from each was identical.
To clarify, the magic cast had been identical, but the ripples of returning power might as well have been in completely different languages; not accents, languages.
It was as if both ships had issued commands in English, and gotten the task accomplished by, and feedback from, a Russian and a Scotsman respectively.
Sure, the end result was effectively the same—they had followed the same controlling ‘document’ after all—but there was nothing remotely similar about the means.
His basic magical cognition wouldn’t let him avoid the singular horrifying conclusion.
Even the System didn’t know how to fully govern jump-tech, and even with precisely identical magical commands involved, radically different means were used to achieve the desired results.
It didn’t help that Natasha was funneling her sensors his way, showing that what he’d observed wasn’t just a visual illusion.
Notice:You have glimpsed a foundational core of the System’s need for that which Runa revealed to you.
Understand and tremble.
Attribute Level-Up:Basic Cognition - MagicalLevel 8 → Level 10
Alex shoved the notification aside even as his speed reading dumped the knowledge conveyed into his mind. There wasn't any upgrade available so he likely had at least a bit more to do, regardless.
All of this had taken less than a blink, and the Innominate was still falling away from the asteroid, Alex flaring and flicking mana almost completely instinctively—following the granted trainings and skills—to roll his ship around.
Pilar was already firing, the space filling with growing dotted lines of non-laser fire.
Turrets they hadn’t disabled on the asteroid began to swivel their way behind them, and Alex buckled in for a strenuous next few minutes.
Juba was apparently fighting his way through the base, and by his reports, he'd need at least another ten minutes before he could successfully disable, circumvent, or take over the base.
The pirate ships were as nimble as they’d expected, sliding sideways with no outwardly visible means of thrust, neatly avoiding Pilar’s precision fire.
It was an odd thing, fighting at this distance as the incoming shots were very easy to see, and that meant that they were individually quite possible to avoid.
The pirates dodged another set of larger shots that Pilar sent their way even as they began to draw closer.
Only through a plethora of attacks would Alex and his companions be able to—
Pilar’s larger attacks detonated, throwing heat out in a sphere that impacted and rocked the two pirate ships from multiple angles all at once, the shots that they had easily dodged now being the origin points for the explosions.
Even as Alex executed something equivalent to a lateral spin to avoid a combination of incoming fire, he barked a laugh. “Good shot!”
She didn’t respond verbally, but he thought he heard a contented ‘hmm’ even as the Innominate continued to fill the sky with fire.
Unfortunately, while the detonation had definitely thrown off their plans, the ships were sturdy enough that they seemed largely undamaged.
Alex was accelerating as fast as he could without warping, trying to put distance between them and the mobile weapons platform that was the asteroid.
We really should have dealt with that more completely. Even as he thought it, though, he knew it was a bit of a foolish notion. Had the pirates taken much more time, Juba could have subverted it to aid the Innominate, giving them a decided advantage.
If the pirates hadn’t come back at all, it would have been their only reward for this already lengthy mission… relatively speaking.
The only downside to the plan had been if the pirates returned very quickly, and it was just bad luck—or Tutorial shenanigans—that had brought about the worst case scenario.
Alex felt building, sympathetic frustration as the pirates continued to do things that seemed impossible, in order to dodge most of Pilar’s shots, even going so far as maintaining reasonable distance so that her occasionally interspersed detonating ordinance didn’t do much.
How could the ships even move in those ways?
It was ridiculous that they weren’t seeming to obey the physics of flight and…
Alex groaned internally.
He’d played enough games with flight-simulation type mechanics that he’d fallen back into seeing this in the same light.
There was no up, no down. Aerodynamics were irrelevant, it was just about the firing arcs of the weapons and the profile presented to the enemy, or along any given vector really.
Seen in that light, the pirate’s ‘flying’ was perfectly reasonable.
In fact, the only real difference was that it looked like their magical dampeners—that which locked the internals to a fixed frame of reference—had a higher tolerance, which tracked with what Alex understood.
The ships didn’t actually have better ability to maneuver on a fundamental level. They were all using effectively the same magical technology after all, but the pirate ships had smaller volume to inertially lock, and that meant they had more they could do within safety spec, acceleration wise.
And that was all the time Alex had.
Their ships closed to within a few miles of one another, and the pressure rose exponentially.
Thankfully, he’d made some distance from the asteroid by that point, and with the proximity of the pirate ships, the plethora of turrets had to be far more sparing in their covering fire.
For a space battle, this was dog-fight range, and Alex finally, finally understood that turn of phrase.
He’d only seen a few instances where dogs tussled, and most of them had been the pups just playing with one another, but he could recall being surprised at how much like wrestling it had looked, the animals ducking, dodging, and rolling around and over one another in a tangle.
That’s what this was.
The two ships were darting in, trying to stay out of point-defense range while bringing their own weapons close enough to be difficult to dodge. Alex asked Pilar to follow his lead and picked a ship and stuck to it with his more clunky movements, the other nipping at his heels as he twisted, spun and shifted orthogonally while pursuing the target.
That ship was no fool, and used its greater acceleration to pull further and further away.
Alex grinned.
It had worked.
The ship he’d chosen was nearly three hundred miles away now, with the other flitting around between two and twenty.
Honestly, if Alex had shown better piloting skills from the beginning, this wouldn’t have worked. But he’d shown himself to be a newbie, and they’d sought to take advantage.
“Switch!”
Alex rolled the Innominate fully over in a maneuver that would have shattered an airplane had it tried, but one that didn’t even redline his Stress-Introspection of the ship. Huh, I could do this faster next time.
Regardless, the main guns lined up on the second ship even as it came in for another harrying pass, and Pilar lit them up.
The first ship saw the change in circumstances, and altered its vectors of acceleration, but Alex had bought them a short window of one-on-one time.
They would exploit that mercilessly.
The Innominate wasn’t suddenly able to out-fly the little pirate ship, but Pilar had picked up a key concept, herding fire.
Alex was sure that there was probably a technical term for it, but that’s what it looked like to him.
Pilar was purposely missing a good portion of her shots to herd the target in the direction that they wanted.
It helped that the pirate vessel wasn’t about to go further from the other ship that was even now trying to get back into the clash. That limited one entire vector of evasion for the little ship.
Even so, it was still incredibly nimble, and the asteroid was once again adding to the chaos of the fight.
Those turrets were either automated, or the pirates weren’t very good at communicating, because the incoming shots were as much hindrance as help for the pirate. Though, that was partly due to how far they were from the base now.
The travel time of the ordnance meant that Pilar could actually incorporate it into her herding fire.
Even so, she didn’t have sufficient weaponry, skill, or practice to exploit her funneling to land a hit. Her efforts did allow Alex to draw ever closer, aiming for when the point-defenses could come into play and turn their simple numerical superiority in regard to weaponry into a tide upon the sand.
That was one thing that had been quite obvious. The pirates had gone out of their way to add far more heavy weaponry on their little vessels than they’d normally have, but that had clearly meant they reduced the amount of smaller weaponry they had at their disposal.
Everything was a trade-off.
They drew closer and closer, Alex continuing to avoid all the incoming attacks from the two ships and the asteroid all.
It wasn’t quite enough.
Maybe if the implanted training had been real, or if they’d had enough time to fully integrate it into their innate capabilities, then they might have clinched the destruction of the singular ship, but it wasn’t, and they hadn’t.
Three things changed all at once.
First, the asteroid base concentrated its fire into a single small region, effectively making that a no-go zone for everyone involved.
Second, the other pirate ship came back into close-combat range, all their guns blazing in a single volley rather than the staggered cadence they’d held to before. That forced Alex to dodge more completely than he’d been wont to do up to that point.
Third and finally, the closer ship flipped and dove straight at them.
Alex responded with a spinning roll, bringing the arcs of the main guns around to focus on that one ship.
Pilar fired, destroying their shields and sending cascading sparks and plumes of burning gas rippling down the hull. That should reduce its functionality, even if it hadn’t destroyed it.
But it had all been cover for the true plan, a distraction.
Out of the ‘no-go’ zone came an all-too-familiar formation of pods.
Lenka’s point defenses lit up, hammering into the incoming boarding attempt, but they knew it wouldn’t be enough. Those things were shielded for short duration, making them all but uncrackable if they were launched at close enough range.
Alex rolled the ship, preventing the incoming pods from contacting the underbelly of the Innominate.
He knew he couldn’t get out of the way completely, so he did his best to choose their point of contact.
The pods bypassed the shield with a pulse of magic that Alex read as being oddly… conceptual? It was a sort of odd agreement between the shields as the magic on the pod connected and subtly altered that of the Innominate.
This was an issue with the overcomplex magic used, it left room for exceptions to slide in that didn’t violate the ongoing instructions but were still not as desired.
As a result of the melding of magics, Alex was able to tell that the pods couldn’t be directly damaging to the ship, nor could they carry ordnance or anything else that was a threat to the Innominate itself. The people inside the pods, though? They would be threat enough.
So, the ship’s shields could be spoofed by non-threatening assault pods and the right magic? It seemed an odd loop-hole, but he had to admit that it had still taken them a lot of power to pull off, and one of the pods hadn’t succeeded, being knocked away to spin out to a distance where Pilar was able to turn it to ash.
Alarms flared as the cargo-bay—where the Initiates had been doing their sparring—was breached, and Grant gave a shout before it was cut off as he left his duty station.
John clicked his tongue, vanishing as he said, “I’ll help him.”
Natasha growled, and Alex decided to give her a push. “Go. He’ll need the help. We’ll hold things together out here.”
He flipped the ship, feeling just a bit of force on his body as he dipped past the red-line to avoid a cluster of fire.
Natasha grunted and was gone.
The pirate ship that had disgorged the assault pods suddenly ripped sideways, the maneuver well past any potential redlines—for a crewed ship.
Alex groaned. Is it on auto-pilot? He considered, then remembered his own command cuffs. The helmsman was piloting remotely now. Well, kill the pilot, disable the ship.
He messaged Grant, Natasha, and John to that effect before sinking further into the fight.
That one enemy ship was now far more maneuverable, but its shots were far weaker than they had been, becoming more of a distraction than a true threat.
Still, distractions could kill as easily as anything else, and they had invaders aboard once more.
The field of battle had changed once again.