[CYA] Chapter 162: Pirate System (4)
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Alex growled, flipping and rolling the Innominate while trying to not think about the attackers within their very hull.
The fact that one of the enemy ships was now much faster helped keep his mind focused outward.
If it had been able to hit as hard as before, the fight might have been over already, but its weapons had lost the enhancement of the weapons officer, and so they were barely more powerful than the defensive buoys’.
Because of that, Alex was able to begin strategically taking hits to allow Pilar to land shots in return.
He closed with the slower ship, allowing Lenka to screen them with increasing effectiveness, and he felt some internal ship’s magics begin to synchronize their actions more and more as they trusted one another more and more.
It wasn’t a mental skill, or anything that could actually influence them, but it operated like most of the duty station magic, it took their trust in and reliance on one another and made it more useful.
He felt his lips quirk in a smile at that thought.
Alex was no longer twitching in unconscious desire to pull a trigger at specified times, but as he let that go, he found that Pilar’s shots came closer and closer to lining up with what he’d have chosen. At the same time, he began feeling little nudges about where she ‘wished’ he would go to line up better angles and vectors of attack for her various abilities.
He could have dug his heels in, but there was no point. She wasn’t commanding him; he simply had a sense that altering his flight patterns slightly would help her. He’d be kind of a jerk if he didn’t at least consider it.
With a shrug, he followed one of the feelings, coming out of one of his sweeping spins a half-second later than he could have, changing the angle of—
FABOOOM!!!
Somehow, Pilar had combined the ship’s weaponry into a singular, far faster attack. It cut across the vacuum of space, just barely missing the manned ship, but that hadn’t been her target.
The timing had been perfect; the faster ship was arcing around to get a better angle on them, and it passed directly in line with the oncoming lance, taking a burning line across the entirety of the vessel.
“YEAH!” Alex whooped even as he rolled the Innominate out of the way of return fire.
The unmanned ship stuttered and began to drift, its inertia already carrying it out of the area of combat, but that hardly mattered.
It was dead in the void.
Alex allowed himself to grin in anticipation of victory. That, of course, was exactly when two things changed.
First, more than a hundred defense buoys powered up—well inside their effective distance—seemingly having been dark before, or maybe they’d only just gotten into position, Alex wasn’t sure. Either way, the Innominate was about to have a lot more incoming fire for Alex to work around.
Second, a heavy thump sounded against his duty station's outer door.
Somehow, despite all the defenders and defenses, some of the boarders had found him.
Well, foggy picnic…
Alex was rather in a bad way, and he instantly sent off messages through his bracelets.
He couldn’t disconnect from the console—even if he knew how to control the ship remotely which he hadn’t figured out yet—because the increasing attacks pushed all his granted training and own growing skill. Any slow-down or lag, or whatever difficulty would be introduced, could be the death of them all.
Worse, even if he could disconnect he was still woefully low on Life, and a fight against anything but undead wouldn’t go well.
He had initially thought that he might have a good advantage against assault mechs, but Juba had explained that such constructs usually had quite a bit of anti-infiltration magic in their makeup.
Mundane metals? Alex could obliterate at 16 to 1, but magically suffused constructs built for war? Not so much.
He would probably have some advantage against them, and was absolutely going to try it if he needed to, but he still had less than six thousand Life and HP at the moment, and that was… Actually, he thought that might be more than someone with a common race and two common classes…
Am I overpowered? He jerked the ship sideways, barely avoiding a pincer of attacks coordinated between the asteroid base and defensive buoys.
The pirate ship was circling even as he pursued, looking for an opening.
No, he was powerful, but not over powered. Those with common classes and races wouldn’t be fighters. They wouldn’t be ‘out there’ in the world.
Bev had said that planetary level talents had at least one legendary class like he did, and they’d actually have levels in it…
Even so, based on his HP, he was slumming it with the Uncommons at the moment.
That made him snort a laugh even as he flipped the Innominate around, allowing Pilar to triangulate and blast a full five buoys out of the sky.
…Ten more took their place.
Well, that was at least an answer, the pirates had called their buoys back from all over the star system, and they were arriving in waves.
He grimaced. The thought about HP and rarity was a bit superfluous, as he couldn’t get up and fight at the moment regardless.
Natasha had responded that she was coming, but she was still a few minutes away, and the banging on the door had changed to a wooshing, cutting sound, the magics of the barrier swelling in counter to the magics of the attack, making it a bit difficult for Alex to pick out details of either.
He grimaced, trying to put more thought toward flying in the hopes of ending the space battle before he had to deal with a far more… personal clash.
Still, he didn’t want to be taken entirely unprepared. As such, he began to spin up a Shaped Force Burst. He pushed aside his distaste and his own linguistic limitations, pretending that he was ‘baby-talking’ to get himself over the mental hurdle.
Bright light began to shine through at a few points around the door, and he had to force himself to take deep breaths.
It was going to be a close thing.
Their ship was not a light fighter or anything else that was great at such maneuverability, but neither was it a defensive emplacement that could simply sit and ‘take it’.
Middle grounds are usually better… Still, when they got through this, he was going to ask John and Kaylee if they could enhance the dampeners to increase the tolerances he had to work with.
Natasha messaged him again, but he couldn’t spare the mental space to look at it.
He almost had the Shaped Force Burst ready. Twist that like that, align it to amplify the power and ensure proper direction…
The entire door was glowing now—the outline more than the rest—utterly ruining his view in that direction, and Alex sensed a burst of magic from the door, full of resistance and disbarment.
It fell before an onslaught of heat, cutting, and an unholy concentration of ‘very, very’s.
The spellform clicked into an intelligible form, and Alex replicated it across the entire arc behind him, dumping mana into the workings and holding them ready.
The door burst open, falling to the floor before vanishing as the room accounted for its presence and compensated. The opening remained, however, and ten little drones poured through that opening, each looking like a cat-sized, stocky humanoid in thick armor.
A man followed close behind, a gun lifting to point at the back of Alex’s head. His voice was gruff and casual, the man clearly thinking he was in control of the situation. “Stop—”
Alex released his hold on his force magic, and it blasted backward.
All eleven attackers were thrown away, most passing through the door once more and ending up in the hallway.
Two of the drones smacked against the frame, being thrown into a spin, and one simply slammed against the bulkhead.
Alex didn’t get a single notification. They’d all survived intact.
Best laid plans indeed. He jerked the Innominate into a twisting spin, having to trust Lenka’s shields to take a storm of fire in order to avoid a hurricane.
Their shields dropped to 70%, but slowly began to tick back up.
Still, that was more damage than he was comfortable with taking in less than a second of fire.
But Alex had been firmly thrown out of the synchronicity that he’d found with Pilar and Lenka.
It was all he could do to keep the Innominate from disaster even while much of his focus was with the more immediate threat.
This place was ludicrously well defended.
Or maybe we just gave them hours and hours to slowly bring all their defenses back to base. Imagine how easy this would have been if we’d jumped into system directly beside this asteroid…
The pirate was already climbing to his feet, and his assault drones were flowing forward once more.
Around them, the anti-intruder magics of the ships were clashing with and rolling off of their own magics in a chaotic mess that at least meant that much of the offensive power was devoted simply to maintaining functionality within the Innominate’s halls.
Alex didn’t have time to spin up anything else, and the pirate was raising his gun in the hallway.
Timing. He didn’t have a moment to warn his comrades, but his death would be worse for them than this. Apologies!
Alex jerked the ship to the side, passing the redline.
The pirate fired, but the last second jerk threw off his aim, sending the projectile harmlessly into the bulkhead of Alex’s duty station.
It seemed that the weapon was designed for use within spaceships, because it wasn’t designed to pierce a hull. Instead, it seemed to throw heavy packets of plasma that would do awful things to anyone living—likely even in armor—without harming most non-living things except to momentarily superheat them a few inches deep.
Yeah… that would slag the plurality of pre-system things… But it didn’t do anything of note to the Innominate.
The man growled, braced, lined up, and fired again, all within the space of a breath.
Alex pulled his shield from his Inventory, angling it.
The attack hit the shield, slamming it into the back of Alex’s head even as the wood cracked, but the shield was sufficient to deflect the second shot.
Alex only had a few more cards to play. He began to hum, allowing power into his throat and trying to throw the dissonance toward his attackers. The pirate winced, and the drones hitched but only for a moment.
This wouldn’t save him.
Then, the drones arrived, and Alex was forced to—
The man in the hallway cried out, and the drones spun and sprinted back toward him, likely following some sort of defensive protocol.
Alex caught flickering flashes of a striking spear along with the retort of the pirate’s firearm discharging again and again.
The drones poured back out, seeking to swarm Natasha, who had arrived in the nick of time.
Through the storm of magics, Alex sensed only flashes of the language of power.
Force Shield.
Best-a-gon.
Shift.
Natasha fought as a blur, lunging and retreating, her force shield now seeming segmented in honeycombed hexagons, with some free-floating hexagons moving around her.
When a drone slammed into a portion of her shield—its anti-defensive magics destroying the small section—one of the free-moving hex’s slotted into place seamlessly, maintaining Natasha’s protection.
Alex didn’t see her response to the little drone, because he had to roll around a renewed storm of fire.
With a deep breath, he put his physical safety fully in Natasha’s hands.
He’d been playing defensively, and that had to end.
This time, it was far easier to fall into sync with the two women, their duty stations aligning and providing a unified purpose, even as the continued sound of gunfire and crackle-pop of force magic tried to distract him.
He tuned out the combative stimulus surrounding his duty station, and reiterated his trust of Natasha in his own mind.
Alex rode the red-line, his Stress-Introspection showing him precisely how close he was to breaking various parts of the ship… including its crew.
Their situation required him to dance the line, and as forces were rarely equal, he began stressing the outer reaches of the ship with near-constant trips across the red-line.
Thankfully, none of the crew were out there, or he’d likely have pulped them, but even with only non-biological things to concern him, he was into dangerous territory.
The cargohold had far better dampeners, and the assault troopers were further protected in their pods, but Alex had no delusions that this was sustainable.
They were destroying buoys almost as fast as they were coming in, and the other pirate vessel was acting more defensively, but they were still slowly losing, and even their delays were unsustainable.
A communication came in just as Alex was beginning to despair. “Juba reporting. Asteroid base secure.”
Alex whooped, flipping the Innominate through the region previously forbidden by fire from that vector, slotting in just behind the final volley.
His yell gave a momentary distraction, and Natasha took advantage, her grunt of triumph enough for Alex to know that she’d succeeded as well.
The Innominate lined up from an unexpected direction, and Pilar fired.
Apparently, the buoys were controlled from the asteroid as well, because they turned on their previous ally, and the second pirate vessel was torn apart in a blaze of glory.
Alex sat for a moment, panting.
He hadn’t even been moving, but he realized that he’d been very stressed throughout the ordeal.
A moment later, Grant and John checked in.
All across the Innominate, systems responded green.
The enemies had been dealt with.
They’d won.