Chapter 58: Abyssal Fright |
Standing on a small rocky shelf five meters above where the waves were crashing against the mountain, Derek had slowly made his way down. He was starting to have second thoughts.
The ocean stretched out beneath him, the scorching brightness of the local star glinting off the rippling surface, the stench of salt and something that had to be alien seaweed stinging in his nose.
This may have been a bad idea.
Oh, he could swim, hold his breath for literal hours with the right aplication of [Aspect Integration], and could even make himself heavy enough to walk along the bottom of the ocean on the off-chance that became required for some bizzare reason, and he’d even swept the water beneath him with his [Aura] to make sure it was deep enough, but none of that was the issue.
Because for all that he could check what was down there, he wasn’t at a point where he could see the reflection of the sky in the surface of the waves impenetrable to his eyes.
Exploring oceans was weird. And dangerous.
Land could be very easily scanned from orbit, jungle canopies could be seen past with radar, and so on, even caves could be somewhat easily checked via ground-penetrating radar and/or the more “standard” trick of having a device start thumping on the ground and then checking how the sound waves arrived on the other side of the area you wanted to check over.
The ocean, on the other hand … water ate light like nobody’s business, made seeing underwater even before you got into the issue of all the sunlight reflecting off the surface, blinding both observers and sensors.
There was also the small issue of life underwater getting big, with the medium they lived within supporting much of their weight, and as powerful as Derek had gotten, having the local orca-equivalent try and take a bite out of him would still hurt like hell and probably injure him to boot. Although who was to say the local apex predators topped out at Earth’s current maximum? What reason did he have to suspect he would not run into something on the scale of a megalodon or mosasaur?
So it was mostly safe, or at the very least, no more dangerous than his usual antics.
With a grin he wasn’t entirely sure was natural, Derek jumped off the stone he’d been standing on for the last couple of minutes.
Yet when the water closed over his head, he discovered something: Barcode’s oceans, or at least the small area he could see from his current location, were far more colorful than the surface, looking like nothing so much as one of Earth’s coral reefs, complete with kinds of fish that might be unfamiliar to him but were still, very recognizably, fish.
Also, whatever gave the plants up above their color had clearly been evolved after they’d reached the land, because the ones down here weren’t black, but a deep orange.
All told, though, these things were surprisingly Earth-like. The “crabs” looked like crabs, the “fish” were streamlined and looked like something you’d find on the planet of his birth, and even the corals were only slightly bizarre.
… Then a shadow moved in the distance, and he was halfway up the cliff before he could even realize what he was doing.
Derek was no stranger to the abyss, really; after all, he’d chosen a life of flying throughout the biggest one in the known universe, but there was something fundamentally different between outer space, where you could see literally forever, and the deep ocean and the way it ate light. Even if nothing down there should be able to hurt him.
With a light sigh, followed by a hard slap across his own face, he threw himself back into the surf, this time focusing on the place the shadow had been.
Had.
Been.
It was gone now, with nothing left to see, not even when he swept his [Aura] through the area, shaping it into a long wedge that took up much of the available volume he had to play with as he waved it through the area.
But other than the vague sense there’d been something there once, water still slightly disturbed by the passage of whatever that had been, there was nothing there.
Yeah, the ocean was a haunted-looking house, and now he’d confirmed to his satisfaction that there was, in fact, something in there. That was enough for him.
Goodbye, thanks for all the fish, and all that.
***
An hour later, Derek found himself in one corner of the chalet, leaning against a pile of pried-up floorboards, hellfire playing across his fingers. His human fingers, to be clear, because in right that moment, it did need to be clarified, what, with the four extra arms he was currently sporting, courtesy of [Phantom Limb], the spindly, smoky appendages of the Magebreaker Phantom ready to retrieve some stone from the hole he was about to burn into the ground.
Four quick slashes with his finger carved a square into the rock, a brief moment of focus separated the bottom from the mountain, and then the projected limbs phased through the ground to grasp the bottom of the stone cube and pulled, removing the first cube in a matter of seconds, exactly a liter of rock.
That then made accessing the next one easier, with one fewer side to cut, and by the time Derek was forced to stop due to a lack of mana, he’d managed to remove around half a cubic meter of material.
Then, while his mana regenerated, he began carrying them out of the house.
He repeated the process a few times before going back to check out the blueprint he’d drawn up and Mimi had checked over to make sure he didn’t undermine the house … well, to be fair, he was undermining it, the point was to do so in a way that did not result in the whole think collapsing into the new cellar, mostly by way of adding wood and metal bracings to hold up the house.
Bit by bit, the mountain was hollowed out, until Derek had created a space that increased the available space within the house by half again. It was a good feeling.
Then, finally, it was time to carve the path down to the ocean Atticus had suggested a while ago. The “trick” here was going to be, admittedly, quite lazy, because he’d already gotten all the stone he needed.
So a concentrated beam of hellfire let him burn a hole in the side of the mountain, then used a combination of hellfire and earthen reinforcement spells to melt the rock he did not want to be there and let it flow out the side at a rapid pace, with him doing some studying on topics of engineering while he regenerated his mana, so he’d hopefully have his next plan be one that did not require corrections.
It took him until fairly late in the night, but eventually, he did wind up buried, reaching the ocean … something he found out when he tried to dig the next drainage channel and wound neck-deep in saltwater after overshooting the water table.
So, once that had been cleaned up, all that was left to do was slot all the steps he’d pre-cut into the walls, and boom, staircase straight down to the ocean.
Derek grinned. He settled on a lawnchair he’d carried along with him in a spatial ring, staring out across the ocean from the cave that was now the second entrance to the chalet, far, far overhead.
He might not like to be in the oceans of Barcode, but looking out across them like this? It was nice. Also considerably cooler than much of the rest of the planet, whose surface typically felt like an oven.
After spending a couple of hours like that, he flipped his book closed and headed back up.
Now that the cellar had been dug out, Derek had a massive pile of fairly even stone blocks that really should be put to a better use than lying in a pile next to the chalet.
But there was a nice empty place in the jungle Derek felt deserved a nice ziggurat, something he could build up, then hollow out, put in some windows, and just in general make look nice and actually be useable.
Why? Well, why the hell not?
Though if it took long enough to come back here, some aliens might find this place before humanity arrived properly, and their archeologists would wind up mighty confused.
Which would be funny as hell, even if a little mean.
Once again, the process was relatively simple. Basic stone-joining spells to create larger blocks, getting pretty close to something that would have been used to make the pyramids … then realizing that not only had he put them together in the wrong place, but also that the combined stone was too heavy to move as he was right now, so he wound up having to take the stone apart again and carry it elsewhere. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen more than once …
All told, the process was quite simple; he built the first three layers of the ziggurat, then carved out the rooms to reclaim the stone needed for the next three layers while leaving the necessary load-bearing walls and columns in place.
Then he put up the next layers, repeated the process, and put on a sort of “capstone” at the very top before leaving to go find some sand the machine shop in the Dragonfly could turn into glass.
That ate up another day, though thankfully, he had enough storage rings to only need to make one trip once he’d found what he needed. Then, turning the glass blocks into one-way mirrors was a quick and painless process, and finally putting windows into the pyramid he had planted in the middle of the jungle.
When he headed back out, it turned out to be … sparkly. Painfully so, especially considering how bright the local sun was. Perhaps the one-way mirrors had been too much?
Honestly, it wasn’t even a question; it was too much. But Derek decided he liked it anyway … and would defer the desperately needed aesthetic renovations until the next time he had free time on this planet.
***
An hour of leisurely walking later, interrupted by a few curious dinosaurs that were kind enough to let him examine them closely while they, in turn, tried to figure out just what the hell he was, Derek finally opened the main door of the chalet and marched in, still in the process of wiping off the drool of a particular sauropod who’d gotten just bit too close.
Aaaand he was late, judging by the fact that the others were already there, and very clearly waiting for him.
“Sorry,” he sighed. “The dinos were being weirdly friendly.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Atticus waved him over. “Did you get your stuff done?”
“Yup,” Derek nodded. “What about you guys?”
“I mean …” Ye-in shrugged, then pointed to the far wall, upon which a small projector Derek had missed had thrown an image against the wall next to the “fireplace.”
It was of a small house in the traditional Korean style sitting atop a mountain that did look remarkably high.
“It looks nice,” Derek said.
“We’ll have to see if it’s still standing by the time I get back to it,” She admitted. “It’s on the tallest mountain on the planet.”
“So, Everest, basically?” he asked.
“About a kilometer taller,” she told him. “I might have gotten too ambitious.”
Honestly, Derek had to admit that it did look amazing, but once he started paying proper attention, it was impossible to miss the limitations under which she’d been laboring while building that thing.
For all that Ye-in was the strongest combatant of them, with an entire build mostly dedicated to turning anything that stood in her way into hamburger, as well as surviving the inevitable retaliation should it, somehow, survive, she had neither Mimi’s engineering capabilities nor [Skills], while also lacking the magic both Derek and Attiucs wielded.
As such, it’d probably need to be rebuilt by the time they next showed up, but even broken down, it would still serve as an unmissable sign of her claim, much as his overly sparkly ziggurat would for the jungle.
“What did you build?” she asked him.
“The cellar,” Derek said flatly, before breaking into a small smile as he connected his phone to the projector. “And this is what I built with the stones I excavated.”
There was a long moment of silence that was eventually broken by Mimi.
“It’s … very shiny.”
“Yeah …” Derek admitted.
“If those are one-way mirrors, you can tone down the reflectiveness without messing with your view from inside,” she said, already pulling out her phone to begin to send him the relevant information, only to freeze, glance around apologetically, then slid the device back into her pocket. “I’ll show you later.”
She glanced over towards Atticus. “Where did you decide to build your house?”
“Nice little rocky mountain isle and put up a little house on it. Nothing fancy, dry stone construction, I couldn’t figure out how to make concrete and was too lazy to look it up, but here it is.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
And with that, he proceeded to show them a picture that could have been a movie set, towering clifffaces that had to be hundreds of meters tall reaching up into the sky, sheer rock dotted with the occasional plant desperately clinging to the stone while waves crashed far below, shards and spires of granite that were yet to be worn down by the wind that was no doubt beating the isle … and unless the photo was highly missleading, there had not been a single flat area large enough to build something on prior to his arrival.
Because it was rather starkly apparent that of the island’s twin peaks, the lower one had been neatly cut and now served as the base for a house that looked … deeply Irish. Old, old Irish. As in, a technique reaching back to the Stone Age.
Stacked stones, interlocking as the weight of the rocks above forced them together, created something that was not only surprisingly durable, but actually capable of staying up even, hell, especially, in adverse situations such as ground shifting underfoot or, for that matter, the kinds of sea storms that no doubt washed across that isle with regularity.
That kind of construction could, in fact, adjust because it wasn’t all glued together by mortar or concrete, which was why a lot of it was still standing in places Derek had visited as a child, even on an island very similar to the one he was currently being shown …
“Did you just find the single most mountainous, inhospitable island that exists on this planet and build on it? And concrete was a step too far, but you managed to figure out that in just a couple of days?”
Atticus shrugged. “Yep.”
Now, why don’t I believe you? Derek thought. He was also relatively sure that both the building and the location related back to something on Earth, but he couldn’t quite recall what.
He glanced over towards their engineer, only to see her nervously dry-washing her hands.
“What about you?”
“It’s not really …” she trailed off, eyes fixing onto the projected image. “I mean, it’s a bit out there, you know?”
“Did you build a Bond villain lair behind a waterfall or something?” Derek asked with a wry grin, only for Mimi to flush crimson, her face nearly as red as her hair.
“You did?”
“No …” she replied, trailing off and staring at the projector for a long moment before finally biting the bullet and revealing her “home.”
It was, indeed, not behind a waterfall. Because she’d built it in the middle of a goddamn active volcano! Derek had to bite his lower lip to keep from laughing from sheer shock, seeing her clear embarrassment. That was such a ridiculously over-the-top thing to make, and the absolute last thing he’d have expected from their ordinarily highly composed engineer. And from the looks of the others around the table, he wasn’t the only one who’d gotten caught entirely off guard.
Hell, he could see the muscles in Atticus’ face visibly warp as he used some kind of [Skill] to get his expression under control while running up against the very edges of the ability.
“Oh, and I found a huge deposit of pitchblende I want to play around with,” Mimi offered after a long moment.
“Pitchblende …” Derek repeated, letting himself get drawn into the obvious topic change. “That sounds familiar. What was that again?”
Part of him thought that it was some kind of magic alloy because, to be perfectly honest, pretty much everything important was, but the presence of a naturally occurring magical substance would have drawn a much more excited reaction from even the engineer, wouldn’t it?
“Just keep the nukes off the planet,” Atticus said, whose face was still slightly twisted. “And please tell us so we can watch.”
Oh. Right. Pitchblende was the ore that had been humanity’s primary source of uranium during the nuclear age. The origin of a power capable that had been capable of rendering humanity extinct, once upon a time. And here they were, considering lighting off a nuclear fucking warhead for the hell of it … though, then again, considering the scale of personal power everyone could at least theoretically achieve, it wasn’t that big a deal anymore, at least if they could avoid contaminating anything important with radiation.
“That sounds crazy,” Ye-in said flatly, only to break into a broad grin. “Let’s do it!”
Derek heroically resisted the urge to facepalm.
Great idea. Crazy idea. Definitely something he wanted to see/do, though, so he’d keep his thoughts to himself.
A vow he was easily able to keep as Mimi wound up setting all necessary precautions into place herself.
***
A few days later, in the depths of night, Derek found himself lounging on the roof of the ziggurat, staring at unfamiliar stars speckling the sky overhead.
Tomorrow, they’d be leaving. Part of him was sad at that, part of him wanted to stay, but they’d also been on this planet for a good ten days, and the way he saw it, they were at the point of having to choose between finishing their cursory scan of this place and staying for a decade and cataloging every inch of its surface.
As such, he decided it was time to finally spend all the XP he’d gained for finding this place, causing his level to instantly jump from 25 to 31, granting him sixty Stat points and enough [Skill] points to buy the first Central [Skill] from [Stellar Captain].
The two options both had him salivating, which made it all the more frustrating that he could only choose one.
[Vessel of Legend] was a ship buff that would connect him to the Dragonfly on a deeper level, letting him find her anywhere, as well as preventing anyone from running off with her, but most importantly, it would effectively give the ship its own mana regeneration, which would allow them to apply more enchantments than the ambient mana alone would allow for.
It was the sort of ability that would take the Dragonfly from an overengineered, overpowered destroyer capable of punching a not-insignificant distance above her weight class, to an absolute monster of a ship, a vessel without peer, something that may even, one day, be able to take on a capital ship.
In theory.
Also, most likely, in practice as well, but that would doubtlessly take a while.
The other option was [Call of Adventure], which did exactly what it said on the tin.
It was a power for locating places to have “adventures,” something that was certainly quite useful in a place as vast as the universe. Or even just the Milky Way galaxy.
In terms of raw ability, boosting the vessel would be best. It was also an ability that wasn’t guaranteed to work retroactively, so he had better get it sooner, rather than later.
However … what was the likelihood he’d be able to power up [Vessel of Legend] in a timely fashion, to actually get any use out of it before he also bought the other Central [Skill]?
He would have to be literally precognitive for that to change; ergo, guidance it was.
Call of Adventure (legendary)
This Skill is an idiot’s dream, providing an endless parade of hornet’s nests to poke with sticks.
Oh, too harsh?
Perhaps, but it is still fairly accurate. After all, “may you live in interesting times” is not an ancient Chinese blessing, now is it? At least this Skill gives you the option of not following its “advice” …
The Call of Adventure will guide you to places that hold the potential to start something “adventurous,” with the exact nature of what it will guide you towards varying based on your current attitude and goals; however, safety is never guaranteed.
Okay, interesting. Now, how the hell did it work?
It looked like a passive, so it should already be active, right? Or was it one of the few that started in the “off” position and needed to be toggled to “on” before it’d start helping?
Derek sat up in the hope that not lying down would make him less sleepy, and mentally prodded the [Skill].
So, according to it, the darn thing was active … but shouldn’t it be doing something?
He’d already known that there’d be some kind of adventure in outer space, and that there was a hornet’s nest he had no intention of poking in the ocean; those were facts he’d been aware of prior to getting the [Skill].
… Right?
Derek closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to look within himself.
Up there waited adventure, down here, he could have peace; the ocean had something that would be scary but not dangerous.
That was … well, the certainty was new, but otherwise, nowhere near worthy of a legendary [Skill].
Then again, and perhaps this would turn out to be a vain hope, perhaps it would give him more concrete answers when it was time to actually pick a destination? When the question wasn’t a choice between “stay,” “stay and do something stupid,” and “leave,” would he get a more concrete answer?
It was a question to be answered tomorrow morning.
After that, finally, he also threw a brief glance at his overall status sheet.
Name: Derek Ambrosius Thoma
Class: Stellar Captain
Species: High Human
Level: 25 -> 31
XP: 211/9,600
Health Status: Healthy
Mana: 2,000/2,000
Fortitude 100 (+15)
Perception 65 -> 100
Strength 60 -> 75
Agility 80 -> 100
Magic Power 200
Magic Regeneration 200
Free Points: 0 Stat, 3 Skill
Central Skills
Aspect Hunter 4
Aspect Integration 7
Call of Adventure 1
Skills
Lightspeed Learning 9
Skill Fusion 7
Knowledge Conversion 1
Branching Capabilities 3
Anima Bolt 3
Lifesurge 1
Predator’s Force 1
Phantom Limb 1 -> 2
General Skills
Bloodline of the Hellborne Survivor
Stellar Mental Maths 12 ->13
Spellcasting 10 (179 spells known)
Variable Weapon Empowerment 6
Phantom Armor 3
Knightly Discipline 1
Starship Upkeep 3 -> 6
Scholar of War 7
Alcubierre Bubble 11
Eye of the Predator 1
Acrobatic Adapatability 2
Aspect
Aspect Skills
Hydra
Regeneration, Redundant Organs
Poltergeist
Ephemeral Form, Spectral Flight
Least Demon Lord
Grand Hellflame, Moment of Immortality
Lord of Time and Space
True Spatial Warp, Cosmos Soul, True Spatial Affinity, And I Shall Not Be Moved
Caladrius
Healing Light, Inner Light
Fata Morgana
Hologram, Perception Block
Cosmic Leviathan
Charging to Infinity, Cosmic Gaze, Stellar Travel, Omnidimensional Maneuvering
Void Dragon
Wings of the Void, Scales of the Void, Star’s Heart, Infinite Mind
Magebreaker Specter
Internal Grimoire, Spellbreaker
Lesser Rock Titan
Rock Hide, Immovable Weight
He had invested most of the new Stat points, including the ones gained by filling his new Aspect Slot for the first time, into Perception, then also bumped up Agility and Strength a little bit, as he was presently quite happy with his Magic Stats as it was.
As for the bracketed number next to his Fortitude Stat, that was the bonus from the Lesser Rock Titan, which he’d set to display separately as he would not be having that permanently equipped, in fact, he only had it so he could create a counterweight in his body with [Aspect Integration] and felt he shouldn’t take it out unless he had something to replace it with.
Derek took one final look at his surroundings, making sure there was nothing nasty in the area and that any ways creatures that might want to take a nibble out of him might reach his position, and then fell asleep on the surface of Barcode for the last time in a long while.
***
Leaving the chalet was an odd experience. Derek was no stranger to moving, between his studies and the Dragonfly, he’d done it a lot, but his connection to this place, brief as his stay had been, was something else ...
As they left, they also made sure to take their tech with them. Leaving human technology, even consumer-level items, behind on an unsecured/colonized planet was illegal, but it wasn’t the kind of law that one was likely to get prosecuted for.
Unless a hostile alien race found your crap. Then you were fucked.
And honestly, with Barcode being as far from anywhere even remotely important as it was, the chance of it being (re)discovered by aliens before humanity could colonize it properly was honestly higher than Derek really felt comfortable with.
He was the last to step aboard the Dragonfly, glancing back across the rocky plateau they’d built their “home” upon, and the dark jungle beyond.
With a whistful sigh, he punched the button to close the airlock, watching until it was fully sealed, before quickly heading off towards his own room to drop off the bag of clothes currently hanging off his shoulder and then, finally, marching onto the bridge, where everyone else was already present.
“Ready?” Derek asked, receiving a trio of nods. “Well, then, let’s try and avoid crashing, shall we?”
The chances of that happening were, unfortunately, pretty high, but at the same time, the ship was sufficiently durable that any crash caused during the “danger zone” wouldn’t actually cause all that much damage. Crushed turrets, broken off sensors, hairline fractures in the hull which’d be fixed the instant Mimi had a few seconds of free time, that sort of thing.
“Shifting enchanments,” Mimi announced, as the magical gravity of the Dragonfly, only a couple of percentage points off Barcode’s, suddenly vanished, replaced by a feeling of zero-g; every drop of ambient mana channeled through the vessel was poured, reducing the grasp of the planet’s gravity to nearly nothing.
“Clear to fire up thrusters?” Atticus asked.
“Clear!” Mimi announced, followed by a muttered “punch it” that Derek was pretty sure she hadn’t meant anyone to hear.
A split-second afterwards, the belly-thrusters of the Dragonfly roared to life, lifting the ship off the surface, straining to get even a single centimeter of clearance even with all the magical help they were getting, the rock underneath beginning to glow cherry-red from the streams of plasma washing across it, a few seconds from going from solid to liquid and the ship a similar amount of time from sinking, yet even as Derek opened his mouth to give the order to stop, to suggest that maybe they take a few hours to reinforce their “launchpad,” a shudder ran through the ship.
And lift off they did. A couple of centimeters. Most of what could be expected from thrusters only meant to turn the ship so that the main engine could shove the vessel in the desired direction.
Yet that was all it took.
“Warping space,” he announced as he dumped half his mana pool into the area underneath the ship, grasping onto the very underpinnings of reality itself, one mental hand just above the ground, the other just below where the Dragonfly’s landing struts now hung, then wrenched the two apart.
And for two seconds, their distance from the ground was one better measured in kilometers. Two seconds in which their main engine could be engaged without frying the ground, without dragging the ship across a rocky plateau that would tear apart the ship layer by layer like the universe’s largest cheesegrater.
The click of the landing struts retracting was drowned out entirely by the roar of the titanic plasma torch to the rear of their little destroyer coming to life, hurling them forward, and the fever pitch of every thruster they had firing to turn the ship in time, to transform a trajectory parallel to the planet’s surface that would inevitably lead to a crash once gravity reasserted its hold.
When the spatial warp Derek had created collapsed exactly two seconds after it had come into being, his mana completely drained, they were already four kilometers up and climbing unsteadily.
Well, the increase in altitude was steady.
The flight, however?
Let’s just say the Dragonfly had been shaking less while getting hammered into scrap by an alien genocide machine and leave it at that …
Derek forced himself to release his deathgrip on the armrests of his chair and simply let the force of the acceleration press him back into his seat, endlessly reminding himself of the fact that they were not getting shot at.
That worked, to a degree, but by the time the shaking stopped and Atticus’ twin announcements of “We’re clear of the atmosphere” and “Escape velocity achieved” rang out across the bridge, Derek found himself once again having to dig his fingers out of the upholstery.
Damnit. Why was it he could only keep his cool in life-or-death battles?
At least it was over now. And now that they were safely in outer space, there were two more things that needed to be done.
First, they needed to talk about whether or not everyone felt comfortable following the guidance of a [Skill] meant to lead them to “adventure.”
Second … hadn’t a certain Sionnach Sidhe prepared a couple of nuclear warheads she’d like to try out?
Derek threw Mimi a questioning glance that she returned with a borderline feral grin that exposed teeth that he was almost positive weren’t normally that pointy …