Chapter 79: A Good Fight
Two days in, Elisa’s math had saved them a hundred times. She not only had entries for each ship in the water with them, but she had also given them names. She knew what they were capable of, speedwise, at least from what they’d shown so far. In fact, she had an educated guess for how fast each of them could be if they really pushed things, saving them where otherwise they would have been caught and dismantled by the enemy fleet.
Math could only describe reality. It couldn’t really change things. Marco could push the ship go a bit faster with his skills, but that was only enough to get rid of the very slowest enemy ships. The rest, it seemed, hung on to their wake like they were being dragged by an invisible line.
“I don’t get it. We are built for speed, right? And I’m optimized to make the ship go even faster. We should be able to outrun these guys. Is it another illusion?” Marco asked.
“No.” Elisa set down her book, shaking her head slowly. “I wish it was. Odds are, there are some ships that are higher leveled and faster than us in that fleet. There are skills out there that keep fleets together, sacrificing speed in quicker ships for the sake of slower craft. It’s something I have to watch out for, because if they find a sneaky way to cancel it, we might see some of the lighter craft speed up to catch us.”
“Why haven’t they done that yet?” Marco asked.
“Because they couldn’t stop us. Even if we took damage, we’d probably get away, and that would leave them scrambling to reassemble their force,” Elisa answered.
“So what do we do?” Marco said. “We can’t get away by running. We can’t land.”
“We might have to Riv it.”
“You can’t make his name a verb.”
“Yes I can, if I want to. We might need a little Riv mentality to get out of this, and I’m not saying Riv mentality ten times a day. Did you ever check your ship screens like I told you?”
“I did. But there was really only one change, and it doesn’t help us here.”
| Crew Ability: Tyrannical Extraction (Riv) Based on your crew member’s current ability to convert his stats to single-use strength buffs, you are able to do something similar with your ship. By expending that same crew member’s strength, you can provide extra propulsion to your ship to extricate it from sticky situations. This skill does not increase your ship’s speed except in situations where your speed is being restricted by some outside force that is countered by the skill itself. Rather, it allows the ship to plow forward through resisting environments where normally it would be slowed, or slowed further. The expenditure of your crewmate’s strength works much like it would otherwise. Any strength points taken from him regenerate over the next few hours. You cannot take more than 75% of your crewmate’s total strength when exercising this skill, and he must be agreeable to the process or it will fail.
|